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No Surface All Feeling; 5/22 early evening - Rugby crew + others
Topic Started: Nov 17 2013, 06:01 PM (574 Views)
Kiwi Black
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International Bloke of Mystery
Queen's Jokers - Admin
Let me tell you something, mate - the best people usually are. That one was actually the Cheshire Cat’s line, not that you had to suppose it mattered much who said what around here, the way they’d all been mixing. But it was a truth alright, and one that Hone thought worth saying to the sad-eyed lady at the end of the table.

"Just so," Purple echoed from the other side of the table, gaze meeting his for a moment as the former chief and sometime oversized cat person twitched his lips in answer. Yeah, they might be more than a wee bit mad, alright, but if it were all going to end in the weeping tantrums of a mental shitstorm, at least the company wasn’t bad, eh?

Frost, she was looking their girl over, clearly as full of thoughts as a whaler’s barrel was full of fat by the time it got back to Nantucket, and she took up the cause next. "Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you've come to-day. Consider what o'clock it is. Consider anything, only don't cry."

It looked - as much as you could tell anything in here, while she was flickering between her empty smile and half a hundred fleeting, hunted emotions - like that might not have been what their Alice wanted to hear just now. A second, maybe two of blankness, a twitch at the corner of her eyes, and she shook her head. “I wish I hadn’t cried so much-” she said, in a voice that was cracking around the edges again, like she’d been back in the room before she’d broken and lapsed back into that closed-off silence. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears.”

“Jean-” Summers prompted, apparently already with a desire for another trip down into whatever hole there was behind his visor. This time though, all he earned himself was a look that seemed about as effective as silencing him as the visor itself had been, then a catty, exaggerated wee mouthing of the words 'Play along', made like it was an invitation to join the farce.

“You think you know what I’m going through.” No question that Grey Ginger hadn’t meant there to be any room for a question there. Overhead, the bright, paint-like sky was tearing up ominously, wisps of dark grey holes forming and reforming like the start of a storm that had come straight off the breath of the Other Bugger.

“Let’s see if you know how it feels to be Me.”

“Mate...” Hone started, trying to keep any kind of demand out of the warning note he tried to sound, but it was too late before he’d even started. One of the holes in the sky ripped wider, swarming down like a waterspout and wrapping itself around Frost. Something about it - something you could just about feel, even from the other side of the table - whiffs of desolation and despair, thrown off the thin mist that had enveloped the White Queen like spume off a ship as she cut the waves.

"Curiouser and curiouser," declared Mantis, sounding about the same as she ever did, while Purple shared a more concerned glance his way. Hone met that, raised it at least a notch, but had bugger all in the way of things to offer beyond concern to guide himself, let alone anyone else here. Hostage situation, or something else? Try as he might to figure it through, he wasn’t getting anywhere.

"She won't understand," Purple managed, finding quiet words for the redhead and keeping her eyes there and nowhere else. Looked like she might have got at least some of Grey’s attention too, though it was hard to say, because the redhead was keeping her own gaze on the mass of grey and black that had recently been Frost, with an expression that was intent but divorced from any other emotion stamped across her features. “I'm not sure she can."

“It’s just feelings,” the redhead argued, sounding just a couple of whiskers short of bloody petulant, for all her lack of visible affect. “You don’t need to understand them. You just feel them.”

If those were ‘just’ feelings she’d draped around the other telepath though, it didn’t seem like feeling them was going to be in Frost’s best interests. That much, Hone would have been the whole bloody flying boat on.

It was Summers though, who was the next to try throwing his hat - or his helm, as it were - in the ring, doffing the thing entirely and setting it beside him on the table. One glance to the Frost-thing at his side, then his eyes were locked solidly on his wife. “Jean, stop it. Don’t do this.” Stern and uncompromising, but who knew, maybe there was a bit of softer emotion in there after all - few days still hadn’t really been enough for Hone to make up his mind on that front.

“If I had a world of my own," Purple added, just in time to break up whatever tension was gathering between the newlyweds, deflating a sudden flash of something that had been gathering behind the green eyes, "everything would be nonsense.”

“You’re hurting her,” Summers continued, maybe even halfway to making it a request, not an order. By his standards, that was probably down on his knees, begging, you just about had to think. “Jean, come on. You’re better than this. You don’t have to do this.”

“Spreading hurt around won’t make it thinner, cuz,” Hone added in the pause that followed, seeing something that looked like it might have been a pause hovering in the redhead’s expression, and deciding to chance the nudge that might tilt it to falling the way they wanted. “It’s not butter.”

She did pause, at least. Didn’t quite let go of that mess of black and grey she had there, but she paused, turned her eyes his way. “That’s not really a line.”

“Nah,” Hone agreed. That was simple enough, as he met her eyes. “It’s what I’m saying though, eh,” he added, with a quick glance around the table at the others. “And I’d say we all reckon you know that too.”

For one moment - one bloody long bugger of a moment - it all just hung there, like it was balanced on the edge of the redhead’s slightly open mouth. Then there was a flicker of something in the periphery, and whatever it was, that cloak of cold dark feeling that had been smothering Frost evaporated, seemingly drawn back across the table and into the woman at its head. She shivered, pulling her knees up close to herself again, and seemed to diminish as she did.

“Everything is what it is and what it isn’t, all at once,” she said, in a still clear voice, “And what it isn’t...”

“...is no bloody good at all.” Starting slightly, Hone looked to his left, where those words had come from. Grey had trailed off before it - that was Mantis who finished that thought, even if she’d apparently taken the words right out of his head before he’d finished forming them.

Curiouser and bloody curiouser, alright.
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White Queen
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Top class breeding, darlings.
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“You think you know what I’m going through.”

The flat, cold delivery only served to reinforce the sudden turn of their little exchange of quaint lines from a quaint story. Jean, still wrapping herself in a cage of misery and suffering stronger than any steel, proof against all their attempts so far to reach deep enough into her consciousness to help her. Or, to be more precise, the woman whose body and mind she was trying to overwhelm. The one player in all this they had yet to bring forth.

But now there was more. A warped interpretation of Emma's own thoughts, fueled by the redhead's rage and grief and insufferable self-righteousness. And danger. So much danger centered directly on Emma as Jean leveled flat, purposeful eyes on her, entire body tilted forward balanced upon knees and elbows like a child settling in for their favorite Saturday Morning Cartoon.

"Not this," Emma said, much too quietly as the long-forgotten grip of paralyzing fear seeped through her. "Not you." It was pointless to protest. Emma could see the futility of her efforts reflected in the unflinching gaze of her former rival as well as in the ominous cracks and stains in the saccharine paint streaks on the canvas overhead. Even if she could have given stronger voice to her plea, it would have fallen on deaf ears.

“Let’s see if you do,” Jean said, and a spreading hole in the sky suddenly erupted into a finger of swirling great and black, reaching for Emma.

Too late to flee. There was no escape. No place in all that was Jean and her mental landscape to hide. "No!" Emma cried out, curling up, arms moving to shield her head, but there was nothing she could do to protect herself from the darkness rushing toward her and the suffering it brought with it.

“Let’s see if you know how it feels to be Me.”

At first she barely felt a thing. She might have thought she'd only imagined the oncoming impact as she was left with no option but to brace for it. But her eyes were proof enough that she'd been taken. Nothing. Like a bottomless pit - no. A coffin. She was on her back, a jagged marble surface below her, wooden beams and metal and concrete surrounding her everywhere else. Pinning her legs. Her chest, compressing it tight enough to make every breath a struggle. Scant inches of empty air between her and anything not directly on top of her. She recognized this. The ruins of the Massachusetts Academy. But something was different, and very, very wrong.

Emma knew what it was before her eyes had adjusted enough, which should have been impossible under all this rubble, to catch a glimpse of her own body. A shoulder. Flesh. Not diamond. That wasn't how it had happened. She'd changed. She remembered it clearly. Her secondary mutation had kicked in right as the building collapsed around them. It was the only reason she had survived the assault, where everyone else had been slain. Her students-

Her students.

The first anguished cries of the dying seared into her mind with the force of a sledgehammer to the gut. Beef and Jetstream. Their deaths had been quick, but the suffering felt like twin eternities, exploding through her and piercing clean through her soul. No, no, no. This hadn't happened. This-

Again. Tarot. Again. Empath. Again. Roulette. Over and over in ones and twos and threes, starbursts of torment as Emma felt the psychic backlash of their final moments in their entirety. "Noooooo!" Emma twisted and writhed, which was impossible. She couldn't move, but she could feel it happen all the same, someplace outside this prison, where she was closed off from all her senses, leaving her only this. This unrelenting torment she could not blunt. This wasn't how it had happened! Her students. Her children.

No.

Not her voice. Not Jean's. And not one voice. Several, but Emma could not be sure how many. She was no longer in the pocket of rubble she'd clawed her way out of in the real course of events. Now she was lying on a table. There were other voices surrounding her in the darkness, but they spoke only in whispers. Moved only in shadows. She heard bare snatches of dialogue. Something that sounded like 'self-induced psychic coma,' but that was all she could make out.

