X-Men: The Last Stand

by Chris Claremont

  She faced him at last, intrigued by what he held.

  “Anything you can think of,” he said.

  The fragment of iron popped from Magneto’s fingers and began to glow as Jean’s telekinesis quickly excited its molecules. His own power gave him insight into what she was doing, and he couldn’t help but be amazed as she played with the core molecular structure of the metal, altering its density, its shape, its state, its very physical nature. She made it a glob of primordial ylem, and then formed a tiny statuette. She excited it to a gaseous state, compressed it to the verge of transitioning into a microsingularity. She altered it from iron to wood and then infused that wood with a spark of life, so that if planted in fertile soil, it might very well grow into a proper tree.

  Her eyes narrowed as she worked, her mouth wide with a smile of delight, like a child embracing her latest Christmas toys. She had a child’s attention span, too, and very quickly she became bored.

  The iron fragment flared beyond incandescent, lighting their corner of the shaded forest brighter than any conceivable sun, as bright as Creation must have been during those first moments when the universe was born.

  The shock wave staggered Magneto, shook the trees around him, and generated a Fourth of July light show. Below, in the campsite, there were cries of alarm and outrage as the wave coursed through them, playing with their skin as a sudden, fierce squall might the surface of a pond. Jean didn’t notice.

  “Jean,” Magneto commanded, “enough.”

  That got her full attention. Perhaps not such a great idea.

  She was smiling, a little ruefully. He liked that even less.

  “You sound like him.”

  “He wanted to hold you back.”

  “And what do you want?” Jean asked.

  “I want you to be what you are. As nature intended…”

  He took her by the shoulder, speaking with his full passion.

  “This ‘cure’ they speak of is meant for all of us, whether we want it or not. If we want our freedom as a species, our rightful place among the peoples and nations of our world, then we must fight for it. Together, Jean”—he moved close—“we can win this war!”

  His words struck a chord. She was interested.

  Magneto was content.

  Callisto was furious.

  Followed by Pyro, she intercepted Magneto on his way back to the encampment.

  “What the hell was that?” she demanded, and he didn’t need telepathy to see that she thought he was crazy for keeping Jean around. “Her power’s totally unstable.”

  “Only in the wrong hands,” he assured them.

  Pyro obviously didn’t buy it. “And you trust her? She’s one of them!”

  Magneto didn’t even spare him a glance. “So were you, once.”

  “I stuck with you, all the way,” Pyro protested as Magneto brushed past him. “I would’ve killed the professor if you gave me the chance!”

  He took a quick, reflexive step back as Magneto rounded on him, consumed by rage. “The professor,” he roared right in the young man’s face, “was my friend!” He paused, for breath and for control: “Charles Xavier did more for mutants than you’ll ever know. My single greatest regret is that he had to die to turn the tide.”

  “So what now?” asked Bobby Drake. It was the morning following Xavier’s memorial. A bunch of kids had gathered in one of the common rooms after breakfast, to be joined by Ororo and Hank McCoy and ultimately—to a smile of warm relief from Ororo that wasn’t returned—by Logan. “What do we do?”

  Ororo shrugged. “I don’t know, Bobby.” Hank knew that none of them had really thought that far ahead. They were still too much in shock.

  Hank spoke up, reluctantly, the doctor delivering the worst of news—news that seemed to be just about what everyone was expecting.

  “Charles Xavier founded this school,” he said. “Perhaps it should end with him?”

  Ororo didn’t comment, but Kitty gave a shallow nod.

  “We should start calling parents,” she suggested.

  “What?” Bobby sounded outraged, not only at the motion on the table, but also by who it was coming from.

  “She’s right, Robert,” Hank said. “We should tell the students they’re going home.”

  “Most of us,” Peter Rasputin reminded him, “don’t have anywhere to go.”

  Bobby shot to his feet. “I can’t believe this! I can’t believe we’re not going to fight for this place!”

  Ororo didn’t move from her place by the window, so it was Logan who answered Bobby’s challenge.

