The tragedy she saw then was that he knew it, too. All that could have been, perhaps even should have been. All that might yet be. Knew it, and rejected it. Charles Xavier was a man energized by humanity's potential; his life, his purpose, had always been defined by hope. Magneto refused hope. His heart had been broken too many times. Long ago, his spirit had been pared down to its essence, brought to white heat in the most awful of crucibles and then pounded by adversity into the shape of a weapon. The metal of his being had been folded a thousand thousand times, as the classical sword smiths of ancient Japan forged their samurai blades. Thanks to that cruel tempering, he could bend without breaking. But regardless of what happened, he would never lose his edge, would never be anything other than what he was. There was a greatness in him, that was undeniable. He was the living embodiment of the primal forces that formed the foundation of the universe. And as a consequence, he was just as terrible as he was glorious.

She found she couldn't bear to be near him anymore. The bleak hollow at the center of his soul was like a whirlpool; to wander closer was to be dragged to a similar oblivion.

She broke from the campfire and took refuge in the Blackbird, returning to the purely mechanical tasks that had filled the afternoon and evening.

Watching her leave, Logan decided he was done with Magneto's Q&A. Brusquely excusing himself, he strode after her through the campsite to find her standing underneath the wing of the Blackbird, with her head and shoulders hidden inside an open belly hatch. She was muttering to herself, in a tone and using words he didn't expect from her. It made him suspect she'd been hanging around him too much; Xavier and Scott would accuse him of being a bad influence. Outstanding!

"How bad is it?" he asked her.

"I'm running fluid through the hydraulics. If the test passes, it'll still take four to five hours to get off the ground. Like it or not, we're stuck here for the night. Fortunately," she continued in a rush, "our stealth netting should hide the Blackbird pretty well from any casual reconnaissance. As for the rest, the passive scanning array says we've got clean sky to the horizon, and according to the infodump on the main computer, there shouldn't be any surveillance satellites overhead, either. That means minimal risk of detection."

"That isn't what I meant."

"I know what you meant, Logan. This is how I choose to answer. Okay?"

He said nothing. He had a hankering for a beer, but he knew there was none aboard the Blackbird, and Magneto struck him as more of a wine guy. A case of five-star premier cru, not a problem; God forbid the man even consider a can of Molson's.

From Mystique he expected nothing less than poison. It didn't matter to her that his healing factor made him immune. Quite the contrary. It struck him that the fun for her would be in seeing how much it would hurt him to recover and how long it would take.

After a while, conceding to herself that Logan wasn't going to go away, Jean allowed herself a sigh.

"I'm worried," she confessed. "About the professor. About... Scott."

"I know," he said.

He stepped under the shadow of the aircraft and reached out his arm to her. In flats, she was his height, but her uniform heels gave her an edge. It amused him to have to look a little bit up to her. At his touch, she folded against him to rest her head on his shoulder, allowing him to take the full weight of her body, which he did without any effort. There was no separation between them, physical or emotional, and his nostrils flared as he realized the implications.

"I'm worried about you," he told her softly. "That was some display of power up there."

She snorted dismissively. "It obviously wasn't enough."

He turned his head to look her in the eyes. She kept hers downcast, using her lids to shroud them, to keep him at a distance. But he didn't need eyes to see what was so obvious, or to sense the depth of the attraction between them. He'd known it from the start, that first moment when he'd awakened in the mansion infirmary to find himself staring up at a face that would haunt him forever.

He was barely breathing; he didn't want to do anything to break the moment. She felt the faint touch of air across her face, and her mouth opened in response, as if it were life itself to her, her head tilting just so against him to give him freer access.

The kiss was there for the taking.

Any other time, he wouldn't have hesitated. Any other time, he wouldn't have cared about the consequences. Now, consequences were everything.

"I love him," Jean said, mostly to herself, because she still wouldn't look at Logan. He knew she believed that with all her heart, so why didn't she sound convinced?

"Do you?"

She looked confused, as if she didn't understand the question. For those few seconds it took to answer, he saw her throw off replies the way a pitcher would reject signs he didn't like from the catcher. The one she settled on satisfied nobody, least of all her.

Now she looked at him. "People flirt with the bad guy, Logan. But they don't take him home." She pulled her hand away. "They marry the good guy."

"Is that enough?" he asked quietly. And then, in response to her silence: "I could be the good guy, Jean."

"Logan, the good guy sticks around."

He threw caution to the winds.

He laid a palm lightly against the slim column of her throat, fingertips tucked behind the knob of her jaw while his thumb caressed her chin. Her skin was the softest, smoothest surface he could remember touching, and the contact between them was electric. He felt a flush of heat against his hand, saw color rise beneath her skin to give it a roseate glow that was a pale echo of the fire of her hair. Her breathing quickened in concert with her pulse, her heart pounding so strongly he could feel it against his own chest, even through the armored fabric of her uniform.

