Flames curled between John's fingers, wavering and wild. He grunted with effort, trying to shape them into something useful. Anything other than the useless flickering he'd been producing for the past ten minutes.
"Getting tired already?" Bobby's voice carried across the training ground. Ice shards glittered around his hands, perfectly controlled. "I thought fire was supposed to be the aggressive one."
"Shut up." John jabbed the flames toward him. They sputtered and died halfway across the gap.
Bobby grinned. "That's not very threatening."
Storm's voice cut through the air from the observation deck. "Focus, both of you. Iceman, hold your position. Pyro, breathe. Fire requires oxygen."
John inhaled. The flame reappeared, small but steady. He pushed more power into it, trying to extend the reach, trying to make it do something impressive.
The training ground simulated a dozen different environments today. Urban ruins, forests, open fields. They'd been rotating through combat scenarios for hours. John's fire had been inconsistent from the start, burning hot when he was angry and dying to embers when he tired.
A ripple passed through the air. Almost imperceptible. The flames on the training ground flickered in unison, then steadied.
John's head snapped up. For a fraction of a second, the world had felt... wrong. Like reality had briefly vibrated at the wrong frequency.
Then it passed.
Something shifted in his chest. A strange sensation, like a door opening in a room he didn't know existed.
The flame exploded outward.
Not wild this time. Controlled. Precision. A tendril of fire shot forward and wrapped around a training dummy, constricting like a serpent. The dummy's synthetic skin blackened and peeled.
John stared at his own hands.
The fire died.
Not sputtered. Died. Every flame on the training ground vanished at once, leaving absolute darkness where there had been light.
Then the world stuttered.
Sound cut out. John's heartbeat filled the silence, then even that stopped. The training ground froze mid-configuration. Urban ruins locked in place. Bobby frozen mid-motion. Ice crystals hung suspended in air.
Reality hiccupped.
John's perception split.
The flame reappeared in his hand. Except it wasn't his flame anymore. It burned wrong, too hot, the wrong color. The fire on the training ground roared back to life, but now there were two versions of everything. The simulated environment and something else bleeding through, a war zone that wasn't here, couldn't be here.
Smoke.
Cities burning on the horizon.
Magneto beside him, calm, certain.
Battlefield stretching infinite. Heat melting bone.Voices screaming commands. The wrongness of existing in two places at once.
John's knees buckled.
John found himself on his knees, palms pressed into synthetic dirt. His breath came in ragged gasps. The training ground had reset. The urban ruins replaced by an empty white space.
Bobby stood over him, expression caught between concern and confusion. "Dude. You just—you collapsed. Like, just fell. What happened?"
"I'm fine." The words scraped out of John's throat. He pushed himself upright, legs unsteady. "I'm fine."
"You don't look fine. One second you were standing, then—" Bobby glanced at Storm. "What happened?"
Storm's jaw was tight. "I don't know. A power fluctuation in the simulation, perhaps."
That wasn't true. John could tell from her voice. She didn't know either.
Storm had returned to the observation deck, speaking in low tones to someone John couldn't see. A camera, maybe. Or something else.
Rogue appeared at the edge of the training area, watching with that quiet intensity she had. She never said much, but she saw everything.
John's hands wouldn't stop shaking.
He turned away from the others, pressing his palms against his thighs to still the trembling. The memory, whatever it was, faded like smoke, leaving only confusion and a vague sense of wrongness. Like waking from a dream and knowing it meant something, but not being able to remember what.
"Pyro." Bobby's hand touched his shoulder.
John flinched hard enough to nearly fall. "Don't."
"Whoa." Bobby pulled back, palms raised. "Okay. Touchy."
"Sorry." John shook his head. "Just—give me a minute."
Bobby hesitated, then nodded. He backed off, casting one more confused look before turning away to resume his practice.
Rogue remained at the edge, silent. Her eyes met John's for a moment. Not judgment, not pity. Something else. Understanding, maybe. Or the absence of it.
John didn't even know what had happened.
He lifted his hand. A small flame appeared, trembling like his hands had been. It looked the same as always.
Weak. Unimpressive.
But he knew, somewhere deep in his chest, in that strange newly opened room, that it wasn't. That it could be more. That something inside him was changing, and he had no idea how to stop it.
***
Inside the mansion, behind walls and windows, Professor Xavier sat motionless in his wheelchair. His eyes were closed. His mind elsewhere. Reaching, searching, sensing.
A flicker. A ripple in the psychic background, there and gone before he could grasp it. Something had torn through the fabric of perception. A brief instability, a moment where the barriers between what is and what could be had frayed and snapped.
Xavier's brow furrowed.
He reached out with his senses, searching for the source. The training ground registered normally. Students in the usual positions. Storm overseeing. The Iceman and Pyro sparring.
But something had happened. Something wrong.
He made a mental note to investigate further. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps nothing at all.