do you still love jean? after this whole time?
and here you see @polcmistis / @phcenixwings, kicking my ass
Which time? He almost wants to ask, but he holds it back. It’s due to the same reason he bites his tongue whenever someone’s stupid enough to ask him of all people about time. They don’t know. In a way, they can’t know. He doesn’t know how to look someone with rose in their cheeks and joy in their heart that they’re dead. A timeline away. Maybe even a universe away, that’s how it works, right? Time and space are supposed to be a little of the same thing, but Logan can’t wrap his head around that. He can barely wrap his head around living past what was meant to be the end.
Did he love Jean still, even after he had her blood on his claws? Yes, of course. Maybe even a little more, in that picturesque frame of her that he made his mind, the frame that cut out all the inconvenience, all the blame, all the flaws. That Jean Grey, the one that haunted him after her death, was perfect, which made life a little easier to find miserable.
That was bullshit though, and Logan knew that. Jean didn’t exist to wait for him. She deserved her own peace, not Logan’s pining torture. So the world burned in Sentinel flame, and Logan tried to learn from the worst of what he saw from the woman he loved. You burn, yes, but you rise.
In a way, they all had, right? He couldn’t possibly say how things ended in the other timeline, but they were here. Alive. Different, maybe, but alive. Now, with memories more or less in tact (as much as over two centuries’ worth of memories collected could be in tact in one mind), Logan could recall a younger Jean - and if you’d asked him the question at hand then, it would’ve been a resounding no. She was a stranger, and he trusted her probably about as far as he could throw her, but she’d crafted a key to unlock his mind then, given him a freedom beyond the underbelly of Alkali. He was unspeakably grateful for that.
And now- now, after this whole time? Faced with Jean, having seen the worst of her, believed in the best of her. That she was patient and kind, and murderous and vengeful, and she wouldn’t hesitate to tear him to shreds but infinitely hesitates to break his heart, still beating patient to beat for her.
“Yes.”
He can’t hide that. He won’t. Jean Grey is the only person in the world, in any goddamn timeline or universe, that Logan had never bothered to hide his love for.
