Logan

I don’t know why I’d expected it to be easy, but I had. I thought that after Jean appeared in my borrowed truck, I’d just follow her to wherever it was that Stryker was keeping Marie. I don’t know, that she’d do some super nifty mind-control voodoo bullshit and volia Marie’s whereabouts would appear.

Not so much.

Jean went over all of my notes, over everywhere Beast had marked on the map, and had added a few places of her own. 

“How the hell do you know that?” My tone wasn’t exactly sweet when I asked.

She had shrugged. “These are places I’ve found him in my other... er. Travels. He could be there, he could be in another spot, but it would be easier to make absolutely sure before we start to reinvent the wheel.” 

It made me feel that whatever dimension she was from, this wasn’t her first rodeo when it came to eliminating Stryker.

She was skilled in avoiding questions that she didn’t want to answer. Jean didn’t go rooting through my mind, but I’d catch her staring at me with this look on her face that made me feel... well. I didn’t quite have words for it. I can’t say I minded the attention- she was a beautiful woman after all. I mean, I wasn’t going to crawl into bed with her or anything, but for whatever reasons she was doing this I sure a shit wasn’t about to say no.   I needed the help, and must have finally gotten over myself, because I didn’t care much who provided it- if the end result was I had Marie in my arms again.

I started to roll my eyes at my own melodrama, then stopped. Marie in my arms, in my bed, in my life. . . maybe I shouldn’t be so dismissive of getting what I wanted. 

“- standing there.”

I jumped, blinking, realizing all at once that Jean was talkin’ to me. 

“I said that I think you might need some sleep based on how long you’ve been standing there staring at nothing. We’ve got only two places left before we start to get creative in our search.”

I blinked. For a second, I thought she sounded like. . .

...Jesus. Maybe I did need to get some fuckin’ sleep. I nodded shortly and stood up, stretching my arms and legs, and wincing when my back popped into place. I didn’t want to stop. With Jean’s help we had scoured through the places in so little time. “I’m fine. Let’s take the next one.”

Jean stared at me, head tilted slightly to the left as though she was listening to something only she could hear. It was quite strange to see her eyes that way; her eyes had been bright and laughing with humor. Well, in my case, exasperation, but they’d always been warm. The black, faintly star-covered inky blackness was bizarre enough that I wanted to both spend a few more minutes trying to stare into their depths and cringe away in equal measure. She wore dark glasses to cover the fact that her eyes looked like something out of a bad acid trip, but she’d taken them off around me fairly quickly.

“Nah.” I finally managed to answer. “Would rather push on, if it’s all the same to you.”

Jean turned around with a shrug and tapped a spot on a map.  “Alright then. This is a long shot, but in my ‘verse, it was quite a party. Hydra had kept a bunker in the middle of a lake, buried between the surface, ‘cuz you know how pretentious those asshole are, and the Aveng- uh. This group I’ve worked with on occasion found a whole stash of telepathic trolls there.”  

“The trolls. . . were telepathic?”

Jean nodded, rolling her eyes a little. “Yeah. Stick with me here, Wolvie. The compound had different apparatuses used for psionics and abilities, and it would be an easy enough stretch to assume that they’re gonna take your girl there.”  She moved closer and suddenly my personal space was occupied. If I’d been drinking something instead of staring down at her damn map, the surprise would have caused me to spew it all over her face.

“You sure you don’t want to take a quick break?”

The way she said ‘break’ coupled with the arch look in her gaze made it pretty obvious what she meant, but the finger she traced down my Adam’s apple to the middle of my chest was like someone shot a gun next to my ear.   

I felt her in my mind then, flipping through my memories, thick, leaving the weird residue behind. The feeling was so odd that I froze in place, staring at her with narrowed eyes.  Deliberately, I took a step backwards, letting one claw snikt into existence. I kept it pointed down, not quite ready to threaten her, but not really down with her flipping through my mind like Gambit did through a deck of cards.

