xp_logs | The Dark Phoenix

The last ditch psionic defense of the mansion meets the Dark Phoenix

In Jim's experience, there was a clear divide between reality and the astral plane. The laws of physics were only occasionally applicable, and the surroundings varied wildly depending on mood, company and location. There was no mistaking it for the "real" world.

Until now. They were linked to Charles, he knew it, could feel it, but something was wrong. It didn't matter whether he looked with his physical senses or his telepathy, or had his eyes open or closed. It made no difference.

In the astral plane Cerebro had burned, and was burning. The round walls appeared to have been caught somewhere between smoldering in cinders and still bathed in flame. The immolation had spread to the rest of the lower levels as well, leaving scorched walls and ashes. Hell was coming to Xavier's School for the Gifted. Or at least, to Charles Xavier's construction of it in his mind. It was already there for the real place.

The air was thick with smoke, wind, and heat. But it had all the hallmarks of a mental construct: the lower levels should have collapsed inward some time ago given the temperature and the rate of destruction from the fire, but they hadn't. The Dark Phoenix strode down the hallway, her fingertips setting the walls on fire as she passed. The burning corridors were home to her, her domain, a expression of self and representation of how she wanted things to become.

"And I think to myself....what a wonderful world," she said, pausing in front of a door marked with an 'X.' It always marveled her how egotistical the man was, no matter what incarnation. He had to put an 'X' on everything, like a dog marking its territory. She didn't have to search at all for her target. He was right where she expected him to be, physically and mentally, He would always be the captain who went down with the ship.

"Charles," she said, locking onto his mind like a bear trap as she telekinetically ripped open the door like she were unwrapping a Christmas present. A slow grin spread across her lips and she cocked her head to the side.

"I see you," she said.

The moment the words left her lips she pounced, yanking his mind into the astral plane, her astral plane, with little warning.

In war you took out the biggest threat first.

Charles' physical body stiffened and jerked under the sudden assault, mouth open in a soundless scream. His astral body, however, flickered only for an instant before it appeared in full psychic armor. Charles had expected this moment - it was inevitable.

"So you are done slaughtering children," he said, voice cold. "Shall we see what you are capable of?"

His statement garnered a laugh, and the Dark Phoenix shook her head. "You really never learn, you sanctimonious prick," she said. It was funny how they always thought they could win. Sad, really.

The setting didn't change much, because the state of the astral plane was nebulous at best. The real world and the astral plane were colliding together around the Dark Phoenix, still located in the mansion corridors above, and Charles Xavier. It was hard to tell where one place stopped and another started.

In the astral plane, the Dark Phoenix and the raptor were intertwined, and Jean took a moment to study her prey carefully.

"There are people still alive. Of course I'm not done," she said as a matter of certainty. The lack of humor to her voice in that statement was almost more frightening than if she had used it.

"Which tactic will you try? Appeal to my sensibilities....claim this isn't me, how sad you are....Or will it be righteous anger? How about an offer to join me? Or to cry. Believe me, I've heard it all, from every version of you. You could not surprise me."

The Dark Phoenix lashed out with the raptor, its talons outstretched as they went for the throat.

"Pathetic."

Claw met steel with a dull clang as a sword flashed into being in Charles' hand. The feedback was purely psionic, however, reverberating through the minds of every psi-sensitive in the area.

"You are not Jean," Charles hissed out between clenched teeth, his words echoing through the astral plane. "You are Death, and if by my life I can stop your destruction, I will."

The sword dropped, then was raised again in a stabbing motion towards the woman at the heart of the firebird.

Even with three telepaths acting as a backstop, the massive waves of energy caused by Charles' clash with Jean's doppelganger were nearly beyond containment. Cerebro's walkway seemed to writhe beneath their feet and its walls pulsed, one moment antiseptic white, the next rusted metal, the next decaying flesh. Glimpses from a mad world -- or a mad mind.

Yet despite it all Jim could not tear his eyes from the dual images of his father: one frail and half-paralyzed in his chair, the other armored and vital, the very fabric of the astral plane swirling in his wake as he drove forward with all the amplified might of Cerebro behind him.

