The Final Flight of the Phoenix
by Mackatlaw
The world is bleeding. At least, that's what Jean Grey thought as she walked through the ruins of the machines under the open sky. The sun shone down bright red, exactly the color of freshly-freed blood, through the pollution's haze that now never went away. This was the remains of the storage yard outside a bombed-out Sentinel factory, making it an unlikely meeting place for one of the last surviving X-Men. Usually these factories were rebuilt, but this area had been abandoned by everyone, here in the nowhere land between mutant strike zones and human protectorates. Everything was dull, rusted, except for the occasional gleam of imperishable weapons-grade metal that made her wonder if all the machines were truly inoperative. She glanced down at her EM unit. A few low-grade electromagnetic fields from some of the batteries had survived, but no energy sources large enough to be a threat. She shrugged. At least, not a threat to her. She was more worried about any witnesses, but the only things alive to her sight were the tall, misshapen weeds growing around the poisoned earth. The closest living mind she felt was thirty miles away in Las Vegas.
She was dressed in black, modified combat-armor with a long traveller's duster over it. She didn't need the protection. She just liked the distance it gave her from everyone else. Jean went her own way, and the smart survivors knew enough to let her be. The ones who weren't smart tended to lose their survivor status. The only mark of color on her outfit was the Phoenix, inscribed in green and yellow on the scales of her chestplate. The sun's color fitted her well, though. The only gifts she gave to people these days were blood and death, red and black, and the only thing she felt was cold. A fiber optic cable stirred idly in the breeze, hanging suspended between two telephone poles.
Idly, she pulled the cable down with invisible hands, telekinetic talons bringing the black strand over for closer inspection. She ran her hand over it, optic strands now dark and powerlessAt the touch of flesh, light glowedsparkling with rainbows inside the red corona of her power's effect. She could power a whole forest of cables, let America talk to Europe. That is, if there had been anyone to talk to there, or the cables to do it with. Jean shrugged and tossed her plaything aside. When she needed to talk with someone, they'd hear her. Telepaths were only as alone as they wanted to be.
"Ah, you're just saying that. You always were a people person, Jean."
"Logan!" She snapped in surprise at his internal voice, sometimes welcome, sometimes not. "Are you here? Did you find what we were looking for?"
An onlooker would have heard nothing but her talking to herself, a bad habit left over from too many days alone. But her vocalization was broadcast on the telepathic bands as well, and its recipient chuckled in his head at her.
"You'll have to see for yourself. Try and find me."
She sighed. Some things never changed. She still had a temper, and Logan could still be frustrating. He had been the only other X-Men on the scene when Scott died, and the transference and acceptance of her husband's link had been the tie that kept her from destroying Westchester. Scott's death was why she didn't use his last name anymore, why memories of her beloved were too beautiful and painful to recall. Jean and Logan weren't lovers now, though they'd tried. They could never be. They were too much alike, too explosive. Each was afraid to open up emotionally more than they already had, because if they let themselves go, they might never come back. Humanity was an act of will for them; she close to losing her identity to the stars, and he close to losing his to the animal inside. But they were more than friends, Logan nearer to her than anyone except Scott had ever been or would be again.
She kept moving, mentally scanning for Logan's presence. He could play games better than her passive scan, but not better than her active. Like her, he was an Alpha Class, as had been all of the X-Men. They shared something else in common, too; they had a plan. It wasn't much of one, granted, but they'd spent the last ten years working on it. Jean could "hear" him coming now. He was being very good, stealthy as he slipped through forests of wire and antennae, behind the corpses of burned-out robot hulks, and climbed over a jeep that had been crushed by a giant's hand. His psi-traces would have gone unnoticed to anyone with a Cerebro unit, and even most full telepaths would never know he was here.
