Archive of Our Own ^beta

“So you used to be a superhero, right?”

Leaning into one end of the couch in Jean’s office, her 14-year-old client can’t seem to take her eyes off the largest photo on the side wall. The team shot from--geez, eight years ago now? Jean in her green Phoenix costume, next to Scott in his Cyclops gear, on the Xavier’s School steps, surrounded by all their friends.

Jean hadn’t wanted to hang that photo in here. Dani insisted.

“Depending on who you ask, I suppose I still am,” Jean said. “Most of the staff here are reservists. We’ll get called in for alien invasions or magical catastrophes, the big stuff. You’re safe here.”

“Oh, I know. I’m not worried about that.” Only then did Vanessa turn to meet Jean’s eyes. “I guess I just don’t get it. Why would you give that up? It seems like it’d be awesome. Wasn’t it awesome?”

Jean smiled. “It had its moments. I didn’t always love the schedule, though.”

“Yeah, I guess,” her client said. “But still! Do you miss it?”

“Sometimes,” Jean said. “But we’re not here to talk about me.”

Vanessa sighed. “Yeah, I know. But we could be. My mom’s gonna pay you for the hour anyway. I won’t tell if you don’t.”

Jean smiled. “Tempting. But how about we talk about what happened with your brother first?”

Vanessa rolled her eyes. “Uggh, fine.” Jean remembered being able to roll her eyes like that. Actually, she probably still did around Bobby. “So I’m guessing Mom told you about me hitting him? Did she also tell you that Fuckleberry Finn took my phone?”

There weren’t many worse sins in teenage eyes than laying hands on another person’s phone.

“She did,” Jean said. “She also said you took his phone first, and you were yelling at him. That he was asking you to stop. Is that accurate?”

Vanessa looked down, picking at a couple of stray cat hairs on her top. “I guess so? Did she say WHY I was yelling at him?”

“Not really,” Jean said.

Another magnificent eye-roll. “That is so like her. I get it, I know she’s been through a lot--I’m the one who actually gives a flying green fuck about that!--but I don’t get why she won’t just stand up for herself and make Max stop being such a little shitbag. She’s our mom, she can do that! I shouldn’t have had to take his phone, because she should’ve done it months ago.”

“Has Max been doing something on his phone?” Jean asked. In grad school, she’d gone to a seminar on cell phone red flags.

“Huh? Oh, nothing like that. That I know of. God, I hope not. You don’t think he’s a pervert or something, do you?”

“I have no reason to think so,” Jean said. “Your brother’s eleven. ‘Developmentally appropriate’ encompasses a wide range of behaviors at that age.”

Vanessa snorted. “Yeah, I guess. At least he keeps his door locked.”

“So what happened?”

“He was just giving Mom so much shit.” Vanessa paused, checking herself. “Should I not be swearing? Sorry! I’m not trying to be rude. Mom says it’s rude. She never used to care about that. I mean--not Mom. I know that wasn’t Mom. You know who I mean.”

“I do,” Jean said. “And in this room, you can use whatever language you need to. I’m not easily bothered.”

Vanessa glanced at the team photo again. “I guess you’ve been through a lot worse, huh?”

“I’ve been through pretty much everything,” Jean said. To call that an understatement would have given other understatements an inferiority complex. “So what was Max giving your Mom shit about?”

“Everything!” Vanessa said. “Every little stupid-ass thing. She packed the wrong snacks in his lunch. She bought the wrong kind of underwear--he’s eleven, he has a phone, and the internet delivers everything. Why can’t he buy his own underwear, and why the heck do I have to hear about it? I don’t want to think about that! But Mom’s nice and still does all this stupid stuff for him and he’s not grateful for anything. She’s back, she’s home, she spent TWO YEARS dealing with goddess knows what on a freaking alien planet, and now she’s home for three months and that little asshat thinks it’s okay to just yell at her about everything? No. No! I refuse to put up with it--because Mom can’t say a word to him, apparently, but it’s not like she should have to--and suddenly I’m the supervillain here?”

“I know supervillains. You’re nothing like them.” Jean’s tone was flat, her face the same one she wore at all of Carol and Jess’s poker nights.

After a second, Vanessa laughed. “Nice. That was good.” Jean just smiled back. “I know I shouldn’t have hit him. I know that’s not cool. But he yelled at Mom, so I took his phone and yelled at him, so he thought it was okay to take my phone. And then I hit him. It just happened. I said I was sorry. And it only happened that one time, and that was like weeks ago. At least a week ago.”

“Have there been other times you yelled at him?”

“Yeah. But that’s normal, right? Who doesn’t yell at their brother, or sister or whatever?”

Jean missed arguing with her own sister too much to argue with that.

“Why do you think it was important to your mother that you come here today?” she asked instead.

Vanessa looked back at Jean. Then she looked at that X-Men team photo again. Then back at Jean, the color suddenly draining from her face. “Oh--oh geez. Did I--did I test positive for the X-gene and Mom was too chicken to tell me? Am I gonna, like, grow fur or something? No offense! I hear blue fur is in this year. It’s just not my thing, you know?”

Jean suppressed an irrational flash of anger, the kind that had been known to summon fiery wings. She didn’t really have the room in here, and more importantly, she knew the teenager was just scared and confused. Or, y’know, a teenager. It only felt like she’d just told Jean that being a mutant like her would be the worst thing on the planet. Jean counted to three in her head and breathed out.

“Nothing like that,” Jean said. When she’d asked the question, she’d just hoped Vanessa might acknowledge that fighting her brother on her mother’s behalf wasn’t making Mom’s life any easier.

“But you said--I just thought--like she needed me to talk to you because pretty soon I’m gonna Hulk out or whatever? Is getting mad at Max is like a safety hazard or something?”

Jean shook her head.

“Okay. My bad.” Vanessa let out the breath she’d been holding. “So if I’m not one of you people, why am I here? Oh--oh shit. Is Max one? Am I a racist? Does picking on my brother make me a racist now?”

Ok, now it was just getting funny. Possibly it shouldn’t have been, but it was. Jean let it show. “None of that. No mutants here but us chickens. And by chickens, I mean the staff.” Not all of the staff, but most.

“I just thought it was weird,” Vanessa replied. “Mom bringing us to the mutant community center for therapy. I thought maybe it was like a Groupon thing. Do you guys do Groupon?”

“I don’t think so. But we recently started branching out with our advertising, from focusing on mutant-specific issues to pretty much anything superhero-adjacent.”

“Oh. Yeah, I can see how ‘kidnapped and replaced by an evil Skrull imposter’ qualifies. For Mom, at least. Do you really think you can help her?”

***

Where Vanessa chattered, Max was stone. Like his sister had used up all the words in the room. When it was his turn, he just sat there in the center of the couch, hugging his backpack to his chest. He didn’t look at any of the pictures on the wall, except maybe a glance as he was sitting down. He just stared at the carpet between them.

“Your mom says you’ve been having a hard time since she came home,” Jean said.

Max shrugged.

“She says you’ve been fighting with your sister a lot.”

Another shrug.

“Would you say that’s true?”

Max twisted his head, looking sideways. “Not really? But she’s been fighting with me a lot.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Because I get mad at Mom. I know that’s not fair. I just--”

Back to the shrug.

“I’m not worried about fair,” Jean said. “Your feelings are your feelings.”

“Aren’t you people all about fair?” said Max, and quickly added, “Superheroes, I mean.”

Jean gave a shrug of her own. “Eh. Some heroes get into the speeches and the drama. But I’m semi-retired, dude. I don’t have time for all that!” She waited, and was rewarded with an almost-smirk. Close enough. “Seriously, though. It’s okay to feel things. How we act on our feelings, how they affect other people, that matters. But feelings happen. Especially when big, scary things happen to us. That’s normal. So what’s happening that you’re mad about?”

Max’s shrug struck back.

Jean thought about what Vanessa said, about Max snapping at their mother for things she should’ve known, should’ve remembered. She didn’t want to just throw Vanessa’s words in Max’s face. She wanted to know what Max was seeing for himself. But there were ways to point him in the right direction.

“When I’m mad, a lot of times,” Jean said, “I realize later that being mad was kind of like wearing a mask.”

“I thought you didn’t wear a mask,” interjected Max.

“That’s called ‘deflecting.’ Nice try. Also, you’re right--as Phoenix I don’t, but I used to. I keep one in the drawer over there. You can see it later if you like. But like I was saying--being mad can be kind of a mask. Something to cover up other feelings we want to show even less. Sadness. Fear. Stuff like that. What do you think of that?”

Max scrunched up his face, considering. Then he shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. Why cover up other stuff by being angry on purpose? Being angry makes you a jerk. Nobody likes you when you’re angry.”

“The Hulk has a dedicated fanbase. Have you ever met an Emo-Kid fan?”

“No, because Emo-Kid isn’t real,” Max said.

“Because no one wants to announce to everyone how sad they are. They’d rather be cool and angry. So I think you just proved my point,” Jean said, putting on a triumphant grin.

Yes, it was cheesy and ridiculous, but Max was 11 and it worked. Just about worked. Jean waggled her eyebrows a little and it worked, Max finally cracking a smile of his own.

“This is a real thing,” Jean said, returning to her gently serious counselor voice. “Not Emo-Kid, I mean the thing about getting mad because we’d rather be mad than sad or scared. We all do it sometimes. Especially if we’re sad or scared about things we think we shouldn’t be.”

Max’s head kind of snapped back, a palpable hit of surprise.

Jean looked down at her hands, turning her wedding ring like she did every so often to keep it from sticking too much to her skin, giving him space to figure this out.

Maybe thirty seconds passed before Max shrugged yet again. “I dunno.”

He had known. For a minute there, she was sure of it, he’d zeroed in on the feeling under the anger, and the reason for it. Something he didn’t think he should be feeling.

“You don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to, Max. But you can, here. You can say whatever you like.”

Max hugged his backpack tighter. Again, Jean waited.

“Can I not say it?” Max finally asked, in a voice just a hair above a whisper. “You said during the interview thingy--you really can read people’s minds?”