She trembled as if her body were being swept by a succession of microquakes. And he held back a smile at realization that her skin was puckering all over with goose bumps.

They were balancing on edges of passion and emotion that put the keenness of his adamantium claws to shame. And yet, because both of them recognized the seriousness of the moment, they both felt perfectly in control. They were poised on the crest of the perfect wave-for him, one of snow, part of an avalanche; for her, one of surf. No effort at all would be required to bring it to an end, to call this quits before they went too far. She didn't need to say a word, to make a gesture; he'd take his cue from the primal signals that weren't under her volitive control.

She caught him by surprise, covering his hand with hers, reaching out at the same time with her telekinetic power to close the miniscule gap that remained between them.

Now it was his breath that was caught up by a sudden gasp, his own heart that skipped a beat amid its own increasing trip-hammer riff, as her lips brushed his.

That first contact was fleeting, tantalizing with possibilities, but he didn't give her a chance to pull away as he opened to her, meeting her mental strength with that of his body. He heard a small noise that mingled desire and satisfaction, but couldn't tell whether it came from him or her as they pulled each other closer, and he came to understand the incredible strength that lay hidden within this lean, whipcord figure.

He lifted her off her feet, shifting his own stance just enough so that he supported her against the whole hard length of him, and now there was no question. He was the one who moaned as barriers collapsed between them and Jean gave him access to her own mind, her own sensations, her own emotions.

His nostrils filled with a rich woodland scent, and he knew this was how he presented himself to her.

The world blurred around them, took on a new shape as her desire caught up both of them, laying them bare to their souls. As their thoughts merged, it struck him that he should be afraid. There were memories here that he fought to keep hidden from Xavier, two volumes to the book of his life. The first, which he believed had been stolen from him, which Magneto now suggested was intimately involved with William Stryker, and which Xavier apparently had known about from the start. But the second, everything that had happened to him since, had more than a few moments that weren't pretty.

Yet he didn't even try to hide any of them; she was too important. He wanted her to see the whole of him; he wanted to give her every excuse to run away, because if she chose to stay, if she accepted what he was, then this was real. It would last.

What surprised him was the discovery that she was just as scared, just as determined.

He saw her playing in a yard, a fragment of her thoughts providing the date and setting: her parents' home at Bard College, an hour upstate from Xavier's, where her dad taught. Jean was eight and hanging with her best friend, Annie Malcolm. Annie tossed a Frisbee for her dog, but a wayward puff of breeze hooked the plastic saucer off over the fence. The dog bolted through the gate, Annie chasing after, heedless of the danger posed by this stretch of River Road.

Jean saw what Annie hadn't, a car speeding around the blind curve. There wasn't even a screech of brakes, before or after, just a sickening thud and the sound of tires skidding on asphalt as the driver struggled to regain control before he sped away.

She found Annie against the stone wall by the gate, her body folded at impossible angles, blood-so much blood, too much blood-splashed everywhere. Jean wanted to scream, to shriek, to howl, but some part of her that refused to relinquish control forced her lips to form proper words, forced her lungs to provide air for sufficient volume to make this a proper shout as she called for her mother.

Annie couldn't speak, the only thing moving about her was her chest, desperately striving-broken as it was-to draw another breath. As well there were her eyes, bright with confusion as her brain struggled to make sense of what had just happened. Jean couldn't stop her own tears. They poured silently from her eyes as she knelt beside Annie and wrapped her arms around her friend.

She found herself in a vast space of light, filled with sparkling clusters of energy. She touched the closest and was filled with an awareness of a specific time and place, together with a torrent of associated emotions, and in a sudden burst of insight realized that each of these clusters represented one of Annie's memories. With a directness only a child can muster, she concluded at once that she was inside Annie's head.

But her delight at this new adventure was short-lived. Even as she watched, she became aware that the brilliance of the individual clusters was fading, along with their background radiance, which suffused this apparently infinite space. It was like looking at the daylight sky, only in this case it was chockablock with stars of every conceivable color and magnitude, and realizing the gradually encroaching presence of night.

To her horror, Jean saw that the clusters closest to the darkness exploded apart in a fireworks shower of sparkles, and just like fireworks, these flaring embers vanished before they reached what she thought of as the ground. But unlike sunset, where the night came from a single horizon, this darkness closed on her from every side, not simply along a horizontal plane but lowering from above and rising from below. She tried to catch hold of the memory clusters, to carry them to some place of safety, but couldn't find one. With each that vanished, she found that less and less of a cohesive sense of Annie herself remained.