"What is this place?" Emma asked, this time only within her own prison. Outside that she could only sense herself rocking back and forth helplessly.

Do, you, Emma? Did you know how this feels?

Emma jerked her head toward the sound of that voice, but it seemed to come from everywhere and receded in hollow-sounding echoes. The former Hellfire Queen tried to move, but she was restrained. Wrist and ankle cuffs, like a medical bed at an insane asylum.

"Hello, Mother."

Emma gasped. Her eyes grew wide with shock, and she rolled her head from one side to the next. As before, the voices came from all around her, but they were clear. Close. No unearthly resonance passed in their wake. Swallowing hard, Emma shook her head in mute denial as a figure approached from the left. Then a second from the right. Three. Four.

Five.

Blonde hair. Identical faces, all bearing hound tattoos on their faces. Whatever passed for Emma's blood in this never before reached depth of the psyche ran cold as ice. This. Was. A Lie!

Laughter. A quintet chorus of silvery peals, eerie in their flat, almost robotic uniformity. "Is not, Mother! Is not!" They sounded delighted. And accusing. And somehow lifeless. "Won't you at least wish us a Happy Birthday?"

"Stop," Emma moaned and tugged at the cuffs on her wrists. "Please don't do this." This wasn't real. This was some trick of her own mind to manifest the pain Jean was cramming down her throat. It couldn't be real.

They laughed again, mocking. Cruel. "You just don't remember," said one.

"It's our birthday, but you got all the gifts," chimed another.

Two more singsonged, "Diamonds are Foreverrrr."

Emma shook her head, a tear crawling down her cheek unbidden. "No."

"They grew us right here," said the last, the youngest, Emma somehow knew. "And sold us to Him."

"And then we diiiiiied!" the singers chorused.

The first swept her hand overhead. "But not our sisters!" To Emma's horror, the ceiling lit up, blooming to life with hundreds, maybe thousands of pods. All containing identical girls floating in a clear fluid.

"Break 'em and replace 'em."

"Mass production, telepath style."

Tears were streaming down Emma's face in great waves. "No. I don't believe this. It's not true!"

The girls closed in, hands drifting over Emma face and head, digging into her hair. She tried to recoil from their touch, but couldn't move. "We took your memories, and they took you back," one said as Emma stared up at them with wild eyes.

"So you could wake up and kill Auntie Adrianne."

"No loose ends here."

"But we're gone, now."

Three of the girls held their hands to their throats and made exaggerated choking noises, tongues hanging out.

"Find our sisters..."

"...Or they'll find you..."

"...We're all dead..."

"...But you've gone-"

"Cuckoo," Emma said under her breath, suddenly back in her seat at the tea party table. She blinked and brought a hand up to her cheek, felt the dampness of many shed tears. She looked around, barely registering what everyone else was saying as she fixed her eyes on Jean, still curled up on her seat at the head of the table.

Snarling, Emma rose on unsteady feet. "Off. With. Her. Head." she hissed, and lashed out with all her mental might at the redheaded woman. Blindly, and with a singular purpose. Not to destroy, but to be destroyed. She didn't want to live with what she'd just seen. With what she'd felt. With what she knew. It was more than she could bear. Better that Jean lash back with that power that dwarfed Emma's own, as Emma's had dwarfed Astrid's. To be absorbed as Emma had absorbed Astrid.

Perhaps in doing so, she might even find that necessary ingredient to balance her mind with the intruding presence of her twin's psyche. Or maybe she wouldn't. Emma couldn't bring herself to care right now. She just wanted the pain to go away.
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Jean Grey
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It really was no use saying no. The Queen of Diamonds really ought to have known that, oughtn’t she? But she did all the same, and non-contrary-wise the result was the same anyway, because it was no good at all thinking you understand, if you didn’t know whether you did understand.

“Mate...” said the Cat, throwing around that word all over again, but Red ignored him too. What would be the point of doing a thing if you didn’t watch what happened after? And she’d done it already, so now she had to watch, and see what happened when she held the Queen of Diamonds close inside a blanket of the storm of emotion that had claimed all of her own mind but this one little kaleidoscope bubble of surreality.

Shrug it off, Red. You can beat this. You’re stronger than this. Great girls don’t cry, they don’t break, they don’t shatter, not if they try hard enough. Everything else is just being precious, self-indulgent.

"Curiouser and curiouser," the Caterpillar uttered, indifferently interested in the proceedings, but perhaps she had enough to see inside the grey cocoon to glimpse the flashes of thought and imagination that the Queen of Diamond had made out of her gifted emotions.

Buried under so much rubble, and all her children dead. Yes, yes, she felt responsible, but the thing... the thing...

"She won't understand," the Hatter commented, making her a very clever Hatter for someone who couldn’t really see inside the thoughts, "I'm not sure she can." She might even be more right than she knew, thought Red. Losing your charges of course, that was very sad. But having to end something that had actually loved you back? What did the queen of crystal and ice with a flaw running through her heart know about that?

But she didn’t want to end this yet. Not till she knew for sure, because otherwise what would have been the point? Of anything? “It’s just feelings,” Red pointed out to the Hatter and her careful tiptoeing unspoken suggestions. “You don’t need to understand them. You just feel them.”

If you had the heart to do it.

The knight’s helm hit the table with a thump, and here, in this imaginary world, his eyes could meet hers. Blue, they were, and stern, and he loved her, but he was scared of her, and he was going to order her to...

“Jean, stop it. Don’t do this.”

Yes. Yes, that. She loved him too, but she could ignore him if she wanted - he hadn’t said please, and he wouldn’t listen to her if she didn’t say please.

“If I had a world of my own," added the Hatter, and at least she was still sticking to the script, when everything and everyone else wanted to try to shatter this fragile little bubble with their warnings and orders and emotions and their imaginations, worlds where clone after clone after clone came to taunt them (Me too, said the Queen of Diamonds. I must have clones too, and more than you, for you are only a little red girl, and I am a Queen), "everything would be nonsense.”

Everything was nonsense. Everything hurt. Everything cried. Everything ought to make no sense at all, because the only sense that there was was full of holes and jagged edges with no safe place to rest.

“You’re hurting her,” said the Knight. He was good at stating the obvious, when he wanted to be. “Jean, come on. You’re better than this. You don’t have to do this.”

She did though, did Red, and she still didn’t look at him. She really ought to do this. How would she know, otherwise? How would she know what she was supposed to be able to bear, if she didn’t know what other people could? How would-

“Spreading hurt around won’t make it thinner, cuz,” said the Cat, interrupting her thoughts and being far too inconveniently right, and not nearly instructional enough to be annoyed at. Patronizing cat-man and his silly homespun ‘truths’. What had Alice done with Dinah’s kitten?

But...

...but....

“It’s not butter.”

“That’s not really a line,” she told him.

“Nah.”. Irritating. Why had she turned to look at him anyway? The White Queen was hurting, her little Queenlets choking and falling over while her mind reeled and fought and hurt, hurt hurt. “It’s what I’m saying though, eh,” added the Cat, shifting his eyes and making her follow him to look around the rest of the table. “And I’d say we all reckon you know that too.”

She...

...but she...

...she...

...didn’t want to have to hurt other people anymore.

"Cuckoo," said the Queen, as she reached down the table without moving, pulling away the layers of grey and black and let them return to where they’d been all along, inside her head, and as much a part of it now as anything else she could feel, no way to tell where the edges were, because there weren’t.

“Everything is what it is and what it isn’t, all at once,” she told them all. Cuckoo, cuckoo, we’re all mad here. And a cuckoo is the thing that sneaks into a nest, kills the things that belonged there, and convinces its parents to raise it all the same. And they do, and they love it, just like they would have loved their own dead babies..

“And what it isn’t...” she began, and trailed off.

What would you call a parent who stole someone else’s baby and made them love them most of all? Madelyne Pryor had known... but Madelyne Pryor was dead, and she was his wife now.

“...is no bloody good at all,” the Caterpillar finished for her. Maybe to help... or maybe to warn, because the Queen of Diamonds was rising, rising rising, standing with a snarl...

"Off. With. Her. Head."

Snicker-snack.

One two, one two... and the psionic lash of diamond hard whiplike will snapped through and through, shattering itself over the surface of the table and skittering away like dry ice across a warm surface.

Jean Grey nodded gravely. “Yes. That’s your line,” she told the white woman, watching her with eyes that had begun to soften around the edges. “Perhaps you can understand a little after all,” she said sadly.

Hurt, and pain, and nothing nothing nothing to go on unless you could find a way to make someone make an end for you. Hurt, and pain, and loss.