Jean nodded. “I’m a telepath. But I’ve learned how to close it off. I don’t read minds without permission. I’m not ‘listening’ right now.” She could feel waves of tension and anxiety roiling off him, she couldn’t help that, but no discrete words or images. “It’s your choice what to say, and I won’t hear anything you don’t.”

“No, that’s--I don’t want to say it,” Max said. “Could you just read it for me? Please?”

***

A minute later, Jean stepped out into the waiting room. Vanessa was there, sitting next to her mother Maria, both of them staring at their phones. Jean didn’t read anything into that. Phones were many things, and nobody needed to be directly engaged with their families every second of the day.

Jean waved, and Maria looked up. “Jean? Is everything okay?”

“Fine,” Jean said smoothly. “But Max has a question. Can you come in for a moment?”

Vanessa still had her earbuds in, but looked up, watching as Maria crossed to the door and Jean closed it behind her.

Maria frowned worriedly at Max, still huddled on the couch. “Sweetie? Are you all right?”

Max looked up at Jean, waiting for her to ask.

Jean waited for Maria to look her way again before saying, “I know we talked about it before, but Max has asked me to read his mind during the session.”

Maria blinked. Where Max’s emotions had fallen over Jean’s office like a weighted blanket, his mother’s thoughts seemed to pull back inside her head, tortoise-like. Just as they had the first time Jean had asked if any of them wanted her to use her telepathy in session. It was a standard question during an intake interview at X-Factor Community Center. Maybe one in ten clients were actually interested, but it was just as important to establish that it was a choice, that the famously mind-reading superhero Jean Grey wouldn’t just go digging through anyone’s brain without permission.

“You really said that?” Maria asked her son.

Max shrugged instinctively, but quickly corrected himself with a nod.

“But I asked you. You and your sister. You both said no,” Maria looked at the ceiling, eyes scanning from left to right as if she could track her thoughts there. “Unless you didn’t? I guess I just assumed?” Max looked back at her, not saying anything. Maria let out a frustrated breath, and turned back to Jean. “Do you really think it will help?”

“He asked, so he thinks it will,” Jean said.

“If you think so,” Maria said. “I guess--can I be in the room with him?”

Jean turned to Max.

Max hesitated.

***

The cell was like something out of Star Trek. Three dark gray walls of foam painted to look like metal, fronted by a translucent blue force field shimmering and humming like a bug-zapper. Inside there was a sink, a toilet, and Maria, sitting forlornly on a bed that was little more than a shelf bolted to the wall.

Facing the force field, seated side by side on the couch from Jean’s office, were Max, still hugging his backpack, and Maria yet again.

“Oh. Oh, sweetheart,” the Maria on the couch said.

The Maria in the cell didn’t say anything. Neither did Max, staring back at her.

Jean stood. Sometimes she stood behind the couch, looking into the cell. Sometimes she stood in the cell, looking at the couch. She almost, but not quite, did both at once. The astral plane, the psychic space accessible only to telepaths and mystics and the guests they brought in, allowed her to move faster than the thought of the speed of thought, but the human brain still processed like a human brain.

“It wasn’t—it wasn’t like this,” the Maria on the couch assured her son. “It was more like—and I wasn’t alone! But love, you don’t have to worry about me.”

Jean spotted those gaps, the m-dashes in her speech. This place lived in Max’s imagination. It appeared to be his idea of his mother’s captivity. Through Jean’s telepathic gift, the three of them could inhabit it together. Max was the bridge, his thoughts guiding the imagery around them. Maria feared that acknowledging her own memories would let them crack through into here.

Max hated thinking of what his mother had endured. Hated bringing Maria back here. Maria hated that even the thought of her horrors could haunt her son. That nothing she said, or didn’t say, could keep them from him.

Still, she tried. “You don’t have to worry about me. That’s why I’m coming here, to talk to Jean. I’m okay. I’m dealing with it. I’ll be okay.”

Max looked at his mom. But he shrugged, and they were still in the room with the cell.

“Are you afraid that if you talk about your own feelings, it will just serve to remind her?” Jean asked. “Because you went through something frightening too. It’s okay to acknowledge that. Your mother is here because she wants to help you process that.”

Max blinked, looking up at Jean. He shook his head, and the force field buzzed louder. It shimmered brighter, and then the whole room glittered and shook and fell apart and—

—they were in a car. A nice sedan, with an electric hum. Jean and Maria shared the back seat, while Max rode in front, next to Maria, who was driving. A song played over the car stereo, and Max was, and also was not, singing along. His face fluttered over his face, a ghost image over the more solid form of Max hugging his backpack. Backpack Max kept his mouth shut, sometimes looking over at the Maria who drove, sometimes back at Jean. Never back at the Maria beside her. Ghost Max grinned and sang his fourth grade heart out.

Even sitting behind him, even with his now-face obscured by the flashing ghost-face of his memory, Maria could still read the tension in her son. Her own frown deepened as she watched him. As she watched the other her.

“I don’t--I don’t know this song,” she said, watching her driving self throw her head back to belt out a high note. “When was this?”

Max looked at Jean again. She heard the words in her head.

“Last year,” she said quietly.

Maria cringed. Jean actually felt Maria’s stomach take a dive, and felt her own dive in sympathy. “That’s not me,” Maria said, staring at the woman with her face behind the wheel. She must have known, or at least guessed. The Max in the memory didn’t look enough younger than he did now for the driver to be anyone else. But until Jean said the words out loud, she hadn’t had to face it. “She--she looks just like me. But that’s not me!”

“He knows,” Jean said. She reached out a hand across the middle seat. Maria took it and squeezed. Hard. In the physical world, it might have hurt. Here it only burned a little. And in here, Jean was fireproof. Most of the time.

Jean knew what it felt like to see your own face looking back at you, not from a mirror but in the world, and to know that that person had existed in spaces meant for you. Had lived with the people you loved. Had convinced them they were you, or as good as. Or better, maybe. Jean had had a doppelganger as well. Two, in fact--one a godlike alien force of creation, the other a tragically manipulated clone. Not Skrulls, but close. Not that she would be getting into any of this. Therapy wasn’t about the therapist. That only went double when you lived a life complicated enough someone could devote a multiple season podcast to untangling its mysteries. Still, Jean knew that fury.

A fury that chilled as Maria forced her eyes back to the road ahead. “Max? Where is she taking you?”

One of his faces still singing, the now-Max looked at Jean again, passing the answer like a note in class.

“Nowhere bad,” Jean promised on his behalf. “A robotics competition for school.”

“No evil robots?” Maria asked.

Jean listened for a moment. “No evil robots. The team from William O’Shea played a little rough, but it was kind of awesome until it was Max’s ‘bot it happened to.”

“I didn’t even know you did Robotics Club,” Maria said.

Max tried to look back, tried to answer in words again, but the sides of the car were already falling over, metal suddenly flat as the scenery in a school play, the seats beneath them dropping away and Jean and Max and Maria and Maria were dropping with them--

--onto living room carpet. Maria and Max sat on the floor wearing safety glasses, a black-with-white-socks cat nosing through the circuit boards, open chassis, and little round plastic wheels strewn on the floor between them. Maria and Jean sat on a floral-print couch, looking down as Maria demonstrated a soldering iron.

Max hugged his backpack and grimaced, and sat up grinning with his hands on his knees, all at once.

Maria-on-the-couch stared down. “I built a computer with my dad in college. That’s--that was his soldering iron.”

Max didn’t meet Jean’s eyes this time, but she heard him all the same. “Max quit the club after you came home. It didn’t feel right any more.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Maria breathed. “Did you like it?”

Max-with-the-backpack shrugged.

Maria glared at the woman with her face and her father’s soldering iron. But when she spoke, the words still came out soft. “If she gave this to you, baby, you don’t have to let her take it too. It’s yours. It’s okay.”

But Max had still seen the glare. When he shrugged this time, his shoulders stayed up like armor. And the suburban house fell away around them, and metal folded up in its place, wrapping them tight--

--in another car, on another road, on a steel-gray day.

And this time there was just one Maria, and Jean, and Max, and Vanessa in the back seat, not scrunched together--the car was wider than the memory--and a man and a woman riding up front in dark suits.

In the rearview mirror, Jean caught a glimpse of a pin on the lapel of the woman driving, with a blade stabbing up through a circular clasp. S.W.O.R.D., the Sentient Worlds Observation and Response Division. Spooks who chased spacefolk, basically.

“You have to tell us!” Vanessa was saying. “Like, I’m pretty sure it’s the law!”

“Definitely sure it’s not, actually,” the agent in the passenger seat replied. He was a bald, broad-shouldered Black man, and quickly losing his patience. “All we’re required to do is take you somewhere and keep you safe. The sooner you shut up, the easier it’s gonna be to get that done. For everyone.”

“Our mom works in Senator Hirway’s office. One call from--”

“You remember the part where we asked for your phones, right? Also the part where you handed them over?”

“Okay. Okay. Fine!” Vanessa spluttered, wheels clearly turning in her brain. “So your job is to keep us safe. Well, if you don’t tell us what happened and where we’re going, I’m going to open the door and jump out of this moving vehicle. How’s that going to look in your next job review, shit-for-brains?”

The woman driving erupted in a deep and unsettling cackle. “Child locks, shit-for-brains! Suck it.”

Vanessa screwed up her face and folded her arms. Max just watched her. He’d just been watching this whole time, from two faces. One watched Vanessa. The other watched Maria, watching Vanessa.

“If I guess, will you tell me?” Vanessa tried. “Did someone, like, threaten our Mom? Or threaten the Senator? ‘Cause if it was that, he gets that on Twitter like every day.”

“I’m not playing,” the man said.

“It wasn’t--if there was a terrorist attack, or a supervillain attack, or something, you have to tell us!”

“No and no,” the woman driving said.

“Rosa!” the man snapped. “I said don’t play!”

“Wizards? Androids? Aliens?” Vanessa tossed out, encouraged now.

In the rearview mirror, the woman driving flushed a little, embarrassed that she’d let herself get caught out. Not that Jean could read her here, Max’s memory of a person. But she could guess.

