Chapter 152: Jean Gets a Talking-To (With Fists)
"Stop rushing me. I said I'm almost there." Magneto's voice had reached the particular frequency reserved for people who are being told something they already know. "If you say it one more time, I will put you down and go the rest of the way by myself."
Xavier said nothing. His expression said it for him.
"I have told you," Magneto continued, "multiple times tonight, that Ethan's capabilities are not something you've correctly assessed. The Phoenix Force in an uncontrolled state is serious. Ethan is more serious."
He wasn't entirely sure where this certainty had come from. He'd examined it on the way over and hadn't found a clean answer. Part of it was the moment Ethan had let him walk away — a display of confidence so absolute it hadn't needed to be stated. Part of it was watching tonight unfold from the sidelines: every move anticipated, every asset countered, the neighborhood still standing.
Part of it, if he was honest, was that Ethan had kept Wanda safe in ways that Magneto, her own father, had consistently failed to manage.
He didn't say any of that. He just flew.
"You don't understand what Jean is capable of," Xavier said. "I've seen it. Three times. At five years old, at seventeen — what she can do to someone who gets close to her without the right preparation—"
"We need everyone working together. Even then I'm not certain we can—"
Magneto stopped.
Xavier started to say why are you stopping and then turned to look at what Magneto was pointing at.
Ethan had Jean on the ground.
Red chaos energy wrapped around both of them, not as a barrier but as a medium — something that moved between them and through the space where the Phoenix Force kept trying to resurface and kept finding itself redirected.
His fists were doing the rest of the work.
Not hard enough to cause lasting damage. Hard enough to be unambiguous.
"You want to lose control in my neighborhood," he said, and his voice had lost the easy cadence it usually carried. "In front of my people."
Fist.
"You put Wanda on the ground."
Fist.
"You tore up streets that residents are going to have to walk on tomorrow."
Fist.
"You can't die, fine. Neither can I wait apparently."
Fist.
Every time the Phoenix energy surged in response — the instinctive reaction, the power gathering to protect itself — the chaos magic was already there, not fighting it, just holding it, redirecting it somewhere harmless, giving it nowhere to go.
Jean couldn't build toward an explosion. Every time she tried, the pressure dispersed.
And Ethan just kept talking and hitting.
"You think losing control is something that happens to you. It's not. It's something you let happen." Fist. "And you let it happen in Hell's Kitchen."
The black was leaving Jean's eyes.
Not quickly. But it was leaving.
Brown coming back in from the edges. Awareness returning — confused, disoriented, the specific quality of someone who had been somewhere else and was finding their way back.
Xavier had closed his eyes the moment he understood what was happening, and now he was reaching — careful, practiced, the telepathic equivalent of someone guiding a person who was lost back toward a sound they recognized.
Jean. Jean. Come back.
She came back.
Her eyes focused.
Ethan was above her.
He stopped when he saw her return. He looked at her for a moment. Then he stood up, brushed the dust off his jacket, and was, in the space of roughly four seconds, back to looking like someone who had been doing nothing more strenuous than evening administration.
Jean stared up at the sky and processed the last several minutes.
Xavier's voice came from somewhere nearby. "Jean."
She closed her eyes.
"I know," she said.
On the sofa, the reaction was mixed.
Logan had his mouth open. He'd seen a lot of things. He'd seen Ethan arrive, and he'd seen the Phoenix Force do what it did, and he'd watched the fight with the focused attention of someone who was professionally interested in effective violence.
He leaned over to Wade. "He just... punched her back to normal."
"I mean." Wade appeared to be recalibrating his own read on the situation. "It worked."
"Is he always like that?"
Wade thought about it. "He's usually much more relaxed. This was — I think this was the angry version." He lowered his voice slightly. "He really doesn't like it when someone hurts Wanda."
Logan looked at Wanda, who was watching the aftermath with an expression that contained a complicated mix of feelings — relief, some lingering embarrassment about the fight's outcome, and something else that Logan didn't try to identify.
He also noticed that she had, at some point in the last thirty seconds, immobilized Wade with chaos magic.
Wade was still in the process of trying to quietly leave despite being completely unable to move his legs.
"She froze you," Logan observed.
"This is a known hazard," Wade said. "I'm working on it."
"Because you were trying to run."
"I prefer 'strategic repositioning.'"
Pietro had gone very quiet and was looking at the ground with the expression of someone who had decided that being unobtrusive was currently in his best interest.
Lorna was pointing at herself and mouthing me too? at Wanda with an expression of genuine bewilderment. She'd come to help. She had helped. She was not sure how she'd ended up in the special training cohort.
Wanda swept all three of them with a look that left no ambiguity about the upcoming schedule. "None of you are going anywhere. We are all going to get significantly better before this happens again."
She turned back to watch Ethan walk toward Xavier and Jean.
Her expression, when she wasn't directing it at the training cohort, was something else entirely.
Xavier stopped Ethan with a hand on his arm.
"She's back," he said. "She's—"
"I know." Ethan looked past him at Jean. "She'll be fine."
Xavier studied him. He had spent decades reading people — not always with his power, often just with his eyes. He'd been wrong about Ethan tonight. He was starting to understand how wrong.
"You knew the chaos magic would work on Phoenix Force," Xavier said. "That's not — that's not something anyone has documented."
"I had a theory."
"You had a theory."
"It held."
Xavier looked at him for a long moment.
"I'd like to talk," he said. "After all of this is settled. Properly. I have questions."
"I have a restaurant," Ethan said. "Come for dinner."
He walked away.
Ethan moved through what remained of the fight's aftermath — checking positions, assessing the damage, building the number in his head that he was going to present to Nick Fury when he found him.
The number was large.
It was getting larger.
"The federal government," he said to no one in particular, stepping over a section of pavement that hadn't survived the evening, "is going to learn about the concept of reconstruction costs."
He thought about Nick Fury specifically. About the phones going off in the command center. About the operation that had just cost significantly more than it had been projected to cost, in every possible currency.
He'd deal with that shortly.
First: find Fury. Have a conversation. Make sure certain things were clearly understood going forward.
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Inkshaper
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you