A/N: Here it is, the most dramatic, the most confusing, the longest chapter, and quite frankly, the whole reason I wrote this damn story in the first place. Logan's big chapter. I can't split this one up without turning it into a mess, so you'll just have to have it in one go. Enjoy!

Logan blearily opened his eyes, his mind hazy from a massive headache. He did a mini double-take when he saw the sun shining through the curtains; the sun doesn't normally break through the smog cover. And when the hell did he get curtains? Or a window for that matter? The bunker shouldn't have...

A radio playing in the background caught his attention, and he rolled over (a squishy bed? what sorcery is this?) to see the unit sitting on an end table. The Roberta Flack song currently playing gave him a strange sense of déjà vu, and he looked around to see if anything was off. There was an overflowing bookshelf next to the bed, not exactly his style, though the Japanese sword display in the corner certainly was.

Deciding what the hell, Logan got up and opened the door. He got a bit of a shock as a school bell went off, and children started scrambling for class. Looking down the hall he spotted his first familiar face, Bobby Drake, who looked a lot less hardened than the Resistance leader he was used to. A second surprise then entered the hall, Rogue, who last he heard was captured and tortured by the sentinel's masters. Is he... back at the mansion?

After a moment of processing, Logan wandered down the hall to see what else was part of this strange dream. He passed a class taught by Kitty and Colossus, a pair he never thought he'd see together. The next surprise was his old friend Beast, who chuckled at him for sleeping in! The last time he saw him was right before the protesters had dragged him from his home and beaten him to death. He even saw Storm in a suit acting like a principal!

When he arrived at the first floor, Logan's mind was already starting to go. That was when he glanced toward Professor Xavier's office, and noticed a redheaded woman leaning in the doorway. Could it be?

Turning around, Jean noticed her stalker and smiled. "Hi Logan, did the coffee run out?"

Dumbstruck, Logan walked up to the door and mumbled. "You're here..."

"Yeah... am I supposed to be somewhere else?"

Yeah, dead. Logan started to raise his arm as if to touch her, when another quickly grabbed it. "Hey bub, look but don't touch." Stepping out from behind the other door, the old pain in the ass named Scott shook his head.

"...I'm glad to see you too, Scott." Logan patted Scott's shoulder, equally shocked that he was alive as well. Scott rolled his eyes and hurried to class, with Jean moving to follow.

"You okay, Logan?" she asked, tilting her head, though Logan simply smirked.

"Yeah, I'm good."

With Jean and Scott gone, Logan turned to the office. Right where he was expecting, the Professor sat behind his desk fiddling with his paperwork. "You did it."

"Did what?" Charles asked flatly, not even bothering to look up from his papers. "Logan, don't you have a class to teach?"

Logan's face curled, as though he couldn't believe him. "A class... to... teach."

Charles sighed, and looked up. "Yes, history."

"History..." Logan chuckled at the irony. "Actually, I could-"

"DAD!"

Logan froze dead in his tracks. That voice, he knew that voice. The last time he heard it was six years ago when the sentinels took her away from him. Logan whipped around, and came nearly face to face with a raven haired, cobalt eyed, sly grinning teenager. "Lilly..."

"If you don't come to class soon, you're never gonna be able to get anything done. By the time you get everyone else to shut up, it'll be over!" Lilly tilted her head and rocked back and forth, waiting for a response. "What's wrong, no coffee?"

"Uh... no, kiddo, that's not it. I, um..." Logan started to reach for her, when suddenly a screaming infant was shoved into his arms, and a brown haired blur brushed past him and collapsed onto the Professor's couch. "Wha..."

"Here you try, she's been crying for three hours straight and I can't get her to stop."

Logan looked at the screaming baby in his arms, before turning to the newest arrival at little party in the Professor's office. As soon as he saw who it was, he fumbled his grip on the child but luckily Lilly dove forward and grabbed her from her father's arms.

