"You really do have a type," Raven said. Apparently she'd spotted Logan leaving Charles' room in the early morning hours.
Charles was torn between two responses: the first, a certain glee at any sign that Raven was taking an interest in anything related to his personal life; the second, the urge to go on the defensive, to point out that this was different. Because it was, for once. He wasn't with Logan because of whatever good he thought he saw buried deep within the surface, something he could bring out of him if he tried hard enough, if he spent long enough trying to convince him. He'd seen that good for himself, hadn't he, when the other Logan had come to him? He'd seen it, and the other Logan had as good as credited him for it, and...it was different, that was all.
Also different: The fact that Logan had sought him out for help in the first place. (Even if he had seemed to think he was following Jean, it had been Charles he'd approached when he'd arrived in Westchester, and that had to mean something, even if he was clearly a very different person from his future self.) The fact that Logan had stayed, for nearly a year now—that meant something.
Still, Charles settled on, "I wouldn't know anything about that," then segued quite gracefully into, "I'll miss you while you're in Mexico," which was where Raven and her team were headed in the Blackbird (which was both why he happened to be in the hangar at four in the morning, and why she had happened to be in the hallway half an hour before).
"Uh-huh," Raven said, and got down to the business of herding every other yawning member of her team into the plane. "You know, I really don't need anyone else in here right now..."
"I'm going, I'm going," Charles said, although the only place he was going was a few doors down, to Cerebro. "Best of luck!"
***
A few hours later, Charles would think of nurseries, and how there hadn't been one in the house since the 1930s, for the very simple reason that the last baby in the house had been Charles himself. He would be thinking about this the whole time he was frantically gathering people together to set one up—for it was clear from what Raven and her team had found in the facility in Mexico that a nursery would be needed in just a few hours.
Even then, he knew it wouldn't be easy. He'd never met any mutant who'd manifested before the age of six. For all the unfortunate experience Charles now had with mutants who'd been experimented on, he had precisely no experience with toddlers, manifested or otherwise, grown in a lab or whatever had been done to create them. (Raven's team had grabbed all the files they could, but all things considered, hardly had the chance to peruse them now that they were on the way home. Charles expected he wouldn't know anything more until he had the chance to go through all the paperwork for himself.)
Still, although he wasn't precisely an expert at setting up nurseries, he'd expected this one to last longer than one night. And it might have. If one of the toddlers hadn't woken up less than an hour after they'd all been put to bed, and if he hadn't been frightened, and if he hadn't caused a minor earthquake.
The next nursery was a bit sturdier. It lasted nearly two days.
The third nursery, more or less the Danger Room Lite, did all right.
***
When Charles finally did have the chance to go through the boxes of file folders Raven's team had brought back, he wasn't surprised to discover what he did. Of the six toddlers they'd brought back, five of them had mutations matching those of adult mutants who'd been rescued from other facilities over the past few years; and as for the sixth, well. Charles was not in the least bit surprised to find whose DNA had been used to make Laura.
He told Logan, of course, as soon as he knew, as soon as he was certain. He could hardly do otherwise.
"I'm not anyone's father," Logan said, which wasn't quite what Charles had just said to him, considering that Laura's DNA was a little closer to his than a daughter's would have been, while being somewhat further away than a clone's would have been. "I'm not made for that, Chuck."
Charles, who'd not had a night's sleep in the three weeks since Mexico, could have said much about this, but found he was too tired to argue, to persuade. Perhaps it was better if he didn't, anyway. It would be one thing if there weren't so many people to help with the little ones. If he and Logan and a few others were on the run, the way they'd been in the future the other Logan had come from—if this had happened then, perhaps he'd have had to push, the way that other Logan had pushed him.
Now, though, all he said was, "Nor am I, really."
***
As it turned out, Charles didn't have to push very much at all. It wasn't really pushing to tell Logan about Laura, now, was it? It couldn't be pushing to tell him all the ways Laura resembled him—not so much her temper, because all toddlers had tempers (or at least Jonah, Gideon, Rebecca, Delilah and Rictor all had tempers, too, which was why the nursery was, well, what it was), but how protective she was of her brothers and sisters, the same way Logan was protective of the students, though he'd deny it until he turned blue. The way she resembled him when she tilted her head just so, or when she started shouting about something. The way she'd wormed her way into Charles' heart even more than the rest of them, just because of how much of Logan Charles saw in her daily.
All right, maybe he was pushing. Maybe a little incessantly. But it worked. Because one day, when Charles hadn't mentioned Laura, Logan asked about her—gruffly, yes, looking like he regretted it at once, but he did ask. A few times, Charles caught him passing by the nursery, and pretended not to know he'd been peeking in.
And, of course, Charles said absolutely nothing about Logan's visits to the nursery, when they started. He made absolutely no sly references to them at all, ever. And he definitely, absolutely was not completely charmed the time he found Logan snoring in the nursery, with six toddlers sleeping on top of him.
(All right, he might have taken a picture. And framed it. But honestly, who wouldn't have?)