X-Men: The Last Stand (41 page)

Assuming the world survived.

“It’s not Jean,” Ororo cried out to him as she tried to pull him away as well. He didn’t bother telling her she was wrong. “Not anymore. Nothing can stop her, Logan.
Nothing!
”

He looked at her and quirked his mouth into a semblance of a smile, as from a man about to embrace the Gorgon in its lair. “I’m the only one who can get close.”

She didn’t need to ask what would happen next. Instead she let her eyes reveal her heart and leapt quickly aloft before her tears could betray her. No matter how tonight ended, if they lived to see the dawn, they would lose something supremely precious.

His insides churned as Logan turned back to face Jean. He knew that he was being bombarded by lethal levels of radiation. Wasn’t on purpose, he knew that as well, she was broadcasting energies like a star coming into being. That insight wasn’t something he’d think of—the flavor of it was purely Jean and it gave him a breath of hope. If she could still reach him on that kind of deep subconscious level, he could find a way to pull her all the way back.

“I hear you, darlin’,” he said, and took his first step, “I know you’re still there.”

The ground was coming apart. It wasn’t a case of rock being shattered to dust and the dust dissolving, she was shredding the component molecules, manipulating the states of existence so that what was solid and opaque one instant became utterly transparent the next, allowing him to see straight down to the core of the world. The patches of earth became utterly nonexistent after that, forcing him to progress in hopscotch fashion, following his instincts—which in turn followed cues he grew increasingly certain came from Jean herself—towards his goal.

Jean turned to him and his own molecules began discorporating, his skin literally (painlessly, thank God) boiling away. The adamantium was partly what saved him, because it possessed the tightest molecular binding of any substance conceivable. Given time and will, she could deconstruct it the way she was shredding everything else, but right now her mind was focused on greater things.

The metal provided an anchor for his physical being and at the same time, the outrush of power from her acted as an amplifier for his own abilities. He hadn’t seen Scott die, but he could guess what happened. She amplified his optic blasts, so much that he damn near shattered an entire mountain, but all that really did was complete the energy loop back to her. Blasting at her actually made her stronger, and meanwhile Scott had no defense against the discorporation process. Same with Xavier. His telepathy must have been heightened to an unimaginable extent, but even if it put him on a level above her, he could not match her telekinetic powers and he couldn’t repair the damage she was doing to him.

Logan, of course, was another critter altogether.

The harder she hit him, the more efficiently his body healed. She couldn’t kill him, only make him stronger. If she really wanted him gone, there were ways to accomplish it. Throw him away for instance; he had no doubt, at her level, she could put him into orbit with a thought. If he was still here, it was for a reason.

He loved her. He wasn’t going to fail.

The buildings were going, and it came to him that he was watching in slow motion the awful and absolute annihilation that occurred at ground zero of a thermonuclear blast.

He went blind as his eyes melted, could see again an instant later, the process speeding up to such an extent that obliteration and reconstruction became virtually instantaneous processes. He reached for her, his arm stripped to bare gleaming bone, the great claws visible and quiescent in their housings.

The linkages were intact. Careless of her not to sever them.

He had no lungs to breathe with, no heart to beat, no blood to pump, no body to sustain. He was little more than artificial frame, the ghost of a nervous system, an agglomeration of self and will within the bunker of his unbreachable skull. Yet he would not fall. He would not stop.

She turned those monster onyx eyes on him and there was no recognition of him to be seen in them.

“You would die for them?” Her voice resounded in his soul. If he’d had a body the effect would have left him gasping, face-to-face at last with the truth of the ancient understanding that angels are as terrible to behold as they are beautiful.

“Not for them.”

She started to smile, preening satisfaction, thinking she’d found the flaw in him that would allow her to discard him once and for all.

“For
you
!”

He didn’t merely say that with words. He couldn’t. No face, no tongue, no lungs, no anything. She was a telepath. He gave her his thoughts. But of course, because she was a telepath, she got much, much more than words.

He loved her, had from the first; he gave her that, too, and all it meant for him. Life had been a simple thing for Logan before Jean Grey. He did as he pleased, took what he wanted, didn’t consider the consequences or repercussions. Nobody had ever cared much for him because he made it plain he wouldn’t care for them in return.

Rogue had been the chink in that armor, and Jean had torn it open wide, so much so that he couldn’t go back to the old ways even if he wanted to. And knowing her, loving her, knowing that she loved him in return—even if she’d pledged herself to Scott—made him never want to again, no matter how much the new way hurt.

He gave her his dreams, he gave her his hopes. He understood that she could see what he likely never would, the creature he had been, and stood upright and proud to be judged against the
man
he had become.

Amidst the fire in her eyes, he saw a flash of green.

