Summary: Ladies and gentlemen, after 3 years, SSJ has finally published her sequel to Phoenix, which was finished in 2017.
Jean has been back eight days. Logan is glad she was alive, of course he is, and it's nice to see her around again. But it… It was easier to let something go when you weren't up against it the whole time.
Logan takes himself off for a quiet drink, but his evening gets far more interesting than he'd anticipated! This leads the X-men to a ring of kidnappers targeting mutants.
Rating: True to form, T for bloody, graphic violence and medical detail
Set: 8 days after my fic Phoenix, so a total of 17 days after X-2. I am broadly ignoring Last Stand
C/W: School shooting in a later chapter. No child death. This chapter will be clearly marked as TW chapters were in Phoenix
If you haven't read my fic Phoenix, I advise you to read that first. This fic will make way more sense if you do.
"Two beers." Logan said, dropping the cash on to the bar. The bar tender looked up at him.
"Who's the second one for?"
"Me." Logan said shortly. The bar tender frowned at him. "Look, bub, I'm not gonna get drunk and disorderly on two beers. I can take a hell of a lot more than that. How about you worry about cleaning that glass and let me worry about where I'm gonna put two beers."
She took the cash and thumped two bottles on the bar, but only opened one of them. She looked barely old enough to drink herself. Who was she to judge him? Logan took both bottles and walked to an alcove table at the back of the bar. He did not want to be talked to. He just wanted to drink for a bit, on his own, away from everybody else.
He sat down in a booth and took a gulp of the first beer. It was cold, at least. He sighed heavily.
Jean had been back eight days. He was glad she was alive, of course he was, and it was nice to see her around again, sitting somewhere in the evenings, marking or whatever she did, talking to students about their homework. But it… He took another long draft of beer. It was easier to let something go when you weren't up against it the whole time. It had been easier to say 'she was never interested. She was Scott's woman to the core' when she'd been dead. Not there, not accessible, not smiling at him as they passed in a corridor, that red skirt just skimming her knees. It would be so easy to reach out to her, to test her, to see if what she did matched up with what he said. He took another draft of beer. Part of him was pretty damn sure it would do. She was Scott's woman to the core. But it wouldn't cost much to check, and the payoff could be amazingly good. And what was the worst that could happen? He was pretty sure she wouldn't tell on him to Scott, and Scott didn't like him anyway. He took another draft of beer. It just… She was Scott's woman. She wouldn't.
And Scott seemed to be rubbing it in his face. The whole damn time. He was always right next to her, wherever she settled in the evening to work, he wouldn't be more than a couple of feet away. He was always next to her at meals… Whatever they were doing, he was with her. Logan took another draft of beer. They even went up to bed within five minutes of each other. Every night. They hadn't done that before Jean had… 'died', that was new. It was as though Scott was going out of his way to stand between Jean and Logan, reminding him that she was his, Scott's, not Logan's.
And everyone else was saying, with some relief, that they'd stopped dreaming about her. Logan hadn't, well… He took another mouthful of beer. He sort of had. Those… The Professor had called them Pseudo-codreams or something, the really realistic ones, the ones that Jean had been aware of too, had stopped. But he was still dreaming about her, in ways that made him very grateful that Jean and The Professor didn't read X-men's minds without asking.
He glanced about, put the second beer under the table and slipped his claws out an inch. He'd worked out a while ago how to get the tops off beer bottles without smashing the bottle or cutting himself. About three quarters of the way down his second beer, his skin began to prickle. Someone was looking at him. He looked around.
There. There was a woman by the bar looking at him. He looked back at his beer. She could jog on. It was a free country. She couldn't stop him from sitting here and drinking quietly.
But when he looked back a moment later, she was still looking at him. He took her in. She was… probably in her forties or fifties, he wasn't good at guessing women's ages, blonde, but possibly bottle blonde, wearing quite a bit of makeup. Her shirt was just a bit too small for her across the chest, her jacket was turned back at the cuffs, her jeans were tight across her hips. And she wasn't looking at him like she was thinking 'what a loser drinking alone on a Friday night'. She was looking at him… with interest. As he looked at her, she smiled at him. He drained his beer and looked back at her. She was talking to the barmaid, paying for something. The barmaid put two bottles of beer on the counter and turned to put the money away. The woman turned and walked over to him, now carrying two open bottles of beer.
