Work Text:
09/02/2018
With the teenagers' crucial discovery about yet another planet-destroying weapon that the X-Men needed to stop, yet the inevitable requirement of another few hours to sit idle this night before they could make a move of any kind … All Logan felt like doing right now, actually, was picking up with his wife in his bedroom what the red alert from the sick bay earlier had interrupted. Leaving behind all the shit out there for at least a short while before things would probably go down the drain once more. The Gods knew he'd been forced to do without that treasured comfort by his side for far too long.
Just when Jean and he had finished checking on the last of their teammates and their successors via Logan's wrist com though, letting the other X-Men know they would be unavailable until sunrise, the apartment door opened.
Since Logan had just secured the door frame display against access by anyone not living in these quarters, it wasn’t too hard to guess who was about to interrupt their badly needed privacy, though Noemi had actually made it very clear to Logan earlier that she wasn’t willing to spend any more time than necessary in their apartment in the foreseeable future. Not as long as someone was residing there whose guts she hated.
Accordingly, she made it a point not to grant Jean as much as a single glance from the corner of her reddened eyes, hurrying toward the door to her room with tight lips. "Never mind me. Just running low on spare clothes."
"Noemi … Sit with us for a moment, please."
Logan didn’t think he'd get used to this broken tone in Jean's usually so warm, deep voice anytime soon. She'd only ever been talking like that when the terror of the demon ruining all their lives for so long now had shaken her soul. Which was not something he wanted to be reminded of when they were just trying for a while to enjoy this repeated yet still so surreal gift of being reunited again, after one of Jean's painful demises.
Noemi, sadly, was entirely oblivious to this bone-deep grief and angst or even worse, couldn’t give less of a fuck about it. And from her point of view, Logan could hardly blame her. Especially after Jean had so dumbly rejected her in the sick bay earlier.
"Fuck off."
"Language, Red." His strength reserves for even one more argument close to zero for the day, Logan wasn’t too surprised to find his hand shaking when he patted his shirt down for a cigar in a gesture of routine. No, not exactly how he'd pictured things to go in the past, in the unlikely case that Jean and he would ever get a shot at a normal family life with their kid. Then again, normal had been notoriously absent from their relationship from day 1.
"Fuck you, Dad," Noemi hissed, ignoring his wince as Logan reluctantly had to admit, maybe he should have listened more often to certain admonishments by his team leader about minding your words a little around minors, at least if you didn’t want them to get thrown back in your face at some point. "Little too late to teach me decency, don’t you think?"
"I only want to apologize, Noemi." Jean quickly spoke up again before the girl could storm into her room with clenched fists, very aware that this might be the only chance to at least get this off her chest before they'd all be wiped off the star maps tomorrow. "I only told you to leave before because I can't tell if I'm safe from her this time. I just know I’ll hurt you all over when I'm forced to leave you two again. You were right about one thing ... After the Scapels moon, I lived with nothing but fear, and now, too, it was the first thing I felt when I awoke. And I’m …" A sob so quiet Logan was sure only his enhanced senses could pick up on it broke from her lips when Jean buried her face in her hands for a moment, gratefully nestling against his hand on her neck. "… I'm so fucking tired of it. I want to give the three of us a chance, even if our time might be limited. Especially then."
Noemi's hand came to rest on the door display right above the opener button but contrary to Logan's resigned expectations, after so many failed attempts of this kind in the past, she didn’t press it, not yet. She wasn’t turning around either though, not surprising given the faint fragrance of salt heavier in the air by the second. Noemi didn’t like displaying weakness even to her own family. In that regard, just like in so many others, she was so much more like Jean than she knew.
"You can’t just pretend you were never gone."
Jean made no move to get up and approach their daughter in any way. Only her frail shape was tensing under Logan's soothing caress up and down her back when she, too, sensed there might be at least a small glimpse of hope in the air there.
"I don’t mean to. I just want to try and be a part of this family. A part of your life, of all the beautiful things you've achieved and become without me."
Noemi snorted and quickly wiped her eyes with her sleeve, baring her teeth still without doing as much as looking back over her shoulder. "You know shit about me."
"That’s not true," Jean hurried to assure, her dark eyes shining with reigniting energy more by the second, finally, an energy that Logan had still failed to give back to her earlier when she'd fortunately stopped trying to bite him away just like Noemi. "I’ve been allowed to watch you guys sometimes from the Further ..."
