X-Men(tm) The Last Stand

by Chris Claremont

  His father looked at him after they had landed and moved a step or so back, intrigued despite himself by the new, confident way his son stood in front of him.

  Warren grinned shyly, his expression darkening just a tad as he remembered the harness he used to wear to hide his wings and he vowed to himself, Never again, “I’ve learned to fold the wings pretty good.”

  “I’m sorry for that, Warren, truly.”

  “I know, Dad. I know you always meant well.”

  “Son…thank you.”

  Warren shifted on his feet. Worthingtons were never good with displays of emotion, especially between men. Ideally, that’s what spouses were for. But Worthington Jr. wasn’t done.

  “Warren, I…” The words came slowly because they came hard, because they came from the father’s heart and from his soul. “I have never been more proud of you. I hope I can become half the man you’ve shown me you are today.”

  “Dad,” Warren began, but instead of words he stepped forward and put both arms and wings around his father in the kind of embrace they hadn’t shared since he was a boy.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said, when they stepped apart once more. “I’m one of the X-Men now. I’ve got to help.”

  “Take care of yourself, boy.”

  “See you soon!”

  And with that, he was gone, rising majestically into the air with a casual sweep of the wings that reminded his father of sketches his son used to make when he was still a boy, long before he’d begun to change. He read comics in those days, and like many fans, created his own characters. His favorite, and here Worthington had to wonder if even then on some deep subconscious level Warren had known what was in store for him, was a winged avenger that he christened Archangel. The suit had been too garish for words, and the pose and body had been cribbed from da Vinci.

  Watching his son now, Worthington Jr. saw that dream made real, in all its glory.

  Jean’s mouth twisted as she caught that faint pulse of awe and wonder and pride from Worthington Jr., and the determination of young Warren to stand by his new friends. At that age, she’d been much the same, yearning to be a part of something greater than herself, to be of value, to be—a star.

  The battle was rushing to its end, and Magneto’s side was losing. Quite badly.

  Not a surprise to her, since she knew what they were up against. Magneto invariably underestimated the X-Men, unable to see how they compensated for the

  weaknesses of each of them as individuals through teamwork, which involved self-sacrifice. Mutant to mutant, Magneto’s forces were stronger by far, but that was how they fought, utterly solo. Each of them demanded center stage as a matter of right; they didn’t care to subordinate to the group—whereas in the X-Men, Xavier created a whole that transcended the sum of its parts.

  The mainland shore was awash in colored light, alternating flashes of red and white announcing the presence of just about every emergency vehicle in the city, and likely every police car in the Bay Area. Not to mention the military.

  There was significant armor on scene, but the tanks and self-propelled guns were keeping their distance, as were the helicopters, out of respect for Magneto’s power. From the cityside came such an avalanche of thoughts and emotions, hundreds of thousands of citizens in varying states of anxiety and rage and outright panic that even Jean found herself staggered. She could block them easily enough, but the overwhelming volume made it increasingly difficult to discriminate the ones she needed to single out from the unending background clutter.

  So she set aside her primary power and used her eyes instead, catching hints of movement that gradually resolved into an extended line of skirmishers, making their wary way onto the bridge, advancing towards the shoreside tower.

  She considered stopping them, turning off their brains, shutting down the engines on the helicopters…

  …and stepped back from that abyss with a gasp.

  She was a doctor, she swore an oath: To do no harm!

  And thought, bitterly: Fat lot of good that did Charles—or Scott.

  Magneto wasn’t happy with the turn of events, and responded characteristically. He turned to Pyro.

  “It’s time to end this war,” he announced.

  There were easily a few hundred cars on the roadway. With a flick of the wrist, Magneto hurled one skyward as if it had just been shot, rocket-propelled, from a catapult.

  “Incoming!” Logan yelled, as the vehicle shot over his and Ororo’s heads. “Take cover!”

  Instead, Colossus strode forward and met the falling vehicle with a punch sufficient to bounce it clear of the island, to land in the bay with a nice splash.

  Magneto gave a cue to Pyro, who flicked his lighter aflame, and launched a volley of cars this time.

  As they cleared the bridge, climbing to the apogee of their trajectories, Pyro hit each and every one with a fireball, igniting their gas tanks and using his own control over fire to amplify them until they blazed hotter than any blast furnace.

  The sight was eerily beautiful, like watching falling stars.

  Pyro grinned, ear to ear, because he was just getting started.

  Magneto had launched a half dozen cars. Pyro detonated them in a random and staggered order, one high in the air as a distraction, some much closer to spray the scene with incandescent shrapnel and flaming gasoline, the remainder as ground bursts. One impact and explosion chopped the base out from under a guard tower, toppling the three-story structure and forcing a number of troops out into the open where they could be bombarded with white hot metal and living fire.

  One car struck Colossus dead on, driving him to the ground. Even as he fought his way back to his feet and pitched the wreckage into the water, Pyro surrounded him with flame, attacking him with salamander-streamers from the other burning cars with such intensity that the armored X-Man quickly began to glow red hot himself, radiating such incredible heat that he became a danger to anyone close by. He stepped too close to a pile of wreckage and the wood there instantly and spectacularly burst into flame, which Pyro turned against him. During his time at Xavier’s school, they’d often speculated about the big Russian’s resistance to heat—just how good was that armor—but no one had ever subjected him to anything approaching the ultimate test, even in the Danger Room. Professor Xavier felt it was far too dangerous.

