26. Praying With Eric

Jean

I feel Lorna fall. I feel the vertigo from inside her brain, feel her fear as though I were the one falling, feel the crunch of her bones as her body hits the hard cement of the launch platform. And then I feel our psychic connection snap, and go dark.

I look across the silo at the man who calls himself Magneto, and I feel his mind as well. I feel his grief and pain, and the way he has wrapped himself in it, using it as a shield to protect himself from the world. It blinds him from everything. He can't see the consequences of what he has done. He doesn't know what just happened to his youngest child. He doesn't know what might be happening to his other daughter, or his son. All he knows is that he is winning. His power is stronger than mine, and Lorna is no longer here to help me. He will wrest the missile from its silo. He's not thinking about how many people have to die — at this air force base or in the nuclear war that will inevitably follow from this battle.

He doesn't think about it, and he doesn't care.

I feel a familiar fire burn behind my eyes, my power swelling up in me. That's what it feels like: not a gift, not a mutation. It feels like power. And since the moment it awoke, I have tried to push it down, to control it, to deny it. No more. I can't afford control any longer. I can't let him win.

I let the rage overtake me. I let it wash over and through me like a cleansing fire, like righteous fury, like the judgment of the damned, and I feel my telepathy getting stronger, spreading out across the base. I feel everything. I hear everyone's thoughts, and for once I don't try to block them out and I don't let them overwhelm me. I simply expand myself into and through them until the boundaries between us all no longer exist.

I am Hank, ably fending off Peepers, leaping and diving and kicking with my massive feet. Even now, with the threat of total annihilation hanging over all our heads, I am too delighted with the marvelous things my body can do to worry about what it looks like. I am Bobby, freezing Morty's every attempt at spitting mucus, grateful for the distraction from my own thoughts, safe in the simplicity of cold.

I am the airman praying to God to end this madness, to protect me that I might go home to my family, to forgive me that I might deserve them. I am the missileman straining against the ropes that bind me, wondering if I can wriggle loose and make my way over to the control panel while my Mutant captors are distracted with fighting, wondering if I have the guts to hit that button. I am Professor Xavier straining to psychically keep the Vanisher unconscious but not dead. And I am the Vanisher, trapped inside my own body — again, helpless — again, silently screaming.

I am Lorna floating in blackness, and I am Pietro, equally frantic to help her and guilt-ridden to think that she might be beyond help. I am Warren, and I need Lorna to be okay because my father cannot be right. I am Wanda in Central Control, pouring everything I have into stopping the missilemen from bombing the Mutant Congo in retaliation. I love my family and I love my people, and I fear I'm losing both, and there's nothing I can do to stop it.

I am Magneto, an iron shield of rage, and I am Max Eisenhardt, a terrified young man who cannot bear to lose any more of the people he loves. I am a gaping, open wound that spits fire so it will never heal. And I am everyone that fire touches, a thousand minds filled with fear and pain. I am everyone in America and the Mutant Congo that a nuclear war would kill, and everyone who loves them.

Even as I feel engulfed in Magneto's grief, I can still recognize everyone else's. But he can't. He is too wrapped up in his own pain to see the pain he's causing others. I can't take it. It has to end. He has to end. And I'm no longer content to simply stop him. I want him to pay for what he's done, that selfish, narcissistic lunatic. For all the blood on his hands that he can't see, that he won't see, he has to pay.

I can see the magnetic fields he's manipulating, and I grab hold of them. The missile stops shaking. With a heavy thud, it drops back to the bottom of its silo. The walkways wrench back into place around it. With a wave of my arm, I cast Magneto out of the silo, up into the air.

I throw him. I throw him into the air and onto the hard concrete of the launchpad. And I fly up, using my telekinesis as I never have before. I fly up, almost ninety feet to the surface, and float above the battleground. He's waiting for me, with twisted metal ripped from the disused above-ground launch site. He hurls it at me, not to trap me, but to hurt me; I toss it aside. It's such a pitiful attempt, it would almost be funny if it wasn't so infuriating.

"I don't want to hurt you," he said.

I don't want to hurt you.

I want him to die.

I shoot psychic shockwaves to the launch pad below. The concrete explodes, crumbled chunks flying up and towards his head. He throws up makeshift metal shields to block me, and I toss each one aside with a flick of my wrist as I close in on him. I will kill him. I will end him. I will see him pay for his crimes.

He stares up at me with Max Eisenhardt's eyes. We ache from the fall. We squint in the glare of the fire above.

I am Scott Summers. I am crouched beside the man I just killed, the man whose name I don't even know. Once I find out, I'll add it to the list in my head that I recite to keep myself awake, to keep myself vigilant. But he does not belong there. They were accidents; this was on purpose. I killed him to stop him. I am everything they always said I was.

I look up at the purple sky and see Jean Grey floating above it all, wreathed in flames, her hair wind-whipped on a still day, her hands hooked into talons as she throws enormous pieces of concrete at Magneto who, for all his age and strength and bizarre metal getup, looks suddenly helpless and small next to this teen-aged girl. She is a burning creature, angelic, demonic, ready to murder a man that a few short months ago comforted her with tea after a nightmare. It scares me to see her like this. That is not the girl I love. That is something else entirely.

My rage drains away. I return to myself. I am Jean again. I sink down to the ground, hear the voices fade, feel the fire subside, and collapse on the broken concrete. I hear Scott shout, "JEAN!" I hear his frantic footsteps getting louder, drumming out a vibration in the rubble. I feel his arms around me, warm and strong and gentle. I am weak, and he loves me.

