Chapter 2: The First Dream
The night over Westchester was quiet, a deep, insulating blanket that even the most restless minds at Xavier’s School eventually succumbed to. In the black steel and glass box of his private quarters, Scott Summers slept beside his wife. Jean Grey’s presence was a soft, psychic warmth, a steady flame in the dark. Her red hair was a splash of color on the white pillow, her breathing slow and even. Scott’s own sleep was disciplined, like everything else—a controlled descent into necessary oblivion.
It began not as an intrusion, but as an invitation.
A whisper in the ventilation, tasting of ozone and something older, sweet as rotting roses. The dream seeped up from the floor of his subconscious, soft and insidious.
He was in the Danger Room, but it was wrong. The sleek, grey surfaces were now polished obsidian, reflecting not his uniform, but swirling, star-flecked shadows. The air was warm and humid, carrying the scent of her. It was the smell of sin given form—jasmine, sweat, and copper.
“So much weight you carry, little leader.” The voice came from everywhere, a husky contralto that vibrated in his bones. “All those lines you never cross. All that control.”
He turned, his beamless visor—even here, he wore it—scanning the empty room. “Who’s there? Identify yourself.”
Laughter, rich and mocking, echoed. “So formal. So tight.”
A shadow detached itself from a pillar, flowing into substance. She was tall, impossibly so, her silhouette curvaceous against the dark gloss. Pale skin, luminous in the gloom. Hair like deep forest moss spilled over bare shoulders. Her eyes were two pools of fresh blood, and they held him without blinking.
“You can call me Morrigan.” She took a step, and the dream-space shivered. “I’ve been watching you. Your mind is… fascinating. A fortress. I adore fortresses. They’re so much fun to besiege.”
“Get out of my head.” Scott’s voice was hard, the command leader-sharp. He focused, trying to reshape the dream, to force the familiar training grids back. The black walls rippled but held.
“Or what? You’ll wake up?” She was in front of him now, having crossed the distance without moving. Her heat radiated against him. “But you’re so tired, Scott. The weight of the world, the weight of the visor… what if you just… put it down?”
Her finger, tipped with a nail black as void, tapped the center of his ruby quartz lens. A crack, hair-thin, spider-webbed across its surface.
A jolt of raw panic, alien and deep, shot through him. Not at the damage, but at the feeling that followed. A dizzying, terrifying sense of release. The constant, pressurized containment he lived with, the careful, laser-focused control—it thinned for a microsecond.
He gasped.
“There,” she cooed, her breath against his ear. It smelled like forbidden candy. “Was that so bad?”
“Jean—” he gritted out, a talisman, a anchor.
“Is sleeping. She’s dreaming of sunlit meadows and soft, gentle things.” Morrigan’s lips brushed the shell of his ear. “You don’t belong in meadows, Scott. You belong in the dark with things that bite.”
The scene melted. The Danger Room became her throne room from a dying dimension—cracked obsidian, dripping starlight, whispering shadows. He stood before her dais. She lounged on the fractured throne, one leg hooked over an arm, naked save for tendrils of shadow that clung to her like a lover’s caress. Every dip and curve of her was a masterpiece of predatory allure.
“This is a dream. It’s not real,” he said, fists clenched. His visor was gone. He felt exposed, naked.
“Isn’t it?” She uncrossed her legs slowly. “Dreams are where we’re most real. All your pristine principles… they’re just wallpaper here. And I want to see the wall.”
She beckoned. A force, not psychic but deeper, primal, pulled at him. His feet moved on the cold stone against his will. Step by step, he ascended to the dais.
“That’s it,” she whispered, her crimson eyes drinking in his struggle. “Stop fighting yourself. You want to. I can smell the want on you. It’s pungent. Delicious.”
He was standing before her. She reached out and placed a palm flat on his chest, over his pounding heart. Her touch was electric, a live wire of pure sensation.
“All this discipline,” she said, her other hand sliding down the hard plane of his stomach, lower. “It’s just stored energy. Potential. Let me convert it for you.”
Her fingers found the waistband of his sleep pants. A hook, a pull, and they were gone. The cold air of the dream-throne room hit his skin, followed immediately by the searing heat of her gaze. He was hard, achingly so, a betrayal his body screamed into the silent hall.
