Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Jean was just one more bad day away from throwing someone off the top of the nearest skyscraper.

Really, it wasn’t her fault. She just couldn’t catch a break. Something always had to be burning down, or somebody was always two minutes away from dying. Sometimes it made her want to pick up the closest villain and throw them off the Avengers Tower. It was a completely normal occurrence. Nothing questionable or concerning to unpack there, nope.

Don’t get her wrong, she loved being a hero… when she actually felt like one, and not just a fraud, anyways. 

Helping people healed something in her that nothing else could. She felt, very simply, better. It was fulfilling. It made all of the sacrifices along the way almost feel worth it. Almost. Stopping purse snatchers and smugglers would never make up for the lost lives. But… it seemed like something they would support her doing. It was honoring their legacy in the only way she had left.

However, there were some days where despair and isolation had her by the throat. And on those days, being a hero loved by New York didn’t really cut it anymore. There would always be someone else to save. Another problem that would break out every other minute. Another criminal who wants to be the next Kingpin. The constant mini-crises each day would pile up, and the grief and guilt would choke the light out of her eyes, and the joy out of her life. In those times, it was difficult to keep moving. To keep breathing. To keep pretending that she was right where she wanted to be, and that there was nothing to change.

It was those days that had Jean wonder if she was ever meant to be a hero, or if she’s just someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her life often felt like it was supposed to go a completely different trajectory. It was often difficult to determine whether or not that was impostor syndrome or if there was something actually wrong. She could usually blame it on her mental fragility and the unbelievable burden of being a superhero, but sometimes… sometimes it was more like she really was a mistake. Like things weren’t supposed to happen the way they did. A forgotten loose thread in a cosmic tapestry that was waiting to be snipped. 

The result usually meant sleepless nights. She tended to have those. She wasn’t sure if she was actually an insomniac, or if she was just stubborn. The difference was insignificant, as far as she was concerned. However, it wasn’t wise to go out to try and fight crime when one’s eyes burned with fatigue, and the body was weighed down by exhaustion. She was sorely lacking for entertainment due to her tight budget, which meant only one other option.

On those nights, she sat down in her dusty apartment, and cracked open her journal. She’d originally scoffed at the suggestion, when she’d once read about it online. However, after a few close calls where the stress piled up and her telekinesis started to lash out, she finally decided to give it a try. Unfortunately for her ego, it actually worked really well. So much so that it had ended up as her sole companion. She tried not to think about how pathetic that sounded, but wasn’t succeeding much in that regard.

Jean wrote down anything and everything. She told that ordinary, plain notebook secrets that nobody else in the world knew. She’d told it her entire life’s story, from start to finish. The good, the bad, the dirty, and everything in between. The important bits, at least. Things that, if she had her way, would never reach the light of day. It went something like…

Hey. My name’s Jean Elaine Grey. I turned twenty-two not that long ago. 

I think I’m the only person that knows that, now. Ugh. Where do I even begin?

I guess we’ll start where I know it all went wrong. I was… fourteen, I think. Ever since Dad died in a car wreck, Mom was different. I wouldn’t go so far as to say she was an exemplary mother before that point, but… you know. She was there. She cooked our food, took us to school, and pretended like she cared about us. Plus, Dad loved us. He was always there when she was absent. We had a nice little place, out in the suburbs of some state I don’t remember. It’s been a long eight years, okay? I’ve been all over the place. Anyways. That was all to say, I had no reason to complain. 

But, again, that was then. It’s funny. I could pinpoint the exact moment I knew my life was going to be forever changed. I guess that isn’t really surprising to say. Any kid would be changed by their dad dying, right? Except, that wasn’t why I felt dread. My main concern, at that very second, was “what’s going to happen with Mom?” I know. That sounds terrible, and makes it seem like I didn’t care that he died. I did. I cared a lot. But I was an older sister. I couldn’t afford to break down, because I knew the only person who actually cared if we lived or died just got crushed in his car. There was nothing I could do about it, nor how utterly anticlimactic it felt. Of all the ways to go out… a few idiots on the highway? Really? …Anyways.

Mom withdrew. More than usual, that is. She married herself to the demon in the bottle. I never bothered to check what brand. She could have chugged rat poison, for all I cared. Naturally, she stopped doing… well, just about everything a mother needs to do. So. I ended up doing all of it, naturally. I wasn’t old enough to drive, so I withdrew what little savings I had to buy us both bikes. I had to do odd jobs around the neighborhood just to put food on the table. I think our neighbors pitied us, even if they never said anything. There was always work, even if it was increasingly specific and weird. There’s better ways of showing you care, but I guess I can’t really be mad. They did more than I expected, in any case. 

She got more aggressive, over time. I never let her hit Sara. I knew that the moment Sara got hurt, I couldn’t just pretend it was a rough patch anymore. I couldn’t just pretend that we’d get through it eventually. I knew I’d have to stop her. I didn’t want to do that. She was still… Mom, even if she wasn’t really a mother. What can I say? I was only fourteen. I didn’t want to lose anyone else so soon. So, I let her take her anger out on me. I got really good at hiding the bruises and cuts. Granted, I didn’t really get much in the way of sleep, so they were always slow to heal. There were a few times I almost got caught because of that. But it’s fine. I got us through it.

Until I didn’t. 

I’d been running home just a bit later than usual. Mrs. Macklamoore, the old lady next door, needed help moving some boxes. She had a bunch of stuff in her attic that had gone untouched ever since her husband died, and she wanted to sort through it. Hence, she called me. She always paid me more than anyone else, and even sent me home with some food on a few occasions. Naturally, I agreed to help her. I wasn’t expecting anything out of it. I was just… being kind. 

I’d learned a long time ago that money made the world go ‘round. In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, kindness was the scarcest currency of them all. There’s an overwhelming demand and very little supply of it these days. 

So, yeah. I was getting home just an hour or so later than usual. It was nothing, in the grand scheme of things. I had just been coming from school, after all. Sara and I didn’t usually eat dinner until six, so it was fine. Home was just three houses down from Mrs. Macklamoore’s. It was a short stroll on my bike down the hill. 

When I opened that front door, I think something in me died right there. Something in me I still haven’t gotten back.

Sara was on the floor. Her head was bloody. There was a shattered glass bottle next to her head. She wasn’t moving. 

Not that far from her, ‘Mom’ was curled up in a corner and sobbing. She couldn’t put down the bottle, even while she was choking on her own tears. It was pathetic.

I could go into more detail, but… is there really a point? Sara died. Laying out the exact interior of the house, furniture placements, and the exact blood splatter pattern didn’t add anything or take away from it at all. It would just be… pointless. Just for the record, I don’t like doing pointless things. Real big sticking point for me.

Regardless. I wasn’t really aware at that point. Not in any meaningful way. Even now, the memory gets a bit foggy at this point. I just remember being so… so angry. There’s really no better way to put it than that. She’d spent three or four months rotting away in bed, refusing to part from her beloved bottles. For the life of me, I could not tell you where she got the money to keep buying them. Life insurance from Dad, I guess. She had never really been there for us, but she had still completely cut back from our lives. She was like… a foreign creature, living in our house. 

