X-Men(tm) The Last Stand

by Chris Claremont

  “I learned some new lessons.”

  He iced the other man’s arms all the way to the elbows, the intense cold striking Pyro with the shock of being plunged into a midwinter ocean, creating a paralysis of thought and action. Before Pyro could recover his wits, Bobby let him have it with a solid punch to the jaw.

  Lights out at the source, no willpower to sustain the superstorm of fire he’d created. And since that blaze had been so unimaginably fierce to begin with, it had consumed all the readily available fuel, leaving only Pyro’s power to keep it burning.

  There was a discernible pop of imploding air, as the flames vanished and cooler atmosphere rushed in to take their place, and the stench of charred debris. But otherwise…

  …the island was still, fog-draped and dark once more.

  Logan tapped Colossus on the shoulder. “Okay, Tinman, time for that fastball special.” Colossus took some steps back from Iceman—he’d been using the other X-Man’s cold to bleed off some of the heat from his armor, and he was still uncomfortably warm to the touch, but no longer glowing. Logan could handle that. Peter grasped the Wolverine by the belt.

  “Make it a strike,” Logan challenged him.

  Colossus made it a bullet, right on the mark.

  Of course, Magneto sensed him coming.

  Without even sparing a glance, he raised a hand and successive waves of magnetic force punched the X-Man into the roadway more than hard enough to make an impression.

  Magneto didn’t bother being gentle. He used Logan’s body to create a trench right down to the underlying steel as he reeled him in the rest of the way.

  “I warned you,” he chided, ever so gently, ever so finally, making abundantly clear they would not dance this particular dance again.

  Logan had no eyes for him, only for Jean, on her perch above and behind the Master of Magnetism. There was nothing of the woman he remembered and loved in her stance or affect. She looked at them as at a strange and alien—and lesser—species, the way a scientist might examine some new species of microbe. She perhaps found them intriguing, but there was no emotional contact to bind them.

  The first line of troops from shore were close enough to take action. Logan started to yell a warning to Jean to watch out, to the soldiers to stand down, anything to head off what he feared was to come, but they were operating on hair triggers.

  They shot on sight, at her and Magneto both—and if Logan got clipped in the cross fire, them’s the breaks, pal. Every combat engagement has its regrettable collateral damage.

  He shouldn’t have worried. None of the darts even came close. Jean stopped them all, less than an inch shy of contact.

  Her eyes flashed celestial fire and the darts turned to dust.

  Satisfied he had nothing to fear from the military, Magneto addressed his full attention to Logan.

  “You never learn, do you?” he mock lamented, raising a hand to separate Logan from his adamantium once and for all.

  “Actually,” Logan replied quite pleasantly, “I do.”

  Too late, Magneto sensed another presence. He spun around, and the fog around him cleared, revealing the form of the Beast—almost invisible against the night thanks to his dark fur and uniform—hanging upside down from one of the suspender cables.

  Hank flashed fangs in a grin and flicked a finger at the X-Men’s oldest adversary.

  Magneto felt a sting across his cheek and the fingers he clasped there came away colored with the merest thread of blood.

  In shock, he took a step away from the Beast. His legs lost all strength. He collapsed to hands and knees in the face of agony such as he had never imagined, much less experienced.

  Around Logan, all sense of pressure and pain faded. He rose to one knee beside the man who’d been about to kill him. His right fist was close enough—it would be no effort at all to pop his claws and put an end to Magneto. Hank had the same thought, he saw, and was gripped by the same ambivalence. Some adversaries, perhaps, ought not to be spared.

  Once, Logan suspected he’d have done just that, without a second thought or an ounce of regret. Thankfully, that man, those days, were lost—Logan didn’t mind in the least. He much preferred the man he was becoming and the way he was starting to live his life. Xavier would have his legacy.

  Magneto sunk back on his heels, dazed with horror as he groped for his helmet, only to have it fall from fingers suddenly gone nerveless.