“Jean.” It was impossible not to compare the two versions. Differences in speaking, the slightly more lethal body aside, she was dangerous in a way that the Jean I had known just wasn’t. I stepped away with another step and she smirked a little but didn’t push it, instead closing the laptop with the map and grabbing her water bottle off the hood of the truck.  

“Well, come on then. We can be there by fourteen hundred if we hustle.”

Still feeling a little like I was missing something, I raised my eyebrow at her back and slid behind the wheel, starting it and waiting for her to program the coordinates into the GPS. The location wasn’t too far from our location. With an unmodified vehicle, it probably would have taken us a few days to get there. With Beast’s little tweaks and nudges, we’d be there in just a few hours. 

Jean reached to turn on the radio, and something with a club beat started throbbing in the small space of the truck’s cab. 

My fingers tightened on the wheel, but I refrained from ripping out her throat.

Maybe I was growing as a person.

I snorted to myself, then pulled out of the truck stop onto a highway.  It was freezing cold of course, and the wind had frozen the slightly melting snow into a kaleidoscope of icicles and frozen drifts of snow.

“Hey, Logan?”

I flinched at hearing her say my name like that, with the same little hitch of breathlessness that had me twisted around her counterpart’s finger.

“Yeah?’

“We’re gonna get her back, you know.”

I swallowed hard, uncomfortably aware of how hard she stared at my profile, unsure if she was sincere or not.  It was hard to keep my reaction inside. I didn’t know her. She didn’t get to poke at me, to see what would happen.

I managed to jerk my head in acknowledgement, and she seemed to get the point.

We were quiet for the rest of the trip.

****

‘Ten o’clock.’

Jean’s mind voice was bright in my mind, clearer than even Chucky’s had been. It was almost brittle with precision, and I nodded, not comfortable with saying words in my head to respond. 

The realization that Marie was likely being held here sent a buzz of adrenaline through my system and as I focused my breathing, I took a precious moment to plan out what I wanted to do, making sure that I could see it in my head.  There were two guards by a guardhouse, with enough firepower to really ring my bell if they were so inclined.  I saw a small guardhouse, and according to the specs of the holding facility, a large elevator that descended under the lake. I closed my eyes and pictured the layout, then nodded again.

Jean aimed, and the pfztt! pfztt!  of her taking aim and shooting made something low and familiar curl in my gut, and the grin stretched my mouth almost before I realized how much I’d missed this; Well, not the murder of lackey assholes part of it, but the fact that after days and days of wasting my goddamn time I was finally doing something.

I ran at the two goons that were on the grating at the second level, and took them out just as they were attempting to swing their weapon into play. It felt good to eke out some kind of retribution, and even if these weren’t the guys who had a hand in taking Marie from me, I could brush off any lingering conscious with the wholehearted belief that somewhere these dicks had hurt one of the good guys.

I was almost bowled over by a heavy, sticky image sent from Jean, an image of Marie on a metal slab of a surgical table, looking frail in a hospital gown. I felt the burning pain of a bullet slice across my abdomen, and grunted under my breath, trying to see past the image of Marie looking pale as death in order to take out the guy who’d shot me.

She’s in the basement prison hospital. I’ll get these guys, you get to her and I’ll catch up as soon as I can.

Instead of answering, I ran at a few soldiers who just about shit themselves, throwing down their guns before I could get to them. It took a second to roll my eyes and knock their heads together- gently though, so that they’d just wake up with a bitch of a headache instead of not wake up at all. I took their weapons and ran towards the stairs, noting that Jean had made her careful way to the elevators. Most of the goons were following her, thinking she was an easy target.

Stupid fucks.

I ran down the first twelve flights of stairs without anyone stopping me. I heard a klaxon going off somewhere and grinned a little at a few mentions of  “-attack! At the elevators!” I raised a surprised elbow when the elevator opened with a ‘ding!’ and Jean stepped out with hardly a hair out of place, a pile of bodies behind her. She waved jauntily, and kicked one of the bodies so the shoulder blocked the elevator doors closing, causing anyone above to be unable to send it up to the surface.

