Jean crouched beside Xavier’s wheelchair, stretching out her hand slowly. “Are you sure this is the only way?” She chewed her lip nervously.
Javier took her hand. Her skin felt very hot against his dry liver-spotted skin. “Jean, you’ve always been a passionate psychic. But discipline has never been your strength. If you can’t learn to control the phoenix inside your body before it destroys you, I will have to go in there and master it myself.”
Jean nodded glumly and closed her eyes. Xavier focused his mind, extending his self into her body, only to be rebounded.
“Jean, you’re going to have to lower your defences for this to work,” he chided her.
“S-sorry, this is just…a little scary.”
Slowly, bit by bit, Xavier felt her mental defences lowering and he pushed forward more forcefully, slipping inside her mind, deeper than he’d ever been before, even in all their training. He plunged deeper, shuddering at the intimacy as he felt her mind pressing up against his, flickers of her memories and passions mingling with his own. The sensation of his frail, paralysed body faded away into nothing.
It was worse than he feared. His inner mental realm, viewed by an outsider, would resemble a stately library, neatly ordered. Her mind was a burning palace, exquisitely beautiful but fractured, as the Phoenix Force roared inside her like a firestorm.
Even he wasn’t sure if he could control it. Still, he stood a damn better chance than his teenaged apprentice.
He paced through the twisted corridors of her mind until he came upon its throne room, the very heart of Jean Grey’s psyche.
“What happens now?” she gulped.
“Now?” Xavier asked. He began to extend his awareness, spreading out into all those corridors and rooms of her mind. Awareness of the physical world started to return but it wasn’t his body he was feeling. His consciousness filled the new youthful vessel. He felt a twitch. He felt… toes. For the first time in decades, he could feel his toes!
“Now you leave,” he said, giving her a hard, psychic shove.
Abruptly, he was back in the real world. His youthful, sinuous figure was crouching beside an old man in a wheelchair. He revelled in the sensation of his plump, spandex-clad ass perched on the back of his heels, the shift of his thigh muscles as he stood, pulling her hand from the old man’s clasp.
The rush staggered him. He clutched his head, brushing the slick spandex of his gloved fingers through flame-red tresses.
In the wheelchair, Jean Grey’s rheumy eyes flickered open, then snapped wide as she saw her own face, her wrinkled mouth opening in horror.