Epilogue

(Logan)

I couldn't stop a tear from spilling down my cheek as I closed Angela's eyes before leaning over to kiss her. I could taste her blood on my lips and the animal in me raged to kill the monster who had done this to her. I'm not an idiot, I know what he wanted to do to her just by where the wound was. Had I been half a minute too slow in taking out that Sentinel, I would have buried my mate in the back of the garden where the other memorials stood. I held her hand for a little longer, grieving for her anyway because even one day apart while she's like that is one day too many for me. I ran a finger down the side of her face, then leaned over and kissed her forehead. "Come back to me tomorrow darlin'. I can't live without ya." I whispered softly.

After a few minutes, I turned to Xavier. "You heard what she said, right? What we have to do?"

He nodded. "Yes Logan, I did, but you will forgive me if I'm against the idea."

"I know. But it was one thing for her to see that kid in a dream. Now she's real an' they're usin' her for a weapon like they used us. I won't have it."

"Nor will I." He replied. "You'll need some time to prepare, even after Angela comes back to us tomorrow."

"Yeah. We'll need more'n you can imagine." I had an idea, something that just might work, but I'd need Angela's approval first. I kissed her forehead again and left the infirmary.

Miraculously, the Danger Room was unharmed by the battle, so Sage quickly programmed a fairly comfortable barracks for us to sleep in. Hank stayed with his patients all night, waking Jubilee every couple of hours to make sure her concussion didn't get the best of her. I stopped in the locker room long enough for a quick shower and went to find myself a cot with the others. I didn't think I'd be able to sleep at all, but I was out as soon as my head touched the pillow.

I woke up slowly, a familiar presence balanced on the cot with me and looked down to see Angela sleeping there peacefully. I smiled and breathed in her comforting scent, which caused her to stir. She rolled over and smiled at me as she wrapped an arm around my waist. "Good morning, lover." She whispered.

"How long was I asleep?" I asked, very confused.

"Almost two days. You took more damage than you told Hank about, didn't you?"

I smirked and nodded, knowing it was no use to lie about it. I'm not really sure how many gunshots I took that night, how many hits from frag grenades or the lasers from the Sentinel. When I'd been called down to the infirmary for Angela, I was still running on pure adrenaline, so ignoring my wounds had been easy. But my body betrayed me as soon as I left, no big deal here in the mansion but potentially fatal in the field. I chuckled bitterly at that thought. We hadn't even started our journey back and already I was thinking like a weapon. "I'm fine now. An' starvin'. What's a fella gotta do to get some food 'round here?"

"Typical man." She snorted. "If it's not your dick controlling your every move, it's your stomach." I laughed and she rolled off the side of the cot and held out her hand. "Come on lover, walk this way."

She sauntered ahead of me and I raised an eyebrow. "Darlin', if I walk that way, everyone's gonna think I'm gay."

"Smartass." She shot over her shoulder, but I followed her out of the makeshift barracks, making sure to watch her walk every step of the way. Damn, but that's a sexy walk.

We got upstairs to the kitchen, which was a bit worse for the wear but one of the refrigerators had survived the assault. She poked around in there and came out with three kinds of meat, two kinds of cheese, mustard, mayo and everything else to make a nice sandwich. She set them down on the only counter not shot to hell and reached for the bread. "How many do you want?"

"Just keep makin' 'em an' I'll tell ya when I'm done." She shook her head but set to her task and it was tempting to have her keep making sandwiches until there was no bread left, but that would have been a mean trick. I stopped her at three, which she handed to me on a plate with a cold beer she produced from the fridge, then set about making herself a couple and settling in across from me. "So, how'd you survive without your usual post-resurrection ritual?" I asked suggestively.

She waved at me, a dismissive gesture if I've ever seen one. "Oh, it was fine. You don't need to be awake for that part of you to work." She took a big bite of her sandwich and munched on it, while I just sat there staring. Was she saying what I thought she was saying? "What?" She asked, wide-eyed and innocent. I didn't buy it.

"Did you…I mean, you didn't really…while I was in a fuckin' coma?"

She looked at me blankly, then suddenly burst into laughter. "No, Logan, I didn't make love to you while you were out. But the look on your face? Oh gods, where's a camera when I need one?"