  “Charley’s dead, kid,” he said. “The professor is dead.”

  Bobby, angrily: “So what?”

  “There is no school,” Logan explained patiently, although it was clear to Hank that what he wanted far more was a session of unrestricted berserker mayhem. “There is no choice.”

  “There’s always a choice!” Bobby threw his own words back at him, and then, rushing onwards: “But what do you care? This was never your home!”

  Logan looked ready to reply, but instead turned to face the doorway.

  Facing them was an angel.

  “I’m sorry,” Warren said, picking up on the vibe. “I know this is a bad time…” His body language and manner told Hank that he fully expected to make things worse.

  “My name is Warren Worthington,” he introduced himself, then with a shy, self-deprecating smile added, “the third.”

  Everyone knew the name. Warren plunged ahead regardless.

  “I was told this was a safe place for mutants.”

  “It was, son,” answered Hank.

  “No, Henry,” snapped Ororo. “It is.”

  With a long and even stride, every step proclaiming the rightness of her decision, Ororo crossed the room to the doorway leading to Xavier’s study.

  “Bobby,” she told him as she passed, “show Mr. Worthington to a room.”

  She threw open the door and entered, with the rest of them following—curious, expectant, impressed, outraged—like fish caught in her net, to behold her taking her place behind the desk, as though it were hers and always had been.

  “And tell all the students the school will remain open.”

  Hank watched her look past the assemblage to Logan, who hadn’t made a move.

  “This is our home,” she told them all, but her words were mainly meant for him. “And as long as I’m here, this will be a safe haven for mutants.”

  There were smiles all around—even from Hank—and a muffled chorus of “Aw-riiight!” “Outstanding!” “Way to go, ’Ro!” From Logan, though, not a word, not even a nod. Ororo had made her decision. He made his. He left.

  Upstairs, a little later, Bobby ushered Warren into a room.

  “Might not be what you’re used to,” he semiapologized.

  “It’s perfect,” Warren assured him.

  “Yeah,” Bobby nodded, comprehending the multiple meanings. “No parents.”

  With just those few words, they made a connection. And from it Bobby intuited at once that Warren had a lot to process, work best done in private. Telling the new arrival he’d give a yell at dinnertime, Bobby stepped out into the hall to leave the boy alone. As he closed the door, though, he caught a glimpse of Warren flexing his wings, stretching the gleaming alabaster pinions so wide they scraped the walls of the room.

  With that sight came the obvious code name for so glorious a creature, that encompassed his strength and the evident courage it must have taken to break from his father—whom it was equally apparent the young man still loved—and of course his unearthly beauty.

  “Welcome to Xavier’s,” Bobby breathed, “Angel!”

  He left the room by a different route, to knock eventually on Rogue’s door and quietly call her name, “Rogue?” And then, answered by silence, “Marie?”

  It wasn’t locked, and his eyes widened as the door swung open on an empty room. She hadn’t taken much, and the chaos surrounding the bureau and closet
told him she’d packed in a hurry. No note, no clue. Damn her and her impulses!

  Outside, he encountered Peter and asked the obvious.

  “Hey, Pete, you seen Rogue?”

  “She took off.”

  “When? Where? Why?”

  Peter had no clue. Bobby’d have to figure out this one on his own.

  Logan stood before Xavier’s cenotaph, replaying those final moments over and over in his memory. He hadn’t moved for most of the day, but everyone at the school had the common sense to leave him be. His eyes were at half-mast, giving the impression he was dozing—but the tension in his body totally belied that. He was in full predator mode, waiting for…something—damned if he could articulate precisely what—and when it arrived he’d be ready to deal with it.

  Trees rustled as his patience was rewarded. The woods were deep in shadow, and as he looked he found nothing there to see. Both trees and air seemed still, yet his ears reported the sound of movement. It was big, and coming straight for him.

