The Flight Home.

Los Angeles, California.

"Are you sure you want to do this, Jubilee?" Scott asked as he helped her load boxes into the Blackbird's vast hold. "Logan isn't around much but he does still live there."

"I don't have a choice," she told him as she lifted a bicycle into the hold. "Mari manifested early and needs help that I can't give her. If Emma can't teach her to shield, she's going to go insane. I mean, I can teach her about bio-energy but that's not her power. She's a telepath. I just can't help her. And with her healing factor beginning to make itself known, she's not safe anymore."

Scott stared at his shoes in apparent fascination. "You never told Logan about Mari, did you?" he asked.

Jubilee fell silent, nervously shifting boxes around unnecessarily.

"Jubilee?" he said, looking over at her.

"I couldn't," she said quietly, not looking at him.

"Why?"

"He would have wanted to see her," she said. "I couldn't, Scott. I just ... couldn't."

"What are you going to tell him?"

"I don't know," she admitted.

"He's going to know," Scott told her.

"Maybe not. She doesn't look like him."

"Jubilee, I know we've had this argument over and over before but you need to tell him. He has the right to know."

"Does he?" she demanded, her head coming up in defiance. "I never told you why I left. You don't know what I went through while I was with him."

"Did he beat you?" Scott demanded.

"Of course not!" she scoffed, appalled that he would think that of Logan.

"Did he cheat on you?"

"Not physically," she admitted.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Every time we made love, he would pretend I was someone else."

"You're kidding!" he said, surprised. "Logan didn't have his mind on the woman he was with? Who was he thinking about?"

"Who do you think he was thinking about?" she asked, scathingly.

"Jean?" he guessed.

"Yeah," she said. "I couldn't compete with her like that and I didn't want to stay with him if he couldn't make love to me and not the Jean in his mind."

"Oh, Jubilee," he sighed, pulling her into his arms and holding her. "I'm so sorry." After a moment, he said softly, "What Logan did isn't all that unusual when it comes to men. We kind of live by our fantasies."

"All the time?" she asked. "Every time?"

"Well, no," he admitted. "Not every time."

"With Logan, it was every time." She stepped out of his arms and returned to moving the boxes around.

"How did you know? I don't think that's something he would admit to you, no matter how you asked."

"He would call her name at just the wrong moment, if you know what I mean."

"Oh."

"Yeah. That kind of thing lets you know he's not really with you."

"Mom?" A dark headed girl came ambling up the ramp searching for her mother.

"Hey, Mari." Jubilee plastered a smile on her face for her daughter. "Do you have everything packed up?"

"Almost," she said. "I need another large box."

Scott pulled a flattened box from the stack near the back. "Here you go, Mari." he said as he handed her the box.

"Thanks," she said. "Are you really Cyclops?" she asked, her head cocked at an angle that reminded him of her mother.

"He sure is," Jubilee said. "He's the leader of the X-Men."

"Your mom used to be an X-Man, also," he told the girl.

"I know that but she was only with the team for two years. You've been in from the very beginning." Mari said, adoration clear in her voice. "Will I get to be an X-Man?"

"Well," he said looking over Mari's head at Jubilee who was shaking her head frantically, "that depends on you. If you study and work hard, we can discuss it later, when you're grown."

"Radical!" she squealed. "I'll work real hard. Just watch me!" She ran off toward the house, the flattened box waving behind her.

"Mari!" Jubilee called after her. She sighed in frustration as Mari ran into the house without looking back. She looked over at Scott, an angry scowl on her face. "I don't want her joining the team, Scott." Jubilee told him.

"That's up to her when she's an adult. We don't take minors anymore."

"I don't want my kid risking her life like I did. She deserves more."

"We all do, Jubilee." he told. "Mari needs to learn to protect herself and you know that."

"She knows how to protect herself." Jubilee told him. "I'm not that stupid. I don't think she needs to learn battle strategies and I definitely don't want her involved with the team."

"You don't want her to have classes with Logan." he corrected.