“It’s one of them, isn’t it?” Vanessa pressed. When neither of the agents responded, she followed it up with, “In about two seconds I’m just going to start screaming, and then--”

“Fine. Fine!” the man snapped, half turning in his seat to glare at Vanessa. His face was mostly blocked by his headrest. From the middle of the backseat between Vanessa and Max, Jean should’ve been able to see him better than this, but his seat was wider than it should’ve been, and the angles weren’t quite right. Max had been sitting behind him. “You want to know what’s going on? Here’s what’s going on. S.W.O.R.D. operatives in Skrull space located human captives in a secret facility. The operatives were able to successfully extract all forty-one captives, alive, more or less unharmed, and are bringing them home as we speak.”

“That sounds like a good thing, and you still sound super tense,” Vanessa said.

“I’m tense because one of the captives they’re bringing home is your mom, kid. And we don’t yet know why she was there or how long she was there or what else the Skrulls have planned. So yes, plenty of tension to go round. But we’re taking you somewhere safe now, so like I said, if you would PLEASE just SHUT UP--”

“You’re not making any sense,” Vanessa said. “How long was she there? She was at breakfast this morning--”

Max was shaking. Vanessa’s backpack was at her feet, but Max’s was on his lap. He was hugging it, and as he shook, memory-Max and now-Max weren’t quite in synch, making it look like he had four arms, all squeezing. Jean had seen him walk into her office with that backpack on his back, but still fought the impression that this was the moment he started hugging it and he’d never really let go of it since.

“Kid, you do know what a Skrull is, right?” the driver asked. “Average sized green person, can shape shift, look like anyone?”

“Duh, I know what a Skrull is. Everyone knows what a Skrull is,” Vanessa said. “They invaded the planet when I was like nine. But didn’t the Avengers expose them all and send them home or something?”

“Yeah, well, maybe they didn’t get ‘em all. Maybe some of ‘em came back. We don’t know yet. We’re working on that,” the man in the passenger seat said.

That, they figured out. Jean had heard that part from Maria. Some Skrulls came back, a smaller sect with their own agenda. Two years ago, they’d tried the whole stealth invasion thing again, but they’d tried to be more subtle about it. Instead of replacing superheroes and S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, they’d targeted people close to non-powered humans in positions of influence.

People like Maria, invaluable aide to rising star Senator Hirway.

“So you’re saying our mom’s been trapped on an alien planet?” Vanessa asked. “Maybe even since the invasion when I was a kid? No. No! How dumb do you think we are? That we wouldn’t notice we’ve had a fake MOM for possibly years?”

“Pretty much that dumb, yeah,” the driver said.

“Not helping,” the other agent said. “Kid, I only think you’re dumb when you’re arguing with me. The Skrull thing--they use sleepers.”

“They get in when we’re sleeping?” murmured Max. It was the first time Jean and Maria had heard him speak since the three of them had dropped into this memory.

“See? Dumb as rocks,” the driver said.

“This is how everyone knows you don’t have kids,” the passenger said. “Calling people smart or dumb is ableist and unhelpful, you’ve got to let them know that achievement comes from making the effort to figure things out--”

“Are you seriously rehashing your podcast at me right now?” the driver said.

The other agent sighed, twisting back to look at Vanessa again. “Skrull sleeper agents are telepathically programmed with the memories of the people they’re duplicating. Near as we can tell, they don’t even know they’re not the real thing until they get activated.”

“So has our--has the person in our house been activated?” Vanessa asked.

“We don’t know,” the agent said. “But our people picked her up at the senator’s office the same time we picked you kids up from school. So now you know everything we--”

“To take her where?” interrupted Max.

Only he kind of swallowed the words, so the agent didn’t get what he was asking at first. “We’re going to a safehouse. That’s all you need to know. Even if you’ve never seen a single spy movie in your life, which I doubt--”

“Kids don’t watch movies anymore,” interjected the driver. “They just watch their phones.”

“Again, if you had kids, you’d know they actually watch both, frequently at the same time, and it’s super--”

“No, I said--where are you taking her?” Max asked more loudly. “Where are you taking the Skrull who was--the Skrull you found, where are you taking her?”

“Oh,” said the man in the passenger seat.

“Space jail,” the driver said. “Basically space jail.”

Maria and Jean both looked over at Max. He had his head down, his face pressing into his backpack as hard as he could.

Their peripheral vision swam.

When Jean and Maria looked forward again, they were back on the couch, sitting in front of the cell. Only this time, the Maria looking back at them from inside had green skin and a bumpy chin.

Because she’d always been the Skrull.

***

“I don’t feel like it--I could see it!” Maria cried. “You could see it! You took us literally inside his mind, and it’s obvious he’s been brainwashed!”

“That would explain the soap smell,” Jean said, pursing her lips. Then she kicked herself internally as Maria’s anger and frustration seemed to sharpen into tiny little daggers, every one of them aimed right at Jean. “Sorry, too soon?”

“I don’t see what’s funny about this,” Maria said.

“Honestly? I reached a point in my life where everything became at least a little funny. It was that or it was all ten tons of awful, and I’m not strong enough to deal with all that.”

Maria continued to glare in Jean’s general direction, but the daggers blunted a little. Empathically speaking.

Max had gone back out into the waiting room, so now it was just Jean and Maria alone in here, in Jean’s third straight hour of Skrull sleeper agent deconstruction. Why had she ever agreed to schedule the family’s sessions back-to-back-to-back?

Still, that was her problem. For another thirty-eight minutes, she wasn’t here to deal with her problems.

“I sensed nothing in Max’s mind to suggest he’s been influenced, or that he had been at any time in the past,” she said.

“He’s worried about her,” Maria said.

“He’s worried about you too,” Jean said. Thinking back, through the whole set of memories Max had bounced the three of them through, Jean wasn’t a hundred percent certain she’d sensed concern for Maria, the real Maria, distinct from the person Max had thought was his Mom for the two years before she was rescued. The two Marias seemed to be all tangled up in the boy’s mind, only really untwisting at the point when their fates collided and diverged: when he’d learned his Mom was on a spaceship coming home, and the woman he’d known as her was being arrested and thrown in space jail.

But Maria didn’t need to hear that right now.

“I still think she did something to him,” Maria insisted. “You people can do things like that, right? Telepaths, I mean. You can mess with people’s memories?”

“It’s within the scope of a telepath’s abilities. But it leaves traces, signs that--”

“I know you didn’t do this. I’m not angry at you,” Maria said. It didn’t entirely feel like it, but Jean was used to that. Outside of the guilt when she dropped a joke that didn’t land where she expected, she usually didn’t let it bother her. “But you can fix it, can’t you?”

“There’s nothing to fix. Not like that, not beyond what we’re already doing. I think he just misses her. It’s painful, but it’s normal.”

“You mean he’s got Stockholm Syndrome?”

Jean suppressed another smirk. “Ooh, don’t get someone in my field started on Stockholm Syndrome. There were specific reasons the people in the bank sympathized with the hostage-takers in that instance. Actually, now that I think about it, it might be relevant--”

But Maria wasn’t listening. “No, that doesn’t make sense. If it’s that, why is it just happening to Max, and not Vanessa too? That thing did something to him, just him! Maybe they need him for something? Maybe they know something? Skrulls have super powers, maybe one of them could tell the future, tell that Max would be important somehow? Something about making robots! Or a Skrull time traveler came back and--”

“Maria,” Jean said softly, calling her back. “It’s scary, I know. It’s terrifying. But I really, truly believe that what your children are going through, what you’re all going through, it’s just regular, everyday emotions.”

“I’m not crazy!” Maria just about shouted. “I’m speculating wildly, fine! But every one of those things I just thought of is a real thing that happens all the freaking time!”

“I know,” Jean said, keeping her voice low. “I promise, I know. You see the man in the photo over there? The one on the end, with the robot hand and the antlers?”

Jean nodded to one of the pictures on her wall. A family Christmas photo from before Ray was born. Jean and Scott on the love seat, surrounded by their older kids. Rachel and Nate, in their early twenties. Nathan, looking fifty-five if he was a day, with white hair and a glowing eye and a shiny metal hand, arms crossed over his ridiculous reindeer sweater, wearing a novelty antler headband. He’d teleported in for the holiday from some war zone, with no luggage, and made the mistake of letting Rachel and Nate go shopping for him. Jean had expected the antlers to fall victim to one of Nathan’s very large guns, but he’d succumbed to a dare from Rachel instead.

“Most people who don’t know assume that man is my father-in-law. But he’s actually my son,” Jean said.

“Adopted?” Maria asked. Her voice was quieter again, now that she had something outside her own head to focus on. Which was exactly Jean’s intent.

“Yep,” Jean said. “But I held him as a baby. My husband and I raised him until he was--until it was time to let go. And then he grew up, two thousand years in the future. And eventually he came back to us. His brother, standing behind us there, crossed over from an alternative timeline. His sister is from the future of a totally different timeline. That’s my timey-wimey family, and I love them dearly.”

“They look like good kids,” Maria said.

“They’re great,” Jean agreed. “So trust me, I know that all the fantastic possibilities running through your brain right now, you’re right, every one of them is real.”

Maria scrubbed at her face with her hands. “I just--then how, if every damn thing is real these days, how are we supposed to figure out if anything is real?”

“The same way we always did,” Jean said. “We hold on to our people. We trust people who’ve been through similar things. We accept that nothing is ever certain except what we choose to hold onto. And we deal with it. We do our best.”

“That’s a lot.”

Jean snorted, not unkindly. “Yeah. It is.” After a second she said, “You asked why Max is so upset about--about what happened to your imposter, and Vanessa isn’t. Everyone handles things, reacts to things, in their own way. It’s possible Vanessa’s feelings are more like her brother’s than she lets on, and that’s why she’s so mad at him. Because he admits to the feelings neither one of them thinks they should have.”

“So--can you fix it?” Maria asked again.

“We’ll keep working on it,” Jean promised. “For all of you.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Her volume was creeping up again, like a pot on the stove coming to a rolling boil. “This woman stole my life. Stole my children! Just for once, can’t one of the million impossible things happening every day be a good thing, be something that works for me? You’re a telepath! Can’t you just make them forget?”

