Disclaimer: I don't own any of marvels characters. The insane Wolverine who appears in chapter seven was based on a similar character in the story Asylum by Lateo of Lateo's Link Lair.

Lucas is my own creation.

Enjoy. ----------
Chapter One: Lockjaw's Narrative

Once upon a time in the multiverse I was born. A rare occurrence to be sure, since most things that happen in a multiverse happen repeatedly, and as I said, I was born once upon a time in the multiverse.

Many other people exist as I do, alone and in infinite company. Rachael Summers, the nomad known as Phoenix, being the most well-known. Rachael Summers who traveled the dimensions in search of self and purpose and then started the mystery school who raised Cable who felled Apocalypse.

She did something with her uniqueness. I can respect that. I feel the need to do something with my uniqueness, or I did. Perhaps I've found it.

Forgive me, where are my manners? I was born to the name Lucas, although it has been years now since I had heard it. Like so many mutants I have taken an alias out of self-defense. Most who know me know me as Lock-Jaw.

While almost no one in any of the worlds of the multiverse knows me (save my own world of course) it would seem that everyone knows my parents. Even though I do not, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

My mother's name is Marie. Although she keeps it like a secret in some worlds. She is also known as Rogue.

In my world, a man named Magneto abducted my mother before I was born. He took her to a Statue that overlooked a great city, intent on an experiment doomed to failure. In many worlds he succeeded in causing calamities of catastrophic proportions. In many more the X-Men defeated him. In three worlds he killed my mother.

In my world he came quite close.

Instead he made her crazy. The torment of the man set itself to rage in her mind and summoning his Magnetic abilities she took flight on instinct for what she thought of as a safe port in the storm. She rose high in to the atmosphere as the X-Jet pursued her after having subdued Magneto.

There was no where to land an SR71 Blackbird in The Savage Land.

My 'uncle' Scott liked to tell me this story. This was his favorite part.

"So I gave the order to turn around." He would begin. "I was about to order Jean and Storm to begin an aerial search when, your Dad, Just opened the door and stepped out. Just stepped out of the plane!"

At that point Uncle Scott would slap his knee. Then he would begin to tear up. And on the bad days he would tell me how you never appreciate people correctly until you've had the time to savor them.

Uncle Scott didn't really like my father. But he made a point of enjoying every time I reminded him of my dad. Uncle Scott is a complicated man. Although most think he is his poker face. He's not.

My father's name was Logan. Also known as Wolverine.

His mutant ability was that of healing. My mother's ability was that of energy absorption. So strong was her power that no one ever though she could touch another person. So strong were my fathers healing abilities that once he had experienced the effects of my mother's mutation a few times he became immune.

My parents returned from the Savage Land as a couple. Many months later Sabertooth re-emerged from hiding. He attacked my mother in a parking lot, intent on destroying my father through her.

But she held him off with the lingering magnetic ability she retained along with Magneto's lingering madness. Held him off for six minutes.

Six minutes. Long enough for the Professor to sense the attack, to dispatch Logan, Scott and eventually Storm to her aid. Long enough for Uncle Scott to lose one eye to Sabertooth's left thumb. Long enough for my father to loose his life. Six minutes. Long enough to burn the last of Magneto's power out of my mother's mind. Time enough to get Storm to electrocute Sabertooth with two bolts of lightning. Six minutes. Beginning to end.

And in the end; it was Uncle Scott who stepped up as Sabertooth began to rise. As he began to reach for my mother again as she held my father's corpse. And it was Uncle Scott, who used his one good eye, despite the pain of the crushed one, and put Sabertooth down for good.

Uncle Scott doesn't tell this story. Not ever. Uncle Scott never killed another man. Not before, and not after. I respect that. I respect that Uncle Scott knows that it isn't necessary to kill, except when it is. I admire that he knew the difference.

I've seen the home movies of my mother and father, living at the Xavier Institute. They were happy. Really happy. But the mother I knew wasn't the girl in those movies. They all said she changed when they lost my father. She stopped talking to people shortly after I was born. And she still doesn't speak. She simply smiles, sadly, and looks away. Or, more often with myself, she will brush my hair away from my face and breathe in slowly as though that breath might rewind life and find her on Xavier's lawn, touching my father, beneath happier skies.

In my late teens a man named Genesis who thought he was heir to the destiny of Apocalypse captured me. He was a madman who thought I would be a horseman in his dark army. He had stolen my father's adamantium skeleton from the laboratory of Hank McCoy who was studying the metal.

I was surgically invaded and the metal was bonded to my skeleton. A series of mental adjustments were implanted as well. None of them took. Later Hank would suggest I had inherited the immunity that my father developed to counter the touch of my mother. That this immunity also fought off the mental damage that was possible through that contact.

And so I am heir to my father's legacy in more ways than one.

My own healing factor allowed me to survive the adamantium bonding process. Although not without the torment of having experienced it. And as I emerged from the bonding chamber, to find Genesis and his thugs awaiting a horseman of death, I dared to use my other power for the first time since childhood.

For as much as I am my father's son, I am my mother as well.

I reached out with my psychic senses and felt their mutant abilities and their minds. And in this touch, I drained them.

They fell about me unconscious. I absorbed their minds and memories, but not as my mother did, wholeheartedly, instead, I seem to experience memories at a distance. But not power. Power I feel quite wholeheartedly indeed.

I drew the powers out of the unconscious mutants that lay at my feet and I drew them in to myself. It was a gamble to be sure. When I was young I had absorbed the powers of a dying friend. My lack of control over his power resulted in my own physical mutation along the same lines as my 'father' did in a neighboring dimension when Magneto removed his adamantium.

But now I too suffered from adamantium poisoning. I had gambled that this would be enough to stop my foreword mutation and allow me to channel that extra power in to healing instead.

I was right. Mostly.

I also developed quite a catalog of abilities in the years since this transpired. Although none of them as strong as when they were wielded by the original owners. And only once did I ever feel the psychological impact that my mother knew one thousand fold. It was when I took the powers and abilities of the mutant known as Stryfe. For just an instant his mind clawed at mine from across the distance and was trying to get in to my head and make himself at home.

After just a few minutes he faded too, all his memories and emotions safely locked back in his own troubled head. I often wonder what my enemies think when they awake, find me gone and their powers mysteriously absent.

No one ever comes back to face me. None of them. Of course, they probably run in different circles after the fact.

And now you know something of me; so on with the rest of the story.