She watches as Magneto hurls cars burning with Pyro's flames into their enemies, watches as Storm, Ororo, once her friend, strikes down Callisto with her lightning bolts (are all her people to be struck down so?), watches as mutant, law enforcement, and mutant face off on a battlefield that could only make humanity fear them worse.
Why? Ororo wants to shout at this woman she does not know, wearing Jean's skin, burning with an unholy fire. Why have you turned against us?
As if she hears the thoughts, the apparition looks up. Phoenix's dark eyes meet Ororo's over a battlefield of minions and of pain. A slight smile curves the wicked lips.
What does it mean to be a goddess?
Ororo glanced up from her own writing across the library table. "What is it?"
"Mmm..." Jean shook her head, red tendrils falling out of her haphazard bun. She looked up, leaned one elbow on the table, and rested her chin on her open, upturned palm. "Did you know the old gods only had one or two powers?" she asked, voice drifting, eyes narrowing at something Ororo could not see. "Like mutants."
Ororo shrugged. She too had been a goddess.
That was the moment Jean set both hands down on the table and leaned forward with an intensity that surprised her friend. "What does it mean to be a goddess?"
Surely Jean is still alive. She will return. For him, if not for her.
"Doesn't every girl want to be a princess or a goddess," Jean said, explaining her need to understand, "if just for a moment or a person? Don't we all?" she pressed.
And what could Ororo tell her?
"It is not what you think," she said. She sighed, furrowed her own brow as she thought upon the question.
What does it mean to be a goddess?
It's over. Phoenix is dead.
And so is Jean.
"A goddess has the power of life and death over her people in her hand," the young woman of another world said with utter calmness and sincerity. "She will only use that power to help her people."
It was difficult to put into words why her own life as an honored, revered deity could so easily be set aside. But there it was.
And Jean sat silently, eyes narrowed at something Ororo could not see. She listened.
She remembers then what her friend had said of those old gods who only controlled a handful of powers, who were humanlike in their bickering personalities, who could be killed.
"Who says we aren't gods or they aren't mutants?" Jean cast her a puzzled frown. "What does it mean to be a god or a mutant—or a goddess?" The words were defiant, stemming from a side of Jean that Ororo had been warned of but had never seen.
Who indeed? What indeed?
Ororo sits in the gently falling rain and tears upon her cheeks. These new gods are as devils, so many of them, angry and vengeful, but Kurt had spoken of one had laid down his life to help his people. This is divinity. This is the act of a god.
She stands up from beside her friend's newly turned grave.
The rain does not stop.
She whispers, "Now you know."