Chapter 1
Setting: AU based around the universe of ‘What If... Wolverine had Married Mariko’ (What If Vol. 1, issue 43). It is also influenced and draws on elements of the first issue of Claremont’s X-Men Forever, and like that is set around the time when the original five ended their version of X-Factor and returned to the X-Men. Like X-Men Forever it takes place after the fall of Asteroid M and the possible death of Magneto. There won’t be any Gold or Blue teams, just Cyclops and Storm as joint team leaders, though that won’t really matter here. Another important aspect of the set-up of this AU is that Madelyne Pryor isn’t a clone of Jean Grey here. As originally conceived they just look alike, and Scott meant it when he said he loved and married her for herself. Like X-Men Forever, Nathan isn’t, or doesn’t become, Cable, and he wasn’t infected by Apocalypse with the techno-organic virus. They came down as a family when Jean was found, and Scott and Maddy have remained happily married.
Genre: Romance/Adventure
Pairing: Logan/Jean
Rating: 18+
More Info:
Logan/Jean in a world based of the What If... Wolverine had Married Mariko?, together with elements from the first issue of Claremont’s X-Men Forever. The triangle will not be a factor in this story, being something purely of the past in how the story is set up. I like to explore the potential of Logan/Jean, just not the drama of the triangle when it gets dragged out. I think when it goes on too long it hurts all three characters.
I imagine something like this would be fairly simple to do for Scott/Jean fans as well (assuming something like that hasn’t already been done). They could explore a story where Jean never gets kidnapped alongside Logan and Sean (Banshee) by Lang and so never needs to fly the shuttle and meets Phoenix (perhaps Wolvie dies on re-entry, and so would be completely removed from the equation). Or Jean could be de-powered after Dark Phoenix and be Jean herself rather than Phoenix, rather than die, and have Scott and her leave and get married (Claremont’s original intention). Maybe she’d get her powers back later, or finally maybe Maddy could really could be Jean’s reincarnation, as Scott originally thought. Hell, you could use What If... Wolverine became an Agent of SHIELD, where it turns out everything is better if Logan joined SHIELD instead of the X-Men (ends up leader of SHIELD, manages to protect the X-Men, uses his influence to thawt Lang’s attempt to rebuild the sentinels, so no Phoenix, and has Senator Kelly discredited, so no Days of Future Past, and prevents/overturns many anti-mutant bills so everything is pretty rosy there, and never really meets Jean. I’m not a enough of a Cyclops fan to attempt any of those, but if Scott/Jean fans read this (unlikely given the pairing I admit ;-) ), maybe you’d want to try it, or something similar.
But onto this story:
A quick summary of that What If that will matter here. In this reality, Mastermind didn’t manipulate Mariko’s mind, so that she rejected Logan on their wedding day and took Clan Yashida deeper into criminal dealings (this was all part of Mastermind’s rather petty revenge against the X-Men for what happened during Dark Phoenix). Instead as in the What If they get married. Logan leaves the X-Men and becomes her champion as Mariko leads Clan Yashida and attempts to deliver the clan from the criminal connections her father Shingen had left it in. This leads them into a war against Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin, who had taken control the Yakuza and wanted Clan Yashida, their standing and political connections for himself. Keniuchio Harada (the Silver Samurai) , Mariko’s half-brother, seemingly joined them against Fisk, as did Shiro Yoshida (Sunfire), Mariko’s cousin. Eventually they drove Fisk to near defeat, where he challenged Logan to single combat to decide matters. Logan wins, and that should have seen Yashida freed. But, at Fisk’s command, Harada, always secretly in Fisk’s service, killed Mariko. Harada and Fisk are killed, and Logan gives the Honour Sword of Clan Yashida and it’s rule over to Yoshida, and returned to the X-Men in grief.
Another important aspect in this reality is, as mentioned above, Madelyne Pryor isn’t Jean clone here, and Scott really does marry Maddy for herself (and not because she reminds him of Jean Grey). As a result Scott doesn’t suddenly become an a-hole who ups and abandons his wife and son when he learns Jean’s alive, never contacts them again, doesn’t tell Jean about them, and only returns when Jean finds out and insists he should. I know it was all said to be Sinister’s influence as a saving throw to rescue Scott’s character from the disaster editorial meddling put it in (since of course, they wanted him and Jean back together, no matter what it did to his character now he was married with a family), but it’s rather curious that Scott seemed perfectly able to resist Sinister’s influence otherwise.
Anyway, that doesn’t happen here. Maddy isn’t some Sinister project, Scott doesn’t leave her or Nathan, and they go as a family to meet Jean. Maddy and Nathan stay with Scott as he formed X-Factor with Jean, Warren, Bobby and Hank. Despite initial difficulties and attractions, Scott remains faithful to Maddy, and Jean and he move on. Another result of this is that Maddy never gets driven insane and falls prey to demonic influence to become the Goblin Queen, and she also doesn’t have a element of the Phoenix Force in her.