"Can you blame me?" she asked.

"She's going to be living in the same house with him. There's no way she can avoid running into him."

Jubilee dropped into a chair and rubbed her eyes in defeat. "Oh, God," she moaned. "How am I going to explain to him why I kept his daughter a secret?"

Scott watched as she tried to figure out what she was going to tell her former lover. She was thirty now and the years had been easy on her. She still looked much like the teen he used to know but her eyes held a maturity that was not there before. She had been a pretty girl but that girl was gone. In her place stood a stunning woman, vivacious and sexy. If he was not committed to Emma, he would have tried to attract this beautiful woman. Logan was in for several nasty surprises, the least of which was Mari.

It took them several hours to pack Mari's belongings into the Blackbird and get into the air. He decided to keep the plane subsonic for the return trip. He needed to get to know Mari and decide if Jubilee was ready to see Logan again.

"Are you going to have to go back for business?" he asked after Mari fell asleep.

"Eventually," she told him. "I stopped taking buyers a month ago and I have an assistant who can do some of the work but I'll need to go back in a few days for some closings."

"Hum..." he said.

"I don't need to work, Scott." she said. "Aunt Hope left me a pile of money but I get bored easy."

"Don't I know that!" he agreed with a laugh.

She smiled saucily at him. "Real estate keeps me busy and I get to snoop in other peoples houses. That's how I found that plot I called you about three years ago. He called me and asked me to sell his house. I can't help it if he was stupid enough to leave the evidence out in the open. He got what was coming to him."

Logan had not been with them for that mission so Scott had felt safe to visit her in her home when the mission was completed. Jubilee had taken the precaution of sending Mari to a friend for the night. He could understand why she did it. It was not so much that Logan could have been with them. It was more that she did not want the team to know and spill the news to him. She needed to be the one to tell him.

"Are you ready to face him?"

"Not really," she admitted, "but I can't delay it any longer. Mari has a healing factor. Not many people know about her but she's a target for every government goober out there, now. I can't protect her anymore."

"What have you told her about him?"

"That he was my mentor and teacher. She doesn't know that he's her father. I'm going to have to tell her soon. I don't have a choice anymore."

"Emma will know."

"She'll keep it quiet."

"How do you figure that?"

"I already told her. She's agreed to keep quiet about it until I can tell both of them."

"Will you tell them?"

He heard her take a deep breath and exhale loudly. "Yeah. Like I said; I don't have a choice anymore."

They continued on in silence for over an hour before Scott interrupted the quiet with the one question she had hoped he would not ask.

"Do you still love him?"

The words tore through her heart. She had tried not to love him. She had prayed, repeatedly, for God to take her love for him away and let her find happiness but it did not work. She had taken lovers over the years, searching for companionship. Most were too tall, or too hairless. All were too nice. None were the man she had been looking for; the man she craved with every fiber of her being. The thought of living the rest of her life without him filled her with such pain that she nearly doubled over with it.

Scott waited for her to make up her mind. He was just about to ask her again when he heard her sniffle back her tears.

"I'll take that as a 'yes'." he said. "Just for the record, I think he loves you, too."

"No, he doesn't." she said, her voice thick with unshed tears. "He loves the memory of Jean."

"No," Scott sighed sadly, "that would be me."

"Oh, Scott." she said gently. "She haunts you, doesn't she?" Her hand came down on top of his and squeezed.

"Every moment of my days and nights." he admitted in a low voice. "I don't know how Emma puts up with me. I love her but there are nights when all I can see is Jean. I feel her with me. I make love to her again. Emma can tell what I'm thinking about but she never confronts me with it. So, I know where Logan's coming from. I'm guilty of it myself."

Jubilee fell quiet for a long minute. "I loved her, you know." she finally said. "Even when she came between Logan and me, I still loved her. She was like my big sister. She even let me vent to her when he first cried her name."

"She loved you, too." Scott told her. "She worried about you for the rest of her life. I didn't tell her about the baby but I'm sure she knew. I never could keep a secret from her, even before we started seeing each other. It wasn't long after you told me you were expecting Mari that she started asking when we were going to start our own family."

