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.