“No,” Rogue protested, “you don’t. You can control your power.” She faltered, remembering the times she’d seen him go berserk, most significantly the night William Stryker’s mercenaries had attacked the Mansion. She and Bobby and Pyro had been cornered, and capture was certain. Until Logan leapt from the gallery above with a terrible cry she’d never forget. She never really saw how many soldiers confronted them—the hallway was dark, things happened so fast. There were a lot, that was certain, and heavily armed. With startling suddenness, they were all dead. Only Logan was left standing, his jeans and T-shirt and face splattered with lives he had just taken. Single-handedly, he’d more than decimated Stryker’s command. None of the casualties were wounded, and more than a few were in pieces. But the true horror of that moment came when he looked towards the children he’d come to save—and didn’t recognize them. They faced the very real possibility that he was so lost in his killing frenzy that he would do the same to them. But he hadn’t. The man in his soul grabbed hold of the monster and regained control.
“I can’t,” she confessed in a broken voice, barely more than a whisper.
“Logan,” she heard Bobby call from the hangar. “Aren’t we in a hurry?”
“But I can’t run away, either,” she finished, sounding a little bit bemused to discover something bright and indomitable amidst the desolation of her spirit, something that had set down roots too deep to be dislodged, that was determined to grow. “I thought that was the answer then”—she paused to look in Bobby’s direction as though she could see right through the wall—“and now. Not my brightest idea, I guess.” She’d never really considered herself particularly strong, or brave, and here she was evolving into someone that was both. It made her smile, just a little.
“Controlling the powers has nothing to do with bein’ afraid, Marie,” Logan said, acknowledging the change within her by deliberately using her real name again, instead of the one she chose for herself. “Of the powers themselves, of getting close to someone, or never going home. If it matters, you find a way. If this doesn’t work for you, find something better.”
She leaned up close to his cheek, sparing him a kiss so fleeting that he barely felt the thrill of her power grabbing for his, yet he’d never experienced anything more heartfelt.
“Workin’ on it, bub.”
“So I see,” he agreed, and added, “They’re a smart and sneaky bunch here, Marie. Give ’em a decent chance to prove it. Throw ’em a challenge.”
She gave Logan a lazy, lopsided, little bit sassy smile that reminded him just how much she’d changed—grown—from the adolescent river rat who’d hitched her way from the Gulf to Laughlin City, Alberta, the unofficial end of the road.
“I’ll get changed,” she assured him.
“I’ll tell ’Ro.”
But she surprised him by saying, “I’m still not comin’.”
Prompted, she explained, “Someone’s gotta look after the kids, don’t you think? Wouldn’t be the first time Magneto’s faked us out.”
“Figure you can handle trouble, if it comes?”
She tossed him a look she had to have learned from him. “Ain’t that what Rogues do best, sugar?”
“That’s my girl.”
“Always. Hey,” she called as he headed for the Blackbird, “you go kick the Bad Guy’s butt, Mister!” He nodded, but she wasn’t done with him just yet. “And you make sure you find a way to save the girl, hear? We’re countin’ on you.”
Come back with your shield, victorious, the queens of ancient Sparta had told their kings when they marched off to war, or on it.
He tossed her a farewell salute and a nod that was both jaunty and deadly serious.
And within the minute, as Rogue pulled her leather uniform from its locker, the complex shook with the rumble of the Blackbird’s huge engines, quickly fading to silence as the plane rose into the air and sped away.
All the lockers around her were empty, all of the X-Men were gone. She didn’t mind being alone, but she’d count the seconds until their safe return.
Jean Grey hated her dreams.
They were full of fire and passion, of a violence as primal and lasting as Creation itself. They took her to places beyond imagination, that somehow she knew were as real as her own life. Because, perhaps, they were aspects of her own life.
