A series by November

Chapter 84: The Fountainhead

On that New Year’s Eve as 2006 turned to 2007, Mariah wed Charles Xavier in a small candlelit ceremony. Rogue, Logan, Logan’s uncle Jimmy and aunt Marisol, and the X-Men were there. Camille had also brought Gillian, and she and Maggie sat whispering during the wedding.

The officiant was a new mutant named Kurt Wagner, a German immigrant with indigo skin who had come to Xavier’s to become its chaplain. They were building a small garden chapel on the grounds, but it was not yet ready, so they married in the ballroom.

Logan watched his mother marry again and thought about how his life had taken a turn for the surreal. He had a mother, and she was marrying Chuck. He had a daughter with blue hair and he was a teacher, for chrissakes. And he had a wife. That little girl from Laughlin City was now his wife. It was impossible but true.

Marie caught him smiling. She was wearing a black velvet dress with the embroidered gloves he had bought her a long time ago. Her hair was shoulder length and she seemed impossibly beautiful in the flickering light of the candles. She had healed tremendously in the time since she’d lost the baby. At times he had feared grief was a gulf they could never bridge. Time had proved that it was not, and his relief at this was so intense that it at times made him dizzy.

It was Marie’s idea that he should paint a wedding portrait for Charles and Mariah. He did this during a weekend in January when the sunlight on the snow was impossibly bright. In it Charles and Mariah were surrounded by white lilies. The smell made Logan crazy but the light on the white petals was beautiful. They were interested to see how Logan, who normally painted light in a very unusual manner, would interpret it. When it was done, the silver of Mariah’s hair shone and Xavier’s smile was peaceful and warm and the lilies seemed to spark with magic and energy. The portrait went above the mantle in their suite and, much, much later, after they were all long dead, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

One day in late January Marie woke early and went down to her office. Logan woke in a column of sunlight and blinked. He sniffed the sheets where Marie had slept.

She was writing a letter on her computer when Logan entered her office, his hair disheveled and his eyes wide. He was still in his pajamas. “What’s wrong?”

He came over to her, wordless, and began sniffing. “Logan? What the hell?” The only thing keeping her from being alarmed was that he was smiling.

“You’re pregnant.”

“What? Really? I don't feel pregnant.” By which, she meant that she hadn't been vomiting around the clock.

“Really.” A trip to the medlab confirmed it, though the pink line was barely visible. Hank did a sonogram that showed nothing and a blood test that showed she was less than a week pregnant. Of course Hank found it scientifically interesting that Logan’s senses were so powerful; he personally couldn’t smell a thing.

At Marie’s insistence they would keep it secret until April when the possibility of spontaneous abortion was decreased. Only Marie, Logan, and Hank knew. One morning in February Maggie sniffed Rogue and said “you smell pregnant.”

Maggie allowed Hank and Jean to run a battery of tests on her. They found enhanced senses of smell, hearing, and vision. There was no evidence that she was telepathic but she was able to identify objects within hermetically sealed boxes. No one, Maggie included, knew how she did it. She was highly intelligent and everything else about her was within normal limits.

Maggie was a happy kid. She loved school and loved the mansion. She was happy that more kids her age were in school. Most of all she was happy to be having a little brother or sister.

Marie knew from the start that this baby was a girl. She couldn’t say how she knew. She barely gained an ounce until she was four months and then she ballooned up. There was no nausea this time, and while that made no sense to her Jean assured her that it was completely normal to have completely different pregnancies.

It was a happy time. Mariah settled into the mansion with only a little bit of homesickness. That first winter was hard for her physically when the snow lost its novelty but the chance to be near Logan, and near her daughter in law and granddaughter made her happy.

Most of all she was happy to be with Charles. He was becoming a more and more interesting figure to the media as he approached his sixty-fifth birthday and they thought it either scandalous or impossible that such a “mutant rights activist” had married a “human.” On one rare occasion that they caught him in public, leaving a restaurant with Warren. When asked about this supposed paradox, he said “we’re all human, dear. And I love my wife tremendously.” In an unusual display of realism they printed it without bias.

