X-Men(tm) The Last Stand

by Chris Claremont

  Gradually, her vision cleared and she blinked many times, trying to center herself. The impossible cold she’d felt had passed, not even leaving a memory, yet she didn’t feel quite right. She felt chilled in a way that was new to her. She shivered, something she’d never done before.

  The others were staring. She was used to that, it was the price to pay for walking around in her skin. Their expressions didn’t register—or perhaps, she simply chose to ignore them.

  She plucked the dart from where it had landed, brow furrowing as she felt a small trickle of blood. Her morphing ability allowed her to cope with injuries as instantly and comprehensively as the Wolverine’s healing factor; usually it took the near-mortal wounds to draw blood.

  Then she saw her hand.

  It wasn’t blue, it was pale.

  She rose to her knees, with the same balletic grace as always, and stared aghast at her body. No more scales and ridges—she was truly, completely naked and nothing she could do would change that.

  “Erik?” she called, lost and aching, as she raised a hand towards him.

  The look he returned matched her grief.

  “I’m sorry, my dear,” he said gently, as to one dead, but who hadn’t yet realized it. “You’re not one of us anymore.”

  Her mouth opened to register her shock, her eyes brimmed with unbidden tears. After all they’d shared, after her sacrifice to save him, the finality of his rejection was too terrible to accept.

  He ran his hand along her cheek in a farewell caress.

  “Such a shame,” he mused in a kind of eulogy. “You were so beautiful…”

  He rose with a snap of his cloak and signaled the others to follow. Mystique stayed on her knees, watching like one who’d just been turned to stone. Pyro, at least, had the decency to appear torn, switching looks between her and Magneto. But then, with a final, farewell shake of the head, he scurried after the Master of Magnetism.

  Through her head ran memories of the times she’d sneered at the X-Men, and thought them fools for following Xavier instead of Erik. And especially, the realization that, if she had stood with them, powers or no, they’d have stood by her to the very end.

  Logan hadn’t left the infirmary since they’d brought Jean home. He watched her with his senses as intently as the machines did with theirs, and probably came away with as accurate an assessment of her condition. When Xavier came in to perform his own examination, plus whatever else he did to her in the way of his personal psychic voodoo, Logan stepped aside, staying close enough to intervene if needed but otherwise deferring to the professor. He also took each opportunity to keep tabs on Xavier as attentively as he did on Jean. The couple of times Ororo visited, she was actually as concerned for Logan as her best friend. Logan wasn’t used to that, wasn’t sure how to deal with it.

  Occasionally, he’d talk to Jean as though they were sitting in some saloon or bar, having a normal conversation, telling her of all that had transpired with the school and the world since she’d been gone. Mostly, he just sat, with the infinite patience that was one of his hallmarks. He watched, and he listened. When she needed him, he’d be there, he’d be ready.

  He saw that some wires were tangled, so he reached over to smooth them out…

  …and she grabbed him by the hand.

  She looked up at him with that same long, lazy smile that he remembered and yet, with something new, something…more. He couldn’t help returning the smile in kind.

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” she noted, making him chuckle. “It seems so familiar, doesn’t it? Except I was in your place and you were in mine.”

  He couldn’t help thinking, you’re wearin’ a lot more clothes than I was, darlin’, which made her blush and grin the wider. So there was nothing wrong with her telepathy, he observed, although she was keeping her own thoughts to herself. He half-expected to hear from the professor, who Logan assumed was monitoring his thoughts or Jean’s, waiting for just this very moment. Thus far, though, they had complete privacy.

  She swallowed, mouth dry, and he held out a glass of water for her to sip from its straw.

  “How long was I…?” she tried again.

  “Too flamin’ long,” he told her, more gruffly than he’d intended, not from anger, but because seeing her awake and all right made him suddenly admit to himself just how much he’d missed her.

  “You feeling okay, Jeannie?”

  She sat up with surprising ease and grace for someone who’d been (a) dead and (b) flat on her back in the hospital. Jean was still smiling, radiating more happiness than he’d ever seen from her. But then, he realized, he’d hardly ever seen her truly happy—save for a couple of instances when he’d caught her by surprise, just off guard enough that he got that special smile of hers, the one that came without any of the filters of duty and responsibility that Xavier had layered on her. He wondered if things had been any better with Cyclops.

  Logan had never felt this way; his heart was full to bursting with the brightest and best of emotions and yet, at the same time, on the verge of breaking. How could any moment seem so wonderful and potentially terrible, all at once?

  “Yes,” she told him. “I’m more than okay. I’m alive. For the first time in my life, I feel alive.”

  He glanced at the monitors, which were having major fits, but he didn’t have a clue whether that was good or bad.

  Jean began pulling off the sensor leads. Logan thought to suggest she wait but she gave him a look that said, Trust me. I’m the doctor here, bub, I know what I’m doing.

  She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, even more stunning than before. He couldn’t help staring.

  “Logan, you’re making me blush.” Logan liked that, and all it implied, and she seemed to as well.

  “You’re reading my thoughts?”

  “Can’t help it.”

  She took his face in her hands and pulled him close.