That part of Inferno doesn’t happen. As a result, Jean doesn’t receive either Maddy’s memories, nor the memories of Phoenix Jean. Currently she is as she was going into Inferno. Jean only remembers up till the point she made her agreement with the Phoenix Entity and was placed in a cocoon at the bottom of Jamaica Bay to recover from radiation poisoning whilst the Phoenix duplicated her and assumed her identity. When the original five X-Men return to the X-Men fold, Maddy and Nathan join Scott, and they live in a suite together at the Xavier mansion.
I guess this is my bit to give Maddy a happy ending at least somewhere. After all before she went mad she gave her life in Dallas to save the world once alongside the X-Men. Her character deserved better than it got in the comics. So did Scott really, in terms of how Marvel butchered his character there.
With that, two important scenes between Logan and Jean play out a little different here. Since Logan has the effects of Mariko’s death weighing on him, and neither he, nor the X-Men, are under demonic influence here, he doesn’t kiss Jean here as in the original Inferno (what does happen gets detailed below). The moment between Logan and Jean in Genosha during the X-tinction Agenda is very similar, but has key differences and will assume a larger importance for this story. In the X-Factor comic where this scene takes place, Logan is seen to be dying. Then in Uncanny X-Men when both X-Men and X-Factor are brought to trial, he’s battered but no longer at death’s door. Probably a continuity error, but I attempt to provide an explanation for it below.
This bit below was going to be included within the chapter below, but it made it too unwieldy so I’m giving a rundown of the events here.
One thing I am importing from X-Men Forever is Fabian Cortez using his power on Logan. It ends up producing a strange effect when Kitty tries to phase Logan out of his hold. Though here I don’t see Cortez being as strong he was depicted in that first issue, as I don’t remember him ever being that kind of powerhouse as to fight the X-Men single-handedly in the original comics.
Anyway it happens in a battle with the remaining Acolytes rather than just Cortez himself. As in that comic though, Cortez caught hold of Logan, immobilised as Cortez used his ability to overcharge Logan’s healing factor to the max, sending it haywire. In the Forever reality this effect if sustained would cause a strain on a mutant’s body effectively killing them. Kitty Pryde, as in X-Men Forever, attempted to intervene and phase Logan out of Cortez’s hold. Instead, making contact, Kitty phased into Logan’s wrists, and her power is sent haywire as well, bright blue energy flaring around the two X-Men and Cortez, as Kitty’s and Logan’s powers merge and fuse for a moment.
In this version, when Jean strikes Cortez to free Kitty and Logan, the impact of the psi-blast kills him.
The end result of Kitty and Logan’s merger, altered and evolved their powers in new directions. It lead to Kitty inheriting two of Logan’s middle adamantium claws, as in X-Men Forever, but in both wrists. The muscular and skeletal structure in her forearms and wrists had changed to accommodate them, as well as two other bone claws either side that have grown and appeared either side. These retractable claws spring free and withdrew in a manner similar to how Logan used his own, apart from the fact that Kitty instinctively uses her phasing ability to allow the claws passage through her wrists and hands without cutting their way free as they do with Logan. Her phasing ability had been altered so it has now granted her a healing factor similar to Logan, though it doesn’t function when phased. Kitty has also gained his hyper-keen senses and enhanced physical abilities, as well as new feral instincts. Again, all largely similar to X-Men Forever.
At the same time, unlike X-Forever, this merger had an effect on Logan as well. Influenced by Wolverine: The End, where we meet a brother of Logan’s who has the same powers as Logan’s, which have been ‘evolved’ to now have some form of phasing ability, it seemed logical based on that that such a merger would have a similar ‘evolving’ effect on Wolvie.
So Logan’s healing factor had be altered. The merger and Cortez effect has repaired the damage his healing factor suffered at the hands of Donald Pierce and the Reavers, and produced an new ‘evolved’ phasing effect. As with is brother from that universe, when phasing, Logan becomes a luminous pale-white, ghostly figure with glowing red eyes. As a balance, his healing factor, like Kitty’s, doesn’t really function when he’s phased. He also now had only two adamantium claws left on either hand, the middle now replaced with a bone claw in the middle.
Sorry for so much background, but that’s everything that has changed from normal continuity leading into this story. One last thing to note is, while I might draw from stories, events and characters that take place chronologically after the events of the fall of Asteroid M, none of them necessarily happen in this universe (this also includes revelations about character’s pasts, in particular Wolverine’s, as some aspects in this story are going to be quite different and follow and develop aspects of a discarded earlier idea that never came to be due to later story decisions/revelations).
Also the years involved here are completely guesswork. Thanks to the elastic nature of ‘Marvel Time’ who knows how long there really was between any of these events. In Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1 215, taking place just after the Mutant Massacre, the events on the Moon at the end of Dark Phoenix are said to have happened ‘years ago’. So who knows. One way to judge it I guess would be to use Kitty Pryde’s age at any point in comic continuity (since she is thirteen during the Dark Phoenix events). Assuming we know that lol.
With all that (sorry it was involved) I hope you enjoy the actual chapter
Chapter 1
Jean looked out from her bay window across the grounds of the Xavier Institute and saw Scott and Maddie walking together. Maddie leaned into him, his arm around her, their son Nathan asleep against her shoulder as the three of them made their way back to the mansion from an afternoon out — a small, ordinary tableau of a family entirely at ease.