There were birthdays. First Logan turned 49, though he didn’t appear a day over 35. They celebrated with a small party.

Then, in May, Maggie turned eight and Marie couldn’t believe she was the same girl she’d found in Philadelphia. She was so much taller than she had been, and she carried herself differently. She was confident and happy. She had decided to get her hair cut a little shorter, with bangs, and her blue eyes seemed wider and bigger. They threw Maggie and Nate a combined birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese, kids running around the table like excited electrons around an atom, everyone ignoring the bizarre animatronic bears that sang and danced. The women talked and wished that the place sold liquor. Judy Pileggi was, quite improbably, pregnant at the age of 43. Were it not for that, she said, she’d have smuggled in some whiskey.

Logan smiled at that. He liked Judy. They both fancied themselves to be wild and irreverent. They snuck outside and puffed on some cigars. Scott just looked around at all the motion and noise and shook his head, bouncing Nate on his knee.

The new chapel was finished in May and Storm was often found there. She and the blue German were together a lot, quietly companionable, seeming to communicate of serene things without words. That fall Kurt began teaching a religious studies class and did some counseling while he finished his work at the local seminary.

Ray finished his doctorate work in Florida and came to Xavier’s. He moved in with Rakim and they were yet another established couple in the school. Rakim was in med school and Ray dove headlong into genetics research with Jean and Hank.

The group received several government grants to study mutation prevalence and manifestation. The medical and lab quarters were growing small. Hank and Jean each had their own office, but Ray and Rakim were forced to share. A second nurse named Matthew, an orange mutant with psifire eyes, was hired to help Darla. And in the labs, a half-dozen research assistants worked throughout the school year, including alumni Astrid Blane and Claire Walters. Both were going to WCC and Rogue gave them a lot of unsolicited advice about professors and campus life in general.

Cody Robbins and Leah McCafferty moved from Salem Center into a small Westchester apartment. They often had Rogue and Logan over for dinner. They had been engaged, it seemed, for forever, but were still no closer to getting married. Rogue was happy to have Leah closer.

In July Rogue turned 25. Mariah and Charles made a lavish dinner for them. Logan took her away for a week in the Catskills where they hiked and fished and made love in every room of a rough-hewn cabin, despite her bulging belly

The next week Jubilee threw her a baby shower. It was an informal, coed affair, and the men smoked cigars and drank whiskey and joked about what they should name their baby. They pretended to agree on some of the more outrageous selections, such as Norbert and Tamequeua, but the baby's name was already decided. Marie could not get over the number of little fuzzy frilly outfits everyong bought them, little pink dresses and little hats with ears and little shoes.

The mansion was very different from when Rogue had arrived. There was nearly triple the student body, and all day long the sounds of construction echoed on the grounds. Though the campus had a feeling of excitement, quarters were cramped and security was a problem, because there were so many parents and students and faculty and construction workers were on the premises. Logan and Scott chaired a security committee and petitioned Xavier for funding to rebuild the ground perimeter alarms.

In September new staff and faculty arrived, and returning students came back to find a new building. It wasn’t quite ready but the scaffolding was coming down and it was beginning to morph into something approximating the architect’s design.

Xavier wheeled around the grounds on a perfect Indian summer day, watching the new kindergarten class play Duck Duck Goose while construction workers move around on scaffolding surrounding the new building. Logan had taken his Survival class outside and they were in the heavily wooded area north of the duck pond.

New children were still registering with their parents and the school was a buzzing hub. Lunch smells wafted pleasantly from the kitchen windows. Left and right were kids they’d rescued, lives saved, and in his head was a growing list of all the people he and his team had saved.

He tried to remember the days when he lived here alone, and barely could. He felt like a small king, surveying his domain, hardly able to believe that this thing he had created was really real. It was not possible that all of this had sprung from him and he felt a bit like Zeus peering at the infant Athena who had sprung fully-formed from his brow. He took a mental step back, and surveyed it in all its enormity, and was utterly, joyfully astounded.