X-Men 2

by Chris Claremont

  “Mystique discovered plans of a base where Stryker’s had his operations for decades. Unfortunately,” he shrugged, “we don’t know where it is.

  “However, I suspect one of you might.”

  “The professor already tried,” said Logan.

  Magneto sighed. “Once again, you think it’s all about you.”

  Then his eyes lifted to the branches above.

  Nightcrawler’s first impulse was to flee, but he took strength and comfort from the smile of greeting that Storm gave him, the wave of invitation that followed to join her at her side. He came down as a circus acrobat, swinging lithely from branch to branch, ending with a triple somersault that landed him right where Storm had indicated. He held the pose for a moment, out of habit, before reminding himself that this wasn’t an occasion, nor this an audience, for applause, and he squatted close beside her.

  Her hand across his shoulders was reassuring.

  “I didn’t mean to snoop,” he apologized.

  Storm gave him a squeeze that told him it was all right, and Jean said, “Relax.”

  She rose to her feet, with a smooth grace that almost matched Mystique, and took position in front of Nightcrawler.

  Jean spoke aloud again, but also with her thoughts, telling him again, “Relax.” He heard far more than the simple word, however. She used telepathy to enfold him in a great psychic quilt that left him all warm and snuggly and safe in ways he should be able to recall from childhood, if he had the happy memories for it. She gave him a window into her own soul to reassure him that these sensations were true, that she meant him no harm, that she genuinely liked him and cared for him. In turn, she found a soul that had weathered the tempests of life with remarkable success.

  Her mouth made a small O of astonishment. Strangely, Nightcrawler represented something she’d never considered, a purely physical mutation that manifested at birth. Herself, Scott, Storm, virtually all the mutants who’d been gathered at the mansion, they were outwardly indistinguishable from their nonpowered brethren. Their powers had manifested at puberty, that’s when their lives had changed; but before then everything had been wonderfully normal.

  Not so with Kurt. He’d never been able to hide. That was why he’d ultimately taken refuge in the circus, even though he’d spent his earliest days there as part of the freak show. Soon, though, with the natural exuberance of childhood, he’d discovered that he could climb faster and better than anyone else he knew, and that his tail provided opportunities for performance that left the others gasping. He was more at home in the air than on the ground, and he quickly became one of the arena’s chief attractions. Despite the evident skill, despite the tumultuous cheers from every audience that ever saw him, he was never invited to join the great world-class circuses. A scout from Ringling Bros. came once and quickly conceded that he’d never seen anything like Nightcrawler. He brought Kurt to the States for an audition. The bosses reacted the same as their scout: Nightcrawler was unique. Unfortunately, that was the point. No one at their level had ever knowingly hired a mutant, no one was willing to take the risk of a backlash. Better he should stay in a regional show.

  Truthfully, Kurt himself didn’t mind. He liked the smaller scale of his own shows, the more intimate relationship with his audience. In the far brighter lights of the big cities where the big shows toured, he wouldn’t be able to continue his own personal quest for meaning, for enlightenment. He found a measure of release, and comfort, on the trapeze, but no answers to the questions that had haunted him since he was old enough, aware enough, to frame them: Who am I? What am I? Why am I? What kind of God would create a creature like me? What purpose would it serve?

  Jean expected to find a person bludgeoned and tormented by his appearance. In stark contrast, she embraced one of the most gentle and secure and stable beings she had ever encountered, who was surprisingly at peace with himself—even if he was still working on his place in the scheme of things.

  He trusted her, wholly and unreservedly, and in the face of that innate nobility she felt humble. It was a faith she would cherish, and it made her absolutely determined to keep him safe as she stepped into the vaults of his memory.

  The images were broken and scattered: flashes from every direction, strobes without number as every camera in the circus tried to take his picture. He was used to it.

  The scout and his bosses gave him a ticket home, but he decided to stay a while, to visit in person this country he knew only from the movies.

  He found himself the abandoned church in Boston to use as his home. He did most of his sightseeing at night. He had no thought of danger. What would anyone want with a circus aerialist?

  Ambush. Bodies slamming into him from every direction, men in uniform, hitting him first with a shot of pepper spray, then mace, screwing with his concentration so he couldn’t teleport, covering his mouth so he couldn’t yell for help. . . .

  A spray hypo . . .

  Oblivion . . .

  Vague recollections of soaring high above the ground, wind in his face, a whuppawhuppa noise that he belatedly identified as a helicopter . . .

  He saw trees and a wall of gray concrete that filled his vision to the horizon on either side and up to the very top of the sky, which vanished as he was rolled on a gurney into a long tunnel, plunging as deep into the bowels of the earth as he’d been carried above it in the aircraft flying here. . . .

  An annoying itch on his neck, where he wore a sedative patch to keep him tractable, no energy to do anything about it, a room, a man holding a syringe . . .

  Soldiers held him down, and he felt acid fire at the base of his skull. He wanted to scream, to curse, to plead, to die, but he’d forgotten how. He was empty, and only the man’s voice could fill him. . . .

  He remembered the White House, the Oval Office, the gunshot, running for his life, teleporting until he couldn’t go any farther. . . .

