A new school year had finally started at Xavier's. New students filled the grounds and old ones had done quite a bit of growing up. They had seen a time when it felt like all of this would end and their sanctuary would be ripped to pieces. But no, the school stood strong on the values that Charles Xavier himself had first instilled it with. And while it still looked very much the same it was not the place that Ororo had remembered growing up in.
She rubbed at a single tear that slipped past her blue eyes and down her smooth caramel colored skin. She stood in the grass before three headstones, headstones that she had never even once gave any thought about only 30 days before. And before those 30 days had someone stood in front of her and told her that she would be burying her mentor that was like a father to her, and her two best friends all in the same week, she would have struck them down with a lightening bolt so strong the earth would have rang out in pain.
Now it seemed as if the sky was crying.
Non-stop for two days it had been raining and Ororo was not sure that she was ready to let it stop. She placed a hand on one of the smaller headstones and felt the cool granite under her fingertips as the rain fell everywhere but on her. Ororo kneeled and traced the name on the headstone with her eyes closed as more tears slowly ran down her face.
"Oh God Jean…" Ororo's voice was barely a whisper as the feeling of loss gripped at her throat with an iron clutch having already demolished what was left of her heart.
Jean Grey was her dearest friend and she was gone. And while the two headstones to the left of hers were only there seemingly due to her, Ororo knew better than that. She knew better than to ever think a harsh word against the woman that she had grown up with, because she knew her. She knew Jean better than she had ever known anyone and she knew that Jean did not cause this.
Ororo had watched her fall apart from the very first time that they had made it to Alkali Lake to the day she watched Logan sink his adamantium claws into her. And in all of that time she had watched Jean struggle and fight and claw for every single second. But when the Phoenix had shown itself, she fought hard for control, and she was fighting right down to her very last breath. Ororo knew this, and so she did not blame Jean. Her heart simply ached for her best friend, her sister. In the end X-men had won. They were still the good guys and they had won.
But Ororo had never thought that victory would taste like this. She never thought it would taste this bitter and feel this suffocating. Least of all she never thought it would lead to deaths of three of the most important people in her life. Ororo found it hard to believe the same way that she once did when Charles's hand was there to reassure her. And she knew she didn't believe in the silence that he, Jean, and Scott had left behind.
A silence that only took a month out to overtake her.
A deafening silence that would render her speechless and weak in the middle of the night, yearning for her best friend to comfort her, hoping to see their faces again. There had already been an anger in Ororo, pitted in the core of her stomach, but 30 days and 3 deaths had made it all the more real and that much more unbearable.