With a silent step and quiet purpose, Jean rose from her seat at the end of the table, and began to walk around it, passing the Knight with a wide berth, and drawing back closer again on the other side of the Emma Frost. Gently, sadly, she placed one hand carefully on the woman’s shoulder, and leaned in to kiss the cold shadows of mental tears that were staining the woman’s pale cheek. “Remember what a great girl you are,” she said, very softly, because perhaps it would mean more to the woman who’d tried to use than it had for her, “Emma Frost never lets the world beat her for very long.”
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Purple Girl
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Just feelings. Things that you just felt, didn't need to understand.

But feelings were substantial things and these gray-black ones swirled and coalesced around Emma Frost like a malevolent entity. Nothing 'just' about them and, yes, she was certainly feeling them, wasn't she? Would that help either one of them, in the end.

Scott Summers pulled off his helmet then, setting it onto the table to demand, “Jean, stop it. Don’t do this.” Like he was talking to a recalcitrant child instead of his wife. Maybe it wasn't what he'd meant it to be, but even when she'd been thirteen and just this side of out of control, Madison or Heather hadn't talked to her that way.

This wasn't a tantrum. This was pain. As much as Kara was concerned by it, torn between whether to intervene herself or not, she thought she understood it at least a little. Her own world, if she'd had one, would've looked something like this. A place of fancy and nonsense, covering up the things she'd tried to make sense of and couldn't.

“You’re hurting her,” Summers continued, not as stern now, but obvious. Wasn't that what his wife was meaning to do? “Jean, come on. You’re better than this. You don’t have to do this.”

“Spreading hurt around won’t make it thinner, cuz,” Hone added in the pause that followed, making an attempt of his own as their Alice seemed to falter the smallest bit. “It’s not butter.”

She didn't release Emma, but Jean turned at least some of her attention to Hone. It was something. “That’s not really a line.”

“Nah,” Hone agreed meeting the telepath's eyes as Kara held herself on that edge, poised between taking control of the whole thing, breaking them all out of it, and letting this play out. Still not willing to interfere, but soon. If she didn't release Emma from..gods alone knew what sort of torment she'd mired her in, she'd have no choice. “It’s what I’m saying though, eh,” he added, with a quick glance around the table at the others. “And I’d say we all reckon you know that too.”

A moment that seemed to stretch, then that foreboding cloud released Emma, pulled back into Jean's head. Gods forgive them for what they'd done to this woman. To both of them, at this point. Even if there was no other choice.

"Cuckoo," Emma said under her breath and Kara's head, halfway through a nod of agreement, swiveled that way, to where the White Queen sat blinking. Face wet with tears that her fingers found when she raised her hand to it.

"Emma?" Kara began cautiously as the other woman peered around the table. Hoping she hadn't made a grave mistake, hoping she wasn't making another one now, by not taking control of this situation that could careen into complete disaster at any given second. She could feel it, that tightrope they were all walking on.

Dark purple eyes swung to Hone as Jean drew herself into a ball again, shivering. “Everything is what it is and what it isn’t, all at once,” she said, in a still clear voice, “And what it isn’t...”

“...is no bloody good at all.” Mantis finished for her, startling Hone. The former chieftain swung his gaze that way as Kara shook her head at her teammate in bemusement. Yes, that about covered it, didn't it?


"Off. With. Her. Head." snarled the White Queen suddenly and from there it seemed to all happen in slow motion. Perhaps it did, as Emma stood and Kara stood with her, poised to take the step off that tightrope as she felt she psionic snap of will behind those words. The intent.

No!

Before she could say the word, even think it more than in that way that words floated to the surface of your mind. Before her own will could enter into the picture, it was done. That willful force shattered like surf breaking on a rocky beach and Jean Grey gave a solemn nod.

“Yes. That’s your line,” [Jean] told the white woman, watching her with eyes that had begun to soften around the edges. “Perhaps you can understand a little after all,” she said sadly rising from her seat as Kara dropped down into her own again, still more than half holding her breath as she walked over to Emma and laid a hand lightly on the other woman's shoulder.

Then kissed her cheek of all things, saying something to her quietly that Kara couldn't quite make out, though the bits she did manage to catch echoed back to the former Hellfire Queen words she'd said to Jean only a short time before. But they seemed more sympathetic then mocking now.

Sometimes she really did believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

"It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life," Kara commented to Hone and Mantis as she took a breath and yet again adjusted her hat. Kept one eye on the two telepaths all the same and hoped they didn't have to deal with another moment like that, though she knew that was probably a futile hope at best.

Walking a tightrope. It was exactly what they were all doing. A tightrope strung down a rabbit hole.

"Being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing," agreed Mantis. Or Kara took it for agreement, anyway and she nodded again.

"Bumped out heads and bruised our souls," Purple Girl added with a murmur, glancing back at the other two women, the ones with the most bumps and bruises so far, and hoping they sorted this as well as it could be without too many more.
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Kiwi Black
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Cuckoo?

Bit of an odd bloody thing to come out with, in the middle all of this, but at least it seemed to indicate that Frost was in possession of her tongue, if not all her wits, now that the redhead had pulled that buggered-up cloud back off her. Apart from that, and the soft question Purple made of the White Queen’s name, now didn’t seem to be much of the right time to get into reckoning that mess out, as far as Hone saw it. Not with Jean Grey, or whatever it was she was calling herself, who’d pulled all of that mess back into herself, and was now sitting there at the end of the table, looking more than a wee bit worse for wear on it.

Still quoting Dodgson, that seedy old bugger, like she had the whole thing memorized though. Couldn’t say whether that was a good thing or not, though the former chieftain was leaning hard on the no end of things with the way she was trailing off over what everything wasn’t even before Mantis went and plucked the bloody words right out of his head and borrowed them for herself.

Never sounded quite right when someone from the non-Commonwealth end of whatever pond you were talking about used the word bloody, but there was bugger all time to get into that either, because without anything like warning, Frost’s voice cut across anything else that might have been going on.

“Off. With. Her. Head.”

Rose to her feet - Kara next to her, following half a beat behind, though that already looked too late, as the woman in the tiara snarled and lashed out in a way that inside this space, you didn’t need the slightest amount of psionic sensitivity to feel right to your bones. Summers was rooted to the spot, rigid as a board, Hone himself didn’t think he could have moved a thought-muscle if his life depended on it (might well have, too), and even Mantis beside him seemed a whole lot more concerned than he’d ever seen her.

Only one who didn’t seem bothered, in point of fact, was the redhead herself. The mental attack fell apart before her like snow falling on a volcano, and all that was left was Jean Grey sitting there, nodding solemnly as a test team selector, and commenting about how that was the Queen’s line.

Well, bugger this all to bloody nowhere.

If someone wanted to tell him whether it was a good thing or not that she’d decided that Frost might be able to understand ‘a little after all’, he’d be ready and waiting, any bloody time, because it was clear as the Waikato in flood season to Hone just now, which was to say, not at all, and watch out for tree trunks and floating dairy cows in there while you’re at it.

Didn’t stop there either, as the redhead got up from her seat at the end of the table, skirting round her husband and seeming to be completely oblivious to the pleading look and the arm he was lifting toward her, coming back in on the other side of Frost. Hand on her shoulder, gentle as someone with a skittish horse, and then planting one on the other woman’s tear-stained cheek.

“It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life,” Purple observed on behalf of pretty much all the rest of them, Hone reckoned. Maybe not Summers - who could tell what that bloke was thinking, as he watched with his wife murmur something else to Frost that was too low to catch from where Hone was sitting. Stone-faced stoicism, or maybe just stolidity, that was about all the New Zealander was seeing from where he was at, but he was about ready to give up trying to figure out that bloke at all, truth be told.

“Being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing," agreed Mantis. All a wee bit topsy-turvy through this bloody looking glass, wasn’t it, Hone thought to himself by way of agreement, while nodding alongside Purple and not quite taking his eye off the two telepaths on the other side of the table, any more than anyone else there was either.

Bit of wisdom living at least three lifetimes worth of life would give you - when there was one woman kissing another, especially in public? Well, then all bets were off about what was going to come next. Could be one thing, could be another, could be nothing at all, but if you were wise, you didn’t rush in to any kind of conclusion about any of it.

“Bumped out heads and bruised our souls.” Purple again, seeming like she had at least as inexhaustible a store of quotes from the Christ Church College Don as Jean Grey had herself as she watched the pair of them. So what was there for a bloke from the other end of the world to do but shrug, and dig one last shot of his own out from the banks of memory.

“One of the deep secrets of life, eh.”

All that really is worth doing, is for others. Good enough truth to be getting on with, Hone reckoned.
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White Queen
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Freedom Fighters
There were other words, other people. They may as well have been buzzing gnats for all the notice Emma spared them. All her intent, all her rage, all her will and desperation was focused entirely upon her target. If Jean wanted a Queen of Hearts, she would have one.

Emma didn't hold back and paid no mind to the sharp spikes of alarm rising up around her. She hurled everything she had at the woman in red with the force of a ranseur. The psychic bolt flung itself against the table between them and dispersed like dandelion seeds in a gale. Batted aside with laughable ease, just as with every encounter where Emma's strength had been tested against Jean's.

