Chapter Text
The thing about getting a lightning bolt put through the platform you are standing on, Jean would reflect later, lying on a cold clinic operating table, was that it really recontextualized your whole week.
She'd been winning, which was the part that stung. The man calling himself High Voltage had been draining a Bronx power station dry, drunk on more borrowed current than any human body could hold, throwing arcs of it around a yard full of transformers like a toddler with a hose.
Jean had come in with the team and done what she did, gotten high and gotten close, up onto a steel service catwalk twenty feet over the yard where she could look down at him and reach for the frightened switch under all that stolen rage. She'd almost had it.
She'd had her mind wrapped halfway around the scared man inside the storm, gentling him, when the storm noticed her.
"GET OUT OF MY HEAD," High Voltage roared, and pointed both hands at the catwalk, and Jean had exactly a half-second to remember exactly how bad an idea it had been to fight a lightning-man from a steel platform.
The lightning bolt hit the catwalk and the wall behind it at once. The steel under her boots went white-hot and then went away, unmade into slag and shrapnel, and the concussive thunderclap behind it threw Jean off the ruin of the platform and out into open air twenty feet up with a fistful of lightning still crawling across her ribs.
The custom vest, Frank's idea, a hybridized NIJ Level III ceramic armor plate seated in a Kevlar Level IIIA carrier, the best rig he could fit her with, did nothing. It was built to stop rifle rounds and pistol rounds traveling in a straight line, and it had no opinion whatsoever about a man made of weather. Every volt went straight through it into her, and then the ground rapidly came up.
Jean closed her eyes and accepted the consequences of her carelessness.
Except the ground never touched her, because Peter came swinging in sideways, yanking her away.
"Gotcha, gotcha, I've got you, babe." A line of silk, a hard yank, and Spider-Man had her out of the air and against his chest and was already swinging them away, away from the yard, away from the storm, his voice ragged in her ear. "Jean, Jean, talk to me, are you"
"'M here," she slurred, which was as much as she could muster, because everything was ringing and her whole left side felt like it was a truck slammed into her.
Below and behind them, High Voltage screamed his fury at the empty air where she'd been, and Frank's rounds cracked, and Daredevil went in low, but the thing had drunk too much and it knew it was outmatched by the whole team and did the smart yet cowardly thing.
It blew the yard's main transformer in a geyser of white fire to cover itself, and by the time the light cleared, High Voltage had arced away up a power line and off into the grid of the city, gone, escaped, a problem for another night.
Peter didn't chase. Peter had made a choice the instant Jean went off the platform, and the choice was her, and he carried her away from the fight without a backward glance, and Jean, drifting in and out against his chest as the city wheeled by underneath, understood dimly that she was the reason a villain got away tonight, and could not, in the moment, bring herself to care, because his heartbeat was going a mile a minute against her cheek and all of it was for her.
Claire Temple did not look up from the coffee she was pouring when Spider-Man came through the window of her clinic with a limp girl in his arms, because Claire Temple had seen everything twice.
"Table's clear," she said, in the flat unbothered voice of a woman who had patched up more masked idiots than the entire staff of every ER in Bellevue combined. "Lay her down, Spidey, and back up so I can work. What hit her?"
"High Voltage. Electrical. Concussive too, she went through a catwalk." Peter set Jean down on the table with a gentleness that did not match the panic in his voice. "The vest didn't do anything, Claire, it just, it went right through."
"Course it did, what the hell were you expecting?" Claire was already moving, penlight, pulse, hands quick and sure along Jean's ribs while Jean hissed. "A vest stops bullets. You're fighting Zeus. A whole different problem." She peeled back Jean's jacket and the ruined vest and looked at the lightning-flower of broken capillaries spreading up Jean's side, and her mouth went tight.
Without another word, Claire had grabbed a pair of shears and began cutting away Jean’s undershirt and sports bra. She attached electrodes to Jean’s bare chest for the ECG machine, at the same time, she grabbed a pulse ox and had it on her patient’s index finger before continuing her assessment.
Spider-Man continued to hover over Claire’s shoulder, despite her increasing annoyance. His body radiated waves and waves of nervous anxious energy, no amount of bouncing leg to leg was going to calm him down.