"Now I know for a fact that you ain't funny. Not even a little bit."

"I'm a riot and you know it." She shot back and went back to her sandwich. After we finished eating and cleaning up our mess – not that you'd be able to tell with the other mess – she took my hand and led me through the halls to the classroom we used for the strategy classes. Most of the wing had come through more or less intact, with only a few broken windows from the concussion of other explosions. She locked the door behind us and strolled over to the desk. "Our room's trashed along with most of the rest of them." She said as she perched on the edge.

I walked slowly up to her, placed my hands on her hips and looked down into her eyes. "So why are we here?"

"Making one of your fantasies come true." She said simply and pulled me down for a long kiss. She'd once sworn she'd never make love to me in our classroom, but our choices for privacy were pretty limited. We spent most of the day in there, trying every surface and coming up with some pretty creative ways to work around the computers.

We finally came back to ourselves as the sun was setting, lying on the floor in a tangle of sweaty limbs and mussed hair. There was something about the way she'd acted through it all, like this was the last time we'd ever get the chance to let go. I kissed her on top of the head and pulled her closer to me. "Darlin', what was all this about really?"

"I wanted to say goodbye." She said and I swear my heart stopped beating for a moment. I tensed and she looked up at me with a smile. "Not to you, Logan, I'll never do that again." She waved her hand at our surroundings. "To this place. This room, the school, the lawn. I wanted to say goodbye to my home."

"We're comin' back someday, you know that."

"I do. But when? How long will it take? Will everyone still be here or be the same when we return? And will we be coming back as heroes or villains?" She shook her head and looked down. "I don't know, neither do you. So I wanted to make sure that there was a supremely happy memory of this place before we leave."

At the word "memory", my idea came flooding back to me. "Angela, I have to ask you somethin'. It'll be hard to do an' I'm sure you won't want to, but it's really for the best."

"What?" She said, her eyes narrowing.

"When we go back, we can't let those people know about our kids here. But I think I have a way to keep 'em from findin' out."

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I was right, she didn't want to do it. But once I explained everything to her, my reasons for it, she reluctantly agreed. We only had one other person to convince and that's how we found ourselves in the Professor's office two days later. He'd been fielding calls from the press since the attack, giving them a cover story for what had happened. He told everyone that a military helicopter had malfunctioned and crashed in the back of the mansion, bursting into flames. The heat caused the ammunition to ignite, which explained the damage to the school. Since we had a conveniently destroyed chopper back there – courtesy of Cyclops and Polaris – that was clearly military in origin, no one disputed his claim. I'm pretty sure Bennington helped in some way, but I don't have proof, just a gut feeling. But as I've said before, my gut's never steered me wrong.

Xavier looked tired and for the first time since I've known him, he was seriously showing his age. I found out later that when Phoenix shut him down and the Professor tried to fight back, she caused a series of tiny forebrain hemorrhages. These are bad enough in normal people, but in telepaths it can be sign of major trouble. I hoped he would be up to helping us with our plan. In spite of all that, he still sat in his chair as though it were a throne, his presence more than making up for his paralysis. Once we were all settled in with cups of coffee or tea, he asked what we wanted and we laid it all out for him.

"Chuck, you know how hard it is for me to let anyone in my head," I started, a bit of panic rising in the back of my mind. I squashed it with a mental slap and continued. "So you hafta know I-we ain't askin' you to do this lightly."

"Perhaps if I knew what you wanted, I could tell you for certain one way or another." He replied dryly.

I nodded and plunged ahead. "Professor, Angela an' I want ya to take away the last ten years."

Of all the things I could have said, that was definitely the last thing he expected. His eyes widened even as he grew pale. "Logan, do you know what it is you're asking of me?"

"I do. But we don't want ya to strip it away, just…bury it, somewhere that no one would ever look. Put layers of false memories on top of it, so many layers that they get tired o' lookin'."

"But the last ten years? Your daughter is part of those years!"

"That's part of the reason you need to do this." Angela said. "Charles, Phoenix already saw her in my mind, so they know what she looks like. She's strong, more powerful than anything I've ever felt in my head before. But she didn't pay attention to much that didn't involve Evie, didn't see everything. Or everyone for that matter and that's why you need to do this."