"Are you okay?" he asks.

"I think so," I tell him. "I'm sorry, I… I don't know what came over me. I'm not a killer. I'm not a bad person, I swear to you, that wasn't me…"

I begin to cry, and the earth begins to shake. We look around; Magneto's gone. But with a sinking feeling, I realize I know exactly where he is. And soon I see him rising up out of the silo, arms outstretched like Jesus, and below him, an I.C.B.M., shrouded in gleaming steel. We watch, frozen, as he lifts it up and carries it with his mind to where the Vanisher is, rolling on the grass, reliving his time in jail, but scratching and clawing his way back to consciousness. He opens his eyes. They're wide and wild and determined. I don't know if he could teleport that missile all the way to the Mutant Congo himself, but they've got a bomber jet, and he can get it in there.

We watch the missile rise up and soar through the air, towards the Vanisher. My eyes meet Scott's.

"This is it," he says.

I need you to trust me, I say. I tell him telepathically because we don't have time for words. Look at it. Take off your glasses and look at it.

And he does.

Time slows down. I'm exhausted and I'm scared, but I tap back into that power.

I am the LGM-30 Minuteman I.C.B.M. I was born in a California factory, flown to the Florida coast, and buried underground. I cradle three little W56 warheads in my long, sharp nose. My payloads and I have lain in the ground and waited for the time when we would be needed. I was never meant to lie dormant in the earth. They made me to fly. It is my destiny. It is all I have ever wanted, and now I am finally flying, and it is exhilarating. But they also made me to burn, and I don't want to burn. They made me to kill, but I don't want to kill.

I don't have to kill.

I don't have to be the weapon they made me to be.

I feel the blast of Scott's eyes against my metal side; and I am the blast; and I am Jean, directing the blast, concentrating it, guiding it. I am the molecules connecting the payload to the rest of me. I let the beam inside me, let it slice through me, separate the payload from the rest of me, cut off my nose. And it soars down towards Bobby.

And I am Bobby, thinking fast, drawing the water from the humid Florida air and letting it flow through me until it has cooled. It's not easy in this heat; I have pushed myself to the breaking point, and once I'm through, I collapse on the ground, no ice left to cover my skin.

I am the payload, blanketed in snow, my fire gone out, my warhead crowned with a delicate latticework of crystalline ice. I am Lorna, lying in Warren's arms, using the last of my strength to guide the payload to the ground. It falls as gentle as a snowflake.

My vision shrinks back down to only what I can see through Jean Grey's bleeding eyes. Magneto flies into the bomber with the noseless missile. He vanishes — they all do, except Mesmero, who lies dead on the ground.

The last thing I see before I pass out is an angel floating down to me, carrying a girl in his arms.

The last thing I understand before my power fades is that she's going to be all right.

We're all going to be all right.

I wake up in a hospital bed, the pain in my head dulled. Everything is dull, in fact — the pain, my thoughts, even my vision is a little murky. I feel like my head is stuffed with cotton. I notice an IV snaking out of my arm and absently wonder if it's full of morphine. That would explain it, I guess.

I look around the room. Scott's long, lanky body is sprawled across two hard plastic chairs to the right of my bed, facing each other. His head is thrown back, his chest rising and falling so slowly, he must be asleep. His clothes are rumpled. I wonder how long he's been there. On my left side is another bed. Lorna's in it, swaddled in all kinds of casts and bandages, but alive and sleeping soundly.

I hear the scrape of a metal chair leg across the linoleum floor and a little grunt. I turn back around to see a flicker of red light behind Scott's sunglasses. He blinks at me. "Hi," he says.

"Hi, yourself." My voice sounds and feels like sandpaper in my throat. "How long was I out?"

"Umm…" He checks his watch. "Maybe five hours. We were worried. Your parents are on their way; they're really upset."

I rub my face. "But we did it, didn't we?"

"Yeah. Thanks to you." He palms my cheek, and I sigh and lean into his hand.

"I'm sorry, Scott. I don't know what came over me." I try to look into his eyes, but as always the glasses make it impossible to read him. "I could have killed him. I wanted to. I haven't let loose like that in so long… and to think, that's what came out. That rage, that hate… I never wanted you to see that."

"I'm not afraid of you," he says.

But he is.

There's a knock at the door. "Forgive me for interrupting," Professor Xavier says. "I thought I felt Jean waking up."

"You did," I say.

He wheels himself up to my bedside. "How are you feeling?"

"Alive." I squeeze Scott's hand. "Could you excuse us? I want to talk to the professor alone."

He hesitates, then kisses my forehead and leaves the room.

"He never left your side," the professor says.

I smile and nod. Of course he didn't. "I figured. Professor, I've been thinking, and… I want to take your offer."

He raises his eyebrows. "Are you sure?"

"Yes." I twist my sheet in my hands, looking down so he won't see the tears welling up in my eyes. "I lost control of my power back there, and… and I don't like what it did to me. I don't like what it turned me into. I don't want it, Professor." I meet his gaze, tears streaming down my cheeks. "Take it away. Please. Just take it away."

"You realize I can't do that, Jean," he says gently. "All I can do is suppress your telepathy, put up some blocks in your mind to hold it back temporarily, until you're old enough to control it yourself. Then we can start slowly removing those blocks. But it will always be there, within you."

"Fine, do that. I just… I can't handle it now. I don't want it. I don't care how you do it, just get rid of it. Take it away."

"All right, Jean. If that's what you want."

"It is."

He places a hand at each of my temples and closes my eyes. Involuntarily, I close my eyes as well.

The world grows quiet and small.