Logan was one of those who found the box sitting outside his room as he was coming back from being out all day and all night and, in fact, since the day before. He could barely make out his team leader's scent above the smell of soap, bleach and blood all over his own hands. Blood on his hands, washed out or not, and regrets heavy on his heart, he opened the box to find the gifts Alex had left for him. He was rather floored at the thoughtfulness behind the early Christmas presents, and he appreciated them, even though he had long since stopped believing in anything sacred outside of honor and duty, and here he was just come back from trampling over both. He wasn't supposed to be out killing people, not even mutant-hating mad scientist types, but whenever he thought of what those Perfect Soldier Project bastards had done to his little girl, he wanted to rid the world of each and every one of them, even if he had to hunt them down and kill them one at a damn time.
He set the box on his table-slash-desk and stripped down to his jeans in the solitude of his room on one of the outside buildings that surrounded the manor. Once he sat down, he kicked off his boots and socks and emptied the box to look at the contents more carefully. A couple of gag gifts, a paperback Hemingway collection and a History of Ancient Japan. A cigar, a good one. He snorted at the month's supply of beer coupon for a local tavern.
Alex's gifts, he thought, were an awfully nice thing to do. It was the kind of thing people did for a neighbor or a friend. For a man, in other words, not for a mindless killing animal. Logan would sit at his modest table for a long time, until morning, the presents laid out scattered on the tabletop before him, considering this dark turn his life had taken of late. In Alex's mind it might have been a light, even small thing. He had no inkling just how big of an impact this kindness might have on some of his teammates. It certainly got one Logan, alias James Howlett the third, thinking long and hard.