Fic: Chase Your Shadow, X-Men Movieverse, Ororo, Emma, Mystique, Charles/Erik, Callisto, Jean
Title: Chase Your Shadow
Author:
lilacsigil
For: xmmficathon
Summary: The Phoenix is destruction and healing all in one: Ororo has witnessed only the destruction.
Recipient:
andraste/andrastewhite
Request Used: 1. Charles and Erik or Charles/Erik, time travel. First Class characters going forwards, trilogy era characters going backwards, it's all good with me as long as it has Charles and Erik and time travel shenanigans; and
2. Storm, post-X3, running the team and the school
Rating: Teen
Characters: Ororo, Emma, Mystique, Charles/Erik, Callisto, Jean
Spoilers: X2, X3, XMFC
Wordcount: 8500
Notes: Thanks to Renata_kedavra and
st_aurafina for beta reading this.
Mystique was the last person Ororo had expected to ever speak with again. Mystique calling her up and asking for help was even stranger.
"Even Irene can't help Rogue. There's too many personalities in there, and all we can handle is damage control."
"And why, exactly, did you take Rogue in? Were you hoping to turn her to your side, after all you've done to her?"
Mystique laughed. "There are no sides, anymore. You and Charles won. No, I tried to help Rogue because Irene said it was important."
Ororo was rapidly getting a headache, as she often did at the end of a day running this madhouse of a school - she was fairly sure that she was going to develop a nice little vertical line between her eyebrows very soon, the same as the Professor had had. "Fine. We'll come to Mississippi and see what we can do."
Logan had proven surprisingly good at keeping the most damaged of the kids - including those who had manifested their powers very young - busy and productive, but he seemed to have the idea that students who could fend for themselves, should. This involved a lot of teenage students being allowed to climb trees, teach themselves to drive, play unsupervised in the pool and re-enact the greatest battles of the X-Men on the lawn, complete with powers. After the fourth broken limb and sixth concussion, Ororo had finally given up and called her old enemy Emma Frost. She might well be evil with a tendence to possess Ororo and go swanning around in her body, but at least she had a degree in Education and a knack for keeping teenagers in line.
"You're flying off in the jet again?" Emma asked, wandering into Ororo's office - and her mind - without knocking. "We've got midterm exams scheduled, so make sure you don't take any of the eleventh or twelfth graders. I'm sure they'll be extremely eager to go."
Ororo put her head down on the desk. "Emma, there's too many of them. There's more and more kids, and not enough adults. I don't understand how Charles did this by himself."
Perching on the edge of the desk, Emma shook her head sadly, and patted Ororo's hair. "If you'd let me, I'd telepathically control every last one of them."
"No, no, I don't think so. We had an agreement."
"Not to take over anyone's body if they're underage, or yours in school hours? Good point. Besides, teenagers are so -" Emma shuddered "- squishy. You don't want to know what it's like inside their minds, let alone their bodies. I'm surprised Professor Xavier didn't make a break for it twenty years ago."
Ororo let Emma keep massaging her aching skull. For an arch-nemesis, Emma was very soothing, sometimes. "Some of the students who were shot with the Cure - their powers are returning strangely, and it's a lot to deal with."
"You mean Anole? I think he looks rather dashing all lop-sided." Anole, the president of the school's Gay-Straight-Mutant-Human Alliance, had lost his lizard form when he was hit with the Cure while fighting with Magneto at Alcatraz.
Most of Magneto's soldiers had been underage. Ororo had managed to negotiate their release to the school rather than to prison. The government must be aware that the Cure wasn't permanent by now, but they hadn't contacted her. She rather suspected that the government wanted to forget about the problem of underage terrorist mutants altogether. Unfortunately, that meant that Ororo was now in charge of not just ninety-six mutant teenagers, but thirty-one of whom had their powers returning, unpredictably and sometimes explosively. In Anole's case, he had regained his scales and ability to stick to walls, but his right arm had suddenly grown to twice the size of his other arm and developed enormous claws. He'd been very upset until Emma had taken him to New York to acquire a new wardrobe.
"I wish they were all as straightforward as Anole! The children who were given the Cure in those clinics don't seem to be getting their powers back at all." This morning alone Ororo had dealt with three bouts of tears and one defiant kid who didn't want his powers anyway, as long as he didn't have to go home.
"Maybe there was something different about the weaponised version? I wish Henry had time to work on it."
There was a loud noise from outside and a tall blond boy went flying past at high speed, his lower half blasting energy. Ororo looked up from the desk and she and Emma watched Sam go hurtling into the trees. Bobby Drake went running across the lawn after him, waving his arms and yelling.
"Should I take Bobby with me to Mississippi?" Ororo asked, her voice weary. "At least he tries to prevent serious injuries to other students."
"Oh, all right. He's probably the only student silly enough to do his midterms anyway. And seeing him should throw Rogue off-balance for long enough for you to take her down."
Ororo sighed again. "You didn't mean 'talk her down', by any chance?"
"Do you even know me?"
---
Mystique had promised that there was somewhere to land the jet, and she was right: a field lay fallow in the late autumn, and Bobby carefully brought the jet down.
"Good landing," Ororo told him.
"Any landing you can walk away from!"
They'd decided not to go in uniform so as not to startle Rogue if she had an old personality in place - Rogue-Magneto and Rogue-Logan had never responded well to the black leather - but as Ororo and Bobby walked down the ramp of the Blackbird, Rogue greeted them with a sharp salute.
"Ma'am. Sir." Rogue's voice was almost unrecognisable, and her upright posture completely different from her usual self-contained slouch.
"Rogue? Do you recognise us?" Bobby was the first to approach her, but Ororo was pleased to see that, even confronted with his former girlfriend, he kept a cautious distance.
Rogue maintained her rigid stance, but her face clouded in confusion. "No, sir. I am aware that my, uh, consciousness is currently contained inside the mutant known as Rogue, but I'm afraid that my access to her memories is intermittent at best." She blinked. "Bobby?"
"I guess that's intermittent memory for you," Bobby joked.
Rogue gestured for them to come over to the small house half-hidden behind a row of trees. "I should invite you in. Please, this way."
Ororo fell in step beside Rogue - though she had never seen Rogue move this briskly in her life - as they walked from the field to the house. "If you're a consciousness contained inside Rogue, what's your name? When did you end up in there?"
"Lieutenant Carol Danvers, US Air Force. Some months ago, I was transporting Ms- I mean, Mystique from a Congressional hearing and we were intercepted by Rogue, who wished to speak to Mystique." Rogue-Carol frowned. "I don't think it was deliberate, but her hand came in contact with mine - Mystique tells me that Rogue took the Cure not long after that. I have no memory of the time between then and yesterday."
An unfamiliar female voice came from the doorway of the house. "Don't worry. The original Carol Danvers is unhurt, and we're taking good care of this one. Honestly, she's by far the most co-operative."
"The Air Force trains us to be ready for anything, Ma'am." Rogue-Carol stepped politely to the side and performed introductions. "This is Destiny."
Ororo had spoken to Destiny - Ororo wasn't sure whether this was a code-name or not - several times in the past, but they'd never met in person. She turned out to be a small white woman who looked to be in her late sixties. She wore dark glasses and didn't look directly at Ororo, though it was impossible to tell whether this was because she was blind, or whether her mutant power of viewing the future made it preferable for her to cover her eyes and avert her gaze.
Rogue-Carol led them into the house through the front door, which had a large hole where someone had punched it, now patched with plywood. Mystique - in the pale-skinned, dark haired female form they'd seen her last - brought them some sweet tea in the living room and they all sat on the ugly orange and brown sofas.
"Rogue's power is returning, then?" Bobby asked, politely sipping his tea, but making a face as if he expected to be poisoned at any second.
"No, we don't think so. Mine is, but slowly." Mystique pushed her hair back from her face and Ororo could see iridescent blue scales along her hairline. "I can't change form yet."
"So if it's not Rogue's power, what's going on?"
"All her previous personalities are reappearing. Sometimes it's just one, and sometimes it's an unpleasant combination of, say, Pyro and Wolverine. You saw the front door."
"I'm doing my best, ma'am," Rogue-Carol said, "But I have to sleep eventually."
Destiny leaned forward and Ororo looked at her more closely. She looked ill, her face pale and drawn, her hands holding the cup to still their shaking. "My theory is that Rogue's power kept the remnant personalities in check, but the Cure got rid of her powers without removing the effects of their previous use."
Bobby agreed. "That makes sense. There's been a few mutants with problems along those lines - they've lost an exoskeleton without growing enough of a regular skeleton to support themselves. They're mostly recovering, though."
"Wait," Ororo snapped. "You said it's your 'theory'. You don't have theories. You can see timelines!"
Mystique rested a hand on Destiny's shoulder. "Irene's power isn't working properly at the moment."
Destiny shook off the hand. "Rubbish. There's nothing wrong with my power: there's something wrong with the time stream. I can't see the future when the past is shifting."
Rogue-Carol poured Destiny more tea. "I've never met a time-travelling mutant myself, ma'am, but we've been briefed on the possibility. There could be one out there messing things up."
"No. I've seen people who could slow time, or reverse it briefly, but it was always a very localised effect. This is much bigger. It affects so many people - including Rogue, Mystique and you, Ororo."
"Not me?" Bobby asked.
"Peripherally, yes."
"We should bring you all to the school," Ororo decided. "Emma might be able to help Rogue, and we can try to work out what's affecting Destiny."
"No." Mystique's voice was flat. "I'm not going back there."
Biting back the comment that she'd had no trouble impersonating Bobby and infiltrating the place, Ororo instead said, "Charles is dead, Mystique. You have nothing to fear."
Mystique laughed. "You thought I was afraid? Ororo, I was never afraid of Charles. He simply helped me understand that the school and our home was his, not mine. I found the best way to live with that. No, I'll stay here with Irene. Rogue will go with you."
---
"Rogue's mind is unnecessarily complex," Emma huffed. "I could drag the other psychic imprints out, kicking and screaming, but Rogue's own personality has taken on a little bit of each of them. It's going to take some time to detach the imprints themselves from the imprints' effects, which are part of Rogue."
"So no sign of her actual power returning?" Ororo was uncomfortable being in the infirmary. Her brain knew that it was underground and always started giving her trouble the moment she walked in. She'd much preferred it when the infirmary was in the old ballroom, even though this was obviously safer.
"Not enough to detect." Emma picked up Rogue's bare hand and held it. Nothing happened.
"Are you done, Ms Frost?" Rogue-Carol was still in charge, but her blackouts were getting longer. "If so, I think you should restrain me now."
"You are restrained, sweetie. Try to hurt anyone or cross the fence and your brain will short-circuit."
Rogue-Carol sat up. "Well, uh, thank you, ma'am."
"Can you remember where your room was? We haven't put anyone else in there, yet." Ororo didn't mention that it was next on the list for a clean-out.
"Yes, ma'am!" She jumped up and walked briskly out the doors.
