X-Men: The Last Stand (30 page)

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 settled 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.

It was the kind of madcap, “dare ya” night that found Ororo and Jean staring across a table at each other, going shot for shot with the owner’s private stock of tequila, while the guys kept score and debated who’d get to carry whom home.

Ororo had reached out an elegant hand, taking gentle hold of one of Jean’s and drawing it to the center of the table, cupping it palm upwards. Jean shivered ever so slightly as a swirl of intensely icy air passed around her neck and dived towards that upheld hand, and then she had felt a decidedly warmer zephyr race around the other side of her, like the caress of someone’s breath.

The two streamers of air had collided, intertwined, fought for dominance, and Jean blinked with surprise at an actinic flash, so sudden she had no chance to react, so intense it scattered spots all across her vision. That same instant, she had felt as much as heard an equally intense but wholly contained boom of thunder.

Clouds had then begun to form over the table, thin streaks that quickly merged and grew into big-bellied cumuli and from there into the anvil-topped monsters of cumulonimbus, creating a pillar of force and energy that reached barely a foot above Ororo’s hand. Outside, with the vastness of the atmosphere to play with, this thundercloud would have easily topped forty thousand feet. Jean had smelled and tasted ozone, and the static electricity generated by the tiny cloud had raised the hairs all the way up her extended arm. Another bolt of lightning had followed, from deep within the cloud, joined by a minor drumroll of thunder that went wholly unnoticed against the backdrop of conversation and the maxed-out jukebox by all save the four mutants.

Then, she had giggled and almost jumped as the first raindrop struck her palm.

The sensation of the cool water had been a delight against her skin, which felt exceptionally hot, and strangely separated from the rest of her, as if she were running an impossible fever. Jean had deepened the cup of her fingers to form a bowl, watched it fill, turned her hand over to let the rain work its wonders on the other side.

The guys had grinned ear to ear, but Ororo wasn’t so thrilled, as not a drop of water fell—either from the back of Jean’s hand or the inverted palm. The simple exercise would have been to form a telekinetic barrier—a bowl of energy. But Jean was in a mood to show off, so she’d tried the much harder route of binding the molecular structure of the water more tightly together, creating such surface tension that it had behaved more like a solid than a liquid, but without crystallizing into ice. Moreover, she’d locked it into place against her own flesh.

Fascinated, Jean had leaned a little closer, and without realizing what was happening her focus sharpened to pinpoint intensity so that she was presented with a view of a single, solitary raindrop, suspended in midair by her telekinesis, partway between the cloud and her hand.

As she had bored in on the drop that caught her attention, it quickly separated into component molecules, to atoms of hydrogen and oxygen and from there to agglomerations of charms and quarks, muons and gluons. This was always more Hank’s side of the street than hers, and without conscious awareness she had plucked from him the information she needed to give names to what she beheld and provide a clue to the next destination on her journey.

Time then lost meaning for her, perception stretching it like taffy as long as she needed. The others had seen her eager and radiant smile, her sparkling eyes, the tilt of her head as she found herself lost in wonderment, encompassing perhaps a fraction of a moment of elapsed objective time. By contrast, Jean could have sworn she was engrossed for hours.