Claire cleared her throat and turned to Peter, "Yeah. Okay. Good news, hero, nothing's broken, ribs are bruised to hell but they're intact, and I'm not seeing signs of a cardiac event, which with electricity is the thing I actually worry about. Your girlfriend got very lucky. The kind of luck that runs out eventually, inevitably."
She was the team's secret, Claire. She'd been Matt's nurse first, many many years back, then Frank's when Frank would let anyone touch him, which was rare, and she ran a quiet clinic that asked no questions and took payment in just about every currency imaginable.
She'd patched up half the vigilantes and villains on the Eastern Seaboard, and she had exactly zero patience for any of them, which Jean found deeply comforting, lying there getting scolded by the famous Night Nurse.
"You," Claire said, tapping a cold pack she had taped over Jean's ribs, "fight energy at range with your mind, and you've got the raw durability of a grad student, and Frank sent you out there in this bulletproof vest. That's like bringing an umbrella to a house fire. He’s dressing you for the wrong war."
She snapped off her gloves. "I keep these boys alive one stupid injury at a time and I'm telling you what I tell all of them and none of them listen to. Better armor is cheaper than a funeral. Fix it before I'm scraping you off a table for real."
"I'm working on it," Jean said weakly. "Apparently. As of tonight."
"Good." Claire almost, almost smiled, and handed Peter a bottle of painkillers like it had personally offended her. "Ice, rest, no swinging her around for a week. And tell Castle his vest is garbage against anything that isn't a gun, he knows it, he just doesn't want to hear it." She turned back to her coffee. "Now get out of my clinic, I've got a guy coming in at two who got stabbed by a guy he was stabbing. It's a whole thing."
Frank was waiting at the lair when Peter brought Jean back to the lair, and Frank took one look at the lightning-flower spreading up his pseudo-daughter's side, as the hospital gown she was wearing didn’t quite cover everything. Frank’s face betrayed his mind as it went somewhere Jean had only seen a couple of times, somewhere quiet and old and unbearably guilty.
He didn't say anything at first. He got her set up on the good couch with the pillows arranged exactly right, and he made her a cup of the terrible tea he thought was medicinal, and he checked the cold pack twice.
Then he just hovered, Frank Castle hovered, a man who'd stormed fortified compounds fussing with a throw blanket, and only when she was settled did he sit down across from her and put his head in his scarred hands.
"That vest should've spread the load," he said, muffled. "It's the best panel money can buy. I fitted it myself. And it did nothing. You went through a wall wearing my armor and it did nothing."
"Frank, he's a man made of lightning. There's no vest for that."
"There should be." He looked up, and his eyes were wet, which Jean had seen maybe twice in her life. "I sent you out there. I looked at you going to fight gods and monsters and I gave you a Kevlar vest and a leather jacket like it was 1987 and I told myself it was enough because I couldn't stand to admit it wasn't. That's on me. That's a father's job and I did it wrong and you paid for it in bruises tonight and it could've been so much worse." His jaw worked. "I keep everybody in this family alive. It's the one thing I'm good for. And I dressed you for the wrong war because the right war's beyond me, and I hate it, I hate it, but I'd rather say it out loud than bury you pretending."
"Frank." Jean reached out and put her hand on his forearm, and he let her, which was its own kind of miracle. "You are not burying anybody. Look at me. Bruised, not broken. You built me armor for what you know how to fight, and you kept me alive long enough to figure out the rest. That's not failure. That's just the edge of what you can do alone." She squeezed. "So we get help. That's all."
Frank was quiet for a long moment. Then he nodded, slow, and something in him resettled into resolve, which was the shape she liked him best in.
"Then that's what we do," he said. "It's time. No more off-the-shelf. No more making do. You're getting a real upgrade, kid, a real suit, built for exactly what you are and what you fight, and I don't care what it costs or who we gotta beg, we're not stopping till you've got armor that means you never go through a wall again."
He stood, mission acquired, grief converted into a to-do list, which was the healthiest thing Frank knew how to do. "And it ain't just this lightning clown, kid, and you know it. High Voltage is the small fry. The one that keeps me up is still out there. Mister Negative. That black-and-white son of a bitch, and those Negative Contrast blasts he throws, the ones that went through the wall next to your head last time like the concrete was paper. Lightning I can maybe plate against. But that. That's the fight we're really building you for."
He set his jaw. "So. Who builds a suit that can take a man made of lightning and a man made of the dark. Because it ain't me. Time to find out who it is."
