Magneto tried to rise but the weight of the planet seemed to have settled on him, a weight that no application of muscle or mutant might was able to dislodge.
Logan, with his enhanced senses, heard more than the others.
“That’s it,” he said, pausing as Ororo called his name.
“Logan, wait for me!”
With that, Juggernaut lowered his helmeted head and charged.
Echoing the tactics they’d used in the Danger Room, Logan and Storm split apart at once.
With a quick glance backwards to ensure the coast was clear, Logan met the onrushing man-mountain head on…
…and just as quickly found himself at the bottom of a shallow trench gouged all the way across the street, through the sidewalk, and partially into the neighbor’s front yard.
Figuring the second hit would be even more fun than the first, Juggernaut kept on coming, faster than before.
Storm, by contrast, went airborne, spinning herself out of the reach of the others left guarding the door. She held herself still in the heart of her vortex, while intensifying the surrounding winds to the point where she generated a localized but formidable tornado. Among mutants left outside, Kid Omega and Radian apparently didn’t know which way to turn as the funnel descended on them, striking faster and more accurately than a cobra. Callisto was far quicker off the mark, ducking inside the house the moment Storm went airborne.
The winds slammed the two boys into each other like they were tackle dummies, keeping them so disoriented that they never noticed Ororo dropping down to finish the job with a succession of powerful, accurate blows.
Logan isn’t the only X-Man who knows how to fight, she thought.
Unfortunately, she didn’t have much time to contemplate this, as Callisto met Storm with a fist to the head as the X-Man followed her inside.
At the rear of the house, Xavier never slackened in his determination to reach his first and most beloved pupil, even as Jean pummeled him mercilessly.
“Jean,” he demanded, putting his heart and soul into the struggle, “let—me—in!”
She stood over him, refusing to yield, and he knew then that things had gone too far. Neither of them would surrender. There could only be defeat.
Juggernaut hit Logan again, punching him into the neighbor’s house, then through the house, pretty much demolishing it in the process. He hammered Logan up through the ceiling…
…only Logan didn’t come right back down again. Not where Juggernaut expected him to, anyway.
Instead, Logan clawed himself a different hole behind his adversary, slashing at some vital joists as he did, to drop as much of the structure as was left on Juggernaut’s head. That wouldn’t hold the big guy long, he knew. In fact, he was counting on it. He was also counting on making Juggernaut really mad. Logan figured he had maybe five seconds, tops, before Juggernaut exploded out of there, and he used them to take off back the way he came, towards the Grey house, to be in a position to meet him.
Jean’s eyes glowed with fire. Her hair stirred languidly, as though she were underwater, moved by currents of energy drawn from places Xavier couldn’t imagine, but wished with his whole heart that Jean would share. He knew the alarms had sounded back at the Mansion. A mutant manifestation of this magnitude was one of the things he’d designed Cerebro to detect, but without him there to guide the system, all it would do was monitor the event. He assumed Kitty would take charge of the analysis, although back in the day that would have been Hank McCoy’s job. Jean was clearly shredding the boundaries between states of reality and possibly even dimensions, and Kitty’s phasing power gave her exceptional insight into what happened on a quantum level under such circumstances. Whatever occurred, he knew they would learn from this encounter.
This time, in the moment before impact, Logan leapt straight up in a stunt Nightcrawler had taught him, way more circus than martial arts, trusting to speed and agility—which he had in far more measure than most folks gave him credit for—to compensate for Juggernaut’s unmatchable power. He used the big guy’s helmet as a pivot, twisting in midair so that he landed right behind his adversary. Then, while Juggernaut was still a prisoner of his own forward momentum, Logan delivered a kick in the ass that sent him through the front wall of the Grey house like an accelerating Mack truck.
He came in right behind, claws bared, ready for the empirical test to see if Juggernaut’s armor, and his power, was any defense against six blades of unbreakable adamantium, taking a moment to register Storm and Callisto messing it up pretty good as ’Ro used a succession of thunder microbursts like punches to bust up the face and body of the other woman.
He landed on Juggernaut’s back, poised to strike the killing blow.
Xavier and Jean had long since passed the point of manipulating tangible objects. There were no more walls to see for these two. There was no point in hurling books when the raw energies being unleashed between them slashed across the molecular bonds that gave objects their shape and definition, reducing them in a twinkling to their component elements.
He understood why the advantage was hers. She was fueled by passion, he by intellect. Swept away by the titanic rush of these newly manifested abilities, Jean cared nothing for the consequences, whereas for Xavier those consequences mattered significantly. He didn’t want to die, of course, although by now he’d come to acknowledge the very real possibility—but even more, he wanted to find a way to save her. He was a teacher and a healer, and to take any lesser path was an abomination.
He’d tried reaching her with her memories, applying to her consciousness the many talks they’d had on ethics and responsibility, reminding her as strongly as he was able that this dream was as much hers as his. That he may be the mind behind the X-Men, but she was very much their heart. Suddenly it came to him, out of nowhere really—one of those unlikely connections that land as a complete surprise yet seem perfectly obvious once they’re in place—that the soul of the team, its moral anchor, was none other than Logan.
