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To kataract52 - lol boobs, gore and angst? Got it! That made me laugh!
To DarkPhoenix2002 - I'm glad you're enjoying the ride! I'm trying to post chapters regularly, but I've been quite ill lately. Perhaps that will change soon.
Thanks so much for reading and reviewing! This chapter's a fairly long one, but I hope you'll love it. I enjoy the bond between Jean and Nate.
The X-Men are Marvel's.
-Maria
Episode 11: One Golden Acorn
Nate Summers silently tidied up the daycare center's commons area from that day's open house event, inhaling the strong odors of ravioli, melted crayons and vomit. It was the aroma of any daycare or nursing home or grammar school or any place where its primary residents needed a bit of extra help with self-care. By the end of the week, he wouldn't notice the smell anymore.
Nate grinned to himself when he remembered Joe's query about bathroom etiquette. Cable would have to hang his framed sampler he had cross-stitched himself in the daycare restroom that stated sagely: "If it's brown flush it down; if it's yellow, let it mellow ."
All in all, not a bad start ... Cable mused. One broken bone. A small tornado. And some heat-seeking missiles ... there is also the matter of Starsmore's car, but that's his problem. Yeah, I did pretty well. No, I did really well , he thought, hope rising like a bright star in his chest. We might just have a chance – or at least half a chance – for these kids.
Not too shabby for a first day, a gentle teasing "voice" rang telepathically through his head. But be modest, Nathan; don't get too cocky.
His smiled widened as he turned to see a woman with fiery red hair and flashing green eyes step out of a teleportation portal that opened in the wall. She was wearing a simple sleeveless knee-length black dress, black tights, black ballet flats and a mischievous expression as she strolled towards Cable.
For all intents and purposes, Jean Grey-Summers, the super-heroine known as Phoenix prior to her daughter Rachel taking on that alias, was quite old - in her early sixties. But the beautiful woman approaching Cable, the woman who had raised him, looked not a day over twenty-five.
From the time Nate was a lonely, frightened, little orphan, it was hard for him not to love her or trust his stepmother Jean completely. Theirs was a bond shared not through blood, but through affection and devotion. Jean, being a telekinetic like her daughter and only biological child Rachel, levitated her body in the air to rest her head on her stepson's shoulder as she sighed with complete contentment – it was good to see all her babies (biological or otherwise) grown up into good, productive role models. Nate's path was taking him in a slightly different direction than Rachel's, but Jean Grey knew him well enough to understand he would be a leader and protector just like his father.
"Couldn't help but notice Rach stealing the show out there today," Jean said with a smile.
Nate's rugged face turned down in a scowl. "She's such a bossy-boots," he complained. "Like I couldn't handle that sitch!"
"Most other people would have run screaming from that sitch," his stepmom commented humorously. Then she shrugged her slim freckled shoulders. "Rachel's like her dad – a bit overprotective. She has a hard time letting go and letting others take on responsibility. What she went through – what your father went through – would make it difficult for them to watch the ones they love take risks. You're a bit more skilled at that than they are …"
Jean noticed her stepson quirk an eyebrow at her. She giggled; Nate looked almost exactly like Cyclops when he made that face. Jean knew what rankled her beloved stepson the most – being compared in any way to his dad or older half-sister.
"No, actually just Dad," he grumbled, but Jean noticed his one blue eye twinkling mischievously at her.
She gasped in mock indignation. "Well, so much for being the scrupulous telepath, Nathan!" she scolded him with a playful swat.
Cable grinned. In his own way, he was as powerful a telepath as his stepmother was, but he seldom displayed this ability – preferring to stick to his inherit telekinesis. Despite them not being blood-related, Cable and Jean shared almost the exact same power-set.
"Well, you were projecting those thoughts pretty loudly," he said sheepishly. Although he was seven feet tall and three hundred pounds of pure muscle, Nate still winced a bit at his stepmom's scolding. "It's almost like you were trying to tell me something, Jean."
Jean laughed in her charming way, holding up her hands in surrender. "OK … OK …"
For all his telepathic and telekinetic prowess, Cable could only ever match his stepmom power-wise and that only came of her rigorous training of him when he was small. He could never breech her private thoughts – unless she wanted him to know what she was thinking.
