Title: The Master and the Mistress

Author: Viral

Author's Notes: I apologize for the wait – I seem to have lost my original conclusion ideas for this fiction, so… Ah yes, the events in this chapter happen over a very short period of time. So although this whole scene may seem drawn out – it just isn't.

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Wet, red hair laid like a dingy mop on Jean's head and face as she flew through the rough wind, over the water that had flooded much of Washington D.C.'s historic district. In the distance she a tornado churning the water upward into the dark skies and then was sending it out again in gushes with debris still intact.  "Professor! I'm almost there! Hold on a little longer!" she exclaimed telepathically, worried for her surrogate father.

Wanda did her best to protect Jean by bending stray lightning bolts in directions that wouldn't hurt her and stopping waves of water from overtaking her, but there was little else she could do. She stood on the cliff, Ororo's drained body still wrapped in her arms and Scott slowly reawakening under the tree where he had been put.

The rain and wind distorted his vision and his ruby quartz eyepiece didn't make things easier for him to see. He managed to make out Ororo's standing almost limply in Wanda's arms. He fought to stand up and then put his hands up to his eyepiece and leaned against the tree. An optic blast hit the ground next to Wanda's feet to get her attention. Ororo turned around to see Scott standing there, prepared to fire a much more deadly shot. "Cyclops! What are you doing?" she yelled in a condescending tone.

"I'm gonna ask nicely the first time: what the heck is going on?" he asked, his eyes still glowing with red light energy.

"What does it look like, bright eye? Rogue tricked Storm and stole her powers and now she can't control them! Your Professor and my father are stuck out in the water and Jean's trying her best to find them before they get fried! And we have only a little bit of time to knock the skunk out of the sky before that tornado rips the whole county to shreds!" Wanda yelled without taking a breath.

He ignored his bloody chest as he normally did his injuries in the heat of battle. No matter how hard he was hurting, as leader he had a job to do. "I'm going to try my best to shoot her down," Scott said, stepping forward to the edge of the cliff near Wanda and Ororo. "Just... if I'm off a little bit, I need you to change the direction of the blast."

"I can't affect the blast that high in the air," Wanda informed him. "You're gonna have to shoot with some accuracy this time, pretty boy."

Scott took a deep breath and then steadied his body, trying his best to create the least amount of movement that was possible. He took aim, closed his eyes, and then opened them again and felt the warm sensation exit his eyes and watched it rush through the air and towards Rogue's hovering body. Much to his dissatisfaction he did not hit her.

Instead, Rogue looked down at the three bodies on the cliff, feeling even more betrayed. Her green eyes were completely covered by the lightning that played in her eyes and danced at her red-painted fingernails. Her eyebrows pointed inward with resentment as the elements continued to physically display her fury. She pointed her hands at the cliff and immediately several lightning bolts jumped from the clouds and down towards them. With less than second to react at the electricity moving at the speed of light, Ororo pulled the lightning bolts in her direction and felt them suck into her body. She channeled the bolts into her hands and then sent them back into the sky where they soon dissipated.

Rogue once again lost control of her own mind and found herself just reveling in the elements. This gave Scott plenty of time to use his strategic mind to come up with a plan. "Wanda – I know this is a stretch of your powers, but you change probabilities so maybe it's not. Could you possibly speed up Ororo's recovery time from Rogue's absorption?"

"What?!" Wanda asked in disbelief. She had never thought of doing anything like that, much less had she attempted to do it.

"I said –"

"I heard what you said," Wanda interrupted. "It just seems so unreasonable."

"Storm's the only person I know that can take a maelstrom and turn it into a sunny day," Scott explained. "She's our only chance of any physical aggression towards Rogue to get her out of the sky."

Wanda closed her eyes and focused everything she had ever learned into this seemingly impossible task. Sure, she could change probabilities – but what were the limits? How far could she go? And what did it really mean to warp the possibilities of things that would happen? Her long black hair was pinned against her head with moisture while she tried her best not to focus on the fact that there was a twenty percent chance that the opposite of what she was trying to do would happen...

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"Ah, good Jesus!" Jean exclaimed, barely being missed by a lose piece of metal shards that had been dislodged from the tornado that she was flying towards. She put up a telekinetic shield and shivered when she began seeing a collection of dead bodies in the water and a reddish tint to the deep brown that she had been flying over. "Rest in peace," she prayed in respectful silence as she kept the bulk of her mind focused on finding the Professor.

"Jean, hurry! Look to your right!" the Professor yelled mentally. Jean turned her head immediately and saw him holding on to an iron bar still in tact to a fairly tall office building. His fingers looked as if they were covered in blood, and probably were. He held Magneto in his other arm, trying his best to keep his old friend's head above the water.

"Professor!" Jean screamed in a spontaneous blurt of relief. He felt the pressure on his biceps lessen as Jean telekinetically lifted his body and Magneto's. "Charles, what happened to him?" Jean asked, pointing her eyes at Magneto's hovering body as she focused most of her strength on trying to keep the three of them above the water and out of the grasp of the speeding tornado, which threatened to come in their direction at any given moment.

"I put his mind at rest," the Professor said. "And I think I may have to do the same to Rogue," he noted, evidently trying to create a transition into further discussion on how to get Rogue out of the sky.

"Do you think you can do that without Cerebro? She's pretty much out of my reach when she's up that high unless I telekinetically pull her down – but I wouldn't want to risk having her create a maelstrom even worse than this one."

"But it seems the cavalry has finally arrived," the Professor grinned, mentally noticing the arrival of the X-Men who had been sent to New York to battle the Brotherhood in a helicopter.