Good.

Next would come the counter strike. Overwhelming and unavoidable. Emma waited for it. She would not brace herself. There would be no desperate attempt to resist oblivion.

The expected retaliation never came. Jean simply watched Emma and nodded, almost as if she'd been waiting all this time for something like this. “Yes. That’s your line,” the redheaded woman said as she watched her with an expression Emma hadn't seen directed at her in so long she'd forgotten what it looked like. “Perhaps you can understand a little after all,” she said, her voice full of sadness.

No! This wasn't what she was supposed to do. Emma's eyes became more wild and furious than they'd already been, urging Jean to obliterate her. They'd only ever known each other as enemies. They hated each other. She'd attacked and she was her, inside her mind. An easy target for the chaos consuming her. What more incentive could Jean possibly need?

Emma shook her head. "No," she said, as Jean rose from her seat and began to approach. She had to will herself to hold her ground and her voice not to tremble. "I don't." ...want to understand any of it. A calculated omission. Bad enough the thought had been there at all, but perhaps the three words which had crept through might spark Jean's anger anew and motivate her to end this.

Had it been a simulacrum of Jean's own pain, it might have been different. No doubt it would have been agony, but she could have tried to endure with the certainty that once it was over, she could step away from it. That it might fade. Not this. No. Something hidden away had been unlocked, a horrible, unimaginable truth, and Emma could feel her mind unraveling under its relentless glare.

This was beyond anything Emma had been prepared for when she agreed to lend her talents to the task before them. What use was mending the clash of wills between each Jean if either one could not endure this private, personal hell she carried? As well to provide a sandwich to a starving man with no teeth.

Jean stood before her, still refusing to slay her and end the torment. Emma's breath caught as her rival placed a gentle hand on her shoulder and moved closer, bending her head to Emma's cheek to place a soft kiss upon the tracks of psychic tears she'd shed. “Remember what a great girl you are,” she said faintly into her ear, and Emma stiffened, face going tight and flat.

Her earlier words turned back on her. But there was a resonating chord to go with them, not unlike Jean's earlier taunt about her father, but in a shifted context. So many achievements in her life. Power. Wealth. Influence. She had much to be proud of. And yet...

“Emma Frost never lets the world beat her for very long.”

No, she didn't. Somehow, though her mind continued to howl and thrash as never in her life, she would find a way to overcome even this. It was what she did. As if moving by itself, Emma's other hand rose and found its way to Jean's shoulder. She sketched her own lips against the other woman's cheek. "It's never enough," she whispered. Never. No matter what she did, how high she rose or how hard she tried, she had always fallen short. Nothing reminded her of that more constantly than her efforts at redemption, and after what she'd seen, how much of that could she be certain was even her own?

Diamonds did not block the light, after all. They merely refracted it.

"And what does Jean Grey do?" she asked. If she was to parade how well she knew Emma, to cut through the hard shell that had been her armor since well before the Hellfire Club, the least Jean could do was demonstrate how well she knew herself.
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Jean Grey
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The most curious thing I ever saw in my life.

But what was it, but a kiss?

Many things. Many sizes, many shapes, and that was confusing, as the Caterpillar told them. Who would know better than One who had been all of them in her turn? She knew much, much much more than there would ever be words to say, but this wasn’t the time for her to take her turn. It was Emma. Little Emma Frost, the great big girl who’d tried to be so many different things in her life, but had only ever been one person.

She should remember that, thought the redheaded woman, whether the White Queen wanted to listen to her or not. She was inside her brain, and so she would simply have to. Though our heads are bumped and our souls are bruised - yet we never can think we were just confused…

But that was an entirely different kind of nonsense mixed in, and she left it unspoken, and said all that really needed to be said.

Emma Frost never let the world beat her for very long.

All that is worth doing, is worth doing for others. The Cat and the Kiwi didn’t think he needed to say the words out loud, and he didn’t, for she knew that one too, even while the White Queen’s pale hand rose, and reached her shoulder, and cool, pale lips brushed in their turn against her cheek.

“It’s never enough," she whispered.

She turned her head, bringing green eyes round to bear on the other woman’s pale blues, where she would be free to see where it was that the pain she’d so recently been wrapped in had been borrowed from. “Do you really think you need to tell me?” Jean asked her. Softly, and sadly, for nothing could ever be enough.

“And what does Jean Grey do?”

Breaks. Shatters. Sinks away into the hole that opened up in her mind. Kills every piece of hope that could have been left to remind her. Sets the trigger on that ancient cannon, and lets it fire, and pulls her own mind to pieces so she won’t have to remember.

Chooses love. Chooses to fight, ever day. Chooses fear, chooses every day after the next, scared of her own reflection, not knowing whether today is the day it will fall apart again and not be saved in time.

“That,” said Jean, matter-of-factly, “is what we’re here to find out.”

And with that, she turned away from Emma Frost, and stepping away, slipping around the Purple Hatter girl’s chair, and taking up a perch on the table, ankles dangling and crossed demurely as she leaned in toward the pair of violet eyes beneath the purple hat brim. Extended her hand to delicately lift away the hat from the other woman’s head, placing it down over her own hair at a rakish angle, then tilted her head to the other side as she considered the woman who called herself girl.

“It all comes crashing down one day, with a power you never asked for,” Jean remarked. Different, of course. It was different. No speeding truck, no screaming pain that sucked away into blackness when it came to its end, but a blush of sudden color, uncovering a story that should never have had to be, but still, there was a core that might be the same, mightn’t it? A power you never asked for, that steals into your life and changes everything.

“The power to do terrible, terrible things.” Jean leaned in further, brushing a stray lock of hair away from the Canadian woman’s face. “And you didn’t balk, you didn’t try to hide yourself away from them.” She paused again, pursing her lips, and watching those purple eyes. “You’re not scared of them.”

How had she learned to not be scared of them? How had she found a way to live her life and not wake up screaming for everything that could happen if she let her control waver?

But those were questions for another time, when she’d only been one person. Now, there was one that seemed even more important, as she looked inside this remarkable mind that was laid out inside her own. “If you could get back in that bath and scrub them all away forever, to be able to keep a son, would you do it?” Jean asked.
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Purple Girl
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So many different sizes in a day. Yes, that's what it all felt like, wasn't it? Impossibly tall, impossibly strong. Terribly small and terribly insignificant. In a few short hours, they'd gone from one to the other and bounced between what felt like it was everything in between.

If it felt that way to her, how much worse, more extreme, did it have to feel to Jean?

Fallen down a hole. Bumped their heads and bruised their souls. One of the lines from that book that hadn't made sense to her as a girl. She wasn't a girl anymore and it made a little too much sense to her these last several years.

“One of the deep secrets of life, eh.” Hone remarked with a shrug. ...all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others, Kara finished the quote inside her own head with a nod to the Maori man.

"Exactly that," she agreed, attention still more than half on the two women bussed cheeks and whispered in turn. Not an easy secret to learn, harder still to really know. Easier to do to others than for them. Weren't her own powers, her own parentage, some proof of that?

"And what does Jean Grey do?" the White Queen asked then, making Kara wonder what had been said in those whispers that brought that question to the front of her mind. Was there even an answer the other woman could give her for that, considering what they were here trying to do?

“That,” said Jean, matter-of-factly, “is what we’re here to find out.” Their red and green Alice turned from the White Queen and moved away, skirting around Kara's chair and settling herself on the edge of the table like the little girl she was dressed up as. The other woman leaned in, then, stealing her hat and settling it onto her own head at an angle, head canting in the opposite direction.

Kara found herself studied by a pair of brilliant green eyes and she peered back at the other woman, wondering what she was seeing, or looking for.

“It all comes crashing down one day, with a power you never asked for,” Jean remarked and those few words brought back a flood of memories. Memories of a thirteen year old girl that were as fresh as if they'd been yesterday. A girl going about her life - an utterly and completely normal life where her biggest worries were boys and friends and gossip and parties - until it all changed in less than a minute.

Looking down at skin that was suddenly, inexplicably and entirely purple.

What's wrong with me, Mama? I just went to a party! I was having some fun, not drinking or doing drugs or anything I wasn't supposed to do -- But it won't come off!!"

“The power to do terrible, terrible things.” Jean leaned in further, brushing a stray lock of hair away from the Canadian woman’s face as her eyes closed very briefly, trying to put away that thirteen year old girl that had suddenly replaced the grown women behind those eyes. “And you didn’t balk, you didn’t try to hide yourself away from them.” She paused again, pursing her lips, and watching those purple eyes. “You’re not scared of them.”

The city of Toronto is mine. Thirteen, and walking through a city under her own control. Taking whatever she liked, doing whatever she liked, following the whims of a wounded, confused girl with too much power who could make her own rules.