  He flexed his fingers, but left his claws retracted. The same instinct that alerted him to the approaching presence now assured him he was in no danger. This thing was as much the predator as he was, but it wasn’t hunting tonight. At least, not him.

  And just like that, within the space of a single breath, his head was filled with the scent of her.

  He heard her call his name. “Logan!”

  Before he could reply, his perceptions twisted inside out and he found himself tumbling through a cascade of waypoints, laying out a trail he could easily follow that led unerringly to a hidden forest encampment below a towering cliff.

  “Come to me,” Jean pleaded, and the force of her desperation, her need, her stark terror, drove him to his knees.

  “Help me,” she begged, and he realized that both sets of his claws were now extended, gleaming despite being shrouded in twilight shadows. Her doing, he sensed, a further tweaking of her perceptions, to show him what was needed.

  “Save me,” she asked of him, in the barest whisper, and then the air fell still once more and the scent of her was nothing but a memory.

  He sat up, back ramrod straight, blades resting open on his thighs, legs folded under him in the Japanese manner that was an unexpected constant in his nature and the source of much speculation among the student body. How could a roughhouser from the Canadian backwoods have a real affinity for one of the most structured, mannered and ordered societies in history? Logan had no answers either. He simply accepted it as a part of himself, like the healing factor.

  He stayed that way as the evening turned fully dark, then with uncharacteristic formality, folded both forearms across his chest, so they formed the shape of an X, and retracted his claws. With a fluid grace he rolled to his feet and laid a set of fingertips on the crest of the great stone, his eyes meeting the face emblazoned on its side. There was a little bit of humor to the way his mouth quirked; he was, after all, a man with an appreciation for irony.

  “You were right, Chuck,” he admitted at last. “You were always right.”

  Nobody heard him retrace his steps through the Mansion, but Ororo was waiting at the carriage house, where she had her loft, with the keys to his bike. There was no need for words. They parted with an embrace that carried with it an acceptance of what was, but also a promise of a future not yet even dreamed of.

  Then, with a roar that woke the house as he opened the bike’s throttle wide, he hit the road.

  Logan had a lot of miles to go before he slept—and a promise to keep.

  Some folks called it Mutie Town. Some smart-ass in the city bureaucracy slapped on the label District X. Back in the day—which in this instance was a century and a half ago—Manhattan’s Lower East Side had been the tenement home to successive waves of immigrants to America’s shores, starting with the Irish, then the Italians, the Jews, all the polyglot variations of country and culture in Middle Europe, followed by the Chinese and most lately, the rest of Southeast Asia. The joke in the Big Apple was that you could stroll from the Williamsburg to the Manhattan Bridge and encounter the world in small, every nationality and ethnic group currently extant upon the globe. And probably a fair sampling of the ancient ones as well. It was that kind of city.

  The newest to arrive sort of broke the mold, in that these folks were substantially homegrown. Here, among the mean streets and hardcore neighborhoods the city would rather forget, mutants gathered to make their home. And like every immigrant group that preceded them, once established they’d begun to extend their influence beyond those initial, confining boundaries, agitating over time for the same services and respect accorded everyone else. True, they lived in a ghetto, but they also believed acceptance was only a matter of time.

  Here, in the media capital of the world, Warren Worthington Jr. and Kavita Rao had established their first clinic, promising an instant escape from years of struggle and hardship, offering the chance for mutants to rejoin the rest of humanity.

  Rogue had waited on line all night to reach the clinic. She’d filled out all the proper forms and been assigned a place in the waiting room. And that was how she spent her day, from that point on: sitting, watching those around her, and waiting. Same as them.

  Some of the mutants appeared excited, others conflicted. The first time they called your name, it was for a session with a counselor, who outlined the nature of the procedure, the potential ramifications. For example, special care had to be taken with those mutants whose life processes involved toxic substances or harmful environments. Reverting someone with gills without the means of yanking them out of the water, pronto, was a nonstarter. Likewise a mutant with sulfuric acid for blood. If you existed in multiple dimensions, Rogue mused to herself, how can you be sure you’ll end up in the right one?