"Elle?!" Logan still remembered the battle where he lost her like it was yesterday; in fact it took both the Professor and Magneto to stop him from going on a reckless suicide mission out of revenge. She died protecting Jubilee and an eight year old Lilly from those sentinel bastards, buying her daughter another year. The memory still haunted him.

"Logan? Logan, is everything alright? You didn't have a nightmare, did you?" Elle stood from the Professor's couch and came over to rub Logan's forehead. "I'm sorry, I spent most of the night in the kitchen with the baby so she wouldn't wake you... I really think she has colic, I can't figure out what else it might be. I guess she doesn't have a healing factor yet."

Standing there dumbstruck, Logan slowly turned from Elle, to Lilly and the baby, finally to the Professor who had a small smile on his face. When he turned back to Elle, her concern had become outright worry, and she vocalized it. "Are you okay? What's going on?!"

"Oh, nothing," he mumbled, taking her hand and kissing the back of her palm. "I'm just still amazed we've got a second kid, that's all."

"Logan, we have three children!" Elle corrected, pulling her hand back and looking from Logan to the Professor in horror. Lilly had managed to get the baby to quiet down a little, but now she resumed her wailing after her mother raised her voice.

Disoriented, Logan scratched his head. "Three?"

"Yes!" Tears began pooling in Elle's eyes, as she pointed to their daughters by the door. "Fifteen year old Lilly, three week old Kanani, and your eight year old son Akira!"

Logan stumbled backwards, just barely falling into chair by the door. "S-son? I have a son?"

"Yeah, and the two of you are practically joined at the hip," Lilly mumbled. "Especially since that fight he got into last week with Warren."

"Lilly, now is not the time," Charles scolded, drawing everyone's attention his way. "I believe an explanation is due, in order for everyone to make sense of the situation..."

"Damn right!" Elle interjected, causing both Logan and Lilly to flinch. Neither were used to seeing the normally reserved wife and mother act such a way in front of the Professor. "What happened to Logan? Why doesn't he remember our family?"

"...Is somethin wrong wit Logan?" The whole group turned around, startled to find they had a new participant in the conversation. Logan stood from his chair, and in a completely uncharacteristic show of emotion, grabbed him in a bear hug.

"...D'accord, now Remy know somfin wrong. LEGGO!" The Cajun eavesdropper wriggled out of Logan's grasp, and took a look around the room. "Professor called me to come get Nani. Walked past what was supposed to be Logan's classroom, bonne chance with that crowd, mon ami. So, what's goin on?"

"You and Lilly were in the same safehouse," Logan mumbled, easing his grip on Remy's arms. "I didn't realize how dear of a friend you were until you were gone."

Remy raised an eyebrow, and looked to the Professor for clarification. The Professor nodded, so he ran with it. "Yeah, well, je t'aime aussi, Logan." Remy then took Kanani from Lilly and left, figuring he'd be filled in later. If Logan was finally losing his mind, he wanted no part of it. He already had a baby boy to look after, and didn't need another one.

Once the door was shut and everyone seated, the Professor got down to business. "Elle, Lilly, you have nothing to be afraid of. I believe I know what has happened. It's going to sound very strange, but bear with me." Turning to Logan, he asked, "Logan, what was the year when you went to sleep yesterday? Right before you woke up?"

It took Logan a moment to understand what the Professor was asking, but he finally understood. "...1973."

Elle and Lilly looked at each other, confused. "But, he was here last night," Elle countered. "He and Scott even went on a mission together."

The Professor nodded. "Lilly, what historical event happened in 1973?"

She thought for a minute, before answering, "Roe v Wade, the end of US involvement in the Vietnam war, the first mobile phone call, and the televised reveal of mutants to the world."

"You've paid attention in history class, good," Charles complimented her. "I'll bet though that your wonderful teacher didn't tell you two of those events are related." This time his focus turned to Logan. "Or that he had a hand in both of them?"

"What?!" Elle once again interjected, but this time with a little ammo. "Professor, I think I know what you're getting at, I've heard this before. Raven, right? Logan turned her down, he had nothing to do with the assassination attempt on the President. Now, I don't know how she tricked Magneto, but-"

"Darlin, I was there."