And then she’d killed my little sister. The only person that I had left. The only thing that I had left. I had practically given up my entire life to support my sister. Sold everything I owned. Operated with as much minimalistic efficiency as humanly possible. And what was it even all for? It was all taken from me in a stupid, drunken tantrum. That’s my best guess, anyways. I’ll never know what really happened. Sara always had the idealistic hope that Mom would come back if we just pushed her enough, and offered our support. I knew better, but that never stopped her. If it wasn’t that, then I really couldn’t begin to guess what happened. Maybe Mom had finally just snapped. Couldn’t tell you.

When Mom suddenly slammed against the wall, creating considerable cracks and fissures, I hadn’t even realized what was happening at first. You’d think that would mean my concentration would break, or I would snap out of it in horror. 

I can confidently say that wasn’t what happened. I don’t know if that makes me a bad person or not. 

I’ll save you the gruesome story. I’m not really a fan of those, despite how much they happen in my life. I crushed her. There wasn’t much more to it than that. I squeezed as much as I could until she stopped crying. Not with my hands, though. All it took was an emotionless thought. Morbid, yeah. Not very quick, either. You’d think, after every time I’d let her beat me, after she’d taken my sister away from me… it would have felt cathartic. Satisfying, in a grim way.

It wasn’t. It didn’t fill any hole in me. I didn’t feel any worse for it, though, don’t get me wrong. I was probably in shock by that point. Didn’t feel much of anything. But still. Even now, I just feel a vague sense of apathy towards the entire thing. 

Obviously, I didn’t stay in that house after I was done. I had powers. I had telekinesis! I was strong. I could defend myself, and anyone else I wanted to. This was a good thing, right? It meant my life could turn around for the better. I was meant to be more. I was meant to do more.

Except I wasn’t strong enough. They weren’t there when I needed them. I had nobody left to protect. I didn’t count myself, at that point. 

So I left home. I left that neighborhood. I left Mrs. Macklamoore. The only thing that came with me was Sara’s jacket. There was no point in bringing anything else. Sentimentality would just weigh me down, in the long run. 

While I was wandering the country aimlessly, I found this special woman. She was almost thirty. Nearly double my age. She was in hiding, for reasons I didn’t understand at the time. Her name was Wanda. She never gave me a last name. I never asked. She was… paranoid. Cautious of me, and how I’d managed to find her. I didn’t know how to tell her that she just seemed to have a special pull.

Like I said, Wanda was… more than human. Like me. She called herself a witch, or something. She’d apparently gotten into a pretty big fight with some former friends. Super-powered friends. Neither side really won, she said. They both walked away from it scarred, neither side strong enough to really beat the other. They’d just… split apart. I told her I didn’t have anybody left. Some of that tension weighing on her shoulders seemed to loosen.

So, for a bit, we had each other. She was kind. Gentle, in a way I hadn’t ever really experienced. I didn’t really want to assign any labels towards her, though. I still don’t. Sure, some of the things she did weren’t something you’d see in typical friends. Most fourteen year olds aren’t friends with people in their mid-twenties, anyway. So. I wouldn’t really call us friends. She was like… an actual mother, almost. The title felt terrifying to even think of, but once it was out… it didn’t feel wrong. I still don’t make it a habit to call her that, though, no matter how many times she called me to make sure I was eating three meals a day. She liked to nag.

I seemed to help her as much as she helped me. The bags under her eyes weren’t so dark after a few weeks together. She seemed happier. Laughed more. She taught me things. Her powers are… a lot. She could do way more than I ever could. She helped me a lot with telekinesis, though. She showed me how to show restraint, which was something I desperately needed. She said I was strong. Too strong. If I didn’t properly manage how much power I was putting out, I would have turned anyone I fought into a pile of broken bones and crushed organs. I would have destroyed entire buildings by accident.

So. She didn’t tell me how to get stronger. She didn’t tell me how to win fights. She told me how to hold back. I think that was the most important lesson she could have ever given me, and I will thank her for the rest of my days. Nobody ever needs to be the strongest. They just need to be able to do what they can, and do it right. 

She taught me that telekinesis was so much more than just brute force. She showed me that it wasn’t just grabbing something and throwing it as hard as you can. Telekinesis can be used as a form of dominion over your environment, but Wanda claimed that was amateur work. Telekinesis, real telekinesis, was like… persuasion. You don’t demand things go where you want them to, you convince them that’s where they need to go. It was very weird when she described it for the first time. She made it sound like all inanimate objects were actually alive. 

Eventually, though, I figured it out. Everything is connected by a thread. Objects really don’t like being moved. We’ve come to call that ‘gravity,’ and other such terms. Don’t ask me, I’m terrible at physics. Either way, surface level telekinesis is heavily limited by having to fight with an object’s natural resistance to being moved. They like being where they are, and gravity tries to pull them back. It’s like trying to take an animal from its home. It’ll fight with you every step of the way, and the only real way to win is to overpower it. Yeah, it works, especially if you’re strong enough, but all you’re really doing is making it harder for yourself.

Advanced usage of telekinesis is convincing an object that it wants to be moved. You have to twist and pluck those thousands of invisible threads that connect everything. Resistance slips away, and gravity doesn’t feel quite so heavy. The force and strain is more than halved. Likewise, you have to try and make an object believe that it shouldn’t be moving anymore to get it to stop. All of that largely depends on how long the object’s been stuck in one area or how frequently it has been in motion, though. Things that have been stuck in their place or cycle for years are really hard to persuade, and you usually just have to overpower them. People are the easiest, though. They are constantly in motion, and their position is always changing. Similarly, it isn’t very hard to tell their bodies that they need to slow down or stop. It’s not difficult to speak to their bodies with telekinesis. I hope that makes sense. I really don’t know how else to describe it if you’ve never used it before. It’s more of an experience than it is a science. I’ll just move on.

We stayed together and travelled the country for a bit. She showed me a lot of her favorite locations- places the average American took for granted. Things that you could really only appreciate when you knew tomorrow was only a hope, never a promise. 

When I asked her about it, she’d said something that still sticks with me to this day. It was something like… “those who run from death, stood still in life.” She never wanted me to have to run from death. She never wanted my life to end with an unfinished story, bogged down by regrets and broken dreams. So, we did everything we could. Amusement parks, zoos, all kinds of tourist traps. She called herself my mother to get into a lot of places. We would have gotten a loooot of weird glances, otherwise. It helped that we were both redheads, I think. I chose not to look deeper into it, even when she seemed to genuinely light up whenever she got a chance to call herself my mom. Sometimes… it’s just better to let people have things.

