X Men Fic
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Title: The Last of the Jedi
Rating: PG
Pairings: Charles/Erik
Summary: What would you do if someone told you that you were special, that you needed to come learn how to use your unique talents? If you were Jean Grey, 11 years old in the summer of 1977, Star Wars would give you something to think about when the Jedi come to you.
This story belongs in the same continuity as Smoking on the Bus and Burn All the Letters, but you don't need to have read them first.
The Last of the Jedi
For Squooie, who can't remember why, for Bobby, who can, and for my father, who gave me The Last of the Wine when I was 11 and a half.
Jean saw Star Wars with her best friend, Annie, on June 12 for Jean’s eleventh birthday. For the next four weeks it was all they talked about. Annie thought it would be cool to be Princess Leia, but Jean was sure that Luke Skywalker was the coolest.
On July 14 they were on their way home from playing miniature golf when they were hit by an eighteen year old who had been doing shots of tequila. Annie was dead at the scene. Her mom died in surgery two hours later.
Jean had been in the back seat with her seatbelt on. She was in a coma for twelve days, and woke up in the intensive care unit on July 26th, while her grandmother sat beside her bed and read The Secret Garden out loud. Later, her parents said she had been lucid when the paramedics had arrived, begging them to save Annie and saying she wasn’t very far away, it wasn’t too late. Jean didn’t remember anything about that or about the accident. She never did.
The doctor said that was common with head injuries, and that she was a very lucky little girl. She didn’t feel so lucky, with stiches down the side of her head and one leg in traction. But she was a lot luckier than Annie.
Jean came home from the hospital on August 30. School had started the week before. It was hard changing classes, especially to the upstairs classrooms, since she was still on crutches. She wouldn’t get the cast off until October 4. She circled the day on her calendar in her room, the one with the pictures of horses. There was a Morgan horse with a pumpkin for the October picture. Annie had given her the calendar last Christmas.
Everything was strange and hard. People whispered about her at school - the strange red haired girl on crutches whose best friend died. Her dad was quiet and gave her everything she wanted. Her mom avoided her. Her grandmother had to go back to Orlando because she was teaching this fall.
Then weird stuff started happening. Shannon Thorpe was making fun of Jean when her locker door swing open and hit her in the nose so hard that she had a nosebleed.
David fell down the stairs after he knocked her books out of her hand on the landing, knowing she couldn’t pick them up on crutches.
Her mom’s alarm clock went crazy and started going off in the middle of the night. She got a new one and it did the same thing.
Jean and Annie had planned to go as Luke and Leia for Halloween. Jean didn’t go out at all. Her cast was off, but she had a brace that she was supposed to wear for another eight weeks. She didn’t want to go.
Just after midnight they all woke up when something happened in the kitchen. All the cabinet doors flew open and all the dishes and glasses broke, all of them, except for the ones in the dishwasher and Jean’s Star Wars glasses from Burger King. Her dad thought it was a prank, but the back door was locked and had never been opened. Her mom didn’t think it was a prank. She had rushed in the kitchen fast enough to see her wedding china flying off the shelves by themselves and smashing against the wall.
Jean saw the way they looked. Her parents were afraid. Afraid of her, some part of her mind said.
The next day Jean came down from her room to find someone she didn’t know talking to her mother in the ruined kitchen. He was wearing a priest's collar, but he wasn’t their regular parish priest, Father Joseph. Father Joseph was very short and fat, and he’d been a priest since her mom was a little girl.
“Jean, this is Father Michael Cassidy,” her mother said.
Father Michael was much younger, younger than her parents even. He had very bright blue eyes and was tall and skinny. He did not bend down or do the things adults do when they think they need to make you comfortable. “Hello, Jean. Your mother has asked me to help her with the poltergeist problem.”
“Poltergeist?”
He nodded. “A poltergeist is when things happen like this, when objects move or break or bang around for no apparant reason.”
“So it’s an evil spirit?” Jean was really interested.
He didn’t believe that, but what he said was, “Many people think so. Sometimes it helps to bless the house, especially when bad things have happened recently.”
Jean cleared her throat. He wasn’t afraid. Ever since the wreck people had been afraid - afraid she’d die, afraid she’d be crazy or stupid, afraid because she was different and quiet, afraid because things happened around her. She could tell that he wasn’t afraid. “I was in a wreck,” she said.
Father Michael nodded mildly. “I know. I’m sure your parents were very worried. And sometimes when people are very upset, bad things happen.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
He let her watch him get out his bag, and asked if she would help him by holding things. The bag was lined in blue velvet, and there were little crystal and silver bottles and things held in with blue velvet straps, and a small silver goblet like the ones in church, only engraved with pictures of sheep. He put a stole around his neck over his suit coat, but it was really different from the silk ones that Father Joseph used. It was a lot of colors and looked like it had been woven on a hand loom. It was really bright and kind of groovy looking. She held the bowl of holy water for him while he asperged the room, saying things in Latin and bits of the 23rd Psalm.
It felt better. He was strong and confident, and certain of his grace. Even her mother started to relax.
When he finished, Father Michael took the stole off and put all the things neatly back in the blue velvet bag. He looked at her mom. “Could I talk with Jean for a little while?”
They went out in the back yard and sat down on the swing set. Her mom could see them through the window but not hear what they were saying. It was a warm day, and there were piles of leaves everywhere. Jean pushed the swing a little with her toes. She was too big for swings. But she and Annie had played here all the time when they were little kids. She hadn’t been on the swing since July.
“Does it happen at school?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“What happens?”
So she told him all about Shannon and the locker and how David fell down the stairs and about how when she was watching gym class and people made fun of her the basketballs did weird things and people who were really good missed all the time. He just listened, not scared a bit. “I think...” she said hesitantly, “...maybe it’s me? I mean, what if it’s not a spirit? What if it’s me?”
Father Michael didn't laugh. "I think that's possible. Despite everything we've learned about science in the last hundred years, there are lots of things that are still mysterious to us. Things that people can do, deliberately or not."
"I don't do things on purpose," Jean said.
Father Michael almost smiled. "I know you don't. But does it seem like to you that things happen when you're sad or upset, or when someone hurts you?"
Jean nodded. She hadn't cried since the accident. She didn't know why suddenly she wanted to cry now. "I think I'm some kind of freak. Like an alien or something. From another planet."
Gently, Father Michael shook his head. "Not from another planet. There have always been people with special gifts. Maybe there are just more of them now, or maybe it's easier to hear about them. I think you have that kind of special gift."
Jean thought about it for a minute. "Are there other people like me?"
"Maybe so," he said. "There are other people who are different, too, with different gifts."
"It scares people," she said. Jean hesitated. "I think...my mom and dad are scared of me. They wish I wasn't like this. I can hear them thinking about how bad and scary this is, and how much they wish...."
"That it never happened?" he asked gently.
Jean shook her head. "That I would go away," she said quietly. "I think my mom thinks I'm bad now." She looked down at the crumpled leaves under her feet.
"Not bad," he said. "You're not bad for breaking a few things by accident." He frowned. "What about school?"
"I don't want to go anymore," she said. "I can't run and I can't do things and everybody says I'm a freak or a witch and I don't have any friends. I just limp around in this stupid brace being a target."
"Your mother says you'll be out of the brace in a few weeks," Father Michael said.
Jean shrugged. "And people will forget about it? I don't think so. I wish I could go to a different school."
"Maybe you can," Father Michael said. Jean looked up. "I know a man who wants to start a school, a special school for kids like you."
"Kids on crutches?" Jean was skeptical.
"Kids with special gifts that nobody understands yet."
"Like you," Jean said, before she realized that she was pulling it out of his mind.
He didn't flinch. "Like me," he said evenly. "I feel what other people feel. Similar to what you do, but not nearly as strong. It's very useful to me as a priest."
"I bet," Jean said. She and Annie had talked about the Jedi Knights, about what would you do if someone showed up and said that the Force was strong in your family.
"Would you like to talk to him?" Father Michael asked. "His name is Professor Xavier."
The next Saturday Jean and her parents drove up to Westchester, New York. It seemed like the drive took forever, but that was because of traffic around the City. A good half-hour before they got there her mother started going on about how much the school would cost. Jean thought that must be because it looked really expensive here. The houses were all set back from the road so far you couldn't see a lot of them at all. They passed one pretty pink brick right beside the road, though.
"See?" Jean said, "that house isn't so big."
"That's a gatehouse," her mom said. "For the help."
"I don't think we can afford this," her dad said. "What was Father Michael thinking?"
He was waiting for them when they arrived, lanky and smiling despite his clerical collar. "Jean, Mr. and Mrs. Grey, I'd like for you to meet Professor Charles Xavier."
Jean got out of the car and looked up. She had imagined that a professor would be an old man, as old as her grandfather, but Professor Charles Xavier was young, not any older than Father Michael. He was tall and broadshouldered, like he skiied or did crew, with light blond hair that was thinning. He was wearing a navy suit, and his eyes were warm hazel.
He shook hands with her dad, then turned and opened the car door for her mother. Pleasantries and a reassuring manner. He looked like he taught at a prep school.
Then he looked at her. "And you must be Jean."
She thought that was pretty obvious. I must be, because there aren't any other kids here. "Yes," she said.
He smiled as though he'd heard her. "It's nice to meet you," he said. And I must be Charles Xavier, because there aren't any other telepathic teachers here.
Jean nearly laughed. He heard me!
He turned to close the car door. Of course I did. I'm a telepath, like you. "May I get your coat, Mrs. Grey?"
They went inside and had tea in the library. Jean could tell that her parents were impressed. They talked with the Professor and Father Michael about schools and curricula and accreditation and other things Jean didn't entirely understand. She understood, though, that her parents were liking it, that they were wanting more and more to send her here.
Jean settled back on the couch and watched, waiting for the Obi Wan Kenobi "You want to send your daughter to school here" moment. It didn't happen. It was all natural. Charm and money and reassurance. Offhanded comments about cutting edge degrees in genetics and a firm background in a traditional education. After a while she got up to look for the bathroom.
"Down the hall off the kitchen," the Professor said. "The door is open."
She didn't even wonder how he knew where she was going.
The bathroom was tiny and cramped, with pink and black tiles and a window that looked out on the back garden. If he was planning to have a school, he really needed a bigger bathroom. With, like, more than one stall.
The bushes were thorny outside. Jean thought they might be roses. In November the garden was bare and cold. She could see part of the drive, and what must be a really big garage. There was a sleek white sports car parked in front of it, and a pair of feet sticking out underneath. There was a tool box next to the feet.
Jean flushed and went back in the hall. It was all dense wood panels, Victorian and scary. Well, not really. The house just sort of felt sad, like a bunch of sad people had lived in it for a long time, and it needed something.
She opened the door beside the bathroom. Not like they'd notice if she was gone a few minutes.
The kitchen had a very high ceiling. It was white, with yellow curtains, and a short little old refrigerator from the 50's or something. The cabinets were all white, with white china put away behind glass panes. There was a stainless steel table and chairs that looked new, and a Mr. Coffee on the counter. Two white mugs and a stainless steel creamer were sitting in the sink. There was an outside door into the garden.