"No," Kara confirmed with a shake of her head, "I'm not afraid of them. I probably should be at least a little." Or at least afraid of that rush of power. That unbelievable feeling that you were invincible, master of everyone around you. The temptation that came with it. To do more, push farther. Do it all the easy way, because you can.

Concerned, that she'd definitely been, continued to be. The path her father had chosen would've been such an easy one to choose for herself. Even now Kara couldn't help but wonder now and then, would a day come when she considered it again?

There were questions in those green eyes. Ones she wasn't sure she'd have any answers for, but she'd deal with that when and if they were asked.

“If you could get back in that bath and scrub them all away forever, to be able to keep a son, would you do it?” Jean asked and it wasn't what she'd expected. Not at all. The corners of her mouth pulled in a little, expression drawing a little tighter at the edges. Something heavy settled near her breastbone, pressing on her chest.

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small. And the ones that mother gives you, don't do anything at all.

Lavender eyes lowering in conflicted contemplation, Kara shook her head slowly. "I don't know," she replied drawing the words out. Carefully and thoughtfully. Of course she'd thought about it. Idly considered it, at least. What if she could've just stayed Kara Killgrave and her father had kept his genetics to himself?

What if she could've had an normal life? A son. A tall, sturdy little boy with dark hair and serious eyes who wouldn't have that legacy hanging over him. Without risk of turning another, possibly even more horrible version of Zebediah Killgrave loose on the world?

What if she could have all of that, just by changing that one thing. That one, huge, life-changing thing?

What if changing it all wouldn't have made her one bit happier than she was with the life she already had?

"No," Kara added after a moment, looking back up at Jean, voice soft and hint of regret that she knew must be in her eyes. Paths not taken, or ones that she didn't have the power to choose to begin with. "Not even to keep a son. For better or worse, I'm this person. I'm Kara Killgrave," she continued, meeting those emerald eyes and lifting one hand from her lap to lay it lightly on the other woman's arm. "You're Jean Grey. We have the lives we have. The powers we have. The good and not so good that goes with them."

The lives they'd been given, the lives they'd made, the choices that went with them and the choices that had been forced on them by necessity. No matter what life they were talking about, it was always going to come to that.

"Another life might let me keep a son, but it would mean forfeiting other parts of myself," the purple skinned woman finished. No quotes from Caroll or any of his characters now. Just her own truth. Not as interesting, maybe not the answers Jean Grey had been looking for. But her path and her choice.
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Kiwi Black
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And they were kissing like two ladies at a society dinner.

Hone Heke had lived long enough - maybe it had taken him a lot longer than most men, and maybe he hadn’t, but either way he’d had even longer than that with which to play with - to know better than to even try to have a wonder about the wheres and whys of why women might do anything, and this seemed like one of those cases, so he didn’t bother making a stab at what it might be that the two telepaths might be doing in whatever whispers they were sharing on the other side of the table.

Stick to the Carroll, stick to Purple’s brief nod of agreement, her words, stick to watching, sparing just a glance toward Summers to make sure he wasn’t a bloke who hadn’t learned the lesson about women yet (seemed like he might be the type to take a while), and wait it out, see whether whatever came next might not put them all in a bit less of a spectator and commentary zone.

“And what does Jean Grey do?”

The question seemed like it might have put pause to the redhead for a wee moment, a stare on her face that seemed to go along with thoughts she wasn’t sharing. But it too passed, and there she was still, looking halfway thoughtful. “That,” [she said], matter-of-factly, “is what we’re here to find out.”

She was away then, and back in the table just at quickly, on the other side of Purple, planting her bum right on top of the table and plucking the hat right off the Canadian’s head.

“It all comes crashing down one day, with a power you never asked for,” she announced, quietly, but the words were still easy enough to hear all the way down the table this time. No secret whispers where it came to Purple, apparently, but where the hell was she going now, eh?

Something that had meant plenty to Kilgrave, you could see that plain enough on her face as the redhead leaned in, gentle as a mother, brushing back her hair and speaking of terrible bloody things that came with that power. Talking about herself, talking about Kara, talking about both of them - all three maybe, but all Hone could see from where he was sitting (keeping his bloody mouth shut, because it wasn’t too hard to see that was the rest of their roles in this business right now, and even Summers seemed to have noticed that for once) was the way Purple had closed her eyes there, just for a the space of a breath (if any of them were even breathing any more).

Balking, hiding, that was what was on the redhead’s mind, apparently. Or that was what she felt like sharing.

“You’re not scared of them,” she accused the purple woman, or maybe that was envy - nothing to say in her voice, and only a few guesses to make without it.

“No,” [Purple] confirmed with a shake of her head, "I'm not afraid of them. I probably should be at least a little.”
As maybe they all should be - at least a little, like she’d said - though through all the odd bloody days he’d been around on this earth, all the buggered up things he’d seen, done, or heard of, still was the truth he’d never seen anyone with as much power over the rest of the poor buggers around her as Purple had, for as little obvious effort. But she wore it well, and she’d have had to have been a lot better of an actress than he’d ever picked her for if she was lying about that fear, outside or now.

Should probably didn’t really come into it, but. Could be a bad thing, could be a good thing, whether you had the fear or whether you didn’t, but whatever it was that the redhead had been looking for from that answer, it looked like she’d gotten it, or at least she’d moved on to other places in whatever list of questions was on her mind.

“If you could get back in that bath and scrub them all away forever, to be able to keep a son, would you do it?” she asked, and in the silence that followed, Hone kept just enough presence of his mind to look first toward Summers, catching that bloke just on the point of opening his mouth, and looking him down until he kept whatever it was you could feel him about to say back to himself before he buggered up this moment where it hung balanced. That was on her mind? Then that was on her mind, and they’d all seen enough by now to have more than half a clue you didn’t get far with this sheila by arguing with her.

Got a glare for his trouble, one that was hard enough to be glad that there didn’t seem to be any place in whatever headspace this was for their powers, but at least the bloke kept his bloody trap shut this time around, till Purple had had time enough to get her thoughts together enough to answer.

“I don't know,” she said, then there was silence again for a long few moments that felt longer again. The air - or atmosphere, or whatever the hell this was around them - getting the kind of thick heavy feeling Hone associated with an American summer, right before the thunderstorms broke. The redhead, waiting for her answer.

“No,” Purple said finally, turning her expressive eyes back up toward the redhead, and sharing a look that seemed like it might be better off for them alone. “Not even to keep a son. For better or worse, I'm this person. I'm Kara Killgrave," she continued, meeting those emerald eyes and lifting one hand from her lap to lay it lightly on the other woman's arm. "You're Jean Grey. We have the lives we have. The powers we have. The good and not so good that goes with them.”

Jean Grey didn’t move, didn’t even flinch at the contact. Couldn’t see her face from where he was, but Hone could have sworn that despite the stillness, nearly frozen where she was sitting, she was listening, thinking, hearing all of it. Waiting for something else from Purple. Something more, or something less.

“Another life might let me keep a son, but it would mean forfeiting other parts of myself,” said Purple finally.

Jean Grey stayed where she was another half a moment, and then she straightened up, without ever seeming to take her eyes off the Canadian woman she was sitting beside. “I’m me. All of me,” she said quietly after a moment, and though it wasn’t what Purple had said, something about it sounded like an echo. “I won’t be taken apart.”

“Jean, this isn’t just you,” Summers interrupted, halfway to testily, as Hone internally cursed not thinking quickly enough to stop him this time around - though odds were silencing that bugger with a look was only ever going to have been something that worked once. “This is her,” declared the other man, waving one hand around the brightly colored, if still half-cracked world, and the table and all of them in their bloody costumes.

His wife turned her head, curling her knees and her feet up onto the top of the table top, and for a moment, she looked at him. Frankly, maybe. Thoughtfully? Dismissively? Whatever it was, Hone couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but he wasn’t going to even think about complaining that it was turned on someone else.

“And who’s really to say where I end, and where I begin again?” the redhead asked her husband, or maybe all of them. “Jean Grey’s thoughts, in Jean Grey’s brain. Can you unravel it? Or if you tug the thread, will all those knots only pull tighter together?”
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White Queen
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Top class breeding, darlings.
Freedom Fighters
So.

It appeared Emma was going to have to live after all. No escaping the knowledge she now possessed or the confusion and anguish brought with it. A bit more than Jean might have anticipated had come out of her object lesson there, hadn't it? Quite a bit more than Emma had anticipated, certainly. Perhaps that was why they were standing here, now, brushing kisses across each other's cheeks instead of Jean annihilating Emma on the spot like the former White Queen had so desperately craved.

She could survive this, however. Jean was not wrong about that. Emma had stood alone against the world before, and still she stood. Diamonds were forever, after all. But diamonds were not born. No. They were forged from coal, and so too had she been. Anger. That always helped when Emma needed to rise above. And there was much anger to be had from the truth now laid bare before her.