***

Forty-two minutes later, when the hour was over and Dani Moonstar wandered into the office, Jean was face down on the desk.

“Rough session?”

“Three of them,” Jean muttered into her arms.

Dani raided Jean’s snacks cabinet for Milano cookies, then dropped onto Jean’s couch. “What happened?” Dani had the office next to Jean’s, but in hours where neither of them had a client scheduled for therapy, she pretty much always ended up in here.

Levering herself more or less upright in her chair, Jean filled the younger counselor in on the broad strokes of what the Vazquez family was dealing with, without naming names or violating HIPAA.

“It’s all hitting a bit close to post-cocoon home,” Jean finally said. That wasn’t a euphemism. Jean had literally been wrapped up in a healing cocoon and left at the bottom of Jamaica Bay for several years, while her first doppelganger lived and died and her second doppelganger came along to marry her boyfriend and give birth to Nathan.

“That sucks,” Dani said. “And I’m sorry. But I’m glad this family has you in their corner.”

“I dunno,” Jean said. “I’m having my doubts about Warren’s whole plan to expand the practice by encouraging more non-mutant clients. The daughter kept getting distracted by the superhero stuff, like I was some sort of celebrity—”

“To be fair, we kind of are,” Dani said. “And that’s a feature, not a bug. Clients who’ve been through the weirdness feel safe here.”

“That’s how we thought it was going to work,” Jean said, “but now I’m not so sure. Neither this mom or the daughter seemed totally comfortable with my powers, and maybe not really with mutants in general.”

Dani growled, mostly under her breath. “The telepathy thing? That I get—and I’m close enough to one I can say that.” Dani’s mutant ability let her pull fears and desires out of people’s minds and turn them into psychic illusions, or even solid objects. Clients checked the box for Dani to use her powers in session even more rarely than they did for Jean. Still, every once in a while they worked wonders. “But the rest? They can suck it. Want me to find someone to refer them out to?” If a client wasn’t a good fit, for whatever reason, X-Factor Community Center could provide a referral to a more suitable therapy practice. Dani liked to joke about referring anti-mutant bigots to Dr. Karla Sofen. At least Jean was pretty sure she was joking.

“No, it wasn’t that bad. Just occasionally awkward,” Jean said. “And maybe they’re just weirded out by anything out of the ordinary right now. Which is understandable.”

“I guess.” Dani sounded less than convinced. “But that’s exactly why you’re the best person for them. Because you’ve been through every damn thing.”

“Says the Demon Bear-fighting former undercover S.H.I.E.L.D. wunderkind and occasional actual Asgardian Valkyrie.”

The Cheyanne grinned. “Touche. But I still bow at the feet of the master.”

“But here’s the other thing—when she wasn't being weirded out by my powers, the mom wanted me to use them. On her kids. To erase their memories of doppel-mom.”

“Like completely erase the time they spent with her? Or erase the fact that they found out about her, so they just think mom was always home?” Dani asked.

“Does it matter?”

“I mean, losing a couple of years of school would seriously mess up pretty much any kid I’ve ever met. So that’s horrible. But just forgetting mom got replaced would mean they’d have a bunch of memories they’d have no way of knowing she doesn’t share. It’d be a conversational minefield waiting to happen.”

“Yeah, no, there’s no good way to do that,” Jean said.

“Nope,” Dani agreed. “And you told the mom that?”

“I did. Not sure she was convinced. And that’s the new problem I’m afraid of—that just because we’re occasional superheroes, our clients are going to assume there’s some magic bullet solution to all their trauma.”

“Peace of mind in twenty-two pages, or your money back!” Dani intoned.

“Hank didn’t actually put that in any of the ads, did he?”

Dani shook her head. “But hey, if being a super-mutant-therapist was easy, everyone would do it.”

***

“Scott?” Jean thought, after Dani had finished her cookies and wandered back to her own office.

“What do you need, love?” Scott’s thought echoed in her mind. If Jean didn’t reach out with something specific, his first thought was always that question. Not to cut to any chase, not out of impatience—she wouldn’t have reached out at all if she sensed he was busy or with a client. That was just where he started, always.

Scott’s office was on the other side of the building. When he wasn’t out with their daughter-in-law meeting emerging mutants and their families, Scott managed the X-Factor Community Center’s skills team. They coached mutants on everything from how to use their powers safely, to how to request accommodations from school or work, to navigating job interviews, including knowing what questions employers weren’t legally allowed to ask but might anyway.

Some couples texted back and forth through their work days. Jean and Scott Grey-Summers had their psychic rapport, a constant backdoor into each other’s heads. Jean found it hard to imagine sharing this with any other partner, anyone with a louder brain than Scott’s. With Scott, it was comfort. A constant, steadying reminder that she was never alone except when she wanted to be.

That was Thursday nights, usually. Most Thursdays she kicked Scott out of her head and Scott and Ray out of the bedroom and watched the junkiest junk she could find on Netflix.

Still, most of the time, this was nice.

Jean: When I came back from the dead, after you found out I’d been replaced, did you ever miss the Phoenix? Or Maddie, for that matter? Did you ever wish I was them?

The Phoenix Force was Jean’s first doppelganger, the godlike alien entity. Maddie was the second, the clone.

Even while conversing at the speed of thought, Scott hesitated just a fraction of a second too long.

Scott: ...

Jean: So that’s a yes.

Scott: Not really. But maybe a little? Something I was doing or watching or reading would remind me of something else, or a Facebook memory would come up, and I’d want to say, ‘hey, do you remember--’ And it’d take me a second to realize that no, you wouldn’t, it wasn’t you.

Jean: Does it still happen?

Scott: Not very often.

That wasn’t quite a no.

Jean: Just when you think about making out on buttes in Colorado?

Scott: NO.

Scott and the Phoenix had definitely done that, while visiting Warren one time. Jean had experienced the memories. They were very vivid.

Scott: Sometimes I’ll hear a joke, and it’ll make me think of--Maddie had an impressive collection of dirty pilot jokes. Or--it happened a little more in Ray’s first year, when I’d think back to me and Maddie when Nathan was that age. But it was mostly the opposite, really.

Jean: What was?

Scott: When you came back, it just made it obvious how much time I’d spent with Maddie wishing she was you. With the Phoenix, at the time, I didn’t know she wasn’t. With Maddie, I knew she was her own person, after some initial confusion, and I told myself I loved her for her--

Jean: But you don’t think you really did?

Scott: No, I did. I think I did. I loved things about her, things that weren’t like you at all. But maybe not as much as I should have.

Jean: What’s ‘should’?

Scott: No, I know. But it wasn’t until you actually were back that I realized how much of what I felt for Maddie was still wrapped up in wishing she was you. Which was awful. She deserved better. So did you, honestly.

Jean: And yet, all these years later, here we are…

Scott: Yeah. How did that happen?

But she could hear the smile in his mental voice.

Jean: Seriously, though. You carried a lot of guilt in those days. And I felt like everywhere I turned, Maddie and the Phoenix were there. Like there wasn’t much space left for me. How did we get through all that?

Scott: We were young and kind of dumb?

Jean: Point.

Scott: Also I called home and the number had been disconnected. Then Maddie was attacked by the Marauders and we thought she was dead. Then we thought we saw her die in Dallas with the X-Men on TV. Then she showed back up as the Goblin Queen and we all got to reenact the movie Ghostbusters and she really did die--

Jean: Wait. Wait wait wait--

A connection had flared in the back of Jean’s brain, and for an incandescent moment, she had it. The page twenty-two twist of a comic book solution, neat and tidy.

Scott: Wait what?

Jean: Maybe that’s the answer I’ve been looking for. For a client, with her own doppelganger situation. She’s also got loved ones who remember her-but-not-her.

When Madelyne Pryor died, for complicated psychic battle reasons, Jean had ended up inheriting both Madelyne and the Phoenix entity’s memories. If Jean could track down the Skrull who had impersonated Maria Vazquez, maybe she could get her to agree to share the memories of her time with Maria’s family willingly. Like they were sitting together over a photo album. Then Maria would have the context for the years her kids had kept growing up with her but without her.

With the door of their psychic rapport wide open, Scott followed the line of Jean’s thought as she raced along the possibility.

And he popped it like a bubble.

Scott: But it wasn’t like that for you, was it?

Jean: Not really. No.

As much as Jean loved the thought of an elegant answer to a therapy problem, when Maddie and the Phoenix had come rushing into her brain, it hadn’t made her grief over her lost years or her disconnections with Scott or anyone else easier. It had made it harder, if anything. For a while there, she struggled to delineate where she ended and the other women began. She couldn’t wish that on anyone.

Jean: So much for that idea. But hey, at least I got to remember the butte sex.

Scott: Please don’t call it that.

***

Jean’s first sessions with the Vazquez family were all on a Monday. So very, very Monday. On Wednesday afternoon, Jean had a late session with another client and some notes to finish, so Scott caught the earlier train to pick up Ray from school. By the time Jean got home, Scott was making dinner for five, and Ray was settled in at the table, working on a drawing of Scott and Moana sailing a boat that flew the X-Men’s flag in place of the skull and crossbones. The 6 year old still launched from his chair when he heard the locks clicking as she came in the door, racing the five feet across the apartment for a hug. Scott didn’t stop chopping vegetables, but smiled and leaned over for a quick kiss as Jean passed the kitchen on her way to their room.

She emerged eight minutes later, more or less the limit of the time she could take alone for herself in the evening. She’d changed into a more comfortable shirt and leggings, if not quite as comfy as the pajamas she wore on nights it was just the three of them, then sat on the bed and snuck a look at her phone. Ray had apparently finished his drawing, because he’d spent the last two minutes of her me-time standing outside the locked door chattering and not minding that some of her “uh huhs” fell in the wrong places. He led Jean back to the living room, where she dropped tiredly onto the couch.

“Play with me, mommy!” Ray ordered.

Jean opened her arms, and Ray, knowing full well this was a down payment on a better answer to his demand, let her pull him in for a quick, squirmy hug and a kiss on the top of his bright orange hair.

