X-Men(tm) The Last Stand

by Chris Claremont

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She’d never had so much fun.

  Too much fun.

  Inexplicably, she had felt a sudden chill, and reacted with a desire for warmth, drawing in the myriad dots of energy that surrounded her, hoping to draw energy from them to restore herself.

  Too little, too late—wrong power, wrong solution.

  It hadn’t been her telekinesis she had to worry about, but her telepathy.

  She’d allowed herself to become so caught up in exploring the subatomic quantum world within Ororo’s raindrop that her natural psi-screens had slipped loose from her control. Like a single loose thread unraveling an entire tapestry, her telepathic window on the world around her had become ever more porous.

  The first thoughts that had come to her were nothing special, raised no flags of warning: she tagged thirty-eight people in the bar, pretty fair business considering the hour, twenty-one men, seventeen women.

  A number were couples, some of them committed, others just friends, some just for the night, others looking for something more. Many were single, a few by choice; some were looking, others didn’t care. She had beheld varying degrees of inebriation, stone-cold sober to slight buzz to one guy falling down drunk and another dead asleep in a booth at the back.

  She had sensed lots of conversation, mainly inconsequential, not a whole lot of actual communication, the facile exchange of words used too much as a shield against intimacy. The true intimacy was reserved to looks, or touch, the lazy smile that sparked a drop of the eyes, a slight flush, an electric tingle racing along the surface of the skin, occasionally delightedly to the core of the being.

  But lurking in the background like a shadow mugger she had felt frustration, loneliness, boredom, excitement, anticipation, desire. There were dreams galore—within reach or just beyond, unfulfilled, even unrecognized.

  She had detected the sharp intensity of predators on the hunt, and the equally sharp taste of those being hunted, all tangled together with the primal needs and fears of rejection, of acceptance, of success, of commitment.

  And that had been just the surface.

  Each person had a history that bundled all the experiences of their lives within the labyrinth of their psyche. Each backstory led Jean down paths that were winding and twisted, branching as randomly—yet in their own way, on their own terms, as logically—as the tributaries of the Mississippi, taking her to parts of each and every person that they likely never even dreamed existed, to the deepest secrets of the subconscious, their fundamental selves, never meant to be revealed. To the thoughts that were forbidden for a reason.

  The emotions crashing against her then were as fascinating as the quantum microverse. By the time she had realized how far she’d gone, she couldn’t tear her inner eyes away, and she didn’t want to.

  The curse of her telepathy: not only did it strip reality of its walls, it seemed to mandate that every observation, every experience be unforgettable. Now, sitting on the plane, the harder she tried, the more the memories thrust themselves into her face. There were so many, crowding in on her like passengers on a rush-hour subway. Her mouth twisted at the power some of them had to thrill her—not always the ones she welcomed. At the power others had to shame her, because even if she atoned for the fault, she couldn’t escape the memory of the original moment.

  There was so much more darkness than light. The darkness was the natural state of things. And yet the alternative terrified her so much more, because it was a light that seemed to Jean to come from the fire in her soul, the transcendent and all-consuming passion that had destroyed Scott and Xavier, and that terrified her so much more.

  It would be so easy to drown. She felt that way with Annie, felt that way at Alkali Lake.

  She closed her eyes, opened them wide at the sound of a familiar voice, to behold another moment of memory, one from that very same night.

  A game of pool, her against Scott, telekinesis versus optic blasts.

  There had been tables in the back of the bar, in surprisingly good shape. She honestly couldn’t tell how she’d gotten to her feet, much less made it the dozen slightly wobbly steps to the game room, but once she arrived there she had been determined not to disgrace herself.

  Scott always had that effect on her. Whenever she found herself in the riptide of her telepathy, his presence was like a sea anchor to her, steadying her against the fierce current, giving her the opportunity to collect herself and regain her inner focus.