It turned out the answer started in Los Angeles, and it started because Matt and Karen had a legal case out West.
"Convenient, actually," Matt said, folding a garment bag over his arm at the airport. "There's a wrongful-termination matter out West, a whistleblower at a defense contractor, Karen dug up the documents that make it winnable and I'm arguing it. We'll be in LA for a week." A faint smile. "And it happens that the best powered-person designer alive keeps a studio ten minutes from the courthouse. Luke Jacobson. He made She-Hulk's whole wardrobe. He made my original yellow suit a lifetime ago. If anyone can dress you for the right war, Jean, it's him."
He tilted his head. "Fair warning. He's a genius. He is also, and I say this with love, a lot. Wear comfortable shoes and let him talk."
So the four of them flew West, Matt and Karen for their case and Jean and Peter for the armor, and it felt, Jean thought, buckling in next to Peter with her ribs still aching, like a family taking a trip, which was a category of experience she'd assumed her whole life she would never get to have.
Peter held her hand and squeezed it tightly through takeoff. Karen fell asleep on Matt's shoulder before they hit cruising altitude. Jean watched the country go by underneath and let herself be, for a few hours, just a girl on a plane with people who loved her, flying toward the strange business of being fitted for a superhero costume.
Luke Jacobson's studio was a cathedral of light and fabric and ego, and Jean liked him instantly but knew within four minutes that she could never wear a single thing he wanted to make her.
First, before anything, before he would even let them past the reception, a sleek assistant slid two tablets and a stylus each across a marble counter and said, pleasantly, that Mr. Jacobson did not so much as thread a needle for anyone who had not signed.
Jean reviewed it. It was a genuinely serious nondisclosure agreement, airtight, lawyer-built and battle-tested, binding them never to disclose his designs, his methods, his client list, or anything they saw or overheard inside the studio. "He dresses half the powered people on the coast," the assistant explained, mild as milk. "Heroes and villains both, sometimes in the same week. Secret identities are the whole business. Discretion is the product. Sign, or the door is behind you." Peter signed with a flourish and whispered “Babe, this is so cool” to Jean.
Jean reviewed the contract more carefully, and found she respected it enormously, a man who guarded the identities he dressed as fiercely as he designed for them. After signing her signature, only then did the inner doors open, and only then did Luke Jacobson himself descend.
He was flamboyant in the specific joyful way of an artist who had stopped caring what anyone thought decades ago, all scarves and sweeping gestures and a measuring tape worn like a doctor’s stethoscope, and he circled Jean the moment she walked in, framing her with his hands like a director framing a shot.
"Oh, darling," he breathed. "Oh, you're a canvas. The coloring. The hair. We build the whole palette around the hair, we do jewel tones, we do drama." He was already sketching in the air. "Come, come, I've prepared something, Matthew told me all about you, the fire, the reach, the whole story of you, I had an inspiration, put it on, put it on, don't be shy, art requires courage."
And that was how Jean Grey ended up standing in front of a three-way mirror in what could only be described as a disco leotard.
It was green and gold and high-cut and glittering, a spangled one-piece with a plunging back and a gauzy little half-cape and thigh-high boots, and it looked less like armor for fighting lightning-men and more like the outfit of a woman about to perform an ice-dancing routine to a Bee Gees medley.
Jean stared at herself, with a copious dose of apathy. The only design that she was interested in was a design on the chest, a stylized bird of flame that she actually rather liked, but it was stranded in the middle of an outfit that would not have stopped a stern breeze, let alone a bolt of electricity, and every line of it screamed look at me on a stage rather than don't look too closely.
Behind her, Peter made a sound.
A strangled sort of wheeze, the sound of a man trying with his whole soul to be supportive. Jean met his eyes in the mirror. His face was doing something heroic and doomed. And then he lost it. Completely.
Peter Parker folded in half laughing, actual tears, gasping, "no, no, I'm sorry, I'm SO sorry, you look, you look incredible, you look like the lead in a very expensive Vegas musical, oh my god, is there a musical number, do you win a trophy" until Jean was laughing too, helplessly, in her ridiculous glittering leotard, and even Jacobson was grinning because a laughing fitting was a happy fitting.