  Watching him, Logan realized the true kindness would have been a quick, clean death, but he shook his head to banish the impulse. He had to learn from the mistakes of his past; if Magneto was worthy of Charles Xavier’s friendship, he’d have to do the same. And perhaps find a way to atone for the harm he’d caused that had brought him to this place.

  “I’m…” Magneto said, unable to go further.

  “One of them,” Logan finished for him. “It should have never come to this.”

  Then came the screams.

  Another wave of soldiers had attacked, and this time Jean didn’t bother with just their weapons, she erased the men as well.

  “Jean!” Logan called, imperative to get her attention before things could turn any worse. In that regard, he’d reckoned without Magneto, who spoke the moment Jean made eye contact with them all.

  “You see, my child,” he said in a voice that could barely be heard but with thoughts that rang out like a clarion call. “Look at me. Look into their hearts. This is what they want. For all of us.”

  She didn’t like that idea.

  “Jean,” Logan called again, making his way to her.

  She unfolded her arms from where she perched, spreading them wide with stately and majestic grace, and gazed at Logan with eyes no longer even remotely human. They were black eyes, doll’s eyes, predator’s eyes, and deep in the heart of them burned the fires of Creation itself.

  Energy pulsed from her body, spiraling outward across bay and city in successive waves that churned the water more powerfully than any storm of nature. She rose from her perch and descended from bridge to island, Logan springing after her, waving to McCoy to follow. He did, gathering Magneto into his arms and then making most of the trip upside down, using his feet as hands to bound along the suspender cables.

  Jean was hovering above the center of the courtyard that had been the main battlefield, streamers of fiery energy swirling faster and farther from her body as though she were becoming the core of her own galaxy. She was certainly blazing brightly enough, generating so much radiance that even sunglasses would have been little help.

  Waves crashed furiously against the shore of the island, against the base of the bridge’s towers, but the water didn’t recede from those impacts. Instead, impossibly, the water began to pour up into the air, as though some great suction pump was evacuating the entire bay. Much the same effect was happening to the island as well, as everything not nailed down—debris, weapons, tools and the like—shot skyward so suddenly it was as if gravity were reversing itself. Thus far, people weren’t being affected, but it didn’t take much imagination to conclude that probably wouldn’t last much longer.

  “Everyone off the island!” Logan bellowed from the ramp. “Now!”

  Jimmy and Kitty emerged from the cell house. For a brief moment, surveying the situation, Kitty considered turning Jimmy loose on Jean. Locking eyes briefly with Logan, she realized with a start that he was considering much the same, and rejecting it, just as she was. Jimmy was a kid, he had no place here. Even if he was willing, both of them knew Jean’s telepathy would give her enough warning to finish him before he got close enough to affect her. Waving off the other X-Men, Kitty made a beeline for the bridge, pausing as she did to inform the army lieutenant about Juggernaut lying unconscious in Jimmy’s cell.

  Given the situation, she doubted anyone was going to go collect him.

  Bobby ignored her signals as he approached with John Allerdyce slung in a fireman’s carry over his shoulders. He’d definitely undergone some major changes since she saw hi
m last. Kitty couldn’t help wondering if they were permanent. He had much the same questions, made all the more pertinent by the absence of Professor Xavier or Doctor Grey to help him find the answers. Within a dozen or so paces of her, his ice shell began to flake away, revealing the skin underneath; he also started blushing as furiously as anyone she’d ever seen, for reasons that became scandalously obvious a couple of steps later. By the time he was by her side, he was well beyond mortification, staring straight ahead as she struggled to do the same, thankful for this moment of utter absurdity to counterpoint what seemed like the imminent end of the world.

  Colossus scooped up as many of Magneto’s fallen fighters as he could carry, passing them off to troopers as they established a rough line through the ruins and up the ramp. Angel saw Iceman’s predicament from overhead and later made himself a friend for life by finding Bobby a pair of pants.