The epic battle raging in front of Sarah seemed like something out of a bleeding edge video game. The blending of the astral plane and the real world, which was especially jarring and disorienting to her, certainly added to that effect. Were it not for the practically incomprehensible stakes at hand she might have even enjoyed such a tableau; instead, it tightened her throat and put knots in her stomach, filling her with fear

Lorna didn't like this at all. The physical world blending into the Astral Plane? She didn't know a feat could be achieved. Her mind was racing and they needed to help the professor gain an advantage. She touched Sarah's arm, "We need to do the EM again, if I can access the iron in her blood...it might help. I can combine my powers with yours and it might be strong enough to break through." She almost didn't sound convinced but they had to try

"What've we got to lose?" Sarah quipped, bracing herself and gathering her concentration. She wasn't exactly sure how much help she could be to someone with powers as awesome as Lorna's but if they thought she could help, then help she would. Looking up at Lorna with a small, tight grin, Sarah nodded when she was ready and let her abilities flow, aiding the other mutant in their Herculian task.

"Why Charlie, you know what she did," the Dark Phoenix said, a grin of judgment on her lips as the raptor continued its assault.

"You felt Magneto and his followers die. You felt it before, those bursts of rage that you knew was just the beginning. Your daughter. A being of incomprehensible power that you knew you couldn't contain. And it terrifies you. We're the same. She just won't accept it. It makes her weak," she said. She gave a brief pause, then laughed.

"But I will. Because I am stronger."

She had sensed Sarah's attempt in that pause. Latching onto the little gnat, she accessed the part of Sarah's brain that controlled her powers and forced them to expand. For a brief moment, the girl would have more power than she had ever dreamed. She would be one with every working machine in the state of New York.

Then, the Dark Phoenix turned that power inward, focusing that laser sight onto the mansion's power conduits. It was like lighting an M-80 and closing it in your hand.

She locked sight with Charles, and a fire lit her eyes up from within as she switched tactics, suddenly linking his mind to Sarah and Lorna's.

"I am the Godqueen and you will kneel."

When the Phoenix had amped up her abilities to the nth degree, Sarah inhaled sharply, eyes gone wide. Her powers had increased after Genosha, to a large degree to her at the time, but that was nothing compared to this, not even close.

Before she could even try to comprehend what it all meant, she heard the word Godqueen - what the hell did that mean, she mused, never having heard it before - but before she could think any further on either topic she felt it. A flickering at first, in her brain, which flared to a fiery, violent temperature almost immediately, instantly incinerating her.

Sarah had been there one heartbeat, then was gone the next. A one, flipped to a zero; a digital death.

Lorna's mind didn't have time to process what was going on as it began to fail, not being able to handle whatever the Dark Phoenix was doing. Lorna screamed as her hands came to her head before she was incinerated from the inside out, leaving only ashes of where she had stood.

Death was difficult enough for a telepath to deal with. Death so personal, with his mind tied to Sarah and Lorna's at the moment they winked out... it was too much. Many years ago, he had saved Jean from a retreat into the depths of her own mind after the death of her playmate - now Charles was pushed to the same sort of self-preservation, yanking his conscious mind away from the abyss into which Lorna and Sarah had fallen, away from the clutches of the Dark Phoenix. Deep into his own psyche he fled, knowing as he did so that it would likely cost his students - his son - their lives.

I'm so sorry, came the barest trace of a telepathic whisper, and Charles' mind was gone, his body slumping in the chair.

There had been no time to react. Sarah burned to ash, and Lorna with her -- Charles' consciousness winked out -- gone, all three of them, in less time than it took to draw a breath. "Lorna!" Jim screamed, his link to Rachel and Emma unraveling like a dropped ball of yarn. "Dad!"

At one time, long, long ago, the feeling of death across the astral plane had severely traumatized a young Jean Grey. She had no one to guide her then. She was considered damaged, and locked away, with only herself to rely on. And so she embraced the damage, twisting it into her own.

When she first encountered the man that lay in front of her it was in another world. He claimed to know her. He pitied her.

But he didn't know her. No one did. No one could come close to her power. She was a God, and they were merely her playthings.

He thought he could hide from her by retreating into his mind. It was cute. But she followed him in, plucking him back out from the depths like she were picking a grape from the vine. But since he was defeated, weakened, all she got was a pale shade, a thin representation of himself. It was fine anyway. She'd rather not have heard him blather on anyway. The link was enough to do some damage.

Crouching down on the Astral Plane's representation of Cerebro that didn't seem to want to go away, the Dark Phoenix reached out to run her hand across Xavier's cheek. It was an almost tender gesture. Almost.