Jean smiled, glad for them. It had been over two years since her return, long enough that she could watch a moment like this and feel only the faintest ache beneath the happiness — not resentment, just the old, familiar echo of a life that might have been hers.
It wasn’t that she disliked Madelyne. She liked her, genuinely, and the two of them had built something like a real friendship despite the strangeness of how it began.
It was only in moments like this — seeing the marriage, the child, the quiet domestic joy — that Jean glimpsed the shape of the life she and Scott might have shared, if not for the Phoenix.
She owed that entity her survival. In exchange for saving her teammates’ lives, Jean had been left in suspended animation inside a cocoon of psychic energy at the bottom of Jamaica Bay — the Phoenix Egg. Her own body had been too ravaged by radiation to safely house that power, so the Phoenix had built a duplicate instead, and lived her life in her place.
According to Scott, it had recreated her so completely that it believed itself to be her.
Through her long sleep, Jean had sensed, distantly, the Phoenix reaching for her again — and had refused the darkness she felt waiting there. That darkness had already claimed her double once, corrupting her into Dark Phoenix, an entity that ended a world and, with it, five billion lives.
Some nights Jean was almost grateful it hadn’t truly been her. If the duplication had been as perfect as everyone believed, would she not have made the same choices, walked the same path to the same atrocity?
She shuddered at the thought and hoped never to find out. As far as anyone knew, the Phoenix had shown no sign of returning. Whatever she’d refused in that half-dream state, it seemed to have held.
It was with Phoenix Jean, though, that her relationship with Scott had truly deepened — the psychic bond, the plans for a future, the kind of love that outlasts a first infatuation. And it was Phoenix Jean’s death that Scott had grieved, before eventually finding his way to Maddie.
All of it had happened while the real Jean lay entombed at the bottom of the bay, cut out of her own life without her consent.
Coming back had not been easy. When Hank, Warren, Bobby, and Scott had arrived to find her — faces she’d been overjoyed to see — Scott had brought a wife and infant son with him. The shock of it, compounded by how closely she and Maddie resembled each other, had felt like staring into a warped mirror of a life that should have belonged to her.
It took a long time to accept how far the world had moved on without her. Even her relationship with Scott had been young, by her own memory — while his memory held years of a love that had never had the chance to grow between the two of them as they actually were.
Those first months had been hard on all three of them.
Jean knew Maddie had been afraid — genuinely afraid — of losing Scott to her. But Maddie chose to trust him anyway. She’d agreed to move to New York when Scott stepped back into the field with X-Factor, and she’d given Jean and Scott the space to talk through everything unresolved between them, trusting that he would still choose her in the end.
She was right to trust it. Painful as Jean’s return had been for him, it became clear soon enough where his heart truly belonged.
As Jean and Scott talked — about Phoenix Jean, about what had followed her death, about the years Jean had missed — she began to understand that it was Maddie who had pulled him back from the edge of that grief. Scott had, for a time, become fixated on the idea that Maddie was some kind of reincarnation of Phoenix Jean. It was Maddie’s pain at the suspicion, and her near-death at Mastermind’s hands, that finally broke him of it — and let him love her, plainly, as herself.
It became clear to both of them, over those conversations, that the woman Scott had loved and mourned so completely hadn’t really been Jean at all. It had been Phoenix Jean. A different woman wearing her face.
Jean’s heart still belonged to Scott, in whatever quiet way old feelings persist — but his belonged to Maddie now, without reservation.
Accepting the full scope of what the Phoenix had cost her took time. Jean didn’t blame Scott for the life he’d built. But in those early months, watching him and Maddie together had meant watching everything she’d once hoped for play out in someone else’s hands.
Even the love she and Scott might have grown into — the real thing, past the “childhood sweethearts” stage — the Phoenix had taken that too, stepping into her life just as it was about to become something lasting, only to go mad and die in her place.
She couldn’t hate Maddie for any of it. Maddie hadn’t done anything but love a man who needed loving, and trust him more bravely than Jean was sure she could have managed herself.
Two years on, they were real friends. Jean watched the little family cross the lawn and smiled again — no bitterness in it this time. Life had taken paths from her that she would never walk. But it had given her plenty in return: old friendships renewed, new ones built, a family that had somehow found room for her twice over.
If there was blame to assign, it belonged to the Phoenix. For a long while Jean had carried real anger toward the entity for what it had stolen from her.
But in the end, the Phoenix had only been answering a plea for help. It hadn’t meant for any of this — it had intended to sustain a copy of her only until Jean herself was strong enough to bear its power, and had simply lost itself in the life it built while it waited.
No one was really to blame. It was just the kind of thing that happened to people who lived the way the X-Men lived.
If there was mercy in any of it, it was this: her feelings for Scott, however real, had never had the chance to deepen into what Phoenix Jean had shared with him. That made it possible — slow, difficult, but possible — for Jean to let go and move forward.
