#thinking about my ‘wipe jean and scott’s memories and send them to space’ au again

[roguestorm]

Jean’s got several sets of memories in her head.

A lot of them are legitimately hers — Redd’s memories, teen!Jean’s memories, Jeanix’s memories. (There are people who would claim that Jeanix is not the same person as Jean; I’m not one of them.) Integrating teen!Jean or Jeanix’s memories as her own would be difficult since she has defined herself as separate from them. Redd’s memories are less separate from herself, but it was a very strange time for her, so it probably requires some work to integrate.

Then she’s got the weird cosmic force memories, from the White Hot Room or from the fact that she is inextricable from Phoenix. Comic writers usually tend to ignore this one entirely, and I can’t say I blame them, but there’s at least an awareness of something there.

Maddy’s memories. She has Maddy’s memories up through Inferno. This is probably extremely weird. I expect she keeps them in a box.

Other people’s memories, just from being a telepath. Scott is probably the big one here, since she’s in his head the most, but I imagine that there’s some bleeding through of everybody’s memories. These probably resurface in that way that you’ll remember something very vaguely and then remember it happened in a movie instead of real life.

Any other lives that she was told were real. For example, the events of Age of X-Man (which she actually lived through) and whatever false backstory memories Nate Grey planted in her head about that time. This would also include the historical stuff that Mastermind made her believe.

Now, some of these, like the Age of X-Man ones, are gonna affect every member of the X-Men. And the other people’s memories one is gonna affect every telepath (and, famously, Rogue). So there’s a certain amount of memory weirdness that just comes with the territory of being a superhero.

What I find fascinating about Jean and memory is that she has so many different sets of memories to sort through. And either she’s very good at it and has a total handle on it, or she is simply repressing any doubts or fears or problems she has with it and pretending she has a handle on it.

I like to think that she has a pretty good handle on it but that things tend to be less tightly controlled when she’s asleep, and so she’ll get dreams of things that aren’t strictly hers. Dreams of events from when she was dead but she doesn’t know if the memories are from one of her teammates or if the Phoenix was watching. She dreams as Maddy probably a fair amount, as Maddy the pilot or occasionally as the Goblin Queen making a deal with a devil. She dreams Scott’s memories of Emma, and that’s probably screwed up in a hundred different ways. And it’s not that weird to dream things that never happened or that you didn’t see or to dream that you’re someone else, but it’s different when you know that so much of it is rooted in actual memory that is in your head but also not yours.