Scott didn't wash the dust of the destroyed buildings off when they got back to the Savage Land. He didn't even go inside the vast, interlocking complex Magneto had built of his native metals. Instead he stayed inside the plane, powering it down, filling out the flight check, letting the rest of the Brotherhood depart to blow off steam. Once they were gone, he left, skirting the edge of the compound until he came to it.
The wing that had once been Xavier's. A monument to integrationism. Books on humanity's great minds, dormitories that had been planned to house baseline humans, and other testaments to peace. All burned down to an amputated limb of Magneto's now sprawling edifice.
The jungle had reclaimed it, opening pathways through the burnt and twisted metal for Scott to follow until he came to the hollow of a tree, growing out of the nutrients of the destroyed kitchen. Already it had grown tall enough to shoulder aside what was left of the roof. Scott brushed the dirt off one of its pale roots, finally pulling out a discarded medical kit. Inside the aluminum box was all that remained of Xavier since the schism. Like antibodies after an illness.
Scott opened it up, wondering if today he would look at all of them, all his lost friends. Beast, Colossus, Iceman. But no. Today, like most days, he was only concerned with the photograph atop the pile. Jean's precious portrait, the Polaroid complete with her handwriting scrawled at the bottom. Loving sentiments that he had committed to memory long ago, leaving the actual ink something of a sigil. The looping letters and neatly dotted Is like a little piece of Jean.
He sat down in the dirt to look at it. It was hard to remain standing under her gaze.
He was always useless after a bombing. Later, he would calm and mellow. He would be able to replay his crimes in his mind's eye, figuring out who had performed exceptionally and who had fallen short, deciding what combination of praise and criticism to employ as team leader. Under his purview, the Brotherhood had evolved from an unruly mob unified only by fear of Magneto and hatred of the human world; it was now almost a team. But it would never be a family.
For now, his mind was miles away from that. Back before all the bombings, all the rhetoric, all the costumes. To the night of the schism. The night everything had gone wrong—he wondered if that applied to him.
"Do you ever think of that night?" he asked the photograph—his red vision and the photograph's own fading making it a mosaic, an impression of the girl he had once known. "Or have you let it go? It hasn't faded for me. It's as vivid as last night. No, more alive. It's like it keeps happening to me. Every day, I make the same choice."
He remembered everything. Bobby bursting into his room in the middle of the night, announcing that the Senate had passed the Sentinel Act. Him and Jean calming the younger students, though some even older than him were in tears. The conference room doors shutting as Magneto and Professor X sat down to talk.
Neither of them had bothered hiding their thoughts, not in the heat of the moment. Jean had relayed the information. Magneto wanted a preemptive strike. Destroy the factories before one of those monstrosities could be built. Destroy the creators before more could be ordered into production. And Xavier, of course, had urged peace, calm, restraint.
They'd talked until morning. It wouldn't have taken that long if they could've agreed. Before, they'd always been on the same page.
When Scott saw Magneto with his helmet on—the helmet that kept Xavier out, the one
given to him
by the professor as a gesture of goodwill—he had known what was coming. He just hadn't thought it would happen so fast. The exodus of those loyal to Xavier. The loss of Xavier's legs.
The attacks.
Scott had wanted to go with them. Wanted to believe that hope and a good heart could save the world. But he'd known the truth even then. Eyes like his never turned back into baby blues. Women like Jean Grey did not fall in love with men like him. And the world did not work as Charles Xavier swore it could.
And now he set off bombs. They had killed people, but he was not a killer. Not in the final refuge of his heart. As much as he could, he minimized casualties. The targets were always property. As Magneto said, homo sapiens tended to value things over people. A million African children dying was a typical day. But the destruction of the Washington Monument—a hunk of marble and granite—that made people pay attention.
He wished it wouldn't. He wished they would listen to the professor and his talk of peace. But Magneto was right. All they understood was violence.
"Scotty..." Involuntarily, his pulse raced, his heart rang. Jean's voice. But not here. He could barely tell the difference, but if it
were
her, he would've felt her mind touching his, as affectionate as a hand ruffling his hair. There was nothing. His thoughts remained alone. "Won't you come back to the X-Men? We want to sing kumbaya and smoke s'mores. It's just not the same without you..."
Scott watched Mystique thread through the vines and ferns that obscured the violence of this place's jagged metal. She wore Jean as a caricature—the graceful stride exaggerated to flouncing, the coy look turned to puppy dog eyes, the voice drowning in sugar.
"It's a good impression," he said tightly, "but it doesn't impress me. A cheap shot like that. Try turning into my favorite comedian. That would at least take some wits." He watched her redness flatten into one shade: her natural, nude color. All but the blood-red drip of hair down her neck. So vivid to him through the visor.
"You think it's tiresome for me to turn into her, imagine how I feel—seeing you fixated with the same girl year after year. Why can't you obsess over Jennifer Lawrence like a normal person?"
"It's not a fixation," Scott argued. "It clears my head. She's calming."
"I could calm you down," Mystique said, reaching up to take hold of a dangling creeper and hanging off it. Her body bounced enticingly. Part of the reason she went naked, he was sure, was so that no one knew if such motions were intentionally directed at them or not. She liked hiding in the ambiguity. "You really want to get over her, say the word. I'll put her back on, you can use us like a cheap whore—bet it'd be cathartic." Although there was something to be said for the direct approach.
"Or I could talk to Mastermind and make him think there are seven Jeans giving me a sponge bath." Scott shook his head. "Not interested."
"She's the enemy now."
"She's not."
"She and her people nearly took Blob's head off in Singapore."
"Who would listen to Xavier otherwise?" When he focused on someone, really looked at them, he could make them know it even through the visor. "We're on the same side. The carrot and the stick. We make the humans fear us, then by opposing us, the X-Men win what little respect they can. It's a symbiotic relationship. Without them, we would incur unrelieved fear toward every mutant on Earth. Without us, they'd just be hippies in fashionable leather outfits."
"Interesting theory." Mystique released the creeper, dropping and twisting, in one smooth motion, to land beside him atop one of the tree's gargantuan roots. "That's what I like about you, Scott. However many merit badges you have, you're not a hardliner. You can see the merits of peace without being a pacifist like Charles. And you can see the merits of violence without being an extremist like Erik. It's because of you that the more liberal news shows call us 'radicals' instead of 'terrorists'." He wondered if her smile now was genuine or hard-won to look so. "Someday we may even be freedom fighters. Wouldn't that be interesting."
"Somehow I'm starting to think this isn't about a booty call."
"Oh, no, it's still about sex. But then, everything is." She reached out to him, and he was surprised by how coolly reptilian her hand felt against his cheek. Through his visor it had looked red-hot. Like a branding iron. "You have potential, Scott Summers. You've come so far from being Magneto's wind-up soldier. You don't just follow orders now, you give them. And Erik's around less and less. Soon he'll be little more than a figurehead. Who would he trust with mutantkind?"
"His son?" Scott asked. And people thought he didn't have a sense of humor.
"Pietro... no. Magneto kills for the cause. Quicksilver kills to impress daddy. He'd drive the Brotherhood off a cliff. But congratulations, by the way. I see he actually followed orders on the last mission. You finally convinced him that slaughtering apes wholesale wouldn't get him that hug."
