After the Fall



Fandom: X-Men Movieverse

Scenario: This story series takes place shortly after the end of X2: X-Men United and draws upon the two X-Men movies as its canon. I use some characters and concepts from the comics and other sources (e.g. the novelization of the first movie) but feel bound only to be consistent with what’s portrayed in the movies themselves.

Disclaimer: The X-Men belong to Marvel. The movies belong to Fox. I get no monetary reward from writing these stories, just enjoyment.

Archiving and Forwarding: Certainly, just ask. Alternate file formats available upon request.

Feedback: Yes, please! Write to me at mogbrg@yahoo.com

Note to Readers of My Prior Stories: This series starts from scratch. It is out of continuity with my other fiction, which was based only on the first movie. I use some of the same ideas and elements I’ve used before (e.g. Scott is still an English teacher) but many of the characters and relationships are different from what they were in my previous fiction. Remember: none of that stuff in the other stories has happened.

Note on Literature Referenced in the Series: As my Scott is an English teacher, my fiction tends to be full of literary quotes and allusions. More information on the literature referenced in the stories can be found in the literature guide, with urls to read the works themselves. It can be found at the end of the series and contains spoilers, so should be read after the series itself.

It's a tough class to teach, even at the best of times. These aren't the best of times, not by a long shot.     

Jean had told me the class would be a challenge, and she was right, as usual. This was way back before the semester started, when I was reviewing the rosters for all my upcoming classes. "Oh no," she said, looking over my shoulder at the list for the poetry survey course, bending down to hug me. She pointed one finger at the roster. "This one's bad news."      

"Why?"     

"All girls, and all interested in you for reasons unconnected with your knowledge of Victorian literature, love." And she had read all their minds, so she should know. I groaned and said I'd try to get someone else to teach it, but Jean talked me out of that idea. She told me I'd get through the semester and even manage to teach them something about poetry. Now I don't have Jean to tell me anything, anymore.     

I've been trying to just keep going, to give the kids a normal life. Well, as normal a life as possible, after their world fell apart. We all have been working to make the school what it used to be. Pyotr coordinated the repairs on the mansion and it looks almost as good as it used to. 'Ro's back to teaching history and spends her spare time replanting the gardens and the lawns. The new guy - Kurt - is teaching comparative religion and circus arts. He's an odd one. Charles called Hank and told him we needed him, so he came home and took over as Medical Director. He's teaching Jean's classes, too.     

Even Logan's teaching. Nominally he's the phys ed teacher, but he's really teaching self-defense classes and we just call that gym. It's good for the kids, helps with the after effects of the trauma. It makes them feel powerful, more in control of their fate. At least that's what Hank tells me, and he's fresh from a post-doc year studying PTSD sufferers.      

Hank thinks I could benefit from doing something that makes me feel more in control, too, although he's recommending therapy rather than self-defense classes. Funny, he always told me I was too much of a control freak. Well, I don't feel like I've got power over much of anything now. But I'm not looking to a shrink to help with that. Therapy isn't going to make the desperate feeling go away. It isn't going to bring Jean back.      

I keep busy. Teaching and leading the team are both full-time jobs, lately. I barely have time to sleep. I can't sleep anyway, much of the time. Work has always been my drug of choice. It's not a cure for insomnia but it's a good way to avoid thinking.      

I can't always work, though. Sometimes I try alcohol, drinking myself to sleep. If she's with me again for a little while, it's worth the hangover. If I dream about losing her, I curse the bottle. Mostly I just do without sleep, lie there wakeful, reliving those last few moments, trying to figure out what I could have done that would have made it end differently. Then I give up and do some work. Like I said, there's generally plenty to do.      

The President took what Charles said to heart, and he - at least - is trying to combat the anti-mutant fervor. Charles spends a lot of his time in Washington, now, arguing our people's case, trying to win the hearts and minds of enough of the government that this country will feel safe for our kind. I used to believe in that vision of peace. Now I think it's a losing battle and we’ll have to stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood again and again. But I don’t tell Charles that I think he’s wasting his time. It gives him something to do.      

So I add running the school to my responsibilities, while he's away, as well as our more and more frequent mutant rescue missions. I'd gotten an emergency call late Tuesday night, and Logan and I had managed to stop an incident of anti-mutant violence before anybody got killed. That took most of the night.

When I came back, it happened again. This time I wasn't even asleep. Maybe I was hallucinating from lack of sleep? I thought I heard her voice in my brain, like I used to. "Scott," she was saying, "It's going to be okay. I chose you. We chose each other. I'll never leave you, not really. It's not what you think." That was it, a moment and then it was over. I waited up all night for another glimpse of her, feeling totally pathetic, living on dreams. Fruitless dreams - that was the end of it.     

I don't know where the dream - if that's what it was - came from. Maybe it was born in what Logan had told me, about Jean making a choice. He'd said that she'd made it really clear that she had been just flirting with him, that she was still going to marry me.      

I'd known that she was interested in him, knew it from when he first showed up here. Sometimes I worried that it could become more. I never worried that she'd do it behind my back, though. Jean and I didn't keep things from each other. I was waiting, though waiting so be hell. I was determined to just give her the time she needed to see how she really felt for Logan. I wasn't going to fight for her. It always was her choice, and we both - all three - knew that. And I never asked her what he had that I don't, since I already knew the answer to that one. Ultimately, I guess, it didn't matter what she chose, whom she chose. She chose to save us all. She chose to leave us both. Part of what keeps me up nights is knowing I didn't want to be saved if losing her was the price.      

So, there I was, teaching Wednesday's poetry class on next to no sleep. And not for the first time. The students didn't know the difference. It's not like they could tell if my eyes were bloodshot or had dark circles under them.     

They sat there looking at me warily. They don't know what to do with me now, how to talk to me. So they pretty much said nothing and I spent the whole hour listening to myself talk. The students tried to look down, out the window, anywhere but at me. They didn't want to stare. The irony of it is that what made this class hard to teach from the start is they were always looking at me, and rarely paying any attention to the subject matter.      

I was keeping to the lesson plan, which meant I was teaching "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." I'd told the kids a little about the circumstances surrounding its writing, how Wilde came to be in that prison. I used to find that kind of thing embarrassing to talk about. Now I think it's good for the kids to be reminded that it's not only mutants who've suffered for being different. So, we'd talked about Oscar's trial and imprisonment, and how the experience really broke him, turned him from a witty bon vivant into a bitter old man, before his time. And a social outcast, as well. The school play last year had been "The Importance of Being Earnest" so most of them had seen the Wilde of the bon mot and clever rejoinder. Now they were seeing his darker side.     

The class was going pretty well, I think, under the circumstances. I can't say it was one of my best lectures, and I sure like it better when the kids discuss what we're reading than when I'm just talking at them. Still, the students seemed reasonably interested and I was doing okay. At first, that is. Then it happened. I wrote one of the central lines of the poem on the board, hoping to begin a discussion: "Each man kills the thing he loves, but each man does not die."     

I looked at what I'd written and I just couldn't go on. I sat down at the desk at the front of the room, put my head in my hands and sobbed. I was pretty much dying of embarrassment, crying like that in front of the kids, but I couldn't stop myself. It's not like I really think I killed her, you know. More like I should have been able to stop her from dying. And if I couldn't, well why was I alive? That's what I kept asking myself as I sat there crying, forgetting about the students, the class, the team and just focusing on what I'd lost.      

The kids didn't know what to do. Kitty asked if I was okay, but I couldn't manage an answer. We all sat there in silence for a while. One of the telepaths in the class must have contacted Charles, because a few minutes later, he came in, with Hank pushing his wheelchair. "Class dismissed," Charles said in his most professorial voice, and the kids scurried out.      

"Come on, Scott," Hank said, taking me by the arm. "Let's get out of here."      

I thought he was taking me back to my room, or maybe to the infirmary. But we went the opposite direction, towards Charles's quarters. I was ushered into the guest room in his suite and told to lie down on the bed. Sun was streaming in through the open Venetian blinds. "You're going to sleep now," Hank said, underscoring the order by taking out a hypodermic needle from his bag and rolling up my sleeve.     

There weren't any dreams. When I woke up, I was having trouble seeing. "Damn you, Hank," I said, thinking the aftereffects of his drug were clouding my vision. Then I saw the clock by the bed. I'd gone to sleep in the morning and woken in the middle of the night. The room was dark. My night vision's always been lousy.

Yeah, he's kind of a dick. An overachieving Boy Scout playing with his own private army. Thirty years old and he still thinks the world's divided into good guys and bad guys. And he's oh so sure that the good guys are the ones with the perfect hair, perfect clothes and perfect smiles. But he really loved her. Got to give him that.      

I didn’t, not really, not like he did. If I'm being honest with myself I have to say that. I do know that I couldn't forget her, much as I tried. No, not even after nailing every willing redhead between here and Alkali Lake. Didn't help a bit. I said I came back to find out what really happened to me. I knew I came back for her. But was that love or just wanting to get into her pants? Was it just the challenge of getting a girl like that, one I knew I couldn't have?     

Maybe it wasn’t even so much about her, as about him. Was it just to get his goat? To take that superior look off of his face by doing his woman? I've got to admit, that was a big part of my fantasies of Jean and me - Cyclops brought low. Yeah, I liked to imagine Jeannie on her knees, gobbling up my dick, and then Summers walking in just as I'm about to shoot all over her face. That image got me going on many a cold night. Still does, many a night since her death. Pretty damn callous of me, jerking off thinking about her. Thinking about him. What the hell - I never claimed to be one of the good guys.     

Well, guess I did, that once. Or at least told her I could be, for her. I think I meant it when I said it, but we both knew it wouldn't last. I'm not cut out for this hero shit and I'm not cut out for love. I would have said anything to have her and we both knew it. So, no wonder she goes with the guy who really loves her. The guy she really loved. Even if he is kind of a dick. And I figured I could be a good guy long enough to tell him about that, to let him know that he was the one she chose.     

That kind of changed things between me and him. I don't think her death alone would've made a difference. He'd still resent me for trying for her, and hate me for not knowing if she'd stay with him or go with me. And I'd hate him for being too stupid to know what he really had with her. But me telling him what she said sort of softened him toward me, took some of the anger away. And it did something to me, too. Sometimes when you do something nice for someone it makes you like them, or at least not hate their guts. Funny how it can work that way.     

Plus I had to admire how he was with the kids, with the team, with everyone at that place. Pretty clear he was on the verge of falling apart, but he never stopped. He's a dick alright, but he's got perseverance. And he's something to see in battle. I've fought with him and I've fought against him. He's a guy to have on your side.      

So, it wasn't exactly Butch and Sundance, but him and me were doing okay. Some of the two man missions it was me he asked first. And some of the times he did, I found myself saying okay. We were out Tuesday night breaking up an attack on some mutants upstate a ways. It would have gone quicker - and been a hell of a lot more fun - if he didn't have this stupid idea that we should do it without killing anyone. Still, it was a pretty satisfying fight, a good way to spend the night. I crawled into bed when we got back and slept for hours. He went off to shower and change and start his work day. I didn't find out until late Wednesday night that he'd collapsed during his first class.     

I ran into him at the pool round about midnight. I looked both ways to see no one was in the hall outside there before I jimmied the lock, knowing they closed it down at 10:00. Strict rules - no swimming except with a lifeguard on duty. So, I was surprised to find there was already someone in the pool.     

He was swimming laps, cutting through the water in one smooth line. He didn't see me. At least I don't think he did. Wearing swim goggles, dark red so I guess they were ruby crystal, too, but maybe his eyes were closed, anyway. He didn't seem to have any idea he wasn't alone. I stood by the side watching him, not sure whether to get in or not. There was plenty of room - six lanes and he was only using one - but it didn't seem my place or something with him there. So I just left my clothes on and sat there for a while.

He was something to see. No unnecessary movements, swimming like a seal or a dolphin or something, like he was totally in his element. No trace of the Field Leader or the English Teacher. No thinking, no plotting, no orders - just gliding through the water like he was made for it, like he was in his own world of water and movement. All body, no brain. I couldn't take my eyes off him. Finally he stopped at the shallow end and saw me.     

"What are you doing here?"     

"Same as you. Just haven't started yet."     

"I thought I'd locked the door." I held up my picks and shrugged. "Nobody's supposed to swim alone. It's not safe."     

"So what are you doing here?"     