-=-=-

"It was heck trying to get in the city," Jubilee said, coming out of the helicopter, followed by Wolverine, Gambit, Iceman, Colossus, and Shadowcat.

"You've handled our business in NYC?" Scott asked Gambit, who had been appointed as field leader for that portion of the team.

"When Gambit is in the lead, the job always gets down, Scotty," Gambit grinned before noticing Wanda and Storm encased in a bright light. "What's going on?"

After explaining the situation to the best of his ability, Scott began doing what he did best: give out orders, but was interrupted when the light shining on Storm's body became increasingly blinding and the Windrider stood up from her weakened stature to the full blown regal, queen of nature that everyone had become accustomed to. Wanda stood behind her, her hands still outstretched towards Storm's rejuvenated body.

Storm's body began to hover in the air, her white hair blowing loosely around her face as she stretched her arms upwards and pointed her hands toward the gray clouds. Immediately the torrential rains began to stop and little rays of sunshine began to poke through the thinning clouds. The X-Men watched from their helpless position below on the cliff as the next phase of their mission took place amongst the sky-dwellers. "Rogue, your time is up!" Storm yelled with fury, flying at subsonic speeds while calming the maelstrom Rogue had created. "You are a slithering traitor and you shall be stopped!"

Rogue frowned and her destructive emotions continued to battle Storm's calming of the weather patterns. For a second the rain would start and then stop. Tornadoes would begin their formation and then completely disappear. The temperature fluctuated frequently between freezing and beginning-of-Summer warmth. "Ah'm the traitor? That thur is some bull! You sabotaged ya own friends and then try and kill us. Ororo, honey, you is the traitor!" After screaming her last sentence, Rogue pointed her right hand at Storm's hovering body and before the eyes could register what was happening, a lightning bolt shot out of the clouds and crashed into Storm's body. Habitually, Storm channeled the electricity through her body as if she were a living lightning rod and sent the lightning bolt downward through her body.

"You must have forgotten, my dear friend, that the mistress controls her subjects and they obey her. You may have attempted to steal my powers but you cannot disrupt my connection. The elements obey my voice and my call!" A vortex of wind sent Rogue's body into a dizzying spin and ended five seconds after it started, only to be followed by a freak of nature: wind coming from all four directions towards her body and crushing her like a box. The force caused the air to be pushed out of her lungs and suffocate her until she began falling out of the air unconsciously.

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My thoughts,

It is amazing how some decisions in your life can change the way you view the entire world and the worth of everything that you've ever done. When I decided to leave the X-Men I never knew how much it would affect my relationship with them or how it would create a new Ororo. The friendships that I spent years building are now nonexistent. I still spend time with Jean, Logan, and Remy – but it's not the way it used to be. Deep down, we all know that we may one day face off and there will be no room for mercy. I just pray that that day never comes.

I wholeheartedly believed in the Professor's dreams of human-mutant peace and I still do think it is possible, but the way he is going about accomplishing it is far too passive. Many of our great leaders in the past were peaceful humanitarians – true – but our conquerors, the people who made things happen, took action. Aggression when necessary. I believe Erik is this type of leader. I have been able to combine his tactics with Xavier's dreams. No longer are we the Brotherhood of 'Evil' Mutants. We are now a group who are making a difference – despite the cost. In place of many of my old friendships, I am building new ones. And with the lost of my surrogate father, I have found a companion.

Much to my amusement, I hear Rogue is still on a respirator. It is rather mean but she is a pain sometimes. How many times must we hear her prattle on and on about her sad life, her first kiss with Cody, and her inability to touch? She will complain until the day she dies – but right about now, I find pleasure in her angst. Sometimes I just want to pull her by her white stripe and throw her... Never mind. That's mean. Be good, Ororo.

Another bit of pleasing news I have is that Erik accomplished his goal! With scientific evidence, aggressive politics, and his sexy voice he managed to convince our nation's leaders make it law that mutants should be considered humans. Therefore, the genocide of mutants is a crime. We are now considered part of the "men who are created equal" – not physically or mentally equal, but equal in the sense that we should have the same inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I still love Charles with all of my heart – but I can no longer support his endeavors.

Ororo read over her entry one last time before closing her journal and placing it under her pillow next to her knife. She left her bedroom and walked outside of the beautiful eight-bedroom house that had been constructed as a haven on a beautiful island off the east coast of the United States. Her bare feet walked through the sand and towards the calm coastline where she saw Erik's white hair resting on his chiseled back. He was shirtless with a pair of white pants on which were rolled up to his chins. She sat down on the blanket that he had laid out and looked at the picnic basket that was sitting there.

"I just can't get over it," Ororo said softly, standing behind him and looking at the translucent water. "The Master of Magnetism is actually a real person behind the whole 'Magneto' façade."

"Maybe it's just you who brings this side out of me," Erik said, standing up from his place on the towel. "Or maybe you're just seeing what you want to see." He grabbed her arm and gently pulled her in front of him. He then wrapped his arms around her waist and relaxed them on her stomach. She then placed her hands on top of his and laid the back of her head on his chest. Her blue eyes looked over to where Wanda, Pietro, Sabretooth, and Pyro were playing volleyball. Altogether they made a weird, awkward combination of people – but they were creating a team that would win equality for mutants, building friendships that would last a lifetime, and sculpting a diverse family that would give them all a place to call "home".

Erik gently kissed Ororo's chocolate-colored cheek and stared onto the water with her. This was merely the beginning of something much more beautiful to come.

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Author's Closing Remarks: Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed the story! :)