"They got a way of givin' any mutant my healin' factor." I stated plainly. "They can make anyone a killin' machine all the way down to the adamantium. If they knew what some o' these kids are capable of on their own…" I trailed off and let him finish for me.

"He could have an army in no time, one that's already been trained by the best." He said and I nodded. He closed his eyes and looked down, warring with himself over what we were asking him to do. Ethically speaking, he'd never do it on his own. But we had a greater reason than the Director and Weapon X. They wanted to control us; we wanted to protect our family. "I can do it, certainly, but it will be very difficult, possibly painful."

"We don't care." Angela said. "You have to do this. But we don't want you to erase the X-Men. They already know about the team and our involvement, so hiding the adults is pointless. This is for the children, to protect them."

"Even Evie?" He asked softly.

I looked away, unable to answer. Angela swallowed hard and I could smell the tears forming in her eyes. "Even Evie. I'm hoping that Phoenix will eventually forget what she saw in my mind, so if she goes back to find something it won't be there anymore. But you can make me believe that Evie is any other little girl, or make us believe that she died in infancy, whatever. I don't want to do it, but we have to protect our family." She didn't say it out loud, but we all knew she meant more than just our own little girl.

Xavier thought about it for a little longer, then nodded slowly. "Very well, I will do as you ask. I will include a password, something that you will not be aware of and that must be sent telepathically in order to work."

"So if someone says it out loud," I mumbled, "our memories won't come floodin' back. Nice."

"This will take some time and I'm sure you'll both hate me before I'm finished, but you can consider it done."

"Thank you Charles." Angela said and she meant it.

"Well, if we're going to do this, we best get started."

It took several weeks of near-constant conditioning, but eventually he did it. The last thing he erased was the memory of us having our memories erased, which of course we didn't know until much later, after everything else was all over. By the time he was done, we didn't even know that Xavier's was more than just the home base for the team. We honestly believed it was the headquarters for the X-Men and that we'd been recruited by Xavier to be on the team, with the occasional batch of kids with dangerous powers invited to learn control. It helped that Chuck didn't recall the students until after he was done and since they'd been sent to a safe house in Connecticutt, they wouldn't be back until we were already gone. The things he left in, however, were the most important.

He didn't make us forget Weapon X or what they did to us. He left our memories of the missions we'd done over the previous decade to destroy them from the outside intact. He kept heavily edited versions of most of the X-Men missions we'd gone on, everything from the Liberty Island incident for me to the search and rescue we did in Colorado. Most of all, he made sure Angela remembered Emma and that I remembered everything I had regained back before Evie was born. In a nutshell, he made us remember why we were going back, the new version. We wanted vengeance, we burned with it, and finally the time was right.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

There was one piece of business we had to take care of before we left. I'd proposed to Angela, impulsively, recklessly, but she'd accepted all the same. After so many years of saying we didn't need to, I had suddenly wanted to and asked her. I wanted to wait, give her a proper ceremony and everything, but since we were planning on throwing ourselves back into hell, I was tempted to make sure we were completely and legally married in advance. I'd been weighing both options for days, but it still took me by surprise when Xavier called us into his office just a few days before we were scheduled to leave.

"Hey Professor, what's up?" Angela said as brightly as she could, taking a seat on the sofa. I took a seat next to her, my arm slung over her shoulders.

"I know the two of you are getting ready to leave in a couple of days." He said and we nodded. He knew all of this, so why were we here? "Before you go, I have a couple of gifts for you." He handed us each a tiny, black velvet box. We opened them and gasped at what we saw. Inside were wedding bands, gleaming brightly in the morning light. We looked at him curiously, since we'd planned on picking out our own. "These were made by…a good friend of mine. They're adamantium."

I scowled. "How the hell didja get the prison guards to let ya in the same room with Magneto an' this much metal at the same time?"

He chuckled, which confused me. "Erik is not the only friend I have who can work with metal. The young man in question insisted on making these for you when he found out you were engaged. It seems he's…quite a fan of the pair of you."

"So some X-Men groupie made these?" Angela asked, clearly skeptical.

Xavier nodded. "Something of the sort, yes. At any rate, he sends his well-wishes to you for a long and happy life together."

I shrugged and snapped the box closed. "Well, next time ya talk to him, tell him we said thanks."