Xavier had been a frequent guest that fateful summer when he recruited her, but after the first meeting, she’d rarely seen Erik Lensherr, sensing a growing sadness in Xavier’s relations with his old friend. Something was not right between them and the passage of time only made the breach wider and deeper. She was aware of it even though outwardly he was as charming and relaxed as ever. He and the ’rents would talk for hours, about a multitude of subjects, as he helped Elaine cook, or shared an afternoon ball game on the tube with John. He had no great love for baseball but he faked it well, and he actually learned some new recipes from Mom. Of course, whether the subject was history or art, current events or philosophy, it was really all about Jean. To learn about her, he was determined to learn about the forces that shaped her, her home and her parents. Moreover, since he’d be taking her out of that home, away from those parents, they had to know they could trust him absolutely.
This, she understood then as now, was where he and Magneto parted company. Magneto might have experienced a momentary pang of regret at the sundering of familial bonds, but for him such a sacrifice was necessary for the common good. Xavier wanted—needed—her parents to share the journey of her life, so none of them would be afraid.
For Magneto, fear was the defining element of his world. For Charles, it had always been hope.
He had always viewed Jean as the embodiment of that hope.
Yet she had slain him. And Scott.
And she had slain the ones she most loved.
To anyone looking, which was basically just Magneto, she appeared utterly normal. Yet the core of the Brotherhood kept well clear of her. Even John Allerdyce, who’d been her student, and Callisto, who professed to fear nothing. She made them nervous. Especially penned together in the plane carrying them westward to their final destiny.
She smiled to herself at the thought of Callisto trying to take Mystique’s place by Magneto’s side. Mystique was the closest thing to fearless Jean had ever encountered, this side of Logan. As likely as not, she’d have simply sidled up beside Jean for a gal-chat, spiced along the way by the occasional metamorphosis into whatever form would get most irritatingly under Jean’s skin. Mystique’s nature was to push everything to its limit; the greater the danger, the more she enjoyed it. Jean envied her that freedom and wondered if losing those powers would make a difference.
Jean had been all alone in that big, empty house at the beginning, although she quickly found herself irresistibly intrigued by all the work being done belowground as Xavier and Magneto built the hidden complex where much of the real work of the school would be accomplished. Later, as the rest of what would become the founding class trickled in, she made new friends.
At first, they numbered but four: herself, Ororo Munroe, Henry McCoy and Scott Summers. Despite herself, she discovered in Ororo a kindred spirit to fill the aching void left by the death of Annie Malcolm. In Hank, she found someone who could make her laugh, no matter what, who could challenge her intellect as no other, and best of all, who taught her how to attempt the triple somersault on the trapeze. She never succeeded—her personal best was a perfect double and an “almost made it”—but the work taught her how to delight in her physicality. And not to be so scared.
She fell a lot, and that’s why she wore a harness, but with practice, as her telekinesis grew stronger, she discovered she could slow her plummet with a thought so that she landed easily on her feet. And later still, to stop herself in midair. And finally, to push herself back up to where she started, so she could try again.
Ororo taught her how to fly, sustaining herself aloft with a combination of her own telekinesis and her friend’
s winds.
As for Scott…
…he taught her love. Which she thought was enough.
Until Logan came along.
She’d told Logan bad boys were for dating, for a fling, for being naughty, but you married the good guy. And he’d said in a way that thrilled her to the core that he could be the good guy. Scott was love, Logan was passion.
Just thinking about him made her heart race, which set their plane to trembling just a little, prompting startled glances at the little trickles of fiery energy that popped into view along the periphery of everyone’s vision, like the monster forever lurking just beyond the campfire’s glow.
They were right to be nervous. She was terrified.
Had Magneto pinpointed the rational reason for her being here? Probably, and he’d no doubt concluded in his arrogance that it was worth the risk and that when the time came he could properly manage her. But she still had too many ties with the X-Men, and she’d already struck them two blows to the heart, without meaning either. To see Ororo or Kitty, Hank or Logan—Logan—fall the same way…
She shook her head violently, the plane bucked, and the pilot warned them they were entering a field of turbulence, telling everyone to strap in.