But she would. She'd always know where he was when she wanted to. His mind would always be next to hers, the pulse of his thoughts like the heartbeat of a lover. If she wanted, she could reach over and touch him with a thought, cross the screen. If she was death, then he was fire, all animal senses and anger and a predator's awareness of his environment, hidden between mental shields on a now-instinctive level. The nearness chafed, rubbing them raw sometimes, and they couldn't stand to be near each for long in the flesh. Their bond kept them sane. But sanity had cost them. Impatient for the news, she kicked a pebble with her boots and delved into his mind as she made her way through the rubble. Grudgingly, he let her. Awareness of the present fell away as her body guided her through the ruins, while her mind relieved the past. In the memory playback, Logan was talking. From his point of view, sheheard him say"Tell me that this is gonna work, and that I didn't hike all the way up here for nothin'." His voice was deep, gutteral, almost inhuman. He no longer used the human tonal ranges much, and he preferred the company of the surviving animals to that of the people.
Through his eyes, she saw Tony Stark, the former Avenger Iron Man, wired into his laboratory. He looked old and eaten up by cancer, the generators and life support plugged into his armor all that kept him alive. He didn't have much longer to live, but he was still the best inventor the human race ever had. He made adjustments on the display in front of him, where robotic waldo arms held a mace-like rod that was covered with circuitry. Then the mutant Forge, his bionic hand moving spiderlike to keep up with his flesh and blood one, bent down and keyed something into a computer. He straightened and wiped the sweat from his face with a bandana holding back his hair, black and as long as ever. Forge regarded Logan coolly, the zoom lenses that had replaced his eyes tracking him with digital precision. He pressed one last button, and the black rod on the console lit up with beautiful silver displays, the circuitry coming alive with light. It was about a foot long and as thick as a person's thumb. The console unlocked, and Tony Stark moved his hover wheelchair over to take the rod out. His hair and mustache were white, but his eyes were sharp, and he caressed the rod like the technological wizard that he was. He held the device up for display.
Jean paused the memory image in mid-recollection. Tucking her hands in her pockets, she headed for the prearranged meeting point, determined not to give Logan the pleasure of his game. "Who cares?" she said to her unseen companion, swimming through his thoughts. "Skip the introduction; tell me if it worked. Do you have it? Stop moving for a minute and I'll fly over there."
"Jean, we tell it my way or not at all. Just settle down, okay
"They're dead, right?"she said offhandedly. "What's the big deal? Did you get it?"
He literally snarled at that, pushing the red haze of his anger at her. "Have some respect for the fallen. And stop rummaging around in my mind!"
She drew back, abashed and puzzled. Sometimes she forgot to have feelings, but Logan's were always so clear for her, the somber tinge of the memory unmistakable. It had been like looking at the faded yellow patina on an old black and white photograph, only emotion, not age, colored this memory. The tension in the link and distraction, jolted her fully back into body awareness. Logan had always been able to get to her, and she let him push her. But then, a lot of things had changed in ten years. He didn't used to be the sane one. Or was she really insane? Jean could wonder about it, but she didn't know if she would be able to tell a difference. The Phoenix waiting outside always looked, always wanted to play. If he didn't push her, one day she would never come home, never come back to the finite. The two had always been close, sometimes uncomfortably so, reading each other's emotions no matter how they tried to hide. They had such basic needs, fit together on such a primal, destructive level. They would have destroyed each other, she knew. Logan never accepted that then, but he did now.
Jean frowned and hastened her walk through the yard, trying to get visual confirmation of her hopes. Impatient, she sighed and reached out again through the link, extending a symbolic white flag of penitent-feeling. The humans had built the factory out here in the first place because the area was already badlands, already uncomfortably close to the nuclear testing sites. None of the other mutants had any business out here. The humans were mostly dead or sterile and in sanctuaries, thanks to the radiation damage from the nukes and Magneto's death. Long-distance communication and satellite responses were largely blocked by damage to the ionosphere, but nobody really wanted to talk to each other anymore anyway. The remaining mutants had split America up into protection zones, squabbling over the remnants like children. No one had any reason to come here anymore but the truly desperate, the fearless and the suicidal. Idly, she wondered which of them she was. Possibly all three.