I stood up, but the Professor stopped me. "Don't be hasty, Logan. There's a reason I gave those to you now rather than later." I lowered myself back to the sofa. "I think it would be wise if you were to take your vows before you go."

Angela narrowed her eyes. "How come?"

His face grew solemn. "The two of you are about to walk into a great darkness that I cannot begin to imagine. Would it not be better to walk into it with something that you can use to remember when you were still in the light?"

When he put it that way, it made sense. So, later that evening, we gathered on the newly-repaired patio and I made Angela my wife, witnessed by the Professor and the remaining X-Men, with Kurt performing the ceremony as he had for Storm and Atlas. The only thing missing was Evie and thinking of her caused my heart to clench painfully in my chest. But Xavier surprised us further by handing us a keycard to the Regency Park hotel in New York City and assuring us it was paid up for the next two days. We smiled and thanked him and went on the only honeymoon we would have for a long time. We spent those days worshipping each other, memorizing every line, every curve, just in case they tried to separate us when we turned ourselves in. I didn't think they would; we were the best team they'd ever had and they'd be fools to split us up. But, you know…just in case.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Three days later, Cyclops dropped us out of Blackbird Three several thousand feet above a place in southern Nevada, reported to be the secret facility known as Area 51. We had to tandem jump, because for all that she's like a cat and always lands on her feet, Angela has an almost psychotic fear of heights. Oh, she's fine on a mountaintop or the highest branches of a tree, but once you take away the concept of "attached to the ground", she panics to the point of freezing. I wasn't complaining though. I had suggested trying it naked, so we could put regular mile-high club members to shame. I'm still not sure how I survived her attack, but I did. That's my wife.

We landed well clear of the actual base, where we removed our jumpsuits and parachute, burying both deep in the desert sand. We had nothing else with us except two canteens of water each. We felt it was important that we arrive much the same as we had when they originally "recruited" us, with little more than the clothes on our backs. It wouldn't – and didn't – save us from days of examinations to make sure we didn't have tracking devices implanted in our bodies, but it would at least show that we weren't armed with anything other than our natural weapons. We traveled about three klicks on foot before a Humvee full of regular military stopped us at gunpoint. "Hey, this is government property, asshole." Said a guy whose stripes indicated he was a sergeant.

"No shit Dick Tracy." I replied, my hands over my head. Angela was pinned in much the same position, only the two asswipes that had her were looking her over in a way that really made me angry. I clenched my teeth to tamp it down. "Get on your fuckin' radio an' tell the Director that Hellcat an' Wolverine surrender."

The soldiers looked at each other, then burst out laughing. "The hell you talking about, moron? They're just military urban legend, never existed."

"Oh yeah?" I popped my claws and the four of them all but shit their pants right there. They looked over at Angela, who now had her claws out as well, with the sweetest smile on her face you've ever seen. "Now, like I said. Get on the horn an' tell the Director we surrender. He'll understand."

The sergeant nodded and motioned for the others to keep us covered, then went back to the oversized vehicle. He emerged a few minutes later, several shades whiter and sweating much more than even the desert heat could account for. "Uh, yeah. So, he says we're to bring you in, but to kill you if you try anything."

"We won't," Angela replied, slowly lowering her hands, "we're giving up. We're coming home."

The End

(for now)

AN: Well, there it is...the end of this chapter of the saga...the good news is, the next one is in the works...:) The bad news? I'm nowhere NEAR finished with it yet...but, if you all need a fix, i am currently posting another story, unrelated to this series, called "Headhunter"...if you're a Dean Koontz fan, you'll probably recognize the majority of the main characters...:) I want to thank everyone who read this story and the others...i hope you've been having as much fun as i am...but i especially want to thank my reviewers, ALL of you, for letting me know you're there and that you like it...and i would be amiss if i didn't extra special thank ALEX10671S, Levanna and Nataku's Wrath for reviewing the last chapter...:) NW: As you can see, there HAS to be another piece in the saga...otherwise, this is a downright awful place to leave things:) Oh, and Dee? I know it's not what you probably had in mind for the wedding, but i promise that will be rectified at some point near the end of the next story...:) It's in my notes, after all, if the damn muse will just let me stick to them!

Thanks everyone for sharing this with me!