Hullo! This chapter focuses on Rachel Grey-Summers, my favorite of the X-Men after Storm and Jean Grey. I don't own Fleetwood Mac, but I love them! I don't own the X-Men. Weeee!
Enjoy and please review! Cheers!
Chapter X: Scars
Megan and Ruby rushed into the arms of Rachel Anne Summers, their big half-sister.
Rachel hugged them fiercely before pulling back to inspect the girls.
"Wow! You two have grown!" she proclaimed.
At this, Ruby stood taller and Meg stood as tall as she could. Meg had exactly zero of the Summers' height gene both Rachel and Ruby seemed to possess. Meg had stopped growing taller when she was 12; Ruby had easily grown three inches since Rachel had seen them last winter. Meg also knew, however, that her half-sister wasn't just being polite – Rachel could sense Meg's telepathic abilities which had grown in leaps and bounds since they had last met.
After her stepmother Emma Frost, Rachel was the most powerful telepath on the planet. But even Emma couldn't touch Rachel's raw psychic ability. There would come a day when the White Queen must concede her reign as the most powerful psychic in the world.
"Rachel, turn down that racket, for God's sake!" Emma scolded her stepdaughter as she walked inside the kitchen.
"Sorry, Emma," Rachel said with a lopsided grin. She turned down the volume on her ear-buds which were spewing Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies … by Fleetwood Mac. "I get in the zone when I'm flying."
Tall with wild curly hair, Rachel definitely resembled Ruby more than Meg, but Meg liked how her half-sister shared some traits with her, like her penchant for late 20th century "soft rock" as Ruby called it. Rachel also liked painstaking tedious pastimes like sand-painting and puzzles that helped sooth her insanely powerful mind.
There was a massive age-difference between her and Meg – more than two decades, in fact. There were other differences too, like her strange facial tattoos and the livid scar over her right eye. When Meg was small she had been frightened of her tattoos; she still found them intriguing and mysterious. They resembled a Rorscharch drawing, Meg thought. When they were little, she and Ruby would spend hours arguing over what the tattoos resembled – Meg always saw a bird with spread wings in the odd markings.
Whenever one of them (usually Ruby) asked Rachel about her tattoos, she would reply: "They are a reminder of a past I fought hard to prevent for you and your sister."
The sisters did not understand this cryptic answer; all Meg could think about when she looked at them was how much they must have hurt to get. They definitely were put there. By someone else. Not Rachel nor with her permission.
Meg adored her half-sister, but there was a great deal of mystery surrounding her. Rachel had grown up with the X-Men. Not in the same way Ruby and Meg had. Rachel had been raised by the X-Men.
Not the team of heroes that went by the name "X-Men" nowadays and were led by Rachel and her father. No. The original X-Men – Storm, Colossus, Iceman, Shadowcat, Nightcrawler, Beast, Gambit and Rogue – the ones Professor Charles Xavier had recruited back when the Jean Grey School had been named for him. The original X-Men who had since for the most part either dispersed or disappeared.
They, however, had cared for Rachel like a daughter. They changed her diapers when she was a baby, amused her with their wide array of powers, told her stories to get her to sleep. It was a charming tale, Megan thought, but she sensed there was something missing from it, something Rachel and everyone else who had known her left out when they retold her story. Something dark. Something wrong.
Like Rachel's tattoos, it gave Meg a cold ominous lump in her belly.
Rachel embraced her stepmother next; she didn't exactly have a mother/daughter relationship with the White Queen, but Emma had telepathically mentored Rachel when she was younger – before Meg and Ruby were born and the two definitely had a warm teacher/student relationship.
Not so with Scott. Rachel gave her father and co-leader a respectful nod and he almost stiffly returned the greeting. If not for the genetic similarities between them, no stranger would have guessed they were father and daughter. As with so many details surrounding her half-sister, Meg didn't know the reason why the two were so reserved with each other. She sensed Rachel's feelings of deep hurt and eventual forgiveness concerning their father Cyclops, but that was as much as she allowed Meg to know.