Noemi finally spun around, almost making Logan wish she hadn’t for a moment, her whole body shaking with aggression, her pale round cheeks glowing in a warning shade of orange smothering on her body, the way she'd only threatened to lose control over her gift as an infant every now and then. Good thing this damn apartment had been made entirely fire-proof ever since then.
"I’m not talking about Phoenix’ mind tricks. You never fucking bother to ask! You just think. You thought you couldn’t beat her. You thought the others couldn’t deal with it, couldn’t protect you, couldn’t drive her out. You thought Dad and I couldn’t take it, knowing your mind and soul were alive this whole time. And now you think we’re too weak to handle it when you piss off again. If you want to be free of her, get rid of her arrogance first. You don’t know anything, Jean Grey."
"Then tell me. Let me get to know you." Now Jean was pleading, help- and hopelessness growing, her grip on Logan's hand on her shoulder growing tighter, but she didn’t give him a chance to speak up himself, not even once. This was her own personal battle she had to fight, and if she didn’t succeed right now, before they'd all have to work together, overcoming enmities and sensitivities tomorrow … Then they might as well have called Mystique to freely give her the missing information about that weapon that the Brotherhood held in their hands, and then sit back and wait for this damn piece of rock to fall into particles.
"Why should I? I don’t know you." Noemi leaned back against her door with her hands shoved down the pockets of her jeans and her chin raised, her pupils still faintly glowing in defiance. But at least she wasn’t trying to leave anymore and that was already more than Logan could have hoped for five minutes ago.
If Jean wanted to make this catastrophe right, somehow, this might be the only chance to start, so Jean forced herself to let this open contempt ooze off of her, straightening up under Logan's arm around her shoulders, looking straight into these angry eyes that so eerily resembled her own back then when the light of her demon had burst out from deep within her. And yet, hopefully, were so very different from that dangerous state of possession. "For your dad's sake maybe? He’s dedicated his whole life to you."
"Dad is a slave of his love to you," Noemi replied harshly, the same incomprehension as ever dripping from her tone as she watched Logan rummage in his pockets for a damn lighter somewhere next, silently, with his jaw grinding and his eyes on the ground, unwilling to let himself be infected by these destructive dark emotions that he'd always been unable to cure his daughter from them.
"All you ever did was hurting him and me. You never cared. You only ever thought about yourself."
"Now who’s assuming? You weren’t there." For the first time in this debate, Jean started to sound upset herself instead of just depressed and apologetic, and maybe that, too, was cynically healthy and necessary for a chance at healing. There'd been far too much unresolved tension never accumulating into a cleansing storm in this house in the last 15 years as it was.
Noemi threw her head back with a harsh chuckle, her fists clenching in her pockets, but with a small bit of relief, Logan could also scent that she had to blink more and more tears from her eyes, the iron wall of wrath and refusal starting to crumble. "Oh yeah, that’s right. So sorry I was only a day old when you pissed off from my life. So sorry I never got to know the so-called real you."
"Do you want to?" A surprising, almost scary calmness had spread in Jean's posture, in her gentle voice, one that Logan didn’t think he'd been able to sense in his wife ever since months before Alkali Lake. Noemi's last justified reproaches of all things seemed finally have uncovered something in the depths of Jean's shattered and arduously mended soul that she'd almost forgotten about, after having been used physically and mentally for nothing but destruction by an otherworldly immortal entity.
When she reached out her hand to her daughter, it was no longer shaking the slightest bit.
Noemi had felt the change too and surprisingly enough didn’t tell Jean to go fuck herself right away once more. Maybe less out of the desire to solve this shitty situation, than out of the same sense of duty she'd early developed without Logan ever having to do much about it, long before she'd become the leader of her own small team. She knew just like him that with all this hostility between them, they'd be fucked in the fight waiting for them soon. If this reluctant knowledge that it was her job, making sure their chances would be as good as possible, was the only reason for her at least considering giving this reconciliation a shot, rather than a real yearning for a relationship with a mother she'd long decided she didn’t need in her life? Well, then Logan would gladly take that over these unbearable smashes of hatred being exchanged here right before his eyes.
"How do I know you’ll show me the truth?"
Jean's hand came to rest on Logan's shoulder on her part now, coaxing him to leave his reserve position at last and accompany her when Jean cautiously stepped toward her daughter, keeping the last of respectful distance though. "I’ll keep the link to your father active. You’ll feel it in yours to him if I’m lying."