  Time, Pyro figured, for me to take Mr. Muscle where the prof was too scared to go.

  More cars led to more fire, and Pyro ran streamers from one blaze to the next, building a fence across the battlefield that allowed no one to escape, gradually building the intensity to the point where it could explode into a firestorm capable of incinerating the island. Anyone not incinerated outright would suffocate as the great fire sucked all the oxygen away from ground level. By the time he was done, there’d be nothing left to mark the presence of any of the island’s defenders, not bones—except perhaps the Wolverine’s—not even ashes.

  Afterwards, for fun, maybe he’d start to work on San Francisco itself, by carving his name across the city in letters ten blocks high.

  Amidst the growing holocaust, Bobby yelled to Logan, “What can we do?”

  He looked to Storm, who shook her head.

  “John and Magneto are working together,” she replied, refusing as she always did to use the code name John Allerdyce had adopted. “Creating a fire dome over the island high enough to deal with any rain I can bring to bear, combined with a magnetic field that cripples my control over the weather. I can’t manifest a storm powerful enough to do us any good, or any lightning.”

  Logan growled, “Sonsofbitches picked the perfect time to quit being divas.”

  Then he paused, eyes caught by some loose cartridges from the soldiers’ dart guns that hadn’t been destroyed by Arclight’s earlier attack.

  “Okay,” he said, shuffling the elements of his plan together like a deck of cards, thinking fast, dealing out orders faster, “they work as a team, we work better.”

  He he
ld out his hand, with the ampoules he’d gathered. Ororo picked up the cue as if they were both telepaths.

  “Best defense is a good offense?”

  He grinned and thought she looked good enough to kiss, and she thought how much she’d like him to try.

  “Yo, popsicle,” he called to Bobby.

  “Don’t call me that!”

  “Make me—but first, you figure you can take out your old bud?”

  Bobby gave Pyro a long, hard look. In all their sessions in the Danger Room, every test of their powers, John had come out on top. He knew Pyro was counting on that.

  He also knew they had no alternative. He was already gasping, and each harsh breath left his mouth and throat dry, his chest aching. Maybe a minute more, they’d likely be breathing flame.

  He signaled Logan. He was good to go.

  “Furball,” Logan turned to Beast, who wasn’t handling the ovenlike environment well at all, “can you still move in that suit?”

  “If it’ll take me off this griddle!”

  “ ’Ro,” and he reached out to lay surprisingly gentle fingers against her cheek, thumb stroking an invisible piece of grit from beneath her eye, in a gesture so light and tender that she barely felt it, yet which sent an unexpected surge of electricity the length of her spine, straight to the core of her being. “I know it’ll be hard, but we need some cover.”

  Her eyes danced back at his, accepting the challenge, and they turned from a warm and welcoming brown to a blue that started as deep as the most magnificent sky before paling to an arctic blue-white. He felt the hairs on his body rise, saw that McCoy felt the same—although there was a special undercurrent to the sensations he felt that he would always keep to himself—as Storm brought her energies to bear, smelt and tasted the faintest hint of ozone.

  One of the remarkable sights of San Francisco is that, looking west late in the day, it appears as though an impossibly huge mountain wall has filled the seaward horizon. It’s a view that never fails to impress, hearkening back to the days of the Ice Age, when great glaciers swept south from the pole to blanket the northern hemisphere.

  Now Ororo drew on that distant phalanx of fog, and used it as the primer to call forth a localized bank of the same from all around the island and the nearer base of the Golden Gate.

  Pyro’s excitement had gotten the better of him, and he was totally swept away by the rush of battle. He had moved ahead faster than Magneto, who was still on the main body of the bridge.

  Magneto called a warning as the fog swirled up around them, closing him off from the sight of his adversaries, but Pyro couldn’t hear him above the crash of falling cars and the roar of flames. He couldn’t use radio, either, even though the units had been constructed to be resistant to his magnetism; the same forces he was employing to inhibit military communications and Ororo’s weather powers created an impenetrable sea of static. If he scaled back enough to reach Pyro, Storm would be able to bring more substantial resources to bear.

  Obviously, the X-Men were up to something. But he had no doubt that when they made their move he’d crush them.

  He sent another car in their general direction, Pyro ignited it…

  …but this time, a whoosh of ice extinguished the flames before they had a chance to get properly burning. The car was quickly coated, made so cold that when it crashed to the ground it shattered to bits, its metal components turned instantly brittle as dry twigs.

  Before them, silhouetted against the background of Pyro’s flames, which still imprisoned the sapien troops, stood Bobby Drake.

  Magneto stepped up beside his protégé.

  “Are you a god,” he asked, as he had the day he’d recruited Pyro away from the X-Men, well aware that once upon a time the two young men had been the best of friends, “or an insect?”