"If I more time I would have tried to find a new way of killing you. But things didn't go as smoothly as I hoped thanks to your little fanatics," she said, breaking off into an amused laugh. "Can't say I didn't enjoy it a little, though."

She paused, shaking her head, then rose to stand.

"And now I'm talking to a vegetable. Again. Shocker."

She was so close. She could feel it, reality cracking and shuddering at her very presence. All she had to do was add just a little more power...then, maybe, she could find what she was looking for.

Cocking her head to the side, she telekinetically lifted him up out of his chair. All things aside, it was the physicality of the act that she liked the most, even if none of it was real.

"I suppose I'll have to resort to the classics this time."

"This is probably going to get me killed," Emma muttered to herself. She couldn't lead this fight and she knew it - she simply didn't have the brute strength to compete with this enhanced version of Jean, nor the time to make her own psyche complex enough with traps and dead ends to confuse the rampaging telepath. But there was someone nearby who was and whose stake in the scenario unfolding before her was far more personal than her own.

Emma's laugh was sudden and contemptuous, but laced with real humour. "Godqueen," she snorted. Even the celebrated Frost ego wasn't insane enough to go for Godqueen.

The tendrils of her telepathy that she sent out were tiny, mere wafts of thought that almost disappeared in the maelstrom that was Astral Plane and reality intermixed. But they continued on, tendrils drifting to the same place and when they had reached Jim, they coalesced in a bright microburst, a concentrated slap of nearly the full force of Emma's not inconsiderable telepathic powers across Jim's mind, scorching into neurons and ganglia and making him pay attention to her. "Fuck this!" she sent, a message as brutal in words as it was in power. "Do your fucking job! Now!"

With the professor no longer around to buffer the onslaught, Rachel had gasped and gasped again, as though unable to draw a full breath under the psychic pressure hammering down on them. She stole yet another thread of telepathy from Emma with great effort and wove it around the rents in her own and minimized her exposure to the avalanche of power as best as she could.

The choking feeling in her chest never let up, and the sensation of teetering off a precipice curved itself around her neck. But while she couldn’t quite breathe, Rachel could still access the immense pool of telekinetic force she kept hidden and stored, and she reached into it to throw up the strongest shield she had ever built as she gasped out, desperate: “Jim!”

Haller's head snapped up from the smear of bone and ash that had once been his friend.

A swirl of pale energy swept over the ghostly talon dangling Charles, extinguishing it like water over a flame. The man dropped limply back into his chair, Cerebro sent slightly askew. His son drew himself up to his full, lank height and met the gaze of the burning figure that shone through the veil between reality and the astral plane, moving forward to physically interpose himself between the Dark Phoenix and the three who still remained.

The Dark Phoenix regarded her newest contender with the interest of someone taking in a form of entertainment. She smiled, putting her hands on her hips.

"Ah...the shattered boy, who is so broken that his brain is split into pieces. You know, I met a few versions of who were whole, once. They were formidable. But you...How do you still function, damaged as you are? You're like a dog that needs to be put down."

She paused. "It does inspire a bit of creativity, though," she said thoughtfully, telekinetically ripping off some of the plates from Cerebro to use to try to toss at him, to cut him with.

The plates slivered into nonexistence. Maybe it had been Rachel's voice, or Emma's command, her "do your fucking job", like a bolt of lightning to the brainstem, but the world had suddenly been cast in sharp relief. She was powerful; matching her telekinesis hadn't been without effort. However, he could sense turbulence on the astral plane: this wasn't the only battle she was waging.

"I'm less divided than you are right now." His voice had a strange resonance, as if more than one person was speaking. Reality immediately around the walkway began to reassert itself, as if the liquid energy was somehow absorbing the flame.

"My division is merely momentary. You are a walking case study," the Dark Phoenix said, casually noticing the world bending to her opponent's will.

"I find it ironic that Xavier, in all his power, cannot fix you, his bastard son. I think he likes having you this way, a pet. Let's see what you really look like."

The Phoenix raptor reared up, as if stoked by gasoline, and suddenly charged, using its talons to try to slash at Haller, to skin the mask that he'd constructed around his psionic avatar.

The attack came too fast and vicious to block. As with Jean, the expressions of their telepathy were antithetical: water to flame. Haller turned that metaphor into a weapon and absorbed the blow, diffusing the Dark Phoenix's power with his own. The talons caught him across the face and chest nonetheless, marking his astral body with trails of blood and leaving his body screaming with sympathetic pain.

