Title: "The Best Laid Plans"
Author: Minor Ramblings
Pairing: L/J
Rating: R
'Verse: Post-X2
Summary: A Jean changed after Alkali Lake finds comfort with Logan.  Unfortunately, they're not the only ones in the mansion.

He liked to think that the nightmares were getting milder since he'd started coming around.    

Logan knew a thing or two about the shit your subconscious could come up with: his own liked to spin out fresh horrors for him on a near-nightly basis sometimes.  In the months since Summers had left her after one last freak out ("You've changed, Jean, I don't know who you are any more.  I'm sorry.") , he'd listened to the sounds from down the hall, the groans and stifled screams, and the hoarse and heavy breathing in the aftermath, knowing her eyes to be riveted to the ceiling as his so often were, staring into the darkness and hoping for the dawn.  

One night, a particularly bad one when her telekinesis had shattered three windows, a lamp, and the frame on the portrait of her parents, that night he'd lingered in her room after she'd apologetically shooed away the concerned students and friends.  That night, standing awkwardly in the room of her girlhood that he'd grudgingly helped her hang fresh wallpaper in, she'd looked up at him with her hair slicked to her forehead by night sweat and her eyes dark in a trauma-paled face and silently patted the place beside her.    Who was he to argue with an invitation like that?  

And so it had gone.  Night after night he'd appear, crawling into bed beside her and wrapping her in his arms, taking the trembling shudders into his own body and whispering to her that it would be all right.  Once he'd slipped up, whispered that he loved her.  Kicked himself as she tensed up and drew away, scabs ripped away from the wounds Summers had left her with.  It had been another two weeks before he'd dared to come again.

Since then, he hadn't said a word, just shown up, held her, and left in the morning before anyone could suspect.  Status quo.  She'd come 'round in time, he shouldn't rush, her, shouldn't press beyond the flirting and leering in the halls, in briefings, in the classroom that was just the way they played their game.  She'd come 'round, and in the meantime, he could damn' well set up a few more dates with his right hand.  Snorting a breath out through his nose, he shifted a little, trying to ease the beginnings of an ache in his groin, and gathered the fitfully sleeping redhead beside him into his arms once more.

He hadn't expected to wake up with a raging hard-on and Jean's hand on his cock.  

It was the sixty second time that Logan had spent the night.  Sixty two nights, over the course of eight months and eleven days since the first one.  A year and five days since Scott had left her.  Nine months even since Scott had left the school.  One year, four months and thirteen days since she'd found herself dripping, chilled, alone and alive on the shores of Alkali Lake, with no memory of the previous forty seven days between then and when she'd saved them all.   Jean had always had a head for figures, and the imposed mental order of a trained telepath had only sharpened it.

Before that night, eight months and eleven days ago, the figures had been the one sole comfort available to her.  Logic was real, safe, comforting.  Run through a litany of times and dates and numbers, amounts, logistics, constants.  Banish the fear of the darkness that had gripped her anew.  Drown out the memories of a newly-telepathic ten year old girl forced to hear the perverse whisperings living behind her kindly lady therapist's smile.  (Dr. Melinda Pryce, later found guilty of fourteen counts of serial murder.)  Ease into the meditations the Professor had taught her by a steady recital of the periodic table, until higher thought ceased and the back-brain images of crushing weight, of cold, of a fading, wavering flame in the darkness were washed away as well.   

For the past four years, three months and twenty two days, Jean had been attempting to reconcile the fact that she wanted Logan with the fact that she loved Scott.   One year and six months ago, she had attempted to reconcile the fact that she now loved and wanted them both by trying to force the choice to be Logan's. By telling him not to force her to choose in the hopes that he'd be the honourable one when she was so close to faithlessness.   Then had come the forty seven days that she had no memory of except in the nightmares, followed by four months and eight days of attempting to reconcile the fact that she loved Scott, while Scott loved the Jean Grey that had gone to Alkali Lake, and feared the one who'd returned.   

