Second Chances

Chapter 11

Martin stopped answering questions after that startling statement. They both watched as the body of the old priest faded and disappeared.

Jubilee laid in his arms, playing with the chest hairs that peeked over the top of his shirt.

"Are ya feelin' better?" She heard him rumble through his chest.

"Yeah," she said quietly.

His arms tightened around her. "I love ya, Jubes. I don't care if we have kids or get married legally or stay with the X-Men. I've been crucified, had my adamantium ripped out o' my body and put back in, burned alive a bunch a times but the worst torture I can every think of is if ya leave me. I need ya. I don't know if I can die of a broken heart but I'll find out if ya leave."

She thought about it for a while. He was the strongest man she ever knew. He could lift a car and not break a sweat. He could take a whole clip of bullets and the only thing that would happen would be that he would get angry and kill the shooter. He could ski but not swim. He could dance like Fred Astaire. He could hunt down a person by scent alone. And he was the most emotionally dependent man she knew. The one thing he couldn't do was be alone for long periods of time when he was not in a feral state.

Logan was what most people called a social misfit. He needed other people around him to truly feel alive. If you looked at his behavior closely, you notice that he seeks out crowds of people who have habits like his own. His favorite bar is a dive near the school that is frequented by some of the roughest people in the area. He prefers the company of mutants but has friends that are human. He doesn't make friends easily, but the ones he has are loyal to him and he to them. He can be very bold and very shy at the same time. He craves recognition for his deeds but is embarrassed when people mention them or thank him. A very small number of people know he has a softer side, fewer have ever seen it, and a very select few have been on the receiving end of it. And the only person he has ever felt secure enough to cry in front of, is Jubilee.

She always knew that he needed her to complete him. It was the same with her. All during her years at the Xavier Academy, she could sense him. She knew when he needed her or when he was in trouble, but the opposite didn't appear to be true. He found her when she freed herself from the Hulkbuster base but he hadn't been aware that she had even been taken. He didn't feel that she needed him after she returned to school, but then, she had smothered those needs with a vengeance. He didn't know she was missing from her home in LA until she showed up, crucified, on the front lawn of the mansion. He felt so guilty after that one that he not only found the people responsible, but he helped her deal with the physical pain of the torture and the emotional pain of the death of her friend, Angelo. It was during that time that she knew she still loved him and was unlikely to fall out of love.

"When did you know you loved me?" she asked.

"I loved ya when ya dragged my sorry ass to that bunker in Australia," he told her.

"I was a kid, Wolvie," she admonished. "When did you know you, ya know, loved me?"

"I know," he said. "Ya were seventeen and ya were goin' out on a date with some dweeb, I can't remember his name. The only thing I could think of was that ya were mine and he had no right to butt in. Ya was wearin' this short black thing ya called a dress and I found myself reactin' to ya. I felt like a dirty old man. Ya were a kid and I was gettin' a hard on just lookin' at ya. If ya remember, I left that night."

"I remember," she scowled. "You should have stuck around. You would have seen Cyke deck the guy for trying to feel me up at the door when we got home."

"He tried somethin'?" he growled.

"You ran out. He didn't get the usual pre-date threat," she told him. "He didn't know that to try anything was to invite a slow, agonizing death."

"Cyke or Gumbo kill 'em?" He was still growling. Jubilee could feel the rumble in his chest.

"Broken jaw," she told him. "He never came back but that's okay. He kissed like a damned fish."

The growling deepened. The vibrations were becoming a little painful to the shoulder resting against his chest.

"It's never going to happen again," she informed him, petting his chest with a soft hand. "I'm yours now."

The growls lessened and stopped as he brought himself under control.

"I swear, I gonna find a way ta marry ya legally so I can kill any bastard that tries anythin' with ya."

"It that the only reason you want to marry me?" she frowned.

"Hell no," he exploded. "If ya remember from the library when we caught Jean and Cyke, married sex can be very hot."

Jubilee blushed as she remembered the day she had been trapped in the library while Jean and Scott had some very wild sex in the stacks. If Logan hadn't smelled her arousal and come looking for her, she would have been miserable for hours.

"Jean knew we were there," she told him.

"Oh?" he asked.

"They finished first," she reminded him. "She popped into my mind, telling me we could scream all we wanted because she had Scott's hearing turned off. Didn't you wonder why I let you howl as much as you did?"

"I hafta admit, I did," he said, chagrined.