At least telepathy still worked. Jean peered eagerly through Logan's eyes and reentered the past of the laboratory, as Tony Stark and Forge began moving again. She watched the thumb-thick rod full of technology like it was a magic wand. She didn't care how the science worked, but she let the memory play on anyway. As the Indian inventor moved around the room, her attention commented idly on the scene. Jean sometimes thought that Forge hated the flesh so much that he'd transfer his mind into a computer if he could. The original missing hand and leg had been lost in Vietnam. After the Mutant Wars, he'd lost more than that. The difference was now, he didn't bother making the replacements look human, or even humanoid. He just made them modular.
Contact restored, she lived the memory again while she guided herself by telekinesis through the broken concrete, eyes blind to the present. She ignored the babble of voices at first and tuned in on just the visual, doing the telepathic equivalent of lounging on a bed, head propped up on her elbows, watching the two inventors. She hoped they'd finally succeeded at something. They were good with tangibles; not so good with the broader problems. Forge and Stark couldn't fix the birthrate problem in time. They couldn't even stabilize the technological infrastructure, because once they started rebuilding, everyone would want a piece and the devil with waiting. It had happened once already. That's why they'd had to relocate to the Rockies, as far away from the controlled and contested zones as possible.
Forge was the human's counterpart, the mutant who could invent anything if he put his mind to it, craft any device if he had enough time and materials. If either found it ironic that their craft had been used by parties on all sides of the genome equation, government, freedom fighter, and terrorist alike, to wage their bloody craft, they no longer commented on the obvious. The end of the world had already happened for them, after all; they could restore technology to all those alive, but they couldn't give life back. That had been Essex, Mister Sinister's, province. Him and the Beast. Oh, the two Tom Swift's had tried to fill their shoes -- or paws -- but the genetic map was just too ripped. If the geneticists hadn't been murdered, then maybe they would have found a solution. But they'd never gotten a chance, at least not after everyone got tired of clones and retroviruses.
Oh, here was a good part. She should listen to this.
"It worked," Tony said, the voice of an old man, raspy and tired. "The sample you provided enabled us to incorporate the transmode virus's shapeshifting abilities. That was the last component we needed to realize our design."
"Yes. It's everything you asked for and more," Forge said with pride. "We couldn't test the high-end energy specifications, of course, but everything we could run through shows that it will handle the load. There may be some side effects to the user, but I believe it will be able to accept the Phoenix Force as a suitable power supply."
"Side effects to the user! Forge, we're talking about Jean. What do you mean, side effects?"
What was he talking about? The Phoenix can do anything. She began to think about Scott, and the picture in front of her began to fade.
"No, Logan," the Indian inventor said. "I'm talking about the future. I'm talking about reality. The Phoenix can handle the task physically. There's never been any question about that. The real issue is whether she can handle it mentally. I have no doubts her body will be preserved by the trip. I'm just not sure about the mind."
"Now, listen here..."
Warnings went off in the lab, a yellow light flashing slowly but insistently on the ceiling to the accompaniment of the chorus of Beethoven's "Eroica". The two inventors didn't like to be overly disturbed, even by the necessary evil of a perimeter breach.
Stark calmly began initiating engagement of remote-controlled weapons units through his vocorder and display-unit holograms, while Forge handed Wolverine the device.
"You have to leave now," he said. "Follow the glowing floor plates until you reach the escape pod. We can only guarantee you safe passage outside the immediate combat zone, and then you're on your own."
"You must be crazy if you think I'm going to run! I'll stay and we'll fight them together, just show me where they are."
"No, Logan. They're using scorched-earth tactics. They'll be through our best defensive screens in minutes, and then the destruction will be total. They won't risk leaving us alive again. If you're going to go, you have to go now."