  He found his church, claimed it now as his sanctuary. . . .

  And Jean found him. . . .

  She broke contact, cradling his upturned face in both her palms, wishing she could borrow some of the peace and tranquillity she saw within him for herself. She gave him a kiss of thanks. She’d never felt so drained, not even after the aerial dogfight aboard the Blackbird.

  “Stryker’s at Alkali Lake,” she told the others without looking at any of them.

  “I’ve been there,” Logan said. “That’s where Charley sent me. Nothing’s left.”

  “There’s nothing left on the surface, Logan. The base is underground.”

  They talked a while longer, with Magneto leading the debriefing, delicately mining Jean’s memory for every possible nugget of information before turning his attention to Logan. He proved a surprisingly skilled and patient interrogator, turning the smallest nuance of dialogue or gesture into a means of extracting even more data than the subject, more often than not, was even aware he (or she) knew. Watching him, listening, Jean beheld the man that Charles Xavier had befriended, a vision of what might have been had Magneto not embraced the inner demons of his childhood. He was just as inspiring a leader, just as intuitive a teacher. He recognized her interest and her nascent insights and for a moment between them there were no barriers.

  The tragedy she saw then was that he knew it, too. All that could have been, perhaps even should have been. All that might yet be. Knew it, and rejected it. Charles Xavier was a man energized by humanity’s potential; his life, his purpose, had always been defined by hope. Magneto refused hope. His heart had been broken too many times. Long ago, his spirit had been pared down to its essence, brought to white heat in the most awful of crucibles and then pounded by adversity into the shape of a weapon. The metal of his being had been folded a thousand thousand times, as the classical sword smiths of ancient Japan forged their samurai blades. Thanks to that cruel tempering, he could bend without breaking. But regardless of what happened, he would never lose his edge, would never be anything other than what he was. There was a greatness
in him, that was undeniable. He was the living embodiment of the primal forces that formed the foundation of the universe. And as a consequence, he was just as terrible as he was glorious.

  She found she couldn’t bear to be near him anymore. The bleak hollow at the center of his soul was like a whirlpool; to wander closer was to be dragged to a similar oblivion.

  She broke from the campfire and took refuge in the Blackbird, returning to the purely mechanical tasks that had filled the afternoon and evening,

  Watching her leave, Logan decided he was done with Magneto’s Q&A. Brusquely excusing himself, he strode after her through the campsite to find her standing underneath the wing of the Blackbird, with her head and shoulders hidden inside an open belly hatch. She was muttering to herself, in a tone and using words he didn’t expect from her. It made him suspect she’d been hanging around him too much; Xavier and Scott would accuse him of being a bad influence. Outstanding!

  “How bad is it?” he asked her.

  “I’m running fluid through the hydraulics. If the test passes, it’ll still take four to five hours to get off the ground. Like it or not, we’re stuck here for the night. Fortunately,” she continued in a rush, “our stealth netting should hide the Blackbird pretty well from any casual reconnaissance. As for the rest, the passive scanning array says we’ve got clean sky to the horizon, and according to the infodump on the main computer, there shouldn’t be any surveillance satellites overhead, either. That means minimal risk of detection.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “I know what you meant, Logan. This is how I choose to answer. Okay?”

  He said nothing. He had a hankering for a beer, but he knew there was none aboard the Blackbird, and Magneto struck him as more of a wine guy. A case of five-star premier cru, not a problem; God forbid the man even consider a can of Molson’s.

  From Mystique he expected nothing less than poison. It didn’t matter to her that his healing factor made him immune. Quite the contrary. It struck him that the fun for her would be in seeing how much it would hurt him to recover and how long it would take.

  After a while, conceding to herself that Logan wasn’t going to go away, Jean allowed herself a sigh.

  “I’m worried,” she confessed. “About the professor. About . . . Scott.”

  “I know,” he said.

  He stepped under the shadow of the aircraft and reached out his arm to her. In flats, she was his height, but her uniform heels gave her an edge. It amused him to have to look a little bit up to her. At his touch, she folded against him to rest her head on his shoulder, allowing him to take the full weight of her body, which he did without any effort. There was no separation between them, physical or emotional, and his nostrils flared as he realized the implications.

  “I’m worried about you,” he told her softly. “That was some display of power up there.”

  She snorted dismissively. “It obviously wasn’t enough.”

  He turned his head to look her in the eyes. She kept hers downcast, using her lids to shroud them, to keep him at a distance. But he didn’t need eyes to see what was so obvious, or to sense the depth of the attraction between them. He’d known it from the start, that first moment when he’d awakened in the mansion infirmary to find himself staring up at a face that would haunt him forever.

  He was barely breathing; he didn’t want to do anything to break the moment. She felt the faint touch of air across her face, and her mouth opened in response, as if it were life itself to her, her head tilting just so against him to give him freer access.

  The kiss was there for the taking.

  Any other time, he wouldn’t have hesitated. Any other time, he wouldn’t have cared about the consequences. Now, consequences were everything.

  “I love him,” Jean said, mostly to herself, because she still wouldn’t look at Logan. He knew she believed that with all her heart, so why didn’t she sound convinced?