One week, she started to withdraw a bit. Nothing major, though. She was just… quieter. That silent kind of sadness, where you didn’t really know what to say or do. The type where you don’t know if they even want you to try talking to them. I decided to give her some space. I even managed to hold back any questions about where we were going. She seemed to have reached some sort of decision about our destination, though, as we travelled in basically a straight line across New York. We stopped getting sidetracked. We stopped having fun.

Even then, I chose not to acknowledge it. That’s the kind of relationship we’d formed. Some wouldn’t consider it healthy, but… well. Neither of us asked many questions from the other. It worked, at least for us. There were a lot of things neither of us really wanted to unpack. She was just… there for me. I was there for her. That’s all it really needed to be. 

We ended up in Westchester County. She stopped just before the entrance to what looked like a massive, symmetrical mansion. The center, far left, and far right portions of the building were all relatively the same size, with what appeared to be smaller segments or hallways connecting them. From what I could guess, we were about an hour or two away from New York City. There wasn’t much of anything in terms of civilization around us- it was all just… nature. Isolated. The mansion surprisingly didn’t look out of place. It looked… ordinary. 

Wanda didn’t say anything, even still. She just stared at the plain, unassuming building with something that I would hesitantly call sorrow. She acted like the red brick and gray ceiling personally called her a freak. The look in her eyes… there wasn’t much in the way of recognition, but it was more like acknowledgment. As if it was a place she’d been trying to avoid, but still knew of. 

We’d been standing there in silence for roughly five minutes before she finally spoke. When she turned to me, her eyes were glassy, cracks of grief running across her face. Her body language spoke of someone deep in mourning, no matter how hard she tried to mask it. I knew her too much, by that point.

“Beauty fades. That is why it is beautiful,” she’d told me. She didn’t elaborate. I didn’t ask her to.

Wanda had turned and left without another word or sound. Simply… walked away. I didn’t follow her. I watched her silhouette grow ever smaller, until she vanished into the woods. I had no idea if I’d ever see her again. 

I’d wiped the streaks of tears from my face, and held it together. I refused to break down. I don’t think I’d shed a single tear since I saw Sara’s body months ago. 

I didn’t need to ask for answers. I knew what she was saying. I knew what she wanted. She believed this to be a place where I would be safe. Safer than if I was on the constant run with a dangerous refugee. 

She hadn’t abandoned me, but it still felt like it. 

I could go into more detail. I could describe the way the stars overhead seemed to lose their luster with every step Wanda had taken away from me. I could describe the cloud of loneliness that had been left in her wake. I could describe the way it felt like I’d lost yet another piece of my family. I could describe the way the darkness seemed to creep in, and lick at my boots. The way it nipped at my heels, and gnawed at my ankles. 

But there’s no point. Wanda left. I remained. Being poetic about it wouldn’t change anything. I don’t do pointless things.

When I finally entered the mansion, hours after the sun had gone down, hours since I’d seen Wanda’s figure disappear between the trees, my life was forever changed. I still don’t know if it was for the better, to be honest.

Charles Xavier. Bobby Drake. Warren Worthington. Hank McCoy. And… Scott Summers. 

They were like me. Special. Mutants, they called themselves. Possessing the X-Gene, which gave us our powers. I was told I had been bestowed with great gifts. That I should be grateful for them. That I was a sign of humanity’s evolution and progress. 

All I really heard was that Sara’s death didn’t make me suddenly become a monster. I was always going to become one. It’s just how I was born. 

So, Xavier made us his little child soldiers. A team called the “X-Men.” They were some… interesting figures. 

I didn’t like Xavier. I’ll just be blunt and straight to the point. He seemed like a deeply flawed individual. I know, I don’t really have any room to talk. But still. He had this idealistic hope of a humanity that could coincide with us. I knew better. I’d talked to Wanda about it more than once. The Sokovia Accords, she’d called them. They were being heavily pushed for at that point. Humans don’t take kindly to things they can’t understand or weaponize. Anyways. Back to Xavier. He claimed to view us as his children and beloved students, yet didn’t hesitate to send us to fight his battles. He was the strongest out of all of us, wheelchair aside. Why did we have to bleed and bruise for his ideals? I’d just wanted a place to be safe, and I guess that meant I owed him. I did my part, but that didn’t mean I liked it. I could burn through this entire journal discussing his hypocrisy and flaws, but that seems like a waste of paper just to hash through things I already know.

I liked Bobby the most. He was the youngest out of all of us, at only twelve years old. He was a bit of a clown, but he always kept morale high. I always pretended to hate his jokes and pranks, but if I’m being honest… out of all of my years being with the X-Men, Bobby was the one who pulled the most smiles and laughs out of me. He just had a certain charm to him. He never crossed any lines or hurt anyone. It’s like… he was so infuriating that all you could really do was respect his commitment to not breaking any boundaries in his elaborate pranks. 

Warren was… better than I expected. He was roughly my age. Originally, he seemed like a walking stereotype for rich kids. He was a bit pretentious, and snotty. To this day I don’t really know how much of that was an act. After a bit, he… changed, I guess. If I had to pinpoint a reason, it was due to the increasingly close calls we had over the years. The sudden realization that money didn’t make him or anyone else invincible was a wake-up call. He became a lot more protective, and threw money at all of us in the form of gifts whenever he could. He was pretty much the only reason we had Christmas gifts to open. I never really had much of those in my life before. I didn’t really care for the prices of his gifts, but the fact he got me anything with clear thought behind it meant a lot to me.

Hank McCoy… eh. Really reclusive guy. And that’s coming from me, so you know it’s bad. I don’t think he bonded with anyone. I’d hesitate to even call him a friend. We worked together. He did what was expected from him. That was about it. He was always the condescending type, where he seemed to think he was more on the levels of Xavier than us puny mortals. He didn’t say any of that, of course, but the way he felt the incessant need to explain anything and everything to us got old really fast. He also wanted to constantly experiment with our powers, and treat us like lab rats. I stoutly refused just on principle. I don’t think that did much to endear him to me, but I can’t say I was exactly trying in the first place. 

And finally… Scott Summers. Okay, let me get the record straight: I like him. On the field, anyway. As the leader of the X-Men, he had a very rational mind. He rarely panicked or acted due to emotions. He was the older sibling I never had. He made sure we all got home safe at the end of a mission. Whenever there was the slightest fumble or mistake on an operation, he was there, covering our slip-up or blindspot. If I’m being blunt, one of us probably would have died if we didn’t have him. His contribution to the team cannot be understated. That’s where my praise ends, I think. Scott Summers and Cyclops are two different people, as far as I’m concerned. Cyclops is reliable, powerful, and a strategic genius. He wasn’t overwhelmingly intelligent, but he understood how to get results. 

So now I’ll address Scott Summers, also known as the guy at home. I didn’t mind letting him take charge on missions, but he tried to keep that same authority at the mansion. He was infuriatingly bossy and pushy. There were several times I almost chewed him out for barging into my room to lecture me on some petty thing I forgot to do or messed up. But I didn’t. My emotions were a lot more volatile than the average person’s. So, I kept it all under wraps. I breathed deeply before responding. I thoroughly weighed and planned every word, just like Wanda told me.