Wolverine growled, but he'd finally learned to choose his fights, and to tell when a battle was lost. He headed down the corridor, and Jean jumped out of his mind and back to present-day and industrial rubble. Standing among the shells of robots and machines, she scrubbed her forehead with her knuckles, trying to remember who she was. Why did her thoughts feel alien, where was her compassion, her awareness that she too was mortal? But then, she wasn't. So she turned her gaze to her destination, and let the past scene fade away. This factory had been the last major plant in operation, until it fell fifteen years ago in a combined strike by Havok's Brotherhood and Sinister's Marauders. The X-Groups had been occupied. Most of them, if they could have stopped it, saw the strike as a blessing and didn't intervene. They were wrong. These machines had been meant to make Sentinels to give the human race breathing room, time to produce gene-therapy for their chromosomes, time to recover from the losses they'd sustained, time to rebuild an oasis of civilization. That had all ended here in the desert, and when the remaining mutants discovered they needed the human race to keep their gene pool from calcifying, it was too late. Mutants were not sufficiently fertile with other mutants
Hank proved that on his own, but everyone else got their proof when the first mutants of the new generation started arriving. Before the war, there hadn't been enough births to have a valid survey sample. After the war, it was too late. A mutant-mutant birth was typically a stillbirth, and usually deformed in the twenty-five percent of live births. Viable mutant children were usually Delta-level mutants of no real power. Human-mutant offspring, however, tended to be more powerful than the mutant parent, and usually inherited a conventional human's physical appearance. The destiny of the mutants and humans had been to interbreed and produce the new race. Now, that would never happen. Unless someone changed all that.
The man she was meeting here was supposed to bring her the tools to start. She turned to meet him, her boots echoing on the metal plates of the walkway that led to the factory itself. And there, in front of the ruins of the hopes of the human race, she met Logan, who they called Wolverine. Like her, he hadn't aged a day, grizzled with sideburns and wild hair, walking with an understated stride and an easy awareness of his surroundings. The army fatigues and black t-shirt showed heavy wear, but the man himself was tireless until you saw his eyes. Logan had seen so much death that it had become a part of him. He fought because he couldn't give up, he fought because he wouldn't die.
Logan looked at her.. "Hiya, Jean. What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?" He stood, almost on eye level with her, his stance relaxed, yet always ready to move. It was a battle stance. The samurai he'd loved of Japan cultivated the tea ceremony and the study of art, along with war. She used to think it just a way for them to console themselves with the murder they did, a flimsy pretense at being more than a killer. Now, she knew otherwise. Civilization and art was what kept a fighter sane. A society without warriors had no future, but warriors without society had no purpose. Like her, he travelled light, with little more than a knapsack and a few pouches.
Jean hadn't aged either since that day in 2009, ten years ago. She owed her own cellular stasis to the Phoenix-force, though, not to a healing factor or any other gift of her mutant genes. When she'd given up on being human, she'd given up on aging. Cosmic force running through them, lacing every molecule and atom and quark of her with power. She didn't sleep anymore, either. She didn't have to, and when she dreamed, she lost her controls. She'd woken up more than one from a dream of fighting, to find devastation allaround herAfter Chicago, she gave up on sleeping.
If she had to go on anymore like this, she thought she might give up, might rise into space as a bird of fire, and let go. The Phoenix would never leave her until it had the power to seek a new host, and the only way it could do that was by first consuming a planet full of enough sentient life. The closest it could reach was Earth. Sometimes, she thought about that.
She said as much to her only remaining friend. "Logan, do you ever stop and think why bother?" After all, this world was doomed. The mutants would soon die out to imitate the humans, and the poor bedraggled biosphere would gasp on a little longer before it, too, faded away. Oh, perhaps the world still has another hundred thousand years of so before the weight of mutations destroyed all life, but what's the point of a world without sentients? "Wouldn't it be better to clean it all out, let the planet start over from the ashes and the oceans?"
Logan shook his head. "That's the Phoenix doing your thinking, or feeling rather, and you've got to watch that. It's not a very complicated force, no matter how powerful it is. Things look so simple to it because all it has are duties. Cleanse, Purify, Heal, Destroy. Stuff like that. But you're more than the Phoenix. Maybe it thinks there's was only one way to heal this place, but don't give up on us yet."
Her heart rose. "Logan... Did you keep it? Do you have it?" She couldn't help herself, she had to know.
He said nothing, but invited her mentally inside. She slipped into his mind, the contact familiar and the pathway effortless, walking in like an old lover, with knocks on the door that were always answered, even when they knew better. She read the image there on the surface, not daring to go deeper just yet. She gasped like a school-girl and hugged him, barely tolerated as his muscles jumped at the unaccustomed feel of human contact. He finally relaxed and hugged her back, his fondness for her plain, but the embrace awkward. It was like hugging a wild animal. He could be around her because he liked her, but somewhere along the way, he too had forgotten how to be human.
