Excerpt
Marvel: What If...Kitty Pryde Stole the Phoenix Force? (An X-Men and America Chavez Story)
Chapter 1Jean Grey
August 1, 1975
Welcome to the last moments of a young woman’s life. Her name is Jean Grey.
Breathless with fear on the flight deck of the Starcore One, she stares through the shuttle’s windshield. The solar flare ahead of them—a massive arc of electromagnetic radiation bursting from the sun’s atmosphere—makes for an impossible obstacle in their path back to Earth. Impossible for anyone but Jean . . . or so she promised her team. Promised that she alone could save them all and survive. Even in his steel-like Colossus form, Peter couldn’t have withstood the onslaught of radiation for this long. Regardless, he couldn’t have piloted the shuttle. And her teammates who know how to fly would’ve died quickly, horribly. Scott would have died. But not Jean. By sifting through the memories of Dr. Corbeau—the shuttle’s creator—she made herself a capable enough pilot to take the yoke and steer the damaged shuttle through the flare without the help of their malfunctioning flight control computer. Blocking the worst of the rays with her telekinetic powers, she would be able to keep herself alive. She swore this to the X-Men before they locked themselves safely (Lord, let them be safe) in the Starcore One’s shielded life-cell. She told them there was hope.
They saw through her, of course, none more than Scott. That man could have found his way to her in every world with his eyes closed. Certainly, he could see her terror in their last moments together.
He’s just now waking up from her psychic blow, held back by Kurt and Peter, pleading to be let out of the cell to . . . what? To save Jean? It’s too late for that. He’d only doom the rest of their friends, who have no pressure suits to protect them. Kurt and Peter understand this, and Professor X, Ororo, Sean, Logan, and Dr. Corbeau as well. Thankfully, Scott’s giving in at last, falling apart. Jean can sense his pain from the flight deck and squeezes her own eyes shut against it, but she won’t let herself follow him. She can’t let herself fall apart so close to the end.
Someday he’ll understand that it had to be this way. That it was Jean, or it was all of them. Someday he won’t hate her for spending the last words they’ll ever say to each other on a lie as obvious as: “I’ll be all right.”
The spasming shuttle threatens to rattle her bones from her body as it plunges toward home, but they’re almost through, only twenty minutes from Earth’s atmosphere. The radiation sensors are at the top of their scales, and her powers are at their limits, a scream trapped behind her gritted teeth. But she can last, she can last, she can—
As if it were the shuttle’s battered windshield, her telekinetic shield cracks under the bombardment of the radiation. Then it shatters, and Jean Grey’s body begins unraveling too quickly for her mind to comprehend. SCOTT, she screams without words as her pale skin withers, her green eyes cloud over with cataracts, her blood boils. After all this, she won’t make it to reentry. None of them will. Dear Lord, hear my prayer and help me!
Jean Grey is dying.
She can tell because there’s light everywhere, not in the stars beyond the glass but behind her, all around her, never mind that she’s gone blind.
And then . . .
Be not afraid. A voice plays like music in her mind even as Jean is beyond hearing.
The pain ends.
Everything is ending.
But something is with her now; a force lifting and holding the diminished form that Scott—the love of her life—would no longer recognize. Perhaps someone has heard her desperate prayer.
Who . . . what are you? Jean thinks, because she can no longer speak.
The sum and substance of life and hope and dreams, the voice answers. All that is, is known to me. I have known you, Jean Grey, from the moment of your conception, as I have known the universe. Out of the infinite whiteness, a figure begins to materialize; not a body, but the idea of a shape of a body, with multicolored light like an aura around it. Holding both arms out to her, it says, You cried out for aid. I heard. I came.
This is crazy. I’m crazy.
No more than any finite being confronted with the infinite. Your form, child, is so fragile. How can you possibly endure?
“I must,” she insists, words somehow finding their way out of her ruined throat.
To save the X-Men, the entity guesses. Its shape is clearer now, the idea crystallizing into execution. And most especially . . . Scott.