Emma spoke quietly. "Something odd is going on. I don't want to go running to Destiny's explanation - everyone sees things through the lens of their own power - but I looked through the records to see which personalities I might find in Rogue's brain. The most recent one I could find in her mind was young Mr Allerdyce."
"No, she's definitely borrowed powers from others since then. We were practising it in training - she's touched Piotr and Kitty, at least."
"That's what I mean. And the scar that the Cure leaves? I couldn't find it on her arm, though Carol tells me it was on her left upper arm, standard procedure."
"Cecilia's coming down tomorrow - she can take a blood sample, maybe. We really need a full-time doctor here again."
A loud thump came from upstairs. "Oh dear, it seems Rogue is testing her restraints already. Come along, Ororo."
Ororo made a face at Emma's back, feeling utterly childish but nonetheless quite satisfied.
Rogue had collapsed on the stair landing, and there were a dozen students standing around her.
"We were just calling you, Ms Munroe!" some of them said, but Ororo was unimpressed.
"Where's your training? Someone collapses, and you all stand around gawking? You, Jimmy, tell me what you should have done."
"Checked they were in no immediate danger, then run to find an adult," Leech replied, looking ashamed. "But it's okay. I'm here, so nothing's going to happen!"
Logan stomped down the stairs, withered little Ernst on one shoulder. "Nothing to do with mutant powers, you mean. What if someone's programmed her to jump up and strangle you? Get out of here, kids." He passed Ernst over to Artie, and crouched down beside Rogue.
"This your doing, Frost?"
"She didn't try to hurt anyone or run, so no. Not me."
Rogue groaned and opened her eyes. "Logan! Hey!" Her voice sounded like her own, soft and Southern, and she immediately tucked her bare hands behind her, a reflex that Rogue-Carol hadn't had.
"What happened, Marie? Good to see you."
"Last thing I remember, I was in California? Then I was here on the stairs. I walked past Leech and I guess I keeled right over."
"What were you doing in California?" Ororo asked in some confusion. "We brought you here from Mississippi, where Mystique and Destiny were taking care of you."
Rogue wobbled to her feet, careful not to flail with her bare hands where she might touch someone. "Yeah, well, I don't know about that. I guess she must have been watching me while I was watching Magneto."
"You found him?" Emma looked both surprised and affronted. "Cerebro couldn't."
"Maybe you're not as great a telepath as you think you are."
"Or maybe his mutation was suppressed at the time we looked," Ororo stepped in quickly to avoid more antagonism.
Rogue took a breath and stepped away from the argument. "While I've been away from the school, I've been checking on other mutants who took the Cure, see how they're doing. Anyway, Magneto's power is coming right on back to him. I saw Arclight, too - she's staying with him in some old guy's basement."
Even Emma looked surprised at that. "She's supposed to be dead."
"She made me a coffee. Pretty good coffee for a dead girl."
Ororo frowned. "Do you think he attacked you? Set off the personality fragments in your mind?"
Rogue shrugged.
"The last thing she remembers is getting on a bus for Los Angeles," Emma said, helpfully, ignoring Rogue's death glare. "That was at least six hours after she met with Magneto, and to my knowledge he can't use his powers on time delay."
"Thanks for digging in my head without asking," Rogue muttered.
"Any time, darling."
Ororo made her decision. "All right. Tomorrow we go to San Francisco. Logan, if I take Emma will you be all right looking after the kids?"
Logan just grinned.
---
From Rogue's information, it was a simple matter to find the house where Magneto and Arclight were staying. It was a modest house in an expensive neighbourhood not far from the Bay, with a separate basement apartment built into the steep hill.
It was a shock when Callisto opened the door. Ororo didn't recognise her for a moment without the facial tattoos or piercings, but she certainly recognised Ororo.
"Oh shit!" she yelled. "It's the mutie cops!"
"Wait! We're here to talk to Magneto. And aren't you supposed to be dead?"
Quill peered around the doorframe, also missing his tattoo. "There's a lot of that going around these days. Welcome to our humble abode. Don't make too much noise - the old Jewish guy who owns the place has a lot of naps, and Magneto gets pissy if we disturb his friend's sleep."
Callisto snarled, but stood away from the door, allowing Ororo and Emma inside. The walls were covered in maps of Alcatraz and the surrounding coastline, overlapping lines drawn in with thick black marker and push pins scattered around it, concentrated on the island itself.
"High tech," Emma commented, though Ororo was fairly sure that she was covering up her surprise at seeing Doctor Kavita Rao - the lead researcher on the Cure - standing in the small kitchen. Arclight was with her, but there was no sign of Magneto.
*She's not being held hostage,* Emma communicated to Ororo. *She's very confused to be alive, though.*
Ororo kept her voice calm and level, and one eye on Callisto, who was still swearing under her breath and pacing. "Hello, Doctor Rao. I must say that you're keeping odd company these days."
Doctor Rao wasn't wearing her glasses, and she seemed slightly dazed. "We all woke up on Alcatraz, and Magneto found us. I'm officially dead, it seems, and that makes life rather complicated."
"We've had some interesting political discussions since yesterday," Callisto muttered.
Quill was more cheerful. "Doctor Rao doesn't want to cure mutants anymore."
"That's not exactly what I said. I agreed with you that I had not thought through the political and personal implications of my scientific work."
"Yeah, heard it before." Arclight leaned on the kitchen bench. "So what do you want, X-Men?"
"Rogue came to visit you, then had problems with her power. We wanted to know what happened."
Arclight looked genuinely surprised to hear this, quite a change from her usual surly expression. "She was fine when she left here. Still under the Cure, though. And Magneto didn't find these guys until after that."
Emma took a seat on a rickety vinyl-cushioned chair, as poised as if she were in her own office. "Were any of you dosed with the Cure?"
"Nope." Quill took the seat opposite hers. "Me and Arclight and Psylocke got kind of dissolved. We could see the hall dissolving and we tried to run but it was too late. Doctor Rao was already dead - I killed her a few minutes before whatever it was got us. Psylocke was there when we woke up but she's gone off on her own."
Callisto stopped pacing for a moment. "I was out in the courtyard trying not to die of electrocution." She glared at Ororo, who glared in return. "I saw the same thing, and it was taking out soldiers, too. It was taking out everyone and everything."
"I think it was that Phoenix chick." Arclight was staying close to Doctor Rao, who looked rather disturbed by Quill's unruffled tone. "I saw her standing up there."
"Jean is dead," Emma replied bluntly.
Ororo sighed, and explained in more detail. "Wolverine killed her to stop her destroying everything. As far as we knew, anyone who was within four hundred yards of her was disintegrated. Those who survived - Magneto and Pyro and Juggernaut - were simply further away."
Emma telepathically alerted Ororo a moment before the door opened.
"Good morning, everyone," Magneto said, his voice as commanding as ever. "I've brought us another guest."
A small, skinny Samoan man followed him in, smiling shyly.
"Phat!" the others chorused in delight, and both Callisto and Quill hugged him.
Magneto turned his magnanimous smile on Ororo and Emma. "How nice to see you both. Rogue assured me that she was not reporting to you, but I'm sure you have your ways and means."
Ororo thought for a moment that Magneto should look diminished, in a plain shirt and pants, with a hat and jacket, any old man out on a sunny day in San Francisco, but he didn't, at all. Instead, he seemed like something who had put on the skin of a harmless old man, but could leap out at any moment, all teeth and claws. The basement apartment was suddenly feeling crowded and airless, and there was someone in the way of either of the exits.
*Don't be dramatic,* Emma snapped. *You X-Men have built Erik up to be some kind of god, and he's never been that.*
"Yes, Emma, my powers are returning: I can tell that you're speaking telepathically. Would you mind sharing your conversation with the rest of us?"
"How's the scar where Hank got you with those Cure syringes?" Ororo asked, suddenly.
Magneto undid the top two buttons of his shirt and showed her the unmarked skin there. "Better than ever. Strange things are happening at Alcatraz, as I'm sure you're aware by now."
"How did you know to go there?" Emma asked, staring at her fingernails as if they were the most interesting thing in the world.
Removing his hat and hanging it by the door, Magneto strolled over to the kitchen. "Arclight, my dear, you haven't offered our guests a drink."
"We've got coffee, tea or soda," Arclight snapped.
Emma smiled at her. "A glass of water would be lovely, and I'm sure Ororo would enjoy the same. Erik, you're avoiding the question."
"I'm not avoiding anything, Ms Frost. I'm assessing what information you yourself might have, and if it would be useful for us to exchange information."
Ororo sipped from the glass that Arclight had shoved into her hand. "You're here on the ground - I think you'll have more to offer than we do. All I can tell you is that after Rogue visited you, her absorbed personalities have been re-emerging, very strongly. And yet her power had not."
"Fortunately, the parts of you that she absorbed haven't surfaced often," Emma added.
"I'm so disappointed to hear that," Magneto's expression remained pleasant. "As for Alcatraz, if you want to keep your government friends onside, you probably shouldn't be going there. Since human soldiers started coming back to life, the island has been flooded with military personnel. Callisto and I barely managed to get Doctor Rao out yesterday."
"I suppose you think she's going to be useful to you. So how did you rescue people from Alcatraz?" Ororo asked suspiciously.
"The bridge still rests on the island, and I have my ways with metal. Callisto tells me when a mutant appears there and I can find them and bring them to safety. It took me three days to find a safe way to get Phat off the island - that's when I ran into Doctor Rao." He tilted his head towards Ororo. "I don't believe any of your team was lost. Jean was always very specific with her fits of destructiveness, wasn't she?"
Ororo leaned forward. "If everyone's coming back, have you seen her? Is Jean alive, too?"
Magneto suddenly he did look his age. "No. Everyone else is revivifying in reverse order: what was destroyed last appeared first. Jean should have been there from the very start, but there's no sign of her."
"Right, then. You need to take us to Alcatraz, Erik, so I can scan for her, or any other mutants you haven't been able to find." Emma sounded so determined that Ororo was up and halfway to the door before she looked over at Magneto.
He looked sour. "I had Psylocke try, before she left. She found nothing."
"I'm better than her."
Magneto nodded. "Well then, Ms Frost, please come with me."
---
Alcatraz was a hive of activity, as it had been last time the X-Men arrived, though at least now there was no battle, no children being held captive for medical experiments, no guerrilla force of disaffected young mutants. The army was everywhere, taking readings and cordoning off areas in regular blocks, search teams on their hands and knees going over each area, though Ororo had no idea what, exactly, they were hoping to find.
Magneto had floated them up to the underside of the bridge, and they sat comfortably on a girder out of sight of the men and women on the island. Magneto pointed over to their right, where a man in an army uniform suddenly coalesced out of thin air about three feet off the ground, and crashed to the dirt. A woman holding some kind of instrument yelled out, but others had already seen him and were racing over with a first aid kit in hand.
"The mutants appeared first," Magneto said, "And now the staff and soldiers, one by one."