"Yeah, Jean, I've got it," he said, his voice rough with suppressed excitement. She let him go, but now that she was this close, the trembling on every muscle, tension tightly held with will, was evident. "I've got our ticket back."
He unzipped the battered knapsack and pulled the time-travel device. "It's already programmed for the exact date of Scott's death. All you have to do is press the button on the end, and turn on the juice. It'll do the rest."
Just as nervous, now that their plan was finally ready, she accepted the rod from his outstretched hand, barely refraining from snatching it. She held the rod close.
Logan hesitated. "Jean... They said there might be side effects. Physically, they said no problem. Mentally, they said it might be rockier."
"Oh Logan," she smiled tenderly through eyes that were crying with tears she had thought lost forever. "We both know there's no going back, that there's nothing for either of us here. It's this or nothing. Death now or in the future, what's the difference? The past is what we have left."
"Yeah. Yeah, I guess I know that. And you're right. Not gonna cry over it. Not even sure I can anymore." He hesitated. "When you see Scott, give him hell for me, okay? Make sure he ducks this time."
Jean frowned. "What do you mean? You're going with me."
He took a deep breath and exhaled. "No, no I'm not. Because what I've been sniffing and what you haven't noticed because you've been busy, is that we're about to be surrounded and overrun. Don't know how many, but it's a lot. They must have trailed me here somehow after they blew up the lab, teleported from out of your psi-range. Probably don't know exactly what we've got, but they want me dead and they won't know they're taking on both of us until it's too late. Jean, I'm sorry."
Her eyes blazed red with fire for a moment. "You're right. I was negligent also. Not a problem, we can take them. Some telekinesis, some destruction, some telepathy... It'll be just like old times."
But her old friend was shaking his head. "No, Jean, this is too important. That time-travel gadget is just too easy to break in a fight; we can't risk it. You don't know how long it's gonna take to make that thing work, so you've got to start now." He clenched his hands and familiar metal claws erupted from their backs. "I'm gonna go buy you some time. I'll head them off, give them something to think about."
"Logan..."
"Jean, I gotta go. Don't make this any harder than it already is."
Logan, I love you, she sent, helplessly.
I love you too. Now go!
And with that he was gone, racing toward the waiting minds she could now feel all around her, approaching much too fast. But she couldn't stop to follow what was happening with him, so she walled away the psi-link, like she'd walled away her emotions once. She could still feel him, off to one corner, but the sensations were rapidly diminishing. Logan was too intense in a fight; she couldn't stay fully in the present with him with him and still do this. Once her flight started, she didn't know if she'd care enough to check in when she could. The Phoenix felt, oh yes. That was the deal. The Phoenix was her emotions, and they were all-consuming. To lock them away was to shut out the fire, shut out her passion, and it felt so wrong.
She pressed the button and waited. But nothing happened. With a falling sensation in her stomach, she realized she had held the power in for so long this time that it wasn't coming when she wanted. Now that she wanted to lose control, she couldn't.
Dimly, she heard screams as Wolverine cut into the attackers, who from their minds had indeed followed Logan to see where he was going. They didn't want the time-travel device. They didn't even know about it, and if they did, they wouldn't care. After all, for those willing to cling on to life at any price, why help someone who was going to go back and make this all have never happened?
Because somewhen this all went wrong, she thought, and she knew exactly when. It was October 23, 2005, the day that Scott Summers was killed and Jean Grey lost her humanity. If he'd still been alive, he could have rallied the X-Men forces and stopped the war before it went too far. But with him gone, there wasn't any leader left strong enough to resist the call to vengeance, and everything went to hell. She despaired at the thought of failure. But despair wouldn't save her now. Only the Phoenix could. She wasn't human anymore, but she'd become something else. Something different, something elemental. To reach the power, she had to find the element of her that still cared, reach her passion, her emotions.
