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The Ascension of the Twelve: Second Gathering
Author: Jenskott
Summary: After of the Gathering of The Twelve the machine and the technology of Apocalypse was abandoned and forgotten in Akkaba. Suddenly the reality has changed drastically, without anybody realizing. What has happened and who is the responsible? Can the X-Men stop it and reassert the timeline in its path?
Notes: This is a tale was a long time cooking in my head. It was meant to be a one-shot, but when I saw how long it was becoming, I decided split it in several parts. I have the entire story written, but I'll post each part only when there be reviews.
Continuity: Comic.
Disclaimer: X-Men belong to Marvel due to some sort of cosmic disaster. And writing nonsense disclaimers to disown stuff that all know aren't yours is boring.
Feedback: To jorgisimox@hotmail.com. I can't stress enough how badly I need advice and supports. English isn't my primary language, so excuse my mistakes.
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Part One-
Eyes snapped open with a start, and his heavy body lurched forward.
Scott led a frantic hand to his forehead, touching gingerly the sweaty and clammy skin. As he struggled to regain his breath, his eyes drifted wildly from one to other side of the bedroom, perusing fearfully his bearings. The raven and murky shadows kept surrounding him, engulfing him. The darkness of the bowels of the night was thick and impenetrable except for the dull red glow was emanating out of his blue eyes.
He massaged his bare eyelids, noting idly he would never get used wholly to the free sensation of his face naked and stripped of ruby quartz, and inhaled heavy intakes of air. He waited while the ragged and shuddering gasps of his lips quiet down the bout of shivering cramps his body trembled with. Shivers had nothing to do with the chilled, frosty weather of Alaska.
Christ, what nightmare. It was awful.
Yet his brain denied recalling it. With the coming of the awareness it had vanished in a vague fog, just like a crust of ice with the warm sunlight, and he couldn't now remember what had scared him so awfully and immensely. Or maybe he didn't want. It was what Jean called automatic defenses of the brain. Shut down when some memory, emotion or event is too strong to bear, and lock it away of the conscious thought was a perfectly natural process.
And he was definitively scared of it. He couldn't dwell on it, and his instincts screamed he didn't.
But it puzzled him, and he was too stubborn to just giving up. He furrowed his brows in intense focusing, and pondered in it, diving in his intermingled remembrances of the bad dream, descending as far as the bottom of his mind, where scattered fragments lie. Slowly he began to piece something together. A blurry outline started to condense inside his head.
A round, blue face stared at him, smirking. The large red eye on its center glimmered malevolently.
He opened again his eyes abruptly, as the start, the panic and the anguish washed away swiftly the disturbing picture, until every glimpse of it had vanished without one trace, along with the remembrance. And then came the oblivion. Only the dread gripping his chest and stabbing spikes of icy horror stayed.
From the corner of his right eye, his pupil caught a glimpse of movement, and he watched ruefully to the slumped shape of his wife stirring awake. Jean shook her dizzy head to recover her senses and looked up and to him. After of a groan of resignation, she pulled her half of the pillow over her head.
Scott felt to himself guilty while saw her getting up and letting slide down the snow-white cotton sheets, the thick wool blanket and the quilt. She had to have felt along the psilink flashes of his stark concern and raw horror, so strong and overwhelming they had awoken her. Still he couldn't help observe with lustful, greedy glances the way her pajamas clung to her sinuous and slender body, and the cute way she mussed her ruffled orange hair. The dim glitter of red luminescence dazzling on his ocular globes lit her young self with a mesmerizing glow.
Hank's theory was correct. His eyesight was really sharper in the darkness.
She ended up fixing her locks and glanced tenderly at him, moving one hand to stroke soothingly his cheek. "Any trouble, honey?"
"Bad dreams" He stated plainly. The elaborate truth was bad, hectic and frightening dreams had rendered him deeply upset. "Nothing you ought to get worried for" Scott smiled with his infamous cocky expression and he wished it was convincing and reassuring. "Besides, the gorgeous teacher of the Anchorage primary school needs her beauty sleep. Or those kids can sneak in her else."
His fingers traced smoothly the inklings of bags under her eyes. She swatted playfully his hand aside, and smirked. "But you need sleep too. What will the people think in your job else?"
He shrugged. "I'm punctual, diligent, hard-working, reliable and grandson of the owners of the company. I think they can cope with lacking of sleep or sleeping in." Scott shut up once said that. The bantering mood sounded hollow and dead on his lips. Thousand thoughts churned within his skull, and Scott was helpless to verbalize properly his emotions.
"I'm scared of the darkness." He said finally, gazing piercingly to Jean and simultaneously letting his feelings leaking and flowing across the mindlink. Someone else perhaps would laugh with that sentence, but he knew Jean would understand. She always did.
She did. Jean wrapped an arm around his back and motioned him to seat him on her lap. Her free hand caught softly his fingers, and without letting go his hand, she gripped his shoulder. Inwardly she was basking in his tumultuous, shaky feelings and deciphering them with the easiness of the experience.
"Me too." She mused, resting her head on his flat chest and stared at the cloak of murky darkness. She bore with her sparkling green eyes the hollow and bottomless shadows of blackness enveloping them. If she held her eyesight enough time, the shades looked spread theirs tendrils towards them to snatch them and strangle them. The atmosphere was heavy, polluted, thick, dense, choking.