Ruby was bobbing around. She fired a barrage of questions at Rachel. "Did you fly the whole way? Did you see the Red Northern Lights? Do you know I have a puppy? Did you eat all those waffles that fast?"
Rachel grinned her lopsided smile at her baby half-sister. Like Ruby, Rachel had a fast metabolism and a roaring appetite. "Yes. No. Yes. And no," Rachel laughed.
Emma cocked an eyebrow at her youngest child and stepchild. "She was positively stuffing her face while Megan and I observed your … handiwork, Ruby," she explained.
"Those waffles were mine!" Ruby yelled, hitting Rachel with a punch that would have tossed Meg across the room. Rachel just grinned after a small grimace. "And you said you wouldn't talk to Rach until we were together," Ruby turned accusing eyes on Meg.
"I didn't!" Meg replied, backing up just in case her sister started throwing punches at her. She knew Ruby was jealous of the bond Meg shared with their half-sister because they were both telepathic.
"No punching or yelling, please," Emma said sternly. Meg noticed the strain already showing thru the cracks in her mom's cool demeanor. Three Summers girls in one house were a bit much.
"We didn't say anything to each other. Promise," Rachel said to Ruby. "Almost the moment I got here, we heard a crash. Emma's gazebo got smashed to bits!"
"Heh, heh, yeah …" Ruby chuckled. "I-I mean, too bad," she mumbled, ducking her head with a guilty glance at her mom.
"Well, I figured only you could be responsible for such a catastrophe," her half-sister said.
"You should have seen the trouble this one got up to when she was a child," Uncle Hank said, walking in the boathouse kitchen on his knuckles as was his fashion, and gesturing at Rachel. He smiled, showing his prominent incisors the size and sharpness of a tiger's.
Rachel hugged the furry blue man who had raised her. "You're looking greyer, Uncle Hank," she commented.
"You alone put each of those grey hairs on me, Rachel Summers. Trust me when I say these two could do no worse than you," he replied, jerking an elbow at Ruby and Meg. He faced his two little nieces. "Around the time she was six, Rachel would go missing for days. We would find her in the oddest places – on the greenhouse roof, miles up the road fraternizing with motorcycle gang members, in a cave deep in the forest. We discovered her to be dimension-hopping with young Master Franklin Richards." Hank shook his head as everyone laughed, including a blushing Rachel.
"Alternate timelines are nothing. I wish I could fly …" Ruby sighed.
Meg glanced at her sister; it was such an odd thing to say. Even stranger was how Ruby reacted to her sister's pointed look. Meg sensed her doing some major mental back-tracking as if she had said something wrong.
Ruby was keeping a secret from Meg and Meg was going to find out what it was if it was the last thing she ever did.
"Well, my dimension-hopping days are over," Rachel stated looking at Ruby in the same puzzled way as Meg. "And flying is hard. It took me years to learn how to do it properly," she cautioned.
"If I were telekinetic, I could learn, I'm sure," Ruby declared.
"Telekinetic! Wrecking my house with ocular beams isn't enough?" Emma commented. She too suspected something and was looking curiously at her youngest daughter.
"Um, well, y'know, if I were," Ruby replied with a shrug and then lapsed into suspicious silence.
"Did you see the Red Northern Lights?" Meg asked inquisitively. Sometimes on freezing nights in the middle of winter, Meg could see the shimmering beautiful Aurora Borealis in shades of green, but the Red Northern Lights were extremely rare. They only appeared at certain times and in certain places, such as in the isolated boreal forests far to the North where Rachel lived when she wasn't with the X-Men.
There she lived with her twin children, Jonathan and Megan's best friend, Jeanie. Rachel and her children traveled to be with the Summers family during Winter Break after viewing the Red Northern Lights. Though Rachel was co-leader of the X-Men, this was the only time of the year Meg and Ruby got to see her. Rachel flew here using her telekinetic energy while Jeanie and Jonathan hopped thru alternate dimensions to get to the Jean Grey School.