"You hate it," Jacobson said, delighted, unoffended, once they'd recovered. "No, no, it's fine, I can see it, you have the face of a woman being fitted for someone else's dream. Not everyone is a green-leotard person. Some people, God help them, want to be able to crouch behind cover." He waved airily. "It happens. My work is drama, and you, my dear, are looking for something you can bleed in and still do the school run. Different animal."
But Jean wasn't quite listening, because she was looking at the bird on the chest.
"This," she said, touching it. "The bird. What is it."
"A phoenix," Jacobson said, and for once the theater dropped out of his voice and left something real. "I put it on you the second Matthew described you to me, sweetheart. Fire. Rising. The whole story of you, if I heard it right. Someone burnt all the way down and came back up out of her own ashes better than she ever was. That's not a costume note." He shrugged, artist to subject. "The leotard's wrong for you. But the phoenix isn't. Keep the phoenix. That part I got right."
And Jean stood in front of the mirror in an outfit she'd never wear, looking at a symbol she suddenly could not imagine being without, a firebird over her heart, and felt the first real thread of the thing pull taut. She hated the suit.
Yet, she loved the phoenix. Somewhere in the gap between those two facts was the answer, and she was starting, for the first time, to be able to see its shape.
"I'm keeping the phoenix," she said quietly.
"Of course you are." Jacobson kissed both her cheeks. "And when you figure out the rest of it, the shape, the you of it, you come back to me for the base layer and the palette, that part no one does better and I'll do it in my sleep. But the vision, darling, the vision has to come from you. I can only dress a woman who knows who she is." He clapped his hands. "Now change out of that before someone sees you, and let me say hello to my two o'clock, she's just walked in and she is going to be so much easier than you."
The two o'clock was seven feet of green lawyer, and the moment Matt heard her voice, Jean watched her unflappable Counsellor become, briefly, a deeply flustered man.
"Murdock?" the woman said, delighted, striding in. "Matt Murdock? Oh my god, it's been years." She was tall and green and gorgeous and radiated the specific easy confidence of a person who had made peace with being the most powerful entity in almost any room, and she swept Matt into a hug that lifted him clean off his feet. "Luke didn't tell me you'd be here. How ARE you, you gorgeous disaster."
"Jen." Matt's voice had gone up half an octave.
"Jennifer, hi, wow, this is, yes, it's been, I'm good, I'm great, I'm here for a fitting, for a friend, this is my friend Jean, and this is Peter, and this is…" He turned towards Karen, and Jean watched him arrive at the sentence he had not planned for, and watched it dawn on him one horrible beat at a time. "And this is Karen. Page. My… Karen's my partner. We're together. Karen, this is Jen. We, ah. Jen and I. Used to…”
The silence that followed could have had its own name.
Karen Page, investigative reporter, veteran of a hundred hostile rooms, looked up at seven feet of Matt Murdock's glamorous superpowered ex-girlfriend, and Jen Walters looked down at the woman currently dating her gorgeous disaster, and Matt stood between them looking like a man who would genuinely rather be fighting Bullseye.
Peter leaned over to Jean and whispered, "I would not survive this, I would simply die," and Jean elbowed him, biting down a grin.
And then Jen Walters, because she was, it turned out, a genuinely good person, broke the tension the only correct way. She stuck out an enormous green hand and said, warmly, "Karen. Hi. Okay, so it's not weird and hanging over the whole afternoon: Matt and I were fuck buddies during the pandemic, 2022, strictly casual, we were each other's quarantine bubble and nothing more, and it ended completely amicably, because neither of us can commit to a houseplant."
She grinned. "He talks with his hands when he’s nervous and he did it all the way through that introduction, so I already like you more than I liked him. Any woman who can keep up with Matt Murdock has my full and eternal respect. Can I buy you a drink and tell you every embarrassing thing he did in lockdown?"
Karen looked at the offered hand. Looked at Matt, who had closed his eyes in resignation. And then Karen Page grinned, slow and wicked, and shook it, and said, "I would like nothing on this earth more than that."
"Oh no," Matt exclaimed.
"Oh yes," said Jen and Karen at the same time, and just like that they were allies, and Matt Murdock's worst afternoon became the founding of a friendship that would haunt him for years, and Jean laughed until her bruised ribs hurt, because this, all of it, the leotard and the phoenix and the ex-girlfriend and the sheer human comedy of it, was family, and she got to have it.