Title: Shades of Grey
Summary: Snow White, Crow Black, Jean Grey. A character analysis (or lack-of-character analysis) in three parts.
Rating: T for implied sexuality and implied violence.
Disclaimer: I do not own Jean Grey, Phoenix, or the X-Men. I do not own telepathic powers, either (if I did, I would make you all think I owned them, and make a lot of money).
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Snow White
(X-Men)
"I don't understand it," Ororo says quietly. Her voice is low and sweet, but I know when she is angry, like now. She's full of thunder, hidden inside clouds. "How you can just forgive them."
I understand what she says. Ororo is furious at the most recent political movement that has been marginalizing mutants. I busy myself with the x-ray scans, holding them up to the light. I understand what she says, but not what she means. This wrath she carries with her is beyond me. I don't think I have ever been as angry as she is right now, as she is all the time: I can't imagine carrying all that inside me.
"It irritates me," I admit. "It's tiring, and exasperating. I don't understand their prejudice. But I know, in time and with understanding, it will fade."
She pulls a face—which of course still manages to look elegant against her queenly features and shocking hair—and mutters something inappropriate.
I blink, certain that I misheard. "Excuse me?"
She sighs. "I said that I don't know how Scott can handle it." Her dark eyes are apologetic. "You're so—patient, Jean. So understanding and—temperate. Calm."
I smile slowly, pleased in spite of the sting I feel at the implied insult. "Scott likes calm," I say lightly.
She sighs again: long-suffering and baffled. "Don't you ever get—upset?" she asks me. "Or even—passionate?" A blush darkens her high cheekbones. "With Scott?"
I look at her blankly. "We're passionate nearly every night, 'Ro," I offer slowly, confused at where she's heading.
She shakes her head, and I feel somehow as though I have completely missed the point. "And now Logan wants you too, Jean—"
I flush, flattered in spite of myself.
"—and he'll do anything to get what he wants. Don't get me wrong, Jean; I think he's a good man. But he's eyeing you like a piece of meat, drawn in by your doe-eyes and your weakness—"
"I am weak," I admit, feeling a little guilty, "but I'm practicing—"
"—and don't you want to be something on your own?"
I stare at her blankly. "I am," I tell her after a moment, a little hurt despite myself. I am sure I look just as doe-eyed and wounded as she says. "I'm me."
When she finds me later, I'm sitting on a window sill upstairs, looking out at the grounds. The children I milling happily, and I am content.
"I'm sorry," she says.
"I forgive you," I reply easily. The sting of her words has faded. Perhaps there is even some truth to them, but I am happy with the way things are. The world is simple. Peaceful.
She sits next to me and takes my hand. "It's so easy for you, isn't it?" she says, but the words are no longer like a curse. "To do that. To do the right thing."
I wonder that she considers forgiving her to be the right thing; it smacks me of ego and arrogance, but I let it slide. "There's no other choice for me, Ororo," I say gently. "You're my best friend. Maybe I'm not wired like other people are, but for me, there is only one option: to let it go."
"Oh, Jean," she says, and her sigh is like the wind on my cheek. I turn my gaze outside once more. She continues to speak, but I am lost in vague, half-formed thoughts. What I said to her was utterly true: there is no other choice. I try to understand, but I am at a loss when it comes to deciphering how other people make their decisions. I know what is right, and I am compelled to do so. Moral code has been inscribed inside my head. Surely it's the same for everyone else.
"…and I always want us to be like sisters, Jean…"
How nice. Sisters. I think of Scott, who is also nice, and so grateful for my love and my body, so dedicated and heartfelt in all his kindnesses and his friendship. I think of Logan, who is nice as well, in a gruff and animal sort of way. Logan, whose eyes warm my collarbone and make me blush.
And the professor, who has been more kind to me than any other person, who took me in when my family feared me, who has trained me to harness and strengthen what little power I have. Thanks to him, I have been educated, both in exercising my powers and my academic mind. I still have the first book he gave me for my birthday: Paradise Lost. It sits on my shelf in a place of honor. My gratitude for him is constant and sweet.
"…but you know what I mean, don't you? You always understand…Jean?"
I glide along at an even keel. I allow myself to sway where the tides take me. I imagine myself as an anemone, drifting in the currents, content in my serene existence. Stronger fish swim around me, making choices, creating waves with their movement. But I am stationary, solid: a solitary blossom existing at the whim of others, buffeted by their troubles and triumphs. By their decisions, good or bad.
"Jean!" Ororo repeats, and I look at her over my shoulder. My voice is tranquil.
"Yes, Ororo?"