Elle stopped midsentence, and stared at Logan. "What?"

"Mystique, she screwed up the future," Logan explained. "I had to help them stop her, or else everyone would die. You, the students, Remy, everyone but the worst humans. She killed the guy who invented the sentinels, and we had to make sure that didn't happen."

Lilly tilted her head. "You mean Bolivar Trask, right? I know who that is, he died in a prison years ago. Nobody murdered him, he got arrested for selling government information."

"If you know who Trask is, then you know what the sentinels were," Charles began. "In our time, sentinels are nothing more than the robots you all smash up in the Danger Room. But in the timeline where Trask is assassinated at the Paris Peace Accords by Mystique, sentinels are highly dangerous devices capable of adapting to any mutant power. I will spare you the details, suffice to say that after Trask's death, the project was overseen by a certain Colonel Stryker."

Elle reflexively grabbed at the coffee table next to her, sending a vase crashing to the floor. She didn't want to hear about that bottom feeder ever again. "Paris Peace Accords, 1973..." Elle closed her eyes for a moment, then spoke as if reciting from memory. "'The last time I saw Raven was in the fall of '72. I remember because I had just got out of Vietnam. After that, when the new year turned, I don't remember nothin' until I picked you out of the snow.' Please tell me you weren't lying to me, Logan."

"He wasn't lying," Charles interrupted, before anything catastrophic happened. Elle had her glassy doe eyes fixed on Logan's, and it was obvious he didn't remember saying that. "If you will allow me to finish, I can clear up this and probably several other mysteries you've had over the years."

"Please do, I'd like Dad to be around for a few more birthdays."

"Time travel isn't exactly a mutant power that we have at our disposal," Charles explained. "The closest we had was Kitty's ability to phase through objects. Since she developed the ability to phase through time, she could send the consciousness of a person in the present into their body of the past. The only problem was that it was a very dangerous process, and took a very strong mind to survive the trip. Logan was the only one who could do it."

Elle furrowed her brow. "What happened to Logan in 1973, if you sent him back there?"

"Kitty in this era hasn't been through the stress that caused her to develop the same way, so I couldn't analyze her powers, but from what I could gather it works like a timeshare," Charles supposed. "While Logan was in the past, his future mind 'paused' his past mind. As soon as he left, his past mind should have woken back up and taken over, without having realized that he was ever there. At most, he should have only lost a month."

"We didn't meet until 1983, Professor," Elle reminded him. "That's more than a month."

"What's the last thing you remember, Dad?" Lilly asked. "That might give us a clue."

"...Drowning." Logan frowned, remembering how Magneto got the upper hand in the South Lawn battle.

Elle stood from her chair and paced around the room, unsettled. Drowning was so far the only known way to kill him. Did he... Is that why he doesn't remember anything? A tapping stole her attention, and she turned to see that Lilly had resorted to her usual bad habit of tapping one of her claws on the chair leg while trying to concentrate. Then it hit her. "That motherfucking son of a bitch!"

"Mom!"

"Elle?" The Professor reached out to her, but from the look on her and Logan's faces, it was obvious who she was referring to. "I see, that would make sense. When Logan came to save us, he did not have his metal claws. When next I saw you, that day I came to Canada to help the two of you at your cabin, they were metal."

"...Great, another thing that bastard screwed up about my life," Logan grumbled.

"No more talk of him," Elle shushed. "So what happened to my Logan, then? Why doesn't he remember the last forty years we've spent together?"

"I... I remember them, just..." Logan looked at Lilly, then towards the doorway.

"When Lilly was born, how did that go? Tell me," Elle asked, on the verge of further tears. She knew Logan better than anyone, especially enough to know when he was bluffing.

"You know I wasn't here for that, Remy helped you." Logan blurted out his answer without even thinking, so when he turned back and saw the horrified look on both girls' faces, he realized his mistake. "Uhh..."