"No," Rachel replied, a shadow crossing her face. Something was wrong, Meg sensed it. She could feel a disturbing undercurrent behind the mental barriers Rachel put up in her mind. Fear gripped Meg's heart when she wondered if Rachel's troubled feelings could concern her daughter, Jeanie.
Not that trouble was anything new to the twins. Their powers certainly made them unusual, even by Gifted standards. Meg adored Jeanie, but she would be the first to admit that catastrophe tailed her and her brother and not necessarily thru their own intentions – simply due to their very odd abilities.
Emma sensed it too; she loved the twins as much as their biological grandmother. "Rachel …" she murmured, gently touching her stepdaughter's shoulder.
Rachel ran her fingers thru her red hair. "Jonathan stayed behind with Laura," she replied, smiling bravely at the girls.
"Jeanie isn't coming either?" Meg asked, disappointment written all over her face. She honestly had never cared for Jeanie's strange twin brother. He was aloof, distant and silent, caring for no one but his sister it seemed. And Laura … the twin's "other Mama," an angry and intense woman, kind of scared Meg.
"Jeanie is here," Rachel chuckled, beaming at her half-sister. "Did you really think she would come here without seeing Kingsley first?"
Meg clapped her hands and dashed out the back door, all other thoughts and concerns forgotten. She jogged around to the backyard where her Angora rabbit hutches were kept. Sticking her finger between the wire on the rabbit's run, Jeanie was gently rubbing Kingsley, Meg's oldest buck, between his eyes in that place rabbits loved to be scratched. When she spotted Meg, the tall redheaded 16-year-old projected an image directly into Meg's mind of a huge exclamation point. Meg giggled and ran to hug her best friend.
She and Jeanie had been besties since Meg was two and Jeanie was three. Jeanie communicated primarily thru projecting her thoughts telepathically into someone's brain. She was sweet and gentle and very, very pretty.
Extremely pretty. As in so pretty Meg might not have liked her if Jeanie wasn't her best friend and Meg liked lots of attention. Because around Jeanie she was going to get practically none. Last summer Jeanie and Jonathan had come to the Jean Grey School to see if they liked it. Jonathan didn't. Jeanie flourished. Meg actually got used to a herd of admirers orbiting her best friend. Even the knowledge that Jeanie was the granddaughter of Cyclops could not keep her suitors at bay.
Jeanie basked in it. It was almost offensive. Meg was used to telepaths being reserved and slightly reclusive, but her best friend not only didn't mind the constant barrage of emotions people provided; she almost seemed starved for it. She thrived, almost having a hypnotic effect on others – boys and girls. They laughed at all her jokes and agreed with all her ideas, even if they were dumb. It was honestly annoying.
Meg was used to seeing Jeanie once a year and having her all to herself. She knew it was selfish, but that was the way she liked it; that's the way she wanted it.
Jeanie projected an image of herself flying alongside Rachel into Meg's mind.
"You flew the whole way here?" asked Meg in amazement. She had no idea her best friend could fly. But then Jeanie was the daughter of an extremely powerful telekinetic. Her kinetic abilities were obviously blooming as she grew in … other ways, Meg thought, surveying her tall gorgeous best friend.
Jeanie smiled and projected an image of herself falling and her mother lugging her the rest of the way. Meg giggled, but she also felt concerned.
"Why didn't you dimension-hop with Jonathan the way you usually do?" Meg asked curiously. The twins could travel thru alternate dimensions, a trait they had inherited from their father, Franklin Richards, a supremely powerful man. They could use this power to create shortcuts between distances in this reality, but they always – always – had to come home eventually. The dimension they were born into sustained them.
"Why didn't Jonathan come with you and your mom?" Meg added.
It wasn't unusual for Laura to stay behind during Rachel's family visits. Laura was notoriously reclusive and bad-tempered, but Jonathan almost always accompanied his mom and sister.
For a social butterfly who loved interaction and attention, Jeanie could shut you out in a heartbeat if she didn't want to discuss something – as she was doing now. Her behavior only ensured Meg, however, that something was very wrong with Jeanie's twin brother.