Better, she’d decided, to be a potential threat to Magneto. Serve him right if things went wrong.
She covered her eyes, liking less and less the patterns her thoughts were falling into. She was a doctor, and she’d sworn the Hippocratic oath to “do no harm.” She was a scientist, whose absolute province was the rational mind.
The events since her resurrection sure had blown both those views of herself all to hell.
Resurrection.
Even by X-Men standards, she was dancing way out on the edge.
Outwardly, her hands were rock steady in her lap, her face almost serene as she gazed out towards the watching stars. Within, though, she trembled like a child quailing in the face of parental rage, so terrorized by the force of the wave of emotions breaking over them that the only outlet is barely coherent tears.
In desperation, within her mind’s eye, she forced herself to her feet and envisioned about herself the bowl shape of a medical theater, claiming for herself the air of a physician conducting rounds.
Break things down. Regain perspective, and thereby, control. Climb the steps one at a time, see where you’re led.
Her leg ached murderously as she dragged herself from the belly of the Blackbird. She’d used her telekinesis to knit the broken bones together, telepathically stealing the “how” of it from Logan’s backbrain, but wasn’t comfortable enough in her knowledge to do the job of healing as quickly and perfectly. Or maybe it was always this miserable for him and he’d long ago stopped giving a damn.
She had seconds to act, to create a barrier to keep the onrushing flood at bay while lifting the X-Men completely clear. It occurred to her that she could rise with the plane, that she could put a protective bubble around herself to survive the torrent, that she might try a lifeline—she faced a whole menu of options that allowed her to survive. Yet she considered not a one.
The passion was rising in her, glorious and hungry; the more she drew on her power, the more there was for her to claim, increasingly desperate to be unleashed. It was a song more ageless than the stars, dating from the moment of their birth, when Creation came into being as an inconceivable outrush of matter and energy. Water turned incandescent at her touch, the ground at her feet fused instantly to trinitite glass, as if seared by the breath of the sun itself. Stellar prominences danced in her eyes, over her skin, filling her with a yearning as inexpressible as it was unfulfilled.
She said her farewells, through Xavier, hoping he would understand, aware that even his brain and insight were limited in their perceptions of what she was experiencing. Very much, and she had to smile, like trying to explain the sensoral totality of telepathy to the head-blind. She felt Scott’s agony as he charged the hatch, was grateful beyond measure when Logan held him back. As bad in some ways, far worse in others, was the sharp and keening cry of anguish that Logan kept to himself. Two hearts were being savaged by her sacrifice; what made the moment bearable for her was the recognition that now she’d no longer have to choose between them.
In truth, she wanted…needed… desired them both.
The plane flew, the water loomed. Time for her to go.
This was for the best, she knew. She was human, that was how her story should end.
So strong an instant before, she shattered with the impact of a million tons of water, crushed and broken, stripped of anything that might resemble the woman she had been.
Yet she went on from there.
She really should have known better. Damnably, of course, X-Men were too bloody stubborn to go out so easily.
Her own perceptions splintered.
She found herself cast adrift from the world—still a part of things as they happened yet increasingly apart from them, experiencing the totality of thought and emotion with an intensity that was as new to her as it was exhilarating, yet equally aware of them as an audience might be, safely removed from all consequences.
From each of her friends, in turn, her touch brought forth sensations of grief, of fury, of confusion, of aching and irredeemable loss. Some were as loose from their moorings as she, while others became their bedrock.
She sensed William Stryker—defiant to the moment of final oblivion—while his son claimed refuge within a threat that would prove more lasting and deadly than he had ever been. Buried in the catacombs, a product of the original industrial plant, it was not yet functional but no longer dormant.
Much the same was true of Yuriko Oyama, Lady Deathstrike, trapped and helpless beneath countless tons of rubble in the augmentation chamber, yet sustained by a spark that—like Wolverine’s—refused to be extinguished.