“First, how was school today?” Jean asked.

Ray shrugged. “I already told Daddy.”

“He said ‘it was fine,’” Scott put in from the kitchen. “I asked about fits. He said they’re working on a fairy tale project this week, and he wanted to work ahead and got upset when Mrs. Simonson said no. But he didn’t think she was too mad.”

“Well, she didn’t message us about it in ClassDojo,” Jean said.

“Yep. Sounds like a good day,” Scott agreed. “And they got to play with the DJ apps in music class again.”

“Will you play with me now?” Ray asked again.

Jean sighed, still tired, but smiled at her son. “Sure, love. Want to play hide and seek? You can hide first.”

Ray rolled his eyes. “Only if you actually come find me after you say ten. It’s not that big an apartment, mom!”

He was definitely on to her tricks. “Not hide and seek, then. What do you want to play?”

“Flying?”

Scott chuckled. “He gets that from both sides.”

Jean grinned. “You know pilots and telekinetics aren’t the same thing, right?” Turning back to Ray, she held both hands up in front of her. “You ready, bud?”

Ray nodded, quick and jerky like a bobble-head. “3, 2, 1...blast off!”

Jean tensed and relaxed all at once, her fingers splaying wider as she flipped switches in her brain, stretching out with her mind to grab hold of her son and lift him gently into the air. Giggling, he stretched out on his belly, punching one fist forward and leaving one at his hip, one knee raised dramatically, just like Auntie Rogue had taught him. Jean stretched out too, laying back on the couch, as she raised Ray over her head, sending him soaring around the room.

“Faster, mommy!” Ray called, and Jean obliged, dipping him down over the LEGO build in progress on the coffee table, then back up to the fan.

Now that Ray was up and zipping around, she only needed one hand to direct his flight, pointing and waving like a very lazy orchestra conductor. The rest of her focus got pulled in by the wall over the table. Much like her office wall, it was covered in a constellation of framed photos of family and friends.

Jean had arranged them aesthetically and sympathetically, rather than chronologically: a photo of Ray and Jean as BB-8 and Rey from this past Halloween, next to a photo of eight year old Jean and her sister Sara as two different versions of Princess Leia when they were kids. Ray in this year’s school photo, showing off his short-cropped hair, with a confident grin and a royal blue polo shirt, between photos of Scott in his blue Cyclops costume and Rachel in the blue Phoenix costume she’d worn for a while. There were a couple of shots of Ray at age three or four that she kept expecting him to ask them to take down, like he had several others, shots where he still had pink shoes and longer hair, even if the hair was pulled back or less obvious because of the angle. There were Ray’s baby pictures, next to Nathan’s baby pictures, and Jean’s and Scott’s and Aunt Sara’s and Uncle Alex’s.

Rachel’s and Nate’s baby pictures were missing, of course, because they hadn’t been babies here--Nate hadn’t really been allowed to be a baby anywhere--and when they each came to this world they hadn’t had the chance to bring anything with them. So Ray had drawn pictures in crayon of baby Rachel and baby Nate, and labeled them, and Scott had framed them and hung them by the other baby photos.

Curling her fingers in a beckoning motion, Jean brought Ray down to the couch again, whispering as he came in close to her face, “Tuck in, bud.”

Giggling, Ray dropped his raised knee and flattened his arms to his sides, as Jean flicked her fingers, sending him darting through the pass-through, into the kitchen and over Scott’s shoulder.

“Buzzing the tower!” Jean called out, a second too late to actually count as a warning.

Scott, who had faced down armies and gods, jumped half a foot off the ground, wildly waving his wooden spoon. “Hey! Hot stove here!”

As Ray dove back into the living room, laughing louder, Jean rolled her eyes. “I’ve got him and he was nowhere near the stove.”

“I’m very cautious!” Scott said defensively.

Ray resumed his best flying pose, continuing to dip and dive, as Jean’s mind wandered back to the pictures.

Nathan’s baby pictures weren’t the only photos from the time Jean had been gone, but there weren’t many. And Maddie and the Phoenix weren’t in any of them. Jean and Scott had never talked about that. They’d never had any reason to. They didn’t really talk much about those years. Most of the time the pain felt resolved, as much as pain could be. And the good times, even with the secondhand memories, didn’t feel like Jean’s to share.

Scott, do you still have any photos of Maddie, or the Phoenix when it was me? Jean asked through their rapport. This is not a trap, I promise.

Umm, Scott thought back. Even in his head, he actually said ‘umm.’ He was adorable. Not really? Not physical ones, anyway. I’ve got digital copies of some, on a backup hard drive in the closet, in a file folder I never look at. Why? Do you need to check something?

No, Jean sent back, beaming reassurance along with the word. Just thinking about that client again.

Ahh, Scott thought. Dinner will be done in five.

Perfect timing, Jean thought, sensing two familiar minds in the hall outside. The girls just got here.

“Ray, incoming!” Jean called out aloud. Swinging herself sideways off the couch, she upgraded to a more intense conductor’s posture, keeping Ray aloft with one swaying hand, pointing with the other at the door. When the doorbell rang, the lock was already clicking open. “Come in!”

“Ray-Ray!” Ray called to Rachel, dive bombing his older sister as she came through the door.

“I’ll save you, love!” Rachel’s wife called from right behind her. Clapping both hands onto Rachel’s shoulders, Kitty Pryde engaged her own mutant power, rendering both Rachel and Kitty momentarily intangible as the laughing six-year-old flew right through them.

He circled the room one more time before Jean dropped him solidly into Rachel’s arms.

***

After dinner, Jean and Rachel squeezed into the kitchen to do dishes. The apartment technically had a dishwasher, but it tended to leave residue if you didn’t pre-wash things first. Forge kept promising to stop by sometime and level the machine up, but never seemed to get around to it. Jean didn’t really mind, having first seen The Sword and the Stone at an impressionable young age. She stood, leaning back against the counter below the pass-through, and as she waved her hands to the music she made up in her head, plates and cups dipped themselves under the faucet and got clean by dirty dancing with the floating sponge, before they were handed off to Rachel. Leaning back right next to Jean, Rachel used her own telekinesis to move the dishes down into the open dishwasher and settle them in.

Once they’d gotten into a rhythm, neither of one of them needed more than half their attention to keep it all moving along smoothly, leaving them free to talk.

“When we first met--” Jean began.

“Oh geez,” Rachel said, her cheeks turning pink. That first meeting, their first couple of them, hadn’t gone so well. Rachel had introduced herself as Jean’s daughter from the future. Jean, already struggling at that point with the memories she’d recently inherited from Madelyne and the Phoenix, had pushed her away. At the time, she’d felt like a tragic hero in an old saga, shuddering under the terrible weight of destiny.

She’d grown up reading a lot of mythology and fairy tales. She and Scott both had.

These days, Jean looked back and realized it was the weight of emotional expectation she’d fought against. Of relationships that seemed to have been chosen for her.

“Sorry,” Jean said. She really hadn’t intended to embarrass Rachel. “I just--even by that point, you already knew this wasn’t your timeline.” Rachel had come from the future, yes, but in the version of the world she came from, there was no cocoon. Jean was never replaced by the Phoenix, instead bonding with the entity in a symbiotic relationship. Scott never married Madelyne Pryor. Nathan was never born there. “You called me your mom, but you had to know I wasn’t.”

Rachel nodded slowly, the silverware she was lowering into the rack in the dishwasher dropping slower in sympathy. “Yeah, I did. But I still thought you could be. Someday. That felt--for a long time, that felt so important. That even if you weren’t my actual mom, you still could be some Rachel’s mommy.”

Behind them, in the living room, someone punctuated this statement with a very loud fart. Ray erupted into giggles like only a six year old who had just heard a grown up fart can.

“Kitty farted!” Ray announced.

“Manners, Ray!” Scott sing-songed back. Peeking through the pass-through, Jean could see him fighting to hide his own amusement. His ever-present red sunglasses helped, but she knew that twitch at the edge of his mouth.

“Well exCUSE, me!” Kitty mock-blustered. She sat in the middle of the coffee table, just her head and shoulders poking up above the wooden surface. “I’m trying to stay still for you guys, and you’re not making it easy!”

Kitty was currently keeping her body phased, while Scott and Ray crouched beside her, clicking LEGO pieces into place inside the intangible outline of her hair. They’d been working on this life-size Kitty sculpture over the course of Kitty’s last three visits, like those kids on the beach on tv benignly burying their parents in the sand.

“Do intang’ble farts still smell?” Ray asked.

“Uncle Hank would say this is an excellent opportunity for scientific observation,” Scott said. “Breathe deep, buddy.”

Ray sniffed, then groaned, then giggled some more. Kitty chortled, flapping intangible hands at the boys. “Stop, stop! If I laugh any harder, I’m going to fall right through the floor!”

“The apartment directly below is Mrs. McGillicuddy. She won’t mind,” Scott said.

Jean glanced sideways, saw the stars in Rachel’s eyes as she watched her wife and her almost-dad and her alternate-timeline brother play.

“But you don’t need that any more. You don’t need there to be a native-you that exists here,” Jean said. It wasn’t a question. They’d talked about that in the months before Ray was born. Scott and Jean had decided against naming the baby after Rachel. They already had Rachel herself in their lives, and they wanted the family’s newest member to get the chance to define themselves. They’d had no idea at the time how quickly that would happen. Nor that when the time came to choose a name that truly fit, Ray would insist on naming himself after Ray-Ray.

When Ray was born, Rachel had understood. She’d agreed it was the right decision, and Jean hadn’t sensed even a thread of disappointment lingering.

“Because I was here. Because by then, I’d figured out that I didn’t need to exist here to belong here. I didn’t need the universe to tell me I wasn’t a mistake or--I dunno, some harbinger of doom.” Regardless of the timeline or universe they hailed from, the whole family shared that flair for the dramatic. Nate literally spent his adolescence as a member of an insurgent theater group.