Emma touched her forehead. "No time has passed for that man from the moment he was dissolved. And I can't find any trace of Jean's mind."
Ororo put her hand on Emma's arm. "Can you search their memories? See if any of them saw Jean, or if she's affected them."
"Of course. It shouldn't take too long - military minds are trained to be neat, and anything out of place shows up quickly." She turned to face the island, her face calm in concentration. She'd told Ororo that it was important to be serene because too much focus might give her wrinkles.
"You said people were appearing in reverse order," Ororo told Magneto. "Then why the mutants first, then the soldiers? That's not how it happened."
"I've told you all I know, my dear."
"You lost the right to call me that a long time ago."
Emma blinked and was with them again. "No-one's seen Jean and there's no sign of Jean's telepathy wiping their minds. Not that she was ever much good at that, not even with Cerebro."
Magneto stared out over the bay. "Jean had a lot of difficulty beginning to use her telepathy. Charles shut it down for many years because it was so damaging to her - she'd borrow other people's minds wholesale, neglecting her own."
"I remember." Ororo couldn't work out if he was trying to win her over with reminiscences.
"Once her telepathy started to creep back, Charles started her off in Cerebro, where everything was clearly defined, mutant or human, yes or no. She could look without touching."
"You're right," Emma said, suddenly. "Mutants are easy to see in Cerebro. Humans are not. She found the mutants first because that's how she was trained to use her powers, when they were at low ebb."
Ororo couldn't help smiling. "So if Jean had burnt herself out and was coming back, slowly and weakly, that's who she'd see first."
"She brought herself to life once," Magneto added. "I can see no reason why she couldn't do the same with others. Doctor Rao and Phat weren't killed by Jean - they died in the fighting before Jean started dissolving the island."
"But their bodies were dissolved along with everyone else." Ororo had put her hand on Magneto's shoulder without realising; she pulled her hand away, but her excitement didn't dim. "She went with your Brotherhood for a while - did she dissolve anyone then?"
"No, no-one. The last person before Alcatraz would have been, was, Charles." Magneto didn't look up, as if this was too much to hope.
"Come on," Emma said with unusual gentleness. "We have to get to Annandale-on-Hudson. And yes, Erik, you're welcome to tag along."
---
Logan called them twice on their way to New York State: more kids were getting their powers back, and this time it included children who had been given the Cure in clinics, not only those who had been shot with the weaponised version.
"Yeah, we've lost the roof on the East Wing and all but two of the windows," Logan reported, laconically.
"All but two of the windows in the East Wing?" Ororo put the plane on autopilot and rubbed at her incipient headache again.
"Nah, all but two of the windows in the house. You ever think of teaching some of these kids to be glaziers? 'You broke it, you fix it', yeah?"
"You can start the older ones cleaning up the glass, at least. Start with the ones who have invulnerable skin."
"Rogue's got a crew of 'em on that. Her powers are on the way, too, and she reckons she's getting better control over the old personalities. She's good. Hovering three feet in the air, but she's good."
"Thank you, Logan. Please ask Rogue not to fly any higher in case her powers cut out again?"
"I've got something," Emma called from the rear of the plane, where she'd been talking to Doctor Reyes on the phone. "Well, to be honest, Cecilia has. But why let her take the credit?"
"What is it, Emma?"
"Yes, do tell us." Magneto and Callisto had seats exactly where he and Mystique had sat last time they'd been here. Ororo glared at them, on principle.
"Cecilia's been looking at the medical records of the students who were injected with the Cure at clinics, and those who were attacked with it. It seems that the weaponised version was made after the original version, and the students whose records she can track all received the same batch of the Cure. All of the students who she can determine received an earlier batch? Their powers aren't returning yet."
"Jean's rolling back the existence of the Cure," Magneto whispered, with awe and something that sounded suspiciously like pride.
Ororo shivered. The bigger the things Jean had done, the less Jean she had become. This sounded huge.
They landed the Blackbird on an airfield outside the small college town, and Emma, with practised ease, replaced everyone's memories with that of a small private jet. Before Ororo could protest, Magneto brought them a car from the parking lot, and by then it seemed ridiculous to argue about it. They drove on to Jean's childhood home, and as they approached, Ororo understood why Magneto had stepped aside for Emma to drive.
Ororo felt she'd been punched breathless, seeing that street again, the small house where Charles had died, and a glance at Magneto showed he felt the same, his horror too great to hide behind his usual smug mask of indifference. Callisto and Emma shared no such visceral memory and instead calmly observed their surroundings. Ororo blinked away tears and thought for a moment that nothing was wrong in the quiet suburban street, until she suddenly realised that the plants were growing downwards, shrinking into themselves, flowers folding into buds, leaves refurling and returning to their branches. There seemed to be no effect on the few people out in their gardens, though they all looked very puzzled.
Outside the Grey home, there was a slightly faded For Sale sign, which brightened and then vanished as Ororo looked at it. Magneto hurried out of the car before it had even fully stopped, and dashed into the house; Ororo was right behind him. Jean's parents were in the living room, staring around in astonishment but both Magneto and Ororo were hurrying to the kitchen.
"Erik!" It was unmistakeably Charles's voice, and Ororo skidded to a halt barely in time to avoid the two men embracing - standing and embracing - both in tears.
"Ororo! Is Jean all right?" Charles' voice was slightly smothered by Erik's shoulder, but it was clearly him, and Ororo felt tears in her eyes, too.
"Charles, Charles, you have no idea what it's been like," Erik told him, but Charles stroked his hair and somehow managed to talk to Ororo at the same time, the kind of multi-tasking Ororo had always envied as she tried to run the school.
"Erik, I'm here, but where's Jean? Ororo? Is she at the school?"
"Charles, I'm sorry, but Jean killed you. It's been nearly a year."
Charles laughed, his eyes crinkling. "Do I have a magnificent tombstone? Did Moira carry out her threat to get one with my head on it, and make the children polish it?"
Ororo couldn't speak, her throat closing in the effort not to cry, and Charles held an arm out to her, as if she was a scared little girl again. Nothing could have stopped her throwing herself into his embrace, not even the fact that he was holding Erik, her enemy, with the other arm. She cried on his shoulder, and he soothed both of them, as if they were the ones who had been hurt and he was the one who'd found them. It was terribly familiar, and that made Ororo cry all the more.
"This is a lovely scene and I'm certainly going to put it on this year's Christmas cards, but we need to find Jean," Emma interrupted.
"You can't put Erik on a Christmas card," Charles argued, but he was obviously delighted to see her, too. "Oh, and Callisto! I've only met you briefly; it's lovely to see you again."
"Yeah, nice that we're both alive now, got to say." She looked him up and down. "And I guess the broken spine went the same way as my tattoos."
"Perhaps so! Let's enjoy it while we can."
Ororo saw Callisto about to argue, so she dried her eyes and got there first. "Before you and her parents, there's only Scott. Alkali Lake."
"I've updated Jean's parents," Emma noted, "And we do have a supersonic jet."
"Then we shall be on our way!" Charles declared, his hand still locked with Erik's. The others followed, out the front door to the car.
As they all got in, Jean's mother ran out of the house. "Professor Xavier! You promised you'd fix her! You promised, and look what she did to us! To you!"
Charles looked back at her, and Jean's father behind her. "What I promised was to help Jean, and instead I tried to fix her. I'm very sorry, Mrs Grey, Professor Grey. And I think, now, Jean may be helping us all."
Emma hit the accelerator and they drove away; the plants seemed to have ceased their strange reversal, but the street looked very strange indeed, full of wintering plants on a late spring day.
The Blackbird took to the air, Ororo at the controls, and for a while, she could simply concentrate on getting them safely airborne and checking in with air traffic control. She could hear the others talking, catching Charles up on everything he'd missed, but Ororo was far more worried about Jean. How was she possibly doing this? She'd brought herself out of the waters of Alkali Lake, but she's brought herself back wrong; all the people she was restoring now seemed to be alarmingly perfect, devoid of scars and injuries that they'd had long before they ever met Jean. Why couldn't she bring herself back that way, sparing them all the pain of Scott and Charles's deaths and the massacre on Alcatraz? Ororo didn't think she'd be able to welcome Jean as whole-heartedly as she had Charles.
Charles was explaining to Callisto and Emma, neither of whom had been present when Jean had been at the school, or when she'd first returned from Alkali Lake. Erik seemed comfortable just to sit at Charles' side, though Ororo supposed he already knew what Charles was telling them.
"Jean manifested her powers in a particularly difficult way, clinging to her friend Annie, who had been hit by a car and was dying. It sent her into a coma, briefly, and when she awoke, she could only live in other people's minds. I helped her recover - Ororo and Erik probably remember my trips to the hospital - but my repairs were not able to stand up to the divisions in Jean's own mind. Her telepathy was ferocious and violent, and she had no understanding of why she shouldn't control other people. Meeting other mutants and realising she wasn't alone helped for a while, but interacting with people without using her telepathy became frightening and overwhelming for her, and she soon started to take over minds again. Raven left around this time, and then Erik, which certainly didn't help Jean's mental stability, and I decided that the best way to help her was to let her experience normal human interaction without the crutch of telepathy."
"You would," Erik muttered. "I don't see you giving up your own telepathy."
"I didn't shut it down completely, and it wasn't supposed to be for long. It was only to give her a way to learn to live around others, to understand that they were real people with their own free will, not her puppets."
Emma touched up her lipstick, peering at herself in a tiny mirror. "She must have been extraordinarily strong, then. I would very much have enjoyed controlling everyone around me, but I couldn't do it."
"Yes, she was. Without the telepathy, she did a lot better: she made friends, she could study unhindered by other people who knew more about a subject, she decided to focus on medicine."
"You restored her telepathy, though." Erik looked deeply unhappy.
"Eventually and slowly, with the help of Cerebro. It never returned to anything its former strength, but Jean had no need to leap into other people's thoughts, either. She was still herself."
"You mutilated her to fit your ideas of good behaviour," Erik contradicted Charles. This was obviously an argument they'd had before, as Charles simply shook his head.
Callisto shrugged uncomfortably. "So what's up now? She's doing a good deed to make up for each bad one? That sounds like you X-Men."
"Now, I'm not sure what's going on." Charles sighed.
Erik leaned closer to Charles. "She called herself Phoenix after she killed you. The name she chose for herself as a child, and never used."
"She didn't want to be a vigilante anymore, she wanted to be a doctor!" Charles snapped, and this was more familiar to Ororo, the constant strain between them.
Ororo spun the pilot's seat around to face them. "Don't do that. You've been arguing for decades and now is not the time to resume."