"I'm tired of safe." He scowled. "If I'd known you were there, I'd have had you count laps for me. I go into a trance, kind of, when I'm swimming. Never know how much I've done unless someone else counts."     

"Why do you want to know how many laps you swim?"     

"I don't know. I like to quantify my accomplishments." I didn't ask who used to count for him. "You want the pool now? I'm done." He got out.     

"Nah, I changed my mind." He toweled off, gathered his stuff together, didn't seem to even notice me. "Hey, Cyclops," I said, as he was walking out. "I'm gonna go into town. Wanna come?" He shook his head. "Come on. Have a couple beers, check out the local scene. Pick up a couple of girls, even."     

"I'm not interested in any women but Jean. She's the only woman I ever loved." He said it quietly, in a flat tone.     

"Not everything's about love, Summers." He didn't answer. "I guess you need your sleep, anyway - up all last night, working all day today."     

"I slept most of the day, actually. Drug induced." He smiled at my surprised expression. "Doctor administered, Logan." He shrugged, embarrassed. "I kind of fell apart during poetry class this morning."     

"What, you blacked out?"     

"Something like that. Hank says I'm overworked. So, he gave me some sort of injection and I slept all day. Now my circadian rhythm's all screwed up."      

"So, you're up anyway. Come on." I gestured to the door with my head.      

He looked down, gestured at his trunks. "Okay if I get dressed first?"      

"Good idea."

---

I don't know why I went with him. I didn't feel like company and I didn't want to go anywhere. I never like going into town and generally manage to avoid trips there. When I do go it's usually with some of the kids, or another faculty member, a shopping trip for supplies or the occasional meal in a restaurant to celebrate somebody's birthday. Not my idea of a celebration. I always feel we're being stared at and am on alert the whole time, in case we're attacked. I count the hours until we're back home and safe. Maybe like I said to Logan, I was tired of safe. Or maybe I didn't want to go back to our room. My room now.     

Anyway, he took me to some out-of-the-way dive where a whole lot of people looked considerably stranger than I do, so I wasn't so worried about being stared at. We sat at the bar and ordered burgers and beers. The barmaid smiled at me, pointing to my glasses. "So, are you a movie star?"     

"No, I'm just practicing in case I am some day."     

She laughed. "No, really. Why the shades?"     

"I have a problem with my eyes," I told her. "I just had surgery for it. I have to wear these all the time for a week or so. My eyes can't take the light."      

"It's not very bright in here."     

"Even so."     

She went off to get our drinks and Logan leaned in, saying, "I think she likes you."     

"I told you - I'm not interested in women besides Jean."      

"Yeah, I know. Look, I'm not doubting you or anything. I know as well as anybody she was somebody special. I know you're grieving. But it doesn't always have to be love, you know. You can't give up on sex - it's not natural."     

"I didn't say I wasn't interested in sex. I said I wasn't interested in women." That took a minute to sink in. I could have predicted exactly what would happen when it did. We'd been sitting on bar stools, close together to hear each other amid the noise. He practically knocked his stool over moving away from me. I looked at him with scorn. "Don't worry. You're not my type."

---

I wasn't even sure I'd heard him right at first, not until he said I wasn't his type. "Really, Cyclops?" I asked. "You're..."      

"Gay, queer, homosexual, a faggot. Take your pick."     

"But Jean..." I wasn't sure what I was asking.     

"I loved her."     

"Did she... Did you..."     

He sighed, wearily. "Yes, Jean knew I'm gay. Yes, we had sex. Yes, we were planning on getting married. No, I don't know if it would have worked out. That's part of why we'd been together so long and hadn’t married yet. We weren't sure it could work. But we loved each other and it makes a difference."     

"So, how did it work? You fucked guys on the side? Jeannie was okay with that?"      

"No, Logan. I didn't 'fuck guys on the side,' as you so elegantly put it. We only had sex with each other. I haven't been with a man for years."

I’m sitting on the couch, trying to find something I can stand to watch on TV, trying to shake off the after effects of another nightmare, trying not to think about what they did to me. 500 channels and nothing’s on. Movies I’ve seen again and again or never want to. Shopping channels. Decades old sitcoms that weren’t even funny the first time I saw them. 24-hour news I’d rather not know.      

So, I’m flipping channels, not able to settle on anything for more than a minute or two. But it beats going back to my room and reliving what they did to me. If it was just during the dream that I felt it, it wouldn’t be so bad. But afterwards, it just goes on and on, repeating itself in my head, like an echo of the nightmare. It won’t stop. I can feel it all over again, them cutting into me. Can’t move, can’t scream, can’t defend myself. I want to kill them all but they’ve got me so I can't and I don't know what's worse: the pain or the helplessness. I keep expecting to see The Doctor everywhere I look. It’s like it’s all in the air there or something, after I wake up from one of those dreams: the pain, the fear, the hatred. I feel like I have to get out of that room or I’ll go mad. I feel like I've already gone mad and I've got to get out of that room if I want a prayer of ever being sane again. So, that’s how I ended up in the common room at 2:00 in the morning, figuring bored is better than punching out the walls in my room.     

I can hear someone come out of one of the bedrooms on the third floor and head downstairs. I hope it’s not Hank. He’ll know what I’m doing here and want to talk. He always wants to talk. Too many big words and too much sympathy. He means well, I know that. Not his fault he’s a doctor, I guess, and I can't expect him to understand why I have no time for the medical profession. Well, except for her. Anyway, Hank doesn’t know shit about what I need or what I’m going through. So, I think about leaving before he shows up, but as the steps get nearer I realize it’s not Hank, after all.     

She’s wearing a long white nightgown, a little bit see-through. Nothing under it. Her hair’s kind of all over the place. Her feet are bare. She looks half asleep and wholly fuckable. “Rough night, Logan?” she asks.     

“Jean!” I say in surprise. “I thought you were...”     

“Dead? Yeah, everybody thought that.” She seems distracted or something, looking right and left, not meeting my eye. I'm still trying to figure out what's going on, how she could be here. Then she sits down next to me and leans in, her hand on my leg. She smells wonderful. She takes the remote from my hand and turns off the TV. “We don’t need this,” she says.      

“How did you escape?” I’m confused, still not sure this is really happening. Could she be Mystique? But no, I’m not falling for that one again. I’m paying attention this time. She doesn’t just look like Jean. She smells like Jean. I put my arms around her and she feels like Jean. She is Jean.     

She won’t answer my question. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t want to talk at all.” And then she kisses me and I don’t want to talk anymore, either. She’s all over me and before I know it she’s on the floor, unzipping my pants, taking my cock in her hand and then into her mouth. She’s sucking me so good, so eager, so wanting. Like she’s been dying to do it. Dying. I'm getting my cock sucked by a dead woman. How can this be? I try to figure it out, but it's no good. I can't think about that, because I'm thinking about what's happening, what I'm feeling and seeing, what I've wanted for so long. My brain isn't working right - I can't start trying to figure out what's happening, not with what she's doing to me. My dick sliding in and out of her hot mouth, her soft tongue lapping at the underside, her hand cradling my balls, fingertips stroking. She’s making this mmmm sound as she sucks hard and I’m loving everything about this – how it feels, how she sounds, how she looks. I’ve got my fingers in her hair and I’m watching her head bobbing on me like that and she’s sucking harder and faster and I know I’m not going to last much longer. I lean back against the couch and close my eyes as I get ready to shoot. Almost there now. A little more, baby; a little harder. You got it, Jeannie. You know what to do.     

Suddenly she stops, pulls back a bit. Her hand on the root of my cock, but her mouth not on me anymore. "What'd you stop for?" I ask, but she doesn't answer.     

I open my eyes and see what stopped her. We’re not alone. Great timing, Cyclops. He’s standing there. Long, lean body framed by the doorway. Can’t see his eyes, of course, but his mouth’s in a flat line. How long was he watching? He walks right up to us and I wonder whether he’s going to yank her away or hit me. But it's nothing like that. He just stands there and smiles. At her. She smiles back at him. “Hi, Scott,” she says, hand stroking me. She licks the head of my cock, swirling her tongue around the top, then speaks again. To him. “You want some?”     


I sit up, suddenly wide awake. Look around at my room. Yeah, in my room. Blankets tossed around but not ripped. Claw holes in the walls but no new ones, I think. What was that one all about?     

Weird dream. An improvement on the nightmares, I guess. But somehow, as I'm lying there after, I'm not so sure about that. I think maybe this dream disturbed me almost as much. I can’t get back to sleep. I'm not sure why. I think maybe it's just from being horny. I’m still hard and I put my hand round my cock, sliding up and down with my fingers, thumb on the head. I close my eyes and try to picture her like she was in the dream. But it’s him I keep seeing instead. On his knees, dark glasses still on, mouth opening to take me in. I don’t know what to make of that, so I just keep at it. When I come, it’s his face I’m seeing in my brain.

---

He didn’t avoid me after that night in the bar. I was surprised; I figured he’d run the other way any time he saw me. It didn’t happen that way, though. Logan's a hard one to figure out, I think. He's not quite what he seems to be, I keep finding. Definitely marches to a different drummer, but I'm never quite know what music he’s hearing. I guess he’s more sophisticated, or maybe more secure, than I gave him credit for.     

He did keep to himself mostly, but then he always had. He never ate in the dining hall or hung out in the faculty lounge. And rarely showed up for meetings. But I’d run into him at the pool or the gym or the Danger Room, mostly late at night. He didn’t say much and he always seemed a little bit wary of me, but so did most of the team these days. And like I said, he didn't leave when I showed up.     

If anything, Logan seemed more comfortable with me than the rest of them. It was reciprocal, too. I wasn’t talking much myself, and it felt better to be with someone who didn’t expect a lot of conversation. So, if I ran into him at night when I couldn’t sleep, we sometimes trained together or swam laps side by side. I coached him on his stroke. He counted laps for me - didn't seem to mind just hanging out by the side and watching. He taught me some self-defense techniques I hadn’t heard of. We talked, but not much. He never mentioned that night at the bar and neither did I. And, after initially hesitating, I went back to taking him on missions. I was almost thinking of him as a friend.     

I think I needed to think of him that way, needed some friendship in my life. I was feeling lonely lately, sometimes desperately so. Things weren’t going so well with the people who had been my friends for years. I was consciously avoiding ‘Ro, who wanted to talk about Jean any time she got me alone, which I couldn't bear. Hank got annoyed when he realized I’d tossed the pills he gave me. And Charles and I were barely speaking.      

He had called me into his office the day after I broke down in poetry class. “I think you need a vacation, Scott,” he’d said.     

“No, thanks.”     

“A change of scene will do you good.” He took keys out of his desk drawer. “These are for the Vermont house. We’ve got a trip up there later in the term, but it’s empty now. A couple of weeks away from the school will make a world of difference.” He wrote a name and phone number on a piece of paper. “Call Dr. Leeds when you get there. He’ll expect to hear from you. I think he can help you there more than any of us can here.”      

“I’m not going, Charles.”     

“I’m not asking you, Scott. I’m telling you. What happened yesterday just shows you’re not ready to go back to work. The students are upset, and rightfully so. You need time to process loss. And you can’t do it while teaching, leading the team, and pretty much running this school.” That quiet voice with the steel underneath that I’ve seen leave everyone from students to world leaders quaking. Still, I wasn’t going to give in.      

“Fuck off, Charles. I don’t get to falter at all? Everyone else is allowed mistakes but not me? I fell apart in class, okay, I know it. I'm sorry. I'll do better. It's not going to happen again. One bad class doesn’t make me a failure.”      

He sighed. “Scott, this isn’t a punishment. Don’t think of it as failure; that’s not what I mean at all. You need help. And the students need to feel like they know what to expect from their teachers. They’ve all been through a pretty traumatic period, you know. They count on us to offer them stability.”     

“I know that, and that’s precisely why I’m not going to Vermont, or anywhere else. I’m damned embarrassed to go back there after what happened but that’s just what I’m going to do. Of course the kids are upset. It’s not going to help them to have their teacher just disappear. And it’s not going to help me to go off to Vermont and see some headshrinker. I need to work. And the kids need to see me working, need to understand it was just an isolated incident and they can count on their teachers."     

I didn't go to Vermont and he didn't mention it again, but it definitely soured things between us. Or soured them for me, anyway. Charles talked to me with calm equanimity, as always, and acted as if nothing had happened. But I was still mad at him, more so as time went on.      

