X-Men: The Last Stand (42 page)

“The yearnings—the hopes—that bind us together as a species must be greater and more lasting than the petty conflicts that drive us apart. We are all of us brothers and sisters, parents and children. And ultimately, the character of each and every person, and the deeds that flow from it, must matter more than the color of their skin, or the structure of their genome.

“That is our dream. This school, and we X-Men, exist to help make it a reality.”

“Not so bad,” commented a voice from right beside her. A sideways glance revealed Kitty, standing nonchalantly on empty air, her easy manner wholly belied by the hooded eyes that surveyed the three markers.

“I’m terrified,” Ororo remarked.

“You get the big office, Headmistress,” Kitty zinged quietly, “you get the headaches to go with.”

“I think I liked our lives better when we were semi-outlaws.”

“Everything changes, ’Ro. Ain’t evolution a bitch?”

Ororo cocked a disapproving eyebrow. Friends they might be and teammates as well, but they were also Head and student and certain proprieties had to be observed. Rules that were good enough for Charles Xavier were just as good for his first successor.

Kitty air-walked down a flight of invisible steps that brought her to the three cenotaphs. Ororo swung herself from her perch with a silent grace she’d learned when she was younger than Kitty, training to be a thief. For her, that outlaw past was more than a mere phrase.

“I miss them,” Kitty said simply.

Ororo draped an arm across the girl’s shoulders and pulled her close. “Me, too,” she replied, her voice going briefly husky. “Every day.”

“It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet.”

Bells sounded throughout the great, old house, and the hallways of its lower two floors exploded with life and activity, as scores of young people made their way from class to class. The student population was double what it had been before Xavier’s death, and there was a deliberate mix now of mutant and sapien, as the school began to establish a reputation not only as the world’s foremost facility for the teaching and investigation of mutant abilities but as an academic institution in its own right.

“This process is slow, normally taking thousands and thousands of years.”

Hank McCoy sat perched over the teacher’s desk as the students filed in, hanging upside down from a trapeze bar installed by Nightcrawler. No one stared, as this was actually one of his more restrained poses.

On his desk, his laptop was open, its webcam oriented to pick him up where he was hanging. He wore a headset. None of the students could see the screen, which was just as well since he was finishing a conversation with the president.

“I appreciate the offer, sir,” he told David Cockrum, “but I truly believe that my place is here. For the present anyway, this is where I can do the most good.”

“I understand.” Then Cockrum broke his train of thought with a shake of the head. “Henry, for God’s sake, have pity on the rest of us. Do you have any notion of how disconcerting it is to talk to someone who’s hanging upside down?”

“You look perfectly fine to me, sir,” McCoy replied, blandly deadpan.

“Have it your own way, then. I’m taking your advice about Alicia Vargas. I’ll be sending her name up to the Senate for confirmation as the new Secretary of Mutant Affairs.”

“Couldn’t do better, sir.”

“Actually, I could, if the fella I have in mind weren’t so damn stubborn. Any time you want a job, Henry!”

“Due respect, sir, the government job I find myself fantasizing about isn’t really yours to give.”

Cockrum snorted. “Give a man his second term, will you? Be well, Henry.”

“Best to Paty, sir.”

“By the way,” the president said just before breaking contact, “a very young lady just walked through the wall behind you. Does that happen often?”

“Do you really want to know?”

Both men chuckled. The screen went dark. As McCoy twisted himself lithely to his chair, he noticed that Kitty had left something for him to look at: a fairly professional-looking poster, a head shot of her looking quite grown-up, below the words:
ELECT CHICAGO’S PRYDE.

He cocked an eyebrow, and she returned a conspiratorial grin; evidently he wasn’t the only one harboring presidential fantasies.

“But every few hundred millennia…evolution leaps forward.”

Hank called the class to order, and set aside the text he’d originally intended using. With a wicked smile, he plucked up a well-read copy of
Ethics,
by Benedict de Spinoza.

“So long as a man imagines that he cannot do this or that,” McCoy read, his well-rounded, theatrical tones instantly quieting the room and gathering in everyone’s attention, “so long is he determined not to do it: and consequently, so long is it impossible to him that he should do it.” He paused a moment to let the words sink in. “So, class, how do we integrate such a philosophy into
our
modern world? What for us constitutes ‘impossible?’ Ms. Pryde, shall we start with you?”

“That is why I created a school for gifted youngsters…”

“Also in today’s news, spokesmen for Warren Worthington Jr. announced this morning that the last of their mutant clinics has been closed. Established only a few months ago to distribute what was trumpeted as a ‘cure’ for the so-called mutator gene that is present in a significant and growing segment of the global population, the clinics were the cause of considerable controversy during those early days. However, with Worthington’s subsequent acknowledgment and acceptance of his own son as a mutant, popular support and interest in that cure has substantially evaporated, as has the need for the clinics.”