“See?” she grinned, a flash of sharp white. “The body doesn’t lie.”
He tried to summon a psi-knife, a telepathic shield, anything Jean had taught him. Nothing came. His powers were silent, distant. Only the raw, human animal remained.
Morrigan’s hand closed around his cock, her grip like silk over iron. He jerked, a strangled sound escaping his throat. It wasn’t Jean’s touch. Jean’s was love, warmth, connection. This was possession. It was filthy and perfect.
“Fuck,” he breathed, the curse torn from him.
“Language, leader,” she teased, stroking him slowly, her thumb smearing the wetness at his tip. “But yes. That’s the idea.”
She leaned forward, her mouth hovering inches from his. “Kiss me. Break your vow right here. Just once. No one will ever know.”
He trembled. Jean’s face flickered in his mind—soft, trusting, asleep in their bed. It was fading, bleached out by the overwhelming presence of the succubus. The loneliness in Morrigan, a void as deep as space, called to a hidden, answering void in him. The part that was tired of being the rock, the pillar, the controlled one.
With a groan that was half agony, half surrender, he crashed his lips onto hers.
It was not a kiss. It was a claiming. Her mouth was hungry, devouring, her tongue plunging against his. She tasted of chaos and champagne. The last vestiges of his resistance shattered. His hands, which had been hanging uselessly at his sides, came up and grabbed her, fingers digging into the soft, impossible flesh of her hips. He yanked her off the throne against him.
She laughed into his mouth, the sound victorious. “Yes! Use it. All that anger, all that focus. Give it to me.”
She wrapped her legs around his waist, her core, hot and slick and open, grinding against him. No foreplay, no gentle prelude. This was a war for his soul, and the battlefield was visceral.
“Do it, Scott. Fuck your control away. Fuck it into me.”
He drove into her in one brutal, sliding thrust.
The sensation was blinding. She was impossibly tight, a velvet sheath clasping him, and yet she gave way with a wet, yielding heat that made his vision spark. She threw her head back, a raw, guttural cry echoing in the throne room. “God, yes! Just like that! That beautiful, repressed fury!”
He was lost. The rhythm wasn’t loving; it was punishing. Each slam of his hips against hers was an attempt to annihilate the part of him that had ever said no. The throne room reverberated with the sounds of their coupling: skin slapping against skin, her ragged, encouraging obscenities, his own guttural grunts. He fucked her with a single-minded intensity he usually reserved for tactical strikes, his hands gripping her ass, lifting her, driving deeper.
“You’re mine here,” she hissed, her nails raking bloody trails down his back. The pain was exquisite, another anchor to this delirium. “This secret is mine. Your energy is mine. Give it to me. Come inside this dream, little leader. Mark it.”
Her words, the overwhelming physical sensation, the dizzying inversion of his entire moral universe—it coiled the tension in his gut to a breaking point. He buried his face in her neck, smelling her corrupting perfume, and with a shattered cry that was equal parts ecstasy and despair, he came. It was a convulsive, draining rush, as if his very willpower was being sucked from his spine and pumped into her.
She clenched around him, milking every last drop, her own climax a silent, shuddering thing that felt less like pleasure and more like a consumption. She drank him in, soul-deep.
For a long moment, he stayed there, slumped against her, inside her, trembling. The dream was softening at the edges, the throne room blurring.
Morrigan stroked his damp hair, a mockery of tenderness. Her voice was a satisfied purr in his ear. “Forty-seven hours now, my sweet Cyclops. The first taste is always the most potent. I’ll be back for the main course.”
She kissed his forehead. The dream dissolved into static.
Scott Summers jackknifed upright in bed, a choked gasp strangling in his throat. His body was sheened in cold sweat, his heart hammering against his ribs. The sheets were tangled around his legs. He was painfully, shamefully aroused.
He looked, frantic, to his side.
Jean slept on, peaceful, her psychic aura a soft, golden glow in his mind’s eye. Unaware.
He staggered to the connected bathroom, locking the door before flipping on the light. His reflection was pale, haunted. And there, on his bare back in the mirror, four faint, parallel scratches, fading even as he watched.
Not a dream. A claiming.
He leaned on the sink, head bowed, the cool porcelain doing nothing to douse the fire in his veins or the ice in his soul. The fortress had been breached. And something dark and hungry was now inside the walls.