I did carry on, did keep up with my classes and team business and school administration. It was an isolated incident, just as I'd said. I do think that that day in poetry class was when I really hit bottom. I pulled myself together and concentrated on my work, didn't indulge the misery like I had been. If I found myself suddenly struck by a memory of Jean or a feeling of longing for what we had, I didn't let it show. I cut down on drinking, figuring that was doing me no good. I found I was getting less sleep without alcohol or pills, but the sleep I got was better, I think. And if I was wakeful in the night, the insomnia was losing some of the desperate quality it had had previously, when the night and my solitary state just seemed to stretch on forever. I found I was almost content to be wakeful, looked forward a bit to hanging out with Logan in the night. I certainly wasn't at peak performance, and I knew it, but I was functioning and functioning well. And I was doing that through sheer force of will, without psychiatrists or New England vacations or drugs or booze.      

But Charles never acknowledged that, never said anything about me pulling it together after that morning, and I resented that. I also was starting to feel like he was keeping things from me. I wasn't in on everything going on with the X-Men like I always had been before. Missions were happening that I didn't hear about until after they were over. Others were being micromanaged by Charles, who was suddenly concerning himself with things he'd left to me for years. He was over-ruling my staffing assignments, in particular sending someone else in my stead, when I'd made clear I planned on leading the mission. And conversations between Charles and Hank seemed to stop short as soon as I approached. I was feeling like they didn't trust me anymore.

Charles Xavier looked up as Scott walked into his office, unannounced. The sun was streaming in from the window behind him, making his reading lamp unnecessary for perusing the papers on his desk. Hank McCoy, sitting across from the professor, gathered the pile of documents he and Charles had been reviewing and slipped them into a manila file folder. Then he turned to face his friend and colleague. "Hello, Scott. What are you doing here?" Charles asked.     

"I live here... I work here..." Scott walked over to Charles's desk and sat down in the chair next to Hank. He paused a moment then, continued. "Oh! You mean what am I doing here? In your office? Right now? It seems you forgot to tell me there was a planning meeting going on." He sat back in the chair and looked from Charles to Hank and back again. "What's up?"      

"It's okay, Scott," Charles answered mildly. "We don't need you right now. We were just finishing, anyway."     

"Finishing what?" Scott sounded a bit on edge.     

Neither of them answered. Hank changed the subject. "We need to talk about lab supplies, Scott. I can't believe the poor quality of the glassware we've been getting lately."      

"Take it up with 'Ro. She does the ordering." Something about the grim set of his mouth made Hank think Cyclops was glaring at him from behind those glasses. "I'd rather discuss the MPP."     

"MPP?" McCoy looked baffled. "That's an abbreviation with which I am unfamiliar. What does it signify? Metaphysical Polymorphous Postulate?"     

"You've got a lot of talents, Hank, but acting stupid isn't one of them. I know what it stands for and I know you know." He swiveled in his chair, turning angrily towards the professor. "Stay out of my brain, Charles. I'm not bluffing. It's the Mutant Protection Plan. You’re working on resettling victims of anti-mutant violence in new places, with new identities, so they can start life over somewhere no one knows their mutant status. Right?” Neither McCoy nor Xavier answered.     

Without warning, Cyclops snatched the folder out of Hank's hands. "And here are the preliminary plans," he added, rifling through the papers. "Alpha Flight's involved; the FBI, even. You’re modeling this after the Justice Department’s Witness Protection Program..." he mused, looking through the papers. "A major X-Men project, from the looks of it. Strange not to even let the Field Leader know about it, isn't it?"     

"Where did you hear about the MPP?" Charles Xavier asked, calmly.      

Scott was still reading the documents. "Logan," he answered without looking up.      

Hank sputtered a bit, turning to Charles. "That man was provided this intelligence with the clear understanding that it was confidential. I told you he should not have been entrusted with such sensitive information, Professor. Revealing such material to others is... is... not the act of a gentleman!" he finished, indignantly.     

Scott Summers looked up, a grim smile on his face. "Well, I don't think the Wolverine has ever claimed to be a gentleman," he said. "But, for what it's worth, he had no idea he was spilling any beans. He didn't know I was an 'other' and by the time he realized it was pretty much too late. Seems you forgot to tell him you were keeping the new project a secret from me. He naturally assumed I was in on it. Hell, I would assume the same thing if I were him." The smile disappeared and he pounded once on the desk with his fist. "Some fucking drifter you barely know gets in on the secret joint project? This guy I picked up for you because you thought Magneto was after him knows all about the new X-Men project and I don't? What the hell is going on around here? Why him?" He looked back and forth between McCoy and Xavier.      

“Logan has assumed different identities several times before,” Hank replied. “We thought he could help us analyze and synthesize the necessary protocols to formulate this new endeavor on which we are embarking.”     

“And was he a help?”     

“Not to the extent we had anticipated his assistance to be efficacious.”      

“Because his amnesia is still pretty profound, right? He’s still got huge gaps in his memory – years he doesn’t know where he was or what he did. For any period before the past fifteen years, he’s unsure of where he was or even who he was. He only has snatches of memory of the different names he took on and what he did under them. He certainly doesn’t have the detailed recall of how he assumed those identities you’d need for him to assist you.”      

Charles nodded. “That’s correct. Logan’s continuing amnesia really prevented him from giving us the information we needed. We gained nothing by bringing him into the project, just as you say.” He paused, then continued. “How do you come to know so much about Logan’s amnesia?”      

“Because he talks to me and I listen. I bet Logan’s spoken more to me than anyone else here,” he answered softly, looking down. “I could have told you all that and saved you the trouble of asking him,” Scott went on, the anger coming back into his voice. “If you’d trusted me enough to consult me at all, that is,” he added bitterly.     

"Scott, clearly you're upset," the professor began.     

"Wow, it’s true what everyone says about you, Charles. You really are a powerful telepath, aren't you? Somebody who trusts you finds out you've been lying to him and confronts you about it and you can tell he's upset. I am impressed."     

"We haven't lied to you," Hank interjected. "You weren't essential to this project, and we thought you had enough on your plate." Charles nodded in assent.      

"Not essential? Not essential?" Cyclops's voice was rising again. "Plenty of field operations needed for this one. Plenty of coordination. Missions of various sizes and scope. So who's planning them? Who's executing them?" Neither man answered. "Look, here's what this comes down to: am I Field Leader of the X-Men or not? You can't have it both ways. If I am, then stop this bullshit and treat me like your field leader and let me do my fucking job. And if I'm not, at least have the courtesy to tell me I'm out of a job, so I can start looking for a new one." He picked up the folder full of papers, dropped it on the professor's desk, and stalked out of the room. Hank called Scott's name as he left, but he didn't answer.

---

Charles Xavier looked for Scott at dinner, but he didn’t show up. Discreet questioning of faculty and students elicited the information that Cyclops had shown up for his classes and advisement sessions, as expected, and had attended the weekly meeting of the Drama Society, for which he was the faculty advisor. No one noticed any unusual behavior on his part, and one student described Mr. Summers as very excited about the plans to perform Twelfth Night as the school play in March, news Charles found reassuring. Scott didn’t appear to be acting like someone on the verge of leaving Xavier’s Academy.      

Charles excused himself early from dinner, and went looking for Scott. He wasn’t in his room, although that was not a surprise. He seemed to spend as little time as possible there since Jean’s death. Continuing his search, Charles didn’t see Scott – or any signs that he’d recently been there - in either the Danger Room, the pool, or his office. While rolling by the library, which was closed for the evening, he noticed the lights were on and went in. Scott was in the back of the large room, with a few books on a table in front of him and his laptop computer, seemingly taking notes from one of the books.      

Charles approached Scott slowly, holding back a little. Scott looked up and greeted him with a sheepish smile. “It’s okay – you can come closer,” he said. “I’m not dangerous. I’ve calmed down considerably.”     

Charles wheeled up to the table. “Glad to hear it."     

Cyclops looked at his watch. "Aren't you supposed to be at dinner? Who's making the evening announcements?"     

"Hank's covering for me."     

Scott groaned. "I hope you provided all the students with pocket dictionaries. And big pots of coffee."     

Xavier laughed. "It's good for them. They'll stop complaining about my announcements, now that they know what they could be like." His tone changed, turned serious. "I’m sorry, Scott. I made an error in judgment and I wanted to tell you so. I didn’t want to leave things the way they were between us.”     

“I appreciate that. And I’m sorry I blew my top.” He sighed deeply. “I wasn’t exactly the model of grace under pressure you want in a field leader, screaming at you and Hank,” he added, shaking his head.     

“Well, let’s just say I hope your speech patterns are rubbing off on Logan, too,” Charles replied, and Scott chuckled. “I was surprised to hear you and he have been spending time together.”     

“I guess you’d be surprised to hear much of anything I’ve been doing lately,” Scott answered, a bitter tone coming into his voice. “It’s not like you’ve taken much interest in what’s going on with me.”     

“That’s not true. I’m always interested. I’ve gotten the impression you don’t want me meddling.”     

“You think it’s possible to show interest without meddling, Charles? I do. You want a clue how to do it? Don’t order me away from my home and workplace.”      

“I’m sorry, Scott.”     

“Yeah, you keep saying that.”     

“I keep saying it because I mean it. I want to know what’s going on in your life. I want you to confide in me, but only if you want to. And I’m glad you’ve found someone else to talk to if you’re not comfortable talking to me. I’m just surprised it’s Logan,” he added.      

Cyclops shrugged. “We’re both outcasts, lately, I guess.” He waited, wondering whether Charles would tell him he was only an outcast because he chose to be. Charles just sat there, listening.

Scott wasn’t sure how much to say. "It’s not just being mad at you. That’s not the only reason I’m keeping to myself. I haven’t really felt like having much company. And I’m having trouble sleeping. I wake up and can’t go back to sleep and I just can't stay put. I go to the gym, the Danger Room, the pool... I run into Logan at night. He doesn’t say much, doesn’t expect me to say much. He’s easy.” He shrugged again. “Or, at least, it felt easy being around him until this MPP thing. Now I look at him and all I can think about is that you trusted him and not me. I’ve calmed down, but I’m still really mad, Charles.”      

“And I’m really sorry. You’re quite right – we should have told you. You shouldn’t have heard it from him.” He picked up the book Scott had been looking at and read the title out loud. “Resumes That Work?”     

“I haven’t looked for a job in a long time. I think I need a refresher.”      

"I don't want you to look for a job. You're needed here." Scott just shrugged. "What kind of work are you thinking of doing?"     

"I'm not sure," he answered, looking down at the book. "Probably straight teaching. I don't imagine there are a whole lot of English-teacher-cum-superhero jobs out there." He looked up at Charles, smiling slightly now. "On the other hand, if I see one advertised I'll have a resume that works."     

Charles laughed at that. "Please, Scott, accept my apology. It was an error in judgment not to include you in the MPP project from the start. Mine alone. And it was another error trying to send you to Vermont. I was aching to see you in such pain and didn’t know how to help you. I thought you could use Dr. Leeds’s professional expertise. I still think that. But I know now that he can only be a help to you if you want that kind of help. I was dead wrong to try to force it on you."     

"Well, thanks for saying that, but it's not just Vermont and it’s not just the MPP. I feel like you're squeezing me out, Charles. I mean, it seems like you're fine with how I'm handling the school responsibilities, at least lately, but you're second-guessing every decision I make with the team. I don't feel like I'm Field Leader anymore. I hardly feel like I'm an X-Man at all." He turned away from the professor. "I know my performance isn't exactly stellar, but I'm functioning, Charles. I accomplish the missions. I bring them back alive." He choked a little on the last sentence.     

"I know you do. I'm filled with admiration for how well you're functioning. Truly."      

"So why are you over-ruling my personnel decisions? Why are you keeping me here half the time when I should be out there in the field?"     

Charles shook his head sadly and didn't speak for a moment. "I'm scared you won't come back," he said finally. Scott opened his mouth, but Charles stopped him before he could say anything. "It's not a reflection on you, Scott, really. It's my problem. I see a dangerous mission and I just can't bear the thought of you going on it. I can't stand the thought of you risking your life. I can't live with the worry."     

Scott chuckled ruefully. "I've been risking my life for you daily, Charles, since I was sixteen. Aren't you used to it, yet?"     