Jean opened it. There was a young poplar tree by the curve of the drive, and beds that must be full of flowers and herbs. It must be beautiful, when it wasn't caught, like the house, in the spell of winter.
She closed the door behind her and followed the drive around. The car was still there. Now the hood was up, and a man in black pants was bending over it. "Hello," she said. "I'm Jean."
He looked back over his shoulder. He was young too, but maybe not as young as the others. He had dark hair that was a bit longer and more fashionable, bright blue eyes, and hands black with motor oil.
"Hello," he said, and went back to tinkering under the hood.
"Who are you?" she asked.
Irritation. It will all change.
"You're a Jedi Knight too, aren't you?" Jean asked.
He looked around so swiftly he almost bumped his head on the hood. "A what?"
Jean shrugged. She wished she'd brought her sweater. "Like me."
He stood up, wiping his hands on a rag. She didn't know why she had thought he disliked her. He was looking at her as though he hadn't seen her properly before. "Yes," he said. "I'm Dr. Lehnsherr."
A thin, red haired girl with a leg brace, haunted dark eyes.... "Get out," he said firmly, "of my head. You'll learn that's not polite."
"I'm sorry," Jean said. "I don't really know how to control it. I just know things. It's not like I want to."
"Charles will teach you that," he said.
"Will he?"
He had decided something, something important. Jean could have tried to tell what, but he would know. "Yes," Dr. Lehnsherr said, "He will."
"Do you live here?" Jean asked.
He looked up at the house. "Here? For now. Usually I live in the City."
"Is that your car?"
"Would I be fixing a leak in the oil pan if it wasn't? Some sort of mystery mechanic who runs about fixing strangers' cars?"
Jean laughed. "Is that a Corvette?"
"Yes. And do you have enough questions?" He was smiling too. "Aren't you supposed to be having tea in the library?"
"I'd like a Firebird," she said.
"In about ten years?"
"Four and a half," Jean said. "I'll be twelve next summer."
When the war ended I was eleven and a half....
There was some shuddering hole of darkness there. Jean pulled away from it instinctively. For some reason it was easy to say the thing she feared. "Is he going to try to cure me?"
Dr. Lehnsherr closed the hood of the car. Then he turned to look at her. "No," he said. "Do you want to be cured?"
"No. But I wasn't sure it mattered what I wanted."
"It always matters, here. Charles will absolutely never do anything to your head or your powers that you do not want. He can teach you to control them yourself. But he's not going to do anything to you." He cocked his head to one side as if listening. "You have a precious gift. And Charles is wondering if you're going to come back to tea before your parents start wondering where you've gotten to."
"I should go back in, then."
"Yes."
"Are you coming?"
He shook his head. "I'm going to put the car away."
She went in then. In the library they were discussing tuition. Professor Xavier looked up at her and smiled as she settled back onto the couch. He continued, "I think we can certainly waive the tuition during this trial period. After all, we are not yet really open to the public, and there are, as yet, multiple accreditation questions we must comply with."
Father Michael cleared his throat. "Although I'm certain those will proceed with the facilitation of the diocese."
Jean's mom looked up. "Will this be a parochial school?"
"Not in the traditional sense, no," Professor Xavier said. "Although as you've seen the diocese has a certain interest."
"I'll be about frequently," Father Michael said. "I used to teach at St. Francis, you know."
"Will uniforms be required?"
Jean tuned out the rest.
Is this what you want? Professor Xavier asked.
Yes, Jean said.
Jean moved in on the first Monday of the new year. She hadn't really cared about finishing the semester in her old school, but her parents wanted her to. It made it seem more normal, somehow, like she was just going away to school instead of moving to New York into a gloomy old Victorian house with a mysterious young professor.
She thought they might change their minds when they were dropping her off, but they didn't. Which was good.
Her room was on the front of the house, looking out into the branches of an oak tree, and across the lawn. It had belonged to a girl before. The walls were papered in lavender wisteria, and the curtains were dark purple. There was a white four poster bed with a lavender comforter, and matching white dresser, chest, desk and chair. A bookcase fitted under the window, four or five clothbound books still on it. Jean picked one up. The Secret Garden. On the flyleaf someone had written "This book belongs to Cathy."
The Professor was standing in the doorway, looking uncertain.
"Cathy?" she asked.
"My sister," he said. "She lives in California now."
"This used to be her room?"
"Yes. But she's thirty-two now. She's married and has children of her own."
"Are you married?" Jean asked.
"No," he said.
Of course not, she thought. Jedi don't marry. For some reason the question made him uncomfortable.
The Professor cleared his throat. "Will you be all right?"
Jean nodded. "I think I just want to do some unpacking."
"Fine," he said. "We'll be down in the kitchen if you need anything."
She heard his footsteps going down the stairs. Jean put her clothes away in the dresser and closet, and took out the books she'd brought and put them on the bookcase with Cathy's. The Little White Horse. Splinter of the Mind's Eye. Forerunner Foray and Ice Crown by Andre Norton.
She went across the hall to the bathroom that had been Cathy's and put her soap and shampoo in the shower. There weren't any towels. She wondered if she should ask the Professor where they were.
Jean went out in the hall and stood at the top of the stairs. She could hear their voices faintly in the kitchen, the periodic sounds of the sink as they finished washing up, the Professor's strong baritone, and Dr. Lehnsherr's lighter tenor, the sound of the coffeemaker brewing. They were making coffee, to sit and drink it together.
Jean went downstairs. The Professor was putting the dishtowel away and Dr. Lehnsherr was getting out two mugs. "Hi," Jean said.
"Hi," the Professor said, awkwardly, like no one knew what to say.
"You don't know how to run a school," Jean said.
Dr. Lehnsherr started laughing. "You see, Charles? It took her all of three hours to figure that out!"
The Professor looked hurt. "I thought you wanted to come here."
"I do," Jean said. She reached for one of the mugs and held it out to Dr. Lehnsherr.
He poured the coffee. The Professor frowned. "It's decaf," Dr. Lehnsherr said.
"There have to be some ground rules around here," Jean said. "It's no good pretending this is a regular school. To start with, I'm the only kid here. You've never run a school before, and I've never gone to a school for Jedi Knights before. So we're all going to work this out."
She looked around for the cream pitcher. Bemused, Dr. Lehnsherr floated the stainless steel pitcher across the room to her. She took it out of the air. "So who's teaching what?"
The Professor cleared his throat. "Well, Erik...Dr. Lehnsherr...is teaching math and science, and I'm teaching literature and history."
Jean looked at him. "So you're teaching me how to use my powers and Dr. Lehnsherr is teaching me martial arts?"
Dr. Lehnsherr opened and closed his mouth.
"Certainly," said the Professor.
"Good," Jean said. "Karate?"
"What makes you think...." Dr. Lehnsherr began.
"She's a telepath, Erik," the Professor said.
"Yes." He got a third mug out and passed it to the Professor. "Well. We'll have to be careful at first, with your leg. And I'm not a Sensei. I'm not really qualified to teach."
Jean raised an eyebrow. "And the Professor is certified to teach sixth grade reading?"
Dr. Lehnsherr coughed. "She's got you there, Charles."
"We'll be reading the classics," the Professor said. "And discussing them. And writing papers. I thought perhaps Huckleberry Finn."
"They read that in ninth grade in my old school," Jean said helpfully.
"Yes, well," the Professor said, "You read above grade level, don't you? I'm certain I read Huckleberry Finn in sixth grade. Erik?"
Dr. Lehnsherr poured the coffee. "Don't ask me. I never went to sixth grade."
There was that hole again, the dark place she felt like a void in the Force. She flinched away from it.
Jean got up and handed Dr. Lehnsherr the cream. "I like science," she said. "What are we going to do?"
"Biology," said the Professor, "is the seventh grade state curriculum."
"Biology," said Dr. Lehnsherr, as though he were deciding on the spot. "This spring we will be studying plant biology."
"Outside in the garden?" Jean asked.
There must have been something in her voice, because he looked at her quickly. "If you like," he said. "There are things we could plant. And study."
"You don't know anything about plants," she said.
A potato sprouting in a jar on a windowsill, behind a window gray with grime. A city with shipyards and steel mills, a school for boys like him where he went every day, carrying his lunch in a tin pail. Walking along the railroad tracks, dancing on the rail, feeling the iron in his blood like a song, the iron under his feet. A ghetto in a city far from here, white dishtowels drying in the sun on the fire escape, a potato sprouting in a jar.
"No," he said. "I'm not a gardener."
"That's all right," Jean said. "I am."
That night she went to sleep in Cathy's room, listening to the sound of the wind in the bare branches outside. It was the first time in her life she hadn't been able to hear the city.
Jean could hear the faint popping of the radiator, the creaking of the floorboards as the Professor and Dr. Lehnsherr came up from downstairs. She heard their footsteps along the hall, the sound of one door opening and closing.
Tomorrow she would walk in the gardens. She would see what there was in those lifeless beds, left untended for years. If Mary Lennox could do it, so could she. There might be bulbs. There might be roses. She would coax them out to help her, like Colin waking from sickness. They would push the leaves away from the green points of crocus bulbs, cut away the dead wood from the roses. Jean fell asleep dreaming of springtime.
Two days later she sat in the library, facing the Professor across the desk. Her hands were sweating. It was warm in the library. Jean took off her sweater and put it on the back of the chair.
Don't be frightened, the Professor said in her mind.
I'm not, Jean thought.
The Professor opened his hands on the desktop. "When you refuse to acknowledge it, fear can rule you," he said. "Fear is what makes you lose control."
Jean bent her head. "Will I remember Annie dying?" she whispered.
"Probably not." She looked up. There was tremendous compassion in his hazel eyes. "It's common to lose the hours or even days around a head injury. The damage is usually permanent."
"I want to remember," Jean said. "Because it's important. And I don't want to remember. Because I'm afraid." Behind him, the lamp began to tremble on the bookcase. The Professor turned just in time to grab it before it fell.
"I'm sorry!" Jean gasped.
The Professor sat the lamp carefully on the floor. "It's all right," he said.
...A floor lamp falling, the bulb shattering against the floor, the shade rolling away, stopping beside the dying man's hand....
"Jean," the Professor said. "No."
"I'm sorry!" The table began to shake.
"Jean. Focus." He took her hands across the table. "Put your hands flat on the table. Concentrate on how the table feels."
She spread her palms under his, feeling the warmth of them above her hands, the smoothness of the table beneath them.
"Focus," he said. "On the table."
Grain and smoothness. Whorls of walnut, smoothed and planed.
"That's better." The Professor's voice was mild. "Focus."
The world stopped moving. Jean felt, for a moment, the breath that is held in the heart of every moment. "Be still," she whispered.
And the table stopped moving.
February 2 was cold and gray. At breakfast she told them that the groundhog would not see his shadow, and soon it would be spring.
The Professor looked over the paper. "You can check the Times tomorrow and see what the groundhog said."
"I will," Jean said, smearing more jam on her toast and going back to the lifestyle section.
