AN: Placed somewhere mid the late 03' - early '04 run, right before Jean's latest death.
~*~*~
Sometimes Jean thinks that the more she keeps things running smooth, the more she knows it's just that she's missed the crack that will eventually break it all apart. Like the flow of her orderly work will result in the chaos of the future, unstemable and unstoppable, just a balance fulfilling it's creation.
She's the head mistress of a school she can walk through without even thinking or looking at it. She's a teacher to thousands of students who spend most class periods worried about dying more than passing. She's wife to a man who's no longer at her side.
Jean knows Scott's cheating. She knows it the way his mind retraces his other woman's body and her voice lingers in his ears. He hasn't allowed himself the transgression of sex though. He's too uptight and correct for that. He'd leave his wife and abandon his son to see a dead love, but he couldn't cheat on either of his wives with the women he decided to love or want more. He had only that last inch of pride, or wisdom, or stupidity, left in him.
Like in the dark at night, next to the body of the woman who wore a matching ring to his, he could tell himself he 'really' hadn't done wrong. That he hadn't 'really' stepped outside the rules, once called vows.
They didn't talk when he returned from the encounter with apocalypse because he didn't want to. They don't talk now, because she's not sure what would fall out if opened her mouth, like she told Lucas The Phoenix can *only* speak the truth.
Maybe that's the reason she's so quiet lately. Maybe she's afraid what truth will come if she opens her mouth for more than to run the school, to teach the students, and to defend with all her heart the only life she's got and loves. Because then maybe she'd find out things she's wondered for years about herself, about others and how they affected who she is.
Maybe she could stand in the mirror and remove all the illusions they've heaped on top of her till it drowned her rings of fire. All but adoptive daughter, A student, right hand of the most powerful mutant, proclaimed to overcome his limits one day. The only girl on a team, perused to the point of insanity and oblivion, that positioned changed to den mother like a society switch. Replaced by two cloned life forms, who each engaged or wed the same man as her, and though dead still inhabit her mind. Three children who call her mother but none from her womb.
She's been the weakest one, the strongest one, the sanest one, the craziest one. She's been the nurturer and the dependant. They want all this of her and more. That was what Apocalypse wrote about her in his Manifesto and it strikes a chord in her deeper than she'd like to admit. She's been so many things for so many people.
And standing before the mirror in the dark as the lights licks across her skin she wonders who she'll be when the fire has finally burned away all the masks she wore for them...and it's just her.
Will they even recognize her then?
Or will the familiar husk be all they know?