That was the link. The passion had always been there. The Phoenix was her passion given form. But it wasn't the same. The Phoenix felt about everything, all at once, and she was it and it was she and she was tired of pretending there was any difference whatsoever. She was the Phoenix. The Phoenix was her. "I accept," she said softly, and held the rod out in front of her, held slightly tilted like a wand ready to strike.
She said a quiet farewell to Logan, who she could feel dying, and instead of shutting him out, accepted her pain, accepted her emotions, accepted the thoughts of everyone around her. Accepted that they had come to an End here on this world, and that there was only one way for the Phoenix to make an ending for herself. So she reached out for the power, and sought the Beginning.
Fire and light erupted all around her, and her mouth opened in exaltation. Every living thing with ears to hear went deaf as far away as Las Vegas, and the sound blew away the atmosphere. But she no longer needed to breathe. She threw her arms up to the heavens as they blazed all around her with fire, the raptor-display of energy suddenly visible to everyone for miles around. Power blazed through her, emotions and heat and life and there was no difference, was no separation. The two were one again and they were alive, one but not the same, for the force was nothing without her to direct it and she was nothing without its passion. Together, they were passion and will, and they were alive. She could no longer tell where one ended and one began, and every cell in her body ached with joy as the power unleashed itself. The wings... Oh, God, the wings. If anyone was still looking down, they could have seen the display from space.
She'd lost all sense of her individual human body, suspended somewhere in the cosmic fire, but she felt the currents of space and the flow of energy and gravity and the connections everywhere. She wasn't human. She was better than human. Then she was flying, suspended above the Earth, somehow holding it in her talons as the oceans boiled. She screamed and prepared to feed, needing the energy to sustain her. But as she wrapped herself around the planet and began the process, the time travel device, already long forgotten from her no-longer human awareness, finally activated. With a horrible wrenching sensation, she realized that her very essence was being drawn into a tiny speck of metal, like some black hole sucking up infinity. Human emotions and thoughts began to reemerge as the pain tore at her. She realized that Stark and Forge must have planned this all along, must have known it would require the death agonies of the Phoenix and the rebirth that came with it, to power the device.
Death was a one-way trip for everyone but the Phoenix.
But -- if it killed the Phoenix -- killed her -- who would she be when she woke up? Memories, sensations, her sense of self, they were all coming apart and falling into the void. It was more than she could take, but she had no choice. The pain was unbearable, but nobody took it away from her, no one let her go unconsciousness. She screamed her defiance at an uncaring cosmos, ripping her human lungs raw as the Raptor's own voice shook dust on the moon, and accepted the challenge. Her identity was long gone now. She never knew how long this lasted, because there was no one to ask. But everything was stripped from her but defiance, her core, and that too was being sucked inevitably away. There were no thoughts, no past or future, only the present and the sense of striving, of refusal. This was what she had wanted, what she had to do, but she couldn't relent. The Phoenix never died easily. It couldn't. The nature of life incarnate is to live. But the lights dimmed anyway.
Finally, the lights went dark completely, and then the last of her was drawn into the device as the discorporation completed, and her essence finished the activation. The rod hung suspended in space hundreds of miles from the earth's surface, somewhere between Earth and the Moon. The last of the fiery glow entered into the circuits that bridged now and forever, and the Phoenix finally died. But the nature of life is also to die, for all things must die. But death is never eternal. For to be reborn, first you must die. And with the Phoenix's death, the device finally finished its job. Little did the makers know, but it worked better than they suspected, yet not as they envisioned.
Somewhen in the backyard of a mansion in Westchester, without fanfare, a red-headed woman appeared. There wasn't even a clap of air as volume was displaced. Instead, reality was simply rearranged. First there was something, and then there was something else. And that someone was Jean Grey, the Phoenix. She opened her eyes, the pain gone and memories of the flight through time already beginning to fade. Suddenly unsteady on her feet, she opened her eyes and then stared in disbelief .