Dr. Lehnsherr was reading the book section, because the Professor still had the front page. He was frowning a little.
"Dr. Lehnsherr," Jean asked, looking up from the paper, "What's the sexual revolution?"
He choked on his coffee. "Why do you want to know?" he asked.
Jean nodded at the paper. "I'm living right in the middle of it, the Times says. So I want to know what it is."
"It means that gender roles are changing, and that people are acknowledging that many of the rules we have are outdated and don't work for people in a post-industrial society."
"So people get divorced even though the Church says it's bad?"
"That's one example, yes."
"So I can be a scientist when I grow up? Even though I'm a girl?"
The Professor smiled gently. "Yes, Jean. You can be a scientist, or anything else you want."
"A Jedi Knight," she said.
The Professor looked confused. "What?"
"Yes," said Dr. Lehnsherr, putting down his coffee cup. "You are special. We are not like them, and their rules don't apply to us."
"Erik...." the Professor began.
Jean nodded. "We have different rules, harder rules. Because we can do things they can't. Because we have powers they don't understand. We answer to each other."
"Yes," he said. "We answer to each other." His eyes met the Professor's across the table.
"And the first rule is, never hurt another mutant," Jean said. "Never use your powers against one of us."
"That's a good rule," Dr. Lehnsherr said.
"Never use your powers to hurt them either," the Professor said. "They cannot understand. They may be afraid of us, or try to hurt us. But we are answerable to a higher standard."
"Because we're the Jedi," Jean said.
"Oh, Charles. You know that's not possible."
"It must be," the Professor said, and his eyes were glittering where they met Dr. Lehnsherr's.
"So you teach me to defend myself and then tell me not to use it?" Jean asked.
"I'm teaching you to control your powers so you don't hurt yourself or other people by accident. I'm not teaching you to fight," the Professor said, looking down at Jean.
"I am," Dr. Lehnsherr said.
"Erik...."
Luke Skywalker stood beside the landspeeder, looking out across the sands at the burning rubble that had been his home, ducked his head, throat tight with bile at the smell of the burning bodies that had belonged to the people who had raised him. He raised his head, and his eyes hardened.
"What happens when they kill your family?" Jean asked. "Can't we defend our friends?" She met the Professor's eyes. "Don't you want me to fight for you?"
"I can defend myself," he said gently. There was something fleeting in his eyes, some sorrow that was not for her.
"Not forever," Jean said. "I'll be grown and you'll be old. That's how the story goes."
"I do not want you to kill for me," he said.
"Then how about for herself?" Dr. Lehnsherr challenged. "She needs to be able to defend herself. The world's not sweetness and light, Charles."
"I know that," he snapped.
She looked at Dr. Lehnsherr. "I'm not afraid," she said.
He closed his eyes so she would not see the fear written there. "Jean. You will be."
As the weather warmed, they did karate in the conservatory, a broad space with wide windows that should have been full of plants. There were no plants, just sunshine.
She liked stretching in the sun, moving through the beginning exercises in the shadows cast by the window frames, feeling her leg becoming part of her again. By the time the apple blossoms fell like white rain on the lawn he was showing her some basic kicks. He was very gentle with her. She was not afraid to kick him hard.
Sometimes the Professor stood and watched in the doorway, a strange and wistful smile on his face.
Lost in the motion of the exercises, she could hear his thoughts like the wind in the trees outside. If you were ours, if you were our child.... He liked seeing the expression of quiet concentration on Erik's face.
Now, she said into his mind, meeting his eyes over her white sleeves, and they moved through the kick and block together, like a ballet, matched like dancers in the sunshine. They bowed, and the shadow of the window frames fell across her back, across his bent head.
"Come join us, Charles?" he asked, straightening.
"All right," the Professor said. He took off his socks and shoes. Jean had never seen him stretch and move before. He bowed quite precisely. She sat down, hugging her knees and drinking Gatorade, to watch.
The Professor wore a gray t-shirt and gray pants. He was taller and beautiful to watch, contrasting like a shadow, punch and block, pull and throw. They did not look away from each other. Dr. Lehnsherr was smiling, his eyes on Charles' face. Block and hold. They paused, inches apart, like a kiss.
The Professor's foot snaked behind Dr. Lehnsherr's knee, and he went down. Pull, and the Professor went with him. Roll, and he landed on his feet. They faced each other again. Dr. Lehnsherr's longer hair was in his eyes. The Professor's chest was heaving with breath.
Of course, Jean thought. We are the Jedi. Our world is different. We love differently.
They bowed, the Professor's light thin hair glittering in the sunshine.
Jean stood up. "I need a shower," she announced. "I'm nasty." She went upstairs and did not come down for an hour.
That afternoon she was sitting in the library, reading A Tale of Two Cities with the Professor. There was a spring thunderstorm coming, and she could see the clouds almost purple beyond the apple trees. Her mind was not on the point the Professor was making.
"Professor," she asked, "How long have you known Dr. Lehnsherr?"
He folded the book closed, his mind equally closed to her. "Nearly twenty years. Why do you ask?"
Her next question was in her eyes.
"Jean," he said. He looked out the windows at the clouds, the mourning doves pecking at the lawn below the trees. To lose all this now....
"I'm not leaving," she said. "It's ok."
The wind stirred the branches. If there was thunder, they couldn't hear it yet. It took him a moment to find his voice. "Thank you."
Jean shrugged. "Lysis and Alexias," she said.
He looked around sharply. "What?"
"Your books," she said. "You said I could read any books I wanted."
"The Last of the Wine is too hard a book for you."
"Not harder than A Tale of Two Cities," she said.
The Professor closed his eyes. "I see I've underestimated you."
Jean smiled. "Remember, I read above grade level."
He looked at her then. "Was I so perceptive at not quite twelve? I can hardly believe so."
"Girls mature faster than boys," Jean said.
"And you've had hard experiences," the Professor said.
Outside, the thunder rolled. The birds were flying away now. The apple branches bent in the invisible wind.
She asked what she had wanted to know since the day she came here. "Professor, if I had known...if I could do what I have the potential to do, could I have saved Annie?"
He would not lie to her, telepath to telepath, even if it hurt. "Yes," he said. "I believe you could have. You could have kept the car from rolling."
Jean nodded. "I thought so."
"You mustn't blame yourself."
"I don't," Jean said. "I didn't know."
"You didn't."
"It will never happen again," Jean said. "Never."
The first raindrops rattled against the windows. "No," the Professor agreed. "Never."
By the time the roses bloomed, the school year was almost over. In the garden plot they had cleared behind the house, Jean's zucchini were flowering too, and the snow peas were already bearing. She was weeding between the young tomato plants while Dr. Lehnsherr brought out her labelled flats of peppers. There were six kinds, started in three different soil mediums, carefully measured for growth habits and sprouting times. Jean had kept her lab notebook carefully. So far the pimentos in the potting soil were doing best.
"Where are these going?" Dr. Lehnsherr asked.
"Over there," Jean said. "The plant book says they need full sun. You promise to take care of them while I'm home for the summer?"
"I promise," he said.
He came over and put them down near her. He was wearing a white shirt, and he had rolled the sleeves up. She glanced sideways and saw. She looked away before he noticed. She looked back at the dirt. Her hands were covered with mud and there was dirt under her nails.
Dr. Lehnsherr reached between the tomatoes and started weeding. The sun was very warm.
She looked again. The numbers were there, blue and unfaded, against the skin of his forearm.
"What kind of tomatoes are these?" he asked, glancing at the stake she had written on. "14?"
"Bigger Boy started in peat moss," Jean said. People labelled like tomatoes, written down in a lab book.
"They're flowering," he said, touching one of the tomato blossoms carefully.
"I hope they set fruit before I leave," Jean said. "If the nights aren't too cold."
"There will still be fruit when you come back in the fall," he said. "The tomatoes should be ripe then. If you want to come back. You don't have to."
"I want to," Jean said. I read the Diary of Anne Frank, she thought, her mind closed the way the Professor had taught her. I could say that. And then what? That there are secrets still, below the skin? That I am happy here?
"Good," he said. "You don't want to go to a regular school? With other children?"
Jean shrugged. "There will be other kids here. Kids like me." She looked up. "I want to stay with you and the Professor. And see my tomatoes ripen."
He touched the blossom again, very gently. "That will be good," he said.
Jean was back at school the week before Labor Day. Dr. Lehnsherr had bought a microscope over the summer, and they spent the first few weeks looking at plants with it, an introduction to cellular biology.
Social Studies with the Professor was anthropology, and they were reading Margaret Meade and Coming of Age in Samoa. Which was appropriate. The second week in October she had to ask the Professor to take her to the grocery store. She wasn't sure which one of them was going to die of embarassment in the checkout line, her or him, buying a big bag of maxi pads.
The clerk was an elderly black lady who smiled at his discomfort. "Your little girl's growing up, huh?"
Jean stuffed it into a bag as fast as she could.
"She is," the Professor muttered, turning bright red.
Neither of them said a word the entire way home.
That night, as she lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and wondering if she felt like a different person, she heard them on the stairs, Dr. Lehnsherr's voice carrying in the quiet house, though he wasn't speaking loudly. "Well, Charles, what did you expect? If you really mean to have a house full of teenagers, you'll have to get used to it."
To it. To what? To seeing her as a grown up? Jean felt so old already. To seeing her as a woman in the world where they lived, without mothers or wives or daughters? Cathy hardly counted, away in California. She wondered if Dr. Lehnsherr had sisters. She wondered if they had died.
No, some part of her thought. He was always alone. The late life child. The favored son. The sum of their hopes and dreams, even in the ghetto.
And the Professor, what did he fear? What was this guilt that haunted his steps? Not the shadow of love.
They weren't going to bed. She heard them in the hall again.
"I'm coming," the Professor said softly.
"Let me get the new motherboard," Dr. Lehnsherr said. "I'm sick to death of the recognition code glitches."
"You're going to install that tonight?"
"Can you think of a better time?" Dr. Lehnsherr asked.
Jean heard the doors open and close, their footsteps on the stairs. She got up, pulled on jeans and a t-shirt, and followed them.
They had closed and locked the door leading down. It took a minute to open it. Dr. Lehnsherr had showed her how to turn the tumblers in locks with her telekinesis. It was a lock that was meant to keep normal people out.
The stairs were very narrow and there was another door at the bottom. It wasn't locked. Jean opened it very carefully into a broad metal corridor, all blue steel and recessed lights. There were three cross corridors, all with doors. At the end was a round door like an iris, standing open, bits of components spread around it.
Not a secret garden, a secret base. A secret base where the last of the Jedi hid their secrets.
Quietly, Jean slipped down the hall. She could hear their voices inside.
"It's not working," the Professor said.
She could see him now, sitting in a steel chair before a console, Dr. Lehnsherr kneeling beside him.
"Try it now," he said.
The Professor leaned down and lifted something into the air, something between a helmet and a crown. He set it on his head, bending his neck as though the weight were intense. Dr. Lehnsherr straightened a little beside him.
Down the narrow platform a row of lights went on. There was a deep bass humming that went through Jean's bones. She came closer.