Her survival, her secondary mutation, all part of someone else's grand scheme. She'd been collected, harvested, and sent back out as a cat's paw to tie up loose ends. It was a wonder she hadn't been handed over to Ahab herself, but then, that would have been poor business, wouldn't it? Why sell the cow when your customer is perfectly content to purchase the milk?

Yes, there was much to be angry about. And anger was an effective means to hold despair at bay.

That was what Emma did, however. And what of Jean? What was it she did when the world tried to drag her under?

“That,” said Jean, matter-of-factly, “is what we’re here to find out.”

And for that, it seemed, a conference with Kara was necessary. Jean withdrew from Emma, turned and approached the woman from Clarice's team. They were all colors here. Black. White. Purple. Grey. Scott and Mantis the only exceptions. Emma sank back into her seat, a spectator once again, watching the scene play out while her mind dwelled on unwelcome thoughts.

Jean climbed onto the table and sat, feet dangling over the edge as a child might, and bent forward to seize Kara's debonair purple hat. She set upon her own head at a precarious angle and proceeded to study Kara for a moment, perhaps inviting herself into Kara's thoughts as she had Emma's.

“It all comes crashing down one day, with a power you never asked for,” she said. Words that could apply to many present, but nonetheless appeared to have the desired effect on Kara. One did not have to know the memory to see one immersed in it. “The power to do terrible, terrible things.” Kara's eyes briefly slipped closed as Jean bent forward and brushed aside a lock of hair from the other woman's face. “And you didn’t balk, you didn’t try to hide yourself away from them.” She paused again, pursing her lips, and watching those purple eyes. “You’re not scared of them.”

"No," Kara confirmed with a shake of her head, "I'm not afraid of them. I probably should be at least a little." The answer appear honest enough, and Emma had never known Kara, in their limited encounters, to play coy even on personal matters. As to the matter of what one should be afraid of, Emma had to wonder what Kara thought might change if she did carry around a nugget of fear of what she could do.

Jean appeared satisfied, however. At least, enough to pose another question. One that drove much closer to the heart of things. “If you could get back in that bath and scrub them all away forever, to be able to keep a son, would you do it?”

Whatever initial response Kara might have had to that, Emma didn't notice. Faces swam once more into the forefront of Emma's mind. She lifted her hands to clasp her elbows, hugging herself loosely. Five identical blondes, all watching her, mocking her. Dead. And what would she have done had she known about them before they met their end.

What was she to do about the rest, possibly still in their incubation tubes somewhere? Abominations. Daughters. Her daughters, but what did that even mean under the circumstances? Certainly not the same as the scenario Jean was posing to Kara.

The air around them seemed to fill with itself, like a haze of clear fog. You could feel it clinging to you, pressing down with pensive fingers. 'I don't know' wouldn't do. Jean would have a real answer.

"No," Kara finally said. "Not even to keep a son. For better or worse, I'm this person. I'm Kara Killgrave, You're Jean Grey. We have the lives we have. The powers we have. The good and not so good that goes with them." She reached out with a purple hand and placed it on Jean's arm. The other woman didn't react to the contact, seeming to be absorbed in Kara's words. Waiting for the rest, seeming to know that there must be.

And there was. "Another life might let me keep a son, but it would mean forfeiting other parts of myself," she said.

Other parts.

Myself.

The words struck a chord with Emma, but it was Jean they were meant for, and it was Jean who appeared to feel them the strongest. She was still for a brief moment, then bent upright once more. “I’m me. All of me,” she said, as if paraphrasing what Kara had said, making it her own. “I won’t be taken apart.”

“Jean, this isn’t just you,” Scott said, then. Stupid, stupid man. Even in her current state, Emma had plenty of irritation to spare for him and his thoughtless words. What had she told him when this began? To focus on his love for her. Nothing else. What did he possibly hope to achieve by trying to define her. Especially now? Emma looked over at him, lips pressed together in silent warning, but not clearly enough to stop him, “This is her,” he said with the certainty of someone who expected things to be a certain way because he wills it so.

It drew Jean's attention, however that was meant, and she slid her legs up onto the table. Regarding him with a look that was difficult to read, but vaguely unsettling any way you chose to perceive it. “And who’s really to say where I end, and where I begin again?” she said, and while the question was directed at Scott, it seemed to reach out to all of them. “Jean Grey’s thoughts, in Jean Grey’s brain. Can you unravel it? Or if you tug the thread, will all those knots only pull tighter together?”

Emma let her hands drop to her sides and shook her head briefly. "A similar question was posed only two nights ago," she said. In that matter, at least, she was a Jeannie-Come-Lately. "No," she said next, in answer. "As well try to draw out an incompatible blood type after a transfusion." Emma doubted even Faiza could manage such a feat. She lifted her eyes, forcing herself to smooth out her expression. To summon more of herself back from the pit she'd been cast into. "A harmony needs to be found. As close to one as can be managed."

If not, Jean would surely destroy herself as decisively as one's own body attacked foreign blood cells found in its system.
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Jean Grey
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A power you never asked for, appearing all at once. Power that was too much, too easy, to do terrible, terrible things.

But though the words had gone behind those violet eyes and pulled out someone else, someone younger - more uncertain, less secure - and the Purple Hatter closed them briefly, she was there. The telepath could feel her there, alongside her powers. Not hiding from them. Not scared of them.

“No,” Kara confirmed with a shake of her head, "I'm not afraid of them. I probably should be at least a little.”

How had she learned that? How could she not be? How, and how and how…

…but there was another question that the woman who had been called Red wanted to know now, more than any of those questions that would have seemed all-important only this morning, only a few hours ago. Now though, there was another, as the memories that were left to creep through her mind, slipping through the blocks, letting themselves into the space that was already fitting itself to take them, recognizing them as self. A son, who had never been born, and never would be born, negated in the determination of those purple eyes by the risk of being a monster. A daughter. One who should never have had to be born, to be given up to another monster.

No going back. There was no going back, and nothing that could be done, after the end of everything. But if she could… if she could, and if she could wipe those powers away and keep her son, would she do it? Would Kara Kilgrave make that choice?

Tightness, in the corners of her mouth, and the violet eyes dropped away as the other woman shook her head, and thought her thoughts. “I don't know,” she said, And thought more, as Jean watched her, nothing else in this little mental world she’d built for herself mattering except the purple woman and the thoughts that passed across her consciousness. Someone else’s thoughts. It was safer that way, seeing them pass by, and staying outside of them.

“No,” Kara added after a moment, lifting her eyes to Jean’s, dark purple and opening a mirror of that measured regret that trickled down through her thoughts. “Not even to keep a son. For better or worse, I'm this person. I'm Kara Killgrave," she continued, meeting those emerald eyes and lifting one hand from her lap to lay it lightly on the other woman's arm. "You're Jean Grey. We have the lives we have. The powers we have. The good and not so good that goes with them.”

It was someone else’s arm. Or it could as well have been, for all the notice the redhead took of it. This person. Jean Grey. Jean Grey, who called herself the Phoenix, and who couldn’t admit, even to herself, that she had hosted it, and lived its life. All these lives she’d had, spinning around the hole that tried to open in her head. For better or for worse. For worse. For nothing that could ever be good again.

“Another life might let me keep a son, but it would mean forfeiting other parts of myself.”

Giving up my pieces. Giving up the good with the bad, cutting out those parts that wouldn’t work, couldn’t keep, couldn’t live with. She’d had that choice made for her once. Had made it herself, once. Had never, ever, ever made it. “I’m me. All of me,” she said quietly after a moment, just like she’d told herself insider her mind in the place with the dead pines and flying boulders. “I won’t be taken apart.”

The good and the bad, the better and the worse. Perhaps she could never be Kara Kilgrave, never find that resolution, that determination, that ability not to fear, but she was Jean Grey. She wouldn’t give that up. Not even to end that desolate pain that was still there, held just a finger nail’s breadth away from crashing over all of them once more. If it was to be whole, or nothing at all -

“Jean, this isn’t just you,” Slim interrupted. Angry. Insistent. Denying. Desperately frightened underneath all of it, as he waved his hand, and forced her to look at all the cracked, crazed colors of the world, the rents in the sky that were still threatening. “This is her,” he told her, as certain as he was about anything. About everything.

Jean looked at him, meeting his eyes, but she curled her feet up onto the table, tucking them under her, dropping two bare hands down to rest in her lap. He loved her. She’d never doubted that. Never could doubt that. And he was scared - so very, very scared, that once again there was a stranger looking back at him from out of her eyes, his wife’s eyes, who he couldn’t reach, and couldn’t keep from being torn away from him. All of that, she could feel, but it was removed, still-distant. As much like someone else’s knowledge as the touch of a hand on her arm had been someone else’s sensation.

“And who’s really to say where I end, and where I begin again?” she asked. Why was this her, and not her? One mind, and where were the seams? “Jean Grey’s thoughts, in Jean Grey’s brain. Can you unravel it? Or if you tug the thread, will all those knots only pull tighter together?” A mind was like a body - it could detect, repel, isolate, destroy foreign intruders, but it had no defenses against its own cells, even when they betrayed it.