It was a game they had played when he was a little boy and she was trying to teach him, in a fun way, to recognize the "personal space" of a person's secret thoughts and respect that privacy. Good telepaths built and maintained psychic barriers to keep others' thoughts from constantly bombarding their brains. Only an unethical psychic would force their powers on someone's mind.
"Besides," he mused a bit more thoughtfully. "I really admire Rachel."
That admission was one he would have never made to anyone but Jean who had been his friend, confidant and mentor since his earliest memories. He wouldn't have dared breathe it to Rachel who might not have let him live it down. His confession was almost worth it when he saw the look on his stepmom's face.
"You mean you didn't know that?" he asked, rolling his exposed eye.
"I know," Jean said, still looking a bit shocked. "I just didn't expect you to say it."
Nate laughed and she pulled him into a telekinetic bear-hug.
"But seriously, I do. I've wanted to be like Rach since I met her really," he said, sighing. "She's so strong, so selfless, so much …"
"Like me?" Jean asked innocently.
"Now who's the modest one?" he retorted, raising silver eyebrows. "No … Rachel's way more of a pain in the ass," he added with a grin. "And way more of an uptight control-freak."
"Now that sounds like someone I know," Jean chuckled. "I thought you didn't want to be like Scott?"
"I don't!" Nate said in genuine surprise. Then he muttered: "I've never wanted to be like my father."
"Welp, too bad! Because you're very like him in some ways," Jean replied good-naturedly.
As Nathan opened his mouth to complain – and he projected some very disgruntled feelings her way loud and clear – Jean put a gentle hand on his massive bear-like arm to stop him. "Look, you are!" she chuckled. "I'm not teasing you. Just hear me out," she said quickly before he could retort.
Nate grumpily crossed his arms, giving her a stone-cold glare from his blue eye and an impatient "I'm waiting" expression.
"Oh, sometimes it's in little things you do," she explained. "Like the way you slant your eyebrows when you hear someone bullshitting you or the way you pour salt on food that's already so salty no regular person could possibly eat it."
"I do that so no one else will eat it …" he muttered darkly.
Jean rolled her emerald eyes.
"OK, but that's definitely nature and not nurture," Cable rejoined. "Cyclops never did a damn thing for me …"
"Did you ever think maybe that's because you've never let him?" Jean asked softly.
"You'd always take his part, wouldn't you?" Nate said, his temper snapping. "You'd always make excuses for him being an asshole!" He saw the hurt look in her green eyes and immediately backtracked. He genuinely loved and cherished this woman who had raised him and Nate would never, never intentionally wound her. "I-I'm sorry, Jean … for being a rude jackass to you. But I won't apologize for anything Scott ever did – or didn't do ," he added crossly.
"I don't expect you to. Nobody does," she said gently.
Jean was a patient woman, but she knew about fiery tempers. She had one herself as did her daughter Rachel. Nate usually didn't show it, but she knew the giant man who was her stepson had one himself. Jean usually got the blame for Rachel's inherited hotheadedness, but she was starting to think that trait actually came down through the Summers line. Meg had a temper (though, like Nate, she disguised it well). Her sister Ruby too and their mother was Emma Frost, the chilliest person Jean knew.
"I know, I know, Scott had no idea I was alive when I was a little kid," Cable growled, his mouth twisting down. "Nobody did but some Athabascan people and you … though I don't think you counted, considering you were technically dead at the time. No offense."
"None taken," Jean said as she smiled in a sentimental way.
After the plane crash that killed Nate's biological mom, Maddy, the small boy of three had wandered around in the Alaskan wilderness until he was found by a kindly Athabascan family who cared for him and made sure he was fed and warmly clothed against the biting tiaga winter. But their village was frightened and superstitious of the little boy with the silvery hair and one glowing yellow eye and one of shining blue. They put him far away on the edge of the woods in a lonesome cabin. The medicine man and Dinuk, the mother of the family who found Nate, were the only people in constant contact with the boy.