Recessed lights darkened. It was a chamber like a planetarium, only the stars were not projected, but seemed rather to glow from the walls. The hum strengthened. The Professor's hands opened on the console. Dr. Lehnsherr waited, taunt, as though to stop something.
Lights everywhere. Stars like the Milky Way, whirling as though the seasons were sweeping by at impossible speed.
The Professor said one word: "Jean."
The stars died as he reached for the crown.
Dr. Lehnsherr stood suddenly, sweeping around. The Professor lifted the crown from his head. The hidden lights went on.
"What is that?" she asked.
"Cerebro," the Professor said.
They made coffee in the kitchen, even though it was late. It was hazelnut, and very good.
"What does it do?" Jean asked.
The Professor massaged his temples. "It amplifies telepathy." He looked tired.
"Where did it come from?" she asked.
Dr. Lehnsherr handed the Professor a cup of coffee. "We built it, Charles and I. We invented it."
"Why?"
The Professor took the cup, his fingers just brushing Dr. Lehnsherr's. "To see if we could."
"To find other people like us," Dr. Lehnsherr said.
"Like me," Jean said.
"Yes," the Professor said. "Like you. We thought, Erik and I, if we could find other people like us, we could bring them together. Train them. Help them learn to use their talents."
"To protect them," Dr. Lehnsherr said, "from people who want to hurt them because they're mutants."
"Does it work?" Jean asked.
"No," said Dr. Lehnsherr.
"Yes, " said the Professor.
They looked at each other.
"Yes," said Dr. Lehnsherr.
"No," said the Professor.
"You mean it kind of works," Jean said.
"Yes," said Dr. Lehnsherr. "It kind of works. It does something."
"It's not finished," the Professor said. "We're still working on it."
"It amplifies telepathy?" Jean asked.
"Yes," the Professor said.
"Like mine?"
"Yes," Dr. Lehnsherr said.
"Perhaps someday," the Professor said. "Right now it's much too dangerous for you to use." He rubbed his eyes. "It's hard for me, and I'm much more practiced than you are. It could hurt you very badly if you tried it. I want you to promise me you won't try it without me there, that you won't sneak down and try it."
Jean nodded. This was what one would expect of the Jedi. "Professor, I promise I won't try to use Cerebro without your permission." She looked at Dr. Lehnsherr and answered the question in his mind. "You don't have to ask me not to tell anyone. I know better than that."
The Professor met Dr. Lehnsherr's eyes. "Erik, she would have found out eventually."
"It's better for me to know the secrets and know what I'm not supposed to say rather than just guess," Jean said. "I'm your student. I know what that means."
Dr. Lehnsherr nodded shortly. "Very well. Then you can help."
The Professor didn't disagree. Her hands were small, and there were pieces that must not conduct.
It was February again. Snow had fallen, eight inches, thick and white. Jean went out to watch Dr. Lehnsherr make the snow shovel clear the drive. She absolutely couldn't resist popping him right behind the ear with a wet cold snowball. Telekinesis made throwing snowballs very accurate.
"Miss Grey, you are going to pay for that," he said, scooping up a handful of snow.
Jean grabbed another handful off a bush. "No, I'm not!"
He missed. She didn't.
The Professor opened the door as the snow shovel dumped over her head while she ran shrieking.
"Erik, what in the world are you doing?"
Dr. Lehnsherr was shaking snow off his scarf, laughing. They both stopped.
"What's wrong?" Jean asked.
The Professor looked tight-lipped. "You remember Ilene?"
Dr. Lehnsherr nodded.
"Then you remember her son, Henry. He's been beaten badly enough to be hospitalized. The school says they don't know who did it, and they don't believe what Henry says. Ilene is going to pull him out of Hedegate."
"Why?" Jean asked. "Who is he? Why did he get beaten up?"
"Because he's a mutant," the Professor said. "Ilene thought it would be okay. But it wasn't."
Dr. Lehnsherr looked away.
"Erik, she wants to know if we can take him."
Jean looked at Dr. Lehnsherr. It would be the end of the three of them, the introduction of an unstable molecule that changes the reaction. "Of course," he said. "You've decided, haven't you?"
"Can we do anything else?"
Dr. Lehnsherr shook his head. "Of course not. But I think you should ask Jean as well." He looked at her. "What do you think?"
This boy she didn't know, would he be mean or strange? Would he ruin everything? She didn't even know how old he was. "I think we should take him," she said.
Henry McCoy arrived on March 1st. He was a stocky, solid boy with untidy brown hair that drooped over his round face. The bruises around his eyes were fading to yellow.
They all stood in the entrance hall, the Professor, Dr. Lehnsherr, Jean, Henry, and his mother.
His mother was blonde and very fashionably dressed, like the women Jean's mom had always envied. She looked around the entrance hall critically. "I see you haven't changed much yet. It looks the same as ever. Just like you, Charles."
The Professor shrugged, though it didn't come easily. All the smoothness he'd shown with Jean's parents seemed to be absent now. "We're not really ready for students yet. I told you we were still remodeling, Ilene."
"I thought you had one student already," she said.
"Just me," Jean said.
Henry was watching her closely.
Dr. Lehnsherr was trying to be inconspicuous, but it wasn't working. Ilene McCoy looked at him. "And Erik. How are you?"
"Fine." Dr. Lehnsherr apparently decided something. He stepped out of the corner and took her hand. "The years have been more than kind to you." There was something vaguely European about the way he bent over her hand, just a shade of flirtation.
The Professor looked round. "Jean, why don't you show Henry around while we talk about business?"
That was an order and a dismissal, so she looked at the boy. "Sure. Let me show you the library."
Thank you, the Professor said in her mind. He meant it.
He followed her down the hall and into the library. Books lined the walls, but there was a new computer on the desk in the corner, a small color television hooked up to its processor. She closed the door.
"So what's the deal?" he asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Are you a mutant too?"
Jean raised her chin. "Yeah. Just like you."
He ran his hand over the smooth wood back of the couch. "How old are you?"
"Twelve," Jean said. "I'll be thirteen in June."
"I'll be fourteen in September," he said. "What do you do?"
"I'm a telepath," Jean said. There wasn't any point lying. He would know what she could do soon. "And a telekinetic. What do you do?"
"This," he said, and pushed the couch five inches forward with one finger.
It was a heavy couch. "And you got beat up?" Jean said.
"There were nine of them, and they were upperclassmen." Henry shrugged. "Call me Hank. I hate Henry."
"Ok."
He looked around. "So how did you come here?"
"Father Michael Cassidy -- you'll meet him, he comes around sometimes -- knows my parents and knows the Professor. How about you?"
Hank shrugged. He was looking at the computer. "My mom used to date Professor Xavier. Back in the dark ages."
"Date?" Jean squeaked. Then she shut her mouth. She hadn't meant to squeak.
Hank looked up. "Date. As in go out. As in went to the prom in a poofy dress."
"That must have been a long time ago," Jean said.
"Duh. I'm thirteen. And my parents have been married for seventeen years. So sometime before that."
"They really went to the prom?"
"I've seen the pictures," Hank assured her. "It was pretty grim." His eyes went past the computer to the paperback copy of Han Solo at Stars End lying by the computer. "Hey, you like Star Wars?"
"Yeah," Jean said.
"I've seen Star Wars 39 times," Hank said.
It changed things, but not badly. Hank was a year ahead of her in school, so he'd already had a lot of things she was learning. His math was two years ahead of hers, because he'd been GT. So they had separate classes a lot, one of them with the Professor and one of them with Dr. Lehnsherr. Hank did math while she did english, and then they traded. In the afternoon they had science together because Jean was already doing Physical Science since Dr. Lehnsherr had covered the whole seventh grade book in the fall. Then they ended with Social Studies and went into the conservatory to do karate.
Hank thought it was dumb until Jean threw him.
Dr. Lehnsherr didn't laugh. "Strength isn't everything," he said. "Jean hasn't a quarter of your natural strength, but she's learned ways of handling people much stronger than she is. If you learn well, with your natural potential, I doubt there's anyone in the world who could best you."
Hank picked himself up. "It's ten anyones I'm worried about." The bruises had faded by now.
"Two years from now ten anyones will be very sorry," Dr. Lehnsherr said. "Let's begin at the beginning."
She watched them in the spring sunlight, moving through the beginning drills. The Professor came in and stood beside her.
Hank was quick, but uncertain still, hair falling over his glasses, mouth set. Dr. Lehnsherr was going very slowly, giving Hank time to follow, the sunlight glinting off the first threads of gray in his hair. The Professor sighed.
"Did you really date Hank's mother?" Jean asked quietly.
The Professor looked startled. "He told you that?"
"Duh," said Jean.
"Yes, I did. A very long time ago."
"Does she know?" Jean asked.
"She must guess. I doubt very much that she wants to know. She introduced me to Erik in college. He was dating a friend of hers."
Jean leaned back against the Professor's shoulder. "I won't tell him. Unless he asks me. He's a guy. He could be funny about it."
"Jean. I'm sorry this is a burden for you."
Jean looked up at him. "Don't be stupid. I love you. Both of you."
The Professor looked away and there were tears in his eyes. "Jean...."
"All right, Jean. It's your turn," Dr. Lehnsherr said. "Let's show Hank what he can look forward to."
She gave the Professor a quick smile and walked out across the floor, bowed in the streaming sun, and lost herself in the dance.
Star Wars was re-released on May 25. It was a year until the new Star Wars movie would come out, but they were re-releasing the first one because school would be out soon. Jean went with Hank. The Professor and Dr. Lehnsherr dropped them at the theater and then went to go have a late lunch with friends.
Jean wondered if it counted as a date. It was with a guy. Alone. Not that she and Hank were that way at all.
They split a giant popcorn with extra butter and a package of milk duds. Hank had 7-up and she had Coke. They whispered half the lines to each other in unison with the screen, and yelled and screamed when the Death Star blew up. He didn't try to hold her hand or anything. She guessed it wasn't a date. That was ok. Hank wasn't much like Luke Skywalker.
"More like Chewie," she said.
"Huh?" said Hank.
"You remind me of Chewie," she said.
Hank grinned. "Thanks. I think Chewie is the coolest."
They waited on the curb to be picked up. "Where are they?" Jean asked. "They were just going to have lunch."
"Probably a two-martini lunch," Hank said. He came from a world where people did that.
"They'd never drink if they were going to drive with us in the car," Jean said. Thinking about it made her feel kind of sick.
"Then they're probably arguing about which one of them gets to have the martini," Hank said.
"I don't think Jedi Knights drink martinis," Jean said.
Hank looked up at her, a serious expression on his face. "Is that what we are? The last of the Jedi Knights?"
"No," Jean said. "You and me, we're the first of the Jedi Knights."
"That's cool," said Hank.
"Yeah." Jean stretched her legs out in front of her on the curb. The day school ended she would be thirteen. Two years was a very long time.
"Best friends?" said Hank.
"Best friends," she said.
The car pulled up. The Professor and Dr. Lehnsherr looked relaxed, like they'd had a good time. And nobody had been drinking. "Come on, Hank. Let's go home."
