The tears that ran down Jean’s cheeks and dampened her yellow
face mask were genuine as she cried, “No, no! That can’t be the end— it can’t!” And the words were not lies, though the other X-Men probably took a much different meaning from them. The careful plan that she, the Professor, and the Changeling had worked out had not taken the latter’s death into account as a possibility.
“It won’t be, Jean,” Hank said, tears also staining his mask, “as the Professor himself recognized. We must now carry on, and make a new beginning.”
Hank McCoy was right, of course. He usually was. She squeezed her teammate’s oversized hand and smiled.
Then she turned to the team leader—and also the man she loved, though she’d never dared to say so. “Scott, if it’s okay, I’d—I’d like to be the one to go through the Professor’s things and pack them up.”
“Of course, Jean,” Scott said stoically. “You knew him longer than any of us.”
She couldn’t read his face—that was nigh impossible at the best of times, especially with the ruby quartz glasses that completely covered his eyes—but she didn’t need to. She could feel his grief and pain. And she could feel that he was trying desperately to shut those feelings out, to carry 011 as leader of the X-Men and not allow the grief to cripple him—especially with Magneto on the loose again. So having someone else do the onerous task of sorting through Xavier’s effects would be fine with the X-Men’s field leader.
Besides which, Scott spoke the truth. Unlike the boys, who were recruited to the X-Men out of high school, Jean first met Charles Xavier when she was ten years old. Her best friend Annie Richardson had been run over by a car, and Jean had felt Annie die in her mind. The Professor had brought her out of the ensuing depression telepathi-cally and also closed off her psionic abilities until she was ready to deal with them.
That time had come just before Xavier had been replaced by the Changeling.
Removing her mask, she went upstairs to the Professor’s study.
His papers and computer files were very well organized. Anything personal, she put in a separate pile, to be placed in storage—perhaps in the attic. The school paperwork would also have to be dealt with, though Jean had no idea by whom.
As she went through a pile of papers, files, and books, she realized that she probably needed to alert the school’s lawyer, Michael Ramsey, about the situation. Or maybe, she thought, / can just not say anything. Then she chastised herself. Right, Jean, just hope Mr. Ramsey doesn ’t notice that his client is dead until he “comes back” from the dead in a few months. That’ll work.
Then there was the domestic staff. All the paperwork related to the running of the school that she didn’t even pretend to understand. Who was going to deal with all that? Xavier’s only family was a half brother who despised him. Perhaps Mr. Ramsey could deal with it, but how could she explain the situation to him?
Clenching her fist, she resisted an urge to pound on the desk. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. The plan was that the Changeling would pretend to be Xavier for a few months, then Xavier would resurface from the bunker, they’d stop the Z’Nox, and the Changeling would go on with his life, having done something to help the world that he, as a member of Factor Three, had almost destroyed. When Jean, the Professor, and the Changeling had discussed and planned this, it had all seemed so sensible. And during those first weeks, it went very well.
But then the shapechanger had to go and get himself killed. And Xavier was now in the bunker, completely unreachable, leaving Jean alone. The Professor had made it clear that, until he was ready, he could not leave the* bunker. To emphasize the point, he’d coded the lock so that it could only be opened from the inside. Even if she wanted to, Jean could not reach Xavier until he chose to come out.
So she had to maintain the charade and pretend that Charles Xavier was dead.
Suddenly, she felt less like the mature woman, the valued teammate, the person in whom the Professor had placed his trust, and a lot more like the frightened eighteen-year-old girl she really was.
She didn’t know what to do, and the one man who could help her couldn’t be reached.
At that moment, she hated the Changeling. Hated him for putting her in this position. Hated him for dying when she needed him to be alive.
Maybe I should just tell the boys everything. They’ll understand.
Maybe we can break into the bunker and get the Professor out. Bobby could freeze the lock, or maybe Scott could blast it down, or.. .
Suddenly, she broke into tears. I can’t handle this. She didn’t care that the Professor had been explicit in his instructions. She didn’t care that he’d locked the bunker. She didn’t care about how important it was that he be prepared for the Z’Nox’s eventual arrival.
She just wanted the Professor back to make it all better.
After a minute, she composed herself. She was almost done going through the pile. She would finish what she started, then go tell Scott and the others the truth. They deserved that. The world could go to hell, for all she cared. She would not carry this burden alone.
The last item in the pile was a book that Jean recognized as the Professor’s journal.
She opened it to the back. Although she had no intention of reading it, she was curious as to when he last put in an entry.
To her surprise, the last entry was dated only five days previous— the morning of the day the Changeling died. Flipping through the pages, she realized that he had maintained the journal. His skills as a forger, she realized, were as good as he had boasted weeks earlier. Skimming through it, Jean could not tell where the Professor’s handwriting ended and the Changeling’s began.
Closing the journal, she placed it in the box she’d labeled personal. Then she used her telekinesis to lift some of the administrative files into the air, and tried to open one of the file cabinet drawers the same way. But the drawer wouldn’t budge. At first Jean thought it was because she was splitting her concentration between the drawer and the files, but she soon realized that the drawer was physically stuck.
