"I just wanted to get a rise out of him, Chuck. See if he's got the stones to watch my back. S'rough out there, kid. There's a time an' a place to be tough. You gotta be ready for yours." (Logan - X-Men: Liberators, Issue 2)

When Piotr joined the X-crew, it consisted of Cyclops, Banshee, Sunfire, Thunderbird, Storm, Wolverine and Nightcrawler.

Wolverine's relationships with the other X-Men were still tenuous at best. He was still just as likely to take a claw swipe at a team-mate as at anybody else. Part of it was his own problems with control at that time, part of it was his continuing 'loner' mentality which the rest of the team, quite frankly, didn't help by tending to pre-judge everything he said and did. In his own words: "You've all been misjudgin' me since the day I joined this turkey outfit!"

It was Piotr, the farm boy from Russia, that actually started the real melding of Wolverine into the X-Men - aided by the last person in the world that wanted Wolverine in another team, Vindicator of Alpha Flight. None of the Xer's (except for possibly Xavier) knew about Logan's history with that team - they just knew he'd been in the Canadian military at some time in his past. Vindicator had come to drag 'Weapon X' back to Canada and managed to knock Wolverine cold, but into the sight of Piotr and Ororo, who were on a picnic with Sean and Moira. Without questioning why first, Piotr moved in to face off Vindicator and protect Wolverine. There were rough spots afterwards still, but after that display of the team fighting for him instead of just expecting him to be a fighting machine for them, Wolverine's basic attitude toward the team as a whole began to shift.

Perhaps with that in mind, it's easy to see why Piotr is the team-mate that he developed a standard fighting manuever with - mixing the advantages of Piotr's strength with his own hard skeleton and claws. Namely what they refered to as the 'fastball special'. That was the only fighting move Wolverine used on a regular basis that depended on anyone else's involvement.

After Piotr and Kurt returned to the X-Men after Excalibur broke up, Kurt and Logan accompanied Piotr back to Russia when he returned to mourn the anniversary of his parents' deaths. He was by then the only one left of his family - his brother, Mikhail, having died sometime before and his sister, Illyana, having fallen to the Legacy virus. It was Illyana's death that affected him most deeply as he felt himself partially to blame for her having caught the disease. It was that guilt that led him to inject himself with the Legacy Virus cure Dr. McCoy developed from the research Moira MacTaggart was able to pass along through Professor Xavier -- even though he knew that at its current development, the cure would kill him before being released to destroy the virus.

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