Title: The Last of the Jedi
Rating: PG
Pairings: Charles/Erik
Summary: What would you do if someone told you that you were special, that you needed to come learn how to use your unique talents? If you were Jean Grey, 11 years old in the summer of 1977, Star Wars would give you something to think about when the Jedi come to you.
This story belongs in the same continuity as Smoking on the Bus and Burn All the Letters, but you don't need to have read them first.
The Last of the Jedi
For Squooie, who can't remember why, for Bobby, who can, and for my father, who gave me The Last of the Wine when I was 11 and a half.
Jean saw Star Wars with her best friend, Annie, on June 12 for Jean’s eleventh birthday. For the next four weeks it was all they talked about. Annie thought it would be cool to be Princess Leia, but Jean was sure that Luke Skywalker was the coolest.
On July 14 they were on their way home from playing miniature golf when they were hit by an eighteen year old who had been doing shots of tequila. Annie was dead at the scene. Her mom died in surgery two hours later.
Jean had been in the back seat with her seatbelt on. She was in a coma for twelve days, and woke up in the intensive care unit on July 26th, while her grandmother sat beside her bed and read The Secret Garden out loud. Later, her parents said she had been lucid when the paramedics had arrived, begging them to save Annie and saying she wasn’t very far away, it wasn’t too late. Jean didn’t remember anything about that or about the accident. She never did.
The doctor said that was common with head injuries, and that she was a very lucky little girl. She didn’t feel so lucky, with stiches down the side of her head and one leg in traction. But she was a lot luckier than Annie.
Jean came home from the hospital on August 30. School had started the week before. It was hard changing classes, especially to the upstairs classrooms, since she was still on crutches. She wouldn’t get the cast off until October 4. She circled the day on her calendar in her room, the one with the pictures of horses. There was a Morgan horse with a pumpkin for the October picture. Annie had given her the calendar last Christmas.
Everything was strange and hard. People whispered about her at school - the strange red haired girl on crutches whose best friend died. Her dad was quiet and gave her everything she wanted. Her mom avoided her. Her grandmother had to go back to Orlando because she was teaching this fall.
Then weird stuff started happening. Shannon Thorpe was making fun of Jean when her locker door swing open and hit her in the nose so hard that she had a nosebleed.
David fell down the stairs after he knocked her books out of her hand on the landing, knowing she couldn’t pick them up on crutches.
Her mom’s alarm clock went crazy and started going off in the middle of the night. She got a new one and it did the same thing.
Jean and Annie had planned to go as Luke and Leia for Halloween. Jean didn’t go out at all. Her cast was off, but she had a brace that she was supposed to wear for another eight weeks. She didn’t want to go.
Just after midnight they all woke up when something happened in the kitchen. All the cabinet doors flew open and all the dishes and glasses broke, all of them, except for the ones in the dishwasher and Jean’s Star Wars glasses from Burger King. Her dad thought it was a prank, but the back door was locked and had never been opened. Her mom didn’t think it was a prank. She had rushed in the kitchen fast enough to see her wedding china flying off the shelves by themselves and smashing against the wall.
Jean saw the way they looked. Her parents were afraid. Afraid of her, some part of her mind said.
The next day Jean came down from her room to find someone she didn’t know talking to her mother in the ruined kitchen. He was wearing a priest's collar, but he wasn’t their regular parish priest, Father Joseph. Father Joseph was very short and fat, and he’d been a priest since her mom was a little girl.
“Jean, this is Father Michael Cassidy,” her mother said.
Father Michael was much younger, younger than her parents even. He had very bright blue eyes and was tall and skinny. He did not bend down or do the things adults do when they think they need to make you comfortable. “Hello, Jean. Your mother has asked me to help her with the poltergeist problem.”
“Poltergeist?”
He nodded. “A poltergeist is when things happen like this, when objects move or break or bang around for no apparant reason.”
“So it’s an evil spirit?” Jean was really interested.
He didn’t believe that, but what he said was, “Many people think so. Sometimes it helps to bless the house, especially when bad things have happened recently.”
Jean cleared her throat. He wasn’t afraid. Ever since the wreck people had been afraid - afraid she’d die, afraid she’d be crazy or stupid, afraid because she was different and quiet, afraid because things happened around her. She could tell that he wasn’t afraid. “I was in a wreck,” she said.
Father Michael nodded mildly. “I know. I’m sure your parents were very worried. And sometimes when people are very upset, bad things happen.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
He let her watch him get out his bag, and asked if she would help him by holding things. The bag was lined in blue velvet, and there were little crystal and silver bottles and things held in with blue velvet straps, and a small silver goblet like the ones in church, only engraved with pictures of sheep. He put a stole around his neck over his suit coat, but it was really different from the silk ones that Father Joseph used. It was a lot of colors and looked like it had been woven on a hand loom. It was really bright and kind of groovy looking. She held the bowl of holy water for him while he asperged the room, saying things in Latin and bits of the 23rd Psalm.
It felt better. He was strong and confident, and certain of his grace. Even her mother started to relax.
When he finished, Father Michael took the stole off and put all the things neatly back in the blue velvet bag. He looked at her mom. “Could I talk with Jean for a little while?”
They went out in the back yard and sat down on the swing set. Her mom could see them through the window but not hear what they were saying. It was a warm day, and there were piles of leaves everywhere. Jean pushed the swing a little with her toes. She was too big for swings. But she and Annie had played here all the time when they were little kids. She hadn’t been on the swing since July.
“Does it happen at school?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“What happens?”
So she told him all about Shannon and the locker and how David fell down the stairs and about how when she was watching gym class and people made fun of her the basketballs did weird things and people who were really good missed all the time. He just listened, not scared a bit. “I think...” she said hesitantly, “...maybe it’s me? I mean, what if it’s not a spirit? What if it’s me?”
Father Michael didn't laugh. "I think that's possible. Despite everything we've learned about science in the last hundred years, there are lots of things that are still mysterious to us. Things that people can do, deliberately or not."
"I don't do things on purpose," Jean said.
Father Michael almost smiled. "I know you don't. But does it seem like to you that things happen when you're sad or upset, or when someone hurts you?"
Jean nodded. She hadn't cried since the accident. She didn't know why suddenly she wanted to cry now. "I think I'm some kind of freak. Like an alien or something. From another planet."
Gently, Father Michael shook his head. "Not from another planet. There have always been people with special gifts. Maybe there are just more of them now, or maybe it's easier to hear about them. I think you have that kind of special gift."
Jean thought about it for a minute. "Are there other people like me?"
"Maybe so," he said. "There are other people who are different, too, with different gifts."
"It scares people," she said. Jean hesitated. "I think...my mom and dad are scared of me. They wish I wasn't like this. I can hear them thinking about how bad and scary this is, and how much they wish...."
"That it never happened?" he asked gently.
Jean shook her head. "That I would go away," she said quietly. "I think my mom thinks I'm bad now." She looked down at the crumpled leaves under her feet.
"Not bad," he said. "You're not bad for breaking a few things by accident." He frowned. "What about school?"
"I don't want to go anymore," she said. "I can't run and I can't do things and everybody says I'm a freak or a witch and I don't have any friends. I just limp around in this stupid brace being a target."
"Your mother says you'll be out of the brace in a few weeks," Father Michael said.
Jean shrugged. "And people will forget about it? I don't think so. I wish I could go to a different school."
"Maybe you can," Father Michael said. Jean looked up. "I know a man who wants to start a school, a special school for kids like you."
"Kids on crutches?" Jean was skeptical.
"Kids with special gifts that nobody understands yet."
"Like you," Jean said, before she realized that she was pulling it out of his mind.
He didn't flinch. "Like me," he said evenly. "I feel what other people feel. Similar to what you do, but not nearly as strong. It's very useful to me as a priest."
"I bet," Jean said. She and Annie had talked about the Jedi Knights, about what would you do if someone showed up and said that the Force was strong in your family.
"Would you like to talk to him?" Father Michael asked. "His name is Professor Xavier."
The next Saturday Jean and her parents drove up to Westchester, New York. It seemed like the drive took forever, but that was because of traffic around the City. A good half-hour before they got there her mother started going on about how much the school would cost. Jean thought that must be because it looked really expensive here. The houses were all set back from the road so far you couldn't see a lot of them at all. They passed one pretty pink brick right beside the road, though.
"See?" Jean said, "that house isn't so big."
"That's a gatehouse," her mom said. "For the help."
"I don't think we can afford this," her dad said. "What was Father Michael thinking?"
He was waiting for them when they arrived, lanky and smiling despite his clerical collar. "Jean, Mr. and Mrs. Grey, I'd like for you to meet Professor Charles Xavier."
Jean got out of the car and looked up. She had imagined that a professor would be an old man, as old as her grandfather, but Professor Charles Xavier was young, not any older than Father Michael. He was tall and broadshouldered, like he skiied or did crew, with light blond hair that was thinning. He was wearing a navy suit, and his eyes were warm hazel.
He shook hands with her dad, then turned and opened the car door for her mother. Pleasantries and a reassuring manner. He looked like he taught at a prep school.
Then he looked at her. "And you must be Jean."
She thought that was pretty obvious. I must be, because there aren't any other kids here. "Yes," she said.
He smiled as though he'd heard her. "It's nice to meet you," he said. And I must be Charles Xavier, because there aren't any other telepathic teachers here.
Jean nearly laughed. He heard me!
He turned to close the car door. Of course I did. I'm a telepath, like you. "May I get your coat, Mrs. Grey?"
They went inside and had tea in the library. Jean could tell that her parents were impressed. They talked with the Professor and Father Michael about schools and curricula and accreditation and other things Jean didn't entirely understand. She understood, though, that her parents were liking it, that they were wanting more and more to send her here.
Jean settled back on the couch and watched, waiting for the Obi Wan Kenobi "You want to send your daughter to school here" moment. It didn't happen. It was all natural. Charm and money and reassurance. Offhanded comments about cutting edge degrees in genetics and a firm background in a traditional education. After a while she got up to look for the bathroom.
"Down the hall off the kitchen," the Professor said. "The door is open."
She didn't even wonder how he knew where she was going.
The bathroom was tiny and cramped, with pink and black tiles and a window that looked out on the back garden. If he was planning to have a school, he really needed a bigger bathroom. With, like, more than one stall.
The bushes were thorny outside. Jean thought they might be roses. In November the garden was bare and cold. She could see part of the drive, and what must be a really big garage. There was a sleek white sports car parked in front of it, and a pair of feet sticking out underneath. There was a tool box next to the feet.
Jean flushed and went back in the hall. It was all dense wood panels, Victorian and scary. Well, not really. The house just sort of felt sad, like a bunch of sad people had lived in it for a long time, and it needed something.
She opened the door beside the bathroom. Not like they'd notice if she was gone a few minutes.
The kitchen had a very high ceiling. It was white, with yellow curtains, and a short little old refrigerator from the 50's or something. The cabinets were all white, with white china put away behind glass panes. There was a stainless steel table and chairs that looked new, and a Mr. Coffee on the counter. Two white mugs and a stainless steel creamer were sitting in the sink. There was an outside door into the garden.