She called her friend's name, but the word echoed through a space where it had no more meaning. Annie was going, and there was no way Jean could call her back.

Jean embraced the final cluster, her own heart so full of grief she thought it would explode while her noncorporeal cheeks burned with tears. She thought if she could push her own strength, the essence of her own will and soul, into this last fleeting scrap of her friend, she'd still be able to save her.

The last of the light went out. All around her, save this last scrap of Annie's self, was darkness.

But paradoxically, as this final night fell, the cluster that Jean embraced blazed more brightly than before, more brightly than any radiance Jean had ever seen, so bright it put the sun to shame. She beheld colors she had no name for, that reached out to all her senses, manifesting themselves as tastes and scents and textures. It was a warm and welcoming light, pure in a way that poets strive for and only lovers attain, and that, rarely.

The last cluster, the last scraps of Annie, broke apart in Jean's grasp and slipped through her fingers, rushing away into the core of this new light. There was such peace and such beauty that Jean's first impulse was to follow so that her friend would not face this new place by herself.

That would be so easy. No more pain, no more fear. She could avoid the crushing weight of grief that awaited her the moment she opened her eyes for real, the memory of her friend, the awareness of the bloody rag doll she'd become.

Someone was yelling, in a voice raw with horror and with fear, and Jean was a little bit shocked to realize that she wasn't simply hearing the words her mother spoke as she cradle-crushed Jean in her own arms as Jean had done Annie, as heedlessly as her daughter had been of the blood that soaked them both. She could feel her mother's emotions as well, and her thoughts, relief that it was Annie lying there and not Jean, shame at that acknowledgment, fury that either girl had been so careless, a terrible and welling rage at the driver for not stopping.

It's okay, Mommy, she remembered saying, sure for years afterward that she'd spoken aloud, which was why she was so startled when her mother fell backward in stark and visible shock. There's no need to cry, I'm okay. Only much later did the understanding come that she hadn't said a word with her voice but had spoken directly, mind to mind.

And much later after that, the comprehension that she'd been quite wrong in what she'd told her mom: Nothing for Jean after that fateful moment when her psi catalyzed into being, years before it was supposed to, would ever be truly "okay" again.

"It's okay, darlin'," Logan said softly, brushing tears from her cheek. "There's no need to cry. You're okay."

She shuddered again, as though the surface temblers had given way to a deep and lasting tectonic shift, from the kind of quakes that level buildings to the ones that reshape the face of continents and raise mountains to the heavens.

She kissed him on the lips, on the cheeks, and he stifled a smile at the realization that he was crying, too.

She took a deep, calming breath but said not a word. Logan followed her lead. There was nothing that needed saying between them, not now, perhaps never again. It would be easy if her heart told her one thing and her head another; scientist though she was, empiricist to the core, she knew she'd follow her heart.

But her heart felt equally, passionately torn between them, and she couldn't see any way yet to heal the rift.

It made her head hurt and her soul ache, and she knew she wasn't likely to feel better anytime soon. Logan wanted to kiss her again, so much and so hard it was an ache within him. He wanted her more than his life, more than his past.

But she shook her head and pulled away.

"Logan, please-don't."

Against every instinct and every desire, he nodded assent and did nothing but watch as she strode away. That wasn't like him at all. His solution to every problem was direct and invariably physical. No hesitation, less regrets.

Until now. Until her. Somehow she brought out the best in him. Even more, she fanned in him a desire to be better, to transcend the person and life he was accustomed to. That would be a lot easier if he knew that at the end he'd have a shot, a chance to gain her as the prize. What made him smile at the wicked joke fate was playing was the realization that winning her wasn't guaranteed. It might not even be possible, no matter how he proved himself. Whatever they felt for each other, her love for Scott was just as strong and could not be denied.

Knowing that, why make the effort?

Knowing that, he found himself wanting to try anyway. Because, even though it made him crazy, he liked the way it made him feel.

Nightcrawler couldn't take his eyes off her, but how she reacted to his interest Logan couldn't tell.

"They say you can imitate anybody," Nightcrawler said to Mystique as the shape-shifter's gaze followed Logan across the campsite. "Even their voice?"

She looked over her shoulder at him and replied, in perfect mimicry, "Even their voice."

Nightcrawler couldn't help a grin of delight that stretched from ear to ear, and he clapped his hands together in one performer's appreciation of another.

"In your case," she told him, speaking as herself now, "the voice is easy. The tail, now, that might take some work."

"It would be like mine- ach, what is the word-"

"Prehensile," Logan said.

"Ja, ja, ja, that's it, like a monkey!"