"I was. Until we lost Jean." Charles sighed. "And it's not like I wasn't aware of the danger or didn't worry about you, all of you. I did, every time. But part of me... I don't know. I think part of me thought you were invincible. And I just don't feel that way anymore. And I'm not saying I'm reconciled to losing any of the rest, or that I don't worry about them. But it's different with you. It always has been. You and Jean. You were the first here. They're all my children, in some sense. But it's not just metaphorical with you. It feels more real than that. You're my son, my only son, whom I love..." His voice trailed off.     

"Yeah, well he was willing to sacrifice his son."     

Charles chuckled. "See why I can't spare you? Even if only for a mission? Nobody else here knows what I'm quoting, or even when I am." He turned serious again. "We both need to heal, Scott. Maybe we've both made some mistakes in the recovery process. I know I have. I've been shielding you too much. I won't do it again. Can you forgive me?"      

Scott nodded. "I've made mistakes, too. I should have talked to you more, opened up more, told you how I was feeling. For my own sake as well as yours." He paused, a hesitant look on his face, then plunged in. "I want to talk to you now. I want to talk about Jean. But I'm a little afraid to. There's something I want to tell you, but I think it will sound crazy."      

"You're the sanest man I know. Tell me."     

"I don't think she's dead." Scott looked at Charles, trying to gauge his reaction.      

The professor didn't look surprised at what he'd just heard. He nodded slowly. "I thought you might come to that conclusion."

Logan and I were in the Danger Room, but it wasn't in the middle of the night and this was no chance meeting. I'd been spending my Sundays there for several weeks now, but this was the first time Logan had joined me. He'd agreed when I'd asked him, but he was showing signs of regretting that now.     

We had been spending the last few hours working on a particularly nasty simulation, based on discovered, never-executed plans of Stryker's. I was determined to complete it successfully, although my confidence in my ability to crack it had been wavering the last couple of weeks.      

It was just one of several new drills Charles had given me a couple of months ago, and I'd been working through them methodically until I got to this one. He had called me into his office a day after I'd confronted him about the MPP project. He had handed me outlines of the new simulations he wanted me to work on, telling me to call a team meeting as soon as I'd read through them and to work out a project plan to master them all. Charles was concerned, he said, that we'd mostly been focusing on rebuilding and kind of continuing as normal, but that we needed to make sure we were ready for any future attacks or other emergencies.      

I couldn't argue with that. We hadn't had any new exercises in a long time, and I'd seen for myself many times in close to 15 years as an X-Man how important continuing practice on both strategy and tactics are. Still, I didn't find the timing of the release of the new simulations coincidental. Charles was trying to do more than just upgrade our preparedness, I was sure. I didn't know whether he was trying to distract me from my musings about Jean or just to demonstrate confidence in my leadership abilities. Maybe both.      

I had found most of the simulations challenging, beyond what we'd done in the past, but ultimately solvable. I'd also thought they were excellent preparedness exercises in case the political tide turned against us and we were again under siege. They were also turning out to be great for morale. Details of the simulated missions were never shared beyond Charles, the team members who participated in the exercises, and me. But successful drills were announced at dinner following their completion, with some anecdote about a team member whose contributions had been essential to the drill's success. Those who participated stood and received thundering applause. It helped the team to feel competent and appreciated and I think the kids felt protected and more secure, as success followed success, helping to heal the scars of the siege.     

This Stryker exercise, though, was something else. It had had me stumped for close to two months. I was determined to conquer it. I knew that the assault had never been executed as Charles had found it detailed in the discovered plans, but that didn't mean someone else wouldn't try the same type of attack. I wanted to feel sure I could handle it if they did. Well, I knew I could take it on with all of the X-Men, but Charles assured me this one could be beaten by a two-man team, although I had my doubts, having tried it numerous times without success.     

Several of the new simulations had been designed for one or two of us to combat them, a change from our usual training, where we practiced with larger teams. As Charles had explained when he gave me the new training assignments, the MPP project was going to require a lot of one- and two-man missions when it went live, since both the rescue and resettlement operations had to be done without attracting attention.     

I've no doubt that Charles really did think it was important that the X-Men improve our ability to work singly and in pairs. Still, as with the timing of the new exercises, I was equally convinced that he had ulterior motives for giving me these particularly thorny two-man simulations. Working on them was forcing me to spend time with each of the X-Men one-on-one, breaking the pattern I'd fallen into of avoiding spending time alone with my friends and teammates. At first I'd been somewhat annoyed, feeling manipulated by Charles, certainly not for the first time. But I soon saw the wisdom of his plan, as my somewhat strained relationships with many of the team warmed as we worked together one-on-one. The Stryker Exercise was an important step in this improvement, although it was frustrating me no end in the process. I'd worked out plans during much of my spare time during the weekdays and had spent several Sundays on it already, trying different approaches with 'Ro, then with Hank, then with Kurt, and finally with Pyotr. A few times we came close to success, but the end result was always both of us "dying" or getting captured.      

Logan was pretty much my last hope on this one, so I refused to quit even after we got 'killed' a dozen times in a row. We'd conferred after each attempt, thinking we had a new approach that would work, but no dice. He wanted to stop, at least for this particular Sunday, but I wouldn't hear it. We screwed our courage to the sticking place and gave it one more shot. And damned if we didn't get them that thirteenth time! So, there we were, sitting on the floor of the Danger Room, catching our breath and feeling pretty pleased with ourselves.     

"You just don't give up, do you?"     

We were sitting side by side, our backs to the wall. I turned to look at him, not sure if he'd meant it critically, but he had a great big smile on his face so I chose to interpret the question in a positive way. "I admit to being indefatigable, occasionally," I replied, smiling back at him as he rolled his eyes.     

"I'll look it up later. Anyway, you can be a pain in the ass with this 'never say die' shit, Cyclops, but it paid off this time." He chuckled and shook his head remembering. "Fuck, we were good!" he said, slapping my thigh for emphasis. And then, just leaving his hand there. He turned and looked at me, his hand still on my leg. The look in his eye and the feel of his fingers on my thigh were suddenly riveting. Uncomfortably so. I looked away.      

He pulled his hand back and kind of stumbled over his words. "I didn't mean... I'm not... I wasn't..." I didn't say anything and he stopped after a minute.      

We just kind of sat there, the easy camaraderie of a moment before gone, replaced by an awkward silence. I broke it. "I know you're straight," I said.      

"I know I'm not your type," he said, head cocked to the side, expression open, questioning, friendly.     

I shrugged. "It seemed like the thing to say at the time. I don't think I have a type, really. I don't think my attractions are all that predictable."      

"Can I ask you something about that?" I nodded. "Jeannie? You and her? I just keep thinking about that. I know it's none of my business, but...well... what was it like? For both of you, I mean?"     

I sighed and thought about how to answer. "It was good. It was good in lots of ways. We loved each other. We had a shared vision, a purpose, a life we built together.”      

“Was that... well, enough?” he asked.     

“We did enjoy making love, both of us, if that's what you're asking. Did you know we had a continuing telepathic link? We always could hear each other's thoughts, any time we wanted to. It kind of adds something to sex, another dimension." I paused, not knowing what else to say. "She was the first woman I ever slept with," I said finally.      

"How'd you get together?"     

"We were friends first, from when we were kids. Hank, Jean, and I, and Warren - you don't know him, he left years ago - we were the first X-Men and we kind of did everything together. I was 16 when I came here. I was the first. Jean showed up a few months later. Then the other two." I looked around. "The place wasn't like it is now. The Danger Room was here, and the labs, but not the classrooms or the dorms. We weren't a real school then. There were just the four of us, and Charles taught us academic subjects in between training us for combat and sending us out to fight."     

"Fight?" he asked, sounding surprised. "You were a combat team then, when you were kids?"      

"Yeah, that's how it started; that was Charles's original concept. And that’s how he chose us – for our potential as members of a fighting force. He started building a school and taking more kids in a few years later. I think he really conceived of Xavier's Academy as just a front for the X-Men at first. Gym and pool hiding the Danger Room, Blackbird taking off out of the basketball court. Stryker wasn't so far off when he called it a mutant training facility. That’s what it was when we were kids. But we all kind of got into having a school for its own sake, not just to train new X-Men. We all wished we'd had schooling where mutants were accepted and we wanted to give that to the next generation, you know?”      

Logan nodded solemnly. “It’s a great thing you’re doing for mutant kids here.”      

“*We’re* doing. You’re part of it.”     

He shrugged. “For a while,” he said. “So what happened with you and Jeannie?”      

"Jean and I went to college together. We'd racked up enough AP credits that we could both get in and out in three years and come back to Westchester. We had it all planned out. She was pre-med and I was an English major and I was going to run the humanities program for the school and she'd be head of the science department." I looked at Logan to see if he was still listening, still interested. He motioned to me to continue.      

"Neither Jean nor I could bear the idea of living in dorms. I think we felt too old for all that. We weren't that much older than the other freshman, but we'd been on a mutant fighting force for three years by that time, risking our lives daily. Other kids seemed like... kids.

"So Jean and I got an apartment together. In some ways it was the stereotypical gay man/straight woman friendship - we were often lusting after the same guys." I laughed at that, remembering. "But then our second year in college it changed. Maybe we'd both gotten our hearts stamped on too many times, or something. We already had each other as companions, study partners, roommates. It didn't seem that strange to add sex to the mix. We definitely looked on it at first as just friendship, friends who fuck, you know? But over time it felt like more. And when we came back here, after graduation, well we came back as a couple. Got a room together. I started building the school, with Charles. Jean was commuting to the city for med school. My life seemed sort of normal, all of a sudden. Respectable."      

"And you wanted that."     

It wasn't a question, but I nodded agreement anyway. “Does that bother you?”      

“Why should it bother me?”     

“I don’t know. You might feel like you wanted Jean for her own sake and I wanted her for respectability.”     

“None of my business. Anyway, it’s what she wanted, too, right? Love, marriage, family, a life with the good guy.” He shrugged. "Nothing I could give her.” He thought some more. “Did you think it would last? Did you think you'd... change?"      

"I don't know, really. Maybe. I was pretty disillusioned with gay life by that point. There's a kind of idolization of physical perfection, at least in the circles I was running in. And being a brain-damaged mutant didn't fit in very well with that. I'd meet guys who were interested in me, guys I was interested in. But when they found out..." I laughed ruefully. "And it's not like I could keep it a secret for very long. A guy knows something's up when you won't let him see your eyes, not even during sex." I sighed. "And I wanted a more regular life. I was feeling like two big things that were different about me was one too many. And maybe this one was malleable."     

"Don’t take this the wrong way, but did Jean feel... used?"      

I shook my head. "Believe me, I agonized over that one. She'd have had every right to feel exploited. But we did love each other. That was always there and it was a big part of who we were. And, remember, we had that telepathic link. We each knew what the other was thinking. I wasn't deceiving her. She knew I was still attracted to men, and she knew I wasn't having sex with men. Mostly I wasn't even thinking about that, was determined to just not let my mind go there. 'That way madness lies; let me shun that.' I thought maybe after a while I'd just forget about that part of me." I mused on that for a minute. “You know, I’ve never talked to anyone but Jean about this. Not even Charles.”      

“Why are you telling me?”     

“You asked.” He laughed at that. “Okay, that’s not it, really. I never said enough for people to ask. Maybe I just needed somebody to talk to. And you were here.”      

He didn’t say anything for a long time. I wondered if he was offended at my suggestion that I was talking to him just because he was around when I needed to talk. But his mind didn’t seem to be on that at all. When he did speak, he referred back to what I’d said before. "Do you still think you could change, forget about that part, like you said? Could you meet someone else, another woman? Fall in love?"     

I shook my head. "No, I'm pretty sure I couldn't. Even if I did meet another woman, I wouldn't try to live like that, not again. It was a mistake, what Jean and I tried to do. An honest mistake, a loving mistake, but still a mistake. I've given it a lot of thought. It's not just about sex for me. I think I notice men more, am drawn to men more in lots of ways. But a whole lot of it is sex. You can't help what turns you on, and it's men's bodies that turn me on. I spent so much time fighting it, and I want to be true to myself now. It feels good not to fight it anymore. I can’t go back. Sex with men is the only kind I want. It's different, there’s more to it – for me, anyway – than there is with a woman. It's hard to explain. I don’t know if you could understand, really."     

"I know the parts are different."     

