Synopsis & Review by Sean Mills. Thanks!:
Synopsis: Thirteen days ago in a S.H.I.E.L.D. medical facility, Mystique finds a bloody room where her lover, Wolverine, was supposed to be. There are hand and feet prints that show that he went out the window, as well as a claws note into the sill that says 'don't follow'. Agent Drew bursts in and asks what's happened, Mystique doesn't know, but she's going to follow. She asks for fifteen minutes before Drew contacts their superior officer: Sebastian Shaw.

Nowish, at her briefing before Shaw, he asks if she thinks that Logan left the 'don't follow' message specifically for her. Mystique says yes. Shaw asks if she thinks the message was meant to be taken literally or metaphorically. Mystique is confused and he says that he'll forgive her feigned ignorance for the sake of brevity. After a moment, Mystique responds that Logan isn't the poetic type.

Shaw gets a chuckle and comes to the conclusion that Mystique did indeed follow Logan, alone, effectively disobeying a direct order. She also compromised Agent Drew by asking for those fifteen minutes. Mystique closes her eyes and says that she has no excuse for her actions. Shaw responds by igniting his powers in a violent show of fury, demolishing his desk into glowing splinters. Mystique gapes in awe as he calms himself and admits that he does have an excuse, and orders his men to take her to the brig. Seven hours later, Shaw is entered the Forensics Lab as he confirms that Mystique has made no escape whatsoever, hasn't said anything, and that isn't what he wanted. In the Lab he asks the tech if Nick Fury is dead or not. The tech doesn't know because the jet fuel in the storage warehouse, coupled with the plastic explosives, destroyed everything and scattered it to the winds. He doesn't even have proof that Fury was in the warehouse. But he did find something else. When the tech went to pull up Fury's file, he noticed that the file had been accessed only three times since the case was closed. Twice by him, and once by...the name shocks Shaw and he instantly heads out.

He goes to Mystique's cell, standing on the opposite side of the bars, and suggests they start over from the beginning. He asks her if Logan ever talks about his past, and she once again replies 'not often'. So Shaw asks what he talks about when he does bring it up. Mystique pauses a moment and says that Logan talks about what the world used to be like before the rise of mutantkind, and how, despite being despised, he felt like he belonged in that world because he had a purpose. Now that purpose is gone.

Sometime ago, in bed one intimate morning, Logan sits with a bottle in his hand while Mystique, lying on the bed, pleads with him. He says it's not gonna hurt him and she tells him that it will hurt her. They both look away. Logan tells her that she doesn't understand, that this little bit of death, the bottle, is the only thing that makes him feel alive anymore. Mystique shouts at him, asking if it's because the war is over? She asks when will he realize that he's worth more than the sum total of his enemies. Logan replies that he doesn't have enemies anymore, but Mystique retorts that they were only humans; they were nothing. Logan tells her that there was one...

Shaw contemplates this, Logan's feelings of having a purpose, and he asks how she tracked Logan. The same way that Logan tracked Fury. Shaw asks her to go on and Mystique explains that Shaw assumed, because it plays into his collusion theory, that Logan knew it was Fury that he was after the whole time. But Logan didn't have to know that at all. The sole reason that Fury targeted the embassy in Mexico was to get the Sentinel, therefore both Logan and Mystique understood that if they could find the Sentinel then they could find whoever took it.

She knew that the Sentinel itself wasn't going to be sold because there are no buyers, there's no market for something like that, but there is a market for information about Sentinels, especially how to destroy them. In order to get that information, hackers would have to take the giant robot to a chop shop and remove the date core, somewhere close due to the sheer size of the Sentinel. So Mystique tracked it down to an old steel mill, where she found Logan, screaming Fury's name.

Shaw asks why she held back from entering the building right away and Mystique says it would've been stupid to charge in blind; besides, Logan can take care of himself. Inside, surrounded by armed guards and Sentinel chunks, Logan pops his claws. He dodges bullets, claws guards, uses old steel mill pieces to fight and takes them all out quickly. Then he heads upstairs and finds Fury in an office, face-to-face. Logan recalls Fury's old lesson, that the only time you should confront an enemy face-to-face is when you want to talk. Logan slashes his claws through Fury, a hologram, and tells him to start talking.

Fury says that the House of M will fall, because of Logan. Logan got sloppy and week and Fury got the Sentinel. All around the world different factions of the human resistance are finding out how to destroy the Sentinels, and once those are gone, the only thing standing in their way will be the Red Guard, meaning Logan, meaning nothing. After a pause, Logan tells him to keep on thinking that because, even if it requires killing every single human on the planet, Logan is going to find him, kill him, and make sure he stays dead.

Fury chuckles and tells him goodbye, oh, and that they have company. Logan might want to tell her to stand clear. Logan only has time to shout his lovers name before Fury blows the bombs in the warehouse. Mystique falls off the stairs and Logan barely manages to save her from being impaled by a girder. He gets her out of the collapsing building and asks if she's okay, she tells him that she is with him. Shaw asks her if that wasn't a bit selfish of her. She is confused, but he asks when did she first hear Fury's name? She heard Logan say it; shout it in anger, when she first arrived at the steel mill. Shaw says that wasn't it, and she actually first heard Fury's name back in the intimate bedroom scene, when Logan was describing the one human who was worth a damn. That's when she accessed Fury's personnel file. Mystique sits silently for a moment and then admits that she loves Logan. Shaw questions this and figures that because of this love, she gave him back the one thing he could not live without: his war. The attack on the Mexican embassy, the kidnapping, the theft and dismantling of the Sentinel, the showdown at the steel mill...she orchestrated all of it. Mystique was Nick Fury.

Fury stands on the other side of the bars, Mystique in his form, and tells Shaw congratulations on figuring it out. In her defense, the only casualties were humans and the Sentinel specs were, of course, never sent out. She is, however, prepared to pay whatever consequences she must for her actions. Shaw is glad to hear that and orders the cell open, he wants her to start immediately. Mystique is confused why she's being released, and Shaw tells her as he leaves.

Mystique sent Logan on the chase, so it'll be her job to bring him back.

Review: I must say; this was probably a better Wolverine in the House of M story than the actual House of M series. I am actually a little let down that we never got to see more of this Logan, that he was relegated to secondary character in this story and then normal 616 Wolverine in House of M. I think it's an interesting take on the character, all worn out and lost because he can no longer be the Wolverine that everyone knows and loves.

Crushed under the weight of his own superiority.

What's there left to do if he's killed everything?

So with that in mind, I definitely liked this House of M story the most, and I read a couple others. I enjoyed Mystique immensely, though I've never liked Sebastian Shaw. Mystique was also great in this story and I just love the Red Guard uniforms. I think I said it in another review, but I would have liked to have seen the formation of the Red Guard, especially considering Nightcrawler was among them. But alas, it's all gone now. Sadly, this story will never matter at any point, ever. Logan now has his memory back in 616 so I doubt he'll ever mention remembering the House of M version of himself.

Something about how quickly the X-Men are moving into Decimation and how none of the other Marvel books are even really mentioning House of M just makes me think that even the people who remember it will probably never reference it. That's another joke I've been thinking about, Brian Michael Bendis goes to such grand lengths to erase all the mutants in the Marvel universe, but he doesn't write any of the mutant books. All the X-Men writers are left to deal with what his writing has imposed upon them, and from what I've read so far, nobody is bothering. Heh.

Anyway, good art, great story, and new look at Logan that I want to see more of! I hope Daniel Way does something with this jaded version of Wolverine in the future. Next, Logan's got his memory back! Ooooooo.