I wish that’s where it stopped, though. I think he… liked me. He never said as much, but… how do I phrase this kindly? It would have been more subtle if he had thrown a brick through my window with the words “I love you” written on it with a sharpie. He liked to push his way into my personal space. Constantly bumping into me, putting his hands on my shoulder, so on so forth. I always pushed him off, of course. Don’t get me wrong, having restraint doesn’t make me a pushover. I never let him have it. But that didn’t seem to teach him much. He always invited me out to do things. Tried to call it a team-bonding exercise. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was a terrible liar. Part of the problem was the aforementioned power dynamic. He liked to have control of everyone, even when we weren’t in a mansion. That included his attempts to flirt and get closer with me. He tried to pull rank, or swing his influence around to get me to go with him and do whatever nonsense he wanted that day. I think he was just lonely, and wanted someone. I understood the sentiment, but that didn't mean I was going to make myself his emotional support out of pity.

Scott’s probably one of the main reasons I left. More on that later.

So, yeah. That was the X-Men. A nice dysfunctional ‘family.’ They’ve grown a lot since then. Thank God I wasn’t there for that. Some of their new members seem sweet, but… that’s just too many people for my tastes.

Our main target of coverage was New York City. We were able to cover a lot of ground, as each of us were able to take street level criminals effortlessly. Xavier originally wanted us to have higher priority targets. He claimed there was a rival group made by a former friend of his, full of mutants. I refused to fight them, though. I’m not getting involved between him and his lack of communication skills. And, since I refused to participate in those, Scott would often refuse to take the missions entirely. So. Street level crime it was. 

That didn’t mean our careers were smooth. We were still susceptible to guns, just like any other person. And, wouldn’t you know it, New York crime had a lot of guns. But, we were able to do our part, and that’s really all that mattered.

I didn’t like working for Xavier, but being able to save those who couldn’t save themselves healed some part of me. It felt like I was finally doing something for my own sake for once. I was thanked instead of feared. Granted… being called Marvel Girl almost always soured those words of gratitude. Seriously, when Xavier suggested it (and Scott approved it) I seriously thought about forcing the mansion to collapse in on them. All of my personal suggestions were discarded, so Marvel Girl it was.

Yet another reason I left. We’ll get to that, I promise.

Anyways. I would say that we did about as well as we could have. We’d really found our stride after a few… rough patches. By the time I had turned sixteen, we’d formed a pretty efficient team. I was content with the way things were going, even if I would always miss what I used to have. They weren’t Sara or Wanda, and they never would be. 

Naturally, that’s when everything that could have gone wrong, did go wrong. 

Xavier claimed it was a simple distress call. A large spike of turmoil in Wakanda. Just something to check out, to make sure everything was fine. I’d thought nothing of it. We suited up, entered the X-Jet (seriously, Xavier was letting teenagers drive highly specialized aircraft) and zipped off to the prosperous nation. 

I don’t have the words to describe the scene we’d found by the time we arrived. It was… war, plain and simple. A colossal battlefield. We had no context for what was happening, but each of us instinctively knew that this was a battle for something larger than we could understand. The tension in the air was thick enough to choke on. Bobby stopped cracking jokes.

We had landed shortly after finding a proper clearing. The exact moment we stepped out of the X-Jet, something inexplicable happened. 

A ripple passed through the air. It felt oddly final, but not in any way that could be described. It was an overwhelming sense of wrongness that pervaded every sense, with no clear point of origin. The rest of them stopped running towards the battlefield, but I didn’t. Nothing would stop me at that point. Not after I saw Wanda. I ran towards her as quickly as I could, my lungs desperately heaving for air. 

She turned her head, met my gaze, and something within her seemed to break. I didn’t understand. I had no way of comprehending the horror within her eyes. I kept running towards her. I didn’t know what was causing her distress, but I would solve it, I told myself.

I never made it.

I watched her turn to dust before my very eyes. By the time I realized I couldn’t feel my legs, I had joined her. 

You’d think it would be horrifying, wouldn’t you? The feeling of watching your very existence be snuffed in an instant. But that’s not what happened. It was… surprisingly peaceful. By the time you realized something was wrong, you were gone a blink later. There was no time to feel terror. There was no pain. It was like a light switch. 

I found out later that pretty much all of the X-Men had been killed in the Snap. Warren was the only exception. We were gone for five whole years, yet the world kept spinning. 

Until that was no longer the case. I can’t really say ‘one day we came back.’ We weren’t aware of anything. Even now, I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s going from complete nothingness to suddenly everything all at once. Your body and mind really don’t even have time to process what happened. 

But I didn’t care about any of that. When I had returned, so had Wanda. I was right next to her. I grabbed her, and I didn’t let go. We stayed like that for several minutes that felt like an eternity. Neither of us could get in a word over the constant sobs. The sudden relief of being alive after being wiped from existence does a lot for your mood.

At one point, Scott tried to pull me into a hug. I didn’t let him. No offense to him, but between him and Wanda… it wasn’t close. I couldn’t care any less about the X-Men if I tried at that point.

Shortly after that, literal portals had opened in the air. My shock factor had worn out at that point, I think. Nothing could have surprised me anymore. Massive purple alien waging war on another part of Earth? Yeah, man, whatever you say.

Except it was actually real. 

I’m going to try and keep this brief. I really don’t like thinking about this part. 

We had joined the battle, just like everybody else apparently had. Wanda attacked the alien with a particular form of aggression I hadn’t seen from her. It was almost certainly personal, which led to me attacking with a ferocity I didn’t really know I had. It was nothing to brag about, though. I didn’t change that much. He was… strong. Remember how I said people were easy to bend, when it came to telekinesis? Yeah, Thanos didn’t get that memo. It was like if an elementary schooler tried to wrestle with an elephant. I could slightly slow him down for a fraction of a second. That was it. 

So, I tried to focus every bit of my power towards keeping him in place for as long as I could. Trying to only partially exert force wouldn’t cut it with him. I had to go all-in, consequences be damned.

If I had one wish, it would be to never make that impossibly stupid mistake. 

It was taking every fiber of my concentration and awareness just to even try to keep him in place. It was making a significant difference, though. He found it far more difficult to fend off Captain America and Thor. However, I wasn’t able to process anything that I was seeing. All of my mind was on trying to keep him still as much as possible. I had no way of noticing when he threw his colossal sword at me. I had no way of knowing that weapon split a certain vibranium shield in half. I had no way of knowing that weapon was able to compete with Thor’s legendary armaments as an equal.

All I could do was focus entirely upon him, and stop him from going on a rampage across the battlefield.

My concentration completely shattered when Wanda stepped in front of me. I had a brief few seconds to understand what I was actually looking at, and what was happening. I could only watch in horror as the shield she attempted to create was destroyed the second it was made. When the sword completely pierced through her chest, nearly touching my own through her, the world around me had gone quiet.