Jean opened it. There was a young poplar tree by the curve of the drive, and beds that must be full of flowers and herbs. It must be beautiful, when it wasn't caught, like the house, in the spell of winter.
She closed the door behind her and followed the drive around. The car was still there. Now the hood was up, and a man in black pants was bending over it. "Hello," she said. "I'm Jean."
He looked back over his shoulder. He was young too, but maybe not as young as the others. He had dark hair that was a bit longer and more fashionable, bright blue eyes, and hands black with motor oil.
"Hello," he said, and went back to tinkering under the hood.
"Who are you?" she asked.
Irritation. It will all change.
"You're a Jedi Knight too, aren't you?" Jean asked.
He looked around so swiftly he almost bumped his head on the hood. "A what?"
Jean shrugged. She wished she'd brought her sweater. "Like me."
He stood up, wiping his hands on a rag. She didn't know why she had thought he disliked her. He was looking at her as though he hadn't seen her properly before. "Yes," he said. "I'm Dr. Lehnsherr."
A thin, red haired girl with a leg brace, haunted dark eyes.... "Get out," he said firmly, "of my head. You'll learn that's not polite."
"I'm sorry," Jean said. "I don't really know how to control it. I just know things. It's not like I want to."
"Charles will teach you that," he said.
"Will he?"
He had decided something, something important. Jean could have tried to tell what, but he would know. "Yes," Dr. Lehnsherr said, "He will."
"Do you live here?" Jean asked.
He looked up at the house. "Here? For now. Usually I live in the City."
"Is that your car?"
"Would I be fixing a leak in the oil pan if it wasn't? Some sort of mystery mechanic who runs about fixing strangers' cars?"
Jean laughed. "Is that a Corvette?"
"Yes. And do you have enough questions?" He was smiling too. "Aren't you supposed to be having tea in the library?"
"I'd like a Firebird," she said.
"In about ten years?"
"Four and a half," Jean said. "I'll be twelve next summer."
When the war ended I was eleven and a half....
There was some shuddering hole of darkness there. Jean pulled away from it instinctively. For some reason it was easy to say the thing she feared. "Is he going to try to cure me?"
Dr. Lehnsherr closed the hood of the car. Then he turned to look at her. "No," he said. "Do you want to be cured?"
"No. But I wasn't sure it mattered what I wanted."
"It always matters, here. Charles will absolutely never do anything to your head or your powers that you do not want. He can teach you to control them yourself. But he's not going to do anything to you." He cocked his head to one side as if listening. "You have a precious gift. And Charles is wondering if you're going to come back to tea before your parents start wondering where you've gotten to."
"I should go back in, then."
"Yes."
"Are you coming?"
He shook his head. "I'm going to put the car away."
She went in then. In the library they were discussing tuition. Professor Xavier looked up at her and smiled as she settled back onto the couch. He continued, "I think we can certainly waive the tuition during this trial period. After all, we are not yet really open to the public, and there are, as yet, multiple accreditation questions we must comply with."
Father Michael cleared his throat. "Although I'm certain those will proceed with the facilitation of the diocese."
Jean's mom looked up. "Will this be a parochial school?"
"Not in the traditional sense, no," Professor Xavier said. "Although as you've seen the diocese has a certain interest."
"I'll be about frequently," Father Michael said. "I used to teach at St. Francis, you know."
"Will uniforms be required?"
Jean tuned out the rest.
Is this what you want? Professor Xavier asked.
Yes, Jean said.
Jean moved in on the first Monday of the new year. She hadn't really cared about finishing the semester in her old school, but her parents wanted her to. It made it seem more normal, somehow, like she was just going away to school instead of moving to New York into a gloomy old Victorian house with a mysterious young professor.
She thought they might change their minds when they were dropping her off, but they didn't. Which was good.
Her room was on the front of the house, looking out into the branches of an oak tree, and across the lawn. It had belonged to a girl before. The walls were papered in lavender wisteria, and the curtains were dark purple. There was a white four poster bed with a lavender comforter, and matching white dresser, chest, desk and chair. A bookcase fitted under the window, four or five clothbound books still on it. Jean picked one up. The Secret Garden. On the flyleaf someone had written "This book belongs to Cathy."
The Professor was standing in the doorway, looking uncertain.
"Cathy?" she asked.
"My sister," he said. "She lives in California now."
"This used to be her room?"
"Yes. But she's thirty-two now. She's married and has children of her own."
"Are you married?" Jean asked.
"No," he said.
Of course not, she thought. Jedi don't marry. For some reason the question made him uncomfortable.
The Professor cleared his throat. "Will you be all right?"
Jean nodded. "I think I just want to do some unpacking."
"Fine," he said. "We'll be down in the kitchen if you need anything."
She heard his footsteps going down the stairs. Jean put her clothes away in the dresser and closet, and took out the books she'd brought and put them on the bookcase with Cathy's. The Little White Horse. Splinter of the Mind's Eye. Forerunner Foray and Ice Crown by Andre Norton.
She went across the hall to the bathroom that had been Cathy's and put her soap and shampoo in the shower. There weren't any towels. She wondered if she should ask the Professor where they were.
Jean went out in the hall and stood at the top of the stairs. She could hear their voices faintly in the kitchen, the periodic sounds of the sink as they finished washing up, the Professor's strong baritone, and Dr. Lehnsherr's lighter tenor, the sound of the coffeemaker brewing. They were making coffee, to sit and drink it together.
Jean went downstairs. The Professor was putting the dishtowel away and Dr. Lehnsherr was getting out two mugs. "Hi," Jean said.
"Hi," the Professor said, awkwardly, like no one knew what to say.
"You don't know how to run a school," Jean said.
Dr. Lehnsherr started laughing. "You see, Charles? It took her all of three hours to figure that out!"
The Professor looked hurt. "I thought you wanted to come here."
"I do," Jean said. She reached for one of the mugs and held it out to Dr. Lehnsherr.
He poured the coffee. The Professor frowned. "It's decaf," Dr. Lehnsherr said.
"There have to be some ground rules around here," Jean said. "It's no good pretending this is a regular school. To start with, I'm the only kid here. You've never run a school before, and I've never gone to a school for Jedi Knights before. So we're all going to work this out."
She looked around for the cream pitcher. Bemused, Dr. Lehnsherr floated the stainless steel pitcher across the room to her. She took it out of the air. "So who's teaching what?"
The Professor cleared his throat. "Well, Erik...Dr. Lehnsherr...is teaching math and science, and I'm teaching literature and history."
Jean looked at him. "So you're teaching me how to use my powers and Dr. Lehnsherr is teaching me martial arts?"
Dr. Lehnsherr opened and closed his mouth.
"Certainly," said the Professor.
"Good," Jean said. "Karate?"
"What makes you think...." Dr. Lehnsherr began.
"She's a telepath, Erik," the Professor said.
"Yes." He got a third mug out and passed it to the Professor. "Well. We'll have to be careful at first, with your leg. And I'm not a Sensei. I'm not really qualified to teach."
Jean raised an eyebrow. "And the Professor is certified to teach sixth grade reading?"
Dr. Lehnsherr coughed. "She's got you there, Charles."
"We'll be reading the classics," the Professor said. "And discussing them. And writing papers. I thought perhaps Huckleberry Finn."
"They read that in ninth grade in my old school," Jean said helpfully.
"Yes, well," the Professor said, "You read above grade level, don't you? I'm certain I read Huckleberry Finn in sixth grade. Erik?"
Dr. Lehnsherr poured the coffee. "Don't ask me. I never went to sixth grade."
There was that hole again, the dark place she felt like a void in the Force. She flinched away from it.
Jean got up and handed Dr. Lehnsherr the cream. "I like science," she said. "What are we going to do?"
"Biology," said the Professor, "is the seventh grade state curriculum."
"Biology," said Dr. Lehnsherr, as though he were deciding on the spot. "This spring we will be studying plant biology."
"Outside in the garden?" Jean asked.
There must have been something in her voice, because he looked at her quickly. "If you like," he said. "There are things we could plant. And study."
"You don't know anything about plants," she said.
A potato sprouting in a jar on a windowsill, behind a window gray with grime. A city with shipyards and steel mills, a school for boys like him where he went every day, carrying his lunch in a tin pail. Walking along the railroad tracks, dancing on the rail, feeling the iron in his blood like a song, the iron under his feet. A ghetto in a city far from here, white dishtowels drying in the sun on the fire escape, a potato sprouting in a jar.
"No," he said. "I'm not a gardener."
"That's all right," Jean said. "I am."
That night she went to sleep in Cathy's room, listening to the sound of the wind in the bare branches outside. It was the first time in her life she hadn't been able to hear the city.
Jean could hear the faint popping of the radiator, the creaking of the floorboards as the Professor and Dr. Lehnsherr came up from downstairs. She heard their footsteps along the hall, the sound of one door opening and closing.
Tomorrow she would walk in the gardens. She would see what there was in those lifeless beds, left untended for years. If Mary Lennox could do it, so could she. There might be bulbs. There might be roses. She would coax them out to help her, like Colin waking from sickness. They would push the leaves away from the green points of crocus bulbs, cut away the dead wood from the roses. Jean fell asleep dreaming of springtime.
Two days later she sat in the library, facing the Professor across the desk. Her hands were sweating. It was warm in the library. Jean took off her sweater and put it on the back of the chair.
Don't be frightened, the Professor said in her mind.
I'm not, Jean thought.
The Professor opened his hands on the desktop. "When you refuse to acknowledge it, fear can rule you," he said. "Fear is what makes you lose control."
Jean bent her head. "Will I remember Annie dying?" she whispered.
"Probably not." She looked up. There was tremendous compassion in his hazel eyes. "It's common to lose the hours or even days around a head injury. The damage is usually permanent."
"I want to remember," Jean said. "Because it's important. And I don't want to remember. Because I'm afraid." Behind him, the lamp began to tremble on the bookcase. The Professor turned just in time to grab it before it fell.
"I'm sorry!" Jean gasped.
The Professor sat the lamp carefully on the floor. "It's all right," he said.
...A floor lamp falling, the bulb shattering against the floor, the shade rolling away, stopping beside the dying man's hand....
"Jean," the Professor said. "No."
"I'm sorry!" The table began to shake.
"Jean. Focus." He took her hands across the table. "Put your hands flat on the table. Concentrate on how the table feels."
She spread her palms under his, feeling the warmth of them above her hands, the smoothness of the table beneath them.
"Focus," he said. "On the table."
Grain and smoothness. Whorls of walnut, smoothed and planed.
"That's better." The Professor's voice was mild. "Focus."
The world stopped moving. Jean felt, for a moment, the breath that is held in the heart of every moment. "Be still," she whispered.
And the table stopped moving.
February 2 was cold and gray. At breakfast she told them that the groundhog would not see his shadow, and soon it would be spring.
The Professor looked over the paper. "You can check the Times tomorrow and see what the groundhog said."
"I will," Jean said, smearing more jam on her toast and going back to the lifestyle section.
