Chapter Fourteen: Rogue's New Home
Lucas stood in the soft drizzle on the back of another Xavier estate. He watched his mother through the small wood frame window. She smiled and laughed. She had come to life again.
Her new husband was much like the old, except that he had spent many years attached to the belief that everyone and everything he knew to be horribly true about his wife was false, or as he has become convinced of late, mistaken.
Everyone knew instinctively to give the cabin a wide birth. It still wasn't truly safe for anyone to approach the happy couple, as Wolverine was finding himself to be quite an over protective husband.
"I knew. I knew you weren't gone Marie. They said it, but I never believed it." He would say and then almost timidly add "I thought they were hiding you from me." And then he would rub his blindfold almost regretfully.
"Ah honestly don't know how they managed to screw up news as important as that!" She would laugh and tease him.
Lucas felt another mutant ease up on him from behind. He turned politely and saw her.
It was the Sister he had witnessed on his monitors above. He held his finger to his lips and she approached quietly.
"I'm Mary-Ann." She said.
"Lucas" He replied with a nod, and he motioned toward the cabin. "Look." He gestured through the window.
"I can't believe this." She forgot herself for a moment, staring at her long dead mother, alive and well, with her father.
His mother and her father were holding each other and bathed in the flickering of firelight.
They spoke quietly. Lucas let all the relevant details fly. Marie's madness, the dimensions, how he had searched for many long nights to find just this world. How Hank had orchestrated this for him on just one hours notice.
"Do they know that they're from alternate realities?" She was trying not to seem too hopeful.
He shook his head.
"Opposing realities in this case." He corrected her. "This world and my world branched directly off the outcome of that one night, all those years ago. Everything they shared up until that night was virtually identical. Everything after... Well, I think most of what followed was a waste on both counts."
Mary Ann nodded her silent agreement.
Then something occurred to her. "Why did you bring her here?"
Lucas was shocked. "I wanted..." and at a loss for words.
"No, not why, but why here? Why not bring him to your world?"
Lucas stopped and turned toward his distant relative.
"Because I never got to know him. He died on me Sis. I lost him. She lost him. My world lost him." He grimaced slightly, and became acutely aware of his own adamantium skeleton. "I couldn't do that to anyone else."
"I never had him in my life before. He thought... He thought I was her. He was..."
"Irrational" Lucas concluded.
"Yeah." She swallowed. "He did it to himself you know. His eyes; Because he saw he murdered."
"I know."
A signal light began to flash on the wrist cuff communicator that Lucas had brought with him.
"This means I have to go." He grimaced.
"It's okay. I can take care of this end now." She hugger herself, unsure "Will you be back?"
"In a week or so, like always.." Was his only reply.
And the wind whistled down the chimney, and over the hearth. Logan sat up slightly.
"What is it?" Marie asked, laying her hand on his chest.
"I smelled someone. Someone I smelled before, and someone else too." He breathed in again, deeply. "Marie, honey, did we have a daughter together?"
Rogue was taken aback, her sanity began to cloud and her mind recoiled. They had a son, not a daughter, she was sure of it, and Logan HAD died, he had died, she was sure of that too.
"aaahhh thought it was a son... Logan..." She reached for him although she felt numb.
"That makes some good sense then. I could smell two people outside is all. I think we had twins. A boy and a girl, and I think there was just as much confusion about them as there was about us."
Rogue sat up slowly. Twins? Outside? She stood up and crossed to the door.
"Marie!" Logan called, rising to his feet and reaching wildly for her.
"I'm not leaving Logan. " She opened the door and called out "Hello?"
And one figure wandered out of the light drizzle. It was a graceful and beautiful woman. She glided up to the mother she never knew. "Hi momma. I'm Mary-Ann. Lucas said I should come say hello. He said he'd stop by and see you in a week, like always."
Momma... The word rolled around her head several times and then she said it out loud, softly, and hugged her child close.
"Logan, dear, it's Mary-Ann" She smiled brightly "One of the children, come to visit."
"Mary Ann." Logan said, as though agreeing with the name. "Your mother and I were just talking about you. Come in, sit with us here, it's warm near the fire."
And Lucas watched longingly as the small door closed in the distance before keying the recall button on his wrist cuff and vanishing from the world entirely.
At just that same moment, Scott and Jean were encountering Kitty Pryde, on the other side of the mansion.