I laughed. "Yeah, and that's certainly a lot of it. But it's not all. As close as telepathy during sex made me feel with Jean, we weren't really sharing the experience, not in the same way as when I'm doing it with a man, even a man I didn't love or even know well. There's something about having sex with another guy... it's hard to explain.” Well, that’s what I said, but what I was thinking was that I didn’t know whether or not I ought to try to explain. I wasn’t accustomed to talking about my sexuality at all, not having done so for a long time. And it felt a little bit risky to discuss it with Logan, although I wasn’t sure why. I took a deep breath and continued. “There's a shared understanding that I just don't think men and women can have, or at least that I can't have with a woman. Can I be specific? Or is that going to make you uncomfortable if I talk about homosex?"      

"Go ahead."     

"Okay. Here's an example: I love giving head. And some of that is just being totally turned on by men's bodies. There's little that feels as good to me as a big, hard cock in my mouth, down my throat." I sneaked a sidelong glance at him, checking to see that he wasn't getting upset with the graphic description, but he looked interested and listening. "It's more than that, though,” I went on. "I have this really intense impression every time I do it. I find myself thinking 'I know what this feels like; I know what he's feeling.' And there's an erotic charge and a connection in that knowledge that I just don't think I could have with a woman."     

"Well, that's true. I can see that there's something there with a man that there isn't with women," he said, not seeming disturbed by the conversation at all. "But there's something else with women that you can’t get with a man. Some mystery or something. I don't know how to say it. Do you know what I'm talking about?"     

"Yes and no. I do know that, for many men, that sense of 'otherness' about women is profoundly erotic. It doesn't matter that you don't know how to express it, Logan," I added with a smile. "I've heard it enough. Much of Western literature is devoted to expressing just that." I shook my head. "I understand it, in a way. I can teach it, I can write about it, but I don't feel it. It doesn't touch me the way it does you, or most men." I sighed and continued. "I've thought a lot about this, since Jean was...lost. I loved her so much, but not having her I've thought more about what kind of love it was, what kind of feelings I've had. I did think sometimes that I would change, when Jean and I were together, but I don't think it now. We loved each other and that was no small thing. But sex, even with some guy I didn't know, didn't care about, wouldn't see again, was always more intense, more fulfilling, more... complete than it was with Jean." I smiled wryly at Logan. "So, I really am gay."     

He smiled back. "I guess so."     

I'd been uneasy talking to Logan about this, and was glad he hadn't freaked out on me. I was feeling good about the conversation now. These were issues I'd been mulling over since Jean's disappearance and I'd felt the lack of someone to talk to about them. It wasn't until later that it occurred to me to wonder what he'd meant when he agreed with me that there was something different about sex between men, something you couldn't get from a woman. Was he speaking from experience?

So, there I was in Peru. Peru, Vermont, that is. Well, actually I was staying at Charles’s house in Peru, but at the moment I was about 30 miles away, in Bellows Falls. Fellow's Balls, the locals call the town. I was sitting in Dr. Leeds’s office. Yes, the same Vermont house Charles had wanted me to go to a few months ago and the same Dr. Leeds Charles had tried to convince me to consult. I sat down, offered greetings from Charles, and then used up the whole fifty-minute hour. Surprised that the time had gone by so quickly and with much more to cover, I made an appointment to return the next week.      

No, I wasn’t having my head shrunk. I was interviewing Dr. Leeds, finding out whether he could be a help to us with the MPP Project. Our mutant refugees were likely to need psychiatric support, both for dealing with after-effects of trauma and for easily assimilating into their new lives and identities. Dr. Leeds wasn’t a mutant, but Charles assured us he was well acquainted with mutant physiology and psychology and utterly trustworthy. And he was certainly conveniently located.     

Ethan Allen Leeds was a true Vermonter, meaning his family had been there for more than three generations. In his case he traced his family's residence in Vermont back to his namesake’s time. But he had gone to medical school at Columbia and done his residency at Bellevue, before returning to set up a practice at home. While at Bellevue, Dr. Leeds treated a young woman who had been committed for observation after multiple suicide attempts. Her symptoms were varied and severe, including hearing voices in her head and a strong conviction that she could move physical objects with her mind. When the woman’s roommate showed up and agreed that the patient could do what she said, Dr. Leeds thought he had a case of folie à deux on his hands. He’d tried to explain that to his patient, as she sat in his office after her roommate left. “Is there such thing as ‘folie à trois’?” she’d asked, as the dictionary in Dr. Leeds’s office flew off of the shelf and landed on his desk, pages flying by until it was opened to “F”. So, when it turned out his patient was a mutant, not a schizophrenic, Dr. Leeds had been determined to learn everything he could to help her. That's how he met and befriended Charles.     

Hank had originally planned on coming to Peru with me to meet with the doctor, but as Medical Director he was being kept very busy lately. A respiratory infection had close to half the school down. Recent rumors of bio-terrorism directed at mutants had all of us worried that it might be more than just a run-of-the-mill virus. Once it had been cultured and Hank had determined it was just this year’s flu strain, we all breathed a sigh of relief and made plans to offer flu vaccine next year. But Hank had to stay and tend to the ill, so I made the Vermont trip without him.     

Interviewing Dr. Leeds wasn’t the main focus of the trip, just a side issue. I was charged with doing all that was necessary to prepare the house in Peru for its new role. And doing it in a way that wouldn’t be noticed by the neighbors.     

Not that the neighbors were all that close. Driving directions to the Peru house had that familiar Vermont refrain in the middle: this is the point where the paved road ends. The house itself was on 38 acres of land, in the middle of dense woodland. It was far enough from the nearest neighbors that we never worried that the noise of a bunch of mutant kids on a nature field trip or ski excursion would bother anyone. Still, what we were concerned about for its future use was secrecy, not just avoiding being a nuisance.      

The house had been in the Xavier family since Charles’s childhood. A huge old farmhouse with attached barn, it had been practically falling apart when Charles's father had bought it for a song. He must have put a fair amount of money into fixing it up, but nothing compared to what it was worth now. Charles could have made a fortune if he'd wanted to sell it. But the kids liked going there and besides, he already had a fortune.

A portrait of a teenage Charles Xavier hung in the hallway between the living room and the master bedroom. He smiled back at me with a full head of hair, standing on skis. I always stopped and looked at it for a while the first day I was there, contemplating what he must have been like before he’d lost the use of his legs.     

I generally was at the Vermont house a couple of times a year, but this was the first time I wasn’t there as a chaperone. It was Hank who suggested that we set up the Peru place as a safe house for mutant refugees who would be in the MPP, while we trained them in all the particulars of their new identities. It was a great location for that – large, remote, quite self-sufficient. Easy to get to from New York, Toronto and Montreal, making it convenient for both Alpha Flight and the X-Men. And only used by the Xavier Institute a couple of times a year. We could easily house several MPP participants there for a few weeks at a time without interfering with the house’s other uses. But we needed to do so without anyone in the area knowing, which meant that the refugees themselves, their trainers, and all the supplies they needed had to be brought in silently and secretly.     

The Blackbird was perfect for that. Our jet doesn’t care where the road ends and its stealth features make it practically undetectable – by eye, ear, or radar. The Peru house had a clearing in the middle of its woodland that would be good for landing, too, given the jet’s vertical landing capabilities. But getting from the clearing to the house itself was an issue. Our refugees would be of varied health and physical capabilities; their arrival would be at unpredictable times. We couldn't count on their ability to trek through the woods during a Vermont winter to get from the landing spot to the house. After some discussion, we’d decided that what we needed was a tunnel, leading from under the Blackbird’s woodland clearing to the barn. There was a secret room in the barn, a hiding place from when this house had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. I'd seen the hiding spot and shown it to the kids as an onsite visual history lesson. It seemed fitting to put the former slaves' refuge to work for a whole new crop of refugees.     

Pyotr had been my first choice to help me with the tunnel. Between my blasts and his organic steel strength, we’d have it dug in no time. That is, we would have if he hadn’t come down with the flu, along with everyone else. Logan doesn’t have Pyotr’s powers, but he’s strong and a tireless worker, so when he offered to pinch hit, I agreed gratefully.      

Logan, it turned out, was a better choice than Pyotr for this mission, even without Colossus’ super strength. He not only had the physical capabilities, but also knew a lot about design, construction and engineering, certainly much more than I did. I took out the plans Charles had drawn up for us, and he read them in a couple of minutes, nodding in understanding, then throwing around terms like "cut and cover " and "driven tunnel construction" as we surveyed the site.     

"Guess what?" I said. "I think you should be foreman for this operation."      

"Fine," he grunted, walking around the spot where the tunnel opening would be.      

"How do you know so much about this stuff, anyway?"     

"I don't know."     

It was hard work, but satisfying as well. We blasted and dug all day for over a week. "Resolute, dumb, uncomplaining, a man in a world of men." We spoke little as we worked, just saying what we needed to get the job done. Logan told me what to do and I did it, not minding being the one taking orders this time. Cutting through the rock with my optic blasts and digging with conventional tools, as well.     

In the evenings we talked more. And read. I'd quoted him that "resolute, dumb, uncomplaining" line and he'd liked it, wanting to hear the whole poem. Then when he'd heard that he wanted more like it, so I read him a few by Robert Service. And others, too. Sandburg, Jarrell. He nodded in grim recognition at Jarrell’s “Death of a Ball Turret Gunner”, saying, “With a hose. Yeah, that’s how we did it.” Gave me shivers. But I didn’t ask, just read more poetry. Poems about war or work or strife. Nothing flowery, nothing romantic.      

"You should take my poetry class," I said. "It's all girls - it would be a nice change not being the only man in the room." He grunted in answer, scoffing at the idea of him in class. But he asked me to read another poem a few minutes later.      

I chose "Chicago" and he was enchanted with it, had me read it twice. "Yeah, that's the Chicago I remember," he said.     

"You never heard the poem before?"     

"I don't think I ever did. Is it a famous one?"     

"Oh yes."     

"He sure paints a picture, doesn't he? When was it written?"      

I looked at the book. "1916," I said, and we looked at each other. "Does that mean..."     

"I don't know." He didn't say any thing else.     

The days were exhausting but satisfying, the evenings relaxed and companionable, but the nights were hard on us both, for different reasons. I was uncomfortably aware of a strong and growing attraction to Logan and more and more worried that, given his heightened senses, he'd become aware of how I felt about him. Oh, he had shown calm acceptance of the knowledge that he had a gay colleague, field leader, and temporary housemate. Still, I thought it likely that easy comfort would vanish if he had any idea what my private thoughts and dreams were like. I did what I could to ensure he wouldn’t find out. The conscious thoughts I just worked on banishing, using that famous Cyclops control to get my mind on other things. "That way madness lies; let me shun that" I told myself again and again.      

My unconscious mind wasn't listening, though, and he invaded my dreams with his strong, hairy body, his powerful arms and hands, that killer smile. Every night I'd tell myself it wasn't going to happen this time, read diverting material before bed, and then find myself in the arms of Morpheus - and Logan, in spite of all my good intentions. On my knees in front of him, my mouth moving up and down on a rock-hard cock, or underneath him, listening to him groan and roar as I felt him pushing deep inside me. I woke up each time excited, disturbed, and confused about what to do about my feelings.     

I wasn't the only one dreaming. If my dreams were exciting but troubling, Logan's were pure hell. The first night I didn't even realize it was a dream. I woke up, hearing sounds of struggle in the next room and then a cry like a wounded beast. I ran to the door and it was locked. "Logan!" I yelled, rattling it. When there was no answer, I blasted the lock off and went in.     

He was sitting up in bed and didn't look happy to see me. "Go away," he said.     

"Are you okay?" He grunted something and gestured to the door. "A nightmare?" I asked, belatedly realizing I'd gone into superhero mode unnecessarily.      

He nodded, and told me to leave again. But as I walked out, I heard him saying, "Thanks, Summers."     

I went to him almost every night, although I tried to be more respectful of his privacy after that first time. Often I didn't go into the room at all, just knocked on the door and called to him until he answered, verifying that I'd woken him up. He always thanked me for stopping the nightmare. He never wanted me to stay. I suggested a couple of times that he get up and read, or we could play cards or something, but he'd just wave a large, strong hand, shooing me back to bed.     

Then one night it was different. I woke up to the moaning and groaning and knocked on his door, calling his name. I heard him yelling, "No!" and then kind of a strangled sound followed by an almost inhuman sobbing. I went in. Standing by the doorway, I called his name, louder and louder, as he thrashed around on the bed, his movements jerky and mechanical, as if some invisible puppeteer had him on strings.     