Dr. Lehnsherr was reading the book section, because the Professor still had the front page. He was frowning a little.
"Dr. Lehnsherr," Jean asked, looking up from the paper, "What's the sexual revolution?"
He choked on his coffee. "Why do you want to know?" he asked.
Jean nodded at the paper. "I'm living right in the middle of it, the Times says. So I want to know what it is."
"It means that gender roles are changing, and that people are acknowledging that many of the rules we have are outdated and don't work for people in a post-industrial society."
"So people get divorced even though the Church says it's bad?"
"That's one example, yes."
"So I can be a scientist when I grow up? Even though I'm a girl?"
The Professor smiled gently. "Yes, Jean. You can be a scientist, or anything else you want."
"A Jedi Knight," she said.
The Professor looked confused. "What?"
"Yes," said Dr. Lehnsherr, putting down his coffee cup. "You are special. We are not like them, and their rules don't apply to us."
"Erik...." the Professor began.
Jean nodded. "We have different rules, harder rules. Because we can do things they can't. Because we have powers they don't understand. We answer to each other."
"Yes," he said. "We answer to each other." His eyes met the Professor's across the table.
"And the first rule is, never hurt another mutant," Jean said. "Never use your powers against one of us."
"That's a good rule," Dr. Lehnsherr said.
"Never use your powers to hurt them either," the Professor said. "They cannot understand. They may be afraid of us, or try to hurt us. But we are answerable to a higher standard."
"Because we're the Jedi," Jean said.
"Oh, Charles. You know that's not possible."
"It must be," the Professor said, and his eyes were glittering where they met Dr. Lehnsherr's.
"So you teach me to defend myself and then tell me not to use it?" Jean asked.
"I'm teaching you to control your powers so you don't hurt yourself or other people by accident. I'm not teaching you to fight," the Professor said, looking down at Jean.
"I am," Dr. Lehnsherr said.
"Erik...."
Luke Skywalker stood beside the landspeeder, looking out across the sands at the burning rubble that had been his home, ducked his head, throat tight with bile at the smell of the burning bodies that had belonged to the people who had raised him. He raised his head, and his eyes hardened.
"What happens when they kill your family?" Jean asked. "Can't we defend our friends?" She met the Professor's eyes. "Don't you want me to fight for you?"
"I can defend myself," he said gently. There was something fleeting in his eyes, some sorrow that was not for her.
"Not forever," Jean said. "I'll be grown and you'll be old. That's how the story goes."
"I do not want you to kill for me," he said.
"Then how about for herself?" Dr. Lehnsherr challenged. "She needs to be able to defend herself. The world's not sweetness and light, Charles."
"I know that," he snapped.
She looked at Dr. Lehnsherr. "I'm not afraid," she said.
He closed his eyes so she would not see the fear written there. "Jean. You will be."
As the weather warmed, they did karate in the conservatory, a broad space with wide windows that should have been full of plants. There were no plants, just sunshine.
She liked stretching in the sun, moving through the beginning exercises in the shadows cast by the window frames, feeling her leg becoming part of her again. By the time the apple blossoms fell like white rain on the lawn he was showing her some basic kicks. He was very gentle with her. She was not afraid to kick him hard.
Sometimes the Professor stood and watched in the doorway, a strange and wistful smile on his face.
Lost in the motion of the exercises, she could hear his thoughts like the wind in the trees outside. If you were ours, if you were our child.... He liked seeing the expression of quiet concentration on Erik's face.
Now, she said into his mind, meeting his eyes over her white sleeves, and they moved through the kick and block together, like a ballet, matched like dancers in the sunshine. They bowed, and the shadow of the window frames fell across her back, across his bent head.
"Come join us, Charles?" he asked, straightening.
"All right," the Professor said. He took off his socks and shoes. Jean had never seen him stretch and move before. He bowed quite precisely. She sat down, hugging her knees and drinking Gatorade, to watch.
The Professor wore a gray t-shirt and gray pants. He was taller and beautiful to watch, contrasting like a shadow, punch and block, pull and throw. They did not look away from each other. Dr. Lehnsherr was smiling, his eyes on Charles' face. Block and hold. They paused, inches apart, like a kiss.
The Professor's foot snaked behind Dr. Lehnsherr's knee, and he went down. Pull, and the Professor went with him. Roll, and he landed on his feet. They faced each other again. Dr. Lehnsherr's longer hair was in his eyes. The Professor's chest was heaving with breath.
Of course, Jean thought. We are the Jedi. Our world is different. We love differently.
They bowed, the Professor's light thin hair glittering in the sunshine.
Jean stood up. "I need a shower," she announced. "I'm nasty." She went upstairs and did not come down for an hour.
That afternoon she was sitting in the library, reading A Tale of Two Cities with the Professor. There was a spring thunderstorm coming, and she could see the clouds almost purple beyond the apple trees. Her mind was not on the point the Professor was making.
"Professor," she asked, "How long have you known Dr. Lehnsherr?"
He folded the book closed, his mind equally closed to her. "Nearly twenty years. Why do you ask?"
Her next question was in her eyes.
"Jean," he said. He looked out the windows at the clouds, the mourning doves pecking at the lawn below the trees. To lose all this now....
"I'm not leaving," she said. "It's ok."
The wind stirred the branches. If there was thunder, they couldn't hear it yet. It took him a moment to find his voice. "Thank you."
Jean shrugged. "Lysis and Alexias," she said.
He looked around sharply. "What?"
"Your books," she said. "You said I could read any books I wanted."
"The Last of the Wine is too hard a book for you."
"Not harder than A Tale of Two Cities," she said.
The Professor closed his eyes. "I see I've underestimated you."
Jean smiled. "Remember, I read above grade level."
He looked at her then. "Was I so perceptive at not quite twelve? I can hardly believe so."
"Girls mature faster than boys," Jean said.
"And you've had hard experiences," the Professor said.
Outside, the thunder rolled. The birds were flying away now. The apple branches bent in the invisible wind.
She asked what she had wanted to know since the day she came here. "Professor, if I had known...if I could do what I have the potential to do, could I have saved Annie?"
He would not lie to her, telepath to telepath, even if it hurt. "Yes," he said. "I believe you could have. You could have kept the car from rolling."
Jean nodded. "I thought so."
"You mustn't blame yourself."
"I don't," Jean said. "I didn't know."
"You didn't."
"It will never happen again," Jean said. "Never."
The first raindrops rattled against the windows. "No," the Professor agreed. "Never."
By the time the roses bloomed, the school year was almost over. In the garden plot they had cleared behind the house, Jean's zucchini were flowering too, and the snow peas were already bearing. She was weeding between the young tomato plants while Dr. Lehnsherr brought out her labelled flats of peppers. There were six kinds, started in three different soil mediums, carefully measured for growth habits and sprouting times. Jean had kept her lab notebook carefully. So far the pimentos in the potting soil were doing best.
"Where are these going?" Dr. Lehnsherr asked.
"Over there," Jean said. "The plant book says they need full sun. You promise to take care of them while I'm home for the summer?"
"I promise," he said.
He came over and put them down near her. He was wearing a white shirt, and he had rolled the sleeves up. She glanced sideways and saw. She looked away before he noticed. She looked back at the dirt. Her hands were covered with mud and there was dirt under her nails.
Dr. Lehnsherr reached between the tomatoes and started weeding. The sun was very warm.
She looked again. The numbers were there, blue and unfaded, against the skin of his forearm.
"What kind of tomatoes are these?" he asked, glancing at the stake she had written on. "14?"
"Bigger Boy started in peat moss," Jean said. People labelled like tomatoes, written down in a lab book.
"They're flowering," he said, touching one of the tomato blossoms carefully.
"I hope they set fruit before I leave," Jean said. "If the nights aren't too cold."
"There will still be fruit when you come back in the fall," he said. "The tomatoes should be ripe then. If you want to come back. You don't have to."
"I want to," Jean said. I read the Diary of Anne Frank, she thought, her mind closed the way the Professor had taught her. I could say that. And then what? That there are secrets still, below the skin? That I am happy here?
"Good," he said. "You don't want to go to a regular school? With other children?"
Jean shrugged. "There will be other kids here. Kids like me." She looked up. "I want to stay with you and the Professor. And see my tomatoes ripen."
He touched the blossom again, very gently. "That will be good," he said.
Jean was back at school the week before Labor Day. Dr. Lehnsherr had bought a microscope over the summer, and they spent the first few weeks looking at plants with it, an introduction to cellular biology.
Social Studies with the Professor was anthropology, and they were reading Margaret Meade and Coming of Age in Samoa. Which was appropriate. The second week in October she had to ask the Professor to take her to the grocery store. She wasn't sure which one of them was going to die of embarassment in the checkout line, her or him, buying a big bag of maxi pads.
The clerk was an elderly black lady who smiled at his discomfort. "Your little girl's growing up, huh?"
Jean stuffed it into a bag as fast as she could.
"She is," the Professor muttered, turning bright red.
Neither of them said a word the entire way home.
That night, as she lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and wondering if she felt like a different person, she heard them on the stairs, Dr. Lehnsherr's voice carrying in the quiet house, though he wasn't speaking loudly. "Well, Charles, what did you expect? If you really mean to have a house full of teenagers, you'll have to get used to it."
To it. To what? To seeing her as a grown up? Jean felt so old already. To seeing her as a woman in the world where they lived, without mothers or wives or daughters? Cathy hardly counted, away in California. She wondered if Dr. Lehnsherr had sisters. She wondered if they had died.
No, some part of her thought. He was always alone. The late life child. The favored son. The sum of their hopes and dreams, even in the ghetto.
And the Professor, what did he fear? What was this guilt that haunted his steps? Not the shadow of love.
They weren't going to bed. She heard them in the hall again.
"I'm coming," the Professor said softly.
"Let me get the new motherboard," Dr. Lehnsherr said. "I'm sick to death of the recognition code glitches."
"You're going to install that tonight?"
"Can you think of a better time?" Dr. Lehnsherr asked.
Jean heard the doors open and close, their footsteps on the stairs. She got up, pulled on jeans and a t-shirt, and followed them.
They had closed and locked the door leading down. It took a minute to open it. Dr. Lehnsherr had showed her how to turn the tumblers in locks with her telekinesis. It was a lock that was meant to keep normal people out.
The stairs were very narrow and there was another door at the bottom. It wasn't locked. Jean opened it very carefully into a broad metal corridor, all blue steel and recessed lights. There were three cross corridors, all with doors. At the end was a round door like an iris, standing open, bits of components spread around it.
Not a secret garden, a secret base. A secret base where the last of the Jedi hid their secrets.
Quietly, Jean slipped down the hall. She could hear their voices inside.
"It's not working," the Professor said.
She could see him now, sitting in a steel chair before a console, Dr. Lehnsherr kneeling beside him.
"Try it now," he said.
The Professor leaned down and lifted something into the air, something between a helmet and a crown. He set it on his head, bending his neck as though the weight were intense. Dr. Lehnsherr straightened a little beside him.
Down the narrow platform a row of lights went on. There was a deep bass humming that went through Jean's bones. She came closer.