“Nice.”

She shrugged elegantly with one shoulder. “I don’t have a lot of time left here. Strange is a bit of a bastard about punctuality. You try the computers yet?”

“No.” I walked towards the door and peeked inside. Marie was there. She was there just a few feet away. My heart jumped to my throat, and a flash of the grainy, green film from when I was kept in the panic room of the Mansion swam behind my gaze. She had done everything for me. There was no way that I could do any less for her.

“Hey, Logan?”

I turned, only to jump back against the door when she stepped right up into my space.

“Don’t gut me, okay?”

My mind stalled when Jean kissed me. Her lips were strangely soft, and she tasted the same as “my” version of Jean. I felt her hand on my cheek, and I realized I was kissing her back, tasting her breath with our tongues twisting together. It was nice, but it wasn’t. . ..

It just wasn’t.

I pulled away, looking down at her with a look of surprise on my face. She bit her lip and looked down, looking rattled for the first time since I’d met this strange-other version of her.  

“Shit. I’m . . . I’m sorry. I just. I had to see if. . . I just had to see.”  She took a short step back, still not looking at me. For the first time since she had shown up, Jean didn’t have the strong sense of confidence about her that I had come to recognize. She looked tired, and strangely sad.

I shrugged. “No reason.” I tilted up her chin so that she would meet my eyes. Not sure how much good that would do me with someone who could fuck my mind over without even blinking, but she seemed strangely vulnerable. “What was that about?”

“I uh. In my. . . world. Well. We. We were a little closer than I think you and the other version of me were. I just had to. . . see.”

It surprised me that her world didn’t have a Scott panting after a Jean, but her and me. . . it made sense. It was easy enough to infer that I had died, or left, and she’d not seen me for quite awhile. The kiss was nostalgic, and I really couldn’t fault her for it.  I started to say something along those lines, but before I could, she snapped back into her Phoenix persona and any softer moments were forcibly stomped to the ground.

“Come on. We need to get in there.”

Jean turned towards the computers, fingers flying over the consoles with very smooth ease. I heard a beep, and long tone, and the locks on the door clicked. I also heard the sound of people on the stairs, and turned to Jean. She shook her head, already raising her hand towards the stairwell. “You take care of the girl. I’ve got this.”

All thoughts of Jean Grey left my mind. I was so focused on Marie that I barely noticed the form of a woman crumpled between the door of the cell and the bed until I tripped over her. She was very obviously dead, the bullet hole an almost perfect hole in her forehead. The exit wound wasn’t as pretty, and the blood and brain matter spattered on the floor answered well enough what had happened to her. I saw the nameplate ‘ McTaggart’ and frowned, knowing that Marie had mentioned that name to me for one reason or another, then shrugged and scooped the nearly weightless Marie up in my arms.

She was cold.

My eyes widened, panic starting to burn its way up my throat.  

I shut my eyes, tuning out Jean noisily kicking ass outside, my own thudding heartbeat, everything except the sound of Marie’s pulse.

Nothing.

No.

No .

I put my ear to her chest, ignoring everything my enhanced senses were telling me. They had to be wrong. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t. Fucking. Possible. Not after everything.

“Marie?” I whispered it, shaky and terrified, my barely there voice loud in the silent room. I swallowed hard, ignoring the tight-pinched feeling in my throat when I still didn’t hear a pulse.

No!  I was. I was too. . . late.

“ MARIE !”

***

Marie

There was probably some kind of far-reaching irony in the fact that I was essentially a passenger in Jean’s body.

After absorbing all the personalities I’d absorbed: the boy I’d kissed so long ago, a few wayward, handsy travellers, Erik, Carol, Logan, and even Charles. . . all of them had been forced to live through me. Literally. If I was asleep, then they were asleep. If I was awake, then they were awake. It wasn’t until Charles’ recent machinations that anything had changed.  