She wasn’t sure she could have had she lived the life her double had lived. Knew the love her double had found with Scott.
Thanks to that small mercy, Jean had been able to move from the life she had lost.
A throaty roar shattered her reverie.
She turned in time to see Logan tearing down the drive on his Harley, off on another all-night ride.
Avoiding her again.
Logan, she called telepathically, patience wearing thin.
Sorry, Red, he sent back. Talk later.
Whenever that turned out to be. She sighed as he pulled out through the gates and onto the main road.
She understood, in the abstract, that he was working through things. But he kept everyone at arm’s length these days — even Kurt, Kitty, and Jubilee had trouble getting past the wall he’d built, outside of X-Men business.
It had been that way, Jean gathered, since his late wife’s death.
Another thing that had happened in her absence — Logan meeting, marrying, and losing the Lady Mariko Yashida, all while she slept beneath Jamaica Bay.
He wasn’t the man he’d been in the early days, all friction and short fuses with Scott. On missions now he moved like the perfect soldier — precise, obedient, no complaints about anyone’s leadership. If anything, it was Betsy, Remy, and Rogue who gave Scott more grief these days than Logan ever did.
Ororo’s leadership, Jean understood — the two of them had held the team together alone through some of its worst years, before Charles came back, and that had forged something unbreakable between them. But Logan’s ease extended even to Scott now, and that was new.
What troubled her was how far he’d pulled back socially. No games, no shared meals, no evenings out. He’d always been a bit of a loner, but he used to often show up anyway. Now he almost never did.
She knew, though, that wasn’t really why he was avoiding her. That had started a few nights ago, when everything between them finally came to a head.
There was an irony in it Jean couldn’t ignore — she’d once left this mansion, asking Scott to come with her, because of exactly this: her reaction to Logan the first time they’d met.
It had been immediate. A pull unlike anything she’d felt before, magnetic and disorienting. His desire for her had been so raw it frightened her — and worse, it had woken something reckless and hungry in her that she hadn’t known was there. Nothing like what she felt for Scott, or Warren for that matter. Something that scared her precisely because part of her wanted to follow it into the unknown.
So she’d run, and tried to build the future she’d already chosen with Scott. But Scott had stayed loyal to Xavier’s dream, and she’d never really managed to stay away from it either. She came back to the X-Men and lost that future all the same.
Now it was Logan who filled her thoughts.
The fear that intensity used to provoke in her was long gone, burned away by everything that had happened since. The Phoenix had already ended the life she’d once planned. She had nothing left to protect from him.
Coming back to a world that had aged without her had changed her — made her older, steadier, more sure of what she actually wanted. She’d chosen to rejoin the X-Men, chosen to push for X-Factor, not only for Scott’s sake but because this was the life she wanted: the danger, the purpose, the whole unreasonable shape of it. She still wanted marriage, family, the ordinary things — but she wanted this too, and had stopped pretending otherwise.
So the attraction that once frightened her didn’t anymore. It felt like something to lean into — fierce, but also steady. She had no idea where it would lead, but she trusted, for the first time, that wherever it went, he’d be there.
Her heart, no longer tied to Scott, had had two years to come loose and open again — toward the man whose eyes had always burned the same way, whether she could read his mind or not.
Near the end, before her disappearance, he’d noticed her choosing Scott and had begun, quietly, to step back. She knew that after she was gone — and more so after Phoenix Jean died — he’d finally moved forward with Mariko.
But the moment Jean met his eyes again, more than two years after his wife’s death, she’d seen those old feelings catch fire, even without her telepathy to confirm it.
And her heart, unburdened now, had answered in kind. She had fallen for Logan — completely, and without permission from anyone, least of all herself.
She could trace exactly when she’d understood the depth of it: the day X-Factor got word the X-Men were presumed dead, killed fighting a being called the Adversary. She remembered watching the battle unfold in Dallas through the feed of a news crew that had tagged along with Freedom Force, reality warping around Eagle Plaza as different times and places collided.
She’d watched Logan on that feed — controlled, precise, nothing like the wild man she remembered, leading in Ororo’s absence.
Then the end: Ororo, back with Forge, needing to seal the gate for good. Forge had called on the spirits of his fallen comrades, and the X-Men gave up their own life-force freely to complete the spell. She’d watched them become pure light, gathered into something like a small dying star, hurled at the Adversary to bind him for an age.
And then the X-Men were gone.
She’d learn later that the goddess Roma had brought them back. But in the moment, X-Factor believed they’d lost them for good.
The grief had been immediate and total — Alex, Ororo, gentle Piotr — but what shook her most was the hollow, disbelieving horror of losing Logan. That she would simply never see him again. It was a thought she couldn’t hold in her head.
That was when she understood how deep it ran.
For months she buried herself in work alongside Scott, both of them grieving. Then X-Factor collided with the X-Men — very much alive — during a raid on Sinister’s base, chasing Scott and Maddie’s kidnapped son while the X-Men hunted the Marauders in retaliation for the Morlock massacre, and to free Lorna, possessed by the Marauder Malice.