“A similar question was posed only two nights ago,” said a voice, calmly and clearly.

Emma. Speaking like a pedagogue, informing them all of what she thought they ought to know. “No,” she said next, in answer. "As well try to draw out an incompatible blood type after a transfusion.”

Forget incompatible. As well try to separate a transfusion of your own blood from itself. Jean turned her eyes toward the pale queen, with her gaze and her smooth cheeks that were unstained by a lines of care or strain. Created from an act of will, rather than an act of nature, and still speaking, still ‘teaching’, still determined to show them all. “A harmony needs to be found. As close to one as can be managed.”

Words. Only words. Only instructions.

“Unbelievable,” she heard Scott snap, rising to his feet and turning his voice on the other telepath, each word sharp and short and scornful. “Is this your idea of helping her? Twenty seconds of what she’s living with was enough to have you shrieking and trying to kill her, and now you can just fucking sit there and lecture her about how she just needs to find harmony?” But Jean herself only turned away from the blonde woman, and from her husband, glancing toward Kara as she shifted herself around on the table, toward the empty chairs far at its other end for a moment before she’d come all the way around to look toward Kiwi Black and Mantis.

“What now, Toroa?” the tattooed cat man asked her, softly, and as gently as she’d ever heard him.

“I don’t know,” said Jean, very quietly. “I want to know how people keep going.”
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Purple Girl
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Things she didn't think about. Things that simply were. Those were the things she was thinking about now.

Because Jean Grey had asked, here in this broken and tattered mental landscape. Because maybe the answers Kara Kilgrave might be able to give her could help in some small way. If she could step back in time like stepping through a doorway to another room, change her entire life by changing one thing, would she take that chance? That opportunity.

Did she know?

At first, she was sure she didn't, but no. That wasn't really true, was it? Her life since the day she'd turned thirteen years old passed through her mind, through her eyes, Kara was sure. The choices she'd made, the choices that had been made for her. Out of fate or necessity, need or preference. They were all there, laid out one by one, like endless paths splitting from the main roadway.

Paths not taken, paths not offered, paths that she'd walked by and ones that she'd walked down. Different choices, different circumstances would've given her a different life. A life where she might've been a normal girl. A normal woman. A woman with a husband, children, a home that wasn't a base of military operations. A son.

A different life might have given her all that and more. Would it have given her more happiness, though, in the end?

The answer was obvious to her. The only answer there could be, at least for her. No. No, even if she could go back, change that, she wouldn't. Not even for a son. Another life might let her keep that, but it wouldn't be without a price. That price would be pieces of herself, the person she was, and that price was too high.

She was who she was, just as Jean Grey was who she was, either or both.

Kara could feel the other eyes on her, around the table, as her hand went to Jean's arm. Lavender eyes met green, the other woman so still she might've been air, though there was substance under her own fingers to verify that woman was solid. The her bearing straightened. “I’m me. All of me,” she said quietly after a moment, and Kara nodded. “I won’t be taken apart.”

"No," the violet skinned woman agreed, grasping some understanding of her own in that. Separating out the parts, no. That wouldn't be possible would it? How did you separate one Jean Grey from another? Turn sand into glass, could you still separate the grains?

“Jean, this isn’t just you,” Summers interrupted, sounding frustrated, maybe a little irritated and Kara sighed internally. However hard this must be for him - and it must be something like torture, she knew - he couldn't order his wife into mending herself. “This is her,” Cyclops declared, hand gesturing to the world around them, the costumes.

Glancing to Hone, Kara gave her head a slightly weary shake. Maybe this had been a mistake.

Jean turned to her husband, curling herself into that ball again, feet propped on the table and knees drawn to her chest. A little girl again. “And who’s really to say where I end, and where I begin again?” the redhead asked her husband, or maybe all of them. “Jean Grey’s thoughts, in Jean Grey’s brain. Can you unravel it? Or if you tug the thread, will all those knots only pull tighter together?”

Emma, to now seeming to have been captive to her own thoughts, seemed to have some sort of answer to that. At least going by the shake of her head. "A similar question was posed only two nights ago," she said and that must've been an interesting discussion. "No," she said next, in answer. "As well try to draw out an incompatible blood type after a transfusion." Perhaps, Kara allowed, or something close to that, anyway. "A harmony needs to be found. As close to one as can be managed."

Apparently at the end of his rope, Scott Summers was the one who answered. “Unbelievable,” the visored man snapped, turning what seemed to be the sum of his anger and frustration onto the White Queen. “Is this your idea of helping her? Twenty seconds of what she’s living with was enough to have you shrieking and trying to kill her, and now you can just fucking sit there and lecture her about how she just needs to find harmony?”

"Enough," Kara told them, turning her head after a brief moment from Jean toward the other two, voice steady and calm but stern. "I know it's difficult, but this won't help her." Her eyes moved between the two, settled on Scott Summers at that, stayed a moment. Even if she didn't have much hope that he'd listen. He was used to being listened to, not the other way around.

“What now, Toroa?” Hone asked, quietly and gently in that way the big Maori had of cutting through all the rest to get to the meat of it.

“I don’t know,” said Jean, very quietly. “I want to know how people keep going.”

It was a complicated question, but also a simple one, Kara mused, head canted as she turned back to the redhead and thought on that. If you didn't get caught on the details, looked at the broader strokes.

"By taking the pieces we have," she began thoughtfully, thinking of how she'd put her own life back together as nothing more than a girl. How she'd seen her friends do the same, time and time again. How nearly everyone she knew in this world had had to do the same, at least once if not more, "fitting them back together as best we can, with the help we have. Then filling in the gaps as we go along."

Again, maybe not the best advice or most wise advice, but it was the advice she had to give as she looked form Jean to Emma to Hone and Scott Summers and Mantis, then back to Jean again.

"You are Jean Grey. All of you," Mantis the caterpillar added with her customary quiet serenity, the green skinned woman's attention focused with calm intensity on the redheaded woman. "Begin there."
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Kiwi Black
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There she sat, lounged on the table like a cabaret singer might drape herself over a grand piano, though you couldn’t say there was anything a bit like allure in the performance Mrs Summers was giving for them now. Questions instead, or thoughts posed as questions, because for reasons Hone couldn’t quite figure out how to put his finger on, even after meeting Purple’s eyes across the table, he had the feeling the redhead wasn’t currently in the business of looking for answers.

Not for the questions she’d asked after her husband’s protest, at any rate.

Frost spoke up though in answer, so maybe she’d seen something he hadn’t, which at this point, the New Zealander wasn’t about to doubt wouldn’t be at all bloody difficult to do. “A similar question was posed only two nights ago," she said, maybe referring to that bloke from the Camp who’d got himself merged with his clone, or whatever that business had been about. Bugger of a mess, that. Didn’t like to think of this one going the same way, as far as throwing up their hands and saying there was nothing to do but ship her back to the other Universe for safe-keeping.

Bit too much like giving up, that felt like, and he’d never been one for that.

”No,” the blonde telepath continued, while Hone kept his eyes fixed on the redhead. For all the good it did to try to guess at the thoughts in her head, he might as well have looked at the table top, though. Or the sky, which all in all had been doing a better job of reflecting the redhead’s feelings than her face had, at least up till now. “As well try to draw out an incompatible blood type after a transfusion. A harmony needs to be found. As close to one as can be managed.”

Ach, bloody hell - now, what in six blasted pits of doom had been in that to set Summers off? Because that was what happened next, the bloke rising to his feet in his clanking armor suit, and snapping in curt, controlled tones at Frost. Or at least, you might have thought it was controlled, if you hadn’t seen the lack of emotion the bloke brought to everything else he did. Once you’d seen that, ‘on the edge of completely losing all his shit’ might be a bit closer to it, in fact.

“Enough,” Kara got in there, hopefully fast enough to shut Summers or both those two at the end down before they sent his wife spinning back into that state she’d disappeared into last time the bloke had decided that picking a fight with someone who wasn’t measuring up to what he wanted for her was more important than looking to her and what she wanted. Looked like she was only ignoring it for now, turning all the way around on the table, past Kara to face the far end of the table, but not stopping there, but who the bloody hell knew, really?

“I know it's difficult, but this won't help her.”

No, and better see what an old bugger who’d never had much to do with any of the psychic business in any of his years, could do on that front, eh? Because the redhead’s turn on the table had come to a halt again, facing between Mantis and himself, and looking from the green currently-caterpillared woman to him, and back again. Driftless and wandering, like the albatross who’d lost her way in an ocean that would have put even the southern sweeps he’d known to shame. Come down to rest on the waves weeks away from land, with a broken wing and no direction for home.

Looking for something, wasn’t she? Or that’s what the former chieftain thought he saw, when he looked at her.

“What now, Toroa?” Hone asked her, gently as he could.

“I don’t know,” [she said], very quietly. “I want to know how people keep going.”