  Twenty meters away, bursts of power fell from Jean with increasing strength and frequency, creating what could only be described as tears in the fabric of the universe. Magneto, whose training and research in the fields of subatomic physics were rivaled only by his erst- while ability to manipulate the forces found there, shook his head in wonderment and utter weariness. He was spent in soul, far more than he ever had been in the flesh, more so even than at Auschwitz. He had only one moment in his life to measure against this one, the death of his beloved firstborn, his only child, his Anya, and the horror he had seen in the eyes of his wife, Magda, whom he’d saved from the camps but who could not bear to look at him, stay with him, once she’d beheld the vengeance he’d taken against those who’d kept him from saving his daughter.

  “What have I done?” he breathed.

  “More to the point,” Logan demanded of him, “what’s she doing?”

  “Discorporating the planet,” was the reply. “Stripping existence around her down to its primal component states.”

  “Why?”

  Magneto snorted. “Because she can.”

  “Your rationale, bub.”

  “It’s what Charles understood that I didn’t: the true meaning of the next step in evolution. For us, for all our powers, we’re talking little more than baby steps; for her, seven league boots. I don’t believe she can handle the transition.”

  “Time for you to go,” Logan told him.

  “I’d like to stay.”

  “For this,” Logan’s voice was brutal, “you lost the right.”

  “I’m sorry,” Magneto told him.

  “Yeah.”

  A trooper grabbed Magneto’s arms and hustled him up the ramp to be swallowed by the fleeing crowd. Logan didn’t watch, didn’t much care; with his powers gone, Magneto was significantly neutered as a threat. If Logan needed to find him, he’d do so.

  Assuming the world survived.

  “It’s not Jean,” Ororo cried out to him as she tried to pull him away as well. He didn’t bother telling her she was wrong. “Not anymore. Nothing can stop her, Logan. Nothing!”

  He looked at her and quirked his mouth into a semblance of a smile, as from a man about to embrace the Gorgon in its lair. “I’m the only one who can get close.”

  She didn’t need to ask what would happen next. Instead she let her eyes reveal her heart and leapt quickly aloft before her tears could betray her. No matter how tonight ended, if they lived to see the dawn, they would lose something supremely precious.

  His insides churned as Logan turned back to face Jean. He knew that he was being bombarded by lethal levels of radiation. Wasn’t on purpose, he knew that as well, she was broadcasting energies like a star coming into being. That insight wasn’t something he’d think of—the flavor of it was purely Jean and it gave him a breath of hope. If she could still reach him on that kind of deep subconscious level, he could find a way to pull her all the way back.

  “I hear you, darlin’,” he said, and took his first step, “I know you’re still there.”

  The ground was coming apart. It wasn’t a case of rock being shattered to dust and the dust dissolving, she was shredding the component molecules, manipulating the states of existence so that what was solid and opaque one instant became utterly transparent the next, allowing him to see straight down to the core of the world. The patches of earth became utterly nonexistent after that, forcing him to progress in hopscotch fashion, following his instincts—which in turn followed cues he grew increasingly certain came from Jean herself—towards his goal.

  Jean turned to him and his own molecules began discorporating, his skin literally (painlessly, thank God) boiling away. The adamantium was partly what saved him, because it possessed the tightest molecular binding of any substance conceivable. Given time and will, she could deconstruct it the way she was shredding everything else, but right now her mind was focused on greater things.

  The metal provided an anchor for his physical being and at the same time, the outrush of power from her acted as an amplifier for his own abilities. He hadn’t seen Scott die, but he could guess what happened. She amplified his optic blasts, so much that he damn near shattered an entire mountain, but all that really did was complete the energy loop back to her. Blasting at her actually made her stronger, and meanwhile Scott had no defense against the discorporation process. Same with Xavier. His telepathy must have been heightened to an unimaginable extent, but even if it put him on a level above her, he could not match her telekinetic powers and he couldn’t repair the damage she was doing to him.