  A gentleman
always, Scott had offered her the break. This was their own private version of the game of pool, played with powers instead of cues. She had smirked and slapped the cue ball with her thoughts, hoping to clear the table with a single shot. That wasn’t impossible—it merely required pinpoint and simultaneous manipulation of every ball on the table. She couldn’t, for example, use her powers to drag the balls over to the pockets and drop them in; back at the beginning they’d agreed that would be way too easy. For this stunt, the contact had to be one smooth, continuous flow from ball to ball, off one another and the rail to their final resting places. She had to play angles and forces in the blink of an eye—and, as the saying went, let the balls fall where they may.

  She’d actually succeeded, more than once. But not that night.

  Six balls had dropped, and from the lazy gunfighter smile on Scott’s face she knew he wasn’t about to show her any mercy.

  He had prowled the table with surpassing grace, a lithe physicality that was rarely associated with Scott, yet was as much a part of him as it was of Logan. They had that in common—they were both hunters. Scott always had an uncanny knack for seeing the patterns of things and of people, which made him as formidable at poker as he was at chess. Nowhere was that more evident than in a pool hall; pool was all about spatial geometry. He’d taken advantage of the shadows in the back to switch his sunglasses for his visor, which allowed him better control over his eyebeams. He had proceeded to unleash his optic blasts in precise and fractional bursts, minute flashes of scarlet neon from his eyes that barely registered even in the darkness at the back of the bar. He’d tap a ball here, nudge it there, using sufficient force to move it properly without damaging the felt it rested on.

  He had run the table, the bastard, and she loved him for it. He grinned when he was done. Because it had been a private moment, because it was just him and her, he let down all his usual defenses and for one of those rare, precious, delicious instants had just let himself be himself. He was strong and confident, tempered by the wounds and losses he’d suffered in his life, made whole by the love he felt for her. And she in return had felt an aching need that drove her around the table and into his arms for a kiss she wanted to last forever.

  He’d looked at her just the same way when she’d killed him.

  She wanted to scream, and she wished for the power, the will, to reach inside her own skull with fingers turned to obsidian claws and tear out the offending memories, to gut her head until it was a hollow shell, just to give herself some lasting peace.

  Then, in memory, something happened that was…different.

  Scott broke their kiss, which is what had happened. And then they’d returned to their hotel arm in arm and put the do not disturb sign on the door, and proceeded to fulfill a great many of their teammates’ more scandalous and fantastical suppositions.

  But instead, the memory shifted, and changed, and now quite seriously, he told her: “Stop!”

  She blinked.

  “Be the teacher, Jean. Show us the way,” he went on.

  She blinked again.

  “Growth is change, change can be chaos. It isn’t always peaceful, and there’s always a price.”

  “Too damn high,” she told him now, in this memory that had somehow warped into something entirely different, taking refuge in acting as drunk as she remembered feeling that night. “I don’t want to pay.” She turned away from the table. “I don’t want to play.”

  He pulled her back, using that strength of body and will that always had the capacity to surprise her. None of the X-Men had really understood how much he meant to the team until he was gone. Especially her.

  “What’s done is done,” he told her, gently wiping away the tears that burst unbidden from her eyes.

  “I killed you.”

  He gave her that damn smile again and shrugged. “I’m still here.”

  She blinked, uncomprehending.

  “Perfect memory, coupled to the power to transcend all the rules and realities.”

  “You’re a figment of my damn imagination!”

  He sighed. “Whatever I am, wherever I come from, I’m a part of you.” He stroked the tip of his thumb lightly across her lips as his hands cupped her face, and she responded in kind by leaning her body against his, marveling at how well they fit.

  “Power is responsibility,” he told her gently. “Responsibility is choice.”

  Her own lessons. She didn’t want to hear them.

  “Have it your own way, then,” he said, and before she knew what he was doing, thought and action so close together—virtually one—that even her telepathy wasn’t able to warn her, he wrenched off his visor.

  Twin spears of force struck her wholly unrestrained with an impact sufficient to punch a hole straight through the base of a granite mountain. She flew backwards as if she’d been shot from a catapult, screaming with rage as she crashed against a wall that should have broken with the blow, but miraculously held.

  The fire blazed within her eyes as she fought back, taking the energies Scott hurled at her and making them her own, using that strength to establish a shield and force the continuing blasts away from her body and back towards their source.

