Kiss of the Phoenix

Prologue

There once was a girl named Sang Summers. She was abused by a step-mother that had once loved her, forgotten by a step-father that had once favored her, and hated by a sister that had once protected her. She didn't see much of the world. She was kept in a room, locked away, like Rapunzel in a fairy tale- except no one ever saved her.

She went outside. Once.

She was walking when she saw men with guns and knives and blazing words crowding around a boy only a few years older than her, with gravel for skin and an inferno for a mouth, with black holes for eyes and a voice like a plea. She was close enough to him that when they blew his head off, the blood splattered all over her face, painting her cheeks like a canvas, a case study for national television.

She wasn't let outside after that.

The abuse got worse after that. Her body was like a punching bag for her terminally ill step-mother who had once kissed her little baby's golden red curls and sang her lullabies until she fell asleep. Who now gave her a concussion, a fractured jaw, a broken collarbone, and four bruised ribs. Who now screamed at her that she would become the Devil's puppet, just like her whore of her mother, just like her father that had abandoned her. Sang didn't understand, couldn't comprehend the abuse she was suffering, but she stayed silent, and complicit and still.

Until the day she erupted.

The day her body had mutated into something that wasn't human, into something that they had said was dead, into something better than human, into a mutant. Sang had the power of telepathy. The roar of voices and bombardment of emotions made her silently scream in her Rapunzel tower, her mind just now a thing of pain and confusion and fear. Sang had the power of mimicry. Her powers reached and reached out to find something to latch onto, until they found Polaris, daughter of Magneto and the mistress of magnetism, a mutant who had retired to a small town fifty miles away from Charleston. Sang's frenzied mind started to rip apart her house, her powers clawing at anything metal, her powers mangled the bodies of her cruel family that had abused her for years, adding the iron that had been circulating in their blood only moments ago to the crazed field of metal around her floating her body.

She was going to destroy the city.

But, the remaining X-Men reacted quickly, Polaris, Magneto, Professor X, Cyclops and Rogue arriving a mere fifteen minutes later. What they saw looked like their worst fears, a young mutant's powers going haywire. A cloud of debris and ash surrounded Sang, as the Professor heard the pleas of desperation coming from her head, as Magneto tried to grapple for control, as Polaris saw the destruction her powers could really cause, as Cyclops saw someone that looked his dead wife, as Rogue took off her gloves and prepared for the worst. They acted quickly, as Sang was starting to warp the Earth's magnetosphere, planes and satellites going down around them. The Professor started to shut down her mind, and Magneto flung Rogue into the flying metal, her draining hands clasping around Sang's arms as she brought her back down to earth. They saved her from herself.

Sang was the Mutant Messiah.

They took her back to Utopia and there was something much more golden than hair. The Professor quickly found out her parentage; he didn't need his telepathy to see that. Scott Summers was awkward around his newly found daughter, his eyes darting behind his rose quartz glasses as he tried to meet the eyes that looked so much like Jean's, see the golden red hair bouncing in the wind that looked so much like Jean's... A little something in him died when he saw the way she flinched away from him, the way she cowered when a voice was raised above a whisper, the way her arms came up to protect herself when someone walked her way. How she could be their Messiah when she couldn't even stand up to her own shadow?

But she slowly got better.

Her weekly counselling sessions with the Professor got easier as they worked through it together, his psychic hands gentle as it stitched up her tattered mind, before all that was left was a few bumps here and there. Her constant training sessions were less of a terrifying chore, and more of an exciting exercise of power, as she could steal power without a touch, her bruises becoming less of a sign of weakness, and more of a badge of honor. Her interactions with her father and older sister were less of hours of silence and awkward stares, and more cracking jokes and learning family history and seeing pictures of her doppleganger mother and hearing stories of her father's glory days, and learning to love her father, even though some bitterness remained. Her green eyes got clearer, her smiles more frequent, her red hair less of a mask and more of an accessory, her flinches now leans in, her voice more of a roar than a quiver, her personality less of an automatic response to fear and operant conditioning, and more of things she enjoyed and things she wished to be and the way she felt and the way she purposefully interacted with people, more of Sang and less of a punching bag.

Sang was the Mutant Messiah with everything to prove.

Now, this is where we begin our story, dear reader. Four years has passed since Sang's powers emerged and four years since a mutant has emerged. And it's far from a normal day in Utopia... but has there ever been a normal day?