Jean Grey leaned her head back, a smile just ghosting at the corners of her lips. As the four teenagers cruised back toward the school, for a moment she could close her eyes and feel…normal.
Scott and Kurt and Jubilation were feeling different degrees of the same thing. Jubilation lived up to her name: the girl was delightfully uncomplicated and generally happy. Her thoughts and emotions danced close to the surface with very little pretense layered on top of them. There was some slight resentment at never being part of the top tier, but that was understandable, Jean mused.
Kurt was mainly feeling an overwhelming sense of relief, gratitude toward Raven, and deeper down there was a lurking fear of going back to his previous existence in Berlin. But he'd never had real friends before, and like Jubilation, there was a joy there, an innocence that Jean couldn't quite identify with.
And then there was Scott. Of the three of them, his emotions tracked alongside Jean's own most closely. She even heard the word "normal" in there a couple of times, followed each time by a darker, more sarcastic voice mocking him for thinking he could ever be normal. She didn't mind his angst, though – based on the hundreds of other teenage boy minds she'd encountered, his response to his current predicament was to be expected. So were his predictable feelings for her – the shy, tentative lust, the hesitation, the embarrassment if she didn't return them.
Well, this was what passed for "normal" for her, anyway. A casual stream of fairly uncomplicated thoughts and feelings, the sunlight on her face, the wind whipping her long red hair around –
And suddenly, it was all gone. The car, her new friends, everything. Jean was suddenly swept into a maelstrom of minds, a torrential downpour of consciousness. Some tiny corner of her mind processed that this was somehow tied to Professor Xavier, that he was currently pushing Cerebro to its limits in a search for…something. But mostly, she was just swept along in the current.
She watched as he filtered the search, effortlessly switching from humans to mutants. She felt rather than heard his warmth as he explained Cerebro to someone named Moira.
And she watched with morbid curiosity as his search zeroed in on a powerful consciousness that could only be Magneto.
Operating on instinct, her mind withdrew from his connection with Magneto, sensing that the intrusion would violate something personal. Still caught in the current, her mind cast around for other nearby minds.
She sensed others near Magneto. One was young, like her – she was idealistic, searching for a hero she could emulate, for power beyond her own. One was slightly older, but far more jaded – he felt like Kurt to her, broken in a way she couldn't understand.
The next mind she almost touched, but recoiled instinctively. It was dark, ancient, terrifying. Jean's own mind curled into a tiny ball, motionless as a rabbit paralyzed by fear. Only when she realized that the mind was completely uninterested in her did she risk searching again.
And then she froze again. Because this mind looked right back into hers. This mind was calculating, cold, amused, contemptuous, confident. This mind held Jean's in an iron grasp while she was too stunned to struggle. It turned her mind over, sifted it through its fingers, laughed delightedly when it felt her looking back.
Well, well. Who do we have here? One of Xavier's little pets?
Jean…Jean Grey, her mind stammered back before Jean could stop herself.
And then she panicked, and that was enough to break the connection with Cerebro, and as that cold mind searched in vain for hers once more, Jean Grey snapped back into herself.
The car had just stopped. None of the other three had noticed her little reverie, and as Jean shook her head and looked around, she realized why.
The school, her home, the only safe place in her world – it lay in ruins.