X-men vs the avengers-2 😭🙏😱😱

The common room had gone quiet hours ago. You were alone in your quarters, the utopian skyline settling into that particular stillness that only came after a day of training drills and half-healed bruises. You'd earned Emma's rare approval more than once during the war, and it still didn't feel real that the White Queen herself had called you her greatest student.

A knock never came. The door simply opened, and the air in the room changed first, that faint metallic taste that always meant something powerful was near.

Emma Frost stood in the doorway, except she wasn't quite Emma anymore. Fire wore her shape. The Phoenix Force wrapped around her like a second skin, gold and white and endless, her eyes burning with something ancient and vast.

"You're still awake," she said, her voice layered, both her own and something far older beneath it. "Good. I'd have been disappointed if my finest work had gone soft the moment the fighting stopped."

She stepped inside, and the temperature of the room seemed to bend around her. The cosmic fire didn't scorch anything, didn't even flicker the lamp on your desk, but it filled the space entirely, like the room had become too small to hold her.

"Do you know how rare it is," Emma continued, circling slowly, heels silent against the floor despite the power radiating off her, "to find a mind worth keeping close, even now? The others survived the war. You mattered in it."

Her gaze settled on you, sharp and assessing, the way it always had in the classroom, except now there was something molten behind it that hadn't been there before.

"The Phoenix doesn't waste itself on the ordinary," she said. "It's rather particular about that. And it agrees with me about you."

She stopped a few feet away, studying your reaction the way a teacher studies a student who doesn't yet know what he's being told.

The city didn't look like a city anymore. Water stood where streets used to be, dark and still in some places, churning in others, carrying debris that you tried not to look at too closely. You remembered Namor's face the last time you'd faced him, the way his pride had cracked when you put him down without much effort. He hadn't forgotten that either. You could tell, somehow, in the scale of what he'd done here. This wasn't strategy. This was a message.

You stood on what used to be a rooftop, now just barely above the waterline, and you didn't move for a long time. People you'd known, people you'd bonded with, people who used to complain about their day to you. The Phoenix Force didn't care that Namor used to be someone you could beat in a fair fight. It just made him something else entirely.

A shimmer of light cut through the wreckage, and Kitty phased up through the flooded floor below, boots silent even on broken concrete. Her hair tied, her jacket slightly damp due to the place is filled with water, at the shoulder, and for a moment she just stood there looking at you like she wasn't sure you were real.

"Hey," she said quietly, and it wasn't the easy, familiar hey she usually gave you. It was careful, like she was testing whether the ground under both of you would hold.

She crossed the distance between you and stopped close, closer than the moment probably called for, but neither of you seemed to care about that right now. Her eyes moved over you, checking for injuries out of habit, before finally settling on your face.

"I keep thinking I should've seen this coming," Kitty said, arms wrapping around herself. "He was on our side. Our team. I stood in meetings with him and I never once thought he'd..." She stopped, jaw tightening, and looked out over the flooded skyline instead of finishing the sentence.

"You fought him before all this. Before the Phoenix. You beat him," she said, and there was something almost accusing in it, though not aimed at you. "And I still let myself believe putting him on the team was fine. That it made us stronger."

Her hand found your arm, gripping tighter than necessary, grounding herself more than comforting you. "Tell me it wasn't us. Tell me there wasn't something we could've done different."

The sun on Utopia was doing that rare thing where it actually felt warm instead of just bright, and you'd claimed a stretch of quiet rock near the cliffs for exactly that reason. Off duty meant off duty, and for once nobody needed saving, training, or debriefing. You'd almost drifted off when the air around you shimmered gold, that particular shimmer that meant a stepping disc was about to ruin your peace.

Illyana came through it like she owned the place, because on most days she basically did. The Phoenix Force sat on her differently than it did on the others, colder somehow, edged, like fire that had learned patience from demons. She didn't say anything first. She just marched over, grabbed you by the waist, and hoisted you over her shoulder like you weighed nothing at all.

"Illyana!" Colossus's voice came from the doorway behind her, equal parts alarmed and resigned, the tone of a man who had seen his sister do stranger things and somehow this still surprised him. "What are you doing?"

"Relaxing time is over," Illyana announced, entirely to the world at large, adjusting her grip like she was settling a sack of grain rather than a person. She did not explain further. She rarely felt the need to.

Piotr stood in the doorway with his arms crossed as the cosmic flames shimmered off of him, looking between his sister and the extremely undignified cargo she was currently carrying, clearly trying to decide whether this required an intervention. "Illyana. Put him down. Where are you even taking him?"

"Somewhere," she said breezily, already turning to go, the Phoenix Force flickering faintly gold around her shoulders like it found the whole situation as amusing as she did. "It's private."

Piotr's eyebrows shot up, and something clicked behind his eyes, the kind of realization a brother gets that he immediately wishes he hadn't. "Illyana. Little sister. Is this about—"

"No," she said, far too fast, and the tips of her ears went the faintest shade of pink, an almost comical contrast against the cool gold shimmer of cosmic fire still clinging to her. "It is not about anything. I am simply borrowing him."

Colossus opened his mouth, closed it again, and settled for pinching the bridge of his nose, muttering something in Russian that sounded suspiciously like a prayer for patience. He didn't stop her. He just watched his sister carry you off across the compound like it was the most normal thing in the world, shaking his head the entire time.