“Okay. So I get all that, I think,” Jean said. “But still, walking up to someone you knew wasn’t your actual mom, someone who hadn’t had a kid, who wouldn’t share any of the memories that mattered to you--”

Jean paused, leaving a glass hovering, as instead of accepting the handoff, Rachel facepalmed. “Look, I was young and dumb, okay?”

“Everybody is, until they’re not. And often even then. If my job has taught me anything, it’s that,” Jean said. “I’m sorry.”

“That I was young and dumb?” Rachel said.

“That it had to hurt,” Jean said softly.

Rachel scrubbed at her face, pushed out a breath, and reached out with her brain to take the glass and get back to work. “I knew it would. But not having anyone, having lost you all, that already hurt worse. I’m sorry I made everything so awkward back then.”

“You didn’t, love. Or not much more than I did.”

“But you still think about it,” Rachel said.

A light clicked on in Jean’s head. Rachel was also telepathic, but she and Jean didn’t share a constant telepathic rapport, and she didn’t go digging through heads without permission, even with family. She must have thought this was all water still somewhat over a bridge.

“Sorry. Sometimes I forget what I’ve said out loud or thought at who,” Jean said. “I didn’t bring this up because of baggage. Just something I’m trying to work through for a client.” Jean gave Rachel the same personal-details free, privacy respecting rundown of the Vazquez family situation that she’d shared with Dani.

“Oh. Okay, I get it,” Rachel said. “What you’re asking is what would drive someone to still want so badly to connect to someone they know isn’t their person?”

“More or less.”

“I was a severely messed up, traumatized kid,” Rachel said. “Of course I wanted my mommy. Maybe the real question is--why did you finally give in?”

Jean shrugged, and thought not just of Rachel, but of Nathan and Nate too. “Because in the end, how could I not want to get to know someone who was a part of me? Even a part I’d missed out on.”

Rachel sighed, the very particular sound of a heart that was filled and breaking all at once. “I love that about you, Mom. But we’re telepaths. We both know not everyone knows how to think like that.”

“I know,” Jean said.

***

It was late Friday afternoon, and Jean had one more session note to finish before she could set herself free for the weekend, when she got the call from Vanessa Vazquez.

“There’s a Skrull!” the fourteen year old said in a pinched, panicked whisper. “There’s a Skrull here, now, and I can’t find Max!”

Jean was already on her feet, grabbing her jacket and moving towards the door. “Vanessa, it’s going to be okay. Where are you?”

“Central Park,” Vanessa said. Jean’s breathing eased a notch. The kids weren’t trapped in a house with a potentially hostile alien. They were in public, in an open space, and not really that far away, as the crow flies. Or the Phoenix.

“I’m on my way. Is your mother with you?” Jean asked.

“No, it’s just us. I was taking Max to Shake Shack for dinner. I was trying to be nice!”

“I know, sweetheart,” Jean said.

“This thing--it’s taking hostages on the lawn. I don’t know where Max went, and he’s not answering his phone! I think he thinks it might be our not-mom, like she escaped or something!”

“Just breathe. Remember to breathe, and stay on the line,” Jean said, slightly distractedly. She’d switched her phone to speaker as she moved down the hallway, typing a search for “skrull central park.” There were already half a dozen news alerts, all less than ten minutes old.

“I can’t, I can’t--oh goddess--I’ve got to go!”

Vanessa hung up. Jean swore, and broke into a run.

“TABBY!” Jean yelled.

Scott had already left for the day. She could talk to him through their rapport, of course, but he’d already be on a train on the way to the school, and someone had to get Ray before 6. Dani was gone too. Most people were, like they should be on a Friday night, but as Jean rounded the corner into the lobby, Tabitha Smith was still at the main desk, her hands braced, ready to vault over the surface and kick someone in the face if she had to. She’d dropped her phone next to her, some game beeping and chiming away on the screen.

“Red alert, boss?” Tabby said.

“Probably not. Yellow, maybe,” Jean said, sliding her own phone into her pocket. “Who’s left in the building?”

“Just you, me, and Doc Reyes. But she’s with a patient,” Tabby said.

“Okay. Okay. I probably didn’t need backup anyway,” Jean said, thinking quickly. S.W.O.R.D. had to be on the way already, right?

“I can go,” Tabby said. “Just tell Cecilia I’m locking the doors, she’ll be fine.”

“No, I’ve got another job for you,” Jean said. She’d double checked the records in her phone, but she didn’t actually have Max Vazquez’s number.

“Want me to call Monica?” Tabby’s former fearless leader at Nextwave, now Scott’s co-manager on the XFCC skills team, had gone home at 3:30, but her powers let her transform herself into a beam of light and arrive pretty much anywhere at the speed of, y’know, light. “Heck, she could pick up Everett on the way--”

“No, I’ve got this,” Jean assured Tabby. She wasn’t interrupting anybody else’s evening over a single hostile Skrull. She filled Tabby in on Vanessa’s call. “I need you to look for Max on social media. See if you can find him in the park.” If there was an alien upset in Central Park, people would be posting pictures. Hundreds of them. “I’ll link us telepathically. Just let me know the instant you have something.”

“Tick tick tick,” Tabby said, dropping into her spinny office chair and snatching up her phone. “Metaphorical boom.”

Did Tabby spend all day on that phone? Yes. Did Scott end up doing 70% of the paperwork Tabby was technically responsible for? Also yes. But the instant a new mutant came out on social media, Cerebro had nothing on her. It’s how they found a lot of their clients, giving Scott and Kitty the chance to reach out and let them know the services that were available. That they weren’t alone.

Max Vazquez wasn’t alone either.

Jean shrugged into her jacket, shoved through the front door, and dove into the sky.

***

Tabby didn’t have any luck locating Max in the couple of minutes it took Jean to fly from the middle east side, where the X-Factor Community Center was located, up to Central Park. She did manage to find several more news alerts and three different people livestreaming, so by the time Jean approached the edge of the park, dropping down to treetop height so the opposition wouldn’t see her coming, she knew right where to go and what to expect.

S.W.O.R.D. was indeed on the way, with an armed counter-invasion unit moving to surround the lawn. A lawn filled with several dozen picnickers currently pinned down by mobs of squirrels and chipmunks, while several gondolas in the lake nearby had been surrounded and immobilized by leaping fish. So they weren’t just dealing with a rank-and-file Skrull, but a Super Skrull, able to simulate the powers of an entire team of Earth superheroes. And this one had made quite an interesting selection.

Park police hadn’t had a chance to unspool an actual cordon yet, but were waving onlookers back from the edge of the lawn in question. Jean had complicated feelings about the NYPD these days, at least about officers not named Charlotte Jones, but she floated down beside an officer on horseback who was a) out of the Super Skrull’s direct line of sight and b) emanating a higher ratio of concern to irritation as she directed the people around her.

Jean pulled her X-Men commbadge from her pocket, along with her S.W.O.R.D. consultant ID card--hadn’t used that one in a while--and waved them both over her head as she approached.

“Hi there! Phoenix, X-Men reserve member. Actual superhero. I think I might be able to diffuse the situation out there. Could you radio me through, please?”

The woman looked down her nose and her horse’s nose at Jean. Jean had felt more concern from her than from most of the other officers down the line, but the whiff of irritation was still strong.

Jean opened her fingers, her commbadge and her S.W.O.R.D. ID now gripped only by her telekinesis. She gave them a little wave in the air.

“Sure. Why not?” the officer said, yanking the walkie talkie from her belt.

“Has the Skrull made any demands?” Jean asked.

“It wants a spaceship.”

“Makes sense,” Jean said.

She gave the woman a moment to inform the other officers that a superhero had arrived to negotiate with the alien hostile, and strode out across the lawn, walking as quickly as she could without looking like she was hurrying. When she was spotted, she didn’t want the Skrull to interpret her approach as a charge, nor as an attempt to draw its attention, which might cause it to fear an attack from another direction. She did her best to scan the crowd as she approached, with her eyes and her mind both, but she didn’t see Max, and between the massive waves of anxiety coming off the folks buried under rodents on the grass and the curiosity and excitement of the people all around them, there was too much telepathic static to pick out one particular mind here.

The squirrels saw her coming first. A couple dozen of them peeled off the picnickers--leaving them still trapped, just by slightly fewer furry rodents--and dashed her way, their bouncing run and the arc of their tails making them seem to ripple across the grass like water bouncing across a decorative fountain.

Jean stopped walking with the Super Skrull now in sight, maybe five hundred feet up the lawn. The squirrels stopped too, a hundred yards or so short of Jean. A couple of them pointed little furry arms, chittering.

The Skrull stood roughly eight feet tall, which is what happened when shapeshifters employed the well-known defensive strategy of cats everywhere: “try to look big!” It stood a little taller than that, even, if you counted the bushy brown tail puffed up behind it. A white domino mask framed glaring eyes, and the natural green of its skin combined with what appeared to be an orange silk shirt and scaled swimming briefs for an effect that was a little more “Halloween pumpkin” than “intimidating alien invader,” despite the pair of wicked metal needles crossed in its green fists.

It was also possible Jean had just been doing all this Way. Too. Long.

“Hi!” she called across the lawn. “My name’s Jean. I understand you’re in need of a spaceship?”

“Yep, that would be pretty great! Have you come to deliver one to me? Hu-man?” the Skrull answered, in a voice that even with a shapeshifter’s theoretically variable vocal cords seemed to be reaching way too hard for deep.

“Not exactly, but I’ll bet we can work something out,” Jean said. “Mind if I come closer and chat? I don’t love yelling.”

“Yes! Yes, I mind!” the Skrull protested. “Just bring me the ship I have asked for! I am not here to talk!”

But Jean was already walking again. The nearest squirrels were dropping back, keeping pace with Jean but at a distance. “Oh, I don’t think that’s true. If you weren’t someone with a very sensible interest in talking things out, you’d hardly have picked Squirrel Girl for a role model.”

“Hah! Shows what you know, my dude. I picked the mighty warrior who bested Thanos!”

Jean cocked her head to one side. “Maybe. But I can see you’ve got the whole Team Squirrel Girl package going: Squirrel Girl, Chipmunk Hunk, Koi Boi…” She pointed in turn at the squirrels and chipmunks pinning people down on the lawn, the leaping fish surrounding the gondolas on the lake, and finally at those wicked metal needles clacking together in the Skrull’s green hands. “...and are you stress-knitting right now?”