  Logan, of course, was another critter altogether.

  The harder she hit him, the more efficiently his body healed. She couldn’t kill him, only make him stronger. If she really wanted him gone, there were ways to accomplish it. Throw him away for instance; he had no doubt, at her level, she could put him into orbit with a thought. If he was still here, it was for a reason.

  He loved her. He wasn’t going to fail.

  The buildings were going, and it came to him that he was watching in slow motion the awful and absolute annihilation that occurred at ground zero of a thermonuclear blast.

  He went blind as his eyes melted, could see again an instant later, the process speeding up to such an extent that obliteration and reconstruction became virtually instantaneous processes. He reached for her, his arm stripped to bare gleaming bone, the great claws visible and quiescent in their housings.

  The linkages were intact. Careless of her not to sever them.

  He had no lungs to breathe with, no heart to beat, no blood to pump, no body to sustain. He was little more than artificial frame, the ghost of a nervous system, an agglomeration of self and will within the bunker of his unbreachable skull. Yet he would not fall. He would not stop.

  She turned those monster onyx eyes on him and there was no recognition of him to be seen in them.

  “You would die for them?” Her voice resounded in his soul. If he’d had a body the effect would have left him gasping, face-to-face at last with the truth of the ancient understanding that angels are as terrible to behold as they are beautiful.

  “Not for them.”

  She started to smile, preening satisfaction, thinking she’d found the flaw in him that would allow her to discard him once and for all.

  “For you!”

  He didn’t merely say that with words. He couldn’t. No face, no tongue, no lungs, no anything. She was a telepath. He gave her his thoughts. But of course, because she was a telepath, she got much, much more than words.

  He loved her, had from the first; he gave her that, too, and all it meant for him. Life had been a simple thing for Logan before Jean Grey. He did as he pleased, took what he wanted, didn’t consider the consequences or repercussions. Nobody had ever cared much for him because he made it plain he wouldn’t care for them in return.

  Rogue had been the chink in that armor, and Jean had torn it open wide, so much so that he couldn’t go back to the old ways even if he wanted to. And knowing her, loving her, knowing that she loved him in return—even if she’d pledged herself to Scott—m
ade him never want to again, no matter how much the new way hurt.

  He gave her his dreams, he gave her his hopes. He understood that she could see what he likely never would, the creature he had been, and stood upright and proud to be judged against the man he had become.

  Amidst the fire in her eyes, he saw a flash of green.

  “Save me, Logan,” he heard her say, and felt her hands gently cup his face and draw him close, bodies closer, lips aching to touch in a last and loving kiss.

  SNIKT!

  She spasmed against him, clutching him to her as if she could merge her essence with his and make them one coherent being. Or maybe it was a desperate attempt to gain access to his healing power. Didn’t much matter because again, the adamantium got in the way.

  One hand, all three claws. There was no margin for error, or mercy.

  “That’s better,” he heard her say with satisfaction, and beheld her eyes still full of fire, but stripped of the dark rage that had fueled her actions. There was the warmth he remembered, the sense of completion he felt during those fleeting times they’d shared together, the native generosity of spirit that was more than he figured anyone deserved, especially him.

  “Stop selling yourself short, bub.”

  She smiled, that wry curl of one side of her lip that he’d always known was just for him, that marked them as kindred souls.

  “Oh Logan,” she breathed. He could no longer sustain her weight, his body was still too much of a mess, so down they went in a clumsy heap with her in his lap, reversing the pose of a Pietà. “Where I am, where I’m going,” and she couldn’t help gathering him into her thoughts, to share the moment so he wouldn’t sorrow for her. He was glad his senses were still a shadow of what they should be because even that fleeting glimpse filled him with such wonder and pure, primal joy that much more would have been the end of him.

  If this was but the merest taste of what Jean had tapped into, small wonder she was overwhelmed.