"Sometimes I get scared of them myself. I'm afraid they take you away of me." She completed.
He nodded, cuddling her tightly. "Yes." He grabbed the covers and draped them around both of their bodies. A lame protection, a barrier, or a shelter against the shadows circling them. Hostile shadows concealing fearsome secrets. "I... have dreams. Nightmares in reality. I don't remember them, but... they aren't nice."
Jean stalled time before answering. "Do you want I help you to remember?"
"No." He stuttered nervously. "I-I don't know why... But I feel it's better if I don't remember anything. I don't want remembering, knowing or finding out. Maybe I mustn't. I'm scared of it. My brain denies to see it, and when I try to clear my head, it blacks out."
She nodded quietly. "One automatic defense, I see. Whatever it is, it must be awful."
He said nothing. Still she had one very good idea of the conflictive thoughts and doubts dueling into his mind.
"Whether it is bothering you so much, or getting such worried, perhaps you should..." She hesitated before continuing "Call to the mansion. Maybe the Pro... Charles can explain the reason."
While she proposed that plan, she failed in concealing the agitated and scared quiver had shaken her body. Scott didn't miss it, as well as didn't miss the lowering of her head. He was sure she was drilling holes on the floorboards right now, and she'd be hunched and embracing forlornly her legs if she wasn't holding him.
She would never admit or say aloud anything, but the truth was the X-Men frightened her very much for some reason. They had stayed away of the X-Men since the debacle on Muir Island and the defeat of the Shadow King, when the teams of X-Men and X-Factor merged and they quitted active duty. During all these years they had kept in touch with their best friends like Warren, Hank, Bobby or Ororo, but they had never returned, and barely had talked with the Professor or with someone of the new team for that matter.
There was something in the prospect of returning to the team that she couldn't bear, even though it was to greet or see again to their friends. She would never spell it in words, complain bitterly, confess her reticence, or explain her troubles, but they were psi-linked, and moreover he knew her too well. And whenever he came up with the possibility of going to Westchester, or suggested go to help with some specific emergency, she got unsettled, her mood dropped and she walked with a downcast and even distraught pace. And whenever they talked about the Professor... he didn't wish dwelling on it, but there was something lurking on her eyes. Reluctance, remorse and fear, but also a spark of disgust, fury and resentment. He was hugely confused for it, and repeated again and again it couldn't be right.
And he didn't manage understand that puzzle. He didn't remember anything happening among them provoked that cold anger and that seething rancor. But in spite of she never talked about the Professor with contempt, neither told anything slandering or outrageous about him, Jean burnt and basked in it. However she never acknowledged any trouble and never protested or begged they remained far from everyone, secluded in their private world. So he used to oblige her anyway to not get her upset.
Who was he to whine or pry into after all, when she never did it, and he owed her his happiness and his sight?
"No, I would rather not bother to Charles with this" He mouthed at last. Like always the possibility of turning to their old mentor was brought up and rejected, her stiff stance loosened at once, her repressed tremors vanished and he felt elation beaming in her head. Why was she so troubled for and loath to it? "Actually I prefer you use your telepathy to calm me down. I mean, if you want. It feels better."
He didn't tell he liked she did that, albeit Jean might guess easily. Her redhead wife smiled and placed a solicitous hand on his bulged temples. "Thanks for your trust, honey. I shall do it all better right now."
Her fingers were glowing with humming energy psychic, a flare of rose hue licking his forehead and sweeping along its damp surface, when the door slammed open. On the threshold stood a figure with its face darkened, giving its back to the light the lamp cast from the passage.
"Dad, mom, I'm thirsty." The young boy leaning on the doorjamb whined.
"You know where the kitchen and the glasses are, darling" His mother stated. "And you are a big boy. You can perfectly-"
"Yes, and I come from there" the seven-year old Nathan Christopher Charles Summers yawned. "But I'm cold."
"Then take other blanket, Nate." His father sputtered. "Have you forgotten which is the drawer? The covers are in-"
"I remember the drawer. The trouble is when I got one, the noises woke up to Ray, and she doesn't want sleep now." The unmistakable shrill of a four-year toddler echoed on the corridor. "What have I to do?"
Both spouses slapped both of their temples in frustration.
Kids.
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INTERLUDE
Shiro Yoshida had been the first. And was insulting the facility of his capture.
Since his first apparition in Washington and his temporary allegiance to the X-Men, he had intervened in less than a dozen of affairs. He was the one kept to himself always apart, always self-excluded of any ordeal the mutants faced, glad of protecting his country and no bothered by the foreign affairs. That attitude of careless and egotistical dropout he nurtured so gleefully was his downfall at the end.
With all his immense power, atomic fire capable of obliterating cities, he wasn't match. He was easily overpowered and defeated, and when he fell, neither of the X-Men noticed. Sunfire wasn't missed.
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Final Notes: Surprised? Scott and Jean retired and living in Alaska. Cyclops controlling his beams and Jean using her teacher degree -she HAS one-. Nathan without T-O virus and a toddler Rachel. What is going on and what has happened to the remainder X-Men? All has his motive. Stay tuned to the next part.