And those bloody green eyes caught his then, and held them, pulling up a world of memories he’d put away where they could be kept safe and dry a long, long time ago. She didn’t say anything more, didn’t ask anything else, only leaned in slowly and pressed her nose against his, forehead to forehead and breath to breath, the way hongi was meant to done. Te question was still there, but, in the sense of her sifting through his mind through a flicker of whanau, of tangis and aroha, in both its meanings.

Two families buried, long long ago, and most of their descendants now too, and here you still are mate. Too bloody stubborn, or too bloody stupid, not to keep plugging on. Her thoughts in his words, or maybe just his own, dredged up on a fishhook from the place he’d kept them all these years.

“By taking the pieces we have,” spoke Purple’s voice, out of the midst of that, picking her words carefully by the sounds of things, “fitting them back together as best we can, with the help we have. Then filling in the gaps as we go along.”

“By mourning where you need, for what is and what was, and no more than that,” Hone added, meeting the redhead’s eyes again as she pulled back and settled on the tabletop, then reaching out to lightly tap the top of her sternum with his hand. “Keep this much of your heart for your dead, Toroa. Then keep the rest for living.”

Was that the lesson she’d been looking for from him? Maybe not, or maybe it wasn’t the one that would fit her once she’d found it, but it was the one he had to offer up, at least.

“You are Jean Grey. All of you,” spoke Mantis, from just beside him, quiet and serene, but pulling the redhead’s eyes toward her all the same. “Begin there.”

And keep going till you’ve found your end, was it? Yeah, could be. Could be.
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White Queen
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Jean was right. There was no separating one from the other. There was no other to separate her from. It was just her, warts and all, no matter what her husband wanted to believe. And she was destroying herself.

Predictably, that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, and he sprang to his feet staring daggers (one had to presume) Emma’s way for daring to state as much. “Unbelievable,” he said, voice angry, clipped, radiating scorn and impatience. “Is this your idea of helping her? Twenty seconds of what she’s living with was enough to have you shrieking and trying to kill her, and now you can just fucking sit there and lecture her about how she just needs to find harmony?”


“What she’s living with is what I’m talking about, you simpleton,” Emma shot back. “Her pain is her. You cannot take it away without taking her away.” She leveled her eyes at him, unflinching and stated the next with cold finality. “If she is unable to live with it, she will not live at all.”

"Enough," Kara’s voice cut in, forestalling anything further Emma might have said on the matter as well as any more nonsense from Jean’s loving husband. Emma arched a brow at the violet-hued woman as she looked in turn from her to Scott. "I know it's difficult, but this won't help her."

Oh, how delightly perceptive. It appeared all it took was a visit into Jean’s mind and some silly costumes for them all to become such experts on what would help the woman. They could all take turns stating the obvious for Scott’s benefit while indulging Jean’s whims. That had proven so much more useful so far, hadn’t it? A wonder they’d summoned Emma in the first place, if she was to be relegated to the role of spectator or chauffer in her own operation.

When she wasn’t being made a target, that is, but perhaps they were past that particular item in the agenda.

Jean herself appeared to have no interest in the discussion, having turned away to look toward the others for a moment. Hone, ever the pragmatic soul, supplied to logical question to address the impasse they had found themselves in. What now, indeed?

“I don’t know,” Jean answered in a faint voice. “I want to know how people keep going.”

More words, then. More stories. No need for Emma to answer. Jean had already seen deeper into her than she ever cared to permit anyone. Kara was quick enough to answer, however. A suitable enough volunteer. Jean had already shown an interest in the other woman’s troubled past. And right on cue there was Hone, adding his own nuggets of advice to the matter. The two of them were having no trouble speaking from the same angle, at least. When Kara was finished, she swept her eyes to the others before focusing once more on Jean.

"You are Jean Grey. All of you," Mantis stated with all the simplicity of a coloring book. She concentrated her inscrutable attention on Jean and added, "Begin there." In all respects, the same basic instruction she’d given earlier, when they were still playing at their lines. It would be enlightening to see if anything new and productive came from this attempt.
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Jean Grey
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She wasn’t going to listen.

Scott, cutting at Emma Frost. That woman cutting right back at him, and neither of them listening to each other, or to anything but Kara’s instruction to be quiet. None of it. All words and noise and frustrated anger wound up tightly to keep themselves going.

She didn’t want that. What did she want? Toroa, that was what Kiwi Black had called her when he’d asked. The albatross. The dead weight around their necks, dragging them all to the dead salt wastes, dried up and empty of everything but old, tired words. She didn’t want that either, Jean didn’t think. She wanted… to know how people keep going.

Not out of spite. Not to damn the whole world by showing that they could. Not with anger. That would work for Scott, and it would work for Emma Frost, but not for Jean Grey, whose anger flared bright and hot and then burned away to nothing but flakes of ash. She wanted some other way. She needed that.

What was in this man’s head, with his tattoos and his whiskers? Lifetimes, lived and set aside. Families who grew old, while he’d endured, unchanged. Perhaps Logan had been lucky, in some ways, to not have to live with those memories. Perhaps not, but nevertheless, the man who called himself Hone Heke had that knowledge, those memories, waiting under the surface of thoughts kept as still and calm as the waves after an oil slick, and Jean leaned in, pressing her nose against his in the gesture that was familiar to him, and helped herself to his memories as she searched for some answer that would work.

“By taking the pieces we have,” Kara spoke behind her, voice measured and thoughts filled of friends and self, and the enormity, the wild diversity that was the same problem, fragmented through the kaleidoscope lenses of any number of individual minds, each with their own unique conditions, “fitting them back together as best we can, with the help we have. Then filling in the gaps as we go along.”

Filling in the gaps. Ha. Jean could have smiled, though she thought that she didn’t. Filling in the gaps, supplying the pieces that were missing so as to reform a person who’d been shattered. To reform herself.

That was how she’d caused herself to be here, wasn’t it? Bridging the gap between herself and herself, till there was nothing left to keep the extra pieces out when they collapsed back on her. Hooray for irony.

“By mourning where you need, for what is and what was, and no more than that,” Kiwi Black spoke then, threading into the gap in the meter where Kara had left off, and reaching out to tap her breastbone, just under her throat. “Keep this much of your heart for your dead, Toroa. Then keep the rest for living.”

Put it away in a box, was that what he meant? No - a glass-fronted cabinet of curiosities, like dangerous exotics at a zoo, safely ensconced away from where they could harm your daily life. Was that what she wanted? A sterile quarantine from her own feelings?

“You are Jean Grey. All of you.”

Mantis. Jean turned, meeting the green woman and her caterpillar guise, looking for the thoughts that lay behind dark black eyes but finding none that she could catch hold of. She had questions for Mantis. A role she’d embraced, a son she’d left behind, like a suit of clothes she had outgrown. But when she looked at the green woman, all she saw was a sense that there would be time for those questions, and that time was not now.

“Begin there.”

Begin where? With Jean Grey? With all of her?

Jean looked to the surface of the table, for no better reason than to find her own thoughts. Begin. Begin at the beginning? No, not there. That wouldn’t work. Begin at the end, and in the middle, begin at anywhere, any point, where she knew a thread with certainty, and work her way out, darning and stitching and smocking together the pattern of the holes till there was a whole once more. Begin with what you know.

“I’m sorry, Emma,” she said aloud, looking briefly toward that woman with a sincere expression. For all and everything she’d done to aggrieve the woman here. For hurting her. For failing to boost her ego by doing what she’d wanted, when she’d instructed it.

But then there was only one person she was looking to, still yards away from her. Standing still, like the tin soldier too many people had written him off as, too many times. Begin with Jean Grey. All of her. And what was Jean Grey without Scott Summers?

She would have to go to him, Jean knew. He wouldn’t break, wouldn’t move, wouldn’t come to her, till she’d shown him that she wanted him, needed him to. But that was Scott, and that was known, and so it was all alright, and she stepped down from the middle of the table top, dissolving the construct as she did till it was only Jean Grey, walking down a narrow aisle, to the man who was waiting still for her, just as he’d been a few days before. And she caught him, resting her hands lightly on his shoulders, and found a smile for the solemn, guarded expression on his face.

“I’m Jean Grey-Possibly-Summers,” she told him. “I married you three days ago.” He barely moved. Half a snort, half an eye roll, but he was watching her, listening to every last inflection, every twitch of her expression, she knew. “I married the fuck out of you,” Jean corrected, and there… yes. There was the smile she knew, the one that was for her, and his hands came up to rest gently at her waist.

“You did.” The smile was gone again already, but there was a smirk at least, one she knew all too well, just as she knew the love, the concern, the care that ran beneath it. “What do you want to do now?”

“I think I’d like you all to be out of my head,” Jean told him thoughtfully, and so she did, with a mental motion like an orange she was peeling apart, she stepped out of the inside of her own head, turning them all out with her, away from the brightly colored world and back to a dull grey bedroom in a helicarrier.
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