#i promise i didn't mean to sideline scott so hard i really do love him

[words-writ-in-starlight]

JEAN/SCOTT FOR THE MEME PLEASE. if i'm allowed to send multiple i WILL be asking about other fandoms later but like. I LOVE THE KIDS.

The kids!!!!!!  This turned into kind of the Jean hour.  Please enjoy this puree of Comics I Enjoy, ft exactly nothing from the comics of the last twenty to thirty years.

Headcanon

This is actually straight up comic canon, but I love it so much that I have to expand on it a little.  In that...niche, that plateau, when Jean is Phoenix but hasn’t quite tipped over the event horizon of power, she becomes the only person who’s seen Scott’s eyes since he first gained his powers.  She’s never quite clear on what she’s doing, she doesn’t know and has an alarming thought that she might be in his brain far more literally than usual, but he smiles at her thoughtlessly.  Jean can feel that he’s a little dazed by the experience, he touches her face with poorly-concealed wonder, and then his hand lands in his hair and he says in delight, “Your hair actually is this color!”

“Of course it is,” Jean laughs, halfway to sitting in his lap with his glasses dangling from one hand.  “What, did you think ‘redhead’ was metaphorical?”

Scott flushes a little at the teasing, but he still has a lock of her hair between his fingers, turning it in the sunlight like he’s never seen it before.  His glasses are as transparent as anyone can make them, but Jean knows that he still sees the world through a film of scarlet, half because of the quartz, half because of his own uncontrolled powers.  It’s tricky to keep his optic blasts leashed, takes more of Jean’s concentration than she’d like, but it’s worth it to see the way he smiles at her, warm brown eyes crinkled at the corners.

Heartcanon

Jean writes Scott a letter, in the handful of hours that she’s--herself, that she is Jean Grey, who grew up in New York and likes riding in convertibles with the top down on the highway and sometimes makes herself peanut brittle at three in the morning so that she doesn’t have to share, and not Dark Phoenix, beautiful and terrible and hungry.  Those hours of sanity were hard bought by the X-Men, by her family, and so she petitions Lilandra for paper and pen, and she writes Scott a letter.  Jean already has plans for this trial by combat.  She’s sorry about those plans.  But she can feel the fire chewing at the base of her skull, she can taste the iron-sweetness of a dying star on her lips, she wants--

She’s got plans.

The letter isn’t long, not really.  One page, unlined, with the polished cursive handwriting that Jean had drilled into her in middle school marching neatly across it.  It’s all the things that anyone ever wants to say.  I’m sorry, I wish it wasn’t like this, it’s not your fault.  She underlines it’s not your fault until her pen rips through the paper and marks the glass-smooth desk underneath.  Scott won’t believe her, but God, she wishes he would.

I could make him, Jean thinks idly, tapping her pen against the desk as she wonders what else there is to say.  I could make him believe me.  I could tell him, and explain, and he would understand, and then he would stay with me, I could make him stay with me, I could keep him forever, it wouldn’t matter what else I did, I could keep him--

Jean lets out a shaking breath that tastes like ash and hydrogen, and writes one more sentence.

I could never have lived with myself if I did anything else.

She signs it Love, forever, and writes her name for the last time.

Gutcanon

Before everything goes horribly wrong, Jean forges a mental rapport with Scott, a permanent link, one that will let her find him anywhere, let him call for her as easily as if she was in the next room.  It’s what finally lets him drag her free of Mastermind’s illusion, of Jean as the Black Queen of the Hellfire Club, much too late to make a difference.  It’s what lets him taste blood in his mouth when Jean’s control snaps and Phoenix’s teeth bite through her lip.  It’s what lets him feel the billowing heat of the star she swallows down, and what lets him say with assurance that Phoenix cannot kill what Jean truly loves, and then--

And then she’s Jean again, herself, tearful and shaken by what she’s done, what she’s become, and the rapport is closed.