"Jean liked having someone watching and getting turned on. She invited us to join them one day but I turned her down."

"Why?" He was curious but he was glad she turned down the offer. He didn't want to share her with anyone.

"Scott doesn't do it for me and I don't want you anywhere near Jean without your clothes on."

"Jealous much?" he teased.

"Possessive," she corrected. "I don't share my toys."

She turned and wrapped her arms around his waist and buried her nose in his chest. He always smelled so good to her. Even when he was sweaty from a workout, the sharp scent of him was comforting and comfortable. She knew all of his scents now, even the nasty ones. She could almost tell what he was thinking by his scent alone. Not as well as he could, she wasn't feral, but she did know her man. She never realized how different each man smelled until she started sleeping with him.

His scent now told her that he wanted her, but not so much that he would try to convince her to have sex if she wasn't ready to resume their conjugal relationship. She wasn't sure she was ready yet. They still had some problems that they needed to work out.

"Logan," she yawned, "I need to sleep off the rest of the drugs but we have a lot of things we need to talk about. I know Emma's keeping her mind on me and she'll be here soon but I'm not ready to go back yet. If she gets here before I wake up, will you tell her I'm okay and we need to stay a while longer?"

"Sure, darlin'," he told her. He kissed her and slid out from under her. She slipped under the blankets and settled in to sleep. He watched her until he was sure she was asleep.

Less than a hour later, the sound of a helicopter broke the silence of the forest. 'Emma's here,' he thought. 'Better get this over with.'

The Frost Industries helicopter had set down in the clearing near the road. The White Queen was marching up to the house, a determined frown on her face. Logan had to shake his head. She was dressed in a leather bustier, tight leather pants and a cape, all in white. She wore white leather stiletto boots that kept sinking into the soft soil. He couldn't understand why she didn't change to more appropriate clothing for a trek to the wilds of Canada.

"Where is she?" Emma snarled as she approached him.

"Hold on, Frost," he said, blocking the door with his arm. "She's fine. She's sleepin' it off now."

"Get out of my way," she said in a low, angry voice

"Ya ain't goin' in there radiatin' anger like ya are. She's fine now."

"I'll be the judge of that." she snapped at him as she ducked under his arm in a quick move and slipped into the cabin. Her mouth twisted in distaste as she took in the shabby furnishings of the small room.

"You keep my student in such squalor," she sneered.

"She ain't yer student any more, Emma," Logan's voice was hard. "she's my wife."

Emma sighed, frustrated. She knew she needed to be careful. Wolverine didn't like her and she didn't believe he would hold off killing her if she came between them. The last part of his statement broke through the anger in her mind.

"Wait a minute," she said slowly. "What do you mean 'wife'? Did you marry her?"

"We ain't married in the legal sense but, yeah, I married her."

"Why?" she demanded.

"What the hell do ya mean 'why'?"

"Why did you marry her?" she asked, her eyes hard. "The whole time she was growing up, you deserted her, repeatedly, and I was left to pick up the pieces. You kept telling her it was because you couldn't protect her from your enemies. Now, she can't protect herself without the real possibility of getting herself killed. She's useless to the team and she can't give you children. Why did you marry her? It's a fair question, Wolverine."

"I love her, Emma," he told her. "I can protect her."

"You didn't protect her from this," she growled at him. "She still tried to kill herself."

"If someone wants ta die, their gonna find a way. One of the things we agreed on was that I wouldn't smother her." He lead her over to the sofa and sat her down before lowering himself into his favorite chair. "I love her, Em. We've bonded."

"Bonded?" she asked, surprised. "Like Jean and Scott?"

"Deeper," he told her. "Our bond is of our life forces. My life depends on hers and hers depends on mine."

Shock bloomed on her face. "You mean if you die, she will too?" He nodded. "Oh my God, Logan, you're an X-Man! You could die tomorrow!"

He ran his fingers through his hair, distressed. "I know, Emma. If I could make it different, I would. Ferals bond with their mates."

"Didn't you know it would be this strong?"

"Of course I didn't," he said testily. "Ya think I want this fer her? It wasn't this strong with Mariko."

Emma sat thinking and tapping a manicured fingernail on the arm of the sofa.

"If she had been successful," she said thoughtfully.

"I woulda probably died on the road back from town," he confirmed.

"Why wasn't she?"

Logan snorted. "Creed," he told her.