Meg didn't really like Jonathan, but she knew he and Jeanie were extremely close – to the point of co-dependence almost. Meg remembered her fear when Ruby was recently closed off to her psychically. She could imagine Jeanie's worry and terror.
Jeanie smiled at Meg and projected an image of the "Yuki Trolls," their favorite TV show when they were little, and the whole Summers family, including Uncle Hank, sitting around the television in the family room.
Meg laughed at her quirky friend. Watching Yuki Trolls the first night the entire family was together was a Winter Break tradition. Then Jeanie put an image in her mind of Meg's Auntie Marie and her two children, Raven and Olivier, joining them.
"Wow! Auntie Marie and her kids are coming too?" Meg cried in delight … but she felt worry nag at her mind as well. Marie, better known by her codename "Rogue," was a former member of the X-Men. Marie was headmistress of the New Orleans School for the Gifted and an extremely formidable woman. She and her son and daughter joined the Summers family here during Winter Break, but never until Carnival, a winter tradition down South where Marie's school was located, was over.
Something was definitely up if Rogue and her kids were coming now.
Meg wondered what it could be …
###
Rachel wandered the grounds of the Jean Grey School, formerly Xavier's, the place she had grown up. Every tree and rock seemed to have a memory attached to it. Jumping into fall leaves. Playing in the snow. Hide-and-seek with her Uncle Kurt when they of course beat everyone using his teleportation powers. Her footsteps took her to the old greenhouse, abandoned now. How many happy hours had she spent there tending her Auntie O's plants? Back when Rachel had been an odd mute child with blindingly difficult powers.
She felt tears sting the back of her eyes when she thought of Jonathan, her son. Was he fated to repeat his mother's unhappy adolescence when she was taken from a family that loved and nurtured her and forced to survive on her own? No, she thought, angrily dashing the tears away with her hand. She had sworn to do better by her children – all Gifted children in their generation, including her little half-sisters, Ruby and Meg.
"Are you going to tell me what is wrong?" Cyclops asked.
Rachel, of course, hadn't sensed him walk up behind her. The mental imprint all people had that Rachel knew them by was absent in her father. He was one of a very few people without it; it was sort of like missing fingerprints.
None of her childhood memories here included him. As a little girl, she'd had no idea who he even was. She'd run from the sight of him during his very sporadic visits and hid behind her Auntie O's skirts. Auntie O and Uncle Hank were her mother and father as far as Rachel was concerned. They might as well have been. She wanted nothing to do with the silent, angry, brooding man who was her father.
Throughout the years, Scott had changed. He had a very different relationship with his teenage daughters than he'd had with Rachel … and Rachel was a major reason he had.
"Emma can't understand this, even if she allowed herself to look into my thoughts," Rachel replied, facing Cyclops, crossing her arms in the stiff, formal way she always did around him. Over time, she had truly forgiven him and had even begun to understand why he behaved as he had when she was small. She now viewed him as a trusted leader and ally, but that was as far as their relationship went. She shared his genes, but she'd never view him as a father. "Because I can't understand this – not fully," she murmured.
Ironically, perhaps Scott could. Or at least she could discuss it with him. Meg, Ruby, Hank and even Emma were too close to Rachel for her to share this with them. She needed a logical objective view and, oddly enough, Cyclops, ever the outsider in her life, was it.
"A few nights ago, Jeanie argued with Laura and ran away," Rachel explained. Scott cocked an eyebrow at his eldest child. Sweet-natured Jeanie was proving to have every bit of her maternal grandmother's temper. Cyclops knew grown men who wouldn't dare argue with Laura.
"Jonathan went looking for her – inter-dimensionally – and he didn't come back."
Rachel sank her nails into her palms until they cut thru the skin. The tears swelled behind her eyes, but she would not cry in front of her father.
"He couldn't."
Rachel watched her father go rigid in shock; it was the closest she would get to any emotional reaction from the ever-reserved Cyclops. Her co-leader's mouth formed the word "couldn't," but no sound left him.