"You weren't here for the birth of your first child?!" Elle's eyes were wide, tears falling and lip trembling. "First you say Akira and Kanani don't exist, now you didn't even see Lilly's birth? H-how did we meet? Tell me that's still the same!"

Logan held Elle's hands as she stood in front of him, waiting for the answer that he was pretty sure he couldn't give her. Earlier she said he 'plucked her out of the snow' in 1983, and the Professor said they had a cabin. When did he have a cabin? What was he doing in 1983... Oh, he remembered now, the island. Both of them were there, come to think about it. "In 1983 I was at Three Mile Island, with you and Remy. It wasn't snowing, I don't think..."

That did it. Elle's legs gave out, and Logan caught her as she collapsed into a sobbing heap. Lilly jumped out of her chair, and tried to comfort her. "Mom, mom! Calm down, it's okay! He didn't forget everything, just, he had to go back when he finished his mission, and since he stopped Mystique, this was the only future he could return to. Right, Professor?"

"Lilly's simplification is correct; in changing the past, Logan is the only one that remembers the 'bad future' of the sentinels. Regrettably, our survival came with the unfortunate cost of sacrificing the memories of this era's Logan." Charles sighed. "A tough choice, I'm afraid."

"Can't you..." Lilly waved her hands around, looking for the right word. "'Fix' him? Are the old memories still in there somewhere?"

"Now that Logan's woken up, no, I'm afraid this reality has settled," Charles answered, as a knock came at the door. "Lilly, will you get that?"

"We're kinda busy right now, but fine." Lilly moved from her mother's side and opened the door, and was surprised to see Jean, standing alongside a dark haired, gray eyed little boy. "Oh, hi Dr. Grey. What'd he do now?"

Simply smiling, Jean led the little boy into the Professor's office, where he immediately balked upon seeing Elle in distress. "HEY! Dr. Grey, Professor, what gives? What'd you do to my Mom? I told you I only hit Warren because he called me a mongrel for having black fingernails. How was I supposed to know my claws would pick right then to come out? You can't expel me for that! Don't let his dad's money boss you aro-"

"We're not going to expel you, Akira," Jean assured him, clamping her hand over his mouth. "I brought you here because I want you to show everyone your pendant."

When Jean let go of Akira's mouth, he shrugged and pulled a necklace out from under his shirt. Hanging from it was a small wooden pendant in the shape of a totem pole. "Okay, whatever gets me out of class. Dunno why you asked me to do that, though, you know Dad's the one that carved it, Mom made it into a necklace, and Lil yells at me for wearing it nonstop. Both you guys read minds, don't you?"

Jean glanced at the Professor, earning confused looks all around. "Should I explain, or do you want to?"

The Professor motioned for Jean to help Elle onto the couch, because Logan's attention had veered elsewhere. He was currently fixated on the little boy with the scruffy hair, which was a rather obvious mohawk haphazardly combed to the sides so someone like Jean or Storm wouldn't yell at him for being disruptive in class. Even better, he had enough guts to sass the school's most powerful mutants. No doubt who he belonged to.

As Jean and Lilly helped Elle, Logan waggled for Akira to come closer. After fixing that ridiculous hair back in line, he knelt down to the boy's eye level. "...You really taught those smug Worthingtons a lesson, huh."

"Yeah, he's still cryin' about his precious nose."

"Let me see 'em." Logan pointed to Akira's hand. "...If you can," he added, remembering his Lilly's trouble at the beginning. Akira shrugged and stuck out his fist, bringing forth his own new claws. Logan tried to hide his awe as the boy cut three sharp black bone claws- two on the top of his palm, and one on the underside of his wrist.

"If the two of you are finished bonding, I'm ready to continue," Charles prodded, enjoying the father-son moment but eager to set the record straight. Akira nodded and settled in beside his mother, so the Professor revealed why he had called for Jean. "Shortly after we recovered from the Apocalypse Incident, Jean approached me to discuss what happened. I had been taken by the enemy, and the mansion destroyed in the accident that killed Scott's brother. Soon after, he showed up and took a number of the survivors to Alkali Lake."

