Lost Time/Found Time
A/N: Because Jean's still the Phoenix, and she got fridged in NXM 150, and she didn't get the character arc she deserved in AvX. This is Morrison's interpretation of the force.
No, it's not DoS, but I couldn't not post it when it came to my 103 degree fevered head.
It's possible her name was once Jean Grey. That she lived in Annadale-on-Hudson; laughed and ate apples; sucked honey from soft tubes of clover. It's possible she had friends and enemies. That she listened to music. That trapped in her skull, she believed Charles, Charles, Charles Xavier. Believed him when he said she was good.
Yes. Perhaps these were things she did. Perhaps.
It's also possible she was made of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen, that she lived in a house of her own choosing. That she put herself in her own mother's womb, gave herself white skin, green eyes, red hair.
Red as poppies, red as children bleeding, red as stars, burning down.
She makes and unmakes herself. She puts herself at the bottom of the ocean, in the eye of the world, the heart of the sun. She dies and survives and dies and survives and the universe fits inside her. The universe is not enough.
She is one and she is legion. She misses the taste of rain.
She could return tomorrow. Make herself a child, make herself hope. She could be the door that life walks through, the mirror where it sees itself. She could be versions of herself, versions of Jean: young and old, and finite and frail, limited, unlimited, a liar and a teller of truths.
She doesn't want to be here anymore. The room is too white. She cannot see. She sees everything. She sees the Work.
It is the work that keeps her here. The Work of wounded galaxies, limping nebulae, falling skies. She picks them up and hangs them back; she sings stillborn worlds to sleep.
Jean Grey eats fire and flowers. When Jean Grey kills, she kills with grace. And they will always forgive her. They will never understand.
He is the last person she thinks will come knocking. Scott Summers, his broken remains. Husband, leader, monster of myth. Betrayer and savior and furious, weeping god.
Too much lies between them that is not important now. There is an infinite second unspooling. It is all the time they have.
"Hello," he says.
"Hello," she replies.
They have all the time in the universe. They have no time at all. They say I love you, I don't love you. I hate you, I'm sorry, I'm sad that you're gone. I was good to you; I wasn't good to you. I lied to you. I know.
"Do you forgive me?"
"Yes. No. Of course not."
"Do you forgive me?"
"No. Yes. Of course."
She touches him through the wall of white. He touches her back. A part of him will stay with her. A part of her will go. His world is breaking, their world, the one she left behind. He must tend it; he cannot stay.
Scott Summers is not the Pheonix. Scott Summers loves. Scott Summers kills.
"You're an idiot. Tell Logan I love the school's name."
She casts him from the garden, she does not let him through. And he will fall the way that angels fall, dull and heavy, into the flesh. But it is in flesh the Work is made manifest; in the atom, as it spins. Is spinning. Spins again.
She envies him and helps him. She curses him as she mourns. She wishes…the Pheonix, no, Jean Grey wishes –
She would return to them, their sadness, their lusts, their doom. But it is not her place anymore. There's nothing else that she can do. She has the Work. What's a woman's short life, compared with that?
Everything, all there is.
Goodbye Scott. Goodbye my friends. I'm still with you. I'll never leave.
Nothing. Nothing at all.