  The other aspect the counselor hammered home, returning to it again and again, was the fact that you couldn’t change your mind. Once applied, the reversion couldn’t be undone. You make the choice, you’re stuck with the consequences. Being a mutant, that was fate’s fault, or nature’s, or God’s; you could vent against those higher powers all you pleased. The cure, however, was all on you.

  That’s why no adolescents were being allowed to participate in these initial trials. Accepting the legal arguments put forth by attorney Vange Whedon (herself a mutant, able to morph into a dragon), head of the Mutant Rights Coalition, the feds had conceded this was too big and absolute a decision to be made for someone, even by loving parents wanting only the best for their children.

  Rogue had done her session this morning, returned to her seat, and patiently continued to wait her turn, wishing her power applied to inanimate objects as well as people so she could lay a hand on this chair and turn herself into a statue of plastic and metal. The longer she waited, the crazier she became, content with her choice one moment, frantic the next. She thought of all she’d done with the X-Men and wondered How could she possibly give up such a life?

  She ached for Bobby’s touch and wondered why she had to wait, and then worried what would happen if things didn’t work out—if he had only pretended to care for her? She had to admit there was a fundamental safety in her power. Her body was absolutely her own, and no one could lay a hand on her without suffering the consequences. Could she handle being vulnerable? Was the need that ate her up inside worth the price?

  Oh God, oh God, what if she was wrong?

  The inner door opened and a couple emerged. They’d been a mixed pair, she remembered from earlier—he a mutant, she not. Now, they were just a couple, very much in love, holding each other, cooing endearments, touching, stroking, marveling at this catalogue of new sensations that made them perpetually giddy.

  The nurse overseeing the line consulted her clipboard and read off the next name.

  “Marie,” she called.

  The name didn’t register at first. Rogue was too used to being addressed by her code name. When the nurse called again, she reacted with a start, raising her hand and putting herself in
to a minor tumult as she gathered her gear and stepped through the indicated doorway.

  Protestors lined the street, pro-cure and anti-, plus a group representing the self-proclaimed “Web-Nation” Purity, who called down a plague on both their houses, decrying the cure as a worthless smokescreen and holding fast to their core belief that the only good mutant was a dead mutant.

  Opposite, and looking understandably anxious, was an unexpectedly thick crush of mutants, all apparently trying to get into the clinic at once. The police had started out by establishing and trying to enforce a line along the face of the clinic building, but the number and intensity of the protestors had gradually driven those prospective patients into a huddle of self-defense. There’d been attempts to move the protestors back, but again sheer numbers were a problem. The fact that two of the three groups consisted of individuals with every variety and degree of power didn’t help. Closing the clinic and sending everyone home was no option—that decision was just as guaranteed to start a riot as attacking the protestors.

  The reality of the situation was that nobody had anticipated the sheer numbers involved, on all sides. Tomorrow, they’d hopefully have a better plan. For today, which so far had gone fairly well, they’d just have to keep their fingers crossed.

  Bobby couldn’t believe his eyes as he had made the corner of Houston and found himself facing police lines and bodies galore. Talking really fast and using a lifetime’s quota of dumb luck, he’d managed to work his way up to the clinic. Didn’t hurt to bump into some friends among the cops, including the tactical commander on-scene, Inspector Lucas Bishop (a mutant and former student of Xavier’s) and his senior sergeant, Charlotte Jones.

  It was a gamble coming down here, but try as he might he couldn’t think of where else Rogue might go. He understood that he was a large part of the reason why she might consider taking such a step, but he really couldn’t comprehend why she’d go through with it; he wouldn’t—couldn’t—give up his power for anything. Until, thinking hard on the train ride into Grand Central, he had asked himself how he’d feel if their powers were switched. If he couldn’t ever touch the woman he so desperately loved. He understood as well that he could promise to be faithful on a stack of Bibles, and mean it, and she’d still have doubts. Because, as she’d said, he was a guy.