“Save me, Logan,” he heard her say, and felt her hands gently cup his face and draw him close, bodies closer, lips aching to touch in a last and loving kiss.

SNIKT!

She spasmed against him, clutching him to her as if she could merge her essence with his and make them one coherent being. Or maybe it was a desperate attempt to gain access to his healing power. Didn’t much matter because again, the adamantium got in the way.

One hand, all three claws. There was no margin for error, or mercy.

“That’s better,” he heard her say with satisfaction, and beheld her eyes still full of fire, but stripped of the dark rage that had fueled her actions. There was the warmth he remembered, the sense of completion he felt during those fleeting times they’d shared together, the native generosity of spirit that was more than he figured anyone deserved, especially him.

“Stop selling yourself short, bub.”

She smiled, that wry curl of one side of her lip that he’d always known was just for him, that marked them as kindred souls.

“Oh Logan,” she breathed. He could no longer sustain her weight, his body was still too much of a mess, so down they went in a clumsy heap with her in his lap, reversing the pose of a Pietà. “Where I am, where I’m going,” and she couldn’t help gathering him into her thoughts, to share the moment so he wouldn’t sorrow for her. He was glad his senses were still a shadow of what they should be because even that fleeting glimpse filled him with such wonder and pure, primal joy that much more would have been the end of him.

If this was but the merest taste of what Jean had tapped into, small wonder she was overwhelmed.

“Be well,” he told her.

She had no final words for him. She didn’t need them.

He had no regrets, because this last moment was a lifetime for them both.

There was a final pulse of energy, surging from her to set right as much as she could. It washed over him like the gentle glow of a spring morning, lighting him as much within as without.

The water pulled from the bay began to return, as a softly falling rain.

The moon appeared through the dispersing fog and cast the scene in strokes of silver and shadow.

He cradled Jean close, rocking slightly back and forth in time to his heartbeat as it reasserted itself, savoring the myriad scents of the island as he gained once more the capacity to breathe, acknowledged to himself the presence of his friends, as first Ororo, then Kitty, and the others returned to Alcatraz.

He was weary to the bone, ravaged in body and soul.

He felt reborn.

“Mutation: it is the key to human evolution.”

When Ororo thought of Scott, or Jean, or as now, Charles, it was as though they were still with her, their words as fresh as if they’d just been spoken, the expressions making her believe they’d only just parted and would surely be seeing one another soon. Within her they were as alive as ever, and when reality reminded her that they weren’t, her response wasn’t what you’d expect. She didn’t feel at all sad. They were gone, but they’d never be forgotten.

A magnificent oak overlooked what was now called the Memorial Garden. When Ororo first arrived at the school she’d chosen it for her private place, an acknowledgment of far too many nights in her youth when she’d had to scramble for a branch to keep from becoming some four-footed beast’s dinner. This is where she often came to think, and to write, which never came easily.

She didn’t believe Charles would object to her borrowing some of his words for her own. It applied to the both of them.

“When I was young and foolish,” she spoke aloud, scribbling the words on her pad, “and feeling totally cast out from the world, I used to wonder if there were others like me, and dream of the future we might create.”

He couldn’t walk when he had recruited her, and never told any of them—except probably Jean—how he’d lost the use of his legs. True to form, he’d bought himself a Land Rover, fitted it for hands-only driving, and headed out across the savanna. He hadn’t gone alone, of course; Jean was by his side. Ororo wasn’t a very trusting soul, living in the shadow of Kilimanjaro and playing up local superstitions and legends to keep herself safe. She’d been learning the use of her powers by trial and error and inadvertently done far more harm than good, trying to help her own people by ending their drought only to cause an even worse one in the neighboring country. She believed Xavier’s words, but it was Jean’s smile that won her over. By the time they returned to Westchester, the two girls were the best of friends.

“Then,” Ororo continued writing, setting aside her reflections, “I actually encountered some, and aspects of that dream turned out not to be so pleasant.

“As with every era in human history—perhaps even natural history—good seems ever balanced by evil. The higher and more glorious the summit of our aspirations, the fouler and more insatiable the abyss we leave behind.

“That’s why Xavier’s has always been, and I shall hope and pray always remains, a
school
.

“While we X-Men exist to protect humanity from those who dwell in the abyss, this school is ever focused on the summit.

“Why humanity is fractured, why some have enhanced genes and others not, none of us can say. But that should not,
must
not, matter, for fundamentally we all come from the same stock. We are all born of this world, composed of the same raw materials as the cosmos itself. A potentially magnificent family of sentient beings.

“We strive because we must, that is reality. But
why
we strive must
never
be forgotten.”

Her eyes flicked across the three memorials: Xavier’s in the center, flanked by Scott and Jean. There were fresh flowers below each one.