And the walls kept tumbling down
In the city that we love
Great clouds roll over the hills
Bringing darkness from above

But if you close your eyes,
Does it almost feel like
Nothing changed at all?
And if you close your eyes,
Does it almost feel like
You've been here before?
How am I gonna be an optimist about this?
How am I gonna be an optimist about this?"

(Pompeii- Bastille)

Seventeen years old. The girl he'd knocked up had been seventeen years old, barely eighteen when she'd died from blood loss, both from the gunshot wound and the slice from his claws. He was responsible for her death. And now Charles was dragging him back to Canada, against his will under threat of mental coercion, to the home of Leslie Kinney. Maia's poor widowed mother.

There wasn't a name for a mother who'd lost a child, and Logan hadn't given it much thought before. The cheery woman that met him at the door wasn't what he'd expected. She couldn't have been sixty, and her dark brown hair lay in the same way her daughter's had. They had the same smile, and her green eyes looked at the group expectantly, "Can I help you?"

Charles returned her smile, turning up his stupid old man charm, "Yes, Mrs. Kinney, I am Charles Xavier, and these are my colleagues Jean, Scott, and Logan. We wanted to speak with you about your daughter."

Her smile turned wistful, and against Logan's every assumption of the little old woman who lived alone stereotype, she stepped aside, smiling at them, "I always do enjoy talking about them, even with strangers. Please, come in."

"Them?" Jean asked, helping Charles over the doorframe.

They sat in the living room, but Logan refused the woman's offer. He'd killed her daughter. He wasn't about to sit on her flowered cloth sofa.

"Sarah and Maia. My girls." She answered Jean's question belatedly, gesturing to a family picture on the wall beside Logan, and he stared at it, completely enamored.

Leslie and a man were seated, surrounded by their five children, presumably in birth order. A man in his mid twenties stood on the far left with a woman of similar age to the right of him with cold features and her mother's inky hair, next to them were two other boys, who both looked just like their father. On the far right, much smaller than the rest, was a younger Maia, the only one who wasn't looking at the camera, her eyes fixed to some point far above the photographer's right shoulder.

Logan nearly popped his claws out when the old woman put a hand on his arm, suddenly across the room and at his side, "That's my Maia. She was beautiful. I was never good at raising girls. I never seemed to be what both of them needed, they both always seemed unhappy. And now they're gone."

"Gone?" Logan asked before he could stop himself.

She nodded, letting out a ragged breath, "Maia was a teenager. Sarah died in a lab explosion where she worked about five years ago. It's just me and my three boys now, though Louis rarely comes to visit anymore." She laughed shortly, "My worst fear fifteen years ago was when Thomas mentioned he wanted to join the navy. That was the last picture we took as a family. Now Thomas is missing half his left pinky and both my girls are dead."

Charles seemed to know that Logan was about to lose it, "We'd like to talk about Maia's disappearance."

For the first time since they'd entered her little house, she seemed startled, "Her disappearance?" She sat gracelessly on a burgundy sofa, "You didn't say death. Everyone always says her death. Do you know something about my daughter? I know she was special, different. She tried to warn those kids, and then she vanished. They tried to tell me she was dead, but she wasn't, was she?" She stopped suddenly, taking a breath, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to…"

"She was alive in eighty four. We have photographic evidence." Charles said bluntly.

Leslie blinked a few times, "I knew it."

She focused in on Scott's glasses. "Maia never made eye contact either. I thought there was something wrong with her for a long time, but besides that, she was a normal little girl. If eerily insightful at times." She looked down at her hands, "She was a mutant, wasn't she?"

"That's quite possible, Mrs. Kinney. We are looking into a facility in which we found footage of your daughter, and they focused on mutant research." Charles said evenly, seemingly unsurprised that she made the jump to mutants so easily.

Leslie sighed, "I never wanted to think of her as different from her siblings, but she was. I regret not coming to terms with that sooner."

"None of your other children are mutants?" Scott asked.

The old woman shook her head, "No. As far as I know, she got that from her father. My husband, Robert, bless his soul, never treated Maia as anything less than his. But Maia's father was a man I had an affair with at a week long conference in Upstate New York. He was a professor at one of the colleges nearby."

Jean went pale and bolted for the door. Charles struggled to keep the concern off his face, "Is there anything else?"

Leslie stood abruptly, heading for a cabinet beside her tv. "Yes, actually, a box was sent to me about a month after the government men came to tell us that Sarah had been killed. I have no idea of what's in it or who it came from, but maybe you will." She handed a metal box no bigger than Logan's fist to Charles, and looked at them all, Jean smiling sympathetically at her, Scott sitting next to Jean on the love seat, and Logan as he leaned against the wall still. He held the box out to Logan, "You should look at this."