“No! Obviously that would be ridiculous,” the Skrull said, quickly shoving the needles behind its back, along with what looked suspiciously like a dozen rows’ worth of a sweater vest.

“Mm-hmm.” Jean stopped, now only ten feet or so from the Super Skrull. “If you were just picking a power set for strength, you could’ve gone for Captain Marvel. Heck, you could’ve gone for me.”

The Skrull’s eyes narrowed. “Who are you again?”

“Jean?” said Jean. “Oh. Right. Sorry. When I’m doing the hero thing--” Jean snapped her fingers, just for the fun of it, and a bird made out of fire ignited itself behind her, spreading its twelve-feet-wide wings into the sky. “--you can call me Phoenix.”

Jean wasn’t actually bonded to, affiliated with, or otherwise endorsed by the renowned/infamous cosmic Phoenix Force these days. Apart from the whole doppelganger replacement mess, their only actual association had been a brief one, when Scott and Jean had been living in Alaska and Jean had gotten it into her head to experiment with the whole phenomenal cosmic power thing. Not nearly as fun as it sounds, it had turned out. When Rachel had come home from the future, she’d become the entity’s host again, and Jean went back to grad school for counseling instead. Still, she’d held on to a sliver of the Phoenix’s power. Mostly just that light show behind her, because it looked cool, and in certain galactic circles it was pretty intimidating.

The Skrull Empire was definitely one of those circles. The Super Skrull let out a shriek, shook all its knitting progress off its needles, and sent forty chipmunks and squirrels running straight at her.

Okay. The Phoenix Flare might have been overdoing it just a tad, thought Jean.

She managed to swallow down her instinctive reaction to as many as four tens of small furry rodents charging towards her. Raising her arms, she folded them in, and her fiery Phoenix wings folded down around her.

“Attack! Attack, my fine furry minions!” bellowed the Skrull.

The squirrels and chipmunks gamely leapt at Jean, despite the fire. Luckily for them, it was more of a visual effect and not actually hot. Luckily for Jean, she’d managed to envelop herself in a complete telekinetic bubble, even where the fire wasn’t actually visible, before the first teeny tiny rodent feet landed. They kept coming anyway. She could feel them scurrying all over her TK force field, dozens and dozens of tiny adorable creepy feet crawling and scrabbling over her brain.

But she put on her most over it face, the one she used on Ray when he was debating bedtime or asking if she knew about Second Dessert.

“Please,” she said to the Skrull. “I’m a mom. I turned my tickles off.”

“Yeah, okay,” the Skrull said.

The chipmunks and squirrels leapt down from Jean’s TK field, scurrying back to surround the Skrull, climbing on each other’s backs to form a wall, like the world’s tiniest cheerleading squad forming a human--or more accurately rodent--pyramid. But they left a gap in front, so the Skrull could still look out at Jean.

Even with all the staticky panic from the hostages on the lawn around her and her own skin still metaphorically crawling, Jean sensed another half dozen minds moving in to surround her and the Super Skrull. Minds so focused they stood out even here, even now.

So that’ll be the S.W.O.R.D. armed response unit, then. Better wrap this up quick.

“Can I ask your name?” Jean asked the Skrull.

“Clearly you just did,” the Skrull said. Jean waited. “It’s T’gann,” the Skrull finally added.

“Cool,” Jean said. “So, T’gann--why make all this fuss? The invasion’s been over for a while. Unless there’s another one? No one ever sends me the invasion schedule.” Jean left another gap, but the Skrull didn’t bite. “No, this seems more like a ‘missed my ride’ situation to me. So why cause a panic in the middle of the city with the most superheroes per capita on the planet? Why risk unnerving a bunch of Earthlings with itchy trigger fingers?”

She didn’t know if the Skrull had spotted the S.W.O.R.D. team yet. At this point, Jean was very carefully keeping her own eyes on T’gann. But not a lot got by the squirrels and chipmunks, Jean was pretty sure.

“I’m waiting for you to offer me a better option. Like a spaceship?” T’gann said hopefully.

“Why not just surrender?” Jean said. “Maybe no one told you, but Earth has a peace deal with the empire. Skrull prisoners get traded home. Unless you don’t really want to go? Maybe there’s someone here you’d miss? Maybe a couple of someones?”

“Huh?” said the Skrull, who was definitely not the Skrull who’d impersonated Maria Vazquez.

Jean hadn’t really thought so. She didn’t even think Max had thought so. She had some other ideas about that. Sort of. For now they were only half-formed, floating around in the back of her brain, waiting for her to have time to develop them.

“Never mind,” Jean said. “Are you looking for some kind of asylum, or can we get you a ticket home?”

“Your ‘tickets’ take too long!” T’gann snapped. “I’m not a general or member of a royal house. I’m not important. There, I said it, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I can just be happy being me. But I won’t be happy sitting in one of your S.W.O.R.D. cells for years, waiting for the diplomats to make it worth Earth’s while to send me home!”

“Gotcha,” Jean said. “That’s no problem. We can work around that.”

“How?”

“Easy. A) I’m a telepath and B) I know a gal. Let me read your mind freely for intel, and in exchange, I’ll personally guarantee they put you on the next ship back.”

*****

T’gann surrendered to the S.W.O.R.D. agents with no shooting necessary, once the squad captain came forward to project a holo-call from Director Brand, who ratified the deal Jean had just negotiated. All the squirrels and chipmunks dispersed, while the fish on the lake dove back to their customary depths. S.W.O.R.D. moved out with their prisoner, and several ambulances’ worth of EMTs immediately moved in, rushing to check on the formerly pinned picnickers. Not one of them had a scratch.

Still, more than a few were shaking, and a handful were hyperventilating. Jean identified herself to a couple of the EMTs as a trauma therapist and followed in their wake, talking to and reassuring the recent hostages, starting with the families with small children.

She was talking to a couple of little girls when her phone buzzed. She pulled it far enough out of her pocket to glance at the name, then let it go to voicemail. But as soon as she was done with that family, she stepped away and returned the call.

“Hi, Ms. Jean!” Vanessa said when she picked up. “Uh, sorry if I freaked you out earlier. We’re fine. We’re all fine here, now.”

“So you found Max, then?”

“Yep. He was fine. He never even got close like I was afraid he would. He’s a good kid. And you were awesome, by the way.”

“So you saw that, did you?” With her phone still pressed to her ear, Jean skipped a few steps and hopped into the air, flying over the still crowded walkways through the park.

“Oh yeah! But from a completely safe distance. I promise.”

“That’s good,” Jean said. “Look up.”

Because there were Vanessa and Max, squeezed onto one end of a bench just down from Shake Shack, their laps full of burgers and fries, passing a milkshake between them. Jean couldn’t sense someone’s presence telepathically over a phone call, but having Vanessa’s voice in her ear in real time had helped Jean pick Vanessa’s mind out of the crowd and triangulate her location.

Max followed Vanessa’s gaze as she looked up, grinned and waved at Jean. Vanessa’s own smile took a second, like a car taking a couple tries to start.

Jean dropped to the pavement in front of them. A couple of people nearby clapped. A couple of others rolled their eyes. Someone even tossed a couple of dollar bills at her feet.

“No, really, that’s fine,” Jean said, lifting the dollars telekinetically and waving them back in the direction they’d come from. “Thank you, but I wasn’t--I’m not a street performer.”

The dollars just hung there, with no one reaching out to claim them. Jean shrugged and waved them right back into her jacket pocket, before turning back to Vanessa and Max.

“I just wanted to check on you both, say hello. I’m glad you’re okay. It must have been pretty unnerving, to get separated right when there was a Skrull here on the lawn.”

Max chuckled. “Separated? I wish. The line here took forEVER. I told Vanessa it would’ve been way shorter while people were still gawking at you and the Skrull--uhh, no offense. I wanted to go get in line then. She said we had to stay together.”

Yeah, that was about like Jean thought.

Raising one eyebrow, she turned her best Hard Stare on Vanessa, and waited.

About three seconds later, Vanessa said, “Yeah, okay, okay! I lied on the phone. Max never actually ran away.”

“I didn’t what?” Max said.

“I just--one of my friends posted about the Skrull attacking the park, and I thought--I wanted him to see what they’re really like. But I also made sure that you’d be here, that there’d be a superhero so we’d be safe. Really, that’s still being responsible, yeah?”

“Had you already promised your brother Shake Shack when you saw about the Skrull?” Jean asked.

“...no.”

“I understand your thought process, but I don’t appreciate being lied to. And you deliberately brought your brother close to a potentially dangerous situation, Vanessa.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. You’re going to tell my mom, aren’t you?” Vanessa said.

“I’ll give you a half hour to tell her first, but I’ll be giving her a call, absolutely,” Jean said.

“Yeah. That’s fair.”

“So how much of what happened over there could you see?” Jean asked.

“Most of it, I think?” Max said.

“But from a completely safe distance! Behind a horse cop and everything,” Vanessa quickly added. “You were pretty fucking awesome, by the way. With the whole CGI firebird effect or whatever? I loved that.”

“Thanks,” Jean said.

“I’m just--is it okay if I’m glad the Skrull was okay?” Max asked.

“Definitely,” Jean said. “I’m glad too.”

“You know she wasn’t the one who--the one we knew, right?” Vanessa challenged her brother.

“I know,” Max said.

***

On the train home that evening, Jean had an idea. Before she called Maria Vazquez, she called Abigail Brand.

The next morning, a little after 8 a.m., Jean picked the Vazquez family up at their home, pulling up to the curb in an unmarked white sedan that had come courtesy of S.W.O.R.D. It was a little surreal sharing an actual physical car with the Vazquezes after her telepathic session with Maria and Max on Monday, in the vague neighborhood of deja vu. But this time there was just the one Maria in the passenger seat next to Jean, and Vanessa was really there, and Max’s face wasn’t doubled or blurred at all. He didn’t even have his backpack to hug close. He was smiling.