"What?" she shrieked.

"I came in and found him walkin' her around the bedroom," Logan said. "He'd already made her vomit the pills back up and was tryin' ta keep her awake, swearing ta kill her if she tried again."

"You're kidding!" She was having trouble wrapping her mind around the concept of Sabretooth saving the life of his greatest enemy's lover.

"I'm havin' problems with it myself," he admitted. "He says he likes her. Threatened ta kill me if she was tryin' ta kill herself ta get away from me."

She snorted in agreement. She's do the same thing.

She sighed and stood. "I'm just going to peek in on her. Will you return to the mansion now?"

"Me and Jubes have some problems we need ta work out first. Will ya tell everyone she's okay?"

"I'll tell them," she said. She walked to the bedroom door and opened it quietly. She looked in to find Jubilee asleep, her mind quiet but open. Emma could see the black cloud was receding and the depression along with it. She was very reassured by the restabilization of the younger woman's mind. Her dreams were quietly erotic, which was normal for a young, sexually active woman.

She closed the door with a soft click and walked back to Logan.

"I have never liked you," she told him, "but Jubilee loves you. As long as you love and protect her, I will try to get along with you, for Jubilee's sake."

He nodded in agreement. "And I'll stop callin' ya 'the frigid bitch'." he told her.

"You'll never get the chance to find out if that's true or not," she smirked. "If I am right, and I usually am, you'll be impotent with other women from now on."

She left the cabin laughing softly at the outraged anger on his face. He returned to Jubilee vowing to take down the White Queen the first chance he got.

"I heard that," Jubilee said as he came back into the bedroom.

He froze in his tracks. "What did ya hear?" he asked, hoping it wasn't what he thought it was.

"What Frosty said," she giggled. "I guess I don't hafta worry about you cheating on me."

"Jubilee," he growled in warning.

"Well, it's comforting to know that you won't be able to get it up for another woman. She didn't, however, say another man."

"No, she didn't," he agreed, a twinkle in his eye.

"Wolvie!" she gasped.

The look of shocked outrage did him in. He laughed long and hard. It was so good to hear her tease him that he couldn't get angry with her for questioning his sexuality.

"But... have you... I mean... Wolvie?" she sputtered as the bed shook when he sat down next to her.

"I've done a lot of thing in my life, but never that," he informed her, still laughing.

"Whew! For a moment there, I though someone was gonna take away my favorite candy."

He gathered her into his arms and rolled to his back, placing her gently on his chest. "No one's gonna take me away from ya," he promised. "And no one's gonna take ya away from me. I believe what that angel or ghost or whatever he was, said. We're bonded fer life."

"We still have problems, Logan," she reminded him.

"Course we got problems. Ya put two people as strong as us together, yer bound ta have problems, but that don't mean we can't work them out."

"Will we?" she asked.

"Sure," he told her. "As long as we talk ta each other, we can work things out."

She rolled off of him and sat, cross legged, at his side. "Okay." She took a deep breath and steeled herself. "Hank's experiment." He opened his mouth to protest. She held up her hand to stop his objections. "I know you don't like it, Logan but hear me out."

He didn't want to discuss the experiment Hank McCoy was conducting with his and Jubilee's cells. The results haven't been promising by what he saw. It couldn't hurt to hear her out. She had been working closer with Hank than him and knew more about it than he did.

"Okay, darlin'," he said, "I'll listen."

"Hank thinks it will work. You only saw the early results, the ones that died or had some of your unwanted traits but you didn't see the last sixteen tests. He's found a way to isolate the section on the rat DNA that controls cell regeneration and the one on yours that controls healing. None of the last twenty test subjects have developed claws or needed to be put down."

"And the cancer?"

"That's still a possibility but he thinks it will be around ten percent."

"Does he have any way ta lower those odds?"

"I don't know. He was working on that when I got too sick to help him anymore."

"Jubes," he began. He still didn't like it. She could still die.

"Please, Wolvie." Her eyes pleaded for him to understand. "I can't live like this anymore. I can't stay home and watch Jean get ready for her baby. I can't sit there and watch the team leave, over and over. I used to be an X-Man. A fighter. A member of the team. Now, they won't even talk to me about a mission unless it's over, and even then, they won't give me details. It's almost like they think I'm a spy or something. I used to be one of them. Now, I'm on the outside looking in. I've lost who I am."

The pain in her voice tore at his heart. He hadn't realized that they had excluded her to such a degree.