He might as well have been trying to stop King Kong with spitballs.
Jean in turn savaged the vaults of his mind for all his failures and regrets. She replayed for him the final breakup with Moira that had sent him off to war. He relived those many, many arguments with Erik Lensherr as their dreams diverged and turned them into strangers. He saw once more Jason Stryker as a boy and then faced him as a man, letting rage take him just for that moment—he couldn’t save him either time.
But standing beside each of those images meant to debilitate him, to tear him down and weaken his resolve, were the faces and figures of his successes. A memory of Jean and Hank playing one-on-one basketball, where his awesome dexterity more than made up for her nascent telekinesis. Of Ororo, who’d lived and fought and prospered in the slums of Cairo and Nairobi, and survived the wild lands in between. Two women who couldn’t have been more different in heritage and temperament, yet who quickly became inseparable, closer than sisters. Of Scott, who’d come to Xavier lost and alone, but had found the woman he loved.
Xavier’s skin rippled then, much as Scott’s had. This, he had always known, would be the ultimate danger in confronting Jean. Fighting a telepath was a battle of the mind, simply a matter of overcoming the other psi’s defenses. Battling a pure telekinetic was much like any other head-blind adversary; for all their formidable physical prowess, switch off the brain and the fight was over. Jean, though, could come at an opponent from both directions, a mental attack and a physical.
With telekinesis she drew Xavier from his chair…
…and with him, dragged the entire building from its foundations.
Energy stampeded through the house, and all the combatants in the living room—Logan, Juggernaut, Storm and Callisto—found themselves pinned to the ceiling as inescapably as Magneto was to the kitchen floor.
By this time, however, Logan was as irrational as the woman he loved, fully in the grips of a berserker rage that would not be denied. He didn’t try to
pluck himself free, but went sideways instead, twisting so that he lay mostly on his belly and then using his claws like climbing spikes to drag his body along.
Xavier sensed Logan’s presence and smiled. It was no accident that he alone was free to move.
Jean was now composed entirely of light, a star made of flesh, so far beyond human and earthly terms of beauty that Charles had no words to describe her. Not even concepts. She simply…was. And through her, he beheld the window to all that was and is, and the best of all that might be. He saw in her a reflection of himself, an embodiment of all hope and dreams.
And yet…
And yet…
The very humanity that made all these things possible held in its other hand the darker demons of human nature. Heights were defined by the depths over which they towered; the greater the summit, the more terrible the fall.
Xavier bared his teeth, thankful for the aspect of his power that allowed him to mute his perceptions of pain. The outer sheath of his skin was being flayed on a molecular level and he didn’t want to discover how much that hurt.
He caught a sense of Magneto in the kitchen, staring with equal parts horror and fascination. His old friend was completely entranced. He would take from this only what was useful, ignoring the rest, and that would likely be his undoing. Xavier spared a prayer that Erik wouldn’t also take the world with him.
He didn’t resist anymore. Charles felt an eerie, almost welcome, calm, and knew that he was shining with light too, by this point—although nowhere near as brilliant as Jean. He also knew that as energy, he could neither be created nor destroyed—although his state might well have changed beyond all recognition.
Death would not be pleased with him, this day. He meant to spit in the Reaper’s eye.
Because Life—Life would find in him a champion worthy of the name. He was beaten, yes, that was looking altogether likely. But he’d never surrender. And out of that determination and defiance would come the chance, the hope, of ultimate victory. He smiled.
Then he heard Logan’s hoarse cry, from very close. He’d done better than Xavier had expected.
Jean ignored Logan. She had eyes only for her teacher.
And he met that glare, continuing to smile, daring her to do her worst.
She took the challenge, as he knew she would.
Xavier had time to voice a single prayer: “Don’t let it…control…you.”
And with those words, he cast forth into the heart of her the very best of himself, only a fraction of an unmeasurable pulse of time before she struck what remained of his body with such force that it instantly shattered into less than its component atoms.
A shock wave erupted from the study with cataclysmic effect. In the kitchen, horrified, Magneto threw up his hands to shield his face, coating himself in such an array of magnetic force that he warped compasses for a thousand miles, aware as he did so that if Jean chose to focus on him as she had on Xavier, there’d be just as little he could do to save himself.
The walls of the study bulged and unraveled, molecules of wood unzipping as smoothly as carpet fiber. A solid battering ram of air struck the other four mutants and cast them each in different directions, dumping them throughout the neighborhood, to the astonishment of some of the neighbors, who—because events had happened so unimaginably fast—were only now coming to realize that the area was being torn apart.
The remainder of the Grey house hung suspended for the better part of a minute, and then crashed down, collapsing in upon itself, until all that remained was a pile of rubble and a single, slim, exhausted young woman with haunted eyes and hair the color of fresh-spilled blood.
Of Charles Xavier, there was nothing left but memories.
Out of the chaos rose Magneto, released at last from where he’d been trapped in the kitchen. He spared a small glance at the twisted ruin of Xavier’s wheelchair, and saw that it was the focus of Jean’s gaze too. She must have known what she’d just done, but was in too much shock for the events to have any true meaning. It was as if it hadn’t really happened to her, it was just something she’d watched on the news.