Erik threw her a mock salute, and Charles looked proud. Ororo turned her attention to the control panel to keep from engaging with either of them. It was as if Charles had never been gone, like everything Ororo, Logan and Emma had built after him had only been caretaking. Ororo might not have always enjoyed being in charge, but things were working and she had made them work: she wasn't merely there to keep the seat warm. And Scott was another one who considered himself in charge, who'd been there longer than Ororo. She hadn't really even thought about running things herself until he'd been so incapacitated after Jean's death; the place had been there and she'd stepped into it. And now it was hers. She was the team leader and the principal, places she had taken by necessity but held with determination and knowledge. Hearing Charles and Erik arguing over Jean's mutant name was hearing the clock hands whirring in reverse. They were taking that authority and confidence away from her, pushing her back to that young woman who could barely cope with her own power, let alone help anyone else with theirs.
The flight to Alkali Lake was long, and Ororo had to deal with various control towers on the way, which had got a lot easier since Hank arranged the X-Men an unofficial hands-off status with the government in the aftermath of Alcatraz. Ororo had no illusions that this would last, but it was certainly pleasant while it did; anyway, they would have tried to stop Magneto killing the Cure facility's staff regardless of this pleasant outcome. She couldn't even blame Rogue for taking the Cure anymore, not after taking in so many students who had tried everything to get rid of their disabling or difficult powers, and had mostly ended up more damaged or resentful. She could remember being that way herself, blaming everything bad in her life on her parents' deaths; it would have been just as likely for her to pick her mutant powers as a target, as they'd been out-of-control and dangerous to everyone around her at that time of her life. Charles had shut Jean down as easily as the Cure had shut down Rogue's powers, and Ororo wasn't sure where the difference was; it was disturbing to find herself on Erik's side of the argument, even knowing that Jean had been happy as a doctor and teacher, her powers small and inoffensive.
---
Alkali Lake looked very different from the first time Ororo had been there, when the hydroelectric dam had been in operation and Stryker running his secret base behind it. The lake was calm and deep, now, as it had been in the days afterwards when they'd searched for Jean's body - and Stryker's, or his son Jason's - and found nothing. There was new growth on the slopes and, to Ororo's relief, all the stones were lying on the ground as they should be, rather than floating in the air.
She brought the plane in to land on the rocky shore, and moments before they touched ground, both Emma and Charles called out,
"Scott's here!"
"Is there any sign of Jean?" Erik asked them, as Ororo set them down safely.
"I can't find anything," Emma replied.
"I can." Callisto got to her feet first. "There's definitely two mutants out there, and one of them is scary big."
"You've met Jean - is it her?" Ororo unbuckled herself and hit the button to open the hatch.
Callisto, unusually for her, looked confused. "I can't tell. And it's changing now, to a much less powerful mutant and-I don't know." She must have been more alarmed than she let on, because she stepped aside for Ororo to exit the Blackbird first.
Scott was standing on a small, half-rotten jetty, wearing his motorbike leathers and visor, staring out into the lake. He hadn't moved, not even to acknowledge his precious plane landing behind them.
"Scott." Ororo walked up to join him, cautious despite her delight at seeing him. He looked, of all things, afraid.
"Jean's out there," he replied. "She killed me, didn't she?"
"You were the first, and now she's brought everyone she killed back to life. Do you remember anything?"
"She drained my optic blasts, then she dissolved me. It wasn't painful, but I could feel..." He made a gesture, his hands moving apart, his fingers spread wide. "Her hair was long, and she was hungry."
*I'm sorry,* came a huge voice, in all of their minds. Ororo instinctively tried to cover her ears, but it made no difference.
"Jean!" Charles called out, from the shoreline.
A vast glowing shape rose beneath the waters. Ororo heard Callisto cry out, and when she turned, Callisto was crouched on the rocky shore, clutching at her head, her nose dripping blood. Erik hauled her to her feet and gave her a handkerchief.
*No matter where I look, you bring me here.*
Ororo wasn't sure to whom the voice addressed this, but the glowing shape reached out a wing, casting its glow over Charles and Erik, who quickly pushed Callisto aside, into a startled Emma's arms.
*You could have healed. You could have protected. Instead, you made us your battleground. Charles wants me to want to be kind. Erik wants me to want to fight. Neither of you will let me go.*
"Jean, I'm so sorry," Charles called out to her. "I tried to help you."
"I wanted you to be free," Erik added.
The glow rolled over them. *Neither of you fear me.*
Ororo stepped forward. "What do you want, Jean?"
*I want to be whole. The Phoenix is destruction and healing all in one. You cannot divide me between you.*
"Then go to where you are whole," Ororo shouted, feeling as if the noise would burst her skull. "You have power! Make your own choice!"
---
Ororo had a terrible headache and she didn't know why. In two days it would be her twelfth birthday, and she didn't want to be sick for that. Sometimes when Mr Lehnsherr was very angry it affected her like low pressure did but he'd promised that he'd try not to do that; still, Ororo hoped that's all it was. She put on her Snoopy slippers and crept downstairs from her bedroom to the kitchen in the dark. She would never get in trouble for creeping around at night, but right now she felt the light would hurt her with its great glowing force. All that time alone in Egypt and Kenya had taught her to obey those instincts, no matter how ridiculous they seemed.
She made it to the kitchen and put the electric kettle on. Most other American homes didn't have these, she'd found out, but the Professor and Mystique had lived in England for a long time and preferred to make their tea this way.
"Hey, Ororo." Mystique was sitting at the table in the dark, with a cup of tea in her hands. She looked as though she'd been crying.
"You surprised me!" Ororo accused.
"Mystique: it's all in the name, babe. You don't look well." Mystique smiled, even though she didn't look happy.
"My head hurts, so I'm making some sleepy tea."
"Good idea. You want me to rub your head until the kettle boils?"
Ororo scampered over and crouched down in front of Mystique, facing away from her, and Mystique gave her scalp a firm massage, her hands warm from the cup of tea.
"Oh, that's nice. You're the best at headaches."
Mystique laughed quietly, and Ororo thought she sounded sad. "Thanks. My brother always had them, so I learned to help him. Listen, if Jean and I went away for a little while, would you be okay? You're good friends with her."
"Yeah, she was my roomie until she started having problems with her power. Where would you go?"
"This school is the best place for a lot of mutants, but I don't think it's the best place for Jean. Sometimes people need a bit of peace and quiet and time to be themselves. Away from other influences."
Ororo could feel her pain fading the longer Mystique massaged her head. "Oh. I didn't enjoy being by myself, but I guess Jean does. So you're going away with Mr Lehnsherr again?"
"No. I'm going by myself. My brother and Erik are such big confident guys that sometimes they forget not everyone feels the same. They forget that it's sometimes okay to be unsure, because that's when you ask questions and figure things out. I think Jean needs to be aware of that."
"So are you going to ask them if Jean can come with you?" Ororo leaned back into Mystique's strong hands.
"I did." Her voice was slightly muffled at that, as if she was crying again. "And Charles made it pretty clear who gets to make the decisions around here. And he can find me if I do anything 'stupid'. And for once, Erik agreed with him. They both think they know best for Jean."
"What's best for me?" Jean was standing in the doorway in her dressing gown. Her voice sounded strange, deeper, and the light in the hall behind her gave the impression that her messy waves of hair were glowing.
"I don't know," Mystique answered, "And I don't think anyone else does, either."
Jean walked forward, and the glow of her hair didn't dissipate in the dark kitchen. Instead, Ororo could see Jean's whole body was glowing with the colours of flame. "It's nice to hear that someone doesn't have grand plans for me. I'm not their Frankenstein's monster."
"You said none of us were allowed to call ourselves monsters anymore," Ororo reminded her.
Jean ignored her and sat opposite Mystique. "You wanted to help me. No-one told me that. You left."
"Mystique wouldn't leave, not for good," Ororo argued, confused by Jean talking as if it had already happened. She stood up to keep her eyes on Jean. "But…maybe you want to?" Ororo couldn't imagine it herself - coming here was the best thing that had ever happened to her - but she also wondered how she hadn't seen that Jean was so unhappy.
Jean didn't say anything, staring at Mystique and Ororo as if she'd never seen them before.
Mystique leaned over the table and took Jean's hand. "I lived here when I was a teenager, and when I left, it was a giant crazy rebellion. I had to be the complete opposite to the way I'd been. I learned a lot, but it was very hard and I don't want that for you."
"They'll tear me in half and stitch me together and make me think I'm happy with it." Jean's voice was low and vicious, nothing Ororo had ever heard from her.
Mystique's gaze was serious, and her voice calm. "Come with me."
"Yes." Jean stood up, her chair tipping over with a loud thump, and the light suddenly died away. Ororo felt the breath rush out of her, as if something huge had just left the room, leaving freckly-faced, awkward Jean, the girl who kissed the Professor's head every morning and dared to hug Mr Lehnsherr despite his protests. She looked tired and sad and yet much younger than Ororo.
"Jean?"
She reached out her hands to Mystique, and Mystique pulled her into a firm embrace. "Let's go pack your things. We'll be on the bike, so pack light."
Jean turned and smiled at Ororo. "You're right. I do have the power, and this time I can make my own choice. Thank you."
Ororo hugged her quickly so that she didn't cry. "See you when you come home, okay?"
---
Mystique had called Ororo, as she often did, ready to send yet another stray teenager on to the school. Ororo had been principal for two years now, since Charles had retired from the position to run his lobby group fighting Senator Kelly's Registration plans. The flow of traumatised mutant children and teenagers never ceased.
"Did you get the wedding invitation?" Ororo asked Mystique. "Charles has probably asked you a dozen times already."
Mystique laughed. "He sent one to each of my past ten residences and all six of my drop boxes, including one that I didn't think he knew about. Yes, I consider myself thoroughly invited. Irene and I will bring Rogue up then."
"It's a pity Jean won't make it."
"She might yet. If anyone can make it from a refugee medical clinic in Kenya to a big gay New York wedding, it's Jean. Last I heard, she was personally flying vaccines out to remote villages with her telekinesis. Maybe she'll fly herself to New York next."
Ororo frowned. "It's been on my mind a lot, recently - do you ever regret taking Jean away? It took Charles and Erik months to fix Cerebro after you broke it to stop them tracking you down."
"No. Never. Jean had to have the chance to make her own decisions rather than have Charles and Erik make them for her. And I think without her to look after, I wouldn't have been back half as often, and neither would Erik." Raven paused for a moment. "Oh, and Irene said to thank you for those five minutes in the kitchen."
"When you and Jean left? If Irene had been around the next day she might not have been saying thank you! I've never seen Charles so angry."
"That's Irene - she never explains. Tell Charles we'll be there to see Erik finally make an honest man of him."
"If the combined teachings of Logan and Emma don't destroy the school entirely by then!"
They both laughed and Ororo hung up the phone. It had been a tough year, leading the fight against the Cure clinics. Every last splinter group of mutant activists held a different opinion - Charles and Erik the first among the activists, but so many more groups springing up every day - and it was hard enough to run the school without the students fighting each other over protest t-shirts. Still, there was nothing like a wedding to bring people together. She sighed and stretched. There were still bills to pay and student reports to sign, and she hadn't even thought about a formal dress, but for now she rather thought she might go outside and enjoy the rain.
