A\N: My first version was considerably less coherent...anyway, enjoy.
"You can't stop me."
On news channels everywhere, they watch.
Their eyes are wide.
"Kill me? Yes. I suppose you can."
A girl's breath hitches as she realizes that Phoenix read Wolverine's mind.
"But you won't."
A boy stares in awe as Jean Grey takes on Logan, friend against friend.
"I am Phoenix. I am female Fire, pure, living flame."
Somewhere, in the deep south, a boy snaps his fingers and sees a flame.
"And the next girl? She'll be Demeter. Female Earth. Pure, raw healing. But death, too."
The girl in question, just fifteen years old, stares at the woman who's just codified her visions of the future, a future where she becomes Demeter, goddess of Death, and carries on Magneto's ideals to save the world.
"The one after that will be Ethan. Poor thing."
Phoenix tilts her head as she reads the future. Ethan, sitting at home, stares with his eyes wide as water dances to his fingertips.
"He's male Water. Quiet, shy, well-read. He'll use people's own blood to kill them."
A woman stops in front of a television store, wrapped in a blanket. Electricity sparkles from her fingertips. She bans it, firmly, feeling the power lock itself away in her mind.
"And then...well, I can't See that far. Maybe me. Maybe I'll live again, who knows?"
A young boy, crying over a picture of the man he loves, feels his tears dry as he looks on in awe at the woman who does what he can't.
"But the thing is, Logan, you can't kill me. I'm Phoenix. And Phoenix? That's just a word that means 'reborn'."
The woman with lightning at her fingertips feels a tear fall from her eye.
Phoenix...poor girl, the woman thinks.
You're going to die.
"I'd lost half my soul, Logan. What is it called? Repression? Yes, repression. I repressed. I cut off my damn arm."
The lightning woman and gay boy chuckle together in bitter recognition.
"My arm, my leg, whatever you like. I denied myself. This is what I am, Logan. Not unnatural. Not 'too powerful'. Just me. And if I'd had a chance, I could have done a lot."
Yes, Ethan thinks fervently. Yes. Go back, Phoenix! You were the top geneticist! Go back and research!
Demeter, the future shaking her, sinks to the floor and begins to cry.
"I was helping heal the world!"
The boy with fiery hands stares at Phoenix.
She looks beautiful.
"And now I never will. Now I'm doomed. So go ahead, Logan, kill me. But you'd better have room on those hands for the blood of the next children. And you'd better be ready to find out the hard way why they're around."
Demeter is still sobbing when her father stalks in. "What the hell are you doing, mutie?"
Ethan flinches when his mother walks in the room.
"They're not happy kids, Logan. They're abused. They're neglected. They're abandoned. And what I'm doing? They'll want to do it too, because it's the only way to protect them."
The blanket falls from the woman's fingers as lightning touches the ends.
The gay boy stares. Is she really...could she mean...no, killing is wrong...but could it save someone from hell?
"Go ahead. Kill me. And someone else will come up in my place."
Demeter looks up, then, calmly, stands. Her father's hand flies up.
She just looks at him before walking away.
"Or, Logan, you could try another option."
Demeter walks past her mother and offers Ethan a hand. "Come on. We're leaving."
"You can stop making terrorists. We can start fighting for the right thing. No more Brotherhood vs. X-Men. No more arguing. We all decide things, we all work together, or nothing happens."
The gay boy walks into the sheriff's office and sets a gun down. The sheriff, who beat him up last night, looks at him in pure horror.
"I'd like to register my gun, please."
"So which is it, Logan? Save everyone? Or kill them?"
There is silence.
The first Phoenix does not die with a scream, but with the snikt of metal claws, at the hands of a man too scarred by his teacher's death to understand that Xavier, even dead, was wrong.
Demeter and Ethan run into the street, walking to the police station, where their bruises and scars will result in the arrest of their father.
The gay boy smiles as the sheriff reads his title of the head of the local sharpshooting club.
And the lightning woman stalks up to the fire-playing boy, determined this will never happen again. She closes in on her prey, slowly, furiously stalking him.
Then, for the first time in three years, she swoops her son into her arms and tells him that Mommy's home.