The truth was, Charles let Jean go solo not just out of confidence in her power… but because he was running the long game.
Kevin was a wild card—especially since he seemed a little crazy from the few seconds he was awake. According to the shattered files they'd recovered, the data was barely legible, scorched in the facility's destruction.
They roughly knew what he was able to do, but not the how… or to what extreme his powers had been twisted.
And that was the problem. Whatever experiments they'd run on him had supercharged his abilities to terrifying new heights.
Charles had felt it—psychic static radiating from Kevin that crackled with more raw potential than his own. The thought wasn't just concerning; it was a five-alarm psychic fire alarm.
If this kid wakes up swinging, Charles thought, they're not looking at a rescue. They're looking at a demolition.
So while Jean handled the field, Charles retreated to his favorite giant, helmet-shaped insurance policy: Cerebro, amplifying his reach across the globe.
Let Kevin stir. Let him even think about losing control. Charles would be ready—not with a fight, but with a flick of a mental switch.
Sometimes the best defense was a perfectly timed, politely delivered psychic "off" button.
…
…
…
Two very disorienting hours later, Kevin's consciousness slammed back into his skull like a bag of wet laundry. He blinked.
"Huh?"
This time, his vision was not only clear—it was hyper-defined. He could count the individual threads on the medical blanket.
But that was the boring part.
His brain, it seemed, had decided to connect to the world's worst, most intrusive Wi-Fi network without his permission.
He could feel the building. Not see it. Feel it. The staticky sleep of four other patients in distant rooms. The low-grade anxiety of a man just outside, sipping what his new senses insisted on labeling "a strange glass of tepid water."
And right in front of him, blazing like a psychic bonfire, was the red-haired woman. She wasn't just a person; she was a concentrated signal of… everything. Power, worry, and the mental equivalent of someone frantically trying to remember how to start a difficult conversation.
Then the mental download hit. Memories that weren't his own unspooled in his mind's eye.
A cold, profound dread pooled in his stomach.
"Oh," he whispered. Then, with more feeling: "Fffffuuuuuu—"
He caught himself, but only because his new, hyper-aware brain was also running a frantic calculation. Beautiful woman present? Check. Mind possibly being read? High probability. Swearing like a sailor? Not optimal for first impressions in a world where people get punched through buildings.
He'd found his old world boring, sure. Existentially tedious, even.
But he'd take a lifetime of soul-crushing office meetings over this new reality, where the general pastime seemed to be "try to vivisect the super-powered being." This was the ultimate "out of the frying pan and into a dimension where the fire is sentient and hates you" scenario.
Meanwhile…
Charles, watching the scene through the unparalleled lens of Cerebro, let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.
The new mutant's psychic signature had flared like a supernova upon awakening—a common, dangerous moment where power could rage out of control.
But it had stabilized almost instantly into a curious, panicked state. No psychic shockwaves. No structural damage. A relief.
The same could not be said for the atmosphere in the medical bay.
Jean found herself in a terrifying new scenario: having to make small talk. Her mind, capable of processing galaxies of information, was currently locked in a frantic, silent loop.
Okay. He's awake. Do I say hello? Too simple. "How are you feeling?" He just had a massive mutant manifestation, Jean, he probably feels terrible. "Do you know where you are?" He might panic. "Nice to meet you, and why are you panicking?" He might be recalling bad memories.
She cycled through a hundred openings in two seconds. All were discarded. The psychic feedback loop of her own social anxiety was, ironically, deafening.
Kevin watched the series of micro-expressions flit across Jean's face—confusion, concern, professional resolve, sheer social terror. It was weirdly comforting.
If she were reading his mind—a mind currently screaming MARVEL UNIVERSE! I'M IN A MARVEL UNIVERSE! ABORT! ABORT!—she'd likely look more alarmed, or be better at hiding it.
This had to be the mother of all transmigration scenarios, a jump between worlds he'd only read about in fanfics. Rule one: do not get tagged as the extra-dimensional stowaway. Rule two: play the part of the confused, recently traumatized new mutant. He could do this. Probably.
The resulting silence stretched, thick enough to walk on. It was a standoff between an introvert who was used to hearing the other side of the conversation and a man desperately trying to wallpaper over the screaming void in his head.
Finally, Jean broke.
"Hello," she said, the words slightly rushed. "Um… I'm Jean. Jean Grey."
She aimed for calm reassurance but landed somewhere near "nervous lab assistant."
Internally, Kevin did a victory dance. She led with her name! She's not probing! We're going with the 'amnesiac victim' protocol! Thank you, book tropes!
He arranged his features into what he hoped was plausible confusion and gratitude.
"Hello," he replied, his voice rough. "I'm… Kevin. Kevin Moore."
He glanced around the sterile room, letting the pause hang for a beat. "Where… where am I, by the way?"
Jean offered a reassuring smile, the kind she reserved for newly rescued mutants who still smelled of fear and antiseptic. "Relax. You're in the X-Mansion now. The facility… let's just say my friend and I had a very persuasive discussion with their security system. It's no longer a concern."
