Jean was still hesitating—but the media coverage of the Fantastic Four had given her enough background to know The Thing was one of the good guys. And watching Namor show absolutely zero concern for the civilians caught in the crossfire made the decision for her.
She let go of her reservations and reached out.
An invisible thread of psychic force concentrated itself to a razor point and drove outward toward Namor with irresistible precision.
"Easy, Namor. I'm here to help. Stand down."
The telepathic touch was masterful—subtle and deep, reaching beneath the agitation to smooth it out. Jean moved quickly through the layers of his mental state, beginning to carefully mend the damage she found there.
The Thing, seeing Namor go still, stepped back immediately and turned to pull injured bystanders clear.
That was when everything went sideways.
From across the street, Human Torch came screaming back like a blazing comet and drove himself full-force into Namor.
Extreme heat. Massive kinetic impact. It severed Jean's telepathic thread in an instant.
Professor Xavier's warnings echoed in her memory—a psyche snapped from one extreme to another never lands gently. Emotional rebound of this magnitude could be catastrophic.
It was.
Namor's composure shattered. His eyes went wild, every muscle in his body cording with fury. He threw his head back and roared—and then he launched into the attack that some corner of him apparently believed warranted dramatic announcement.
"SOUL-STEALING OVERLORD FIST!" he bellowed.
Knees bent, then he vaulted skyward, both fists coming down on Human Torch with the force of a collapsing building.
(The Marvel universe had an inexhaustible supply of grown adults who named their special attacks out loud.)
Daisy had no time to appreciate the absurdity.
"The heat—" Jean's face had gone white, her expression twisted with pain. "It's burning through the link—"
For an ordinary person, the temperatures Human Torch generated were lethal. Against a Phoenix host, they registered as barely a candle flame. But that candle flame had just reached through the psychic connection and touched something that had been sealed for a very long time.
Something that very much wanted out.
The temperature around them spiked. Tables and chairs began to tremble. A nearby tree swayed without wind. Above their heads, the sky shifted—a deep, burning crimson gathered at the edges of the clouds, spreading inward like the world itself was catching fire.
The cheetah's bond that Daisy maintained with a distant animal companion sent a spike of pure alarm through her chest—wordless, primal, the clearest possible signal: run. Run now. Don't look back.
She crushed the instinct.
It's not that bad yet. And where exactly would I run to?
The magnetic field around them had gone chaotic. Gravity, at least, was still behaving. She reached for it—pulled on it—and used it to press down on the manifestation like a physical weight. The sky she couldn't touch. But she could buy time.
"Kill me." Jean's grip on Daisy's arm had become something else entirely—skin scorching hot, strength suddenly beyond human. Daisy pulled against it three times and didn't move. "Do it now. Please. Quickly."
"Jean. We are nowhere near that point."
Kill Jean Grey. She ran the logic in approximately one second flat.
Cyclops would never stop coming for her. Fine, she could handle Cyclops—probably. But then Havok, Scott's brother, would come for her. And Vulcan, the third Summers brother, currently running a cosmic pirate fleet somewhere in deep space, would somehow find out and come for her too. Then Rachel Summers—Scott and Jean's daughter from an alternate timeline, the one who'd been boosted by the Beyonders into wielding the complete Phoenix Force—would materialize from wherever she was and come for her. Then Cable, their son in this timeline. Then Hope, Cable's adopted granddaughter.
Not to mention Emma Frost, the White Queen, whose relationship with Cyclops was complicated in ways that would still make her show up. And the fact that little Lorna Dane was currently living under Daisy's roof, and according to the original timeline was going to become Havok's girlfriend—
One bloodline. Practically every corner of the Marvel universe. A family tree that functioned like a small army.
She could turn herself purple trying and she still wouldn't come out ahead against that many overpowered catastrophes.
"Let me help reinforce the mental cage," Daisy said instead.
She shifted her genome—locked out the Phoenix-susceptible resonances—and then turned her limited telepathy toward the breach. Shoring up the walls. Patching the gaps.
This wasn't like the trilogy's Jean, who lost herself completely. This was the dark personality waking up for the first time—fresh, uncertain, still finding its edges. Block the opening and it couldn't push through.
The reprieve gave Jean enough room to breathe. She was the far superior telepath, and she knew it—she immediately began sharing technique, guiding Daisy's movements through the psychic space. Jean as the primary anchor, Daisy holding supplementary pressure. Together they worked to seal the cage.
Bearing the weight of Jean's dark side, Daisy couldn't help absorbing fragments of what was behind it—flashes of Jean's life bleeding through the connection.
What she saw was a woman who had known almost no ease. Not from childhood. Not even at Xavier's, surrounded by the most powerful telepathic protector alive. Jean had been afraid for as long as she could remember—afraid of harming others, afraid of destroying the school that had been the closest thing to home she'd ever had.
Pampered, Daisy thought flatly. She filed the observation away without sentiment.
Jean had grown up with food, shelter, safety. Protected by Xavier. Cherished by Cyclops, by Logan. She had not, by any reasonable measure, suffered. There were ten thousand people in this city right now living harder lives than Jean Grey ever had.
Dark personality. It sounded meaningful. But what darkness had Jean actually encountered? What shadows had crept into that quiet, sheltered existence?
Daisy had sat across the table from members of a presidential campaign staff. She'd watched how that machine operated from the inside. Those people had darkness running through their veins. Jean's so-called dark side was a mild inconvenience by comparison.
Professor Xavier had said something to Cyclops once that stuck with Daisy—not because it was profound, exactly, but because it was true: It's not the power that makes someone strong. It's the will.
An odd thing to say in a universe that ran on raw power. Bordering on ironic, coming from Xavier specifically. But Daisy believed it—believed she had more raw endurance than any Phoenix host in the roster, believed she was heading somewhere none of them had reached. A dark personality? She'd carry the weight.
The Phoenix Force apparently overheard the thought.
In the next breath, it opened a window and showed her exactly why that confidence was premature.
Images. Cascading, endless, spanning every scale. The rise of civilizations. The collapse of empires. Hands breaking soil that would someday grow cities. Cities folding into dust in a single hour. The same event, the same moment in history, refracted through a thousand different eyes until it fractured into a thousand different truths.
The Phoenix Force watched people. More precisely, it watched intelligence—awareness—anything that thought and felt and chose. It had been doing this since before humanity had words for what it was watching.
And now it turned that vast, accumulated gaze on one small, unremarkable woman and offered her a single, wordless statement: You think you understand scale. You do not.
Someone's instinct for provocation proved to be exactly what was needed.
The Phoenix's attention caught—and held—on the challenge.
Jean didn't waste the opening. Every ability she had detonated outward simultaneously. She drove inward, seized the ground she'd lost, and slammed the dark personality back behind its walls.
Daisy felt the shift. The Phoenix's gaze withdrew.
Jean resettled herself, breathing hard. She understood what Daisy had felt—the Phoenix did this. Every time you believed you'd found your footing, it descended from somewhere above it all and reminded you how small you were.
It never gets easier, her expression said.
Good to know, Daisy's did not.