He staggered, but did not fall. He raised his hand to his face, half-expecting to feel wetness under his fingertips, and only then realized something. This parody of Jean was right; it was his instinct to mask his astral form to match his physical appearance. Past traumas and his own illness had left his avatar a patchwork man, a collection of disparate parts trailed by every selfish, shameful impulse given personality and form.

But not now. Here, in this moment, the mask had never even occurred to him.

David Haller looked up at her, blue eyes calm. "Today," he said, "what you see is what you get. But you're right, I am pathetic. And I feel sorry for you, because if this is what someone as worthless as me can do for the people that matter to them, I can only imagine what you could have been."

Though perhaps he already knew.

It didn't matter. Narrowing his eyes, Haller extended his hands and lashed out at the woman that was the beating heart of the flame.

"Get away from my father."

Emma winced as she felt Jim lash outwards, a sledgehammer blow against a woman made of fire. It had some effect - flame shifting, re-shaping, around the lash and heaviness, but it wasn't right.

~Fire can't burn in a vacuum,~ she sent to Haller, a tight-band message, a pin-prick in a maelstrom. ~She won't stop attacking you. Be a hole, a vacuum, a space. Consume her. I can,~ words stopped, just pictures now - pipes and drainage and channeling, fire being poured into gutters and taken away, smothered, remade, sent back.

Another message, equally small, equally focussed. ~She wants this,~ Emma sent to Rachel, a snapshot of Cerebro. ~Can you break it? Kill it? She's a child, a toddler, deprived of her favourite toy. Danger if you do. Can you? Will you?~

~Yes.~

With the Dark Phoenix's attention averted, power flowed from Rachel's pores as she recovered and shot up into the air above them, still ensconsed in her thick shield that seemed to leech energy from the very essence of the Astral Plane bleeding through the atmosphere. The redhead raised both arms above her head, sketching a scornful parody of the 'godqueen' as she locked onto her target with a vicious smirk.

If there was one thing she had been trained to do by one fictional Remy LeBeau, it was to destroy.

A shimmering blue bubble snapped into existence around her shield as the psion clenched one fist and then the other, energy filling the space between and crackling dangerously against her forcefield. Overwhelming grief, pain and rage for the countless of losses and sacrifices of people she had known, had wanted to know, and had known in another lifetime found its brief outlet in the battlecry Rachel screamed out as the Dark Phoenix turned, just a fraction towards her. Just a fraction too late.

The wave of power burst forth from its confines as Rachel pushed, pouring energy into it with abandon as she unleashed the destructive force into the room.

Panels cracked, broke and shattered. The platform that they stood on shuddered. And still she pulled from within to push outwards until the telekinetic force from another threatened to crack her own shield, sending her tumbling towards the ground.

Emma barely had the capacity to notice Rachel’s actions, caught as she was behind the maelstrom that was Jim’s fight with the Dark Phoenix. But she was diamond and she was ice and pure white frost and she clung to those aspects of her identity, channelled the ice-cool organisation that defined her and let fire burn through her, shaping it, taming it, dissipating it. It was only a fraction of what Jim was dealing with, but she could help. And beyond ice and diamond she tapped into everything else that was her – her heart and passion and burning intelligence, love and laughter and tears and everything that loved life and clung to it – everything that made her human, and she poured that out to Haller, bolstering his strength with her own.

Clinging to Emma's orders, Haller gave the Dark Phoenix no chance to look elsewhere -- meeting lashes of flame with whips of water, maelstroms of fire with waves of light. Every blow left his mind red and raw, grinding him inexorably back, but part of the force was absorbed, funneled into the telepath behind him. He bowed, but Emma's strength did not let him break. Together, they made the god fight for every inch.

He was acutely aware of the lives behind him. There was Adrienne's sister, shunting the power into their shared defenses with the focused precision of a machine even as it scorched the shining pathways of her mind. There was Moira's daughter, fallen but still fighting with all her bright rage and black grief to deny the Dark Phoenix her prize. There was his father, frail and defenseless in his chair.

There was his friend, dead on the ground.

Only now, in the crumbling depths of Cerebro as reality split around them, did Jim understand the power you held in your hands once you came to accept there was nothing left to hold.

So much power. But, as their dwindling pocket of reality began to twist and blacken beneath the endless flame, still not enough.