Jean stood frozen, disbelieving, staring at everyone she’d grieved for standing in front of her, alive. And the relief she felt at seeing Logan left her unable to speak.
Then he crossed the room and pulled her into him, and for a moment nothing else existed. He said her name like something sacred. She held on just as hard.
When he pulled back, his eyes found hers — disbelief, relief, and something raw and unguarded she’d never let herself name before — and for a moment she thought he might kiss her.
Then something in him caught. Guilt flickered across his face, and he stepped back so fast it was as if she’d burned him, mumbling an apology before Ororo pulled her into an embrace of her own and the reunion swallowed the moment whole.
There was no time to return to it. The world kept happening — the Marauders, N’astirh’s demons pouring into Manhattan, Sinister himself dying at Scott’s hands in a single unleashed burst of concussive fury for everything he’d taken. X-Men and X-Factor scattered back to their separate lives, and Jean didn’t see much of Logan in the months that followed.
That changed at Genosha.
Then, X-Factor had joined the X-Men to free Ororo and the captured New Mutants — Warlock, Tabitha, Rictor, Rahne — from the Genoshan magistrates and Cameron Hodge, Warren’s former friend turned immortal cyborg through a bargain with N’astirh and Genoshan technology. They won, but the cost was Warlock’s life. Hodge’s severed head, still alive by the terms of his own deal, was left buried beneath the citadel Rictor brought down on top of it after Scott and Alex destroyed the rest of him.
But during the fighting, both Jean and Logan were captured, their powers suppressed.
What happened to them there changed everything.
Flashback
Jean was shoved into a darkened cell, bracing for whatever Hodge had planned next.
From the shadows came Logan’s voice, thin and shaking. “That you, Red?”
Something cold closed around Jean’s heart. She turned toward the sound, already dreading it.
He was lying on a bare platform that passed for a bed, his uniform torn away almost entirely, boots and the top of his pants all that remained. Pale, feverish, shaking. Cuts and burns covered him, and a deep puncture wound — the kind a spiked tail might leave — bled steadily from his side, running down the platform’s edge to pool on the floor.
She couldn’t move for a moment. He wasn’t healing. She understood, with sick clarity, why the guards had said this cell was built with her in mind.
Another of Hodge’s twisted games.
“Logan,” she finally managed, “what have they done to you?”
He coughed out a laugh. “Had a little trouble with customs, Jeannie.”
“Not a pretty sight, is he, my dear” Hodge’s voice came through the door slot, delighted with itself. “Life’s harder for him these days, without a healing factor. I suspect he’ll need the kind of care only you can provide. Regrettably, you’ll be sharing accommodations — our cells are at capacity, and with your assistance, I expect to be acquiring more guests shortly.” He laughed and slammed the slot shut.
Jean had never hated anyone the way she hated Cameron Hodge in that instant. If her power had been active, she’d have torn the door apart with her mind and anyone standing behind it to get at Hodge.
The fury lasted only a second before fear swallowed it whole. She rushed to Logan’s side, kneeling in his blood without a thought for it, and had to bite back a sob at how fragile he looked. Some of the wounds were already inflamed, turning septic.
Even without her telepathy, she could feel the love pouring off him, unguarded in a way it never was when he was well. She kept her face steady, grateful his heightened senses were down for once — he wouldn’t smell her fear.
“We were wiring the compound when they took us,” she told him, tearing a strip from her own uniform to rebind his wound. “That scum had us mind scanned. He knows where every charge is planted, and where Scott’s team is hiding.”
Her hands shook as she worked. The bleeding wouldn’t stop.
He was dying. She could see it plainly. She suspected he knew it too.
She finished checking him over, confirming what she already feared, and reached up to wipe blood from a cut above his eye, close enough now to feel the old pull between them, sharper here than it had ever been.
He smiled faintly. “Funny. Before you lost your telepathic power, used to be you always knew what I was thinkin’ before I did. Never had a clue what was in your head, though.”
She fought down the black thought trying to consume her — that she was about to watch him die in front of her, again — and acted on instinct. She kissed his forehead, then each bloodied cheek, then the bridge of his nose. “And now?”
“Now we’re even,” he rasped, their faces inches apart.
Caught, trapped by his piercing cobalt blue, Jean lost the thread of every thought she’d been having.
“Good to see you again, Jeannie,” he said quietly. “Even here.”
“Good to see you too,” she whispered, and unable to stop herself even if she wanted to, she closed the distance and captured his lips with her own..
Their first kiss started soft and then became something else almost instantly — an electric jolt at the first contact, and then Jean simply stopped holding anything back. Like a dam breaking, she poured everything she had into the kiss. All her longing, desire, and the stronger, deeper emotions driving her, restrained for so long, burst free at last.
She pressed into him, one hand braced against the wall, the other gripping his arm, and he met her with the same intensity, one hand sliding up her back, the other tangled in her hair, holding her against him like he meant to keep her there.
She fell, in that moment, leaping over the cliff she had been teetering on the edge of increasingly since she had come back, entirely, desperately, in love with the Wolverine.
And underneath the joy of it came a grief so large it nearly buckled her — because she understood, with total clarity, what the kiss actually was.
