CHAPTER 96 - DON'T MAKE HER CRY

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[Sarah Kinney POV]

Sarah took in deep breaths to calm down the nervousness she was feeling as the car pulled up to the driveway.

"Mom?" She heard her daughter calling her and felt her smaller hands wrap around her own tightly as if trying to help her in any way she could.

"Mommy's fine sweety." Just seeing daughter trying to comfort her made her berate herself and pushed all her nervous feelings aside. How could she show such a vulnerable expression when her daughter was sitting right beside her?

'Get your shit together, Sarah! You are doing this for your little girl!'

"You guys good back there?" Steve asked as he turned off the car and glanced at the mother and daughter duo who were sitting in the back of the car.

"We're fine, Steve. I was spooked for a second there but I'm good now." Sarah assured and glanced at the huge building in front of the parked car.

Natasha who was riding shotgun with Steve smirked as she knew exactly what was going through the single mother's head. "You don't have anything to worry about, Sarah. Steve and I are here for the off-chance things spiral out of control."

"It's… I heard that he's a pretty violent person." Her confidence couldn't help but waver ever so slightly as she said that but all she got were two full smiles from Steve and Natasha.

"Trust me, if he so much as makes Laura sad or cry then nothing is stopping Davis, Pietro and Wanda from raining down hell on him for hurting their little sister. And honestly, I think you're overthinking things too much."

Hearing Steve's words, her confidence soared to an all high peak as she remembered that she had a new family and her daughter had people who genuinely cared for her.

She kissed her daughter on her forehead and they both alighted the car along with Steve and Natasha, drawing more curious stares than they already did when they drove into the school.

The children who had been curiously looking at them were forced back to their classes as Charles arrived to greet the visitors with Ororo following behind him.

"Captain Rogers. It's a pleasure to have you back here again."

"Please, call me Steve, Professor. This is my teammate Natasha and this is a friend of mine and her daughter; Dr. Sarah Kinney and Laura Kinney." Steve did the basic introductions after shaking hands with Charles and Ororo.

Despite his curiosity, Charles greeted them and gave them a brief introduction of who he was and Ororo behind him.

As Charles invited them in, he voiced his thoughts as he saw how the mother and daughter were looking around. "Mr. Rogers, am I correct in believing that the reason for this surprise visit is because of Dr. Kinney, or more specifically her daughter?"

He noticed that none of them reacted to his words other than the simple yes Steve gave so he said nothing else and directed them to his office.

"Please make yourself comfortable." He gestured at the couch in the middle of his office that was wide and long enough to comfortably fit all of them. All of them took their seats except Natasha who stood behind them and leaned on it.

"So, how can I be of help to you?" He asked after taking a quick glance at Laura and then at Ororo but even she had no inkling of why else they would be here if not to ask for help for the young girl.

Unfortunately, the two of them were thrown out of the loop when Natasha asked a question completely out of the left field.

"I'm sorry, but is Logan around? We want to have a brief word with him if possible." Charles felt his curiosity growing higher but accepted her request and sent a telepathic message to Logan who was making some auto repairs in the garage.

"He's on his way. Would that be all?"He asked and Natasha nodded with an appreciative smile, making Charles wonder what sort of connection Logan had with the red haired woman.

The door to the office opened a few seconds after and Logan walked in with an oblivious look on his face but suddenly he stopped and looked at the other people in the room as he picked up a weirdly familiar, yet at the same time unfamiliar, scent.

The atmosphere in the room grew tense as Logan looked from Steve to the smiling Natasha and then to the seated Sarah and then automatically stopped at the thirteen year old girl who just so happened to be staring intently at him just as he was doing.

"Oh…" The gears in Charles and Ororo's head spun and weaved several loops of stories and landed on the same one as soon as they saw the way Logan and the girl were having a stare off. One in shock and complete confusion at the bizarreness of a gleaming fact that he suddenly found himself mentally denying, while Laura just stared at him, in complete confusion of what she was supposed to do next.

"… First of all, can we all take a seat?" Charles had no choice but to cut the growing tension, especially when he felt that Logan might say something completely insensitive and worsen the already complex situation they all found themselves in.

Logan dumbly sat on a couch, his eyes barely leaving Laura, the girl that felt so much like him, and he ended up asking the only question on his mind.

"How?"

Despite being just one word, his question carried everything they all wanted to ask.

He looked at Sarah and then Laura and quickly spotted the tiny resemblances but that confused him even more because he didn't have any memory of ever being with a woman resembling Sarah.

Sarah, noting how volatile the current situation could escalate, answered him so that get started somewhere. "Genetic grafting and culturing."

"Cloning." Ororo gasped softly at those words.

Unlike her, Logan had a completely different reaction as deeply buried memories threatened to unearth themselves.

"It was a continuation of the experiment that grafted adamantium into your skeletal frame. They were trying to recreate an army of unkillable soldiers and based the entire research on your DNA and tried to clone you from the ground up but all of the cloned specimen ended up dying very quickly, leaving only a single embryo behind but out of fear that it would die too, I grafted my own DNA into it and watched it grow up into her. My daughter."

"…You worked for them?" Logan didn't know why but the question just escaped his mouth but Sarah denied it.

"My participation wasn't by choice as they mostly abducted us or forced us into submission by targeting the loved ones of those of us who had families. Being the only survivor of the experiments, they decided to pause the cloning and study her as much as they could to decrease their chances of failure when they restart the cloning experiments again."

"I tried taking care of her as much as I could but ultimately it didn't amount to anything, at least that was until they started grafting adamantium into her bones that I couldn't bear it any more and planned to sabotage the entire research." She paused a bit and managed to crack her first faint smile since entering the Mansion. "Fortunately someone beat us to it and saved us."

As Sarah finished her recap, the room once again fell silent but Xavier's side had no idea where they could start processing everything from, especially Logan.

"I-I…"

"I brought her here because I believed it was high time you knew of her existence. Whether you want to accept her or not is totally up to you. Same thing goes for her too… I have done the only thing I could do, which is raising my daughter and giving her all the love I can." She spoke and then held Laura's shoulders that were slightly trembling. She looked at Logan whose eyes told the story of the number of emotions he is currently going through after hearing he had a child. A cloned daughter.

"I know it might be hard for you right now, even unfair to you to a great degree, but all I ask for is that you please consider her when you make your decision."

Right now, only three people were in the room as far as Sarah Laura and Logan were concerned. No one else mattered right now, something they all tacitly understood so they all remained quiet.

Logan, who was still out of it, snapped his eyes back to focus as he felt the faint trembling of her shoulders and the silent sobs that were threatening to bawl out and his heart clenched.

Despite him not knowing how he felt for little girl, he knew instinctively that he stood to lose something priceless should any decision he makes be the wrong one and so uncertain of what choice to make, he followed his baser instincts one more time and not only surprised himself, but everyone watching, as Laura cried….

While enveloped by his arms in a hug.