I didn’t rejoin the battle. I didn’t try to stop Thanos anymore. I held Wanda as close as I could, even when her warm eyes went dull. I didn’t let go, even when blood stopped flowing from her colossal wound. I held her, I rocked her, I sobbed, and I pleaded. 

Nothing answered. Not Wanda, and no higher power.

Another person I’d lost. Another person who’d truly cared for me, gone because of me.

You’d think I would have snapped at that point. But I didn’t. I couldn’t even think about leaving her. I didn’t even have time to say goodbye. She had died almost instantly. I’d been able to meet her eyes for just a second before the light within them sputtered out. Nothing felt real, at that point.

I didn’t leave her, even when the battle continued around me.

I didn’t leave her, even when it concluded with one more snap. 

I didn’t leave her, even when people tugged at me and tried to pull us apart. 

Yet all I could think about was what she used to tell me, back when it was just us.

“Those who run from death, stood still in life.”

“Beauty fades, that is why it is beautiful.”

Those words, however poetic they may be, were nothing more than harsh memories circling through my mind. They were nothing more than reminders of my own failures. 

I… refuse to go into more details than that. Even with this journal, some things are better kept private. She’s dead, and pouring my grief out onto the page wouldn’t bring her back. 

The funerals the next day were a solemn affair. The X-Men only went because I refused to go home until we went, and Scott wasn’t in a rush to leave me. 

Tony Stark, Natasha Romanoff, and Wanda Maximoff. Three people. Three sacrifices. Three saviors. Each of them had given their lives for others.

I kept my head down the entire time. I didn’t want to face reality. I didn’t want to face the consequences of my mistakes. 

I should have never been there. All I really did was slow him down. Make it a bit easier to fight. I only got Wanda killed. 

The aftermath of the war was devastating. The entire world seemed to be caught in some form of limbo, where they didn’t really know how to move on or cope with what happened. I was more than aware of this, but for the most part I didn’t really experience any of it. I didn’t talk to many people, and I didn’t make it a habit of being near the Avengers more than I had to. 

There was one person, though. One person I actually liked who survived the Snap. Warren. 

Warren wasn’t the same after that. His eyes were… haunted. Nobody ever pushed him on what happened, or how he’d spent five years on his lonesome. He was far more clingy and social than before. He refused to sit in a room alone, and was constantly trying to organize social gatherings and parties and all of that stuff. I went to a lot of them. More than I would have for most people. 

Almost every single time, it was just us at the end of the party. Everybody else would head to bed. Scott would always try to stay up, but eventually he would give up. 

We would sit together on the sofa in the living room, on opposite ends of it. We never spoke to each other. We never even looked at each other. We just… kept the silence, and stayed in each other’s company. None of the other X-Men really understood. They didn’t lose anything from what had happened. 

I’d lost the first person I would ever call ‘Mom.’ Warren lost the only people he had for five years, and had to figure out how to move on.

He was an adult, now. Twenty-one, while the rest of us were still in our teens. I rarely saw him without a bottle of some kind. I shoved down the pangs of terror at seeing such a familiar object being held by someone I cared about. 

I always took it away from him whenever he set it down. It’s the only time he would show any kind of joy those days. It would always prompt a tiny, grim chuckle. It wasn’t much, but… it was something.

I wasn’t the same Jean Grey after the war. I was always a bit of a recluse, but it only got worse by then. It felt like even though I was surrounded by people, I wasn’t really there. My mind was years away. I’d always be lost in thought, hearing distant whispers and chimes of laughter from a woman I would never see again. I didn’t speak much anymore. Just simply nodded or shook my head. It felt difficult to get out of bed some days, but I kept pushing forward. It’s all I knew how to do.

Xavier changed, as well. He had been affected by the Snap just like the rest of us. His keen awareness of his mortality must have rattled him. The idea that he wasn’t safe even inside of his mansion had given him something to think about. 

He took a much more involved role in us as a team, instead of just being a distant manager-like figure. He participated in strategy meetings. He gave individual lectures and lessons for each of us. He helped us sort through the worst of our memories, and would pinpoint what was bothering us. It was a welcome change. It was more helpful than I’d like to admit. There were still signs of the old Xavier, but… it was much easier to manage.

He helped me significantly with my telekinesis. He was only a telepath, but they were both psionic powers at the end of the day. Five years ago, when things were how they used to be, I would have thought he was just training up one of his prized weapons. But now… it was different. He knew my weakness against Thanos was destroying me. He knew my ineptitude and involvement with Wanda’s death was a suffocating shadow wrapped around my heart. So he pushed me as hard as I could go, because I never wanted to be the reason someone died ever again. 

I hesitate to refer to him as such, but he became almost a father figure. He still had a lot to pay for, but he’d been invaluable to recovering after the loss of Wanda. I will never forget what he did for me.

There’s one more change that’s probably important to mention, especially for what comes next. Scott Summers. 

Sure, everyone changed after the Snap. But Scott was a special case. He became… darker, I guess. A lot more aggressive. He didn’t care as much for casualties or environmental damage. He had far less restraint with his powers. He was demanding. He violated boundaries and personal spaces constantly. It was like someone had taken all of his worst attributes and overclocked them. I barely even wanted to look at him anymore, and that only seemed to drive him over the edge. He’d started going to New York on his own a lot more.

He’d started assigning his own missions and operations, outside of Xavier’s discretion. He’d claimed it was to help himself build towards being an efficient leader. For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, Xavier took it at face value and didn’t try to push deeper into the matter. Maybe he was trying a little too hard to be better, and we were all going to face the consequences for it. 

Scott had left to go back to New York for a week, at one point. When he came back… he acted like he was just following programming. He was still the same Scott. Acted the same, anyways. He followed his routines down to the letter. There were times, though, where he seemed to pause and completely shut down. Like he was waiting for some kind of instruction or input. And then he’d just… keep moving, like nothing happened. 

I didn’t pay as much attention to it as I should have. Everyone was pretty sick of Scott by that point, so we just wrote it off as him being weird, as per usual. 

Until he approached me one morning, while I was digging into my tub of mint chip ice cream. I had a particular sweet tooth, and I’m not afraid to admit it. It might sound dramatic, but it gave me reasons to keep going some days. Getting ice cream was a ritual I had with both Sara and Wanda, so it was kind of like I was keeping their memory alive, I suppose. 

Anyways. That’s besides the point. He approached me, body as stiff as a board. He looked like he was fighting every impulse just by being in my presence, which was… odd. Normally, he tried to get as close to me as possible. He said there was a team of scientists creating anti-mutant technology in New York. Now, generally speaking, I didn’t like to get involved with those kinds of missions. It was just asking for trouble. However, I also happened to be the one best suited for the job, so I reluctantly agreed to it. He’d told me that he had a contact in New York that was going to help me.

I agreed to it more easily than I should have. I really just… didn’t want to talk to him, if I’m being honest. Especially not when he was acting that weird. I was en route to New York City the next day. Manhattan, to be specific. 