  “There’s nothing wrong with what you want, Logan. It’s what I’ve always wanted too.”

  Her lips brushed his, a laughing invitation that didn’t just send tingles through his body, it unleashed a lightning bolt that rocked him from his head to the tips of his toes. It was as though he’d been plugged into an emotional supercharger, every sense kicked into overdrive, all of them centered on Jean. The sight of her eyes, so close to his, the impossibly smooth touch of her skin, the scent of her hair, the sound of her voice, the very taste of her—all combined to fan his desire to white-hot incandescence.

  The last time they’d kissed—a stolen interlude beneath the fuselage of the Blackbird—he’d been the aggressor, trying to stake his claim to her heart before it was too late. But she’d made her commitment to Scott, much as either of them might wish differently. And he’d respected that.

  Now, by contrast, there was no holding back. She didn’t merely kiss him, she forged a connection between her mind and his. He was hard, she was soft; he was soft, she was hard—the lines of demarcation blurred and re-formed so that he lost track of what was real and what was imagined. Time stretched, expanded, turned back upon itself, enabling them to live a lifetime in an instant, and then go back and try it again. They grew old together, they walked hand in hand to the end of forever; they watched Creation end and used their passion to make something new.

  He couldn’t breathe, didn’t have to; couldn’t stop, didn’t want to. He beheld the world through her eyes and gasped to acknowledge a great and aching hollowness within, a sense of being incomplete, of possessing the illusion of sight while being tormented by the realization that you were actually, truly, blind. At the same time, she walked a lifetime in his boots, tears starting from her eyes at the discovery of truths and memories he was glad remained hidden. She saw the blood in his past and what it had cost him, the creature he had been and the man who’d grown to take his place.

  Before this moment, Logan had never known the true meaning and nature of love. He still wasn’t sure he had the answer. But what he fou
nd here—what he and Jean were sharing—was just as fundamental. It had changed his life by showing him possibilities he’d never dared imagine. It was intimacy.

  Unseen by Logan, just for a flash, Jean’s eyes flickered, and burned with a heat that had nothing to do with the wholly human passions that claimed their otherwise full attention.

  Logan sensed heat radiating through Jean’s body and into his, but chose not to notice, not to care as her telekinesis tore open his belt.

  Anyone walking in on them now…

  And he remembered what had spun past him through the air at Alkali, another belt buckle, forged in the shape of an X. The one Scott wore.

  “Jean,” he said, pulling away a little and finding it among the hardest things he’d ever done. “Wait!”

  “Why?” She wasn’t interested, acting more like him than he was. It would be so easy to give in, and he remembered the story of Lancelot and the Grail, the not-quite-perfect knight doomed to behold the sacred prize but never to claim it. Was Jean his Grail and his Guinevere?

  “Jeannie,” he protested, “this isn’t you!”

  “It is me.”

  He held her by the shoulders, finally able to put some distance between them, but caught in a fit of trembling as she stroked with telekinesis the parts of him he wouldn’t let her reach with her hands.

  “Stop it,” he warned.

  “Make me,” she challenged playfully.

  “Please.”

  She gave him a lopsided grin that was better than any caress, and he couldn’t help thinking, I should’ve found you first, and the wish had nothing to do with her relationship with Scott. The smile faded. She’d heard him, and understood.

  “You’ve been through hell,” he told her gently, “maybe you ought to take things easy.” He had another thought—she hadn’t yet said a word about Cyclops. “Charley said you might be different.”

  Her look darkened, and he no longer had to hold her back. The mood was broken.

  “He would know, wouldn’t he?” she said, and didn’t bother hiding her bitterness. “You think he’s not inside your head, too?” she challenged. “Look at you, Logan, he’s tamed you!”

  The words struck home, because he’d thought them himself from time to time. But he didn’t react.

  “Jean,” he asked instead, “where’s Scott?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “We traced the beacon on his bike to Alkali Lake. I found his glasses there.” He chose not to mention the belt buckle, or the weird physical manifestations they’d encountered, and considered that she might pluck them from his thoughts regardless.

  Still no response, so he called her name again, “Jean!”

  She looked towards him, eyes lost and filled with a mix of confusion and pain.

  He set Scott’s glasses down on the bed between them, and her gaze followed his down to look at them.

  “Where is he, darlin’?”

  “I…” she blinked, sniffed, shook her head, blinked again, as though waking from the deepest of sleeps, not comprehending why her eyes were filling with tears. “I’m sorry, Logan.” Her expression twisted with the realization that she had perhaps lost something supremely precious, but didn’t yet quite know precisely what. “Where am I?” she asked suddenly, catching him by surprise. She really meant it. She had no idea where she was.

  “You’re in the Mansion infirmary, Jean.” He took her by the hand, willing his strength into her slim frame, hoping that by taking it she’d be able to use him as an anchor against the chaos swirling inside her mind. Whatever else was going on in her world, she had to accept that he loved her. That had to be the absolute, the one constant she could depend on. Why that was so important, he hadn’t a clue, but he’d learned early to trust his instincts.

  “Listen to me, darlin’,” he went on gently, as though to a spooked filly. “You need to tell me what happened at Alkali Lake. To Scott.”