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Jean Grey
(X2)
"I don't understand it," Ororo says quietly. "Why Stryker's men would attack the school. I know they're after Logan, but—the children have nothing to do with that—"
I rub my temples. I wish she would stop. The reality of the situation is not lost on me. I know that we were lucky, that students have been hurt or taken captive, even killed. Once, the thought would have made me anxious. I would have waited for the professor's guidance, nervously fluttering about as I looked for something useful to do.
Nervousness is a shallow emotion, and I miss it. The tidepools I used to wade in become tsunamis instead: inconstant, unexpected. One moment I will be happily unaware, returned to my former state of quiet contentment—and in the next, I am crippled by something I do not understand.
Right now, for instance. I am useless: my fingers dig into my temples, fighting off the tremendous confusion inside. I think once—savagely—that if anything ever again tries to harm the ones I love, I will do everything in my power to protect them. I have never been the strongest X-man, but suddenly I suspect that if the situation calls for it, I may find hidden reserves of power—abilities shrouded from myself and even from the brave professor, so like a father to me.
If anything ever endangers my friends—my adopted family—
—I will crush it—
—I will save them, be it an act of man or nature.
I know this with a ferocity that stuns me. I wonder if this is how Sabertooth used to feel, but then I shake my head in my hands. Ororo takes it as a denial of her truth: that we are sitting ducks for Stryker, that he will attack again and take the children prisoner. This is not what I intended, though it suits my purposes. Rather, I remind myself that I have always seemed deficient in the scope of human emotion (strange, that it now seems like a deficiency) and that for me, the anger or joy or grief of an average person is debilitating in its intensity.
My head is throbbing. Unexpectedly, I remember a fish I had when I was a child. It lived alone in its own bowl, and sometimes I would hold a mirror up to it in order to see it puff up and fight. It hated any intruders in its space. Once, when my mother had been cleaning my room, she had placed the bowl next to the other fish tank and had forgotten it. The fury that rose in it at the sight of the other fish had caused it to charge against the glass of its bowl, heedless of the self-damage it had inflicted. Again and again, it must have rammed itself into the side of its transparent cage, until it brained itself and died, floating to the surface with a cloudy streamer drifting from its head.
The image is fitting for how I feel. Trapped (which is ridiculous; I am with a family of my choosing, after all), and claustrophobic (though the mansion is huge), and confined (though I am sure I am freer now than I have ever been before). Things creep up on me that I have never noticed before: doubts. Fears. Passions.
"I wish we could prevent things like this," Ororo says. Her voice is smoky and warm with the force of her ire. "We're supposed to be the ones on the front lines, taking risks. Not the students. This is meant to be a haven for them—"
Scott is surprised and perturbed by my moods lately. He says he has never known me to become so angry over so little, to take offense so easily. I think he is unfair. Even now, with my strange and unexpected onslaughts of nonsensical emotions, I am still of milder disposition than almost any other woman I know.
But I know it hurts him. Sometimes, rather than welcome him to my body with open arms and a peaceful heart, I now turn him away and lay on my side facing the wall, dreaming of Logan's mouth and the hair on his muscled legs as they press between my thighs. I have never felt Logan's legs or even seen them, but I can imagine them with more clarity than I can even remember Scott's.
And sometimes I wake in the middle of the night with a scream built in my throat, or I think I hear howling. The tattered remnants of dreams cling to my eyes like cobwebs. In these dreams, all I remember is something that battering itself against walls and screaming for freedom.
I hear Ororo's voice from a distance and pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to concentrate. My gaze narrows on her mouth as she speaks. Her eyes are worried. Another headache, Jean? her lips say.
I imagine a moth, fluttering madly under a glass. I imagine a fly trapped between a window pane and a screen. I imagine a sheet of paper being swallowed by fire, which leaves only ash behind. I imagine a bird bashing its head into a window, leaving a bright splash of red on the glass—
"Jean!" Ororo repeats, and I look at her over my shoulder. My voice is tranquil.
"Yes, Ororo?"
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Crow Black
(X-men: The Last Stand)
"I don't understand it," Ororo says softly. There is something like grief in her voice, though she knows no grief—not by my standards. "You're not her."
I am blazing. Every cell in me is blazing. Who are you to tell me who I am, who I should be?
Something in me is cawing, crowing with a smoke-hoarse cry, rasping the words: Rape, rape, rape!
The professor.
The thought of him alone makes my hair rise. Murderer, my bird-voice screams. Jailer! Rapist!
"Do you know what it is like," I ask her coldly, "to have every decision stripped away from you? To be made powerless, incapable of knowing even yourself?"