I met with a woman named Emma Frost, Scott’s “contact.” She was… a pretentious sort. A telepath, like Xavier, but she claimed to be far inferior. She was supposedly only able to read surface-level thoughts. I couldn’t exactly prove or disprove that, so I just took it in stride. She claimed she’d been interrogating some people and getting important leads, so I let her lead the way. 

She showed me the building she’d narrowed down the laboratory to. It looked… large, but it still fit in with the rest of New York. I wouldn’t say it looked out of place. A bit gothic, maybe, but not obnoxiously so. We entered together, but it seemed mostly abandoned. The laboratory must have been underground, as the building’s interior was mostly fancy architecture. It seemed vaguely medieval adjacent. It was kind of like the interior of a castle. The decor was certainly a decision, and I had to admit it didn’t look terrible.

Emma told me it was fine if I wanted to trash the building. Scott apparently gave approval. Supposedly, they had enough evidence to claim without a shadow of a doubt that it was the right place, and there was no point in leaving the place in one piece. Now, I can say this one wasn’t really my fault. Anyone who’s met Emma Frost would know that she’s one of the most convincing people you’ll ever meet, for a variety of reasons. I agreed rather easily. It made sense to me. Nothing that had happened seemed out of place, from my perspective. 

So, I went room by room. I had a little bit of fun destroying fancy sculptures and antiques. I thrashed the furniture. I caved in walls. I tore down everything I could find. It didn’t look that far off from if a tornado had passed through the place. None of it really mattered to me. The plan was to completely level the surface building, and then find the underground floors. It seemed simple enough. 

It wasn’t until I reached one of the last rooms that I had reason to pause. The moment I pried open the door, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Something felt distinctly… wrong. It looked like an office of some kind. That was pretty normal, even if it was absurdly fancy and luxurious. What wasn’t normal was the diamond plaque resting on the desk, with a very elegant ‘Emma Frost’ engraved upon it. 

I felt like someone had thrown an entire bucket of cold water on me. That subtle haziness that clung to my thoughts shattered like glass. 

It was easier than usual to lift myself upwards, flying towards the entrance to the building with one of the highest speeds I’d ever accomplished. It wasn’t that hard to navigate the various hallways and rooms, since I’d destroyed most of them. Emma had been waiting beside the grandiose doors, arms crossed. She seemed to be waiting for something. 

When I whispered to her body to go flying, I wasn’t expecting the complete lack of resistance. Maybe I was just particularly angry. Maybe she really was that weak. She went slamming into a wall, nearly causing it to collapse on the spot. 

I’d asked her what her game was. What her name had been doing in that office. I demanded to know what was even happening. She merely laughed at me, like I was a petulant child throwing a tantrum.

She’d looked at me with that patronizing calmness, and had responded with a little too much glee. Like she was the cat that caught the canary.

“Sorry, darling, but a girl has to pay off her debts somehow. It helps that I had the perfect chance to remove the competition,” she’d chuckled.

With an idle thought, I’d completely forced her through the wall. The building was already collapsing, so I took my time stepping through the hole I’d just created, ending up back on the street. I forced Emma to float back to me, before binding her in place. I merely let her dangle from the air, just so she could feel helpless and small. I didn’t take kindly to being played, if that wasn’t made abundantly clear by this point. 

“Explain. What competition are you removing?” I barely even recognized my own voice. I sounded… hoarse, and worn. I couldn’t really unpack why that was until after. We’ll get to it, I promise.

“For Scott’s heart, dear. He has such a… fixation with you. It makes it difficult to get close to him, you see.” She’d smirked, like I was going to suddenly explode with rage at the idea of her making a move.

I felt speechless. It was like I’d slipped into some delusional fantasy world this morning. That had been what this was all for? Seriously?

A glint of light caught my eye. I turned my head, and saw… news reporters. There were at least ten, and more were coming by the minute. They were watching my every move with laser-precision, dozens of cameras aimed at me.

I paused.

I looked back at what I had left in my wake.

The building I had thought was a laboratory was little more than a pile of rubble. In reality, it was the Hellfire Club, a place where immense wealth was dealt and some of the heaviest pockets in the world handled business. And I had reduced it to its foundation.

Emma Frost, whom I was beginning to realize was actually a very important person, was currently dangling a foot in the air from an invisible force. 

The scattered puzzle pieces clicked together in one great symphony. I felt nauseous. 

It was all a grand play. Emma had likely manipulated Scott to set up this entire thing. I was to destroy one of the most influential locations in the world, and assault the White Queen of the Hellfire Club. All caught on national television. 

No explanation would be good enough. There were no justifications I could offer these news outlets. I would be labeled highly dangerous before the day was over, and mutants across the nation would suffer. 

I looked back, and met Emma’s victorious grin. My expression was blank. I thought about slamming her into the ground, or sending her flying into the air. 

I chose neither.

I cancelled my hold on her body, letting her hit the ground harshly. It was barely a foot, but hitting concrete like that still wasn’t pleasant. It was the least she deserved. 

I flew away. The damage had already been done. There was no point in lingering. 

I returned to the X-Mansion as quickly as I could. I was a flurry of movement, rushing to my room and packing my bags. The others had questions, naturally. They’d seen it on the news. I told them if they really wanted to know, they should ask Scott why he put me on that mission in the first place. Noticeably, he was the one member of the X-Men I hadn’t seen. I saw no problems with that.

My possessions were meager. I really only had stuff to pack thanks to Warren and his insistence on Christmas and birthdays. Thanks, Warren.

I fled the mansion. I went into hiding. My identity and relationships had been advertised across every news station in the country. ‘Jean Grey’ was now a mutant terrorist. At least I didn’t have to be Marvel Girl anymore. That was a big plus.

What wasn’t a ‘plus’ was the fact I couldn’t really do anything anymore. No places accepted me. I got kicked out of restaurants and was constantly refused service. The police were called on me dozens of times for daring to sit on a park bench. My face was one of the most well known in the world. I had to destroy my old phone, since weird people on the internet had managed to figure out its number and even wire a way to track it. Every time I almost got a moment of peace, I’d find that my current location had been revealed on social media, and I’d have to get on the move again. It was just easier to toss out my phone and move on without it.

I lived life a day at a time, just struggling to survive and find a reason to keep going. Emma had more or less taken everything from me. I couldn’t go back to the mansion- not without jeopardizing everyone. 

This kept going until I was a little bit past eighteen. Let me tell you, roughly a year of that is enough to make a person go utterly insane. I’d reached my breaking point, and promptly invested all of my time into tracking down a man called “Stephen Strange.” Wanda had once claimed he was a very capable sorcerer. I was going to find out for myself whether or not that was true. 

Finding the Sanctum Sanctorum shouldn’t have been easy. By all accounts, it should have been thoroughly warded and hidden. If I was never supposed to find it, I certainly wouldn’t have.