Mystique searched once more for Logan and thought back briefly to their battle on Liberty Island. Her morphing ability had allowed her to generate a set of facsimile claws that were almost as good as the real thing. As well, it had enabled her to survive three of his own adamantium blades that had gone right to her heart.

"It isn't polite to ask a woman's secrets, mein herr, " she said gently. "Or expect the woman to give them up, just for the asking."

"Forgive me," Nightcrawler said hurriedly, recognizing the undercurrent of emotion flossing through the other mutant without knowing quite what it represented, "I did not mean to offend."

"Not even close," she assured him.

"I was wondering, though," he continued, "with such an ability, why not stay disguised all the time? You know... look like... everyone else." What he meant, and it was heartbreakingly plain to see, was "like normal people."

Her answer was direct: "Because we shouldn't have to."

His expression showed that he liked that. He just as obviously liked her, for reasons that had nothing to do with her appearance.

Logan should have been sleeping, but he didn't even try. From the moment he crawled into his tent, he'd been fingering and staring at his dog tags, as though physical contact-or glaring at them-might inspire some miraculous revelation. Charley had told him to be patient about his past, that his mind demanded the same opportunity and time to heal as his body would. Clear implication: This was a journey they'd take together. Now Magneto comes along to imply that Charley knows more-a lot more-than he's let on. Truth? Or was the bad guy just screwing with Logan's head?

The faint scent of Folavril-her perfume-announced her presence a moment before Jean opened the tent flap and crouched inside. Suddenly, his heart rate kicked into high gear, and he could see from the pulse on her throat, the faint flush to her skin, that the attraction was as undeniably mutual.

He started to speak, without the slightest idea of what he wanted to say, but she stopped him with a finger against his lips. Her eyes were laughing with anticipation and delight as she crawled closer across his sleeping bag. His own eyes couldn't help but follow the line of her shirt, more open than she usually wore it, to the shadows between her breasts. She straddled him and settled her weight on his hips. The touch of her was electric, the scent intoxicating, as she slid her hands across his chest, up the thick column of his throat to take hold of him along the line of his jaw and bring his lips to hers.

There was no hesitation this time. The kiss was dynamite, fulfilling all the promise of the first, and he returned better than he got, moving his left hand up to cup her neck and his right beneath her shirt to caress her across the ribs and belly. She trembled against him, catching her breath with the sparkling overload of physical sensation.

That's when he popped his claws. The outsiders from his left hand, to bracket her throat right beneath her chin, forcing her to hold her head erect and at attention, or risk slicing skin-and likely bone-on the razor-keen adamantium blades. The middle claw was the kicker, the final incentive to behave: One false move, she'd be done.

At the same time, he tore open her shirt to reveal three scars right below her left breast, the indelible legacy of his claws stabbing through her rib cage to her heart.

"Busted," Mystique said, sounding not at all dismayed. If anything, her smile was broader and livelier than ever, as was the light in her eyes. She danced with danger, it gave life spice and meaning. As he watched, green eyes turned chrome yellow, that color expanding to subsume the entire eyeball. Then, in the kind of dissolve animators love to use, the transformation spread outward from her eyes. Her hair shortened and turned a darker, more angry shade of red; her clothes faded into her skin, which in turn morphed from pale to indigo blue.

As an acrobat, she was in Nightcrawler's league. Logan knew from experience she could give and take a serious punch. Whatever her appearance, her strength demanded respect. Now she used that strength to gently but firmly push his blades clear of her neck. She did a good job; with barely a millimeter to spare, the edges never touched her skin.

At the same time, she melted against him, as Jean had beneath the Blackbird, kissing her way from mouth to ear.

"No one ever left a scar quite like you," she said.

"You want an apology?"

She chuckled, much as he might. "You know what I want."

She bit him, on the lobe, hard and sexy, and when she sat straight up before him she shifted position just that little bit needed to make her intentions and desires unmistakable.

"But what is it," she continued, her voice going as sultry as her manner, "you want?"

She changed in his arms, skin turning brown, hair turning silver, eyes turning blue, gaining height and majesty until it was Storm sitting there, spectacularly naked. She lifted her arms to spread her hair wide across her shoulders, allowing him an unobstructed view...

... and then she changed again-shrinking in size and stature, skin paling, eyes turning green, hair going brown with its distinctive skunk stripe down front, covering her nakedness demurely with crossed hands as she presented herself as Rogue...

... and then she was Jean again.

He'd had enough. He hit her, palm of the hand, flat to her chest, with force enough to pop her off his lap and almost to the opposite wall of the tent. He'd caught her off guard, and there wasn't time for her to recover. She landed in an inelegant sprawl, which only made her more amused than ever as she rolled over onto her belly and levered herself up on her hands.

By the time her arms were at full extension, Logan was staring at William Stryker.