"That's right. He can't. Something is preventing him," Rachel said impatiently. She didn't fight with her father the way she used to when she was a hot-tempered younger woman, but his emotionless nuances still exasperated her.
"I haven't spoken with Franklin. You know I can't," Rachel hissed, closing her eyes, trying to steady the horrible anger inside her chest that wanted to burst out and hunt down whatever – whoever – had prevented her son from returning to her and kill them slowly.
Franklin had given up whatever power he had to return to this dimension – and whatever power he had to communicate with those in this dimension, including Rachel – when the twins were very small.
"I prayed Jonathan was with his father, but the twins must return to this dimension within 72 hours, at most," she said, her voice dangerously close to cracking. "I-It appeared as though he were trying," she added. It was twilight now and Rachel allowed a single tear to slither down her cheek; she prayed Cyclops wouldn't see. "When Laura and I found Jeanie, t-there was an … outline of him … my son. I-I could sense he was struggling to return here to this reality with his sister."
"You can still detect him psychically?" Scott demanded, his voice dangerously even. Rachel knew this man who was her father was, like her, holding something back in light of this news – something explosive.
Rachel shared a psychic rapport with both her children, allowing her to sense their emotional state at all times. It was sort of like the psy-link Emma had established amongst her family, but Rachel hadn't had to create this rapport with her twins. It simply came to be when they were conceived. And the rapport linked her to Jeanie and Jonathan even when they left this dimension.
The proud Phoenix finally broke down in tears. "No," she wept.
"I remember Jeanie and Jonathan being cut out of my belly and taken away from me when they were newborn babies, when I was sick and weak and mentally broken. Now my power is at its fullest," Rachel cried, rage throbbing thru her body. Her eyes and the scar over her right eye glowed and a flaming bird seemed to erupt around her, beating at the air with its wings. One voice that seemed like countless ones boomed out: "Who would dare take the Phoenix's child ?!"
"Rachel …" Scott said. His voice was soothing and even gentle. He almost never used her true name, preferring to call her by her codename with the X-Men: Phoenix. It was like a kind and unexpected touch; it seemed to shake Rachel from her fit of rage. She could count on her hands the times her father had behaved like a loving supportive parent towards her.
The gigantic fire-bird retracted its wings inside its host again and Rachel fell to her knees, sobbing. Cyclops gently put a hand on his daughter's shoulder. She lifted her head in surprise at this unexpected gesture of comfort and then embraced him.
"The strongest, the most dangerous enemy might have," Scott murmured. "The deadliest foe the X-Men have ever fought."
He had her full attention. She gazed up at her father with her wide blue eyes. When she was a child, Rachel had had to wear protective eye-gear just as her father did to contain the albeit weaker concussive beams she had inherited from him. Hers had neither the power nor intensity of his or Ruby's. She had eventually learned to contain them.
"Apocalypse?" she whispered as if saying the name aloud would summon the awful presence every living thing in their world lived in mortal fear of.
Apocalypse as they knew "him" was an incredibly powerful being who was once only a man – En Sabah Nur. But all traces of his mortality and morality had gone. The X-Men had not defeated him – one such as Apocalypse was immortal – but they locked him away in an alternate dimension – his prison where he could never harm another person. Franklin and Rachel had led this attack on Apocalypse; it had cost the X-Men dearly. Iceman, one of the founding members of the X-Men and one of Cyclops' closest friends, had perished, orphaning his two young children.
And Franklin had forever given up his ability to return to this dimension, for fear of setting Apocalypse free. Rachel too had sacrificed her ability to accompany him. She could never see her lover and lifelong friend again.
In fact, a dire punishment had been set on anyone who traversed dimensions, until of course, Rachel's twins were found to have this ability. Jeanie and Jonathan had to travel to alternate dimensions in order to stay alive – in the same way plants were sustained by the sun. Their travels, however, were always carefully supervised by their father. They could travel nowhere without Franklin knowing. And he would ensure his children would return to the home dimension where their family lived.
So Jonathan missing was extremely troubling.