To this day, I don’t know if Strange just let me in, or if it was the Sanctum. Either way, it didn’t take long at all to find it. He seemed to be expecting me on some level, as he wasn’t very surprised to see me. 

He’d heard about what happened. Of course he had. However, there were motes of pity within his burdened eyes. He told me he knew that nobody who had given Wanda her light back would end up as a terrorist unprompted. Granted, he also knew that Emma was a rather well-known manipulator in more influential circles. She’d tried with him, once, but his mind was thoroughly warded. Apparently, her telepathy was one of the strongest he’d ever seen. That made me feel a little better, at least.

So, he agreed to help. The terms were simple. A spell that would make everybody forget the crimes of Jean Grey and Marvel Girl. That should have been the end of it.

But of course it wasn’t. Jean Grey never gets to do things the easy way.

Apparently, something had been listening. Something that had committed several terrible deeds, and wanted them forgotten. Out of a rift in the air, out came… well, Jean Grey. She was much older than I was, and had a black outfit with a yellow crest engraved upon her chest. She seemed… normal, at first. 

We hadn’t known she was the reason the spell went wrong. Strange seemed mildly suspicious, but I was just caught up in the fact there was an alternate version of myself. It was pretty cool, I have to admit. So, while Strange tried to figure out how to send Other Jean back, and actually do the spell properly… we talked. She said she’d gone through a lot of hard things. There were several people that tried manipulating her and weaponizing her. She was apparently one of the strongest beings to ever exist, possessing potent telepathy. She kind of just seemed better than me in every way, really. I could never even begin to compare to her. She even said she was in love with Scott of all things.

She was surprised to find out I felt as far from that as I could. Something seemed to twist on her face at that moment. I didn’t recognize the danger until it was too late. The moment I’d mentioned that Emma Frost was going for Scott, it was like a switch had flipped. I quickly found out that the ‘older sister’ personality was an incredibly thin and fragile mask. She entered some sort of delusional frenzy, and started disintegrating entire buildings and people. She flew off towards the X-Mansion in a burst of cosmic fire.

When I went back to the Sanctum and told Strange, his expression was grim. On some level, he seemed to have already realized what I’d just found out. There had been nothing wrong with the spell… but the ‘Dark Phoenix’ had decided it didn’t want to live with the consequences of its actions. It planned to take over my universe, replacing me. She was going to weaponize the spell to erase everyone’s memories of any crimes committed by Jean Grey, and utilize her own telepathy to fill in the gaps. 

Strange quickly opened a portal with his Sling Ring, leading straight to the X-Mansion. The hopes of stopping her were slim, but if left unchecked she would destroy everything. I was only functioning off of adrenaline by this point- it was hard to reconcile that an alternate version of me had become a genocidal cosmic force. It sounded utterly insane.

By the time we’d gotten there, the damage had already been done. The mansion had been reduced to ashes and rubble. The X-Men were sprawled out in various locations, unconscious and thoroughly scorched. The fact they were even alive was baffling. 

At the center of the destruction was Other Jean, who was holding Scott by his neck towards the sky. She was screaming at him, her expression a torrent of psychotic fury. I couldn’t hear what she’d been saying to him, but I was able to rather easily interpret the sentiment being conveyed. Even if I didn’t like Scott, the unmitigated terror on his face caused bile to stir in the back of my throat.

I’d never wanted any of this. I was just trying to make things go back to normal. But… all I’d done was burn it down for everyone else, and ruin their lives. Every time I tried to have anything, the world just had to fall apart.

I wish my gaze never wandered at that point. You see, I’d been curious where Xavier was in the midst of all of this. He’d been doing better, after all. He wasn’t the type to sit back and let his home be destroyed.

Indeed, he hadn’t been. He’d been the only one Other Jean fought to kill. I quickly sprinted towards his semi-conscious body. His wheelchair had been personally burnt to a crisp. I hadn’t even been sure he’d been breathing at that point. For the sake of not ruining my dinner, I’ll try and keep it… vague. He was very badly burnt, and I’m still not entirely sure how he was even still alive by then.

His glazed eyes had looked at me. I nearly broke. He told me he wasn’t mad at me. He told me he was proud of me. He told me that he understood why I’d left. He knew the truth of the situation, but there had been nothing he could have done to undo what Emma had put out into the world. He had wanted to support me, but I’d already left by then. He merely looked at Other Jean, as she shook Scott like he was a disobedient child. He said that I had every reason to crack, and succumb to power, just like Other Jean had. But I didn’t. I’d tried to fix it, instead of lashing out and destroying as much as I could. I’d never once attacked humans, no matter how much they directed their hatred towards me. 

His rapidly fading eyes met mine once more. 

“There will always be those with the power to change the world, my dear girl. It is up to us to ensure those changes are for the better. If we don’t, who will?” 

If we don’t, who will?

Those were his last words to me. That was the final exhale of air from his chest, before his body stopped moving. Before that subtle hint of his presence in the back of my mind, always watching to make sure I was safe, sputtered out. 

I hadn’t always liked Xavier. Things had been rough for several years. Once upon a time, he’d been one of the people I hated the most, for his treatment of me and all of the other X-Men. For his complacency. For his cowardice. For his apathy. For his distance.

But he’d changed. He’d changed for the better. He’d pushed us to be our best selves. He made sure that if we ever had to leave home, we’d do so prepared for the worst. He taught us how to come back home alive. He taught us how to put together the pieces when the world broke us down. 

And then he was gone, because of me. 

Again. Another one lost because of my own ineptitude. 

I’d looked up at Other Jean. She was trying to embrace and show affection to Scott, like they were on positive terms. Like they were together, and nothing could split them. The revulsion on Scott’s face was another knot within the rope my stomach had formed. The cosmic flames emitting from her were steadily destroying everything around us in an ever-expanding circle. Would it ever truly stop? Would she end up burning down the entire world?

I’d never wanted this.

I’d just wanted everything to go back to how it used to be. 

I was tired of losing people.

I looked back at Strange. His expression seemed lost. He didn’t know what to do. There was no way he could defeat Other Jean. That is what his face told me. He was strong, without a shadow of doubt. But this was anything far beyond our world was ever meant to hold. Even now, I could see the cracks begin to form within the very sky. Reality itself was fraying at the seams trying to host this otherworldly entity.

When I finally spoke to Strange, I barely even recognized my voice. It was hoarse. Quiet. Defeated. And yet, even over the sounds of destruction, fire, and screams… he’d heard me. His head snapped towards me, eyes widening.

I told him to do it, one more time. To get it over with.

“Erase the effects of Jean Grey upon this world,” I’d said. 

He understood.

When he utilized the Runes of Kof-Kol once more, I instinctively knew it would work this time. I looked back at Scott. He was staring directly at my defeated form, even while Other Jean was practically strangling him in an embrace. 

I met the gaze reflected within his ruby sunglasses, and meekly smiled. He seemed to understand, and began trying to break out of Other Jean’s hold. The poor boy tried to reach me one last time, even as my other self was practically violating him.

