X-Men: The Last Stand (22 page)

She gave his question due and proper consideration, then said, “I wish I knew.”

Suddenly, he found himself acutely conscious of how good she looked, still very much a work in progress but showing all the signs of growing into a major and lasting beauty once she emerged from adolescence. Her lips were very close, open just enough, her eyes half-lidded, to suggest that any advance would not be summarily rejected.

He decided on discretion and indicated her skates, still in the corner where she’d dropped them, many months ago.

“C’mon, girl. Up you get, on your feet, you’re with me!”

“It’s after curfew, Bright Eyes. Storm told everyone to stay in their rooms.”

He gave her a look, saying with his eyes and a twist of his mouth,
What, you
never
broke a rule?

Aloud, he assured her, “Don’t worry, we won’t get caught.” Then, with a soft and charming smile, “You
can
walk through walls, you know.”

Walk through walls
and,
it turned out, on air itself, which unnerved Bobby a tad as she led him down an invisible ramp from her upper-floor room to the ground. Properly phased, her body had no coherent mass, but she could generate motion—very much like swimming. Suspending herself within a greater volume clearly worked the same whether applied to a solid, a liquid, or a gas.

Grateful to be back on terra firma, he led her to the ornamental pond out back. The swimming pool was too obvious for their purposes—too much chance of being caught. Here, hidden amidst the hedges, they were more secure. Both of them felt a measure of comfort to be under the watchful gaze of Xavier, even if it was only a representation of him in profile upon a pillar of stone.

“This place can be home, too,” Bobby told her, his words reminding Kitty that he hadn’t been back to Boston since the Stryker incident. No letters or calls from his folks, and everything he sent to them was returned unopened.

He touched the water, and just like that it began to crystallize.

Bobby held up her skates and in the second or so it took for her to pluck them from his grasp, the pond was solid ice, the air chill enough to prompt a cloud with every breath.

“I’m not very good,” she warned, taking to the ice. In fact, she considered herself a major klutz.

Bobby didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to—she’d seen him skate. He was beyond gold in skill, he was platinum.

Tonight, though, he showed none of that grace and flamboyance. Instead he made plain that tonight was all about her, and she loved him for it. They skated around the little pond, which actually didn’t leave much room to be fancy, and they talked. As time gradually passed, the sorrow began to give way just a little. They weren’t up for laughter yet, but the ache inside wasn’t quite as bad.

She whooped in alarm as he twirled behind her, hands clasping her waist—it was all she could do to keep from phasing, her reflexive response to any such surprise—pulling her up and around in a spin. She knew what was supposed to come next. The moment her blades made contact, she would allow momentum to pull her through a twist of her own and then grasp his outstretched hand, while still spinning, so that she’d end up with her arm fully extended. It was a maneuver pulled from ballroom dancing, and if she were wearing shoes she could manage it quite nicely.

But she didn’t even make it through the first rotation. She snagged her toe on his, thrust out a leg clumsily to keep from pitching flat on her face, felt her balance go all to hell, and crashed against Bobby, sensing him start to go too—but neither fell.

He caught her strongly and just like that she was cradled in his arms, their bodies tangled tightly together. He was grinning, and she smiled back. It felt good.

“Thank you, Bobby,” she said, realizing their eyes had been locked a half-beat too long.

As he nodded agreement, she craned her head up to kiss him on the cheek. Kitty liked the way he smelled and let the contact linger longer than it should have, same as with their eyes. She didn’t want the moment to pass.

Upstairs, another student who couldn’t sleep saw their heads move together. From Rogue’s angle, it looked like Bobby and Kitty were kissing on the lips. What was for them a brief but welcome interlude of peace and reprieve from the misery of recent days, was for her a spike through the heart, in its own way far worse than Xavier’s passing.

Bobby was the one who pulled back, but Kitty didn’t press. They were both conflicted.

“I’m sorry,” Kitty began.

“No, no, no,” Bobby interrupted, “I just…”

Both voices trailed off.

“Yeah, I know. Me, too.”

She butted his shoulder very slightly with hers, a “buddy” thing. “C’mon, popsicle, we should get back inside.”

Logan paused a beat by the window of his room, taking a breath to catalogue the comings and goings outside. His room was usually a mess, the floor strewn almost to overflowing with empty beer cans. It would have been odd that Xavier had never mentioned it, except Logan figured he’d known the reason why. In the dark, it was virtually impossible to find your way across the floor without disturbing them, and even the slightest noise was all the alarm Wolverine needed. Better by far than the flocks of geese that guarded ancient Rome. Today, though, he’d swept it clean, and taken care to polish the floor until it glowed.

Because this time, he really didn’t believe he’d be coming back.

“Where are you going?” Ororo demanded from the doorway. He made a face. So much for his clean getaway.