Noemi's lips tightened, her eyes on that narrow hand hovering in front of her, the disgust even at considering touching it plain to see … But then curiosity won, one of those notions she'd very clearly not inherited from the father's side of her family. "Whatever."
One hand firmly in Logan's, Jean was quick to reach for her daughter's with the other when it finally was raised, as if she was afraid – for good reason – that Noemi would change her mind again if she waited too long.
Part of Logan promptly wished she hadn’t, being thrown without warning right into that ocean of orange and green of their mental connection all the way, a sensation as if he was yanked from his body that never failed to have his stomach turn and make him sway on his feet unnervingly, the experience joined by the still so restless, still so unshaped flickering of the pure crimson red that was Noemi's presence this time … An event that under different circumstances, he might actually have enjoyed experiencing, knowing that the three of them were finally, after all this time, as closely joined in their consciousness as could be.
If only Jean hadn't been forced to use that community link to have them all go through the darkest times of what little of their lives they'd had spent together.
From very far away, with that hated sensation as if he'd had cotton in his ears, his feral perception no longer only tethered to his physical shape, Logan could hear Noemi gasp in both shock and pain somewhere beside him, and for a moment, he couldn’t help but be angry with his wife himself, close to yell at her via that deep soul connection to stop right away. To tell her that Noemi didn’t deserve to go through this shit. That their daughter wasn’t ready for that completely unreal experience of having to feel in her head what a powerful telepath like Jean was putting in there in terms of the impressions left on Jean's nerve endings at any given point in time …
And yet it was already far too late to cancel, now that the journey had begun, and part of Logan was still aware enough, luckily, of just how necessary it was to soldier through this.
So he forced himself to keep his eyes open and swallow down the tightness in his throat when he understood, that burning and throbbing in his lower abdomen and in every single vein was what Jean had been waking up to this morning six feet under, as Phoenix had once more brought her body back to life.
Returned to a body not half as extensively healed as back then when his wife had arisen from the floods of Alkali Lake for the first time, the damages she'd succumbed to at her last death still torturing her.
It was a mercifully brief flash only, thankfully, Logan's mind darkening when Jean took Noemi and him further with her into her memory, showing them glimpses of those last few years that she'd spent resting and healing in the Further, meditating to strengthen her mind against Dark Phoenix' mental tendrils trying to get hold of her again. Dull, daily efforts, hours over hours, without any real idea if it would ever even become necessary to use those shields in a real mortal shape ever again, a routine only occasionally broken by small breaks that Jean was allowing herself to let her gaze wander afar.
To the planet and the people, she'd been forced to leave behind once more. To glimpses of a life that stung in her heart like a rusty poker every time and at the same time filled her with the bitter relief that she'd done the right thing, allowing her little family happiness without the dread of an everlasting threat hovering over them. An endless string of moments witnessed, of that deep affection, pride, and limitless trust shaping Logan's and Noemi's unbreakable bond more by the day, of all these steps of their daughter on her way to becoming that headstrong, powerful, and incredibly empathic young woman she was today.
Like when Noemi had protected fellow members of her first training group in a Danger Room session as early as at five years old, from a painful fall down a simulated skateboard half pipe. How she'd been training her complicated powers every day over until they no longer threatened to burn anything down by accident, not least by lighting Logan's cigars every morning for breakfast with a small snapping of her fingers. Giggles in the sun in some waterpark at a slide race together with her best friend, tearful apologies over using her telekinetic gift without even meaning to, to further her chances in that little competition. Apologies in the shape of an allowance wisely spent on a round of ice cream for the two girls and beers for Scott and Logan.
Desperate tears of loneliness in her father's arms after they'd dropped off Saskia and Scott in their apartment across the floor that night, to the welcoming arms of Saskia's mother waiting for them to hear the tales of her little girl from that day of fun. Questions there was never any good answer to every day at bedtime hour, until Noemi had stopped asking them at some point. A daily gaze up to the sky from the Mutant High roof, with tears glistening in Noemi's eyes.