  “Do you?”

  She looked confused, as if she didn’t understand the question. For those few seconds it took to answer, he saw her throw off replies the way a pitcher would reject signs he didn’t like from the catcher. The one she settled on satisfied nobody, least of all her.

  Now she looked at him. “People flirt with the bad guy, Logan. But they don’t take him home.” She pulled her hand away. “They marry the good guy.”

  “Is that enough?” he asked quietly. And then, in response to her silence: “I could be the good guy, Jean.”

  “Logan, the good guy sticks around.”

  He threw caution to the winds.

  He laid a palm lightly against the slim column of her throat, fingertips tucked behind the knob of her jaw while his thumb caressed her chin. Her skin was the softest, smoothest surface he could remember touching, and the contact between them was electric. He felt a flush of heat against his hand, saw color rise beneath her skin to give it a roseate glow that was a pale echo of the fire of her hair. Her breathing quickened in concert with her pulse, her heart pounding so strongly he could feel it against his own chest, even through the armored fabric of her uniform.

  She trembled as if her body were being swept by a succession of microquakes. And he held back a smile at realization that her skin was puckering all over with goose bumps.

  They were balancing on edges of passion and emotion that put the keenness of his adamantium claws to shame. And yet, because both of them recognized the seriousness of the moment, they both felt perfectly in control. They were poised on the crest of the perfect wave—for him, one of snow, part of an avalanche; for her, one of surf. No effort at all would be required to bring it to an end, to call this quits before they went too far. She didn’t need to say a word, to make a gesture; he’d take his cue from the primal signals that weren’t under her volitive control.

  She caught him by surprise, covering his hand with hers, reaching out at the same time with her telekinetic power to close the miniscule gap that remained between them.

  Now it was his breath that was caught up by a sudden gasp, his own heart that skipped a beat amid its own increasing trip-hammer riff, as her lips brushed his.

  That first contact was fleeting, tantalizing with possibilities, but he didn’t give her a chance to pull away as he opened to her, meeting her mental strength with that of his body. He heard a small noise that mingled desire and satisfaction, but couldn’t tell whether it came from him or her as they pulled each other closer, and he came to understand the incredible strength that lay hidden within this lean, whipcord figure.

  He lifted her off her feet, shifting his own stance just enough so that he supported her against the whole hard length of him, and now there was no question. He was the one who moaned as barriers collapsed between them and Jean gave him access to her own mind, her own sensations, her own emotions.

  His nostrils filled with a rich woodland scent, and he knew this was how he presented himself to her.

  The world blurred around them, took on a new shape as her desire caught up both of them, laying them bare to their souls. As their thoughts merged, it struck him that he should be afraid. There were memories here that he fought to keep hidden from Xavier, two volumes to the book of his life. The first, which he believed had been stolen from him, which Magneto now suggested was intimately involved with William Stryker, and which Xavier apparently had known about from the start. But the second, everything that had happened to him since, had more than a few moments that weren’t pretty.

  Yet he didn’t even try to hide any of them; she was too important. He wanted her to see the whole of him; he wanted to give her every excuse to run away, because if she chose to stay, if she accepted what he was, then this was real. It would last.

  What surprised him was the discovery that she was just as scared, just as determined.

  He saw her playing in a yard, a fragment of her thoughts providing the date and setting: her parents’ home at Bard College, an hour upstate from Xavier’s, where her dad taught. Jean was eight
and hanging with her best friend, Annie Malcolm. Annie tossed a Frisbee for her dog, but a wayward puff of breeze hooked the plastic saucer off over the fence. The dog bolted through the gate, Annie chasing after, heedless of the danger posed by this stretch of River Road.

  Jean saw what Annie hadn’t, a car speeding around the blind curve. There wasn’t even a screech of brakes, before or after, just a sickening thud and the sound of tires skidding on asphalt as the driver struggled to regain control before he sped away.

  She found Annie against the stone wall by the gate, her body folded at impossible angles, blood—so much blood, too much blood—splashed everywhere. Jean wanted to scream, to shriek, to howl, but some part of her that refused to relinquish control forced her lips to form proper words, forced her lungs to provide air for sufficient volume to make this a proper shout as she called for her mother.

  Annie couldn’t speak, the only thing moving about her was her chest, desperately striving—broken as it was—to draw another breath. As well there were her eyes, bright with confusion as her brain struggled to make sense of what had just happened. Jean couldn’t stop her own tears. They poured silently from her eyes as she knelt beside Annie and wrapped her arms around her friend.

  She found herself in a vast space of light, filled with sparkling clusters of energy. She touched the closest and was filled with an awareness of a specific time and place, together with a torrent of associated emotions, and in a sudden burst of insight realized that each of these clusters represented one of Annie’s memories. With a directness only a child can muster, she concluded at once that she was inside Annie’s head.

  But her delight at this new adventure was short-lived. Even as she watched, she became aware that the brilliance of the individual clusters was fading, along with their background radiance, which suffused this apparently infinite space. It was like looking at the daylight sky, only in this case it was chockablock with stars of every conceivable color and magnitude, and realizing the gradually encroaching presence of night.