He was saying goodbye.
That was why the walls were down. Why he wasn’t hiding anything from her anymore.
She broke the kiss with a sob she couldn’t hold back, arms around his neck, crying for everything she’d just found and was about to lose.
His hand moved over her back, steady despite everything. “What is it, Red?”
She couldn’t say it plainly. “It’s just — the cruelty of this place. The helplessness of it. Can we ever really beat something like this?”
“It’ll be okay, Jeannie,” he said. “Cyke’ll figure somethin’ out. We’re down, not out. Hodge ain’t beaten you yet, an’ he’s not about to start now. You’ll get outta here.”
He said nothing about himself. She noticed.
“As for whether any of it’s worth it,” he went on, “I ain’t the guy to ask. But you gotta stand for somethin’, darlin’. Live an’ die for somethin’, an’ it might as well be somethin’ that matters. Might never know if it works out. But if you let fear stop you from standin’ up for what’s true and right, you’ve already lost — worse than anything Hodge can do to you.” A weak smile. “Besides, that fat lady ain’t belted out her song just yet. We’re still breathin’. Story ain’t over. Gotta keep livin’ right to the end.”
End flashback
Thankfully he didn’t die. Hodge had the magistrate Wipeout restore his healing factor just long enough to keep him alive for trial — and for whatever else he had planned.
Jean still remembered, with a cold shudder, when Hodge forced Warren and Logan against each other. With his powers suppressed, Warren couldn’t control the Archangel wings Apocalypse had given him, and under Hodge’s influence they turned on Logan, slashing him open again and again while he tried to take out Warren’s wings. Eventually after the rest of them broke free, Jean threw herself between them to reach Warren, but Logan was already torn apart by the time she got there — and would have died in her arms if Ororo hadn’t restored their powers in time.
There’d been no room, in the aftermath, to talk about what had happened in that cell. By the time Genosha was settled, X-Factor and the X-Men went their separate ways again.
X-Factor got pulled into another clash with Apocalypse, during which Jean recovered her telepathy fighting the Dark Rider Psynapse. The X-Men, meanwhile, were off-world with the Shi’ar, returning eventually with Charles in tow — quickly followed by the Shadow King crisis that finally brought the two teams back together, and Jean and the other original X-Men returning back into the fold of the X-Men for good.
Trouble never let up for long. Magneto’s death during the crash of Asteroid M led into the hunt for Fabian Cortez, his treacherous lieutenant.
Through it all, Logan had been fending off a personal vendetta — Donald Pierce, Lady Deathstrike, and the Reavers, who’d crucified and tortured him for days before Genosha and left him weaker than before, a wound Genosha had only deepened.
Something about a recent clash with Deathstrike and Sabretooth had rattled him badly, in a way he wasn’t ready to talk about. The glimpses Jean caught, worried and half-accidental, showed fragments of white-hot pain, fear, violence, and voices that felt disturbingly familiar, though she couldn’t place them.
No one could get him to open up about it. And soon enough, Cortez led the Acolytes in another attack, and there was no more time to press.
The Acolytes were defeated. Jean killed Cortez herself, once his betrayal came to light in front of the others. Logan and Kitty, meanwhile, were left dealing with the aftermath of an accidental power-merge that had changed both their abilities, and spent the following weeks working through it together.
It had startled Jean to watch him with his students during that time — Kitty, Jubilee, even Rogue. Seeing him settle into something like a mentor, almost a father figure, wasn’t something she’d have believed possible when they first met.
But Logan had always had more in him than people expected.
Then, a few nights ago, everything came to a head.
Flashback
The team had gone out to Harry’s Hideaway for a rare quiet night off — even the Professor came along. Jean and Kitty had even talked Logan into joining them, over his usual objections.
He loosened up as the night went on, grateful, it seemed, for the distraction. He laughed — actually laughed — and something in Jean’s chest turned over at the sight of it.
By the time the crowd thinned to just the two of them in their booth, something had shifted. The guard he usually kept up around her had slipped without either of them deciding to let it. Conversation drifted, punctuated by long, comfortable silences, and his eyes held that same unguarded heat she’d seen once before — in Sinister’s base, and again in that cell.
She could feel it too, now, leaking past whatever wall he usually kept around his mind. It was, she realized, the happiest she’d felt since waking in the Baxter Building.
At some point their talk turned to loss — her sister Sara, the life she might have had, his wife, the life he’d shared and lost. The particular difficulty of building something new out of the wreckage of something old.
Her hand found his without her quite deciding to move it. His face went briefly haunted, grief and guilt rising to the surface, and she held on and let her eyes say what words couldn’t.
He startled at the contact, hesitated — and then let her hand stay.
For a moment the haunted look faded, replaced by something open and slightly stunned, his feelings as plain in his mind as they were on his face. The air between them thickened, their faces beginning to drift closer —
— and then Ororo, Maddie, and Kurt dropped back into the booth with a fresh round of drinks, and the moment broke.