Placing the files back on the desk, she concentrated harder on the drawer. She mentally “felt” something physically blocking the tracks. Gently removing the object, she then took the drawer all the way out, and moved the files into it.
Then she pulled out the item itself: it was a small book. The cover had a lovely marble paper design, but no text. After replacing the drawer, she opened the book. The cream-colored pages had text written in very neat handwriting with what seemed to be a simple ballpoint pen. Another journal of the Professor’s? she wondered. But no, the handwriting was different.
She read the first page:
I’ve had many names in my life: Charles Sage, Werner Reiman, Jack Bolton, John Askegren, Francisco Zerrilli, Martina Johanssen—and, most recently, Charles Xavier.
But there’s a difference with that last one. The guy who was born with it is still using it. He asked me to take his place, to become him while he went off to do something else.
Part of being Charles Xavier is to keep a journal. Keeping his has made me decide to keep one of my own. I don’t have long for this world (the doctor said the cancer would take me in six to nine months) so I figured I should leave some kind of legacy. Especially since, if everything goes the way it's supposed to, only two people are going to know what I did at the end: Xavier himself, and Jean Grey. Hell, only they and the X-Men and a few others are even going to know who I am.
So I figure Xavier or Grey will someday read this journal, and then people will know just who this guy was.
Jean felt her jaw fall open. He had cancer. He only had a few months to live. That explained why the Changeling had kept asking Xavier, “You won’t be down for more than six months, right?” The Professor had assured him that he wouldn’t.
It also explained something that hadn’t made any sense to Jean at the time. As he lay dying in Warren’s arms, the Changeling had said that he was dyin
g “of an illness even I could not cure.” At the time, Scott had thought that was why “the Professor” had been pushing the X-Men so hard, because he needed to get the training in before he died. In fact, the Changeling was simply following Xavier’s instructions to work the X-Men as hard as possible in preparation for the Z’Nox invasion. Instead, the Changeling let them believe that Xavier was dying in any case.
Perhaps it was to take the sting out of his death at the hands of Grotesk—the knowledge that he would have died here long—or perhaps it was simply so someone would know that he was dying of cancer. Jean would never be sure. She had closed her mind off from the Changeling’s when he died. She only recently started using her telepathic powers; she didn’t think she could handle feeling someone die in her head again.
I shouldn’t read this, she thought. It’s his private diary. Besides, I have to go tell the boys the truth.
But he’d intended it to be found after he died. Just because that death happened several months ahead of schedule didn’t change the intent.
And suddenly, she was consumed with a great desire to put off telling her teammates the truth. Not the day of the funeral, she rationalized. Give it a day or two.
She sat down in one of the the leather guest chairs—the wheelchair-bound Xavier had never placed a chair behind the desk itself, of course—and turned to the second page.
August 19,11:45 p.m.
It’s pretty late. Most of the X-Men have gone to bed, exhausted after the battle with the Frankenstein monster. And Xavier has locked himself in his bunker.
For the last week or two, Xavier and I have both been acting as the X-Men’s mentor. Fie was the one who found out that the Frankenstein monster was real (which threw me for a loop, I don’t mind saying). I was the one who told the X-Men about the mission initially, but he was the one who stopped the monster and wiped that boat crew’s memory of the incident. This was his way of easing the transition, having each of us play the role of Xavier alternately. It seems to have worked, and now he’s gone down in his bunker.
Leaving me with the X-Men.
Since I didn’t go on the mission to stop the Frankenstein android, I’m not as exhausted as the kids are. So I figured I’d start this journal for real.
“Begin at the beginning,” the Queen of Hearts said in Alice in Wonderland, and that’s probably where it makes the most sense,
For me, the beginning was St. Julian’s Orphanage for Boys in Central City, California, or, as I like to call it, hell. My first memory is getting beaten up by Johnny Brill, one of the older boys. So are most of the other memories. I was a scrawny, sickly, ugly little kid. I didn’t have a real name. The nuns had me listed as Charles Sage, but they made that name up. When I was older, I broke into St. Julian’s records, and found out that I’d been left at the orphanage as an infant, with a note saying, and I quote, “Tak kare of the boy.” All I know about my parents is that they didn’t want me, and they couldn’t spell.
But that came later. After puberty. Before that, I was just Johnny’s designated victim.
That changed one night when I was fourteen, i had a weird dream, then i woke up. I went into the bathroom, and some tall, muscular kid with a good-looking face stared back at me in the mirror. Took me a few minutes to realize it was me.
Took me half a day to realize I could change myself back.
But I didn't. To this day, I’ve never gone back to looking like what I looked like before. Why should I? The scrawny, ugly, sickly kid that the nuns called Charles Sage was a miserable little twerp whose main purpose in life was to be Johnny Brill’s punching bag. I didn’t need to be him anymore.
The nuns didn’t recognize me, asstimed i was a trespasser, and threw me out.
At first, I thought everything would be great. Freedom, away from Johnny and the nuns!
What I forgot is that St. Julian's, whatever its flaws (and believe me, it had plenty) also fed me three squares a day and put a roof over my head. I was in Southern California, so sleeping outside wasn’t as much of a chore as it might’ve been. But I was still a fourteen-year-old kid with the clothes on my back and not a hell of a lot else.