Both kids were. And the smiles only got bigger, as the car pulled away from the curb, levitated into the air, and angled its front bumper to the sky. With an impressive whooshing noise, the car’s wheels turned sideways, the trunk folded up to reveal rocket engines, and the sedan made a break for the thermosphere.

Jean’s hands rested lightly on the steering wheel, but she leaned back comfortably in her seat, watching the kids in the rearview mirror and basking empathically in the secondhand joy of new experience.

It was Vanessa who finally broke the silence. “So I’m in Big Trouble Young Lady, but I’m still getting a trip to space. You know this is like the total opposite of grounding, right?”

“Oh, don’t worry. This just means you’ll be extra grounded when we get home,” Maria said. It had taken her a minute, but even she was grinning now, even if there was more anxiety gnawing at the edges. “And you know you’re not allowed to post about any of this on social media, right?”

“Obviously! I got that when you didn’t even let us bring our phones, Mom. Goddess!”

Jean suppressed a laugh as Maria rolled her eyes right back at her daughter.

“So are you an actual space pilot?” Max asked Jean.

“I have been. Once or twice,” Jean said. “But S.W.O.R.D.’s flying cars are all self-piloting these days. I can take over if anything gets weird, but we’re just about...here.”

Just as she said it, the car broke through the upper atmosphere, clouds giving way to the starry black of space. She’d planned that, obviously. She’d been reading the 3D-GPS at the side of the dash out of the corner of her eye. She grinned again at the inevitable chorus of “oohs!” and “aahs!” from Vanessa and Max, punctuated with Maria’s, “That’s no moon!”

Jean snorted.

“I don’t get it,” Max said. “Isn’t the moon the other way?”

“It’s an old Star Wars thing. Mom’s just being old,” Vanessa explained.

“Hey now!” Maria said.

“It’s no moon because it’s a space station,” Jean said helpfully.

Not that The Peak looked anything like a moon. S.W.O.R.D.’s space station was more of a spire, with the narrow tip pointed at the Earth, a ring built out around the broad end, and another couple of rings further down.

Docking bay doors slid open in one of those rings, and the car angled itself inside, its wheels turning back down again before it settled with the slightest bump onto a cool steel floor. The bay doors slid shut, atmosphere cycled into the hanger, and a red light turned off on the dash before the doors finally unlocked themselves.

When Jean and the Vazquezes stepped out of the car, a woman with green hair, green sunglasses, and a scowl waited for them by the interior airlock door. The scowl didn’t bother Jean. Abigail Brand, director of S.W.O.R.D., wore that scowl nearly as habitually as she wore the glasses, and like Jean’s husband, Brand had a lifetime membership in the I Wear My Sunglasses At Night (Even When the Night Is Space) Club. Behind the shades, underneath the scowl, Jean could sense Brand was actually having a fairly good day. The kind of day when she only had twelve things to do in the next three hours, as opposed to fifty.

“Grey,” said Brand.

Jean nodded back. “Brand.”

“Let’s get this over with.”

***

The cell wasn’t quite like Max had imagined. The walls were clearly actual metal, not the spray-painted foam of a tv set. The force field didn’t burn blue, but red - a comforting sort of light to Jean and probably Jean alone. And the woman standing on the other side had the green skin and bumpy chin of a Skrull, but her features didn’t look anything like Maria Vazquez.

But this was the same Skrull who had taken Maria’s place. This was where she waited to get sent home, while the Super Skrull Jean had talked down in the park last night sat in an interrogation room down the hall, waiting for Jean to be done here so she could do her part as agreed and earn a much faster ticket. When Jean had called Brand to work out the details, she’d managed to talk Abigail into letting the Vazquez family fly up with her. To give them this chance to see the Skrull who had upended all their lives face to actual face.

Maria frowned, hanging back a few feet, staying next to Jean.

Max took a step forward and hesitated, looking back at his mom.

Vanessa marched right up to the force field, crossed her arms and glared.

“Yeah, you kids have fun,” Director Brand said, already out the door. “Grey, don’t let ‘em touch anything!”

“Yeah yeah,” Jean called back, mostly to annoy her. They had that kind of friendship.

“Max? Vanessa?” said the Skrull in the cell. “They said you were coming, but I didn’t--I thought maybe it was a tactic.” Then she looked past the kids, settling her gaze on Maria. “And you must be Maria?”

“I--yes,” Maria said.

“That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say?” Vanessa snapped. “No ‘I’m sorry for taking over your life and enabling my sorry-ass excuse for a people to completely fuck up your lives for two fucking years?’ Nothing?”

The Skrull stared at her. “Of course I’m sorry for all of that. Of course I am.”

“Really. That’s real easy to say from in there,” Vanessa said.

“Do you want to--do you want to have a seat?” Max asked, waving towards the cot in the cell. There weren’t any chairs on this side, but Max dropped down to sit cross-legged on the floor.

The Skrull hesitated, looking from Max, to Maria. When Maria stayed standing, the Skrull shook her head. “No, thank you. I’m okay.” When Maria met her eye, for the first time, she said, “I’m N’ssa, by the way.”

“I can’t exactly say it’s nice to meet you,” Maria said. When her kids looked back at her, Vanessa smirking with an edge, Max’s eyes wide and sad, she added, “But thank you.”

“Why’d you do it?” Vanessa blurted out.

N’ssa looked back at Vanessa for a long moment before she answered. “Did they tell you I was a--”

“Sleeper,” Jean supplied, having recognized the sense of someone searching for a word in a tongue that wasn’t their first.

“Yeah they did,” Vanessa said. “So when you were--when we thought you were mom, you thought it too. Great, whatever. But you still chose to do that to us, right? Because before you didn’t know, you did know--didn’t you? You knew they were gonna give you someone else’s memories, someone else’s family, and you still signed up for that? You chose that!”

“I’m not sure choice is exactly the concept that applies. It’s different where I grew up,” said N’ssa.

“Yeah? And you don’t have conscientious objectors or whatever? A rebel alliance? Something? Fuck you!” Vanessa said.

Maria opened her mouth to interrupt, but glanced at Jean first. Jean very carefully didn’t say anything, not intending to moderate anything anyone needed to say here unless absolutely necessary, or unless she was asked. But Maria shut her mouth anyway.

“I didn’t know there would be children,” N’ssa said.

“Yeah, well, you should’ve thought of that. Fuck you even more!” Vanessa said.

“God, Vanessa, SHUT UP!” Max finally snapped, shoving to his feet again.

Vanessa turned her glare on Max then. But when he glared back, she turned her face up to the corner and shrugged. “Whatever.”

When Vanessa didn’t say anything more, Max finally took another step closer to the force field. “Are you--are you really okay?”

N’ssa nodded. “It’s not bad here. Small, obviously. Kind of boring.”

“You deserve--!” Vanessa started to shout, but cut herself off, finishing in a pointed whisper Max could mostly ignore, “you deserve that.”

“But they let me read. Have you read anything good lately?” asked N’ssa.

“I guess?” Max shrugged. “Actually--yeah! We just read A Wrinkle In Time for school. It was kinda weird, but good. Did you ever read it?”

“No, I can’t say that I have. What’s it about?”

Jean suddenly felt her stomach fall out, like she was on one of those amusement park rides for people who didn’t actually have a phobia about elevators and liked the thought of pretending they were trapped in one as it plummeted to their near-certain doom. It was so powerful, so encompassing, that it took her a second to realize the feeling wasn’t her own.

As she turned to look at Maria, Jean sensed the feeling pass, replaced by a cool, calm certainty. The stomach drop hadn’t been terror at all. Just the uncomfortable, necessary feeling a person sometimes gets when they lose their grip on a flawed but load-bearing premise.

“This was never a monster problem,” Maria said, watching the tender quirk of N’ssa’s smile as she listened to Max chatter about a book. Then she looked at Vanessa, who was watching N’ssa watching Max. Even she didn’t look so mad now. “My son just has a stepmom now, one no one in our family ever asked for.”

“That’s not a bad way of describing it. But despite all of this?” Jean said, nodding at the space station all around them. “That’s not really new territory for family therapy. We’ll keep working on it.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

***

Jean didn’t see any of the Vazquezes that Monday, having mutually agreed on the flight home that they should take some time to process before their next session.

The Monday after that, Maria, Vanessa, and Max shared the couch opposite Jean’s chair. Jean still sensed tension, and prickly feelings around the edges, but maybe a little less than she’d become used to.

Max had just started to talk about an experiment he’d liked in science class that week when they were interrupted by a knock at the door.

“Come in!” Jean called out.

Dr. Hank McCoy backed into the room, turning to smile over one of his considerably broad shoulders, waving at Jean’s clients with a very large blue-furred hand. His other hand guided a hover-cart through the doorway, carrying a more moderately sized flat screen monitor.

Hank lifted the monitor easily, setting it down on Jean’s desk in the corner and unwinding the cord from around the monitor’s display stand.

Jean raised an eyebrow at her friend. “Did you really need an entire hovercart for one flatscreen monitor?”

Hank looked just the slightest bit sheepish, like he’d been caught with his blue furry hand in the proverbial cookie jar. “Truthfully, no. But who am I to diminish the verisimilitude of the AV Club experience?”

“True,” Jean said. “In school you were definitely that guy.”

“I was indeed,” Hank said. Having plugged the monitor into the wall, he handed Jean a remote, shoved his hovercart back out the door, and waved once more at Jean and her clients on the way. “Toodles!”

Jean waited until the door clicked close before turning back to the Vazquez family. With the remote in one hand, she checked her phone with the other.

“Okay, Director Brand confirms everything is ready on their end. Are you all ready to get started?” Jean asked.

Max and Maria nodded. After a moment, Vanessa did too.

Jean clicked the remote, and the monitor snapped on. Selecting an extremely exclusive app, she established a secure video link with the Peak. For a second, the S.W.O.R.D. logo filled the screen.

Before it was replaced by a view of the inside of N’ssa’s cell. This time, when she smiled awkwardly at them all, there wasn’t even a red glow between them.

“Okay. Who wants to go first?” Jean asked.

END