The X-Men were playing badminton out on the lawn, girls against boys. A net had been set up and four teammates were volleying each other, trying to knock the birdie over the net. Girls were on one team, boys on another. Scott and Piotr were playing on one side, the first in shorts and white t-shirt, red goggles and tousled brown hair. Colossus held the racket carefully with his greater height and strength, even in human form, but still swung and knocked the white piece of plastic out of bounds. He sighed in irritation. The other side cheered.
"Toss it over here! Our serve!" Jean yelled. "Finally, we're going to show you how the girls play." Storm pushed her long white locks out of her eyes and raised her hand. "Does this mean it's my turn to serve?"
Phoenix blinked in disbelief, then anger. This couldn't be right. If she was looking at herself, then she had overshot the timeline. This wasn't 2006, shortly before Scott's death. From the younger looks of everyone, especially herself, twenty years in the past. How long ago, she wasn't quite sure. She'd simply have to ask.
The badminton game continued to be played, and Piotr tossed the birdie over to Ororo, not trusting his racket to get it there. Beside him, Scott chided, "Peter, don't hit it so hard next time. This isn't baseball or even golf. The game is all about precision and accuracy."
Peter sighed. "Can I say I've heard the talk about team training and organized sports as a substitute for the Danger Room the first time, so we can continue playing?"
"If you want. Just remember, look at where your opponents are, then aim for where they're not, as long as you keep within the boundaries."
The birdie bounced off Scott's head.
"Hey!"
"What was that part about observing your opponents again?" Peter said dryly.
Scott grumbled and dropped the birdie from his hand, tapping it with the racket back to the other side, where a delighted Storm caught it. She simply smiled, but Jean blew her lover a kiss. "Heads up!"
The older Jean stared and tapped her foot. She was standing on the sidelines naked, yet no one noticed. "Excuse me!" she said. Her red hair begun to burn slightly with phosphorescent light. "I'm standing right here. No one blows Scott a kiss but me."
She stopped for a moment puzzled to consider what had happened. Something was off.
"You know, you're supposed to announce before you serve…"
Peter elbowed Scott in the ribs. "Let it go, my friend, especially if you want to be on good terms with her later tonight. Is there not a movie in the den?"
Scott's cheeks flushed red with embarrasment and he coughed. "Your point is well-taken." He raised his racket to defend his side of the grass.
Jean looked down at herself. She seemed to be standing partway in the grass, but she didn't feel the soil. She put a hand down to touch the soil, and it went straight through the well-kept lawn. She was insubstantial. That explained many things. To the world around her, she was a ghost, able to see but not touch. The only thing solid to her was her own flesh, tangible as she seemed to herself. The world was out of synch, or was it? The last memory she had before the gateway was being torn apart, energies dissipating. Perhaps the flesh hadn't come through. Instead, only psychic energy, consciousness.
The teams volleyed back and forth, Scott making an acrobatic roll to reach a corner and lobby back a shot from Jean, who promptly knocked it right back. Peter raised his racket like an entemlogist hunting a rare butterfly, hunching slightly preparing to capture the birdie as soon as it came near. Experimentally, Phoenix raised a hand and pointed at the birdie. It swerved out of bounds.
"Hey! No powers!" Scott yelled.
Storm looked indignant. "I am not using my winds. I would not cheat."
Scott looked at Jean, the likelier culprit. Jean crossed her arms, nose in the air. "For your information, I don't need my powers to cheat. I'm beating you fair and square."
Clearly a body was needed to better effect events. Being a ghost, powers or not, was not what she had in mind when she decided on this plan. No, flesh and blood, and the ability to touch Scott was required. Her younger self was already here, and the timeline must stay unaltered in all major events until the crucial point in New York. Therefore, the steps were obvious. She strode firmly towards the X-Men, feet leaving no trace on the grass as she crossed.
Jean continued to argue with her boyfriend while Peter looked exasperated and Storm tried to calm events. Ororo didn't like arguing; it upset her. Already clouds were gathering in the sky above them. If nothing was done quickly, everyone would be playing in the rain. Phoenix soon reached her other self and touched a hand to Jean's temple, more for orientation than anything else. Then she slipped inside Jean's body and mind with a flash of light, and Jean collapsed to the ground, clutching her head.