The new future was lonelier than Logan had expected.
He was a man used to loneliness, both the kind he wanted (there were times when a six month long vacation to the great white north seemed like a really fucking good idea) and the kind he didn't (losing all the people you cared about defeated the fucking purpose of fucking off to Canada for six months whenever you felt like it). This was a new kind, though—a kind where people he'd thought he knew kept looking at him like he was walking around in their friend's corpse. The only people who'd looked glad to see him were Charles and, to a lesser extent, Beast.
It took a grand total of three days for Logan to decide that fucking off to Canada sounded better than it had since around 2013 in the original timeline. That was about how long it took for him to stop being amazed at everything that had changed, and start realizing that he'd expected to step back into his own life, only better, and that that...wasn't going to happen.
He headed down to the garage, figuring he was about to find out what Scott drove in this timeline. He was just about there when the kid ambushed him.
"Hey!" she said, stepping into his path.
He'd seen her a bunch of times since he got here. Little girl, couple of years younger than the typical student here. Dark hair, combative expression. Unlike everyone else, she didn't look at him like he'd died, so much as that he'd killed something she cared about, and she was going to kill him back. But he didn't even know her, so whatever her deal was, he didn't give a shit.
"What do you want?" Logan said.
"You're leaving again," she accused, crossing her arms.
"Uh, yeah. What's it to you?"
"You can't leave! You just got back!"
"...So?"
"So you were going to take me to Disney World!"
"...What." There was no way any version of him in any life would have promised to take a kid to fucking Disney World, or anywhere else where people walked around in Mickey Mouse costumes.
"Okay, maybe not Disney World. But I said I wanted you to take me somewhere when you got back, and you said, 'Sure, kid.' And that means you're not supposed to leave until we do something."
"Who are you?" Logan asked. He was starting to get a bad feeling about this. A really bad feeling. A 'some condom leaked somewhere about eleven years ago, and no one bothered to fucking inform me of this so I could steal Scott's motorcycle two days faster' kind of feeling.
"Unless I can go with you," the girl continued, seemingly not having heard. "That would be cool."
"You're not coming with me," Logan said. "Who. Are. You?"
Whoever this girl was, she knew that tone. "I'm Laura," she said. "Duh." Before Logan could say that didn't actually help him, her expression cleared, and she said, "Ohhhhhhhhhhhh. Everyone said you were different, but I didn't know that meant you forgot stuff again."
"—Yeah, I forgot stuff again." Again? What kind of shit had the other Logan been up to, anyway? "Fill me in, kid. Who are you?"
"Oh, yeah. Uh, you're sort of my dad, and I'm sort of your clone?"
"You're my what?"
"Your clone!" Laura said, and went off on an explanation about Weapon X, and Logan's sperm, and a surrogate, and the first four years of her childhood in a lab in Mexico, and absolutely every single part of it made Logan feel a thousand times worse than 'broken condom' ever could have. Apparently, Laura could tell, because at one point she peered at him and said, "Do you need to sit down?"
"No," Logan said, even though it was pretty obvious that she was asking because however many other times she'd explained this to him, he'd always needed to sit down. And in fact, he did sit a minute later, back against the wall, staring into space and thinking that cloning him was the worst thing Stryker ever could have done to some poor kid.
"It's okay," Laura said, after she'd stopped telling him about her past, and he hadn't said anything for a while. By then she was sitting next to him. "You always think you're so awful, but you're a pretty good clone dad."
"I am, huh?"
"You let me stay up as late as I want. You also said it's okay if I join the Junior X-Men on my birthday next year. So that makes you pretty cool."
Logan looked at her. "You're way too fucking young to join the X-Men. So you can forget that."
Laura sighed. "Everyone said you were different now, but you don't seem different to me."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." She sighed again.
"Clones, huh," Logan said, a minute later. "We never did clones in the timeline I'm from. Next you're going to tell me me and Summers have a thing."
Laura gave him a sidelong look. "Um. That's not really the best example..."
"You've got to be shitting me," Logan said, although actually, that felt like it explained a few other things. Things he would deal with at a time much, much later than right now. "Did you say you wanted to come with me?"
"Yeah!" she said, jumping up. "Really? Do you mean it?"
"Sure," Logan said. "Why not?"
There were probably a million reasons why not. He could think of a hundred off the top of his head, a thousand by the time they located Scott's bike plus a helmet for Laura ("Why do I have to wear one? I'm immortal too."). But if the thought of where she'd come from made him more than a little queasy, she seemed to like him...and as for the loneliness he was so used to, it was really fucking overrated sometimes.