He’d felt much the same, that first day at the Auschwitz crematoria, still more boy than man, but strong enough to be assigned as a Sonderkommando, to cart the bodies from the gas chambers to the furnaces, to search them for valuables along the way and chip out their gold teeth, and then search the ashes afterwards, just to make sure. If he’d acknowledged the horror of what he’d done, he’d have plunged himself into the flames rather than face another day. He had watched another boy do precisely that, and another still hurl himself on the guards so he could be beaten to death. He’d found a way to survive.
Now he would try to help Jean do the same. And together, they would banish all the nightmares from their past, the demons of memory who stalked them still, and build a future for their people of peace and prosperity.
That was something Charles had never given him credit for—that he had dreams too. Perhaps, by achieving them, they could do honor to his friend, and to all those who had died before.
“Jean,” he said, laying a gentle arm around her shoulder. She was trembling, unable to speak, likely not even fully aware of who he was.
“Come with me.”
And he led her out the back…
…just as Logan bulled his way into the rubble standing out front, with Storm right behind, all thoughts of the mutants they’d been fighting cast aside, their sole concern for their mentor and their friend.
Logan was able to make it to what remained of the study on sheer adrenaline. The minute he crossed the threshold, his body called it quits and he collapsed to his knees. Until he recovered, and he knew that would be a while, he wasn’t going any farther. He tagged Jean’s scent mixed with Magneto’s and told Ororo so, but there was no point in following. Not after his eyes found the wheelchair. The scent combined with the flashes of memory of the things he’d seen while dragging himself across the ceiling confirmed what had happened here.
Charles Xavier was dead.
Logan threw back his head and roared, a cry that echoed out across the nearby houses and raised the hackles on the necks of all who heard it—even Magneto, ushering Jean into his vehicle. Jean blinked a couple of times, as though trying to find her way back to herself, her mouth starting to form the shape of his name, so that her next exhaled breath might say it aloud and restore some order to her world.
But she caught her breath instead, and sagged into the remains of the furniture behind her.
Charles Xavier was dead and a terror walked the world.
It was a glorious day, with only a bare scattering of clouds to gentle the sun with occasional moments of shade.
One and all, though, the students thought it should be raining. Something torrential, biblical even, would be far more appropriate to how they felt.
This was the private ceremony for what Charles Xavier considered his true family, the students he had gathered and mentored over the decades, all of whom—regardless of age—were feeling more than a little bereft, like ships that had lost their moorings.
There’d been the equivalent of a town meeting. Xavier had left some instructions in his will, but the faculty felt it would be best to give the students their own voice on how to proceed. Charles had wanted to rest on the grounds, among those he loved the best. The only question that had remained was where.
The decision was made to establish a memorial in the garden, because that was always where he taught the hardest cases who came to him. He would take the offending parties and set them to work doing what was difficult for him—caring for his roses. And because he was never one to let pass such an opportunity, those sessions turned into seminars of extraordinary variety and depth. A course of instruction on how to properly transfer a plant evolved quite naturally into a discussion on the nature of structure and balance, and how natural selection was affected by human engineering, which in turn led to philosophy and a measure of history. And since he’
d never let anyone get away with just spouting a position—oh no, they’d had to buttress it with citations going back, invariably, to the dawn of writing—that would often lead to a course in Latin or Greek or who knows what else. The deeper into this seemingly makeshift curriculum one went, the harder one wanted to work. A lesson learned, a life saved, roots put down—and not just for the rose.
He had an infectious love of learning, and a respect for knowledge that inspired the same in those around him.
Losing that, for these people, was like stealing the sun from their sky.
There were two stones, the greater cenotaph as tall as Xavier himself, emblazoned with a bas-relief of his face in profile, along with his name and the words father * mentor * teacher. Beside it was a second pillar, slightly smaller, bearing Scott’s name.
The air was very still—Ororo had seen to that—yet the temperature was quite comfortable. Each breath brought them the rich and varied fragrances of the garden, and their ears were touched from time to time by the buzz of honeybees and the occasional trill of birdsong from the surrounding trees. Farther off in the distance could be heard the keen of a hawk, calling for its mate.
Only two were painfully conspicuous in their absence: Jean Grey and Logan. Neither he nor Ororo had spoken of the events at the Grey household beyond the fact that the professor had been lost during a confrontation with Magneto, and at the moment they were content to let the blame fall entirely on him. But Jean’s manifestation of power had sent ripples through the aether that were felt by every student in the school with even a smidgen of psychic awareness. Ororo had to admit, when talking about it alone with Hank, that Jean’s actions had likely been sensed by damn near every psi on the planet! In a school full of active, inquiring minds, encouraged to think outside the box, it wasn’t long before the kids began putting together the pieces and drawing disturbingly accurate conclusions. So, now, they weren’t just shaken by the loss of the man who’d recruited every one of them, who’d been their guiding light as they’d explored this strange new world of their powers; they also had to deal with the inescapable fact that one of their own—perhaps the most powerful of them, as well as the member of the staff who was second only to Xavier himself as a nurturing parental figure—had gone rogue.
X-Men(tm) The Last Stand Page 13