Finally, he opened his eyes and sat up. "How long you been there?" he asked.      

"A couple of minutes."     

He held up his hands to show the claws were retracted, and then gestured to me to come closer, saying, "I'm not dangerous. Not now." He turned on the lamp and then put both hands to his eyes, rubbing them like he was trying to erase what he'd just seen.      

I sat down in the armchair near his bed and looked around. He was a mess. The room was a mess. The bedclothes were ripped to shreds; there were holes in the wall. And there was blood everywhere, lots of it. Staining the torn sheets, drying on his chest and arms. No visible wounds, but they'd probably been there a few minutes ago.      

"Were you trying to hurt yourself?" I asked.     

"Nah. I was just fighting them off," he said, looking at his blood all over the bed. "I guess I got in the way."     

"Dreams can be like that."     

We sat there for a while. I didn't want to leave, since he wasn't telling me to, but I was pretty uncomfortable. Trying not to look at his body lying there on the bed next to me, but looking in spite of myself. I hadn't been this close any of the other nights and I wondered if he always slept naked, and whether I would have found some excuse to come closer on other nights if I'd realized that.     

The remnants of the sheet were thrown over him, but most of him was clearly visible. He was sweaty, presumably from the dream, but now that that was over it looked like the glistening sweat of exertion and power. I wanted to lick it off of him.      

And then he started shaking uncontrollably, all over his body, like some machine was churning inside of him and he couldn't turn it off. He tried to hold onto the bed with both hands to steady himself, but they were shaking, too.     

"Are you okay?" I asked.     

"Shit!" he said. "I hate this." He clenched and unclenched his fists, grabbed onto the bed frame, seemed to be trying to do anything he could think of to make it stop, but nothing was working. "Sometimes it just takes me like this, afterwards," he said, still trembling uncontrollably.     

“Do you want me to call Dr. Leeds?”     

“No!”     

Well, unlike Charles, I can take no for an answer. “How about Hank? Maybe he can prescribe something.”     

He tried to shake his head, but the trembling made it go back and forth in a bizarre, almost robotic way, his teeth chattering. “No doctors,” he said. “No drugs.”      

"Is there anything I can do to help you?"     

"Yeah, yeah," he said. "Come over here. Put your hands on my shoulders. Hold me still."      

So, I did. I got onto the bed with him, holding him by the shoulders, talking to him softly. He seemed to relax after a while and the trembling stopped. "Thanks," he said.      

"Is there anything else I can do?" I tried to keep my mind off what I wanted to do.      

"Yeah..." There was a long pause and I almost asked again. But then he said it, "Suck my cock."     

"What?" Had he really said that, or was my strong desire making me hear things? I figured I should check, just in case he'd really said "Take the clock" or something like that and my overactive imagination had turned it into something more exciting.      

"You said you like to do it? Right?" I nodded, figuring we weren't talking about clocks. "It helps. Sex is the only thing that... makes it stop. For a while, anyway. Come on, Cyclops. Do me a favor."     

So, I did. He sat on the edge of the bed and I got down on my knees, stroking him to hardness, looking at his cock. I’d sneaked peeks before but this was the first time I was seeing up close. He had curly dark hair at the base; the skin on his balls was dark. He was circumcised, which surprised me. I figured he'd be old enough that it wouldn't have been a common practice. His cock was long and hard and seemed very thick, with a purplish head that looked like it was straining to be sucked. He looked delicious.      

I bent down and started licking him as I stroked, savoring the taste and the feeling, one I'd wanted for so long. Then I put the whole head in my mouth, kissing and sucking, moving down a little farther with each stroke until I was taking him all the way in and pulling all the way back up. He stroked my hair and moaned as I did him. I could smell the sweat and the blood and it seemed almost like I could smell his fear disappearing and turning to joy and excitement. The sounds he was making were driving me crazy, better than I could have imagined: moans and sighs and seemingly random spoken words of joy and lust, all in this almost growling undertone, as he stroked my hair and cheeks encouragingly. I cradled his balls with one hand while I held the root of his cock with the other, bobbing up and down, almost overcome with the taste and the feel of him in my mouth, with the sounds and smells all around me. When he came he was in up to the root and breathing hard.      

He stayed still, catching his breath afterwards, smiling ear to ear. "God, that was good," he said, after a minute. "You've got a real talent for it."      

"Field missions, English classes and blow jobs. I think it's important to have varied skills," I replied, and he chuckled.     

He moved over on the bed, sitting with his back to the headboard and feet stretched out. He sighed happily and patted the space next to him. "Come on," he said. "Sit down." I joined him, very aware of my hard cock straining against my boxers.      

He was aware, too. "You do like giving head, don't you? Turns you on. Well, let me take care of that for you," he said, pulling my dick out of the opening and starting to stroke me with a loose fist. "Only fair."     

I leaned in to kiss him, but he turned his head away. Kept jerking me, though, with a truly wonderful motion of his hand. I wasn't even sure what he was doing, but it felt great. And then he reached under my shirt with his other hand, playing with one of my nipples, then the other. He was making me squirm and moan. I closed my eyes and just gave myself to the feeling.     

And he kissed me. Not on the mouth, but on the shoulder, licking and sucking and biting a little, moving into my neck all the while he was rubbing and stroking like he knew just what I needed. "I'm going to come," I told him.     

"Good," he said, right in my ear, as I shot on his hand and his leg.      

"Good," I echoed, head back and coming down from that high now. "Very good."      

"You came buckets. Been a long time?"     

"Too long." Neither of us said anything for a while. "Maybe we could do that again sometime?" I asked.     

"Yeah, maybe," he replied with a chuckle.

"It's a lot harder than it looks." Logan looked up at Scott, his hand still stroking Scott's erection. He had a look of consternation on his face.      

Scott looked down. "It doesn't look hard?" he asked, puzzled.      

"Not your cock, stupid. Giving head. It looks so easy when you're doing it to me. I'm really trying, here, but I can't get the hang of it." He put his head down again, licking the underside of Scott's cock slowly and thoroughly, with long rough strokes, enjoying the unfamiliar sensations as well as the sounds Scott was making. He worked his way up the shaft until he was right at the top, moving his tongue all around the head, lips sucking as he licked round and round. One hand stroking up and down and the other on his own hard on, moving in the same rhythm.     

Scott was moaning and whimpering a little, giving into the marvelous feeling, then stopping abruptly because he was worried he was too loud. Since they had come back to Westchester, Scott had been very aware that he and Logan didn't have the degree of privacy they'd had when they were all alone in that big house in Peru. Still, Logan's bedroom was near the Danger Room and far away from student dorms. No one was likely to be on this floor at all so late at night. So he resolved not to worry about the noise, leaning back and closing his eyes as Logan's mouth engulfed the head of his cock, moving down a little, hand still rubbing up and down, fingers meeting his mouth. "What are you talking about? This feels great. Your mouth... and your hand..."     

Logan's head came up again. Both hands on Scott now, he kept stroking him absentmindedly while he talked, one hand moving up and down the shaft, the other stroking the head with thumb and two fingers with strong, slow movements. Logan was clearly thinking about what they both were saying, but what he was doing with his hands was giving Scott shivers. He was having trouble following the conversational thread, wanting to just go with what Logan was doing to him and how it made him feel. But he worked at listening to what the man in front of him was saying, trying to focus his attention on Logan’s words, rather than his actions, as he continued talking. "I can't take it all the way in like you do. It makes me choke when I even try. How the fuck do you do that?" His eyes narrowed as he looked down again. "You're not any bigger than I am."     

Scott laughed at that. "Maybe I've got a bigger mouth."      

"That I'll believe." He bent down again and started licking Scott's balls while he stroked. Scott surrendered to the luxurious feeling again, hoping they were done talking. But pretty soon Logan stopped and asked, "Really, though. How do you do it?"      

"It's just something you do with your throat, sort of relaxing the muscles. It takes practice." He smiled. "I've had a lot of practice."     

"That I'll believe, too." Still stroking with one hand, Logan put the other one to his own neck, feeling around as he experimented with different kinds of swallowing motions. "Relaxing the muscles?" he asked. "How do you do that?"     

"I can teach you, if you want." He took Logan's hand away from his neck and brought it to his own mouth. Scott sucked the middle finger in deep, stroking it with his tongue. "But not now," he continued, letting Logan's hand go and sighing as Logan resumed stroking with both hands. Scott reflected absently that there were many times when he wished Logan would speak more, but just now he'd be happy if he'd shut up. "Just do what you were doing before. Please." The last word came out breathlessly, sighing as Logan bent his head back down to Scott's cock.     

Scott closed his eyes again. Logan looked up and saw the red glow fading as he continued to kiss and lick. One hand was stroking up and down, rotating slightly as he did, while the other cradled Scott's balls, a finger sliding up behind, into the crack of his ass, teasing the opening a little. The motions of Logan's hands and mouth were slow, steady, and powerful. Scott thought, not for the first time, that Logan's hands were amazing. Skin unbelievably soft, since his healing factor prevented calluses from forming, yet great strength and an almost superhuman control. And now, with what he was doing with his mouth as well, it felt totally glorious. “I never want this to end,” he thought clearly. He tried to hang on longer, feeling the approaching orgasm as Logan sucked on the head and rubbed harder and faster on the shaft. Finally, he couldn’t hold out any longer and gave into it, feeling the cum spurting out of him into Logan's mouth and opening his eyes to see if he'd swallow it.      

He did, or most of it anyway. Logan quickly got up and grabbed Scott by the back of his head, kissing him hard, excited by what he'd just done. Scott could taste his cum as Logan's tongue pushed into his mouth. Logan took Scott's hand, whispering, "Do me." Scott obliged, rubbing hard as they kissed, and then bending down to take Logan's cock in his mouth when the kiss ended. It wasn't long before he was tasting Logan's cum as well as his own.      

They sat there afterwards, breathing hard still, contented to sit side by side, companionably, without speaking.     

Logan broke the silence after a few minutes. "You liked it?"      

"Oh yes." Scott smiled happily. The smile disappeared and he asked, a little hesitantly, "Did you like doing it?"     

"Yeah," he replied, slowly, contemplatively. "A lot. I really wanted to but I wasn't sure I'd like it."     

"Well, I'm glad you did."     

"It felt great. I loved the taste of you, the feel of doing it to you. And something else.” He held his head to one side, thinking. “Part of it was sort of feeling like you were totally in my hands."     

"And in your mouth." They both laughed at that.     

"Yeah, but you know what I mean. Feeling like I was doing something big to you. Something powerful. Really turned me on. I sure didn't last long afterwards."      

"Yeah, I noticed." Scott thought some more. "Did it feel like... a big deal? A big step to take? You'd never done it before, right?"     

"I don't know, really. There's a lot of stuff I don't remember." Logan looked away. "But, no, I don't think I ever did. Not in the time that's still there in my brain. Or the part of my brain I can get to." He laughed, a low chuckle. "And if I get the professor to read my mind again, I don't think I'll ask him to look for forgotten blow jobs, necessarily. At least not first thing." He thought some more. "I'm not sure what you mean by a big deal. It did feel different than doing other stuff, different than what we've been doing, or what I’d done with other men. I thought about what you said that time, about knowing what it feels like. I knew what you were feeling. I wanted you to feel what I've been feeling when you blow me. I guess that's why I wanted to take it all the way in."     

"I thought it was just because you couldn't stand the thought of me being able to do something you can't." Logan laughed again at that. "Seriously, though, I guess by a big deal, I meant that it's kind of a defining act or something." He looked away again. "I thought it might make you wonder if you're gay."     

"Nah."     

Logan seemed unconcerned about the question, so Scott persisted. “Did you ever think that? Or that you’re bisexual? I mean, you say you’ve had sex with other men.”      

“Yeah, even some I remember.” He didn’t say anything for a long time. Scott wondered if he was going to say more at all. “I guess that gay and bi stuff doesn’t mean a lot to me. I don’t really get it. It’s women I’ve been interested in. Well, until recently,” he added, looking with pleasure up and down Scott’s body. “I’ve done it with men mostly ‘cause it was convenient, I guess.”     

“Convenient?” Scott laughed.     

“What’s funny about that?”     

“I don’t know. It just sounded kind of funny. What do you mean?”      

