Last Exit to Eden
Timeline: Post-X2, alternate ending
Summary: What if the fight in the generator room had ended differently?
Pairings: L/J, lots of mention of S/J
Rating: PG13 for some bad language. (Dude, it's Logan and an angsty Jean, you expect something else? ;->)
Disclaimer: I own nothing that belongs to Marvel, 20th Century Fox, etc. etc., don't sue me, all you'd get would be the rights to my student loans. Blah.
A/N: All right, so this is the attack of the plot bunny that wouldn't die, despite my whining at it to do so and leave me be. This tries to answer a what-if that occurred to me after seeing the movie. What if Jean -couldn't- break Stryker's control on Scott? It's gonna be angsty, it's gonna be introspective, and there's going to be very little fluff. Run. Run now. Methinks I'll make a two or three parter of this. Also inspired by listening to far too much Amanda Marshall. Feedback and beta-reading would be adored and given cookies?
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It was Logan that found them, the flames of the Phoenix risen in defiance of the dam collapsing around her ears, her shattered leg canted at an unnatural angle out behind her as she cradled his head in her lap, rocking gently like a Madonna and child, seemingly heedless of anything but the still, perfect features of Scott Summers, released at last from their icy chemical mask and now resting in almost beautiful repose.
Dead without a mark on him. Even in killing, Jean was a surgeon still. The waxen face showed no sign of the brain behind it, riddled with aneurysms from her final, desperate effort to save him, save herself, after the blast that cracked the dam left him still advancing and her down for the count. Splitting her teke to burrow through his body like a hell-bred parasite, she'd sought out the weak spots in an attempt to cure or kill.
The results of that last-ditch experiment were obvious. And so, she'd resolved to die with him, to protect his body from the indignities of the inevitable dam burst, rather that try to make it away herself. She wasn't going anywhere with that bad of a broken leg anyways.
And so Logan found them, the others safely aboard the jet, but the man refusing to leave without Jean, he'd traced her first by the Professor's guidance and then by her scent, finding her wrapped in a cocoon of fire that spoke of a force of will still strong behind that mindless exterior. When he pressed her to leave and come with him, she screamed at him to go away with sudden violence in her tone, raging at him, raging at the circumstance, raging at herself for not being good enough, for not being strong enough or smart enough to find some other way.
He let her rage, let her curse him, let her damn the day she'd met him, because it was his kiss that had been last on her lips, and not the man who now lay dead, that her heart couldn't let her give up and join her fiancee, her fiancee, in final oblivion, because he'd, damn him, stolen a place in it for himself. He couldn't even let her have this separate and alone.
Through it all he stood there, waiting, until a falling chunk of concrete nearly flattened him, and she automatically deflected it, and then suffered herself to be picked up and carried away, limp and helpless as a tired child. He brought the body, too. Wouldn't have been right to leave it.
She sat alone and separate from the others on the flight back home, eyes dark and skin pale, features cut from marble. The kids watched her with unease, the Professor and Storm with concern. Kurt Wagner had attempted to speak to her, offer a few words of comfort, but had stopped partway through and returned to his own seat in embarassed silence at a simple shake of her head. Logan alone left her be, simply working with Storm to fly the Blackbird and letting her have her isolation the way he hadn't let her have her death.
She did not go with the rest of the team to Washington.
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She couldn't stand to sleep in their bedroom, and had been relocated back down the hall to the room she'd occupied as a girl, snatching bits of rest in among the pyramid of stuffed toys on the teenager-approved bed, or staring over at a wall still decked with dusty rosettes and ribbons, legacy of long-past horse shows. So, the day after the funeral, four days after their return, four days after she'd murdered one of their own, Jean left.
They'd buried him on a hill with a view of Breakstone Lake and the Mansion, the grounds of the place that had been his home spread out at his feet. Scott Summers, 1980 - 2003. Fidelis Below it, etched with the deftest hand, the 14 lines of John Gillespie Magee's sonnet 'High Flight'. Calm, peaceful, fitting... and it should never have happened so soon.
Scott's foster parents, who'd heard nothing for years from a beloved son who'd been too bleakly sure they'd never accept him as a mutant, had been flown in by Professor Xavier, who somehow knew where to find them, and that they'd come. Grey haired and quiet, they spoke softly with those who'd known him, told stories of their bright, wonderful boy as they'd known him, seemed glad that he'd had friends, had a place, had a future.
The explanation given mentioned nothing of the real circumstances of his death, of course. Professor Xavier stated it was a simple aneurysm, quite unpreventable, no warning, and almost instant. An unforseeable accident. At this, Jean began to laugh out loud, suddenly seguing into hysterical tears, until Storm was tasked to take her away to lie down, away from the shocked parents. Murmured explanations of 'grief' served only to anger her, until a sedative from her own dispensary was administered, and she fell into warm darkness for 12 hours, only the occasional twinges of her splinted and healing leg intruding on shapeless dreams.
A Greyhound bus the next morning, a ticket for some backwoods town in Canada, up past Sudbury, whose sole draw was that no-one would think to look there. She sat alone on the bus, as separate among strangers as she'd been among friends, and stared out the window at the endless scenery. A stopover in Toronto had provided a change of clothing, even though she now looked like a tourist in a garish souvenir sweatshirt and hat, both blazoned with maple leaves. An elderly lady kept trying to feed her oranges and tell her about the loss of each of her three husbands. She listened with a detached politeness, and declined the fruit.
Left two days later in front of one of those classic motel-and-diner joints that typify small Northern Ontario towns, she shifted her bag on her shoulder and had a brief bite to eat at the counter, where the loggers and loggers' wives watched her, screamingly a city girl, but didn't press for details. Checked into a room with a bottle of Crown Royal for company, a bucket of ice, and a tumbler glass from the bathroom. Didn't open it. The ice melted, she poured the water down the sink and got more. She watched a lot of CBC, but retained none of it bar the news reports on the Canadian mutant situation that some logical part of her mind wouldn't let her tune out.
Two days after that, she came back from an aimless walk up and down the nearby stretch of highway in the snow, crutches catching in the ruts at the side of the road, half hoping she'd get eaten by a rabid moose, to find Logan settled on her bed, watching hockey and drinking the whiskey she hadn't touched.