I am pleased that she has understood my words, that they haven't come out in some foreign bird-tongue that is incomprehensible to her small human brain. Instead, they sound almost serene, devoid of the emotion that is scalding me from the inside out. I am not sure how I have spoken instead of bellowing out a screaming nonsense:
Of man's first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe
Instruct me for thou know'st
thou from the first wast present with mighty wings outspread
I do not know where these words have come from, only that they are shrieked in my head in a thousand voices, each sounding like my own. I am more aware of every part of me than I have ever been before: the winged parts, the beaked parts, the sharp and hard-eyed parts with the pointed predator's gaze. I imagine my eyes, dark and gleaming. I imagine my fingers blackened by soot. From somewhere, I smell burning feathers. From somewhere, in those harsh, screaming voices, I hear more accusations, more meaningless phrases. I do not recognize the language, but I know what the words mean. I wonder if they are the verses of valkyries and harpies, burning through the air with gleaming axes in their hands and flames in their eyes. Something in me screams, FLY FLY FLY FLY—!
"You killed him," Ororo whispers, and there is an ache in her voice—a shadow of the screaming I feel in my bones.
And chiefly thou o spirit, that dost prefer before all temples upright and pure
WHAT IN ME IS DARK, ILLUMINATE.
That to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal providence, and justify the ways of god to men
"He tried to kill me first," I say. My voice is so cold and serene that it cracks, like ice. I see her shiver. "He shackled me and caged me. He wanted to put me back in."
"He wanted you to live!" she cried out. I remember once not knowing how Ororo could live with such passion; now I only stare at her in contempt as she flails in the pitifully shallow dregs of her emotion. She knows nothing of feeling, of being free. "He knew you couldn't function like this—he just wanted you to be healthy, and happy!" Her voice is a tragic plea. It means nothing to me.
"He wanted a doll," I say, "a child. And so he has crippled me."
Th'infernal serprent; he it was, whose guile stirred up with envy and rage, deceiv'd the mother of makind
what time his pride had cast him out of heaven with all his host of rebel angels, by whose aid aspiring to set himself in glory above his peers
him the almighty power hurled headlong flaming from the' ethereal sky with hideous ruin and combustion down to bottomless perdition
"He has hobbled me to try to keep me bound to him." I bear my teeth, though my words are still and calm. "But now I am simply a bird who is unable to land."
"You're going to die," she protests, as though this is a horrible thing. She is small and weak. How can she understand that this body is just another cage? "Don't you see how gaunt and starved-looking you've become? Please," she begs, and the sound is repugnant to me, "please come back with us. We can try—Logan will try. You know he will. We'll find a way to make you better."
I turn my back to her. Her whining bores me. My skin is scorching. "I do not want to be made 'better,'" I tell her. My voice is placid, unyielding. "And I will not die. Only this flesh will burn up," I tell her with a sharp-toothed grin, "like a Phoenix."
"Come back with us, Jean," she begs.
I walk. The voices in me are a cacophony of whirling freedom, a cyclone of fire and bright meteors.
Well I see and rue the dire event that with sad overthrow and foul defeat
hath lost us heaven
as far as gods and heav'nly essences can perish
"Jean!" Ororo repeats, and I look at her over my shoulder. My voice is tranquil.
"Yes, Ororo?"
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I wrote this on a whim yesterday (if it's not AWESOME, then I blame it on the minimal amount of time I spent on it… which is a blatant excuse).
I have never been a huge fan of Jean. It always seemed to me that she had no character whatsoever and never even got interesting until after she died. But I was thinking yesterday that maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe she is interesting, and I just never noticed after all. Perhaps her very boringness is what makes her unique.
So this was born.
Notes:
1. Jean's last name is spelled "grey." The color is spelled "gray." This is a pun. I'm sure most of you get that, but I have had a couple readers question me on that pre-posting.
2. Each section is created in accordance with one of the three movies in the trilogy (imagine them fitting in behind-the-scenes of the stories we watched). Each section starts with the same single phrase and ends with the same triple-phrase.
3. Each title corresponds to how I view her during that particular movie: "Snow White," the innocent princess; "Crow Black," the charred but freed scavenging bird; "Jean Grey," perhaps the most authentic version of the woman herself and a small glimpse of what she could have been if she had been taught rather than handled.
4. The nonsense that Jean is babbling in her brain is actually adapted from Book 1 of Milton's Paradise Lost, which is the first book the professor ever gave her (according to the first segment of this character analysis, anyway ;)).
5. I did not always present Ororo or Professor Xavier in a flattering light here (and perhaps neither Scott nor Logan, either). This doesn't mean I dislike them…the opposite is true, in fact. I find them all much more engaging than Jean. :) But she had a story that needed to be told, and to be honest—in her story—they really are all villains.
I hope you enjoyed the bits and pieces—thanks so much for reading. :)