It’s for the better this way, I decided. The world didn’t really need a Jean Grey.

A moment later, when Strange finished the spell, I felt the ripples as it passed throughout the world. It was… powerful. A spell that affected reality itself. It was overwhelmingly powerful, and its non-fatal nature was the only reason it could be cast so easily, even without materials like the Infinity Stones. 

I watched the mansion rebuild itself before my very eyes. I witnessed as the brutalized bodies of my friends disappeared, relocated back to where they once were. Before Jean Grey had made a mistake. 

It couldn’t bring back Xavier. It couldn’t bring back Wanda, even though that was my fault as well.  The spell’s major restriction was that it could not affect the living or the dead permanently. 

The mansion was rebuilt. The Hellfire Club would be returned to its original state. Everything I’d ever destroyed or touched would be like nothing ever happened. All of the news headlines would be gone. All of the memories would be swiped away. Any and all records turned to dust. Any objects tied to me or associated with any memories of me were no more.

And, as I met Other Jean’s gaze, I witnessed the rage of a being far larger and greater than I could ever dream of being. Yet, before my very eyes, I watched as she disappeared in the blink of an eye. 

Other Jean had brought herself here, but she was still ‘Jean Grey.’ By undoing Jean Grey’s actions, Other Jean no longer existed within this universe, nor would she ever be able to come back. Her foothold within our world had been destroyed. 

That was four years ago. Like I said before, I’m now twenty-two as of a few months prior. I’m the only one that knows that, now. 

I originally thought about reconnecting. Trying again, you know? But… I saw how happy they were. With the complete absence of me and our shared history, their minds filled in the blanks. Their lives improved. They’d taken to recording clips of life at the mansion and posting it on social media for PR purposes. It was a smart move.

It also hurt. A lot. I've watched almost all of them, year by year. Emma and Scott are disgustingly sweet together. All of that darkness swirling within Scott had disappeared alongside me, and Emma seemed to be a genuine improvement upon his life. They seemed to bring out the best of each other, and soothed their rougher edges. The spell convinced them that Xavier had died of natural causes. Thus, Emma and Scott took over the mansion and school. They’ve gotten a lot more members in the past few years. Mutants are becoming increasingly more common. I think I saw a theory about the Snap awakening dormant X-Genes. I don’t really know how true that is. 

All of them seem happier, for the most part. In the videos, Warren seemed to be a little distant, but he was coming out of his shell. All of them were doing better. They are better off without me. I only seem to bring out the worst in people, I guess. It was fine. 

I’m fine. 

I’ve taken up residence in Manhattan. I’ve become a full-time superhero for New York City. The only reason I have money to survive is thanks to Warren and Xavier, who always ensured I had a sizable stash of money hidden for emergencies. That money will run out eventually, but that’s a problem for a future me.  It’s better to throw my life into making up for the things I’ve done. It’s better to not think about what I used to have. The city was originally confused at suddenly having a hero with superpowers at their disposal, but they’ve gotten used to me over the past four years. Unless your name ends with Jameson, anyway. 

So. Allow me to introduce myself, one more time.

My name is Jean Elaine Grey, and I’m twenty-two years old. Four years ago, Marvel Girl died. I’ve taken up the mantle of Phoenix. My new life was born out of the ashes and rubble of my mistakes, and… well. I never want to lose sight of how my life even came to this point. The ‘Dark Phoenix’ will forever haunt me as a lesson of what I could have turned out to be. By picking up the name, it will be a permanent reminder. 

I’m alone. I’m tired. I’m hurt.

But I’m alive. I’m surviving. I’m helping everyone I can. I’m living life like Wanda and Xavier wanted. 

“If we don’t, who will?”

-J.G.

Jean snapped her journal shut with a sigh, putting her pen down. She’d finally finished writing out the outline of the past eight years of her life. It had taken her longer than it should have, but it was so much easier to not think about those things. It made it difficult to want to keep writing about it, especially when she tended to drift off in thought while reminiscing. 

She glanced out the window of her apartment, towards the sprawling streets of Manhattan. The hustle and bustle never stopped, not for anyone or anything. Everything looked normal, but she knew better.

A new threat had emerged within New York, because of course she couldn’t have peace. 

But… it was an odd sort. It seemed highly aggressive, and there wasn’t much of a pattern. Criminals of every type had been found brutalized within an inch of their life. Both petty street thugs… and actual supervillains that she normally dealt with. Tombstone had been found unconscious and bloodied within an abandoned warehouse a week ago. She shuddered to think about just how strong something had to be to hurt Lonnie that badly. 

However, it was also targeting the DoDC. That, unfortunately, gave her actual reason to have to get involved. She would never say no to a nameless contributor to crime-fighting, but she couldn’t overlook attacks on a government agency. She didn’t have much love for them, but it would be seriously bad for PR if she was on the record for not stopping domestic terrorism against a social protection organization.

Rumors and whispers had spread around the city. Man-Spider, they’d taken to calling it. An all-black shadow who hung from ceilings and swung from webs. A ghost of New York City who seemed to be hellbent on accomplishing something, but Jean was unable to figure it out for the life of her. 

It wasn’t building a crime empire. It wasn’t killing people. It wasn’t throwing around money, building connections, or purchasing property. It wasn’t buying, stealing, or selling anything. It was like violence was the only thing it understood. As the name suggested, it seemed more beast than man. A savage force dedicated exclusively to inflicting pain and destruction, but never enough to end a life. Like it was more interested in letting the metaphorical wound fester and rot, rather than ever fully cross the line and finish the job.

There was no motive she could determine. It was very specific about its targets, yet it never stole anything. It never tried to claim power. It didn’t even really have a territory that could be determined. It had been spotted on opposite ends of New York City in the span of ten minutes. It was like a bloodhound, relentlessly pursuing criminals and Damage Control. Whenever there was the slightest opportunity, it was always there. It possessed a savage cunning and intelligence that made her wary of directly engaging it. No matter how brutal and wild its methods, it was unbelievably persistent and thorough, which was the main reason Jean believed it to be far more sentient than most people gave it credit for. They wrote it off like they would a wild bear, and it was always to their detriment. 

Nobody had ever so much as caught a clear look at the thing. It was active at nearly all times of day. It didn’t even seem like the thing slept. Jean happened to relate to it in that regard, even though lack of sleep only made things significantly worse for her instead. Regardless, the Man-Spider was unbelievably slippery and agile, and bafflingly efficient. 

It was driving her up the wall, and only made the accumulating stress infinitely worse. However, Jean Grey was stubborn, if nothing else. She had an immense debt to the city, and she was going to pay it off if it was the last thing she ever did. Even if words like hero and savior were beginning to be thrown around in discourse about Man-Spider, she had an obligation to put an end to threats and powers that weren’t held accountable. 

She had a duty to make sure that any changes that came towards New York would be for the better.

If she didn’t, who would?