This entry was originally posted at http://lilacsigil.dreamwidth.org/69252.html - comments are welcome at either location.
Author:
lilacsigil
For: xmmficathon
Summary: The Phoenix is destruction and healing all in one: Ororo has witnessed only the destruction.
Recipient:
andraste/andrastewhite
Request Used: 1. Charles and Erik or Charles/Erik, time travel. First Class characters going forwards, trilogy era characters going backwards, it's all good with me as long as it has Charles and Erik and time travel shenanigans; and
2. Storm, post-X3, running the team and the school
Rating: Teen
Characters: Ororo, Emma, Mystique, Charles/Erik, Callisto, Jean
Spoilers: X2, X3, XMFC
Wordcount: 8500
Notes: Thanks to Renata_kedavra and
st_aurafina for beta reading this.
Mystique was the last person Ororo had expected to ever speak with again. Mystique calling her up and asking for help was even stranger.
"Even Irene can't help Rogue. There's too many personalities in there, and all we can handle is damage control."
"And why, exactly, did you take Rogue in? Were you hoping to turn her to your side, after all you've done to her?"
Mystique laughed. "There are no sides, anymore. You and Charles won. No, I tried to help Rogue because Irene said it was important."
Ororo was rapidly getting a headache, as she often did at the end of a day running this madhouse of a school - she was fairly sure that she was going to develop a nice little vertical line between her eyebrows very soon, the same as the Professor had had. "Fine. We'll come to Mississippi and see what we can do."
Logan had proven surprisingly good at keeping the most damaged of the kids - including those who had manifested their powers very young - busy and productive, but he seemed to have the idea that students who could fend for themselves, should. This involved a lot of teenage students being allowed to climb trees, teach themselves to drive, play unsupervised in the pool and re-enact the greatest battles of the X-Men on the lawn, complete with powers. After the fourth broken limb and sixth concussion, Ororo had finally given up and called her old enemy Emma Frost. She might well be evil with a tendence to possess Ororo and go swanning around in her body, but at least she had a degree in Education and a knack for keeping teenagers in line.
"You're flying off in the jet again?" Emma asked, wandering into Ororo's office - and her mind - without knocking. "We've got midterm exams scheduled, so make sure you don't take any of the eleventh or twelfth graders. I'm sure they'll be extremely eager to go."
Ororo put her head down on the desk. "Emma, there's too many of them. There's more and more kids, and not enough adults. I don't understand how Charles did this by himself."
Perching on the edge of the desk, Emma shook her head sadly, and patted Ororo's hair. "If you'd let me, I'd telepathically control every last one of them."
"No, no, I don't think so. We had an agreement."
"Not to take over anyone's body if they're underage, or yours in school hours? Good point. Besides, teenagers are so -" Emma shuddered "- squishy. You don't want to know what it's like inside their minds, let alone their bodies. I'm surprised Professor Xavier didn't make a break for it twenty years ago."
Ororo let Emma keep massaging her aching skull. For an arch-nemesis, Emma was very soothing, sometimes. "Some of the students who were shot with the Cure - their powers are returning strangely, and it's a lot to deal with."
"You mean Anole? I think he looks rather dashing all lop-sided." Anole, the president of the school's Gay-Straight-Mutant-Human Alliance, had lost his lizard form when he was hit with the Cure while fighting with Magneto at Alcatraz.
Most of Magneto's soldiers had been underage. Ororo had managed to negotiate their release to the school rather than to prison. The government must be aware that the Cure wasn't permanent by now, but they hadn't contacted her. She rather suspected that the government wanted to forget about the problem of underage terrorist mutants altogether. Unfortunately, that meant that Ororo was now in charge of not just ninety-six mutant teenagers, but thirty-one of whom had their powers returning, unpredictably and sometimes explosively. In Anole's case, he had regained his scales and ability to stick to walls, but his right arm had suddenly grown to twice the size of his other arm and developed enormous claws. He'd been very upset until Emma had taken him to New York to acquire a new wardrobe.
"I wish they were all as straightforward as Anole! The children who were given the Cure in those clinics don't seem to be getting their powers back at all." This morning alone Ororo had dealt with three bouts of tears and one defiant kid who didn't want his powers anyway, as long as he didn't have to go home.
"Maybe there was something different about the weaponised version? I wish Henry had time to work on it."
There was a loud noise from outside and a tall blond boy went flying past at high speed, his lower half blasting energy. Ororo looked up from the desk and she and Emma watched Sam go hurtling into the trees. Bobby Drake went running across the lawn after him, waving his arms and yelling.
"Should I take Bobby with me to Mississippi?" Ororo asked, her voice weary. "At least he tries to prevent serious injuries to other students."
"Oh, all right. He's probably the only student silly enough to do his midterms anyway. And seeing him should throw Rogue off-balance for long enough for you to take her down."
Ororo sighed again. "You didn't mean 'talk her down', by any chance?"
"Do you even know me?"
---
Mystique had promised that there was somewhere to land the jet, and she was right: a field lay fallow in the late autumn, and Bobby carefully brought the jet down.
"Good landing," Ororo told him.
"Any landing you can walk away from!"
They'd decided not to go in uniform so as not to startle Rogue if she had an old personality in place - Rogue-Magneto and Rogue-Logan had never responded well to the black leather - but as Ororo and Bobby walked down the ramp of the Blackbird, Rogue greeted them with a sharp salute.
"Ma'am. Sir." Rogue's voice was almost unrecognisable, and her upright posture completely different from her usual self-contained slouch.
"Rogue? Do you recognise us?" Bobby was the first to approach her, but Ororo was pleased to see that, even confronted with his former girlfriend, he kept a cautious distance.
Rogue maintained her rigid stance, but her face clouded in confusion. "No, sir. I am aware that my, uh, consciousness is currently contained inside the mutant known as Rogue, but I'm afraid that my access to her memories is intermittent at best." She blinked. "Bobby?"
"I guess that's intermittent memory for you," Bobby joked.
Rogue gestured for them to come over to the small house half-hidden behind a row of trees. "I should invite you in. Please, this way."
Ororo fell in step beside Rogue - though she had never seen Rogue move this briskly in her life - as they walked from the field to the house. "If you're a consciousness contained inside Rogue, what's your name? When did you end up in there?"
"Lieutenant Carol Danvers, US Air Force. Some months ago, I was transporting Ms- I mean, Mystique from a Congressional hearing and we were intercepted by Rogue, who wished to speak to Mystique." Rogue-Carol frowned. "I don't think it was deliberate, but her hand came in contact with mine - Mystique tells me that Rogue took the Cure not long after that. I have no memory of the time between then and yesterday."
An unfamiliar female voice came from the doorway of the house. "Don't worry. The original Carol Danvers is unhurt, and we're taking good care of this one. Honestly, she's by far the most co-operative."
"The Air Force trains us to be ready for anything, Ma'am." Rogue-Carol stepped politely to the side and performed introductions. "This is Destiny."
Ororo had spoken to Destiny - Ororo wasn't sure whether this was a code-name or not - several times in the past, but they'd never met in person. She turned out to be a small white woman who looked to be in her late sixties. She wore dark glasses and didn't look directly at Ororo, though it was impossible to tell whether this was because she was blind, or whether her mutant power of viewing the future made it preferable for her to cover her eyes and avert her gaze.
Rogue-Carol led them into the house through the front door, which had a large hole where someone had punched it, now patched with plywood. Mystique - in the pale-skinned, dark haired female form they'd seen her last - brought them some sweet tea in the living room and they all sat on the ugly orange and brown sofas.
"Rogue's power is returning, then?" Bobby asked, politely sipping his tea, but making a face as if he expected to be poisoned at any second.
"No, we don't think so. Mine is, but slowly." Mystique pushed her hair back from her face and Ororo could see iridescent blue scales along her hairline. "I can't change form yet."
"So if it's not Rogue's power, what's going on?"
"All her previous personalities are reappearing. Sometimes it's just one, and sometimes it's an unpleasant combination of, say, Pyro and Wolverine. You saw the front door."
"I'm doing my best, ma'am," Rogue-Carol said, "But I have to sleep eventually."
Destiny leaned forward and Ororo looked at her more closely. She looked ill, her face pale and drawn, her hands holding the cup to still their shaking. "My theory is that Rogue's power kept the remnant personalities in check, but the Cure got rid of her powers without removing the effects of their previous use."
Bobby agreed. "That makes sense. There's been a few mutants with problems along those lines - they've lost an exoskeleton without growing enough of a regular skeleton to support themselves. They're mostly recovering, though."
"Wait," Ororo snapped. "You said it's your 'theory'. You don't have theories. You can see timelines!"
Mystique rested a hand on Destiny's shoulder. "Irene's power isn't working properly at the moment."
Destiny shook off the hand. "Rubbish. There's nothing wrong with my power: there's something wrong with the time stream. I can't see the future when the past is shifting."
Rogue-Carol poured Destiny more tea. "I've never met a time-travelling mutant myself, ma'am, but we've been briefed on the possibility. There could be one out there messing things up."
"No. I've seen people who could slow time, or reverse it briefly, but it was always a very localised effect. This is much bigger. It affects so many people - including Rogue, Mystique and you, Ororo."
"Not me?" Bobby asked.
"Peripherally, yes."
"We should bring you all to the school," Ororo decided. "Emma might be able to help Rogue, and we can try to work out what's affecting Destiny."
"No." Mystique's voice was flat. "I'm not going back there."
Biting back the comment that she'd had no trouble impersonating Bobby and infiltrating the place, Ororo instead said, "Charles is dead, Mystique. You have nothing to fear."
Mystique laughed. "You thought I was afraid? Ororo, I was never afraid of Charles. He simply helped me understand that the school and our home was his, not mine. I found the best way to live with that. No, I'll stay here with Irene. Rogue will go with you."
---
"Rogue's mind is unnecessarily complex," Emma huffed. "I could drag the other psychic imprints out, kicking and screaming, but Rogue's own personality has taken on a little bit of each of them. It's going to take some time to detach the imprints themselves from the imprints' effects, which are part of Rogue."
"So no sign of her actual power returning?" Ororo was uncomfortable being in the infirmary. Her brain knew that it was underground and always started giving her trouble the moment she walked in. She'd much preferred it when the infirmary was in the old ballroom, even though this was obviously safer.
"Not enough to detect." Emma picked up Rogue's bare hand and held it. Nothing happened.
"Are you done, Ms Frost?" Rogue-Carol was still in charge, but her blackouts were getting longer. "If so, I think you should restrain me now."
"You are restrained, sweetie. Try to hurt anyone or cross the fence and your brain will short-circuit."
Rogue-Carol sat up. "Well, uh, thank you, ma'am."
"Can you remember where your room was? We haven't put anyone else in there, yet." Ororo didn't mention that it was next on the list for a clean-out.
"Yes, ma'am!" She jumped up and walked briskly out the doors.
