⚜️ Saga 0: The Ash Years
📍 Location: Safehouse interior — Wanda's room & stairwell corridor
🕰 Year: Winter 2006 | Late night
🎯 POV Focus: Jean Grey & Wanda Maximoff, Dante Sparda
🛡 Sin System Status: Emotional Cross-Thread Inquiry / Rivalry Re-Evaluation
⚠️ Rival Phase: Tier 5 Dormant — "Breach Risk: Low, Depth Risk: Critical"
—
**The hallway was silent.**
Jean stood there silently. Without posture. Just stillness in soft nightclothes—her bare feet pressed on cold floor like she wanted the frost to stop something from cracking wide inside her.
For twenty silent seconds, she hovered outside Wanda's door.
Then:
Knock-knock. Two soft taps.
Wanda looked up from where she sat, legs drawn in bed, a candle flickering nearby. Chaos symbols shifted idly through her fingertips like they didn't know where to land.
"Come in."
Jean stepped in.
Softly.
She wasn't her to get angry.
Just tired.
And little scarred in new places she didn't want to touch.
"I'm not here to fight," Jean whispered.
Wanda nodded, not speaking.
The flame popped.
Then silence.
Until Jean said, plainly:
"Did you ever plan to make room for me in her story?"
Not rude.
Not rhetorical.
*A child's name had been spoken into the world,* and Jean had heard it from a doorway she was never meant to enter.
The question hung like a sword with no hilt.
Wanda set the candle down without meeting Jean's gaze.
"…No," she admitted after far too long.
"Because I didn't think I'd survive long enough to share what I made."
She looked up.
"Because I was scared you'd turn it into fire before she ever took her first breath."
Jean stiffened—but didn't flare.
She just asked, dry-throated:
"Would you let her call me Mother?"
"Would you let her love me?"
Wanda inhaled slowly. Magic buzzed faintly under her pulse.
"I don't know," she said honestly. "But I never stopped imagining her with your eyes."
And Jean… nodded.
Not in approval.
Just because for the first time—
She finally understood:
They both had loved a child not yet born, from opposite ends of the same fire.
> [Sin System Alert: Dual-Thread Divergence Soft Merged — "Emotional Parity Detected"]
> Jean Grey → Sync: 61.9% → 62.5%
> Wanda Maximoff → Sync: 87.8% → 87.9%
> Status: Conflict Delay — Communion Phase Reached
> Rival Dialogue: Logged as "Empathic Exchange"
—
**Downstairs**, in the stairwell half-lit by ashlight—
Dante paced.
His coat was slung over one shoulder. Shirt clung to him like burden.
Breath unsteady.
The dream hadn't left him.
Neither had the name.
Wanda found him mid-step.
She didn't interrupt.
Just leaned on the wall quietly, waiting for him to stop.
And finally… he did.
Back to her.
Voice hoarse.
"I saw you both," he said.
"In the dream."
"Her dream."
He swallowed.
"She called you both Mother."
Wanda's lips parted, catching her breath.
Then, said quietly:
"Will she only ever be mine?"
Dante turned, slowly.
The cold between them was thicker than the snow outside.
He didn't answer at first. Because there wasn't a clean one.
Then—after a long, painful pause:
"If I ever had the power to choose who she belongs to…"
He looked at her, red eyes dim.
"I don't want to use it."
Wanda stepped forward once.
Only once.
"You're running from saying yes or no."
"I know."
Her voice shook—just one syllable.
"Will she only ever be mine?"
Dante whispered:
"She was born from both of you."
"But you're the one who never let go of her."
That wasn't blame.
That was truth.
And Wanda nodded.
As if that answer *broke her heart* and *fulfilled her soul* all at once.
> [Sin System Update:
> Wanda Maximoff → Sync Level: 87.9% → 89.1%
> Jean Grey → Sync Reinforced at 62.5%
> Dante Emotional Integration: 51.8% → 54.2%
> Status Flag: "Shared Grief Cannot Equal Shared Claim—Yet"]
Mute silence fell again.
But this one was *earned.*
A fire that waited to be rekindled.
Not as rivalry.
But as something harder.
*As parenthood no one had asked for, but everyone was naming into existence.*
—-------------