Her words hit Logan hard. He thinks of the cold impassive feel of a stone statue under his fingertips; rainy afternoons attending too many services for too many friends who didn't even have a body left to bury. They used to joke about death not being able to keep a grip on the X-Men, carefully not talking about the way that uncertainty eats at you. About how it still hurts, every time.

And he'd come back himself to find them all gone and Scott dragging up the tatters of their family, all the odds and ends that fate had turned aside from this time. Logan catches himself wondering if they've found their way back yet, or if this is really it, this time.

He hadn't said goodbye. That regret surfaces in the back of his mind, pulling at him with black claws. Ororo, Kurt, Peter, Kitty. Laura. All of them. They'd lived for months with his death. Now he was alive again and they weren't. How's that for fuckin' irony. All the good people, gone. And creatures like him allowed to survive.

But that's his burden. He won't let Ellie share it.

"Yeah, sometimes it feels like that. But there are still good people out there, kid. They might be harder to find, but they're there. All the darkest parts of my life, the times I thought I was beyond hope and beyond savin'.. there's always been someone there at the end of it, reachin' out to me." He grunts to himself, bitter amusement. "Even when I didn't exactly deserve it."