  It wasn’t easy. Even when they’d fought at Alkali Lake, when Scott had been mind-controlled by Stryker into becoming the X-Men’s adversary, the fact that he’d been shooting through his visor maintained an upper safety limit on his power level. This time, all those governors had been cast aside.

  She gathered her own power and prepared to strike back.

  Only—just like that, he closed his eyes.

  The sudden absence of pressure caught her as much by surprise as his initial attack. She was pushing so hard against that titanic resistance that she was thrown immediately off-balance and couldn’t stop herself from pitching to the floor in an undignified sprawl.

  As she shoved herself up, she found him beside her, visor once more in place, the picture of loving solicitude. She reacted with fury and slapped him aside, putting some distance between them as she moved against the wall, the better to let him see the fire in her eyes.

  He was no more afraid of her now than he’d been at Alkali.

  “I can’t help myself,” he told her as he had told her long ago, and tapped a couple of fingers against his temple. “Something’s not quite…right in here, a bit that’s broken, that we never found a way to repair.” She’d done the MRI and CAT scans after they’d met. It was a crucial bit of organic brain damage dating from a childhood accident. In a way, it was much like what had happened with her and Annie; both she and Scott had suffered a trauma that catalyzed their powers ahead of schedule. Each had had to deal with the lasting consequences.

  “I can’t turn off my optic blasts,” he continued, “and you have access to more raw power than you ever imagined. Question is, my love, does the power control you? Or…?”

  Xavier’s final question, his final plea.

  Charles hadn’t been afraid, either, but more—surprised. And in a way that suggested he beheld a frontier of infinite possibilities, not the end of his life but a whole new beginning.

  “You have a choice, Jean,” Scott told her.

  It was time.

  “Welcome,” the tour guide announced, “to the northern anchor of the Golden Gate Bridge.”

  The big Prevost bus was pulled off to the side of the road, onto a paved overlook that provided a sweeping sea-level panorama of the Bay, with a spectacular view of San Francisco and Alcatraz. Almost a full load, a little shy of fifty tourists, mainland Chinese on holiday, had come to view the sights and visit relatives who’d emigrated generations ago. There was a lot more variety in clothes than the guide remembered from previous tours and a significant improvement both in general style and quality. It was fascinating to him how much like everyone else they’d become, surprisingly indistinguishable in outward affect from their counterparts from Des Moines. Made sense in a way; for all he knew, they made a lot of the clothes heartland Ameri
ca wore—why shouldn’t they wear them as well? Generational splits certainly transcended national and societal boundaries, that much was obvious: the older folks were totally excited, the parents looked harried, torn between caring for their parents and their kids, while the kids, who ran the spectrum from very early teens to barely twenties, clearly wanted to be anywhere but here. On their own, they might have found this fun, but stuck in this crowd, they were determined to proclaim their independence by radiating ennui.

  “If you look in this direction,” he said, leading them around the front of the bus for a better look, “you’ll see the foundation anchors for the north tower. The bridge was the brainchild of engineer Joseph Strauss, and executed by architect Irving Morrow—who we have to thank both for the Art Deco design touches and the bridge’s distinctive and unique color—along with engineer Charles Alton Ellis and designer Leon Moissieff. Construction began on the fifth of January, 1933, and the bridge itself was completed in April, 1937, and officially opened a month later, in May. It’s one point seven miles from end to end, with a central span of forty-two hundred feet rising two hundred twenty feet above mean high water. The two towers that support the roadway stand seven hundred forty-six feet high, ninety feet above Golden Gate Strait.

  “Couple of more fun facts before we move on,” he continued, preening ever so slightly as a number of cameras turned his way. “Each of those anchorages, the one here in Marin and its counterpart over there at Fort Point, weigh better than sixty thousand tons. The total weight of the bridge—soup to nuts—is just shy of nine hundred thousand tons. Each main cable is about a mile and a third in length, a yard in diameter, and is made up of twenty-seven thousand separate strands of galvanized wire. The total weight of the main cables, the suspender cables, and all the bits that hold them together is nearly twenty-five thousand tons.