  She touched the glasses with the tips of thumb and forefinger.

  “Oh, God,” she moaned, and right then he knew for certain what had until now been just a suspicion. He’d never see Scott Summers again.

  He spared a quick glance away from her face as objects began to rattle around the periphery of the room.

  “Oh God, Logan!” This last was an outcry of desperation and terror, and he knew she had found herself facing a memory and a grief that she could not bear.

  The side effects on the room worsened accordingly. Screws spun from their holes and shot through the air, the fluid in the IV bags began to drip upwards, and Logan’s skin began to tingle the way it did on the eve of a wicked electrical storm. The smell of ozone filled the air.

  Once more, he took her by the shoulders.

  “Talk to me, Jean. Focus!”

  She was whispering, so softly he couldn’t make out the words. He read her lips as they moved, and didn’t want to.

  “Jean!” he cried again.

  “Kill me, Logan,” she said again, making sure he could hear, telling him with her voice and with her thoughts.

  He shook his head in absolute refusal.

  Only now, she took him by the shoulders, with a strength that matched his own, her voice building in power and resonance with every word, “Kill me—before I kill someone else! Please, Logan, I’m begging. You’re the only one who can. Kill me!”

  He looked into her eyes and saw the end, just as when they’d kissed. The end, the beginning, all that came between, as great and as terrible as imagination could make them. He beheld Creation in all its wonder and glory. He knew she was right—and found himself flawed enough, stubborn enough, human enough, to think he could deny it and find a way to win.

  “No,” he said, setting himself before her, in the flesh and in her thoughts, as that anchor. “Look at me, Jean. You’re inside my head, deeper than I can go, likely deeper than Charley.” He took the risk of mentioning Xavier’s name, but tempered it with the suggestion that she could do far more than he. “You can see where I’ve been. I’ve lost it, too, darlin’. But you can climb out of that abyss. We can help you, Jeannie!”

  The room began to calm.

  “You truly believe the professor can help, Logan?” she asked in a voice that held all the sadness that ever was. “That he can fix it, make things like they were?”

  “We can try.”

  She looked him square in the face. “I don’t want to fix it.”

  She hit him with her telekinesis, a shot to the chest containing the full force of a Category Five hurricane. Anyone else would have been pulped on contact, but Logan merely made a body-sized dent in the wall.

  “I can’t go back to the way I was. I won’t. I’m free now.”

  Jean looked at Logan sprawled unconscious on the floor, her face showing both longing and loss.

  Very softly, she left him some last words, using telepathy as well as speech because she wanted him to remember. “I thought you more than anyone would understand that, and love me enough to let me go.” The image that went with the thought was that of his claws.

  With a wave of the hand, she blew open the door and was gone without a backwards glance.

  Hank McCoy had a big, bold signature, a match in its way for that of John Hancock on the Declaration of Independence. The letter it closed was brief and to the point. Everything that needed to be said had been—face-to-face.

  The president stood behind his desk in the Oval Office. Hank stood opposite. It was an awkward moment. Neither had wanted to come to this juncture, yet now that they had arrived, there was a certain inexorable momentum.

  “I’m not happy about this, Hank.”

  “Neither am I, sir.”

  “You think resigning is going to make a difference?” A wave of the letter for emphasis. “That’s no way to influence policy.”

  “Due respect, sir, policy is being made without me. Mr. President, the decision to turn the Worthington-Rao cure into a weapon was made without me!”

  The president actually looked
surprised as Hank tossed a file on the desk, previously restrained anger taking him to the precipice of disrespect. The file contained photos of what was left of the convoy, including some of Mystique.

  “I know precisely what happened on that convoy. I do have some friends in the Pentagon.”

  “Hank, that was an isolated incident. You’ve got to understand, those mutants were a real threat.”

  “So you say. But who decides what constitutes a threat?”

  “For God’s sake, McCoy, they were convicted criminals!”

  “Jamie Madrox was a bank robber. Juggernaut’s crimes were all against property. Are these capital crimes? Are we at the point, sir, where—like in olden days—we cut off the hands of thieves and burn out others’ eyes? The 8th Amendment of the Constitution prohibits ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ I submit, sir, that stripping a mutant—permanently—of his or her abilities falls wholly under that definition. And that’s just for starters.

  “Altering a person’s genetic code without their consent is the ultimate illegal search and seizure, not to mention a violation of fundamental privacy.”

  “We do much the same with sexual predators, in terms of drug therapy and incarceration.”

  “We don’t castrate them, sir. Nothing is permanent. This process is. My God, David, have you even begun to consider the slippery slope you’re on?”

  The president nodded, his eyes gone hard.

  “I have, Henry. Long and hard. And I also worry how democracy—that very Constitution and the Republic I swore in my oath of office to defend, ‘so help me God’—survives when one lone man can move cities with his mind.”

  “Honorable and well-meaning as you are, sir, what about the next man? Suppose he uses your rationale to strip mutants of more rights?”

  “That’s why I ask you to reconsider your resignation. I need you by my side, Hank, to be that voice of reason. Your country needs you.”