She ran out of figures as the first light of dawn began lifting the darkness of her bedroom into shades of pearly grey, and turned instead to a study of the man beside her, one heavy, solid arm still draped across her, hand spread across the small of her back.  For all his hyper-acute senses, Logan slept more like a bear than a wolverine, his mutation causing him to crash every inch as hard as he flung himself through life, biological karma at work.  She'd added a lazy study of him as he slept to her repertoire of distractions, and now found herself continuing it for the sheer pleasure.   

If asked, she could have answered that his eyes were four of her fingertips apart, that he was one inch longer from head to toe than Scott, and two less than her regrettable and usually forgotten college boyfriend, and that he was the most muscular of the three men she'd ever had occasion to lie beside, but still within the category of lean muscle that had always called to her.  She could have spoken on how even the skin of his hands was, roughened by weather and the odd callous, but free from any sign of the old scars, freckles, nicks or other marks that would appear on anyone else's hands.  That appeared on her own.  She could have explained many things, including the whorls reversing the directions of the line of hair leading down below the waistband of his boxer shorts, and how too much thinking on that in a meeting one day had earned her a somewhat stricken look from the Professor.  (Jean, please. No father figure should have to hear his adult daughter's more adult thoughts. )

It was only recently that she'd begun to allow herself to touch him, secure in the knowledge that he could wake and catch her at it and neither of them would mind.  Five weeks since he'd let the word 'love' escape and she'd pulled away.  She'd hurt him with that, had wanted to explain that it was just that Scott's I love yous had always come as sleepy mumbles just like that, but Dr. Jean Grey, speaker at Senate hearings and lecturing professor of senior biology had found herself unable to find a single thing to say.   She still hadn't, and had so far settled into trying to pretend it hadn't happened.  In the pearly dawn light of this particular morning, it occurred to her that actions had always been more to Logan's liking than words.  

Grinning to herself, she allowed her hand to drift southwards, she sailed into uncharted waters with a touch that was gentle but not at all hesitant, thumb venturing first beneath the elastic of his boxer shorts.  Fingers encircling him, palm pressed against the head, she began with long and slow strokes to coax him to hardness, rolling in closer to trap her hand between their thighs as his hips arched unconsciously in towards her.   

Alternating her strokes with small circles of her palm, she grinned all the more as his eyes flew open, rich brown and laced with questions along with surprise and a purring animal pleasure.  "Morning," she murmured to him, the grin fading into a species of lazy contentment.   No turning back now.

Morning.  A man wakes up with the makings of one of his fantasies playing out in the breathing flesh, and all she decides to say is 'morning'?  

No doubt that this was real, though.  Logan'd been chasing women for about a century, he figured, and alive a bit longer than that, and there was no way in hell he could've imagined-Fuck, was that telekinesis?   Thought sputtered to a stop, before he managed to roll his eyes back down out of his head again and reached over to grab Jean's wrist and pull her on top of him with a rumbled groan of protest.  Entirely against every instinct that was screaming at him to take her, hold her, bruise her mouth with his and drive deep down into her until he could lose himself in her scent and taste and feel, the rational part of him was making a last ditch 'don't fuck this up, asshole' rally to slow down and ask some questions.  "Jeannie, Red, Jean, hold on a second, dammit,"  he began, teeth gritted as she shifted to nestle in against him, green eyes dancing.

The woman was going to kill him.

He'd die happy, suggested his back brain.

"Are you sure you want this?"   There, there, and he'd done the right thing, and if the answer was no, despite all signs to the contrary, despite the musk underpinning the wildfire of her scent, then he would do the right thing again and get himself the hell out of the room and locked into his own.  Praying, he figured, probably wasn't the proper course for this scenario even if he and JC were on speaking terms.  Yo, God, get me a go-ahead to fornicate this woman into next week, amen didn't sound like something the guy upstairs was supposed to go for.