"What happened?"

"We tried. She lost two before she got pregnant the last time. She was eight weeks when she died."

"Oh, God," she breathed. "Why didn't you tell me when I called?"

"I couldn't. I tried to tell you but I couldn't make myself say the words." He reached forward and adjusted the autopilot slightly. "You're the only one who knows. I haven't even told Emma that Jean was pregnant when she died."

She was surprised that he would tell her this. He was usually so private. She looked at him closely. He was older now but that was to be expected. It had been three years since she had last seen him and the mantle of leadership weighed heavily upon him since Xavier's death. He had gray at his temples but it only made him more attractive. It was strange. All her life she had thought of Scott as an anal retentive stick in the mud. The leader: the robot. For the first time, she saw him as a man and she like what she saw. She could see why Emma wanted him.

"You've changed," she remarked.

"I haven't changed, Jubilee," he corrected, "not really. But you have. You've grown into a beautiful, intelligent woman who has the world at her feet. As painful as it was to leave, these years away from the mansion have been good for you."

"You're right," she said, surprised that he understood. "I needed time to learn who I was, apart from the X-Men. I like the woman I've become. She's smart, rich and has a very full social calender. The only thing she's having problems with in her life is her eleven year old daughter."

"Are you having problems with her?"

Jubilee did not answer. She could hear Mari approaching the cockpit, her footfalls heavy on the deck. Jubilee shook her head. Someone will have to teach her how to move with some semblance of stealth.

"How much longer?" Mari asked, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.

"Just over an hour," Scott told her. "We'll start our descent in fifteen minutes."

"Can I try flying the plane for a while?" she asked hopefully.

"No!" Jubilee said quickly.

"Why not?" she said, her attitude showing. "You used to."

"I was trained to fly the plane and I was older."

"It's always about older, isn't it. That's always your excuse for not letting me do something."

"Mari," Scott interrupted the argument, "the Blackbird is one of the most difficult planes to fly. I won't even let you mother fly it again without checking her out in the simulator first."

"You have to be sixteen to pilot a powered aircraft and eighteen to fly a jet." Jubilee argued. "I wouldn't even attempt to fly this thing. It's been a long time since I flew a supersonic jet."

"You weren't sixteen," Mari countered. Hostility was clear in her expression. "You told me that you once took one of the mini jets and chased Wolvie down in Japan. You said you were fourteen at the time. Why can you do it and not me?"

"I was young and stupid at the time." Jubilee protested.

"So you think I'm stupid?" Mari crossed her arms and glared at her mother.

"I didn't say that, Mari." Jubilee said through clenched teeth. "I said I was stupid."

"Yes you did," Mari countered. "You think I'm stupid just 'cause I'm a kid."

"Mari," Jubilee sighed, "I know you're not stupid. I've seen your grades. You're just not ready to do things like flying an airplane yet."

A loud whistle cut through to cabin with an earsplitting shriek. Both Lee females stopped and stared at Scott in surprise.

"Break it up," he ordered in his best 'Fearless Leader' voice. "Jubilee, stay here. Mari, go back to your seat. I won't have fighting on this plane."

"Yes sir," Jubilee said automatically.

"Fine," Mari huffed. She turned on her heel and marched back to her seat.

"When did this start?" Scott asked in a low voice.

"In the last year," Jubilee told him. "At first, I was just having a hard time getting her to clean her room. As you can see, it's progressed from there. She argues with me about everything now."

"Maybe it's time for Logan to step in and take over parenting her," Scott suggested gently. "He always was good at understanding the adolescent female mind."

Jubilee looked at him in horror.

"Just a suggestion, you know. You don't have to take my advice."

The remainder of the flight passed without incident. Scott brought the jet down with his usual economy and landed it gently in its hanger.

"Are you ready for this?" he asked the nervous woman as he powered down the engines.

She squared her shoulders and nodded. "Let's go."