So does anyone else see Scott Summers as, like, the mutant version of the Chosen One?
Perception
A MCU: X-Men Fanfiction
Author: Sanjuno Shori Niko
Summary: Scott was not expecting this when Jean asked him to trust her and open his eyes... Can he use his safeword now?
Timeline: This is the only part so far, but I am prepared to write more.
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(In which Scott disagrees with the Phoenix's problem solving method.)
"It’s alright, Scott. Trust me." Jean’s voice held a smile, and Scott could feel the warmth of her, so gloriously alive against his skin and in his mind. "Open your eyes, Scott."
He loved her, he trusted her - and more than anything, he wanted to believe her - to believe in her. In her words and her survival and in the selfish hope that one day he would be able to look at her without a distorting layer of ruby-quartz between them. He wanted to know if her eyes were as green as his frail memory and imagination had painted them.
Scott could feel her fingers - so gentle on his face.
"Please, Scott." The whisper of Jean’s breath feathered across his lips.
Scott swallowed his nervousness and opened his eyes.
Colour. For the first time in decades. Grey-brown stone, brown and white and black bark, blue-green-grey mosses, clear water reflecting forest and brilliant blue sky and white clouds and her. Auburn hair and fair skin and pleased green eyes. "Jean."
"Oh, Scott." Pink lips curving in a happy smile, her eyes glittered.
"You..." Scott blinked, overwhelmed by sight and the breaking of his heart. "You aren’t Jean."
She blinked in surprise - just once - then anger and outrage darkened her eyes, twisted her expression into something savage as she hissed. "How did you know?"
"Jean wouldn’t have been standing in front of me." Scott stepped back, retreating in devastated horror. Whoever this woman was - she sounded like Jean, was in his head like Jean - but she was not Jean. "She wouldn’t have risked it. She knew how much it would kill me to hurt her, even by accident."
"Clever boy." As terrifying as she was, she was still beautiful when she smiled. "A pity. You’re a little too clever, and a little too brave for me to let you go."
"What do you mean?" Scott shifted his weight as things - rocks, branches, water - started to move, spiralling around the still center where the two of them stood facing each other. One more mark against her. Jean did not have that kind of mass control over her telekinesis. She had been too wary of her own power to ever try. He had to keep her talking, keep her distracted, or his chances of making it away from the lakeshore alive did not look good. The sudden surge of adrenaline - the realization that he wanted to survive, to live - it took Scott by surprise.
"Even now, you’re thinking about how to stop me." Not-Jean tilted her head and smiled, smiled the way his Jean had smiled when Scott had done something that had impressed and charmed her. "Oh, my love, I cannot let you, but how perfect you are. I cannot kill you; I love you too much to have the will for it."
"... What will you do with me then? What other options do you have?" That... was not the smartest thing he could have said, but Scott had never had an enemy declare their love and inability to kill him in the same breath as a threat before.
"I will have to send you away." The not-Jean mused, walking closer with a seductive sway his Jean had never used. Scott found he was frozen in place, unable to retreat thanks to familiar feeling of a telekinetic grip.
"I’ll come back." Scott warned her as she pressed up against him in a parody of a loving embrace. "It doesn’t matter where you send me - I’ll find a way back."
"No..." She murmured it against his lips, low and soft like an afterglow confession. "No, you won’t"
Scott closed his eyes to block out the sight of her face as she pressed her mouth against his more firmly. The world dissolved - it hurt, like nothing he had ever felt before - and Scott tumbled down into a darkness that should have been familiar.
/.../
Scott’s whole body hurt. Not the sharp heat of battle-earned wounds, but the dull, pervasive ache that he had felt only a few times over the course of his entire life. Scott only ever felt this way when he was running low on the energy that fuelled his optic beams - when he went too long without sunlight.
Something was wrong.
Without thinking twice, Scott opened his eyes.
White - blinding white and surgical steel. He was in an operating theatre. Scott sat up, twisting his wrists free of the badly secured straps without thinking twice about the action, and turned his head to face the surprised looking man in a lab coat.
A lab coat and not surgical scrubs. A single man, no nurses, no anaesthesiologist - just the pale, dark haired man holding a needle. The back of Scott’s head throbbed, the familiar hot slide of blood moved down his neck.
Scott narrowed his eyes at the man he had never learned the name of, but recognized immediately anyway. Second only to Jack Winters in his nightmares, this was the man who had robbed Scott of the ability to control his mutant powers. A man who had done who-knows-what to Scott as a child. A man Scott realized only later his foster father had sold him too. A man who had worked for the government, catching and experimenting on mutants to see how they worked under the cover of the state-run hospital that cared for orphaned children. The man who had worked for Stryker senior long before Stryker junior had attacked the Mansion. Charles had never said it outright, but Scott knew that Erik had killed this man. Next to the memory of his parents and Jean, it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him. It was the reason Scott could never bring himself to fight all-out against the man who had become Magneto.
Scott did not know how or why it was possible for this man to be standing over him again, all he knew was that there was no way in Hell he was just going to lie here and let that sadist cut him apart until he fell into a coma a second time.
"No. Never again." Scott only had one shot, but one shot was all he needed. The optic blast was weak - weak compared to a full strength blow that could level mountains - but it was more than enough to vaporise the man and remove a few walls.
Scott stumbled as he tried to run, finally settling into an unsteady trot. Something was wrong with his body, with his legs, something beyond his continued ability to control his optic blasts (and oh the irony in that statement burned) - but that would have to wait until after he had escaped.
Scott slammed into a door as alarms started to blare, the haze falling away from his mind as adrenaline and training took over the instinctive urge to flee from a threat.
Cyclops pushed aside his pain and weariness as he straightened up and looked through the small window set in the door. Another lab, less surgically sterile and more experimentally macabre, with a strange glass coffin filled with some not-water liquid, draped in tubes and monitors, and an extremely bloody, completely naked, incandescently angry Wolverine.
"Oh, fuck me." Cyclops groaned, and allowed himself a single moment of existential angst before he slammed through the door.
(Word Count: TBA)
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Woo! Hands up for random fandom! I had a complete scene for this thing, and so... voilà.
I have no ever-fucking clue what the ever-loving fuck is up with me and LJ right now, but I switched computers and half the keyboard commands still don't work. I may actually, legitimately, have to contact the LJ maintenance guys and whine at them. Seriously, what did I do to deserve this?
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HERE THERE BE DRAGONS!! (I am having far to much fun with this flower garden thing. WTF self?)
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