On the other hand, maybe it was.  Jean's answer was an affirmative, amused, exasperated "Yes, dammit!" that was followed by an upward surge that ravaged his mouth and pressed him back against her pillows.  For a brief moment, his hands caught at nothing but air, before one cupped the back of her head while the other wrapped her waist, keeping her close to him as he sat up with the headboard at his back and buried his lips in the curve of her neck.  He laid a trail of wetly tongued kisses around to the hollow of her throat and then down further, mentally thanking the disapproving God again for warm nights and Amazon redheads who wore loose old tank tops to bed during them as he lifted the top and took her breasts in hands and mouth.

Whether it was his swiss cheese brains again, or just a sex-induced haze, he wasn't exactly sure at what point the rest of their limited clothing ended up on the floor, or just when it was that Jean reached for her bedside table and condoms by mutual mental accord.   He remembered quite well the discovery that Jean wasn't a screamer, but that he could make her drop her telekinetic control with his head between her legs and her hands tearing convulsively at his hair.  He also remembered very clearly the point when he decided that Summers was on to something with his obsession with telepaths after a direct touch to his pleasure centers had him coming in her hands harder and faster than he had in years.    

And he'd now remember to his dying day that it was just as Jean reached for those condoms that Jubilation Lee came bursting in.   He was pretty damn sure his ears would never forget.

"Oh Doctor Greeeeeeeeey!  Jeanniekins!   There's a sale on at Macy's, it's an hour's drive to the city and you've got a credit card and car keys and you love me and I can borrow them, right?"    Jubilee was seventeen, had been at the school for four years, and was pretty sure she already knew the form of the answer, and it involved the letters N and O.  She remained hopeful all the same that she could convince the deputy headmistress that the possibility of cute shoes was worth a mission into New York City.  If she had to, she'd bring up the fact that superior forms of cheesecake existed in the city too.

The slam of the bedroom door banging open and then bouncing off the doorstopper was nearly instantaneous with the shriek of "OH MY GOD!" as Jubilee got an eyeful of what was, yes, two people in Jean's bed.

Two naked people.

Two naked people that looked like Dr. Grey and Professor Logan.   

Oh. My. God.  Were those condoms?

"OH MY GOD!" she shrieked again, experimentally, as Dr. Grey threw her duvet over the both of them and Professor Logan swore, his claws shooting out on one hand and waving around before he thought better about it and retracted them, settling for glaring at her over Dr. Grey's shoulder.   Her naked shoulder.  Had she mentioned the naked part yet?

"Kitty and Rogue are going to DIE," she informed the teachers, skittering back towards the doorway and clinging to it like a life raft in this sudden can't-look-away car wreck insanity and Logan and Jean having sex.  Having sex?   Teachers, no matter how hot, should never have sex.  It was against the laws of the universe. "Ew.  Can't you two, like, get a room or lock the door or something?  I mean, I am standing here and you're like, naked and stuff and do you have any idea how traumatizing this is for me?"

"I could make you forget," Jean offered.  Jubilee didn't quite trust the gleam in the telepath's eye.  She'd read Harry Potter, and had no desire to experience the Dr. Grey version of obliviate.

Logan was more succinct, glowering at her as he reached back behind the bed and fished out a pair of boxer shorts.  "People fuck, kiddo.  Jean and I are people.  Get over it."

And then Jean sighed, shook her head, and admitted to Logan that "It is about time to get some breakfast," as a silk dressing gown flew over to her outstretched hand.  She did not attempt to abandon the duvet and change into it, but did give the errant teenager a sharp look and a nod towards the door.  

Jubilee was relieved.  She could now safely take her leave, go find Rogue and Kitty and Siryn and Rahne and tell them the horrors she'd just witnessed.  She'd be in Pixie Stix for a month off of this.

She did not, however, need to hear the door close over her shoulder as she walked away, and the hopeful suggestion from Logan that "I bet you could use this, Red.   Remember that sex ed scene in Meaning of Life?"