Recessed lights darkened. It was a chamber like a planetarium, only the stars were not projected, but seemed rather to glow from the walls. The hum strengthened. The Professor's hands opened on the console. Dr. Lehnsherr waited, taunt, as though to stop something.
Lights everywhere. Stars like the Milky Way, whirling as though the seasons were sweeping by at impossible speed.
The Professor said one word: "Jean."
The stars died as he reached for the crown.
Dr. Lehnsherr stood suddenly, sweeping around. The Professor lifted the crown from his head. The hidden lights went on.
"What is that?" she asked.
"Cerebro," the Professor said.
They made coffee in the kitchen, even though it was late. It was hazelnut, and very good.
"What does it do?" Jean asked.
The Professor massaged his temples. "It amplifies telepathy." He looked tired.
"Where did it come from?" she asked.
Dr. Lehnsherr handed the Professor a cup of coffee. "We built it, Charles and I. We invented it."
"Why?"
The Professor took the cup, his fingers just brushing Dr. Lehnsherr's. "To see if we could."
"To find other people like us," Dr. Lehnsherr said.
"Like me," Jean said.
"Yes," the Professor said. "Like you. We thought, Erik and I, if we could find other people like us, we could bring them together. Train them. Help them learn to use their talents."
"To protect them," Dr. Lehnsherr said, "from people who want to hurt them because they're mutants."
"Does it work?" Jean asked.
"No," said Dr. Lehnsherr.
"Yes, " said the Professor.
They looked at each other.
"Yes," said Dr. Lehnsherr.
"No," said the Professor.
"You mean it kind of works," Jean said.
"Yes," said Dr. Lehnsherr. "It kind of works. It does something."
"It's not finished," the Professor said. "We're still working on it."
"It amplifies telepathy?" Jean asked.
"Yes," the Professor said.
"Like mine?"
"Yes," Dr. Lehnsherr said.
"Perhaps someday," the Professor said. "Right now it's much too dangerous for you to use." He rubbed his eyes. "It's hard for me, and I'm much more practiced than you are. It could hurt you very badly if you tried it. I want you to promise me you won't try it without me there, that you won't sneak down and try it."
Jean nodded. This was what one would expect of the Jedi. "Professor, I promise I won't try to use Cerebro without your permission." She looked at Dr. Lehnsherr and answered the question in his mind. "You don't have to ask me not to tell anyone. I know better than that."
The Professor met Dr. Lehnsherr's eyes. "Erik, she would have found out eventually."
"It's better for me to know the secrets and know what I'm not supposed to say rather than just guess," Jean said. "I'm your student. I know what that means."
Dr. Lehnsherr nodded shortly. "Very well. Then you can help."
The Professor didn't disagree. Her hands were small, and there were pieces that must not conduct.
It was February again. Snow had fallen, eight inches, thick and white. Jean went out to watch Dr. Lehnsherr make the snow shovel clear the drive. She absolutely couldn't resist popping him right behind the ear with a wet cold snowball. Telekinesis made throwing snowballs very accurate.
"Miss Grey, you are going to pay for that," he said, scooping up a handful of snow.
Jean grabbed another handful off a bush. "No, I'm not!"
He missed. She didn't.
The Professor opened the door as the snow shovel dumped over her head while she ran shrieking.
"Erik, what in the world are you doing?"
Dr. Lehnsherr was shaking snow off his scarf, laughing. They both stopped.
"What's wrong?" Jean asked.
The Professor looked tight-lipped. "You remember Ilene?"
Dr. Lehnsherr nodded.
"Then you remember her son, Henry. He's been beaten badly enough to be hospitalized. The school says they don't know who did it, and they don't believe what Henry says. Ilene is going to pull him out of Hedegate."
"Why?" Jean asked. "Who is he? Why did he get beaten up?"
"Because he's a mutant," the Professor said. "Ilene thought it would be okay. But it wasn't."
Dr. Lehnsherr looked away.
"Erik, she wants to know if we can take him."
Jean looked at Dr. Lehnsherr. It would be the end of the three of them, the introduction of an unstable molecule that changes the reaction. "Of course," he said. "You've decided, haven't you?"
"Can we do anything else?"
Dr. Lehnsherr shook his head. "Of course not. But I think you should ask Jean as well." He looked at her. "What do you think?"
This boy she didn't know, would he be mean or strange? Would he ruin everything? She didn't even know how old he was. "I think we should take him," she said.
Henry McCoy arrived on March 1st. He was a stocky, solid boy with untidy brown hair that drooped over his round face. The bruises around his eyes were fading to yellow.
They all stood in the entrance hall, the Professor, Dr. Lehnsherr, Jean, Henry, and his mother.
His mother was blonde and very fashionably dressed, like the women Jean's mom had always envied. She looked around the entrance hall critically. "I see you haven't changed much yet. It looks the same as ever. Just like you, Charles."
The Professor shrugged, though it didn't come easily. All the smoothness he'd shown with Jean's parents seemed to be absent now. "We're not really ready for students yet. I told you we were still remodeling, Ilene."
"I thought you had one student already," she said.
"Just me," Jean said.
Henry was watching her closely.
Dr. Lehnsherr was trying to be inconspicuous, but it wasn't working. Ilene McCoy looked at him. "And Erik. How are you?"
"Fine." Dr. Lehnsherr apparently decided something. He stepped out of the corner and took her hand. "The years have been more than kind to you." There was something vaguely European about the way he bent over her hand, just a shade of flirtation.
The Professor looked round. "Jean, why don't you show Henry around while we talk about business?"
That was an order and a dismissal, so she looked at the boy. "Sure. Let me show you the library."
Thank you, the Professor said in her mind. He meant it.
He followed her down the hall and into the library. Books lined the walls, but there was a new computer on the desk in the corner, a small color television hooked up to its processor. She closed the door.
"So what's the deal?" he asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Are you a mutant too?"
Jean raised her chin. "Yeah. Just like you."
He ran his hand over the smooth wood back of the couch. "How old are you?"
"Twelve," Jean said. "I'll be thirteen in June."
"I'll be fourteen in September," he said. "What do you do?"
"I'm a telepath," Jean said. There wasn't any point lying. He would know what she could do soon. "And a telekinetic. What do you do?"
"This," he said, and pushed the couch five inches forward with one finger.
It was a heavy couch. "And you got beat up?" Jean said.
"There were nine of them, and they were upperclassmen." Henry shrugged. "Call me Hank. I hate Henry."
"Ok."
He looked around. "So how did you come here?"
"Father Michael Cassidy -- you'll meet him, he comes around sometimes -- knows my parents and knows the Professor. How about you?"
Hank shrugged. He was looking at the computer. "My mom used to date Professor Xavier. Back in the dark ages."
"Date?" Jean squeaked. Then she shut her mouth. She hadn't meant to squeak.
Hank looked up. "Date. As in go out. As in went to the prom in a poofy dress."
"That must have been a long time ago," Jean said.
"Duh. I'm thirteen. And my parents have been married for seventeen years. So sometime before that."
"They really went to the prom?"
"I've seen the pictures," Hank assured her. "It was pretty grim." His eyes went past the computer to the paperback copy of Han Solo at Stars End lying by the computer. "Hey, you like Star Wars?"
"Yeah," Jean said.
"I've seen Star Wars 39 times," Hank said.
It changed things, but not badly. Hank was a year ahead of her in school, so he'd already had a lot of things she was learning. His math was two years ahead of hers, because he'd been GT. So they had separate classes a lot, one of them with the Professor and one of them with Dr. Lehnsherr. Hank did math while she did english, and then they traded. In the afternoon they had science together because Jean was already doing Physical Science since Dr. Lehnsherr had covered the whole seventh grade book in the fall. Then they ended with Social Studies and went into the conservatory to do karate.
Hank thought it was dumb until Jean threw him.
Dr. Lehnsherr didn't laugh. "Strength isn't everything," he said. "Jean hasn't a quarter of your natural strength, but she's learned ways of handling people much stronger than she is. If you learn well, with your natural potential, I doubt there's anyone in the world who could best you."
Hank picked himself up. "It's ten anyones I'm worried about." The bruises had faded by now.
"Two years from now ten anyones will be very sorry," Dr. Lehnsherr said. "Let's begin at the beginning."
She watched them in the spring sunlight, moving through the beginning drills. The Professor came in and stood beside her.
Hank was quick, but uncertain still, hair falling over his glasses, mouth set. Dr. Lehnsherr was going very slowly, giving Hank time to follow, the sunlight glinting off the first threads of gray in his hair. The Professor sighed.
"Did you really date Hank's mother?" Jean asked quietly.
The Professor looked startled. "He told you that?"
"Duh," said Jean.
"Yes, I did. A very long time ago."
"Does she know?" Jean asked.
"She must guess. I doubt very much that she wants to know. She introduced me to Erik in college. He was dating a friend of hers."
Jean leaned back against the Professor's shoulder. "I won't tell him. Unless he asks me. He's a guy. He could be funny about it."
"Jean. I'm sorry this is a burden for you."
Jean looked up at him. "Don't be stupid. I love you. Both of you."
The Professor looked away and there were tears in his eyes. "Jean...."
"All right, Jean. It's your turn," Dr. Lehnsherr said. "Let's show Hank what he can look forward to."
She gave the Professor a quick smile and walked out across the floor, bowed in the streaming sun, and lost herself in the dance.
Star Wars was re-released on May 25. It was a year until the new Star Wars movie would come out, but they were re-releasing the first one because school would be out soon. Jean went with Hank. The Professor and Dr. Lehnsherr dropped them at the theater and then went to go have a late lunch with friends.
Jean wondered if it counted as a date. It was with a guy. Alone. Not that she and Hank were that way at all.
They split a giant popcorn with extra butter and a package of milk duds. Hank had 7-up and she had Coke. They whispered half the lines to each other in unison with the screen, and yelled and screamed when the Death Star blew up. He didn't try to hold her hand or anything. She guessed it wasn't a date. That was ok. Hank wasn't much like Luke Skywalker.
"More like Chewie," she said.
"Huh?" said Hank.
"You remind me of Chewie," she said.
Hank grinned. "Thanks. I think Chewie is the coolest."
They waited on the curb to be picked up. "Where are they?" Jean asked. "They were just going to have lunch."
"Probably a two-martini lunch," Hank said. He came from a world where people did that.
"They'd never drink if they were going to drive with us in the car," Jean said. Thinking about it made her feel kind of sick.
"Then they're probably arguing about which one of them gets to have the martini," Hank said.
"I don't think Jedi Knights drink martinis," Jean said.
Hank looked up at her, a serious expression on his face. "Is that what we are? The last of the Jedi Knights?"
"No," Jean said. "You and me, we're the first of the Jedi Knights."
"That's cool," said Hank.
"Yeah." Jean stretched her legs out in front of her on the curb. The day school ended she would be thirteen. Two years was a very long time.
"Best friends?" said Hank.
"Best friends," she said.
The car pulled up. The Professor and Dr. Lehnsherr looked relaxed, like they'd had a good time. And nobody had been drinking. "Come on, Hank. Let's go home."