Logan growled, knowing exactly who. "Did I kill him in this life? Please tell me I did."

"I know the next bit," Elle mumbled, pulling her children close. "Jean let Logan out of his cage, and he killed almost everyone he ran into."

"Alright, Dad!" cheered Akira, quieting after a bonk from Lilly.

"What you may not know is that when I read his mind to free him of his programming, I accidentally found the gap left by this Logan," Jean revealed, motioning to the skeptical Canuck. "It was the strangest thing. There was a period of nothingness, a short hiccup, then the nothingness again. At first I thought it was something I did, so I made a point to discuss it with the Professor. Then we figured out what it really was."

"Hank and I had decided we would discuss our knowledge of the bad future with no one, not even you, Logan," Charles continued. "When Jean came to me with what she found, I decided to fill her in, to get her insight. It was fascinating that your brain had those holes there, and it got us thinking about what would happen when you eventually woke up. The hiccup she mentioned was probably from a small incident where the future Kitty lost control, and the past Logan surfaced. It happened when we encountered someone that future Logan recognized, who I now know was Stryker. When Kitty got control again, past Logan disappeared, almost as if he was never there, hence the blank spaces in your mind."

"The Logan of the past ceased to exist while Logan of the future was using his body," Jean simplified, "so the most obvious conclusion was that the Logan of the good future would cease to exist when Logan of the bad future returned."

"Logan, you had me look into your head when we were searching for Raven," Charles recollected. "I saw what you went through, what you lost. And I admit, I used that information to shape this future into something less catastrophic."

Elle sat up from her slump. "...You're the one that kept Stryker from accessing Magneto!"

Charles returned Elle's aha with a wink. "But in addition to the bad, I've also seen what you've built in this life. So I wanted to make sure you had the option of choosing which future to call your own. You'll have to forgive my and Jean's deception, of course, but along with the treatment for your nightmares, we've been secretly 'backing up' your memories onto Akira's little totem pole pendant."

Elle gasped, and grabbed the pendant. "...I am picking up faint traces of metal," she said, turning it around and feeling it over. "There, I think there's a circuit board inside!"

"I'm sorry, I snuck it into the pendant shortly after it was clear he wasn't going to part with it," Jean admitted. "The last scan we got was a week ago, shortly after the big fight. Kanani's birth is in there, too, don't worry. We knew the time was coming for you to return, Logan, but you hadn't had a nightmare in so long and it wasn't like we could just ask you to come down and sit still..."

Logan frowned. "I take it that he wasn't a fan of people messing in his head, either?"

"I used the excuse that the blocks I put in place to stop your nightmares periodically wore off," Charles explained, "as a result of your healing factor. Normally a quarterly treatment sufficed, but this year I switched to monthly. My bluff was that impending fatherhood put you into overdrive. Besides, I had a feeling number three would cut it pretty close."

"So my Logan is inside here?" Elle interrupted, holding up the pendant. "Can you put him back? Will it work?"

"...That all depends," Charles answered. "Like I said, it's a tough choice, and Logan has to decide if it's what he wants. After all, a lot of people gave their lives to give us this reality, and he is the only one who remembers their sacrifice."

Logan stared at the ground in thought, then glanced back toward Elle. He was getting a very strong attachment vibe from her, even stronger than he was used to. The two of them were close of course in his own time, but they'd had some rough spots. Plus, he couldn't ever remember Elle being so clingy, even after they made up. Not to mention how devastated she looked right now... But could he really just give up his life for one he didn't know?

"...Dad? You still there?" Akira broke the silence, though he didn't quite know what was going on. "Or is this one of those 'true love' moments where you talk without talking?"

"I... I think I need some time to process all this," Logan mumbled, startling everyone by marching straight out of the office. It hurt, but he tried to ignore the sound of Elle's weeping as he continued out of the mansion.