2000 – 2005
Logan participated in the destruction of Weapon X, joining with the X-Men there after. He and Scott Summers would have a hot and cold friendship as they competed for the affection of Jean Grey. Things especially began to go astray when the Skrulls Expansionary Force replaced Scott Summers. Logan and Scott’s arguments grew pitched, resulting in Logan and Jean breaking away from the Academy and forming a second their own team, X-Force. X-Force would work with Warren Worthington and X-Corp.
Jean and Logan were married in 2004. The couple would go on to miraculously conceive a healthy baby girl whom they named ‘Rachel Howlett.’ On the eve of Rachel’s first birthday, the man known as Cable absconded with Rachel, to the future. Cable sought to sew the seeds of the future, by raising and training the very ‘Mother Askani’ who would later raise him. Recognizing that no child could have a regular childhood in his future, Nathan arranged for Logan and Jean to leap-forward in to the future psychically. While there they were able to raise Rachel for the first four and a half years of her life, by astral-projecting in to the bodies of her so-called foster parents. During this time Logan found himself not only raising a child, but experiencing a future where mutants without conscience ruled. Logan would find that upon the death of their future hosts, they would revert back to the past. So a great deal of their time in the future was put in to the effort of running, surviving, in order to linger long enough to teach Rachel of the world she might never experience.
However, it would all come to an end when Logan and Jean sacrificed their Host forms against the Horseman War in order to insure Rachel’s safe passage out of what was once the United States and in to Canada.
Upon returning to the ‘Present,’ Logan watched as Jean began to gradually lose control of her emotions. After Charles Xavier explained that Jean was facing a severely enhanced form of postpartum depression due to her empathic connection to her daughter, James realized that she might never recover. Over the course of the next year, he tried everything that was suggested by doctors and friends to pull Jean from the depression with little to no success. Finally, after Jean killed an innocent man during a Friends of Humanity rally, Logan made a deal with the Devil. He bartered the genetic samples of several X-Force members to Nathaniel Essex in exchange for the creation of a second child. One that would, in theory, replace Rachel in Jean’s empathic bond.
With the aide of Gideon, an elaborate ruse was staged. Sinister’s Marauders attacked Jean and Logan at home, in Japan. In order to create an inescapable illusion, the Marauder known as Scalphunter even succeeded in scalping Logan. In reprisal, X-Force would attack the Marauder’s home base. There, as planned, Jean discovered a small cloning vessel labeled X-23, within which was the creation Logan had bartered for. As planned the arrival of this morsel, sparked Jean’s maternal instinct and she began to connect with it, through which she regained the vigor of life.