Emma spoke quietly. "Something odd is going on. I don't want to go running to Destiny's explanation - everyone sees things through the lens of their own power - but I looked through the records to see which personalities I might find in Rogue's brain. The most recent one I could find in her mind was young Mr Allerdyce."
"No, she's definitely borrowed powers from others since then. We were practising it in training - she's touched Piotr and Kitty, at least."
"That's what I mean. And the scar that the Cure leaves? I couldn't find it on her arm, though Carol tells me it was on her left upper arm, standard procedure."
"Cecilia's coming down tomorrow - she can take a blood sample, maybe. We really need a full-time doctor here again."
A loud thump came from upstairs. "Oh dear, it seems Rogue is testing her restraints already. Come along, Ororo."
Ororo made a face at Emma's back, feeling utterly childish but nonetheless quite satisfied.
Rogue had collapsed on the stair landing, and there were a dozen students standing around her.
"We were just calling you, Ms Munroe!" some of them said, but Ororo was unimpressed.
"Where's your training? Someone collapses, and you all stand around gawking? You, Jimmy, tell me what you should have done."
"Checked they were in no immediate danger, then run to find an adult," Leech replied, looking ashamed. "But it's okay. I'm here, so nothing's going to happen!"
Logan stomped down the stairs, withered little Ernst on one shoulder. "Nothing to do with mutant powers, you mean. What if someone's programmed her to jump up and strangle you? Get out of here, kids." He passed Ernst over to Artie, and crouched down beside Rogue.
"This your doing, Frost?"
"She didn't try to hurt anyone or run, so no. Not me."
Rogue groaned and opened her eyes. "Logan! Hey!" Her voice sounded like her own, soft and Southern, and she immediately tucked her bare hands behind her, a reflex that Rogue-Carol hadn't had.
"What happened, Marie? Good to see you."
"Last thing I remember, I was in California? Then I was here on the stairs. I walked past Leech and I guess I keeled right over."
"What were you doing in California?" Ororo asked in some confusion. "We brought you here from Mississippi, where Mystique and Destiny were taking care of you."
Rogue wobbled to her feet, careful not to flail with her bare hands where she might touch someone. "Yeah, well, I don't know about that. I guess she must have been watching me while I was watching Magneto."
"You found him?" Emma looked both surprised and affronted. "Cerebro couldn't."
"Maybe you're not as great a telepath as you think you are."
"Or maybe his mutation was suppressed at the time we looked," Ororo stepped in quickly to avoid more antagonism.
Rogue took a breath and stepped away from the argument. "While I've been away from the school, I've been checking on other mutants who took the Cure, see how they're doing. Anyway, Magneto's power is coming right on back to him. I saw Arclight, too - she's staying with him in some old guy's basement."
Even Emma looked surprised at that. "She's supposed to be dead."
"She made me a coffee. Pretty good coffee for a dead girl."
Ororo frowned. "Do you think he attacked you? Set off the personality fragments in your mind?"
Rogue shrugged.
"The last thing she remembers is getting on a bus for Los Angeles," Emma said, helpfully, ignoring Rogue's death glare. "That was at least six hours after she met with Magneto, and to my knowledge he can't use his powers on time delay."
"Thanks for digging in my head without asking," Rogue muttered.
"Any time, darling."
Ororo made her decision. "All right. Tomorrow we go to San Francisco. Logan, if I take Emma will you be all right looking after the kids?"
Logan just grinned.
---
From Rogue's information, it was a simple matter to find the house where Magneto and Arclight were staying. It was a modest house in an expensive neighbourhood not far from the Bay, with a separate basement apartment built into the steep hill.
It was a shock when Callisto opened the door. Ororo didn't recognise her for a moment without the facial tattoos or piercings, but she certainly recognised Ororo.
"Oh shit!" she yelled. "It's the mutie cops!"
"Wait! We're here to talk to Magneto. And aren't you supposed to be dead?"
Quill peered around the doorframe, also missing his tattoo. "There's a lot of that going around these days. Welcome to our humble abode. Don't make too much noise - the old Jewish guy who owns the place has a lot of naps, and Magneto gets pissy if we disturb his friend's sleep."
Callisto snarled, but stood away from the door, allowing Ororo and Emma inside. The walls were covered in maps of Alcatraz and the surrounding coastline, overlapping lines drawn in with thick black marker and push pins scattered around it, concentrated on the island itself.
"High tech," Emma commented, though Ororo was fairly sure that she was covering up her surprise at seeing Doctor Kavita Rao - the lead researcher on the Cure - standing in the small kitchen. Arclight was with her, but there was no sign of Magneto.
*She's not being held hostage,* Emma communicated to Ororo. *She's very confused to be alive, though.*
Ororo kept her voice calm and level, and one eye on Callisto, who was still swearing under her breath and pacing. "Hello, Doctor Rao. I must say that you're keeping odd company these days."
Doctor Rao wasn't wearing her glasses, and she seemed slightly dazed. "We all woke up on Alcatraz, and Magneto found us. I'm officially dead, it seems, and that makes life rather complicated."
"We've had some interesting political discussions since yesterday," Callisto muttered.
Quill was more cheerful. "Doctor Rao doesn't want to cure mutants anymore."
"That's not exactly what I said. I agreed with you that I had not thought through the political and personal implications of my scientific work."
"Yeah, heard it before." Arclight leaned on the kitchen bench. "So what do you want, X-Men?"
"Rogue came to visit you, then had problems with her power. We wanted to know what happened."
Arclight looked genuinely surprised to hear this, quite a change from her usual surly expression. "She was fine when she left here. Still under the Cure, though. And Magneto didn't find these guys until after that."
Emma took a seat on a rickety vinyl-cushioned chair, as poised as if she were in her own office. "Were any of you dosed with the Cure?"
"Nope." Quill took the seat opposite hers. "Me and Arclight and Psylocke got kind of dissolved. We could see the hall dissolving and we tried to run but it was too late. Doctor Rao was already dead - I killed her a few minutes before whatever it was got us. Psylocke was there when we woke up but she's gone off on her own."
Callisto stopped pacing for a moment. "I was out in the courtyard trying not to die of electrocution." She glared at Ororo, who glared in return. "I saw the same thing, and it was taking out soldiers, too. It was taking out everyone and everything."
"I think it was that Phoenix chick." Arclight was staying close to Doctor Rao, who looked rather disturbed by Quill's unruffled tone. "I saw her standing up there."
"Jean is dead," Emma replied bluntly.
Ororo sighed, and explained in more detail. "Wolverine killed her to stop her destroying everything. As far as we knew, anyone who was within four hundred yards of her was disintegrated. Those who survived - Magneto and Pyro and Juggernaut - were simply further away."
Emma telepathically alerted Ororo a moment before the door opened.
"Good morning, everyone," Magneto said, his voice as commanding as ever. "I've brought us another guest."
A small, skinny Samoan man followed him in, smiling shyly.
"Phat!" the others chorused in delight, and both Callisto and Quill hugged him.
Magneto turned his magnanimous smile on Ororo and Emma. "How nice to see you both. Rogue assured me that she was not reporting to you, but I'm sure you have your ways and means."
Ororo thought for a moment that Magneto should look diminished, in a plain shirt and pants, with a hat and jacket, any old man out on a sunny day in San Francisco, but he didn't, at all. Instead, he seemed like something who had put on the skin of a harmless old man, but could leap out at any moment, all teeth and claws. The basement apartment was suddenly feeling crowded and airless, and there was someone in the way of either of the exits.
*Don't be dramatic,* Emma snapped. *You X-Men have built Erik up to be some kind of god, and he's never been that.*
"Yes, Emma, my powers are returning: I can tell that you're speaking telepathically. Would you mind sharing your conversation with the rest of us?"
"How's the scar where Hank got you with those Cure syringes?" Ororo asked, suddenly.
Magneto undid the top two buttons of his shirt and showed her the unmarked skin there. "Better than ever. Strange things are happening at Alcatraz, as I'm sure you're aware by now."
"How did you know to go there?" Emma asked, staring at her fingernails as if they were the most interesting thing in the world.
Removing his hat and hanging it by the door, Magneto strolled over to the kitchen. "Arclight, my dear, you haven't offered our guests a drink."
"We've got coffee, tea or soda," Arclight snapped.
Emma smiled at her. "A glass of water would be lovely, and I'm sure Ororo would enjoy the same. Erik, you're avoiding the question."
"I'm not avoiding anything, Ms Frost. I'm assessing what information you yourself might have, and if it would be useful for us to exchange information."
Ororo sipped from the glass that Arclight had shoved into her hand. "You're here on the ground - I think you'll have more to offer than we do. All I can tell you is that after Rogue visited you, her absorbed personalities have been re-emerging, very strongly. And yet her power had not."
"Fortunately, the parts of you that she absorbed haven't surfaced often," Emma added.
"I'm so disappointed to hear that," Magneto's expression remained pleasant. "As for Alcatraz, if you want to keep your government friends onside, you probably shouldn't be going there. Since human soldiers started coming back to life, the island has been flooded with military personnel. Callisto and I barely managed to get Doctor Rao out yesterday."
"I suppose you think she's going to be useful to you. So how did you rescue people from Alcatraz?" Ororo asked suspiciously.
"The bridge still rests on the island, and I have my ways with metal. Callisto tells me when a mutant appears there and I can find them and bring them to safety. It took me three days to find a safe way to get Phat off the island - that's when I ran into Doctor Rao." He tilted his head towards Ororo. "I don't believe any of your team was lost. Jean was always very specific with her fits of destructiveness, wasn't she?"
Ororo leaned forward. "If everyone's coming back, have you seen her? Is Jean alive, too?"
Magneto suddenly he did look his age. "No. Everyone else is revivifying in reverse order: what was destroyed last appeared first. Jean should have been there from the very start, but there's no sign of her."
"Right, then. You need to take us to Alcatraz, Erik, so I can scan for her, or any other mutants you haven't been able to find." Emma sounded so determined that Ororo was up and halfway to the door before she looked over at Magneto.
He looked sour. "I had Psylocke try, before she left. She found nothing."
"I'm better than her."
Magneto nodded. "Well then, Ms Frost, please come with me."
---
Alcatraz was a hive of activity, as it had been last time the X-Men arrived, though at least now there was no battle, no children being held captive for medical experiments, no guerrilla force of disaffected young mutants. The army was everywhere, taking readings and cordoning off areas in regular blocks, search teams on their hands and knees going over each area, though Ororo had no idea what, exactly, they were hoping to find.
Magneto had floated them up to the underside of the bridge, and they sat comfortably on a girder out of sight of the men and women on the island. Magneto pointed over to their right, where a man in an army uniform suddenly coalesced out of thin air about three feet off the ground, and crashed to the dirt. A woman holding some kind of instrument yelled out, but others had already seen him and were racing over with a first aid kit in hand.
"The mutants appeared first," Magneto said, "And now the staff and soldiers, one by one."
Emma touched her forehead. "No time has passed for that man from the moment he was dissolved. And I can't find any trace of Jean's mind."