They pulled back fast, breaking eye contact. Jean’s face burned as she busied herself with her drink, avoiding the knowing looks aimed her way. Maddie, at least, had the decency not to say anything out loud — though her grin promised an interrogation later. Kurt just raised an eyebrow at Logan, who growled into his drink, which only made Kurt laugh harder.
The moment was gone. Jean felt Logan’s thoughts retreat behind their usual wall, his eyes going careful and distant again, and it stung more than she expected, sitting there while Kurt, Ororo, and Maddie chattered on, Scott soon joining them.
He’d always left her a little off-balance — a heat that flared up out of nowhere and then vanished again. She used to be able to push past it, anchored to Scott and their shared future. That anchor was gone now, and she’d let herself drift into these turbulent currents without reservation. Watching him retreat again left her unsteady, anxious, hurt.
Rejected, if she was honest with herself.
She watched him from across the table — quiet now, withdrawn, barely present in his own conversation. By the time they got back to the mansion, she saw him head off alone toward the lake, the ember of a cigar glowing faintly as he walked into the dark.
Her hurt had blazed into anger by then, and she’d barely kept her temper in check on the walk back.
He’d been doing this since she came back — keeping her at a careful distance except for these rare unguarded moments that flared and vanished before either of them could name them. She could feel exactly how he felt about her regardless: the way he watched out for her, the tenderness under his usual gruffness, the heat that showed up when his guard slipped. In that cell, in his kiss, there had been no room for doubt. Telepathy only confirmed what she already knew.
She hadn’t planned to force the issue tonight. Their moments had been ever thus. But she was done letting him get away with pretend nothing was going on between them.
There was an irony to it — once, she’d been the one running from this pull, but for reasons that couldn’t have been more different.
But either way, she was finished indulging his silence.
Not tonight, buster, she thought, launching into the air as the others filed inside. You don’t get to pretend this away again.
“Something tells me a certain Canadian better watch out,” Maddie giggled behind her.
“De Wolverine best be doin’ some of dat duckin’ an’ weavin’, non?” Remy joked.
“Don’t think that’s gonna help him none this time, sugar,” Rogue laughed.
Apparently the two of them hadn’t been nearly as subtle as they’d hoped. Jean knew she’d have jokes and knowing looks waiting for her when she got back. She didn’t care.
Right now, she only cared about getting Logan to admit there was something to gossip about in the first place.
She found him by the lake, moonlight silvering the water and the trees around it, the whole scene lit up like something out of the ordinary world entirely, enchanted and magical.
He stood still enough to be a statue until he heard her land, and turned his head slightly. “What’d you come all the way out here for, Red?”
“You know why,” she said, landing in front of him. “We need to talk.”
“Every man’s favorite four words,” he said, with a laugh that didn’t reach anywhere real. “What’s there to talk about, Jeannie?”
Her temper snapped and she closed the distance, jabbing a finger into his chest. “You know exactly what, mister! What’s been going on between us since Sinister’s base. What we feel.”
She saw the denial forming before he spoke it. “And don’t you dare lie to me right now and say you don’t feel it, because I can feel it burning off your mind right now, no matter how well you think you’re hiding it. Everyone can see it. I’ve kept quiet. I let you pretend nothing happened at Genosha. I’ve played along, pretending we’re not watching each other whenever we think the other one isn’t looking, hoping you’d finally open up. That’s over. We’re talking about tonight, about Genosha, about us — even if I have to hold you here telekinetically to do it!”
He looked away. “It’s just sparks in the trenches, darlin’. Don’t let it bother you none. Find somebody who deserves you.”
She reached up and cupped his jaw, turning his face back to hers, and saw the skittish terror there, underneath everything else in his eyes.
“That’s bullshit, and you know it,” she said. “I lost whatever life I might’ve had, thanks to the Phoenix. Maybe things would’ve gone differently if Lang had never grabbed us, if I’d never gotten on that shuttle. Maybe better, maybe worse. Doesn’t matter now — that life’s gone, and I stopped grieving it a long time ago. I’m alive. I’m back with the people I love, doing the work I’m meant to do. And I don’t have to pretend anymore that you don’t have a hold on my heart. So here’s the headline, buddy: I’m in love with you. Not just attracted. Not ‘sparks in the trenches’. In love. Look me in the eye, open your mind, and tell me you don’t feel the same.”
Shock crossed his face at her bluntness, breaking all the unspoken rules between them of never addressing their feelings for each other. She felt him reaching for a denial and watched it collapse before he could voice it.
He looked down. “You know how I feel, Jeannie. I love you. Have since the first time I saw you, before I even understood what it was I was feelin’. First woman I really loved since I crawled outta whatever I was before Mac an’ Heather found me. Tried to move past it when you chose Scott — figured it was the right call, even. Buried it deep after Phoenix, after I thought you were gone for good, an’ found Mariko. Then you turned up alive and it all came roarin’ back.”
“Then—” she started, joy breaking loose in her chest, drifting toward him.
He caught her arms, holding her back. “Wait. Flyboy had me pegged right, all those years ago. I’m bad news, Red. You oughta stay as far from me as you can get. Forget about me. Hate me if it helps. Find somebody else.”