"It's the logical explanation," Scott replied softly. Rachel knew him as a stern man, hardened by leadership and a warrior's life, but she also knew now he wasn't without compassion. "And the perfect revenge on you and Franklin."
Without Rachel's sheer cosmic energy and Franklin's ability to dimension-hop, Apocalypse would not have been defeated that day.
Rachel's eyes darted around frantically. She struggled to slow down and think clearly, logically, but desperation clouded her thoughts like choking fog. God, her son in the hands of Apocalypse!
"H-He wouldn't kill Jonathan," she whispered, but that was no comfort to her. Rachel had seen firsthand what Apocalypse could do to the living … and death was so much better.
With his telekinesis and inter-dimensional powers, Jonathan was already a formidable warrior. Apocalypse had abducted and brainwashed more than one young warrior to turn him into his personal assassin.
"If Apocalypse has Jonathan …" Scott trailed off. It was too horrible to fathom. He had watched one of his closest friends, Archangel, become a pawn to the evil being. Now, the same was going to happen to his only grandson.
Rachel could never know her father's thoughts, but she could sure as hell guess them as she felt his embrace tighten. Her father had hugged her this way only once. "D-Dad …?" she asked.
"We must assume Jonathan's stumbled upon Apocalypse," Cyclops finally said, his voice hoarse. "Franklin created his prison so he could never escape. So no one could ever escape."
It was true. Franklin Richards had lured Apocalypse into a trap – into an alternate dimension, a labyrinth the powerful being could never escape. If Jonathan wandered inside it … he might never escape.
"Then we must formulate a plan," Phoenix replied desperately. "We have to rescue Jonathan."
Scott cupped her face in his hands. She could tell his eyes were searching her face, looking for the woman, her mother, he had loved and lost so long ago. "No," he replied, the lines in his face hardening.
"What?!" she gasped.
"If Jonathan has found Apocalypse's prison –"
"Dad!"
"He found his way in …" Cyclops whose entire life seemed one tragedy after another, who had seen more friends than he cared to count die on the battlefield, faced his daughter and said: "Let's pray to God he doesn't find his way out."
Rachel felt the blood drain from her face. She couldn't believe she was hearing this.
"He's my son!" she cried.
"And my grandson! My only grandson," Cyclops snarled. "Do you think I don't love him?"
"No!" Rachel screamed, her eyes beginning to glow again. "You're willing to sacrifice him? You're willing to throw him away? The same way you threw me away?"
"If Apocalypse finds his way back to this dimension do you have any idea what that could mean? Yes, of course you do!" her father shouted. "You fought Apocalypse alongside Franklin Richards. You watched Iceman die. Apocalypse is the reason his kids don't have a father! The reason you can't raise your kids with their father! Do you want that terror unleashed on our dimension again?"
"Jonathan is my son!" Rachel screamed at him. "I would make any sacrifice for him!"
"Any?" Scott demanded. "What about the millions that would die if Apocalypse came to this world? What about the rest of your family? What about Jeanie? What about Ruby and Meg?
"You're the leader!" he shouted her down. "A leader weighs the needs of the many against those of the few. That is your lot, Phoenix! Accept it!"
Rachel was weeping in earnest now. Scott glared down at her. Finally, he turned and began to walk away. Her tears abating, Rachel sniffled. "You always did, Dad," she murmured. "It was so easy for you to cut your losses and walk away. From your family, from your friends … from me."
Scott whirled on his eldest daughter, his hand touching the side of his visor. Phoenix's eyes burned as the outline of a fiery bird began to burn around the woman. The co-leaders of the X-Men prepared to face off –
-When Meg came trotting up with Kingsley in her arms. Rachel glanced at her little half-sister and powered down, the girl's bewildered appearance bringing Phoenix back to her senses. Megan had sensed Rachel's distress and anger and had come looking for her. She, of course, could not sense her father's emotions.
Right now, the girl's blue eyes were darting back and forth between her dad and half-sister, fear written on her freckled face.
"Uuuh, w-we're gonna watch Yuki Trolls now," Meg stammered.