But Nate's telepathic powers, which were budding already when he was a young child, allowed him to make contact with Jean Grey, his father's first wife. Jean had "died," so to speak, when Rachel was a baby, but she still existed in the Astral Plane – an alternate dimension that could be accessed only by psychic minds like that of little Nate. So, with one foot in the "real world" and one on the Astral Plane, Nathan Summers was raised by Jean Grey who taught him how to control his extremely powerful mind, use his abilities in an ethical manner and, of course, nurture him and care for him in all the ways a good mother would her son.
"Those were good times," Jean murmured, shaking her head. "Scary as hell because I had no clue what I was doing."
"You mean accessing this reality from the Astral Plane using me as your conduit?" Nate asked with raised eyebrows.
"No, raising a child!" she laughed in response. "I'd never done it before; I was scared shitless!"
Stepmother and son chuckled together for a moment as they strolled out on a balcony perched near the crown of the tree. They leaned against the railings, enjoying the cool evening air and the easy companionable silence that settled between them for a few moments as fireflies flashed their signal lights at one another. The owls in the rose tree were starting to hoot at the full moon.
"I didn't do so bad a job, you know," Jean said as she affectionately patted his arm.
"Maybe not," Cable replied, smirking. "But the fact Scott didn't know about me doesn't excuse how he abandoned Rachel when she was young," he pointed out. "She's the only person I know who's had it harder than me – losing her mom to death and her dad to apathy in one fell swoop."
"Well, no, it doesn't excuse Cyclops," Jean conceded. "Even though Scott was very unwell at that time. He wasn't even that much in touch with reality, in fact. I think it wasn't so much apathy as insanity that drove him from his own daughter. Much as I love him, even I'll admit it. Rachel was far better off being raised by Storm and the X-Men. Ororo knew about as much as I did about raising a baby as I did with you, but she cared. Storm had compassion and common sense – and one hell of a gut instinct. She was a good mother to my baby girl."
Nate nodded thoughtfully, listening to Jean's words. Jean and Rachel were incredibly close, but Nate as well as everyone else (Jean included) knew that Rach would always view Ororo Munroe, Storm, the beautiful and vivacious leader of the X-Men, as her mom. Storm had diapered Rachel when she was a tot, cleaned up her scrapes, dried her tears, wiped her boogers, braided her plaits and provided for and protected the girl with the devoted ferocity of a mama lioness. And Rachel – very much like Nathan himself with his own surrogate mother – was in her teens before she knew better than to question that the tall willowy woman with ebony skin and flowing white tresses was indeed not her bio mom.
Regal – that was the first word that popped into Nate's head when he thought about Ororo Munroe. The woman was a metaphorical and literal goddess, able to command the winds and weather with a flick of her wrist or the blink of an eye. It was very difficult to imagine her as an actual person with actual feelings and failures, but she had been.
"Thinking about 'Ro?" Jean asked with a sly smile on her lips.
"Ethical telepathy, Dr. Grey!" Cable gasped in mock outrage.
Jean chuckled: "I don't need to read your thoughts to know when you're mooning over Storm."
"She was my first crush," Nate said with a shrug, but there was a secretive smile on his face.
"Try not to worry too much about it," Jean laughed, ruffling his hair. "Everyone's had a crush on Storm at some point or another."
"Everyone?"
"Everyone …" Jean gave a self-assured nod.
"Even …?"
She grinned. "Oh, yes."
"Ah."
"Y'know … if that lady hadn't been so wrapped up with Logan, you might have had a shot with her," Jean murmured.
"Jean …"
"I'm serious, son. 'Ro was a classy lady. She never took second-best."
"Hmm …" Nate hummed, his thoughts on the Summers clan's old enemy, Wolverine, Ororo's cantankerous husband. Welp, another reason to hate Logan … Cable mused.
"Try not to look so miserable, Nate. And try not to wonder too much about what might have been. Don't you know we have alternate timelines for that?" she giggled. "Besides, all of us have our plates full with what's going on in our lives in the here and now without worrying over alternate realities – you particularly. You've got your work cut out for you here if those twins are any indicator of how your school is going to go."
"I like Becka and Mel," Nate said, massaging the silver stubble on his chin. "Though it's hard to think they're Ororo's grandkids. Storm was usually so serene."
"You didn't know 'Ro in her youth," Jean replied, laughing. "She was a right little savage. I can't tell you how many times she almost killed your father when they fought over my attention."