It even burned that she’d been better at the control of those personalities than I was.  I sighed, staring balefully at the bars of my cell door.

The worst part about all of this is that I didn’t know how long I’d been in here.

I heard a thud from outside, and a low growl and mutter of German. Whatever Jean had done to keep her travelers from overlapping one another, she’d done a bang-up job. The cells were practically soundproof; ensuring that we could barely communicate. Even shouting at the top of my lungs hadn’t worked at first.

It had taken hours and hours, or maybe days and days, to break down the cells so that we could even communicate. Now I could hear Erik, and he could hear me, but that was about it. The structure was still strong enough that we couldn’t do anything else to free ourselves. I looked around. It looked like a standard padded cell. There wasn’t a toilet- but we weren’t in our actual bodies, so that hadn’t mattered much. I was wearing a hospital gown for some reason, and looked filthy- my hair lank and greasy from being unwashed for several days.  The most comfortable place to sit was in the corner, and that’s where I had spent most of my captivation, hunched in the corner with my legs drawn up to my chest, head pillowed in my arms.

“Diese schlampe.”

I winced, and looked up towards the door.

Erik was less than complimentary about his imprisonment, although I think that a good bit of that had to do with Jean keeping Erik and Charles from each other.

Charles might as well have completely disappeared. He didn’t respond to either of us calling for him.

I heard another thud and what sounded like a shout of satisfaction. Erik shouted something else but before I could move, the door to my cell exploded open, and a furious Erik Lehnsherr strode through, the metal of the door flowing around him like bees disturbed from their hive.  With a twitch of his fingers, the once-door fell to the ground in tatters, and he almost tripped in his haste to get to my side, concern visible on his face. “ Wie gehts? Marie?” Forgive me, Liebling. Are you. . . Marie?”

“Hi.”  I was a little shocked that he’d gone to such trouble to get to me. I’d expected this for Charles- especially after the scene I’d witnessed, but not me.

His worried face broke out in a smile so huge that for a moment he didn’t look like the broody Erik I’d gotten to know. “Hi.”  He brushed my hair off my forehead and shifted to sit beside me, stretching his arm a little awkwardly out so that he could lay it along my shoulders. With a twitch of his hand, the metal of what had recently been the door to my cell stacked itself neatly outside of the doorway.  

At first, it was horribly awkward. Neither of us was particularly good at neither comfort nor cuddling. We figured it out well enough, by me turning my body into the crook of Erik’s arm, nestling my face just above his armpit, on his chest. Slowly he relaxed, becoming less wooden and more natural, and we sat there, curled into one another until I fell asleep.

***

‘Marie. . .’

The voice was almost visceral. It rocketed through me like a gunshot.   

“Charles?”

“Charles!”

Erik and I spoke at the same time, shocked.

He looked awful .  Erik was halfway up and reaching for him before I could even blink, and I couldn’t say what exactly had made me do it, but I managed to keep ahold of his other hand, keeping the two of us linked.  I had no idea of the stipulation that Charles had fought so hard against was still there, or what, but I for damn sure wasn’t going to be the thing that broke us.

“Alter Freund, Was ist mit dir passiert?”

Charles swayed where he stood, phasing through the walls of the prison. Where he walked, chaos reigned. Erik had broken through Jean’s prison on pure stubbornness; unwilling (or perhaps unable) to remain apart from me when he knew that I was alone and scared.

Charles had broken through on pure will . Whatever limits the Dark Phoneix of our world had imposed on Charles Xavier’s mutation were completely obliterated. Looking through his body to the walls behind him, I could see that the landscape of Jean’s mind looked like a tornado, utterly decimating as far as the eye could see.

I wasn’t sure if Jean knew what Charles had done, but part of me really didn’t care.