Ororo put her hand on Emma's arm. "Can you search their memories? See if any of them saw Jean, or if she's affected them."
"Of course. It shouldn't take too long - military minds are trained to be neat, and anything out of place shows up quickly." She turned to face the island, her face calm in concentration. She'd told Ororo that it was important to be serene because too much focus might give her wrinkles.
"You said people were appearing in reverse order," Ororo told Magneto. "Then why the mutants first, then the soldiers? That's not how it happened."
"I've told you all I know, my dear."
"You lost the right to call me that a long time ago."
Emma blinked and was with them again. "No-one's seen Jean and there's no sign of Jean's telepathy wiping their minds. Not that she was ever much good at that, not even with Cerebro."
Magneto stared out over the bay. "Jean had a lot of difficulty beginning to use her telepathy. Charles shut it down for many years because it was so damaging to her - she'd borrow other people's minds wholesale, neglecting her own."
"I remember." Ororo couldn't work out if he was trying to win her over with reminiscences.
"Once her telepathy started to creep back, Charles started her off in Cerebro, where everything was clearly defined, mutant or human, yes or no. She could look without touching."
"You're right," Emma said, suddenly. "Mutants are easy to see in Cerebro. Humans are not. She found the mutants first because that's how she was trained to use her powers, when they were at low ebb."
Ororo couldn't help smiling. "So if Jean had burnt herself out and was coming back, slowly and weakly, that's who she'd see first."
"She brought herself to life once," Magneto added. "I can see no reason why she couldn't do the same with others. Doctor Rao and Phat weren't killed by Jean - they died in the fighting before Jean started dissolving the island."
"But their bodies were dissolved along with everyone else." Ororo had put her hand on Magneto's shoulder without realising; she pulled her hand away, but her excitement didn't dim. "She went with your Brotherhood for a while - did she dissolve anyone then?"
"No, no-one. The last person before Alcatraz would have been, was, Charles." Magneto didn't look up, as if this was too much to hope.
"Come on," Emma said with unusual gentleness. "We have to get to Annandale-on-Hudson. And yes, Erik, you're welcome to tag along."
---
Logan called them twice on their way to New York State: more kids were getting their powers back, and this time it included children who had been given the Cure in clinics, not only those who had been shot with the weaponised version.
"Yeah, we've lost the roof on the East Wing and all but two of the windows," Logan reported, laconically.
"All but two of the windows in the East Wing?" Ororo put the plane on autopilot and rubbed at her incipient headache again.
"Nah, all but two of the windows in the house. You ever think of teaching some of these kids to be glaziers? 'You broke it, you fix it', yeah?"
"You can start the older ones cleaning up the glass, at least. Start with the ones who have invulnerable skin."
"Rogue's got a crew of 'em on that. Her powers are on the way, too, and she reckons she's getting better control over the old personalities. She's good. Hovering three feet in the air, but she's good."
"Thank you, Logan. Please ask Rogue not to fly any higher in case her powers cut out again?"
"I've got something," Emma called from the rear of the plane, where she'd been talking to Doctor Reyes on the phone. "Well, to be honest, Cecilia has. But why let her take the credit?"
"What is it, Emma?"
"Yes, do tell us." Magneto and Callisto had seats exactly where he and Mystique had sat last time they'd been here. Ororo glared at them, on principle.
"Cecilia's been looking at the medical records of the students who were injected with the Cure at clinics, and those who were attacked with it. It seems that the weaponised version was made after the original version, and the students whose records she can track all received the same batch of the Cure. All of the students who she can determine received an earlier batch? Their powers aren't returning yet."
"Jean's rolling back the existence of the Cure," Magneto whispered, with awe and something that sounded suspiciously like pride.
Ororo shivered. The bigger the things Jean had done, the less Jean she had become. This sounded huge.
They landed the Blackbird on an airfield outside the small college town, and Emma, with practised ease, replaced everyone's memories with that of a small private jet. Before Ororo could protest, Magneto brought them a car from the parking lot, and by then it seemed ridiculous to argue about it. They drove on to Jean's childhood home, and as they approached, Ororo understood why Magneto had stepped aside for Emma to drive.
Ororo felt she'd been punched breathless, seeing that street again, the small house where Charles had died, and a glance at Magneto showed he felt the same, his horror too great to hide behind his usual smug mask of indifference. Callisto and Emma shared no such visceral memory and instead calmly observed their surroundings. Ororo blinked away tears and thought for a moment that nothing was wrong in the quiet suburban street, until she suddenly realised that the plants were growing downwards, shrinking into themselves, flowers folding into buds, leaves refurling and returning to their branches. There seemed to be no effect on the few people out in their gardens, though they all looked very puzzled.
Outside the Grey home, there was a slightly faded For Sale sign, which brightened and then vanished as Ororo looked at it. Magneto hurried out of the car before it had even fully stopped, and dashed into the house; Ororo was right behind him. Jean's parents were in the living room, staring around in astonishment but both Magneto and Ororo were hurrying to the kitchen.
"Erik!" It was unmistakeably Charles's voice, and Ororo skidded to a halt barely in time to avoid the two men embracing - standing and embracing - both in tears.
"Ororo! Is Jean all right?" Charles' voice was slightly smothered by Erik's shoulder, but it was clearly him, and Ororo felt tears in her eyes, too.
"Charles, Charles, you have no idea what it's been like," Erik told him, but Charles stroked his hair and somehow managed to talk to Ororo at the same time, the kind of multi-tasking Ororo had always envied as she tried to run the school.
"Erik, I'm here, but where's Jean? Ororo? Is she at the school?"
"Charles, I'm sorry, but Jean killed you. It's been nearly a year."
Charles laughed, his eyes crinkling. "Do I have a magnificent tombstone? Did Moira carry out her threat to get one with my head on it, and make the children polish it?"
Ororo couldn't speak, her throat closing in the effort not to cry, and Charles held an arm out to her, as if she was a scared little girl again. Nothing could have stopped her throwing herself into his embrace, not even the fact that he was holding Erik, her enemy, with the other arm. She cried on his shoulder, and he soothed both of them, as if they were the ones who had been hurt and he was the one who'd found them. It was terribly familiar, and that made Ororo cry all the more.
"This is a lovely scene and I'm certainly going to put it on this year's Christmas cards, but we need to find Jean," Emma interrupted.
"You can't put Erik on a Christmas card," Charles argued, but he was obviously delighted to see her, too. "Oh, and Callisto! I've only met you briefly; it's lovely to see you again."
"Yeah, nice that we're both alive now, got to say." She looked him up and down. "And I guess the broken spine went the same way as my tattoos."
"Perhaps so! Let's enjoy it while we can."
Ororo saw Callisto about to argue, so she dried her eyes and got there first. "Before you and her parents, there's only Scott. Alkali Lake."
"I've updated Jean's parents," Emma noted, "And we do have a supersonic jet."
"Then we shall be on our way!" Charles declared, his hand still locked with Erik's. The others followed, out the front door to the car.
As they all got in, Jean's mother ran out of the house. "Professor Xavier! You promised you'd fix her! You promised, and look what she did to us! To you!"
Charles looked back at her, and Jean's father behind her. "What I promised was to help Jean, and instead I tried to fix her. I'm very sorry, Mrs Grey, Professor Grey. And I think, now, Jean may be helping us all."
Emma hit the accelerator and they drove away; the plants seemed to have ceased their strange reversal, but the street looked very strange indeed, full of wintering plants on a late spring day.
The Blackbird took to the air, Ororo at the controls, and for a while, she could simply concentrate on getting them safely airborne and checking in with air traffic control. She could hear the others talking, catching Charles up on everything he'd missed, but Ororo was far more worried about Jean. How was she possibly doing this? She'd brought herself out of the waters of Alkali Lake, but she's brought herself back wrong; all the people she was restoring now seemed to be alarmingly perfect, devoid of scars and injuries that they'd had long before they ever met Jean. Why couldn't she bring herself back that way, sparing them all the pain of Scott and Charles's deaths and the massacre on Alcatraz? Ororo didn't think she'd be able to welcome Jean as whole-heartedly as she had Charles.
Charles was explaining to Callisto and Emma, neither of whom had been present when Jean had been at the school, or when she'd first returned from Alkali Lake. Erik seemed comfortable just to sit at Charles' side, though Ororo supposed he already knew what Charles was telling them.
"Jean manifested her powers in a particularly difficult way, clinging to her friend Annie, who had been hit by a car and was dying. It sent her into a coma, briefly, and when she awoke, she could only live in other people's minds. I helped her recover - Ororo and Erik probably remember my trips to the hospital - but my repairs were not able to stand up to the divisions in Jean's own mind. Her telepathy was ferocious and violent, and she had no understanding of why she shouldn't control other people. Meeting other mutants and realising she wasn't alone helped for a while, but interacting with people without using her telepathy became frightening and overwhelming for her, and she soon started to take over minds again. Raven left around this time, and then Erik, which certainly didn't help Jean's mental stability, and I decided that the best way to help her was to let her experience normal human interaction without the crutch of telepathy."
"You would," Erik muttered. "I don't see you giving up your own telepathy."
"I didn't shut it down completely, and it wasn't supposed to be for long. It was only to give her a way to learn to live around others, to understand that they were real people with their own free will, not her puppets."
Emma touched up her lipstick, peering at herself in a tiny mirror. "She must have been extraordinarily strong, then. I would very much have enjoyed controlling everyone around me, but I couldn't do it."
"Yes, she was. Without the telepathy, she did a lot better: she made friends, she could study unhindered by other people who knew more about a subject, she decided to focus on medicine."
"You restored her telepathy, though." Erik looked deeply unhappy.
"Eventually and slowly, with the help of Cerebro. It never returned to anything its former strength, but Jean had no need to leap into other people's thoughts, either. She was still herself."
"You mutilated her to fit your ideas of good behaviour," Erik contradicted Charles. This was obviously an argument they'd had before, as Charles simply shook his head.
Callisto shrugged uncomfortably. "So what's up now? She's doing a good deed to make up for each bad one? That sounds like you X-Men."
"Now, I'm not sure what's going on." Charles sighed.
Erik leaned closer to Charles. "She called herself Phoenix after she killed you. The name she chose for herself as a child, and never used."
"She didn't want to be a vigilante anymore, she wanted to be a doctor!" Charles snapped, and this was more familiar to Ororo, the constant strain between them.
Ororo spun the pilot's seat around to face them. "Don't do that. You've been arguing for decades and now is not the time to resume."
Erik threw her a mock salute, and Charles looked proud. Ororo turned her attention to the control panel to keep from engaging with either of them. It was as if Charles had never been gone, like everything Ororo, Logan and Emma had built after him had only been caretaking. Ororo might not have always enjoyed being in charge, but things were working and she had made them work: she wasn't merely there to keep the seat warm. And Scott was another one who considered himself in charge, who'd been there longer than Ororo. She hadn't really even thought about running things herself until he'd been so incapacitated after Jean's death; the place had been there and she'd stepped into it. And now it was hers. She was the team leader and the principal, places she had taken by necessity but held with determination and knowledge. Hearing Charles and Erik arguing over Jean's mutant name was hearing the clock hands whirring in reverse. They were taking that authority and confidence away from her, pushing her back to that young woman who could barely cope with her own power, let alone help anyone else with theirs.
