Jean Grey

Once upon a time, a very brave and very precise young man named Scott Summers met someone who made him completely lose track of what he was saying.

Her name was Jean Grey.

She arrived at the Xavier School in late autumn, when the leaves on the estate were orange and gold. Scott was already there — the school's first student, Xavier's most trusted trainee — and he was standing at the window of the common room when he saw her walk up the path, her red hair catching the afternoon light, laughing at something Professor Xavier had said.

Scott turned around and went back to his training notes with great seriousness, as though he had simply been thinking about beam trajectory angles.

He was not thinking about beam trajectory angles.

Jean Grey was a telepath and a telekinetic. She could sense the quiet hum of thoughts in the minds around her — never invading, just aware, the way someone might sense warmth from a nearby lamp. And she could move things with her mind: lift them, hold them, push them gently or firmly, all without touching. She was extraordinary in the Danger Room, intuitive and fast, her telekinesis flowing into the spaces between problems the way water finds the path around stones.

Scott did his very best not to act strange around her.

He was strange around her for six months.

He answered her questions at training carefully and completely — too completely sometimes, adding three extra paragraphs when a sentence would have done — and then went very still and waited for her to go away. Jean, who was a telepath and understood perfectly well what was happening, found this quietly delightful. She asked more questions. She sat nearer at strategy sessions.

She mentioned once that she'd been thinking about the second phase of the flooding-tunnel exercise, and whether a staggered deployment might work better than the simultaneous entry they'd tried.

Scott said, "Yes. I've been thinking about that too. Here's what I had in mind—" and talked for twenty minutes while the sun moved across the windows and neither of them noticed.

Gradually, over weeks and months, the conversations moved away from training scenarios and into the wider world. Books. The sky at different times of year. What the color blue felt like to someone who had never seen it. What it was like to hear the thoughts of many people at once. What it meant to have a power you had to be very careful with — the responsibility of it, the particular joy of learning to trust it.

They understood each other in the way that only happens when two people have thought carefully about the same large, important questions.

What Jean saw in Scott that others sometimes missed was the difference between being careful and being afraid. Wolverine teased him for his plans within plans, his precise briefings, his habit of checking emergency exits. But Jean saw something simpler: someone who cared. Someone who prepared because he loved the people around him and did not want anything to happen to them. The discipline was not armor. It was devotion.

In the field, they were extraordinary together.

Jean's telekinesis could hold a position above Scott's range, keep something suspended that his beam couldn't reach without risk of overshoot. And Scott's optic blasts could open exactly the angle Jean needed for a heavy telekinetic lift. They trained combinations in the Danger Room for months, until it stopped being a rehearsed sequence and became something more like breathing. Natural. Easy.

Bobby Drake took a photograph one afternoon by the school's lake — an old camera of Xavier's, with real film inside. He pressed the shutter at entirely the wrong moment.

Or entirely the right one.

The photograph showed Scott Summers laughing. Really, fully laughing — his head tipped back, his visor shifted up a fraction, his whole expression open and unguarded in a way that almost none of the X-Men had ever seen. Jean had said something — Bobby couldn't remember what — and it had caught Scott completely off-guard.

Jean in the photo was not looking at the camera. She was looking at Scott.

Bobby apologized several times for intruding.

The next morning, the photo was on Scott's desk.

It stayed there.

Sleep well. The bravest people in the world need someone who sees them clearly — and that is one of the finest things friendship can be.