She wrenched free, furious. “Don’t you dare tell me who I can love, Logan! And don’t you ever say that about yourself in front of me again. You’ve more than proven what the Professor and I saw in you back then. You’re one of the backbones of this team. I’m not forgetting you, and you’re not scaring me off.”
“You don’t get it,” he said, something haunted crossing his face. “Bad shit happen to the people I care about. Especially the women. Forgot that with M’iko — told myself it’d be different this time. I loved her, Jeannie. Different from you, but I really loved her. Left the X-Men for her. Became her champion. Fought a war against Fisk and his people to free her clan of her father’s mess. Won it too — beat Fisk in single combat. And right at the end, her own brother killed her on Fisk’s order.” His voice roughened. “Both of ‘em are dead now, and I hope they rot in hell, but that don’t bring her back. Nearly broke me, Jeannie. All because I got greedy, wanted a life somethin’ like me’s got no business wantin’. An’ M’iko? She paid the price.”
A tear broke loose and ran down his face before he could stop it, and Jean felt the deep psychic wound underneath everything he’d just said, years of grief and guilt he’d buried ruthlessly without ever letting it heal. She closed the distance and wrapped her arms around him. “Logan, I’m so sorry.”
“Oh God Jeannie. It was all my fault,” he said, voice cracking, arms coming around her without him seeming to decide it. “Shoulda stayed away. Left her be. She’d still be alive. Still feel her blood on my hands sometimes, like it won’t come off. An’ the thought of that happenin’ to you — I can’t do it again, Jeannie. Not knowin’ I was the reason. Only way I know to keep you safe is to keep away from you.”
She held him for a long moment, saying nothing, letting him have that. Then she pulled back and looked at him — more exposed than she’d ever seen him — and cupped his face again. “Logan. I can’t begin to understand your grief. But you have to hear this — Mariko’s death wasn’t on you. That’s the guilt talking, not the truth. I never met her, but everyone who did speaks of her like she mattered, that she was a remarkable woman — Rogue especially. And everything I’ve heard says you were nothing but good for her.”
He started to shake his head. She held him still.
“If you’d never gone to Japan when the X-Men did, she likely have died in that earthquake in her garden, the day you met. Her father was going to marry her off to a man who beat her — you saved her from that, at real risk to yourself. If you’d walked away after, her brother or Viper or Fisk would have killed her anyway, except you would have taken away the joy and happiness she had with you first. You keep focusing on how she died and forgetting who she was while she lived. It’s a tragedy she died the way she did. She didn’t deserve it. But don’t let it steal the good memories of the life you had with her, the love you shared. Stop punishing yourself for something you had nothing to do with. I never knew her, but I think I can say this much as someone who loves you too — she wouldn’t want this for you. You’re not honoring her this way. You’re just hurting yourself.”
Anger flared in his eyes, a low growl in his throat. But she held his gaze, undaunted. “Am I wrong, Logan? Would she be proud of what you’ve made of her death — all this guilt, all these walls you’ve built to keep everyone out?”
The anger drained out of him as quickly as it came, replaced by something like shame. “No,” he admitted quietly, looking away. “She’d be disappointed in me.”
She tilted his face back up gently. “Your grief’s twisted things around, Logan. Made you believe you’re responsible for keeping everyone around you alive — like it’s on you if they die. It isn’t. We live a dangerous life. People we love are always at some risk. Keeping your distance doesn’t protect anyone — it just isolates you, and hurts the people who care about you. You have to let this go, or it’s going to hollow you out. Besides — how are you going to look out for any of us if you’re not actually with us?”
She paused. “And I never died on you, Logan. That was Phoenix. I’ve been here the whole time, circling you since the day we met again. Now that I know you love me too, and that everything keeping you from admitting it only sounds reasonable because you’ve never said it out loud to anyone — you’re not going to be able to keep me at arm’s length anymore. Besides,” she added, softer, “you already love me, so by your own logic, wouldn’t I already be in danger? Doesn’t that mean I’m safer with you?”
He looked stunned. She closed the last of the distance and kissed him — soft, deliberate, everything she felt poured into it. He responded after a beat, and the kiss deepened, his mind opening to her fully, love unguarded for the first time.
She pulled back before either of them lost themselves entirely, holding herself steady while he blinked back at her, still dazed.
“At Genosha, you told me we have to stand for something, even without knowing if we’ll win. That giving in to fear means we’ve already lost. That applies here too, Logan. What we have is real and true, and it’s not going to stay buried just because you’ve decided it should.”
She kissed him once more, lightly, and lifted back into the air. “Are you going to keep letting fear run your whole life? Because I won’t. I’ve made my choice — same as Mariko made hers, eyes open. I’m not going anywhere.”
Goodnight, my love, she sent, and flew back toward the mansion, leaving him alone with everything she’d said.
End flashback
Back in her room now, the memory finished, Jean stood, determination settling over her, and opened her wardrobe — pulling outfit after outfit out telekinetically as she dressed for the conversation ahead.
Time’s up, Logan. Ready or not, neither of us is running anymore.
