⚜️ Saga 0: The Ash Years
📍 Location: Upper hall, Second Floor Suite + Dante's Dreamspace
🕯️ Year: Winter 2006
🎯 POV Focus: Wanda Maximoff, Jean Grey, Dante Sparda
🛡 Sin System Status: Emotional Reckoning Phase / Projection Dream Active
⚠ Rivalry Status: Breach-Adjacent | Stability: Pending Reaction
Wanda sat on the edge of the bed.
Her fingers curled over the folds of a worn red scarf — the one he'd once wrapped over her shoulders after she'd collapsed in a dream-walk.
The room smelled faintly of pine.
She wasn't crying.
She was breathing steady, as though holding words inside her heart like spells not yet cast.
And then… she let them fly.
"Lioré," she said aloud.
"She'd have your eyes. And my sleep."
"A little fire but no burden."
Her voice didn't waver.
"She was never a fantasy," Wanda whispered softly, not yet knowing she wasn't alone.
"She was a memory before she ever existed."
"I never needed a promise. I just… wanted you to want her too."
Unseen through the cracked stone wall — Jean stood frozen. Half-clothed, book in hand, walking the corridor back from the reading nook.
She hadn't meant to eavesdrop.
She hadn't even meant to pause.
But that name hit her like Phoenix flame in reverse.
Warm. Intimate. Possessive.
A child.
A child she hadn't named. A child born from **expectation she wasn't invited to hold.**
> [Sin System Thread Vibration Alert]
> Wanda Maximoff → Emotional Claim Reinforced: 86.1% → 87.8%
> Jean Grey → Emotional Shock Signature Detected: 63.4% → 61.9%
> Rival Thread Logic: "Unspoken Competition / Offense Without Addressing"
>
> 🛑 System Annotated: "This was not forgivable. Nor intended to be cruel. That's why it will wound far deeper."
Jean didn't speak.
She simply walked away, into a different hall, book still open with no words seen, and the Phoenix stirred beneath her like a wind willing to wait — but not forever.
**Elsewhere, Dante was dreaming.**
For once, the world didn't burn. But It glowed.
A field of white-blossomed trees, golden snow falling sideways against a sky neither real nor false. Peace hummed in the shape of laughter.
He turned.
A small voice rang out, clear and warm:
"Papa!"
He kneeled.
And the girl with red-ember hair ran to him.
Eyes gold-ringed.
Skin radiant.
Born from nothing and everything.
In her steps behind – two silhouettes rose.
Jean Grey— dressed in wear-worn robes, mouth lifted while trying not to cry.
Wanda Maximoff — barefoot, glowing faintly, not jealous. Just present.
"Mothers!" Lioré gasped with joy, running between them.
Dante's dream wavered.
His pupils dilated.
Both women bent to hold the child — one from fire, the other from fracture — and the world in between flickered.
Because *both* had borne her.
In different timelines.
Through different grief.
With only *him* held constant.
> [Sin System Warning: Map Fragment Echo Detected]
> Event ID: ECHO_REFRACTION_00004-X
> Projected Survival Probability: 0.3%
> Cause: Temporal Thread Fusion Without Sacrificial Divergence
>
> Label: "Impossible Love Light – Requires Reality Rebuild or Mirror Collapse"
The dream collapsed into ash and lullaby chords.
Dante gasped awake in the safehouse bedroom, alone, fists clenched around sheet corners not knowing who he'd held most tightly walking out of that dream…
…but knowing one thing clearly:
That child had known both names.
And now, so would he.
—