Logan took the box from Charles, and was instantly sure he wouldn't be letting anyone else touch it. It was adamantium, and the lid had been melted on. Logan let his claws loose, and was oddly aware that Leslie didn't seem too startled. Instead she chuckled softly, "Well, guess that answers wether you all are all mutants or not." She stood back up, getting close to Logan again, peering at his claws, "Those are the same metal as the box."

"Yeah." Logan grunted, "You might want to step back."

He forced the box open and nearly dropped it. Inside was an oddly familiar sharp female scent, a piece of paper, and a lock of fine brown hair tied with surgical thread. The scent was on the paper, and Logan pulled it out carefully. Eight words: 'If you're somehow alive, find her. X-23.'

Logan would never admit his fingers were shaking as he pulled the hair out. Away from the perfumed note, the scent still lingering to the hair after five years surged into his brain. The scent belonged to his offspring, the animal part of his brain offered, memorizing the sweet vanilla scent. His daughter was a brunette, the color just a few shades lighter than his own, and she'd been alive at least five years ago. That, and someone was apparently looking out for her. That gave him far more hope than it should have.

Leslie clapped a hand over her mouth, looking at the note, "That's Sarah's handwriting. What the hell?"

Charles gave her a brief explanation that left her breathless, "I have a granddaughter Sarah was… protecting." She looked up at Logan, "You're her father, and my Maia's really dead." Leslie had apparently reached her breaking point, "I'm sorry, I need to be alone right now."

Leslie went into the back of the house and Charles motioned for them to head out. A message was waiting for them back on the Blackbird from Hank, asking them to call him. "I found a facility farther North that's registered as abandoned by the government twenty years ago, but it's been drawing power for the last decade." He rushed out, excited at his discovery.

"She could be there." Charles said quietly after he hung up the phone. "It's up to you, Logan."

Logan cracked his neck, "Let's go get her."

Jean and Scott insisted on stealth, but it went against every fiber of Logan's being. It looked like an ordinary warehouse, but it shouldn't have been staffed at all. They moved into the facility silently, avoiding the limited security crew easily. There were a few people walking around inside, but they didn't keep their attention. There was a segment of the facility with tighter security than the rest, but the designer hadn't accounted for Jean's ability to fly them to the odd roof of the section and drop them through a ceiling tile.

"It's a dollhouse." Jean gasped out. It did look like a little girl's fantasy, pink and flowers everywhere, paper scenes on fake windows. Nothing was real, and everything had been made practically indestructible. The only signs that it was a prison were the occasional scratches that marred the cheery wallpaper and the fact that everything was bolted down.

"I smell something." Logan growled, and they moved through the rooms as he tracked a sweet scent, all stunned into silence by the little fantasy world someone had created. They found a bedroom, a bed and closet the only things inside…besides an occupied rocking chair facing the corner of the room.

A small figure was sitting in the chair, a grey hoodie pulled up protectively, the sweet smelling female rocking back and forth. They were about to approach her when Jean and Logan realized in unison that someone was coming. The trio of X-Men hid in the closet, Jean clutching both their arms in fright when she saw the plethora of frilly dresses inside. "Shhh." Scott urged, patting her hand.

Dr. Dean Rice walked into the room. Logan recognized him from his own research into the Weapon X program, and had thought he'd killed the man. Judging by the man's limp, he hadn't done a good enough job. "Good morning, Darling. I've already been told you're having a rough day. Little girls don't bite, you know that. Your Nanny and I are quite disappointed. She had to get stitches."

The female growled, and Jean's hand on his arm was all that kept Logan from busting out of the closet.

Dr. Rice pat the female on the shoulder, "Now, now, you know we don't use our mouth for anything other than speaking and eating. I hate to punish you like this. I am proud you dressed yourself today, even if you snubbed the pretty dress Nanny laid out for you." He put his hand on the top of her head, "Since you won't be eating like a big girl today, I'm going to go to the kitchen and fix you something you can eat." He sighed dramatically, "We'll try to be better with our manners tomorrow, won't we?" Silence answered him, but he didn't seem too worried, "Good girl. I'll be back soon, and if you're very good for the rest of the day, I might Zander by to play with you. He does enjoy your time together. You're practically his sister."

After he'd been gone a few minutes and Jean was sure they were alone, she opened the closet door. Jean approached cautiously, Scott right on her heels, and she said softly, "Hello?" Silence followed.

Several minutes passed before the female broke the silence with an agonized moan.

Logan took a few steps closer, ready at any second to put his claws to use or to retract them, whichever was needed. "We're here to help." He said lamely.

The female's head turned to the side to partially face him, one sightless blue eye searching the air fruitlessly, the majority of her face still covered by her shoulder.

From the edge of the hoodie, lank red curls spilled forth.

Yikes! Let me know what you think!
-Jenn