The flight to Alkali Lake was long, and Ororo had to deal with various control towers on the way, which had got a lot easier since Hank arranged the X-Men an unofficial hands-off status with the government in the aftermath of Alcatraz. Ororo had no illusions that this would last, but it was certainly pleasant while it did; anyway, they would have tried to stop Magneto killing the Cure facility's staff regardless of this pleasant outcome. She couldn't even blame Rogue for taking the Cure anymore, not after taking in so many students who had tried everything to get rid of their disabling or difficult powers, and had mostly ended up more damaged or resentful. She could remember being that way herself, blaming everything bad in her life on her parents' deaths; it would have been just as likely for her to pick her mutant powers as a target, as they'd been out-of-control and dangerous to everyone around her at that time of her life. Charles had shut Jean down as easily as the Cure had shut down Rogue's powers, and Ororo wasn't sure where the difference was; it was disturbing to find herself on Erik's side of the argument, even knowing that Jean had been happy as a doctor and teacher, her powers small and inoffensive.
---
Alkali Lake looked very different from the first time Ororo had been there, when the hydroelectric dam had been in operation and Stryker running his secret base behind it. The lake was calm and deep, now, as it had been in the days afterwards when they'd searched for Jean's body - and Stryker's, or his son Jason's - and found nothing. There was new growth on the slopes and, to Ororo's relief, all the stones were lying on the ground as they should be, rather than floating in the air.
She brought the plane in to land on the rocky shore, and moments before they touched ground, both Emma and Charles called out,
"Scott's here!"
"Is there any sign of Jean?" Erik asked them, as Ororo set them down safely.
"I can't find anything," Emma replied.
"I can." Callisto got to her feet first. "There's definitely two mutants out there, and one of them is scary big."
"You've met Jean - is it her?" Ororo unbuckled herself and hit the button to open the hatch.
Callisto, unusually for her, looked confused. "I can't tell. And it's changing now, to a much less powerful mutant and-I don't know." She must have been more alarmed than she let on, because she stepped aside for Ororo to exit the Blackbird first.
Scott was standing on a small, half-rotten jetty, wearing his motorbike leathers and visor, staring out into the lake. He hadn't moved, not even to acknowledge his precious plane landing behind them.
"Scott." Ororo walked up to join him, cautious despite her delight at seeing him. He looked, of all things, afraid.
"Jean's out there," he replied. "She killed me, didn't she?"
"You were the first, and now she's brought everyone she killed back to life. Do you remember anything?"
"She drained my optic blasts, then she dissolved me. It wasn't painful, but I could feel..." He made a gesture, his hands moving apart, his fingers spread wide. "Her hair was long, and she was hungry."
*I'm sorry,* came a huge voice, in all of their minds. Ororo instinctively tried to cover her ears, but it made no difference.
"Jean!" Charles called out, from the shoreline.
A vast glowing shape rose beneath the waters. Ororo heard Callisto cry out, and when she turned, Callisto was crouched on the rocky shore, clutching at her head, her nose dripping blood. Erik hauled her to her feet and gave her a handkerchief.
*No matter where I look, you bring me here.*
Ororo wasn't sure to whom the voice addressed this, but the glowing shape reached out a wing, casting its glow over Charles and Erik, who quickly pushed Callisto aside, into a startled Emma's arms.
*You could have healed. You could have protected. Instead, you made us your battleground. Charles wants me to want to be kind. Erik wants me to want to fight. Neither of you will let me go.*
"Jean, I'm so sorry," Charles called out to her. "I tried to help you."
"I wanted you to be free," Erik added.
The glow rolled over them. *Neither of you fear me.*
Ororo stepped forward. "What do you want, Jean?"
*I want to be whole. The Phoenix is destruction and healing all in one. You cannot divide me between you.*
"Then go to where you are whole," Ororo shouted, feeling as if the noise would burst her skull. "You have power! Make your own choice!"
---
Ororo had a terrible headache and she didn't know why. In two days it would be her twelfth birthday, and she didn't want to be sick for that. Sometimes when Mr Lehnsherr was very angry it affected her like low pressure did but he'd promised that he'd try not to do that; still, Ororo hoped that's all it was. She put on her Snoopy slippers and crept downstairs from her bedroom to the kitchen in the dark. She would never get in trouble for creeping around at night, but right now she felt the light would hurt her with its great glowing force. All that time alone in Egypt and Kenya had taught her to obey those instincts, no matter how ridiculous they seemed.
She made it to the kitchen and put the electric kettle on. Most other American homes didn't have these, she'd found out, but the Professor and Mystique had lived in England for a long time and preferred to make their tea this way.
"Hey, Ororo." Mystique was sitting at the table in the dark, with a cup of tea in her hands. She looked as though she'd been crying.
"You surprised me!" Ororo accused.
"Mystique: it's all in the name, babe. You don't look well." Mystique smiled, even though she didn't look happy.
"My head hurts, so I'm making some sleepy tea."
"Good idea. You want me to rub your head until the kettle boils?"
Ororo scampered over and crouched down in front of Mystique, facing away from her, and Mystique gave her scalp a firm massage, her hands warm from the cup of tea.
"Oh, that's nice. You're the best at headaches."
Mystique laughed quietly, and Ororo thought she sounded sad. "Thanks. My brother always had them, so I learned to help him. Listen, if Jean and I went away for a little while, would you be okay? You're good friends with her."
"Yeah, she was my roomie until she started having problems with her power. Where would you go?"
"This school is the best place for a lot of mutants, but I don't think it's the best place for Jean. Sometimes people need a bit of peace and quiet and time to be themselves. Away from other influences."
Ororo could feel her pain fading the longer Mystique massaged her head. "Oh. I didn't enjoy being by myself, but I guess Jean does. So you're going away with Mr Lehnsherr again?"
"No. I'm going by myself. My brother and Erik are such big confident guys that sometimes they forget not everyone feels the same. They forget that it's sometimes okay to be unsure, because that's when you ask questions and figure things out. I think Jean needs to be aware of that."
"So are you going to ask them if Jean can come with you?" Ororo leaned back into Mystique's strong hands.
"I did." Her voice was slightly muffled at that, as if she was crying again. "And Charles made it pretty clear who gets to make the decisions around here. And he can find me if I do anything 'stupid'. And for once, Erik agreed with him. They both think they know best for Jean."
"What's best for me?" Jean was standing in the doorway in her dressing gown. Her voice sounded strange, deeper, and the light in the hall behind her gave the impression that her messy waves of hair were glowing.
"I don't know," Mystique answered, "And I don't think anyone else does, either."
Jean walked forward, and the glow of her hair didn't dissipate in the dark kitchen. Instead, Ororo could see Jean's whole body was glowing with the colours of flame. "It's nice to hear that someone doesn't have grand plans for me. I'm not their Frankenstein's monster."
"You said none of us were allowed to call ourselves monsters anymore," Ororo reminded her.
Jean ignored her and sat opposite Mystique. "You wanted to help me. No-one told me that. You left."
"Mystique wouldn't leave, not for good," Ororo argued, confused by Jean talking as if it had already happened. She stood up to keep her eyes on Jean. "But…maybe you want to?" Ororo couldn't imagine it herself - coming here was the best thing that had ever happened to her - but she also wondered how she hadn't seen that Jean was so unhappy.
Jean didn't say anything, staring at Mystique and Ororo as if she'd never seen them before.
Mystique leaned over the table and took Jean's hand. "I lived here when I was a teenager, and when I left, it was a giant crazy rebellion. I had to be the complete opposite to the way I'd been. I learned a lot, but it was very hard and I don't want that for you."
"They'll tear me in half and stitch me together and make me think I'm happy with it." Jean's voice was low and vicious, nothing Ororo had ever heard from her.
Mystique's gaze was serious, and her voice calm. "Come with me."
"Yes." Jean stood up, her chair tipping over with a loud thump, and the light suddenly died away. Ororo felt the breath rush out of her, as if something huge had just left the room, leaving freckly-faced, awkward Jean, the girl who kissed the Professor's head every morning and dared to hug Mr Lehnsherr despite his protests. She looked tired and sad and yet much younger than Ororo.
"Jean?"
She reached out her hands to Mystique, and Mystique pulled her into a firm embrace. "Let's go pack your things. We'll be on the bike, so pack light."
Jean turned and smiled at Ororo. "You're right. I do have the power, and this time I can make my own choice. Thank you."
Ororo hugged her quickly so that she didn't cry. "See you when you come home, okay?"
---
Mystique had called Ororo, as she often did, ready to send yet another stray teenager on to the school. Ororo had been principal for two years now, since Charles had retired from the position to run his lobby group fighting Senator Kelly's Registration plans. The flow of traumatised mutant children and teenagers never ceased.
"Did you get the wedding invitation?" Ororo asked Mystique. "Charles has probably asked you a dozen times already."
Mystique laughed. "He sent one to each of my past ten residences and all six of my drop boxes, including one that I didn't think he knew about. Yes, I consider myself thoroughly invited. Irene and I will bring Rogue up then."
"It's a pity Jean won't make it."
"She might yet. If anyone can make it from a refugee medical clinic in Kenya to a big gay New York wedding, it's Jean. Last I heard, she was personally flying vaccines out to remote villages with her telekinesis. Maybe she'll fly herself to New York next."
Ororo frowned. "It's been on my mind a lot, recently - do you ever regret taking Jean away? It took Charles and Erik months to fix Cerebro after you broke it to stop them tracking you down."
"No. Never. Jean had to have the chance to make her own decisions rather than have Charles and Erik make them for her. And I think without her to look after, I wouldn't have been back half as often, and neither would Erik." Raven paused for a moment. "Oh, and Irene said to thank you for those five minutes in the kitchen."
"When you and Jean left? If Irene had been around the next day she might not have been saying thank you! I've never seen Charles so angry."
"That's Irene - she never explains. Tell Charles we'll be there to see Erik finally make an honest man of him."
"If the combined teachings of Logan and Emma don't destroy the school entirely by then!"
They both laughed and Ororo hung up the phone. It had been a tough year, leading the fight against the Cure clinics. Every last splinter group of mutant activists held a different opinion - Charles and Erik the first among the activists, but so many more groups springing up every day - and it was hard enough to run the school without the students fighting each other over protest t-shirts. Still, there was nothing like a wedding to bring people together. She sighed and stretched. There were still bills to pay and student reports to sign, and she hadn't even thought about a formal dress, but for now she rather thought she might go outside and enjoy the rain.
This entry was originally posted at http://lilacsigil.dreamwidth.org/69252.html - comments are welcome at either location.