Then he’s with her in the whiteness, too. Her heart could shatter at the sight of him, and at the thought of all that almost was and never will be. Though she knows he’s only a memory dredged from her mind—the real Scott Summers would be beyond her reach even if her fingertips weren’t whittled down to bones—it’s good to see him one last time.
But she has to let him go now.
“What do you want?” Jean demands of the figure.
You called, child of man. And I, mother of stars, answered. It is for you to name your heart’s desire.
She wishes she could see her friends one last time, too.
She wishes she could have kissed Scott goodbye.
No, she wishes . . .
Jean forces herself to look the entity in the face, almost fully realized now. The halo of bright light outlines a body she knows as well as her own, because it is her own (or was, before she became a wreckage of herself). “To save the X-Men, I’d dance with the devil himself,” she grits out through crumbling teeth. “And . . . I want to live.”
All things are possible, child. The entity offers its hands made of light.
After a moment’s pause, Jean takes them, closing her eyes as the light flares and spreads to cocoon her desiccated body.
Something is beginning.
To anyone watching when the Starcore One slams down onto the runway at JFK, crashes through the barrier, and plunges into the waters of Jamaica Bay, it would seem impossible that anyone aboard could have survived. But the X-Men have always been notoriously hard to kill.
One by one they break the surface, gasping for air as they bob amid broken pieces of the shuttle like flotsam themselves.
“Cyclops! I was the last one out,” cries Peter, vulnerable for the moment in his human form.
“Then we are all safe,” says Ororo, the floating strands of her bone-white hair a stark contrast to the oil-slicked waters of the bay.
It isn’t true, though. Jean is down there somewhere, and Scott won’t be kept from her. “Get in my way this time, and I’ll kill you!” he growls as Kurt fights to stop him from diving down.
Scott will drown himself searching for what precious little remains of Jean Grey before he lets her go.
But as he tries to thrash himself free, something kindles below them, like coals glowing at the bottom of the bay where the wreckage of the shuttle now rests. The choppy surface grows more agitated still, steam rising to merge with the lingering, yellow-tinged smoke from their crash. It’s the only warning they get before great plumes of water shoot skyward, and Jean Grey explodes from the depths.
“HEAR ME, X-MEN,” she roars. “No longer am I the woman you knew.” Clothed in a green-and-gold suit they’ve never seen, fists raised and flame-red hair wild, it’s a claim they cannot help but believe. “I am fire, and life incarnate. Now and forever, I am the Phoenix!”
•
Kitty Pryde
1980
Sunrise finds them on Central Avenue in Deerfield, in front of Kitty Pryde’s house. Though it certainly hasn’t changed in the past twenty-four hours—the same white picket fence, same neat walkway, same egg-yolk-yellow front door—it looks strange to her now. That’s because Kitty has changed. She’s no longer the thirteen-and-a-half-year-old who trudged home from ballet class yesterday with a skull-splitting headache and her parents’ impending divorce stuck like a splinter in her heart.
She’s a mutant. Just like the X-Men. Just like that horrible woman, Emma Frost, who called herself the White Queen.
According to Professor X, Emma Frost and her minions only managed to find Kitty because he and the X-Men tracked her down first. Emma had been spying on the professor, planning to peel away the young mutants he sought to protect, and recruit them instead for the Hellfire Club: a shadowy group of bigwigs scrambling for wealth and power in the world, and more than willing to use their mutant powers to get it. She’d beaten the professor and his students to Kitty’s house by mere moments, then laid a trap to wipe out the X-Men once and for all, thus eliminating the Hellfire Club’s competition. It was beginner’s luck that Kitty managed to sneak away and contact Jean Grey, who’d been on a mission elsewhere with the remainder of the team.
She supposes if the X-Men hadn’t come, she’d be asleep in her bedroom right now.
But then she’d be alone. And that sounds scarier than the night’s dangerous ordeal. Instead, she’s surrounded by people who see her for who she is, and accept all of her. People who risked their lives to protect her, and in turn, Kitty risked her life to save them from the White Queen, discovering that she was brave and capable in the process. Kitty-of-yesterday couldn’t have imagined a feeling like that, a friendship like that.