The same that were running down her chubby cheeks when Jean said goodbye to her daughter under similar desperate sobs, putting her in Ororo's arms as the agony of lethal injuries was wrecking her body. A telekinetic field fading away from around Noemi's tiny shape that Jean had had used that day to protect her baby from the very same weapons of those Clean Mankind for God bastards that had ended her latest attempt of living without her demon. Dark Phoenix' mental hold seeping through the shields around Jean's soul like battery acid thanks to that protection being paper thin that morning, because the bigger part of Jean's mental powers, she'd used to protect Noemi's entirely defenseless mind against the very same influence of that fucking cosmic bitch.
This time Logan almost did feel himself topple over, only held by the instinctive telekinetic strength from two sides at once broadening his stance. The taste of bile burning in his mouth was almost unbearable at this point, cottoned sensations or not.
So this was why. This was in truth how he'd lost Jean last time.
And he hadn’t even fucking realized.
The renewed hurt and disbelief didn’t entirely fade but at least was pushed in the background somewhat, soothed by tenderness in his soul when it was now the images of those few hours before this horrible battle at Ontario Lake before his inner mind's eye. The endless car ride from the hospital home, shaped by the growing anxiety about if they'd make it to the protection of their team in time before the enemy would find them. A tension they'd so desperately tried not to let their newborn daughter feel, with Jean holding that tiny pale body to her chest the whole time while Logan and she had been singing for their baby along to the radio so that she would remain asleep and not have to sense the fear for her wrecking her mother's mind.
A shaking, faint squeeze of his hand let him know, Noemi might finally, after all this time, just have understood why Logan had stopped finding any kind of joy in music long ago.
Back at the hospital. Limitless hate filling both Jean's and his soul as they hurried to the jeep as fast as Jean's condition, compromised from the early birth, would let her. The memory unshakable in their heads of why they were getting the fuck out of there, against every advice by doctors and their friends and teammates.
Alright, but really only another moment. She needs her bath.
The brilliant smile of some auburn-haired haggard nurse with their child in their arms, trying to leave the room with the little one several times, only held back by Jean's desperate hold on her mind as his wife, long before Logan did, realized, something was terribly off about that woman.
Logan. Take Noemi. Now. Tell that bitch we need a few minutes alone with her. I'll try to make her leave. She's had telepath defense training; I'm hardly getting through to her. Distract her. Hurry.
Jean's desperate, fearful pleading in his mind, not a bit less painful as back then, followed by the gruesome vision of that very same psychotic woman fantasizing in her head, even as she had a helpless infant in her arms, about how she would drown that baby in the next best sink the moment she was alone with it and fill the IV bag that Jean was hooked to with lethal medication.
A shriek of terror that might as well have come from Noemi's shocked mind as from one of theirs before Jean quickly took them both away from that moment, another few minutes back this time only, to comfort them over the horror so barely prevented that day. Showing them instead what had maybe the only moment between the three of them when they had been really happy as a family.
I love you so much … Both of you …
Jean, exhausted but happier than Logan had maybe seen her ever since before Liberty Island even, with her little girl in her arms, firmly snuggled into his arms as both her and his tears fell down on Noemi's beautiful little face.
That one other day that he could remember when she had been similarly smiling for him like this, as it had become so rare since she'd become the unwilling vessel for that demon bitch. A kiss in the rain, a ring on her finger. Some images from between these two occasions, from Jean's sinewy body slowly rounding, camouflaging clothing no longer able to hide her condition from the critical eyes of the world. Lying next to each other in bed for hours, to escape that hostile scrutiny out there, her hands next to his caressing her belly. Impatient curses while trying to reassemble some damn cradle ordered online because shopping in person with the woman the world knew as the face of some insane fire demon, was a really shitty idea.
Dark Phoenix' menacing glow in the garage of the New York Mutant Department as Jean was reluctantly using her enhanced powers once more to protect both Logan and the innocent being in her belly from aggressive bigots trying to take revenge for the destruction of their city.
Limitless hate.
Endless fear.
Love stronger than both of these powerful sensations combined.
The three dominating emotions in that broken beautiful mess that was Jean's soul.
When Noemi pulled back abruptly, tearing the three of them out of this incredibly intense joining, panting hard, the tears were openly on her face this time. It hurt … But at the same time, Logan didn't think he'd ever heard something as beautiful as that choked little sound on her lips that she'd never wanted to pronounce Jean's way her whole life. "Mom …"
Her widened gaze went back and forth between Logan and Jean several times, beholding the way, Logan was tiredly burying his head against Jean's shoulder, still trying to process everything he'd just seen and suffered through once more while Jean on her part looked as if a huge weight had finally been lifted off her heart, now that a few things had finally been revealed that she'd not been able to bring herself to back then. And for good reason as Noemi, too, now had finally been made to see.