"What about Rogue's idea?" he asked. "We could move out."

"I didn't like it the first time you mentioned it and I don't like it now," she insisted. "I may not be an X-Man anymore but you are. The team needs you. Any delay getting to a fight could cost someone their life, maybe one of our friends. We need to stay in the mansion."

He reached up and brushed a strand of hair over her shoulder. "Not if it hurts ya every time the team responds. I don't like seein' ya hurt. This is the one thing I can't control. If ya still want kids, we can hire a woman ta have our babies. People do it all the time. Ya won't hafta grind yer teeth every time Jean coos about her baby. But I can't make it any easier fer ya ta watch the team leave without ya."

As soon as he mentioned surrogacy, her eyes widened in surprise. They'd never talked about it before. She had been afraid to bring up the subject, knowing his distrust of strangers.

"You'd let another woman have our kids?" she asked, incredulous.

"Not my first choice," he admitted, "but if ya want kids, that may be the only way. I'd let someone else hatch fer us as long as she stays with us so I can protect her and the baby."

"She'd have to be a mutant," Jubilee mused.

"Not necessarily," he told her. "I talked ta Hank about it a long time ago. He said that it probably shouldn't be a mutant. Her own mutation may interfere with the development of the kid's own mutation since it wouldn't be genetically related to her." He was proud of himself for remembering all that. He hadn't really understood what Hank had meant but he could parrot with the best of them.

"You talked to Hank about surrogacy, before talking to me?" she demanded. Uh-oh.

"I didn't want ta get yer hopes up if it weren't possible," he told her.

"And if it wasn't possible, were you going to tell me?" He could tell she was getting angry. He realized now that he had done something stupid. He should have talked to her first.

"I don't know," he admitted. "I'm sorry, Jubes."

"For what?" she seethed. "For talking to Hank before talking to me or not telling me what he said a long time ago?"

"Both," he told her. "I shoulda told you as soon as we talked but I shoulda asked ya first."

She crawled over him and began to pace the bedroom in angry, lurching steps. The only thing she wore was his green flannel shirt and her long, shapely legs kept drawing his eyes. He felt the rise in his groin that always accompanied the sight of her naked legs. He couldn't help himself. Jubilee was a beautiful woman all the time but when she was angry, she was magnificent.

'Get yer mind off it,' he told himself. 'She's mad at ya and fer good reason. Ya also forgot ta bring her diaphragm.'

"I can't believe you," she ranted. "First, you and Rogue decide that I need a house and you go and look for one without my input. Then, you and Hank decide that another woman will have my children and you don't ask if it's okay with me. I understand that you want me to be happy but has it ever occurred to you to ask me what I want? Don't you think that major decisions like a house and kids should involve both of us? Were there any other decisions you've made to change my life that you haven't told me about?"

"There was one thing," he admitted. Her eyes flashed in anger. "Not a decision, darlin'," he told her quickly, "just somethin' Hank said that ya should know."

She stopped pacing and crossed her arms, glaring at him.

"After ya told me that Hank told ya not ta get pregnant, I asked him what would happen if the experiment worked. He said that the pill probably won't work fer ya anymore and ya might have trouble keeping from getting pregnant. I was concerned that ya'd pop out kid after kid. That ain't healthy fer a woman. Hank was concerned that ya'd have miscarriage after miscarriage. He thinks yer body may decide a baby is like a virus and reject it."

"I'm glad you told me this before I got pregnant," She told him bitingly. "Honestly, Logan, you say you love me but you treat me like I'm thirteen. I'm grown up now. Quit trying to shield me from the ugly things in life. I can handle it."

She moved over to the bed and sat down next to him. "Marriage isn't a dictatorship, Logan, it's an exercise in negotiation. A lot of the time, we're going to agree on what we do but there are going to be times when we won't. As long as we talk, we can work things out and come to an agreement. It's when we start making major decisions without consulting each other that we run into trouble. You once asked me not to shut you out. I'm asking you to do the same for me."

"It ain't easy fer me," he told her. "Yer young and I'm an old man. We old farts get set in our ways."

"I'm not looking for an excuse," she told him. "I'm looking for a promise. If it concerns both of us, you'll talk to me before we make any decision. And you'll stop sneaking around behind my back and deciding where my life will go."

"I'll try," he promised.

"No, Logan," she said, "you'll do it or we are going to have some major problems."