It stays closed until the last moment, when she’s already given away her plan and started her suicide, and then Jean’s mind comes crashing back like the tide held away through sheer force of will.  It’s all fire and savage rage and joy and hunger and love, and Scott can’t tell what’s Jean and what’s Phoenix and what’s both--

The silence afterward is worse than anything he’s ever felt.

Junkcanon

Jean is the kind of person who leaves fights with a lot of left-over adrenaline and tends to crash like a motherfucker if she doesn’t handle it somehow.  Scott is an extremely good sport about this, although he does enforce a very strict policy about even semi-public sex, so Jean has mastered dragging him into closets or bathrooms to kiss him dizzy before he can protest.  She has a very fond memory of managing to pin him to the inside of a vault door in a bank, one time.

Also, telepathic sex!  I have a lot of thoughts about it.  Safewords are for people who don’t have a continuously open door into their partner’s brain.  They do Stuff With Blindfolds because Scott finds it reassuring to know that he’s harmless.  Jean enjoys sensation play because...*gestures to the entire Dark Phoenix saga* she just does, that shit’s canonical.

Spleencanon

I have to believe that Jean and Scott were able to raise Rachel for at least a couple years.  Please let these two raise one of their kids.  I understand that they’re the Skywalkers of the Marvel universe, but just let them! Raise! Their! Kids! In! Peace!

On a related note, AU where they find some assorted clones of Jean, courtesy of Sinister.  They’re all half-grown, five girls with bright hair and hard eyes--the oldest is maybe twelve and the youngest can’t be more than two--and Scott and Jean stand there for a moment, looking over the lot of them.

“We’re not perfect,” the oldest says in a clear, cool voice.  She reports her name to be Six.  “So we weren’t finished.  I was the closest--the most recent.  So he put me in charge.  Who are you?”

//I’m going to kill him,// Jean says silently, and Scott grabs her wrist before she can march back to Sinister and crush him.

“Let’s--okay,” Scott says.  “Let’s slow down.  I’m Cyclops.  Scott.  This is Jean.”

“We’re going to take you away from here,” Jean says, with the kind of absolute confidence that implies and god help you if you say we’re not, Scott Summers.  “You’re Six--how many of you are there?”

“Just us,” one of the middle girls says in a shy whisper, the one holding the little girl on her hip.  “I’m Four.  One didn’t--we’re not sure.  She didn’t make it.”

//All right,// Scott allows, on his private link with Jean.  //Maybe we do kill Sinister, actually.//

#jean grey #scott summers #phoenix #the skywalkers of the marvel universe #xmen #starlight writes stuff #ask meme #headcanon meme #i promise i didn't mean to sideline scott so hard i really do love him #i just am...SUPER obsessed with jean as phoenix #everyone who wants to do phoenix as just Jean But Crazy is a coward and i will not be moved #make phoenix the star-swallowing heart of a nebula that never knew what it was to feel before it found jean #before it felt the strongest mind in the cosmos SCREAM for someone to save her family and answered #because how could it not? how could a thing that stirred itself out of stardust and fire not answer that kind of power? #it starts as magnet to magnet and it ends in horrible co-dependence and the entire time phoenix clutches at jean with claws of iron #and asks 'why? why are we not together? why do you fight me? why is the joy not here anymore?' #'what will bring us the joy again? the joy of flying and feeling the wind and loving the world?' #and then phoenix swallows a sun and all the people who love its light to make jean love it again and jean-- #god help her jean almost does #THAT'S the shit i crave! #'phoenix is just jean but op' you are a bitch sir! #phoenix is an alien intelligence so far beyond fathoming that all jean can do it swallow it whole and wait for it to burn through her bones #jean grey knows the taste of a supernova and the sound of a planet in flames! #phoenix knows the feeling of gentle arms and stolen sweets! #these things are inimical to their respective natures and yet they are thoroughly intertwined! #a queue we will keep and our honor someday avenge #smallblueandloud #asked and answered