Nate chuckled, but then he muttered: "Too bad she didn't succeed …"
Jean gazed pityingly at her stepson. Rachel had finally made peace with her father over his behavior towards her when she was a child. But Nate still had a ways to go towards reconciliation with Cyclops.
She put a gentle hand on his shoulder. "Come with me … I want to show you something."
Nate turned to follow her curiously. Cable could appear as a world-weary cynic to others, but one thing he loved about Jean was her idealism. She always kept surprising him; she always reminded him there was something new he could learn.
"Focus on what has occurred in your life, son, not what could have been," Jean advised him as a teleportation portal opened up suddenly in the wall of the treehouse commons and swallowed them up.
Nate always listened carefully to what Jean had to say. He was often labeled a reckless smartass hotshot by his colleagues and superiors, but he was wise enough to know who was wiser than him and who would call him out on his bullshit.
A portal opened far below the ground where the rose tree's massive roots reached down, down into life-giving Earth. Nate always marveled at it. The rose trees of Wakanda-Askani were enormous and long-lived, some living for hundreds of years, seeing generations of birds nest in their branches and generations of people and animals shelter in their shade.
None compared to this one, however. It had been planted by Ororo Munroe herself; she had tended it with her own rainclouds and warm, sunny weather. It was a venerable behemoth of a tree.
"Everything happens for a reason, Nate," Jean said as they stepped out of the portal into the bottom-most basement of the treehouse. It served as the school office, littered with paperwork, files and heaps of other detritus – but made sunny by the crayon drawings and macaroni sculptures of little children.
Jean walked up to a niche in the bark and another smaller portal opened. Nate was surprised, but then even he didn't know all the secrets of this place. This miraculous tree was Ororo Munroe's legacy. It was fitting her very best friend, Jean Grey, would intimately understand its heart and soul.
"I know it's clichéd to say so. Maybe I am a sentimental old fool or maybe I've just hung around Kurt Wagner too long and I'm picking up on some of his sermons," Jean chuckled, motioning for her stepson to follow her inside.
Nate had to stoop and suck in his breath to squeeze inside after her.
"But I do believe it is true," Jean continued. "Even the horrible things that happen to us. Your father abandoning Rachel. Poor Maddy dying. Even Cyclops marrying that cantankerous Emma Frost woman!"
Nate laughed along with his stepmother at that as his eyes adjusted to the gloomy interior of this tiny room they were cramped inside. It seemed to be lit by a single glowing candle that cast a soft amber aura around them … Only it wasn't a candle. It was an acorn. A single golden acorn.
Nate's exposed eye widened as he watched the tiny glowing seed; it seemed to quiver and pulse with energy. It was radiating psionic waves which must power the tree's unearthly nature and which his telepathic mind was immediately aware of.
"Marvelous …" he whispered.
His scientist's heart longed to understand it, dissect its mystery. How did it work? What made a humble acorn emit as much psionic power as a nuclear reactor would atomic energy?
"Isn't it?" Jean said, smiling in a sad way. "As Ororo grew older, she lost a great deal of her natural mutant abilities – control over the weather. She couldn't fly as she used to; she even lost her vision. She almost gave up on living any longer. It took the love of her family – me, us, the X-Men – to pull her through her depression.
"Storm began pouring her remaining energy, the last of her life, into studying magic. She became a great sorceress. She had many apprentices … including Illyana Rasputin."
Cable shuddered inwardly at that name. It was a name that struck terror in the hearts of almost everyone – including him.
"Magik, the Sorceress Supreme, studied under Ororo ?" he asked in awe.
Jean nodded. "But none of her pupils were as skilled as Storm, not even 'Yana," Jean continued. "Most of her students wanted only power. Ororo wanted to understand the mystery of magic which she concluded, when broken down to its barest form, was actually just the mystery of nature itself … the force which 'Ro had ruled almost her entire life … and that which ruled her."
Jean shook her head, her green eyes misty, as she recalled her strong and beautiful friend. "What sparked life itself? And could a magician recreate that process?"
"Did she ever succeed?" Cable asked, his heart giving a powerful throb. Storm had been a scientist! Like he needed another reason to adore her.