“Erik,” Charles gasped, falling to his knees on my left, with Erik still half-stretched towards him. Erik cupped Charles’ cheek and brought their foreheads together so gently that I felt like an interloper on what was a painfully intimate moment.

I knew that Charles and I were close, and that to some extent he loved me as a fond niece, or perhaps a favorite student in need of a nudge to reach their full potential.  He was loyal, and unbearably kind. I felt extremely close with him, and knew that he’d taken over my body to protect it. In my time in this damn prison, I’d come to understand how much Charles and I were alike, and needed one another.

But watching the two of them?

God almighty; it broke my heart.

I tried to press myself back, awkwardly attempting to ignore them even while my childish, romantic heart did flips in place.

Charles, somehow knowing exactly how I felt, turned slightly to brush my hair back from my face.  It was sweet, and poignant, and made me feel anchored, secure in the knowledge of my place in the world.

Of course, that’s when everything went to shit.

**

An Interlude

A punch to the diaphragm, the implosion of a small star, a flicker of realities, flipping like a deck of cards into one vision and all of the sudden, I could see.

-- I was Jean and Jean was me as we leaned forward, meeting Logan’s startled lips with our own. We tasted his surprise, and his acquiescence to the kiss, our heart broke in remembered pain of watching him murdered before our very eyes, and somehow. Somehow he’s alive and well and tastes. the. same.

- He pulls away and our heart breaks all over again to see his familiar, worn, and worried face marked with a strange sort of sympathy. Of pity. “What was that about?” and we can’t tell him, can’t possibly explain. Not in any way that can make sense, but we try. We fail.

-We are distracted, and swear under our breath, and by the realization of what must be done. We see the dead, crumpled body of the woman in the cell with us and know that Logan’s pain, the sound of his heart shattering when he realizes that we are---

“MARIE !”

-The sound of the end of everything. It’s staggering in its simplicity, and all at once we can understand again why success is so important.

-We cannot fail.

--and it’s time, it’s time. Strange told her what she must do, and how she must do it, and it hurt so much. Gritting her teeth, Jean walks into the cell, ignores the pain of seeing Logan crumpled around Rogue’s lifeless body. He wasn’t hers in this world, and it seemed impossible that this man did not have someone who loved him, someone who needed him as much as Jean had needed her version of Logan, her Logan who was lost to her forever.

It was time. Time . TimetimeTimetime. . ..

Jean licks her lips, and flings a barrier to stop the minions advancing on their position. Like this, and with this much understanding, she can see the poison in Rogue’s veins, and with a heavy heart she flings Logan from the girl’s body with another barrier of pure force.

The look of utter betrayal that flickers over his features is just as painful as what she is about to do.

With a deep breath, she attacks.

Rogue’s mind is undefended, weakened.  Jean flinches as she covers Rogue’s psi points with hands that shake. She throws everything at the fragile-seeming girl underneath her, burning out the Cure that wracks her body, changing her DNA at the cellular level.

Rogue’s body bows underneath Jean’s onslaught and the scream that fills the room is almost inhuman.

Jean sees the gold circular spark of Strange’s Portal and jerks with everything that she has in her.  She has known what would happen, and accepted the consequences with the two of them connected mind-to-mind as they were.

Whatever she had done to them in this world. . ..

. . . she hoped that this evened the red in her ledger. She sucked in what breath she could find as the creeping poison spread from Rogue to her own body. Rogue’s mind was empty for the briefest of moments, but even then, the Shadowbeast was poised and ready to take over.

And that? That would be the end of them all.  

Jean readied herself, more exhausted than she had ever been, weary and desperate as she screamed out her last-ditch effort at absolution.

“ NOW , CHARLES!”

TBC

I had some help with a few friends with the German, but if you see any issues, please let me know. 

Diese schlampe- That whore   (I was going for bitch, but that's as close as I could figure out.) 

Wie gehts ?-- Are you okay?

Liebling- Sweetheart

Alter Freund, Was ist mit dir passiert?- Old Friend, what's the matter?