She skimmed the residual essence of the slain troopers scattered through the complex and what remained of those who’d preceded them—a number that horrified her—dating back to the days when Alkali Lake had been a thriving community of Black Ops medical research. If karma had any meaning, this cursed place was well and truly haunted and would remain so always.
In her mind’s eye, Jean opened her arms and sped away from all she knew, to eagerly embrace the far greater All that awaited her.
Splinters became prisms, reflecting a myriad of possibilities, the lives that might have been, or perhaps actually were elsewhere: she saw herself older, younger, with a daughter, alone unto death. Living a life of unbearable routine in a world where mutants did not exist, doing precisely the same where mutants were the norm. She called herself Marvel Girl and favored an X-Men costume of emerald green and breathtaking brevity. She saw her own grave, tasted grace, ruled Hellfire; she shuffled the deck of existence and cast forth every imaginable permutation of herself.
She flew across the face of Forever, on wings so wide they reached from the beginning to the end of All.
She heard humming, in absent delight, a song her father favored when she was little, played to the point of her mother’s distraction, his own way of celebrating the promise of the future represented by his children. She tried her very best, remaining painfully, perpetually aware that Grace Slick would always do it better, “You are the crown of creation…”
Worlds, whole dimensions, screamed violently to an end, others slipped unnoticed into being. Life was forever a cycle, each ending a beginning somewhere else, the story of every individual, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, forming its own thread in the tapestry that philosophers called the scheme of things.
She ached with the yearning to know more, to be more, chafed at the sense it wasn’t yet her time, impatient as any child to run when barely able to stand, no sense whatsoever of the cost when she fell, no comprehension yet that none stood by to help and comfort her, that she had reached that point in fate where she must prove herself able to act on her own.
Or, she thought, blinking furiously as her thoughts sett
led back to the world of the now, a growing pressure in her ears telling her the aircraft was descending at a rate dictated by stealth and expedience rather than the comfort of its passengers, I could just be mad.
At the moment, she figured, it was a toss-up which was better.
It made her wonder, though, as she had since that fateful day when Xavier and Magneto first came calling, what it really meant to be the “next step in evolution.”
She sagged back in her chair and creased her lips into a real smile as she reconsidered one of the images from her daydream: an emerald green off-the-shoulder minidress.
She stretched and let her gaze travel down the long, lean length of her legs. Definitely not her style, even when she’d been young enough to dare anything and damn the consequences. The Hellfire leather, though, that had definite possibilities.
Scott, she knew, would have loved the mini. And been tempted by the leather.
Logan, she knew, cared nothing for the trappings. He loved her. Enough to do what Xavier could not and Scott would not.
Sometimes, the soul had to sit in judgment of the heart.
Jean always loved San Francisco. New York was about power, an expression of humanity’s dominance over its world; aside from the harbor, the view was nothing but pillars of steel and stone and glass. The City by the Bay however, while amply represented by the works of man, one of which—the Golden Gate—loomed below them, was dominated more by those of nature. What you saw back east, strolling along the waterfront of Manhattan, were more buildings, as both New Jersey and Brooklyn took it upon themselves to ape the island that separated them.
Here, there was brilliant blue water to behold, and the island of Alcatraz to catch the eye, unless you preferred to look a little more seaward to the heights of Tiburon and Mt. Tam beyond.
The X-Men had spent some time here, and a memorable night had been lost to Ororo and Jean, Scott and Hank, starting in Chinatown—Hank ordered, since he spoke both the language and local dialect. They strolled downhill to the Bay and cruised the piers, closing two or three bars before calling it a night with the dawn just below the horizon, sun on the barest brink of rising, with the sky equally split between shadow and light, enjoying crab fresh off the boat with cocktail sauce so hot with horseradish they thought they’d instantly combust.
X-Men: The Last Stand Page 19