  Pyro stepped away from Magneto and bounded down to the courtyard, to face Bobby gunfighter to gunfighter, every element of expression and body language proclaiming that he had no doubt as to how this fight would end, and that he was looking forward to enjoying every delicious minute.

  From the surrounding fire, he hurled twin pillars of flame at his former roommate.

  True to his code name, Iceman parried as he had every time they’d fought in the past, with barriers of ice. Pyro shrugged and upped the ante, aware as he did that as he poured more and more concentration and energy into his confrontation with Bobby, he was allowing the barrier walls he’d created to fade away and the troops he enclosed to race for fresh shelter. He wasn’t bothered, though. Once he was done here he’d simply stoke the flames to an even higher intensity than before. The poor saps were just prolonging the inevitable, just like Iceman…

  …whose ice was melting at a rather distressing rate, allowing the flames to approach ever closer. He was sweating buckets. Soon he’d be burning.

  “Same old Bobby,” mocked Pyro, deciding the time had come to put his former friend out of his misery. “Maybe you should go back to school.”

  “You can’t do this!”

  “I do what I please, a-hole. Can you stop me?”

  “How could you join Magneto?”

  “Simple. He’s right. Xavier’s wrong. Not to mention dead.” Pyro shook his head in anger more than pity. “God, you and Rogue are such a matched set, I am so glad I let that train wreck pass me by.

  “Don’t you get it? While Xavier talked about sharing, the so-called human race was turning the Earth into a cesspool. They’re so busy ruining their present they’re not giving a thought to the future. They don’t give good god- damn about their children, or their children’s children; it’s all about today. Well, we represent tomorrow—we’re here today and we want to make sure we have a decent home to inherit. If that means evicting the current tenants…hey, get with the program, popsicle, or get deleted.”

  “I won’t let that happen.”

  Pyro smirked. “Yeah, right. Is this some kind of joke, putting you in the field against me? I mean, remember all those scraps we had in the Danger Room, about which of us had the better power, fire or ice? Who always came out on top?”

  He advanced on Bobby, pushing his flames to their limit, and was satisfied to see Iceman hammered to his knees. Still, battered though he was, Bobby refused to yield. The flames were close, but he was still fighting back, with more strength and determination than Pyro would have given him credit for.

  “Drop a mountain of ice on me, Bobby boy, my fire’ll melt it to vapor in a flash.” Arrogant snap of the fingers for emphasis.

  “Hey,” he continued, “when you’re icing, do you burn like normal folks, or make like the Wicked Witch of the West?” He adopted a singsong parody of the classic moment from The Wizard of Oz, “‘I’m melting, I’m melting!’”

  Pyro shook his head. “Dude, you gotta stop thinkin’ we’re still buds. We were never friends, Bobby, just classmates for a while. That story’s done. In this new one, I take no prisoners.”

  Bobby’d always known that, just refused to accept it, hoping against hope that sooner or later things would work out. He was on hands and knees, alive through sheer mulish stubbornness, staring at the ground without seeing as he focused solely on enduring this torment as long as he was able, to buy his fellow X-Men the time they needed.

  He’d miss last good-byes with Marie, with Rogue, that was his sole regret that mattered. Calling them a train wreck was utter bullshit, as if Pyro’d ever done any better.

  His eyes narrowed as the visual information they were transmitting finally made its presence felt inside Bobby’s somewhat heat-addled brain. His ice barriers were melting, no surprise there, but while much of it was indeed incandescing into gas, there were puddles of water all around him. And now that he was paying proper attention, he could see that even though he was sweating, every exhalation of breath brought with it a puffball cloud of condensed air. He wasn’t simply generating cold, he was cold.

  Connections closed on levels far below his conscious mind, memories of discussions he’d had w
ith Jean Grey on the nature of his power, of mutation, of where it might lead him. She and the professor always talked about things happening in the natural course of time, but he no longer had time to wait. He had to make things happen right now.

  The puddles crystallized, the crystallization flashed from one to the next, building linkages of ice as Pyro did with fire.

  They touched his nearest finger.

  “You were always too much in love with your own mouth, Johnny,” Bobby said, getting a shrug in return. “Too damn busy being you to pay attention to basic science.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Entropy.” His finger was coated with ice, yet it bent just like normal, the process of transformation accelerating as it swept up his arm. The sleeve of his uniform shattered to splinters as if it had just been plunged into liquid oxygen, revealing a perfectly formed arm of ice underneath. He couldn’t help grinning at the look on Pyro’s face now, as the rest of his jacket fell apart, even if his humor was partly to cover for his acute embarassment. He didn’t want to think about what was coming when his pants shattered. If this was the way his power manifested from here on, they were definitely going to have to find him at the very least a set of cold-resistant briefs.

  “Even molecules get tired, Johnny. They slow down, they get cold. The default state of the universe isn’t fire, it’s ice.”

  The flames couldn’t harm him. His new skin was better than armor.

  Pyro didn’t believe it. “This isn’t fair. This isn’t right! Every time we tangled in the Danger Room, every evaluation of our powers and skills, I was always better!”

  Bobby lunged forward, grabbing both of Pyro’s hands in his.