Jean nodded at the small trembling acorn and then gestured around them. "You can see it for yourself. It's right there in front of us and all around us. Storm, the true Sorceress Supreme, realized the true nature of our universe almost too late – that with death comes new life. With grief comes great joy. On and on in an endless cycle.
"That was when she produced this." Jean plucked the little acorn off the small pedestal it was perched on. The tiny seed quivered like a jumping bean at the woman's touch, like an affectionate pet recognizing its master's touch. "Pure life out of nothingness. Something no sorcerer, not even Illyana, not even Stephen Strange, had ever done before. It was Storm's final act and she took the secret of how she truly did it to the grave with her. She was afraid the knowledge to create life from nothingness would be used by others to amass power. She never even told me …" Jean said.
She was smiling, but Nate thought he glimpsed a look of resentment in her green eyes. Jean and Storm were closer than sisters; this secret was perhaps the only thing Ororo ever kept from her best friend.
"Ororo only left her teachings that nature itself had taught to her over a lifetime. And this …" Jean patted the tree's bark fondly and Nate noticed their surroundings tremble slightly in recognition.
Nate believed it. When he asked Jean, who was the treehouse's curator, if he could employ it as his daycare, she allowed it on the condition that no statues or monuments of any kind be built of Storm. It was the woman's dying wish that she would never be revered in this way. This legacy she left here was enough.
"Awful stuff happens, Nate, hon, but in its way it leads to great things," Jean explained. "Rach growing up alongside the X-Men; me raising you; Meg and Ruby being born. Don't tell me you could imagine life without those two?"
Cable smirked. He doted on his baby half-sisters and everybody knew it.
"You really think Emma Frost is as awful as all that?" he asked his stepmom as they stepped back inside the wall teleportation portal.
"Oh, no," said Jean, her green eyes wide in false innocence. "Emma is much, much worse."
Mother and son laughed.
The portal opened up back in the commons area. "Why did we come back here?" said Nate. "I finished cleaning up for the night, Jean."
"Oh, I know, but I got a last-minute 'call.' That's actually what I was hunting you up for. I found a great candidate for your empty teacher slot in Hand-to-Hand-Combative Skills."
"Great!" said Nate, rubbing his forehead. He implicitly trusted Jean and had put her in charge of selecting the last teacher on his faculty. "God knows I have enough to chew without worrying over a late hire. Having you on the schoolboard is a godsend, Jean."
"Well, don't thank me until you meet her. But I think she meets all the requirements and then some."
Nate liked the sound of that. He had considered asking Risty to take on the extra load of Combative Skills teacher if the schoolboard couldn't find someone suitable in time to fill the role on their own. Risty was a nice girl, but she could be a bit ... capricious. And flighty.
If Jean thought this new girl was good enough, then the candidate had a cool head and feet planted firmly on the ground. But if she was interested in working with preschoolers, she must also have a sense of humor ...
Hmmm ... a fun, sassy gal who knew how to handle herself?
"Cool down, Romeo," Jean teased him. When he scowled at her, she said: "No, I'm not reading your thoughts, but I know that look. And I know it isn't professional to date on the job."
"Well, this might come as a surprise to you, but I don't work 24 hours a day, Mom - Ooof!" Nate choked out that last bit as Jean none-too-softly telekinetically "elbowed" him in the gut, for they were now within earshot of a slim young woman with dark brown skin, a light cloud of hair and (Nate couldn't help but notice) a very flattering pair of hips.
Her back was to them as she admired the bulletin boards encircling the room. She was studying one with a striped tiger kitten hanging onto a clothesline for dear life.
"S'right, hang in there, buddy! It gets better ..." she murmured in a low voice that sounded all-too-familiar to Cable.
He realized the truth a split-second before the woman turned to face him and Jean. Her brown eyes widened in recognition as they met Nate's equally bewildered gaze. A very odd patch of lighter skin covered her left eye in a distinctive birthmark.
"Nathan," said Jean. "Meet Neena Thurman -"
"Domino, yeah, we've met," he growled, refusing to extend his hand which was just as well because Domino was now glaring at him with her honey-brown eyes. She made no move to greet him either.
"Oh, good, you know each other!" said Jean, glancing between the pair, amusement written all over her face at their expressions.
"You could say that ..." Cable replied. "She's my ex."
Next time: Nick explores the dream realm ...