Kevin on the medical cot blinked, processing. "You dealt with them? What about Aloone? And the others?"
He named the friends of the body he now inhabited.
At the question, Jean's smile softened into a somber line. She sighed, the sound heavy with the weight of too many similar conversations. "I'm sorry. By the time we breached the compound, you were the only one we found alive."
She braced herself for the storm—the grief, the rage, the shattered denial that usually followed such news. Instead, she was met with… relief? It flickered across his face, clear as day, before being schooled into careful neutrality.
Jean's eyebrows attempted a merger with her hairline. "What?"
"Uh… what?" Kevin parroted, feigning ignorance. He'd meant to play it cool, not 'visibly relieved my fictional friends are dead' cool. Whoops.
"Your friends just died," Jean stated, her voice laced with a therapist's cautious probing. "And you look… shouldn't there be some sadness? Anger?"
Kevin considered the performance. A full theatrical meltdown? Tempting, but high-maintenance.
Once you commit to a soap-opera-level persona, you're stuck with it for the long haul, and Kevin had read enough comic books to know the long haul here involved alien invasions, time-travel paradoxes, and at least one wedding crashed by a supervillain.
"Sadness?" he finally said, opting for weary truth instead of convenient fiction. "I really would have liked being here with them. But for them? This is what they wanted. Prayed for, even. Now they don't have to suffer anymore."
He saw the logic of it. In the grand, messy tapestry of the Marvel Universe, a clean exit before the next world-ending event could be a strange kind of mercy.
For the weak, the experimented-on, the perpetual casualties, death wasn't always the tragedy. Sometimes, it was the curtain call before the really weird stuff started. Not that he, a brand-new occupant of this chaotic reality, was in any position to judge.
Jean was, for perhaps the first time that week, speechless. Part of her, the well-trained X-Man, wanted to gently chide him for the chilling apathy.
The other part, the powerful telepath who had brushed against the lingering screams in that lab's walls, understood. The conflict left her mentally sputtering like a stalled motorcycle.
Is this survivor's guilt? she wondered. Or is it… clinical depression? Suicidal ideation? It wouldn't be the first time someone emerged from a hellhole like that believing death was a better destination than living.
Her mind began racing, drafting about six different crisis counseling protocols at once.
Fortunately, she was saved from her own spiraling thoughts by the familiar presence of two approaching mental signatures.
Oh, right. The Professor. I was supposed to call him. In her defense, existential debates about the virtue of death were terribly distracting.
The door slid open with a soft hiss, and in rolled Charles, whose calm demeanor could pacify a Hulked-out Wolverine, and Scott beside him, posture so rigid he could have been used to calibrate leveling tools.
Charles had felt that Kevin's emotions were stable when the latter woke up, so he left Cerebro and decided to intervene, knowing his prized student sometimes overthought interactions into a psychic quagmire.
He brought Scott along to see that the person he'd helped rescue was okay, a living balm for his guilty conscience.
"Jean," Charles greeted, his voice a warm, psychic blanket. "You forgot to contact me."
There was no accusation, only a twinkle of amusement in his eyes. "I see you've been getting acquainted with our guest."
Kevin watched the bald man in the high-tech wheelchair. If he didn't know this was the world's most powerful telepath—a man who could, with a benign thought, turn your memories into a charming pop-up book—he'd have pegged him for an extremely serene, if prematurely bald, guidance counselor.
"Professor, he just woke up," Jean explained, a slight flush on her cheeks. She couldn't very well say, He's emotionally stable in a horrifyingly pragmatic way, so I didn't see the urgency.
Charles offered a forgiving nod before turning his full, tranquil attention to Kevin. "How are you feeling?"
Kevin sat up straighter, every instinct screaming, SHIELD YOUR MIND, BUT POLITELY. This was the man who believed in radical consent—except when he famously didn't. "I feel… alright, considering. And you are?"
"Charles Xavier. This is my home. And this," he gestured, "is Scott Summers. He, like Jean, is part of the X-Men. We're glad we could reach you in time."
Kevin nodded, taking in the trio: the mind-reader, the possibly depressed telekinetic, and the brooding laser-eyes guy. A classic lineup. He placed a hand over his heart, offering a shallow but sincere bow from his seated position.
"Thank you," he said, and he meant it with every fiber of his not-entirely-his-own being. The memories of cold metal tables and clinical agony were visceral enough to make his soul shudder. "You pulling me out of there… it means everything. I don't know how to repay that kind of debt, but I hope I get the chance."
It wasn't a lie. He was terrified, confused, and mentally building a fortress out of grocery lists and song lyrics to keep psychic snoopers out. But underneath the panic, the gratitude was real and solid.
They'd yanked him from a script that ended in a lab dumpster and dropped him into the X-Mansion. It was trading one kind of chaos for another, but at least this chaos had a chance of a tomorrow.
And possibly better catering.