Logan shrugged. “Men are easy, I guess.” He thought about it. “I was moving around a lot. Didn’t really know anybody. But I wanted sex. Needed it. I like to have my cock sucked and there’s always some guys that like to suck cock. They’re easy to find lots of places. And you don’t have to talk nice to them or buy them dinner or anything. Easier than women. Convenient.”     

“I guess so. So, you don’t usually feel attracted to men? Just women?”      

“Mostly women. Until you. I mean, I definitely got off on guys giving me head, but not the specific guy. Sometimes I’d feel a little of what you were saying that time, that connection or whatever it is of you both being men. Thinking of him sucking my cock, thinking he probably likes having his cock sucked, too. But I never felt like doing anything to the other guy. I never even touched them, really, never jerked them off like I’ve been doing with you.”      

“Were you... repelled by the idea of touching another guy’s cock, of bringing him off?”      

“Nah, I don’t think so. Just no interest. I just wanted to get off.” He mused a little more. “Sometimes there was something else. I liked the fact of this guy on his knees in front of me, too, some of the time. Sort of felt good the same way fighting does, when I win. And I always win,” he added with a smile. “But lots of times I’d close my eyes and pretend it’s a woman there doing it. And, what you said about noticing people – it’s always the women I notice, can’t look away from. Or was. I don’t know – it’s been different with you. I wanted to look at you; I like looking at you." Scott felt warmed by his intent gaze. "I wanted to touch you, knew when you sucked me off I wouldn’t be thinking of anybody else. It’s been like that for a long time. Maybe from the start. Although that was all mixed up with hating your guts,” he added with a chuckle.     

“Yeah, we didn’t get off to a good start. But a lot of that was Jean, don’t you think? Being in love with the same woman?”     

Logan shook his head. “I was never in love with her. I wanted to fuck her, no getting away from that, but I wasn’t in love. And maybe,” he added slowly, like he was trying to get it straight in his head, “Maybe I partly wanted to have her kind of as a way of getting you. I’m not sure.” He thought about it some more. “But I’m sure it wasn’t love. I ain’t never been in love.”     

“With the usual caveats,” Scott interjected with a smile.      

“Whatever that means.”     

“Oh, just that you can’t know for sure. Because of the amnesia. You just know that you don’t remember being in love.”     

Logan thought about that one for a minute. “Nah, I bet I’d know if I had,” he said. He didn’t say anything more, and Scott waited, not knowing whether to press him further. When Logan spoke again, it seemed to be an entirely different topic. “I can speak Japanese, you know.”      

“No, I didn’t know.” Eyebrows raised.     

Logan chuckled. “What?"     

"It just seemed like quite the non sequitur."     

"Hang on. It has something to do with what we were talking about, trust me.” He closed his eyes in memory. “I didn’t know I could for a long time,” he continued. “Isn’t that weird? To know a language but not know you know it? I didn’t know lots of stuff I know. When I woke up in the woods that time, well, I had other things on my mind. I didn’t remember a lot, but I didn’t know what I didn’t remember, couldn’t even tell what was missing. I mean, I knew something awful had happened to me and I knew that I wanted to die. So, that’s kind of all I focused on for a while. But when I couldn’t...” He looked away from Scott. “Well, then I started thinking about what I did and didn’t know. It took a while to even realize how much was missing. I mean, I kind of didn’t even notice what I didn’t know, or maybe didn’t realize that other people did know that stuff. It all seems so fucked up when I look back on it, but it must’ve taken me a year or two to even think it was strange that I don’t know my whole name. Can you believe that?”     

Scott nodded. “I’ve read up on post-traumatic amnesia lately.” He reddened a little at Logan’s inquiring expression. “Well, I’m interested in what you’ve been through. I’m trying to understand,” he added hurriedly. “Anyway, what you’re saying is kind of typical. The amnesiac doesn’t even know what information is missing, doesn’t have a clear sense of what he ought to know. It takes time to sort of get a handle on the extent of the amnesia. Often it’s family or friends or the amnesiac’s doctor that clues him into what he’s missing.”      

“Yeah, that’s what it was like for me. Logan – I knew that was my name, but I still don’t even know if it’s my first name or my last name. And I knew I was a mutant, knew about the claws and the heightened senses before I had to use them.”      

“What about the healing factor?”     

“No, I didn’t know that part. Not at first. I was real surprised when I found out – first time I tried to kill myself,” he added. “I used my claws, put ‘em right into my heart. It hurt like hell, but I didn’t die. I was so pissed off. And confused, too. I mean how can a person get stabbed through the heart and not die? But then, after a minute, it kind of came back and it made sense to me why it didn’t work. I spent a month or more trying different ways, but none of them worked. I was still alive. And by the end of that I was almost feeling more mad that I couldn’t do it than just wanting to die for its own sake, if that makes any sense.” He laughed ruefully. “Pretty fucked up, like I said. But I figured it was time to give up on trying to kill myself and start looking for how I got to be this way.”      

“And the suicidal feelings were just gone after that?”     

“Nah, they come back sometimes. I try to fight ‘em when they do.” He paused again. “Booze helps sometimes. Sometimes it makes it worse. Hard to know. Sex helps, though, pretty much all the time. It’s worse – the suicidal stuff – when I’m doing without.” He looked at Scott. “You’ve been helping me.”     

“I live to serve.” Scott tried for a light tone, knowing that the last thing Logan would want was any expression that might sound like pity.     

Logan continued. “Anyway, it was like you said, I didn’t have a clear sense of what I should know so I didn’t know what I was missing. But I didn’t have any family or friends or doctors to clue me in. And I was moving from place to place, not talking to people much, just kind of figuring it out on my own. So, I started to realize I was missing a lot, but I still didn’t know what I did know. So, for example, I didn’t know I could speak Japanese. I was mostly in rural Canada, not anywhere you’d hear anybody talking in Japanese, eh?”      

“I guess not. How did you find out?”     

“Well, sometimes I would go into the cities, trying to find out more about who I am and how I got to be this way. I had this idea that it had something to do with the government there, so I’d gone to Ottawa. And I’m sitting in this bar one night – no luck on what I was trying to find out so I’m just hanging out there feeling discouraged, trying to distract myself from my own thoughts, which weren’t good ones. Well, you know how it is - heightened senses – I can hear anything I want to. So, I’m just kind of scanning the room, seeing if anybody’s saying anything interesting. There was this blonde in a booth across the room, whispering to her boyfriend about what they were gonna do that night, but that was just getting me horny, so I figured I’d move on. Two Japanese guys were in the booth next to them, just talking business. What they were saying wasn’t so interesting, but I couldn’t stop listening to them. I could understand every word. Well, not quite – there was some stuff about their work that I didn’t get, maybe it was too technical or something. But most of it was just as easy to understand as English. So, that’s when I knew I knew Japanese.”     

“And you can speak it, too?” Logan nodded. “We have a Japanese student here. Masako. Have you met her?”     

Logan nodded again. “Yeah, I’ve talked to her a few times. She likes having somebody to talk to in her native language. She says I have a ‘country’ accent, that I talk like her grandparents. She’s from Tokyo, but her grandparents live in a village up north.” He mused some more. “That makes sense to me. I look at pictures of Tokyo and it doesn’t look familiar at all. But sometimes, I see pictures of rural Japan, the countryside or villages, and I know it. Not just the language. I know the plants and the animals – sometimes I know the names for them in Japanese but not in English. I can look at the picture and know what it sounds like there, what it smells like.” He looked right at Scott. “I have no memory of being in Japan. I don’t have any idea when I was there or what the fuck I was doing there. But I know I was there. I know the language, the clothes, the food, the people. So, I’m sure I was there.”     

“Okay, that makes sense.” Scott nodded, encouraging Logan to continue.      

“Well, when people talk about being in love, like when you talk about Jeannie... it’s not like you’re talking in English. Or Japanese. It’s like another language, one I don't know. Or maybe not like that. I mean I understand the words. But I don’t understand the idea, not like I would if it had happened to me. If I’d ever been in love, I might not know when or how, like I don’t know when I was in Japan. But I’d know it had happened, I’m sure of it.”

Months had gone by, and life was achieving a semblance of normality for us all. With spring, 'Ro's landscaping efforts were showing, and the gardens and fields looked much as they had before the siege. To me, anyway. She told me she was trying a new color scheme in the South Flower Garden. I, of course, couldn’t tell the difference. "I'm still looking at the world through rose-colored glasses," I reminded her, the old joke sounding less bitter than it had lately. To my ears, at least.      

We began thinking about what, if anything, we should do to commemorate the battle anniversary, which was approaching. And which day to use as anniversary, anyway. When Kurt had, against his will, attacked the White House? When Charles and I had been taken captive? When Jean had sacrificed herself to save us all? Ultimately we felt that the first anniversary of the siege of the school was most important to the students, and planned a general assembly and moment of silence for that day. We expected it to be a difficult day, but cathartic. Necessary. We were taken aback a little at how hard most of the school found the day before the anniversary, though. More weeping, more hollow-eyed blankness then than the anniversary day itself. Perhaps reflecting on the last day before our world fell apart was harder to take than remembering the first day after.     

I had a tough day, too, the day before. And the anniversary itself, and a few days after. Reliving those days of a year before, thinking what I could have done differently. But I wasn't worried that I was sinking into depression again. I was cutting myself some slack and giving in to the melancholy for a few days, recognizing that I had healed a lot, but still needed to grieve some, one year later.     

Mostly, I was functioning very well. Not just functioning, enjoying my work in a way I hadn’t for some time. I was teaching my classes with a renewed zeal, working effectively with Alpha Flight, our affiliate team in Canada, and the FBI reps on our MPP project, training with the team and with students in the Danger Room, directing the school play. I was starting to feel like myself again.     

A lot of feeling better was just letting time work its magic. Some of it was the result of getting over the stubborn insistence that I had to handle all this myself, and truly enjoying and benefiting from the comfort that my old friends could give me. Charles, ‘Ro, Hank – they all shared my loss and I found, over time, that talking and listening to them was more consoling than painful. There was a healing factor in just being in my own home, doing my own job with the people who cared about me and had cared about Jean, and once I opened myself to it, I profited from it.     

There were still times I missed Jean so much I could taste it. Even worse were the times when I forgot she was gone, tried to say something to her in my brain or rolled over in the night reaching for her. But, as time went on, those were fewer and farther between. Jean’s absence had felt like a sharp wound for months after her disappearance. But lately it seemed only a dull ache most of the time, and even that was receding.     

No, it wasn’t Jean’s absence that was worrying me lately, but what seemed to be her presence. Or the presence of someone or something that called itself Jean. The dreams, and even waking impressions, of Jean speaking to me telepathically became quite frequent in the first few months after she was lost. She’d tell me she wasn’t dead, that she’d be coming back. At first I thought they were just an expression of my own longing, wish fulfillment in dream and fantasy. But they were too insistent and too real for that.      

Charles had alluded to similar experiences, saying he wasn’t surprised that I thought Jean might be alive but we hadn’t talked about it much. He’d tried to raise the subject once or twice after I told him what I suspected, but I wasn’t ready to discuss my experiences or let him into my brain and he’d backed off. Time had passed, though, and the messages from Jean were getting more and more frequent. I brought the topic up again with Charles and he confessed that he, too, was hearing thoughts from Jean. Only he wasn’t sure that they were from Jean. He wasn’t able to articulate exactly why he doubted the messages’ veracity, but he said that somehow it didn’t feel like Jean in his brain.      

He told me that the last moment he'd felt Jean as herself was when we were all in the Blackbird and she was outside. He'd tried to convince her to join us in getting to safety, assured her that she could move the jet and escape, too, if we all worked together. And then it was as if another being was there, along with Jean. When Jean took over his mind and spoke through him to me, saying "Good-bye," something happened. He was sure there was someone else there in his brain, too, along with her. Jean had never had powers that could overcome his. He wasn't sure what had happened then and he wasn't sure what was left now, but it wasn't Jean as we knew her. An enhanced Jean, a mutated Jean? Or was Jean dead and someone had absorbed all her memories and was impersonating her? He didn't know the answers, but he felt sure that the being that was contacting him was someone other than the woman I'd loved.      