“Where do you think?” he replied, slipping on his jacket.

“She’s gone, Logan. She’s not coming back.” And he knew she wasn’t talking about Jean’s physical departure with Magneto.

He shook his head. “You don’t know that.”

He slung his backpack over a shoulder but she blocked the doorway. “No,” she told him, making it an order. He quirked an eyebrow, suggesting that she not take this any further. Her eyes had adopted a blue cast that told him she was already drawing on her power; if it came to a tussle between them, it could get ugly.

“Charles was like a father to her,” she said. “And she killed him.” He could tell it was difficult for her to believe it, even as she said the words, but at the same time it was impossible for her to forgive.

“That wasn’t Jean,” Logan maintained stubbornly, without a shred of rational evidence to back it up. “The Jean I…” briefest of pauses, to find a stand-in for the word he wanted to say,
love,
“…know is still in there. I mean to reach her, to find a way to bring her home.”

“You truly believe that?”

He nodded tersely. “I have to.”

He advanced a step, but she stood her ground. The air around them grew charged enough to raise the hackles on his neck.

“Why?” Ororo cried out, and then, with even more intensity, “
Why?
Why can’t you accept the truth?”

“Not my truth, ’Ro.”

“Damn it, Logan, why can’t you let her go?”

“Because…” he said, and found himself completely at a loss for words. “Because…”

Her shoulders slumped and the air between them grew calm. She looked at him with more sorrow and sympathy than he’d ever seen in another’s eyes—at least directed at him.

“Because you love her.”

He nodded.

“Logan,” Ororo told him, “Jean made her choice.” He started to protest but she stopped him by laying her fingertips across his lips, a gesture that seemed to him very much a caress. It came to him in that instant that
he
wasn’t the only one held by the grip of primal emotions. “It’s time to make ours,” she said. “If you’re with us, then make sure you’re
with us.
”

She shifted her grip, sliding her hand down from his lips to cup his jaw in a way both tender and achingly intimate, revealing far more of herself with these few small movements than she’d done in all the time he’d known her.

“I’ve now lost two of my oldest friends, and the only father I’ve ever really known. I don’t want to lose you, too.”

With that, she left him.

Magneto found Jean standing on the edge of forever. An escarpment rose behind the clearing where the mutants he’d been gathering had made their camp, beneath a cliff as tall as a skyscraper. It looked as if nature had formed this little valley just like a quarry, cleaving the rocks in disconcertingly straight lines.

Jean was balanced right on the edge, staring out across the sky in a way that made him think she was looking straight through the atmosphere at the very stars themselves. And then the thought came to him that she might actually
see
those stars in ways unavailable to the finest telescopes on Earth. He also saw as he approached that she was standing as much on open air as on the rock itself, and he couldn’t help but be impressed.

The more he saw and learned about her, the less he truly knew.

“Do you remember,” he began, and she sent the ghostly projection of her reply skittering across the surface of his thoughts before he even completed the sentence:
Everything.

“…When we first met? Do you know what I saw when I looked at you?”

“A scared little girl,” she replied aloud, out of courtesy.

“I saw the next step in evolution.” Again, she permitted him a sense of her thoughts, which this time consisted of a round of quiet laughter, as she responded to a joke he didn’t get. “What Charles and I dreamt of finding.”

Words came this time—a warning:
Be careful what you wish for.

He ignored her thoughts, and focused on the woman: “And I thought to myself, why would Charles want to turn this god into a mortal?”

“I
am
mortal.”

He raised a piece of metal, shaking his head. “I can manipulate the metal in this scrap of iron. But you can do
anything
!”

She faced him at last, intrigued by what he held.

“Anything you can think of,” he said.

The fragment of iron popped from Magneto’s fingers and began to glow as Jean’s telekinesis quickly excited its molecules. His own power gave him insight into what she was doing, and he couldn’t help but be amazed as she played with the core molecular structure of the metal, altering its density, its shape, its state, its very physical nature. She made it a glob of primordial ylem, and then formed a tiny statuette. She excited it to a gaseous state, compressed it to the verge of transitioning into a microsingularity. She altered it from iron to wood and then infused that wood with a spark of life, so that if planted in fertile soil, it might very well grow into a proper tree.

Her eyes narrowed as she worked, her mouth wide with a smile of delight, like a child embracing her latest Christmas toys. She had a child’s attention span, too, and very quickly she became bored.

The iron fragment flared beyond incandescent, lighting their corner of the shaded forest brighter than any conceivable sun, as bright as Creation must have been during those first moments when the universe was born.

The shock wave staggered Magneto, shook the trees around him, and generated a Fourth of July light show. Below, in the campsite, there were cries of alarm and outrage as the wave coursed through them, playing with their skin as a sudden, fierce squall might the surface of a pond. Jean didn’t notice.