I noticed the beggars on the street. I started watching them, and realized the ones that looked crummy but not really awful were the ones who did the best. So I changed to look like one of those and panhandled for a few days. That at least got me enough to buy some lousy food.
Then I went back to St. Julian’s. I knew my way around the place (years of hiding from bullies had taught me all the hidey-holes, and I knew the security routine) so breaking in proved pretty easy. That was when I read my file.
And then I went after Johnny.
And I beat the holy crap out of him.
It was the greatest moment of my life up to that point.
Pathetic. All I’d lived for was to do to Johnny what he’d been doing to me for ten years. But when I was done, I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t even know who or what to be. All I'd known was the orphanage.
That, and panhandling. So I went back onto the street and joined the evergrowing ranks of the homeless.
Then Werner Reiman came along. Werner was a retired guy who apparently was bored, so he'd wander out and check out the homeless. He didn’t want to give them money, he just wanted to lecture them on how they should make something of their lives like he did. “Worked at Consolidated for forty-seven years. Took a job right out of high school, retired at sixty-five, Made me a nice little nest egg. Never heard me beggin' for no handout, nosireebob.” For the better part of a week, I heard him use this spiel on various homeless guys.
When he tried it on me, I told him to go away. It was easy for him to say, “Get a job.” He had a name. He had an identity. All I had was a sickly kid named Charles Sage that I swore never to be again. That left me with nothing.
Undaunted, Werner went to bother the colonel.
He wasn’t really a colonel, of course, but he did serve in the Army. I got a look at his dog tags once when he was sleeping—he'd been a corporal. What war he served in changed depending on the time of day, and he had so much hair on his head and face that you couldn’t tell what his age was.
Nobody messed with the colonel for two reasons. One was that he carried a pistol. The other was that he was as nutty as a fruitcake.
But nobody told Werner Reiman either of these things. So old Werner was pretty surprised when the colonel shot him.
Realizing what he'd done, the colonel ran off. So did the other local homeless guys.
i didn’t. What I was missing was a name, an identity. Werner Reiman had both, but he wasn’t going to need them much longer.
As the life bled out of Werner, I removed his clothes. I studied his face and his skin tone, looked for birthmarks, everything. It didn't take long, since I have a photographic memory. Or, at least, I have since the day I discovered my powers. I’m not sure now if it’s a part of my mutant abilities, or if I just don’t want to remember the days before I stopped being Charles Sage. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. One look up and down Werner Reiman’s body was enough for me to remember every detail of it.
Then I became him. I now had his face, his ID, his wallet, his credit cards, his car keys, and his “nice little nest egg.” I didn’t have his fingerprints—I can’t manage that—but that never turned out to be an issue.
Werner Reiman was my ticket off the street.
Getting tired. Going to get some sleep. I’m surprised at how good it feels to get all this down. Been a while since I even thought about life in Centra! City—so much has happened since then.
I’ll probably do more tomorrow.
August 20, 7:30 p.m.
Pretty routine day today. Ran the X-Men through a training session, then through a more traditional day in the classroom. Good thing Xavier prepared detailed lesson plans, since teaching is a bit out of my league. I had thought “Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters” was just a front, but this place really is a school, and these five kids
are gifted. Especially McCoy, if he has any brains (and he’s got plenty), he’ll get out of the hero racket and become a scientist or something. He’s got the taient.
Anyhow, I just updated Xavier’s journal, and I figured I’d do it for mine, also. I left off at Werner Reiman yesterday.
Werner’s driver's license had his address, so I went there, changed into less bloody clothes, and then started to become Werner.
The hardest part at first was duplicating his handwriting. After all, having his credit cards wouldn’t do any good if i couldn’t sign his name. Though the nuns always gave me bad penmanship marks, I was always good at copying things. Whenever they’d given us tracing paper and a drawing and told us to reproduce it on the paper, i had never bothered putting the tracing paper on the picture. I just looked at it and copied it over, and I always did better than the other kids. (The other kids, goaded by Johnny, usually used that as another excuse to beat me up, of course.)
So it didn’t take long to hone my talent for forgery.
I always wondered about that. Was the affinity for forgery a by-product of the fact that I was a shapechanger? Did my ability to copy things as a little kid have some kind of effect on what my mutant power would be? Or was it part of the telepathic talent I didn't even know I had until Xavier, Grey, and I concocted this plan? I wondered the same thing about being eidetic, for that matter.
Yeah, I know, it’s all philosophical and you can’t answer it, but hell, it’s my journal. If you can’t be philosophical in your own journal, where can you be?
Anyway, it took a couple of months, but I finally got Werner’s handwriting down.
Luckily, Werner was single, retired, and weird. He had a couple of relatives, but they didn’t call that often, and I blew them off. They told me I was acting immature, which in retrospect was absolutely true. I mean, I was a fourteen-year-old passing myself off as sixty-five. Werner was cranky. I was whiny. People didn’t notice the difference.
So now I had some money, a home, an identity.
Legends Page 3
