Author: Wallace (wallacehotmail.com)
Title: Looking for the enemy.
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: The characters and concepts utilised herein are the property of Marvel Entertainment and Twentieth Century Fox. I'd also like to give a credit to James Marsden and Bryan Singer.
Summary: You are not in denial.
Written for the X-Men Movieverse Ficathon, for Wyoluvr.
Pairing/scenario requested:
1. Scott/Jean, post X-1 or 2 (I'd prefer after X-2). No character bashing, any rating.
2. Warren and Hank and Scott, not slash, any rating, but how they deal with Jean's funeral.
I chose option one, but quite a bit of option two crept in.
Warnings (if any): Melodrama, angst, reference to character death (unsurprisingly)

1. Morning.

You are not in denial.

You wake up alone for the eighth day running, and there's no gentle touch on your mind. You go downstairs and brew coffee, and stop short of setting out a second mug. You run your circuits of the grounds alone and in silence, and for the eighth morning running you decide that you should get some kind of personal stereo to listen to as you exercise. You dress, guessing at colours, and stop off at the conservatory to check with Ororo that you don't look stupid. It only took you forty-eight hours to incorporate this last into your daily routine.

Jean is not here, and you have felt her absence with every minute of every day since she let herself die.

Guilt is natural. The Professor has talked to you about this at some length, repeatedly. You've never hit a handicapped person. You've never come closer than in these sessions. The Professor talked about survivor's guilt, responsibility, leadership, and the choices Jean made.

You broke the dam. When it burst, Jean died. What she chose to do, what everyone else chose to do, cannot change these two simple facts.

Your last session ends with you turning your back on the Professor. You don't shout at him. You want to shout at him, want to scream and rant and tell him he's a worthless old cripple, demand to know why he let her go, blame him for every bad decision he's ever made, for letting Magneto leave and for letting Jason live and for letting Stryker remember. Blame him for putting you in charge.

--

2. Noon.

There's a memorial service today.

The Professor is a Protestant, Huguenot stock going back four hundred years. Jean was a non-practising Dutch Lutheran. You're an atheist.

All the students are here. You're not sure who organised that - probably the Professor. He's the best and kindest man you've ever met, mostly. But he's also a twisted, Machiavellian bastard, too, and when he wants something to happen, somehow or other it always happens.

Most of the students don't have much religion, either, generally for similar reasons to you. Kitty Pryde is Jewish, Bobby Drake still goes to confession once a month, Sam Guthrie is a river-washed Baptist… most of them didn't have that kind of security in their lives.

What's left of the staff are here, too - Xavier and Ororo, the newcomers Kurt and Logan. Logan, silently glowering, hating everyone and everything in the room - Logan, who would protect this place, and the children within, against all the armies of the world.

And, finally, there are the only ones who really matter, at least to you - Jean's friends, the men who loved her. Hank and Warren arrived at the same time, separately and without collusion. They don't talk. They don't try to make you talk. But they take their places on either side of you, tall and quiet and composed. That's something all of Xavier's original students have in common - an unflappability, an emotional reticence, that comes of growing up in the shadow of a telepath who himself never let anything show. Jean was the first of you - so far the only one of you - to move beyond that, and you loved her as much for that as for anything else.

The three of you sit and listen to Xavier's platitudes and Kurt's prayers and the occasional muttering of a bored student. Xavier had asked you to speak, but you had quietly refused, and ignored the anger that he can hide from everyone but you. And, afterwards, you get up and walk away, together. These last eight days you have shunned company, but you welcome that of these two.

--

Warren asks you a question. You don't answer him, and he repeats himself, and then asks others. He's not interested in the answers, of course.

Warren always used to be able to get a rise out of you. He's relying on that, today. It doesn't seem to be working.

You no longer have any anger left to spare.

Hank is coming back, rejoining the school, perhaps rejoining the team, although it's anyone's guess in what capacity. Warren… isn't. He still feels he has nothing to offer, and you still agree with him.

He gets angry himself shortly after this, and tries to fight you. But you turn your back on him.

When you do, you meet Hank's gaze. He watches your face, trying to see through the quartz of your shades, and for a moment you entertain a vision of flipping them up, of letting him truly see your eyes, of simply watching what the blasts did to him.

It's a beautiful vision. But instead you walk away.

This isn't about how you feel about them. It's about how they feel about Jean, and right now, you can't help them any more than they can help you.

--

3. Afternoon.

Kurt finds you later on, down in the gym. He's diffident, polite, respectful of your feelings. He's noticed that you've been avoiding him lately, and appreciates why. He's more perceptive than you had realised. He's worked out that you broke the dam. He's noticed that you're angry.

He reminds you that he, too, was controlled by Stryker.

You tell him to leave. He refuses.

You killed Jean, he reminds you, because you broke the dam while under Stryker's control. But neither of you would have been there if he had not attacked the President.

Stryker would have found a way, you tell him. He had his plan to capture the Professor already in place; the attack on the White House was simply one stage in his plan, and he could have done it a thousand other ways.

Everything could have happened other ways, Kurt reminds you. But they did not. He precipitated the events that ended with you breaking the dam, and Jean dying, and the children who call the mansion home losing that vital sense of security, and the Professor feeling helpless for what must be the first time in his life.

As he speaks it occurs to you that beneath his placid exterior Kurt, too, is angry.

He doesn't offer you an answer. Everybody in the mansion knows where he looks for reason and forgiveness and he, at least, understands why you cannot do the same. He isn't going to try to change your mind.

--

Everyone is angry, of course. Anger is a natural response to fear; that's the basis of the mutant problem in this world. The mansion was attacked, its residents threatened. You are all angry and afraid, and it's a wonder that Magneto only gained one recruit in the immediate aftermath. There will be others, you know, other children who cannot reconcile the idea of protecting or living in the world to those black-clad soldiers who stole away their home.

You're not even sure that you still can.

The memorial service was supposed to be a time of closure, a time to accept that Jean is gone. But it was also a reminder of what you had lost, and of what had been done to you.

The war Magneto has been prophesying for as long as you have known him finally arrived. And you no longer know which was the right side, but you do know that you fought on the wrong one.

--

4. Evening.

Logan finds you at sunset. He's looking for a fight. You think about it for a while, and then give him one, blasting him into the walls of the Danger Room, moving around him quickly, avoiding his angry lunges. Eventually he makes contact, battering you about until you blast him away again. It should feel good to cut loose, but of course you aren't really cutting loose. The walls are still intact, your opponent is still intact - you haven't truly exercised your powers since Alkali Lake.

You leave him to heal, and walk away.

--

Dinner is a quiet affair, the students' conversation muted. At the staff table nobody talks to you, not even to question your bruises.

You eat quickly, and go to your office. You have paperwork to attend to. Just because the world ended and then began again, doesn't mean your job gets any simpler.

--

5. Night.

Alone in your bed and alone in your head and Jean is dead.