"I … I think I get it now. But I … I can't … Not right away …"
"I would never ask you to." Not letting go of Logan for even a second, Jean reached out to Noemi again, and this time, Noemi took her hand immediately. "All I can hope for is a chance, little Firebug. And that the two of us can find the strength inside to protect this world from Dark Phoenix together, the way I was never able to alone."
Noemi nodded slowly, visibly still far too overwhelmed by all she'd just seen to consider such momentous questions again already. After a long squeeze of Jean's hand, she pulled away, burying both hands in her hair, slowly shaking her head. "This … has been a lot, guys."
"Take your time", Jean nodded, carefully pulling Logan back towards the sofa with her, to show Noemi that she was more than ready to give her daughter all the time she needed. "I'm not going anywhere. Not this time."
Again this shaky, uncertain nod, this gaze into emptiness. But for now, Noemi didn’t make any more move to vanish into her room or leave for her best friend's apartment as so often in the past when she'd needed distance from this incomplete, blurred picture in these quarters of a family she'd never had.
After a few moments of cluelessness as to how to show her daughter that she'd support her in this newfound confusion in all the ways Noemi wanted and needed it, Jean softly rested her lips on Logan's, motioning him to wait, and then went over to the elegantly polished black instrument that Katja had had delivered to this apartment not too long ago, as a thank you to Noemi for helping her break free from the possession by Emma's telepathic hold.
Promptly, Logan was left once more with his mouth hanging open, his damn cigar still dangling from his fingertips, forgotten, as another secret between his wife and him was revealed, albeit this one that didn’t hurt as much as what she'd let him in on earlier. Jean had never mentioned even once she could play the damn piano.
It had probably been some time, judging by her slightly clumsy movements and the occasional mistake … But the sound of that one melancholic jazz piece that Noemi had played for Logan back then before everything had gone to shit in New York once more, was still unmistakable.
Yes, his wife had very obviously been watching them closely.
Once Noemi was done blinking her new surge of tears away, without a lot of success, she strode over to her mother on unsteady knees and bent over the stool without hesitation, resting her lip's on Jean's forehead for a long moment. When she pulled away, a faintly glowing spot remained on her mother's skin, just for a split second, before disappearing.
Jean gasped, entirely forgetting about finishing her little performance, her fingertips wandering to her head. "Noemi …"
"She will never get you again, Mom," Noemi said calmly, firmly, without the smallest doubt in her voice. "She will never destroy our lives ever again. I promised Dad that, and I hold to that."
For a long moment, she paused, looking back between Jean and Logan once more, taking a deep breath as she forced her heart, too, to at least start accepting the same thing of which she'd just coaxed her powerful gifts to help make sure, it wouldn’t just vanish from their lives right again. Not now, when they'd all finally managed to feel it for the first time. "So that one day, we might finally be able to live what the two of you started back then. Maybe. I can't promise anything yet, Mom."
"Your father and me, we've always rather been friends of keeping promises, anyway," Jean answered, still completely taken aback, wiping her eyes a couple of times before finally giving it up, just staring up shyly at her so very composed, powerful and big-hearted daughter. Her hands shyly folded in her lap, she was holding on to Logan's like a lifeline when he finally overcame his own surprise enough to come to stand behind her.
"I know that can't mean a lot to you, Noemi but … I'm so unbelievably proud of you."
"I think I can live with that quite well." Noemi finally brought herself to smile, somehow, and it seemed genuine. The way she briefly reached out again to squeeze Jean's shoulder and flick Logan's cigar alight finally with an almost casual movement of her gift, said more than any dramatic embrace anyway.
"I … think I need to be alone for a while now. And we should all be getting some rest before tomorrow."
"Your daughter is more reasonable than the two of us combined, James," Jean realized with a wry little grin.
"His and your daughter," Noemi corrected her dryly, rolling her eyes a little. "At least about that, there's never been any doubt. Oh, and speaking of it: Just so we're clear, same rules for you as for Ororo. Every time I can hear you two have sex, my allowance rate rises by five percent."
Logan finally gathered his wits back enough to show his daughter a very good-natured middle claw before Noemi left them alone with a mischievous little giggle.