"This seat taken?" She asked.
Logan leant back. "You offering me beer?"
"Depends," She said, smiling. "is the seat taken?"
"Depends." Logan smiled back. "Are you offering me beer?"
"If I am?"
"Then help yourself."
The woman handed him a beer and sat down beside him. This was unexpected. He took a mouthful of the beer and looked at her, waiting.
"I'm Carol."
"Thomas." He didn't really want to give her his name, but he didn't want to push her away. She was looking at him in a way that made him think it might be worth sitting and talking to her for a bit. There might be more than beer on offer.
"So, Thomas, how does a guy like you wind up drinking alone on a Friday night?"
Logan sighed. "I…" He was going to have to completely make this up. He couldn't exactly say 'I just needed to get away from someone who came back from the dead, and her pain-in-the-ass boyfriend, for a bit'. "I was passing through, I was going to drop in on some friends for a couple of days, but they had something on tonight, so I said I'd clear off for a few hours."
"Huh. Their loss then." There was a brief silence.
Logan took a mouthful of beer. "How about you? How did you wind up here?"
Carol sighed deeply. "It's a long story. It starts with a man who… lied and lied and had a taste for young, European blondes." She sighed again. "My ex. I'm a month divorced. I got the house in Westchester County, he got the one in Florida and I'm… I guess I'm not used to being on my own in the house."
Whether a word of that was true, Logan had no idea. He took another mouthful of beer. "That's rough." He said.
Carol nodded. "You got anyone?"
"Me? Nah. I live on the road."
She looked at him for a second. He saw her eyes flick to the chain around his neck. "You a vet?"
He looked down at where it disappeared under his shirt. "Long time ago." He said. "I don't… talk about it much." He lifted his bottle again. Hard to talk about something he honestly couldn't remember.
"Okay." Carol said. "What do you do now?"
"Trucker." Logan said. "I'm on leave right now, so I was trying to see some folks, but…"
She flicked her eyes over his body. "You're stacked for someone who sits on his ass all day."
"I fight a bit." He said. "Pays to keep in shape for that."
Her eyes lit up. "What? Boxing? Wrestling?"
"Cage."
"Huh." She smiled. "MMA."
"If you wanna call it that."
She settled a hand on his leg. "That is… for me, that's very interesting. Big, powerful muscle-men who have real command over their bodies are very interesting to me." Her hand slid up an inch.
He looked at her. He'd probably win more credit with her for staying calm than for touching her back. "Are we really?" It had been a long time. It had been a really long time, and she wasn't Jean Grey. She wasn't even a shadow of Jean Grey. She had none of that… maybe it was part of her powers, that restrained, collected energy about her, that poise, grace. She didn't have Jean's flawless, almost luminously clear skin, or her flame red hair.
"Yes." Carol said. She took her hand off his leg, used it to take a mouthful of her beer, then set the beer down again and poked Logan in the chest. "You are."
But she was interested. She wanted to do more with the dangerous guy than flirt. She wasn't Jean, but she was offering, or thinking about offering. And right now, that was the best he could do. It might even force Jean out of his head for a couple of hours, and he'd take that right now. He took another mouthful of beer and shifted to face her. "And what about us do you find so interesting?"
They sat there for a while, Logan started to lose track of the specifics of what they said, they both knew where this was going, just she didn't seem to want to move things on. Logan felt… he felt almost drunk. A bit slow, a bit… too relaxed, maybe. He had had three beers in just over half an hour, and he hadn't had a drink for ages, since he'd arrived at Xavier's. Maybe his tolerance had dropped.
"You wanna get out of here?" He asked, after a bit.
"My place?" She suggested.
"Suits me." He could not take her back to Xavier's. For all whole lot of reasons.
"You gonna pick me up and carry me out of here?"
"Bathroom first." Logan got up. The world span. That stuff was stronger than he'd given it credit for. He looked firmly at the bathroom door and started walking. He felt like messages weren't getting through from his feet, so he was having to sort of guess where they were. And he was missing the warm buzz being drunk usually gave him. What the hell was the matter with him? He'd sober up. He'd be fine in a bit.
But he wasn't getting better. By the time he'd finished, he was leaning against the wall with one hand. Everything was just moving. He felt like he was on a boat in a storm. What the hell was happening to him?