And once he’d told me that, I attended to the dreams more and found the same thing. The words were Jean’s – the references to things we’d done were ones only she would know – yet somehow the presence in my mind was not Jean’s, not what I remembered. I didn’t know what to make of this. If not for Charles, I might have thought that I was just imagining the difference, not remembering anymore just what it felt like to be telepathically connected to her. But I didn’t think we could both be imagining this. And, then it wasn’t just Charles and me, but Logan, too. Still, it took me a while to realize that he was experiencing something similar.      

Logan certainly had a role in my improved state of mind, as well. We weren’t lovers, not in any real sense. I think I could have fallen in love with him. I was certainly needy enough and he was appealing enough. But he had made it so clear that love was out of the question for him and that kept me at arm’s length, emotionally. He was friendly, and he was a valuable team member, and we were having sex several times a week, but there was still a certain reserve about him that made clear the boundaries of the relationship.      

And, truth be told, that was fine with me. I was increasingly sure that I didn’t want to go back into the closet, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to step out so far, either. If I’d been involved with someone where we were kind of a social couple, I’d have to deal with that with my colleagues and students in a way I wasn’t ready for.      

With Logan – well, we certainly weren’t an acknowledged couple and I think it unlikely that most people even realized we were friends. The time we spent together was out of the watchful eye of students and faculty. I wasn’t suffering from insomnia so much anymore, but I was still meeting Logan at night, to train together and to talk, as well as to have sex. We’d often start with one activity and end up with another: swimming laps or working simulations and then, in the flush of success and exertion, sucking each other off or fucking on the Danger Room floor or by the side of the pool. And long conversations afterwards, with him telling me his fragmented memories of long ago times, often spurred by poems I’d recited to him or books of historical fiction I’d lent him.     

So, I was getting the advantages of regular sex and the excitement of getting to know Logan in ways I hadn’t before, in ways I don’t think anyone else at the school did know him. And I didn’t have to deal with the potential changes in how colleagues and students would view me if I came out more publicly. I was getting annoyed, yet again, at the girls in the poetry class and their crushes, but I also saw their mooning in class as a good thing, as a sign that they saw me sort of coming back from the dead, not thinking about Jean all the time.      

That Logan might be disturbed by thoughts of Jean hadn’t occurred to me. He’d gotten into the habit of knocking on my door at night when the aftereffects of a nightmare were bothering him. I hadn’t seen the full-body shaking again that had so alarmed me that night in Vermont, but he often seemed shaken and worn out by the time I saw him. He said that sex helped and I was only too happy to provide that kind of assistance, for my own sake as much as for his. I never thought much about the fact that he seemed not to want to have sex, or even talk much, in my bedroom – that we always had to go to his room or the Danger Room or the pool or the gym. My room was on a student floor and more in the thick of things than his, which was right near the Danger Room. So, I figured he just wanted more privacy than we could have in my room. But one night when he knocked on my door just past midnight I felt kind of settled in bed, and asked him to stay there with me.     

“I can’t.” He shook his head.     

“It’s okay. The soundproofing is good here. No one will hear us,” I said, with a smile, gesturing to him to sit on the bed. He just shook his head, looking nervously around. “What’s wrong, Logan?” I asked, feeling suddenly like there was more to his refusal than worry that some student would hear us having sex.     

He kept looking back and forth, not meeting my eye. “I can’t tell you.”      

“Why not?”     

“You’ll think I’m nuts.”     

“I haven’t yet,” I replied, trying to reassure him. “And you’ve told me some pretty crazy-sounding stories. Imprisonment and torture at the hands of two governments; fragmented memories that seem to span well over 100 years from a guy who doesn’t look a day over 30. You’re not nuts – you’ve just had a lot of crazy things happen to you.”      

“Yeah, well, this is different.” But he did sit down on my bed.      

I reached over and started rubbing his shoulders, which were terribly tense, talking to him reassuringly. “Did you have another nightmare?” I asked, and he nodded but didn’t say anything. “Lie down,” I said. “I’ll rub your back.”     

He lay prone across my bed and I got on top of him, straddling him as I rubbed his shoulders and back, feeling some of the tension go away as I massaged and talked to him softly. “That feels good,” he said, sounding sleepy and relaxed.     

I, on the other hand, was feeling more and more awake. His body under me was giving me ideas for more than just a back rub. I leaned down to his face, turned to the side, and tried to kiss him, but he turned away. “Not here,” he said. And then he was asleep.      

I wasn't quite resigned to just let him sleep. I kept rubbing his back, thinking it might wake him a little and lead to something else. He turned on his side in his sleep and after a while I lay down next to him, pressed against his back, spoon fashion. Nuzzled his neck a little, reached around and started stroking his cock. He was getting hard, seemed to like it. He was maybe sort of half asleep and half awake, moving into me, sighing happily. But then he stopped suddenly, took my hand away and said, "Stop it."      

“Why?” I asked.     

“She doesn’t want us to.”     

"Logan?"     

He sat up and turned on the lamp. "I didn't mean that. I was half asleep."     

"I know you were half asleep, but I think you did mean it. You're talking about Jean, aren't you?"     

He nodded, slowly. We looked at each other. "I don't believe in ghosts," he said.      

"No, me neither. She's not a ghost."     

"She’s talking to you, too?”     

"Yeah, except I'm not sure it is her." I explained what Charles had told me about that time in the Blackbird and how her telepathic presence had felt since.      

"Jean never talked to me in my head, before. I guess I wouldn't know how it should feel." He looked me in the eye. "What do you think it means?"     

"I don't know. But this I know for certain sure: Jean wouldn't tell you not to have sex with me. Is that what she's telling you?"     

"Yeah, but I figured I'd just agree not to do it in your room. Her room."      

"So, you're compromising with a ghost? A ghost you don't believe in?"      

"Okay, when you say it like that it sounds a little strange." I laughed at that. He thought some more about what I'd said before. "Why not? Why do you think she wouldn't tell me not to? Don't you think she'd be pissed off about you and me?"      

I shook my head "If she was, she wouldn't let it govern her actions, anyway. That's not how we were with each other. I told you - we didn't know if it would work out between us. But what we did know was we wouldn't stand in each other's way." I stopped talking, mulling over what he'd said before. What he said about ghosts was bothering me, making me think of something. "Nineteenth Century American Literature."     

"What are you talking about?"     

"It's a class of mine. We're reading The Turn of the Screw. There's all this whispering and muttering in class. Three kids transferred out of class, saying they couldn't read it, that it’s giving them nightmares. I meant to talk to Charles about this - I've taught this book before without trouble. I was figuring it was indicative of more after effects of the siege. But now I don’t think so. It's a ghost story. I never thought of it that way, but yeah, somebody who wasn't familiar with how telepathy feels might think it's Jean's ghost talking to them."     

"So you think Jean - or whoever it is - is talking to some of the kids, too?"      

"Maybe. And scaring the shit out of them in the process. That’s not like Jean at all. If it were Jean, she’d assure them she’s not a ghost. Or stay away from the kids altogether, not wanting to scare them. But this being isn’t showing that kind of judgment. Charles, you, me. Students, too. What does she want? Who is she?"     

"I don't know. I'm just relieved to know I'm not the only one she's talking to." He thought some more. “Do you think Jean’s alive?”     

“No.” I shook my head. “I think it’s someone or something else. But that somehow whoever it is got hold of her memories. Because if it were Jean in my brain, no matter how she’d changed, I think I could tell. And if someone had her captive she’d be in my brain. If she were alive, nobody could stop her from talking to me. And the other stuff – telling you not to do it with me, scaring the kids – none of that gibes with the woman I knew.”      

I was convinced and I think I managed to convince him. We needed to be on guard, I thought, from whoever this presence with Jean’s voice and memories was, since we didn’t know her intentions. But she wasn’t Jean. That’s what I thought and what I kept on thinking. Until the day Jean walked in the door.

Literature Guide for After the Fall
Poems

Randall Jarrell. “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.”
This brief, haunting poem is about exactly what its title says. Jarrell’s experiences in the Army Air Corps in World War II are reflected in much of his poetry. Scott reads this one to Logan in Vermont and gets shivers when Logan nods in recognition, indicating his graphic memories of death during that war. Read the poem at http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1088miss a dia humax 5400.

Robert Service. “Song of the Wage Slave.”
Canadian poet Robert Service wrote mostly about rugged men in northern climes. Working hard on the tunnel in Vermont, Scott thinks of a line from “Song of the Wage Slave”: “Resolute, dumb, uncomplaining – a man in a world of men”. Much of this poem (and, in fact, much of Service’s poetry) makes me think of Logan. Another line from this one: “I, with the strength of two men, savage and shy and wild –“ seems very evocative of Logan, or at least my version of him. Service’s poetry is very accessible. Read this one at http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem1843.html

Carl Sandburg. “Chicago.”
This is arguably Sandburg’s most famous poem. He describes the city in both brutally accurate and admiring tones, speaking of “the marks of wanton hunger” on the faces of women and children as well as a city “proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.” Logan relates to the poem, saying it is the Chicago he remembers, suggesting that he was there at the time of the poem. It’s available many places, including http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/5.html.

Oscar Wilde. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”
This is the poem that Scott is teaching when he breaks down during his poetry class. The line that causes his collapse is one of the most famous lines in the poem: “Each man kills the thing he loves, but each man does not die.” Scott makes reference in the class to Wilde’s imprisonment, which had prompted this poem. Oscar Wilde was a highly successful writer and popular in English literary/social circles until his trial for sodomy. His two years in Reading Gaol impoverished and embittered him. The Project Gutenberg version of the poem is available at http://www.gutenberg.net/etext95/rgaol10.txt.

William Shakespeare. Sonnet 58.
The Shakespearean sonnets show up a lot in my stories. Sonnet 58, in which Will is trying to come to terms with his lover's infidelity, appears in this series in the first story, when Scott is remembering the period when he was waiting to see whether Jean would leave him for Logan. Scott identifies with Will's feelings about his lover, known to Shakespearean scholars as the Fair Youth, saying that he was waiting, "though waiting so be hell." The poem, an agonizing portrayal of a man trying to force himself to accept something that is causing him great pain, can be read at http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/58.html.


Plays

William Shakespeare. A number of Shakespearean plays are referenced in this series. The plays are widely available but I like www.shakespeare-online.com for its clear layout and interesting commentary.

Hamlet.
Scott paraphrases Polonius’s advice to his son (“to thine own self be true”) when he is deciding to try to live more honestly in the future. Perhaps the most famous of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet is full of phrases and sayings that are part of our everyday language. Read it at http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/hamletscenes.html.

Henry V.
In the first story in this series, Scott reflects on the likelihood that the current calm won’t last, and that war between mutants and normal humans will begin again, saying that they will need to “stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood” again, as King Henry exhorted the troops. See http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/henryvscenes.html to read the play.

King Lear.
Scott quotes a line from Lear a couple of times: “That way madness lies; let me shun that.” Lear is, in fact, driven mad by his own actions. A beautiful and tragic portrayal of descent into madness and misery, Lear can be found at http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/learscenes.html.

Twelfth Night.
The school play at Xavier’s will be Twelfth Night, one of the most popular of the Shakespearean comedies. It’s a story of gender confusion, cross-dressing and mistaken identity, but all turns out right in the end. The play was supposedly commissioned for the Twelfth Night (January 6 – twelfth night of Christmas) celebrations at Elizabeth’s court in 1601. Read it at http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/twnscenes.html.

Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest.
Wilde’s Earnest is pretty much the quintessential drawing room comedy. Scott comments that the kids know the lighthearted Wilde from having seen this play last year, and that now they are seeing his darker side with “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” A copy of the Project Gutenberg edition of the play is at
http://www.farid-hajji.net/books/en/Wilde_Oscar/gutenberg3.html.



Novels

Charles Dickens. Tale of Two Cities.
Scott echoes Dickens's famous first line (“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times”) when he says that the post-war period of Xavier is not “the best of times, not by a long shot.” Dickens’s book is a story of the French Revolution and the two cities of the title are Paris and London. Romance, drama, and doppelgangers all infuse the plot. Read the Project Gutenberg edition at http://www.gutenberg.net/etext94/2city12.txt.

Henry James. The Turn of the Screw.
A long short story or novella, James’s nineteenth century ghost story still causes shivers and sleepless nights in its readers, but the students at Xavier’s have particular reason to be disturbed by it, as Scott belatedly realizes. It’s a horror story of two innocent children corrupted by evil spirits. Read a searchable online version of the story at http://www.online-literature.com/henry_james/turn_screw/.


Miscellaneous

Bible.