Mutant High can be a scary place, especially from the outside.
Even when you're one of the "Gifted Youngsters" in question, that doesn't change the fact that the building is huge—strong, grey, cloaked in ivy, lined with hedges. On misty days, it looks like either a vampire's hideout or a Hogwarts that landed in upstate New York. Except here, students show up with powers that are usually already way out of control. We are already traumatized little monsters. Less cute than spurts of magic popping up here and there at puberty.
For many of us, Xavier's was a place to hide, to be safe, and to be someone new. But even that makes it scary. The possibility of being someone new can be terrifying.
I remember walking up that front path only dimly. Severely sleep deprived at the time from hours at the police department, I saw it first through heavy-lidded eyes, head tilted downward. My body was so numb with fatigue, I walked up that front path like I was crawling out of battle.
By then, it wasn't even weird to be walking into a dark mansion. I was no longer certain of what the world looked like.
At a minimum, I wasn't sure what was normal.
I walked beside Jean, all nerves, braced for an attack at any moment. I was still in my pajamas. It was one of those Just After moments of adrenaline when you wonder if your heartbeat will ever slow down, if anything will ever feel real again. I was desperate to find ground zero.
"Jesus, where'd you find her?" were the first words I heard when I walked in.
It was Logan, though I didn't know it at the time, and he would later tell me that what he saw in my face that day was all he ever needed to know about me. A strangely intense revelation for a man with whom I rarely spoke.
Magneto's Human-Mutant war would truly escalate around two years later. It took over our lives.
In the cities, scrappy-boned old buildings built before prohibition would fall to alleyway fires or Molotov cocktails thrown from passing strangers. In suburbs that had been the same since the dawn of high school gym shorts, homes were caught off guard by secrets that siblings, wives, and children hid from each other, restaurants were vandalized for serving all clientele, and companies were rumored to know, after all, that their employees had tails or wings or flower buds that flew from their fingertips.
It was an ugly thing that had been coming a lot time, and that had been there below the surface all along. It was a suspicion that had been with us always and only recently grew talons and shape-shifting skin. Obsession with the differences that made us inferior sucked us all in, whether we wanted to play a part or not. Beneath the physical damage to people and property were the friendships stretched and families torn apart.
Even at "Mutant High" in upstate New York—where I thought for once, I might be on the sidelines and not squarely in the middle of it all—we would be ripped full-speed through the same onslaught.
You can call me a coward if you want. Cold, indifferent, an ice queen. I am who I am. I had my reasons for being the way I was.
The upshot, really, is that a lot of shit had gone down in my life, and I had some nice little demons to tame while I tried to figure out what being a decent person meant in this new landscape. This was in the early days, when the news first showed other mutants tearing down buildings, demanding that humans be paid back in kind for cruelty. I wanted to be certain of where I stood and why I stood there.
I was angry. I was also a paranoid, anxious, bitter, and terrified 17-year-old who had seen something so terrible it broke a part of me. And I decided, for reasons I hope you'll understand, that doing the right thing meant finding my own feet first.
It wasn't exactly painless.
2 years later
"Let me go, Celia," John said, trudging up the hill.
I followed instead, soles thin on the snow. His voice was low and tense but I felt vaguely not in control of my actions. For context, I am very much usually a rule-follower.
"Where are you going?"
He turned abruptly to face me and ice washed through my stomach at the anger in his eyes.
"I just need to be alone right now, ok?"
He was yelling. I felt myself automatically shut down at the sound of a raised voice. I hadn't quite rid myself of the instinct, apparently, and John had never yelled at me before. In fact, despite all his attitude, I don't think I'd ever heard him yell.
The wind whipped at our sides at the high altitude, and I latched my arms around myself hastily.
"Aren't you sick of their shit?" he said, though not really looking at me at all, caught up in the moment of his own rebellion. "Aren't you sick of being treated like a child? Like you're powerless? Like you aren't even a part of what's happening?"
To be honest, I would have preferred not to be a part of what was happening. But I couldn't say that.
"We live in a school, John," I said, shaking my head. "A school is supposed to be a safe place for learning, not a guerrilla training facility."
He was quick to recover.
"And that's going so well so far, right?" He said, eyes meeting mine, frowning.
He nodded to the landscape, and didn't need to do much else. After all, we were standing a few paces away from a jet parked over a secret government facility under a lake, our younger peers kidnapped and trapped somewhere below. It was kind of a stretch for the term "field trip."
I gaped. I knew he was headed in a dangerous direction but I couldn't explain why I felt that way without explaining a lot of other things, things I still hadn't told him.
"Just because something doesn't work out perfectly right away doesn't mean it isn't still the better thing to do," I said instead, silently pleading with him to just stop fighting and come back with me.
He'd been having violent dreams for weeks. I knew that, because a bizarre bonus feature of my mutation meant I would experience other people's dreams if they were nearby. As a result, I had seen all of that fire on his mind...buildings on fire and people on fire. Humans crying out in the streets, and one man at the center of it all, hands ablaze.
He was nearby a lot.
I just need a little bit more time, I pleaded silently now.
He looked at me with those warm grey eyes that I'd come to need, and for a moment I thought I could reach out and pull him close again, physically prevent him from leaving. I suddenly wondered what I would do without him close by. I felt irrationally like I was dying.
But he stared at me across the snow, face closed and angry. It was a look that I imagined said "of course that's enough for you," like a pat on the head.
If we were at school, it would just be a fight. He would brood and pace the grounds, clicking his lighter open and shut between the neat little trees in the backyard, and then we would make up...somehow I doubted this fight would end that way.
"I'm not sure what's right, right now," he said, jaw still angry.
I was suddenly aware of my numb fingers, feeling overly fragile in the wind. I wondered if he would startle if I moved closer, like a wild animal.
"John, it's cold," I said stupidly.
I still felt like I was dying for reasons I couldn't explain. Is this a powers thing or a human thing? Please be a powers thing.
"I just need to be alone." he said, and then his grey eyes caught on mine for just a second, just enough time for my heart to leap and then splinter apart on the snowy hilltop, and he walked away toward the trees.
Nope. Human thing. Damn.
It was a while before I made it back to the jet.
At first, I'd taken some quality time, involuntarily, to just stare at the spot where John had stood. Then slowly, I tried to come to terms with the fact that he'd done it, really left, potentially walked away to the "Dark Side" (as Bobby called it, lightheartedly, and as Rogue called it, less so), because I knew Magneto and Mystique still lurked somewhere on the premises. My mind finally told my shivering body to get back indoors before the rest of me caught up to my grief.
Logan was steps from boarding when I reached the landing spot. Artie, one of the younger kids, stared solemnly from his arms.
Logan spotted me and frowned.
"Don't tell me" he said, with the tone of someone who's already had a long day.
"Don't ask," I responded in the same.
Artie stared at me from Logan's arms without comment. He was a quiet kid by force of nature, unable to speak but somehow able to communicate with mental images if he had physical contact with another person. I skipped outside the reach of his arms as we boarded, numbly sure I had nothing I wanted seen.
The others were waiting for us on the jet—Storm calmed Rogue with one hand while coordinating controls with the other. Bobby sat on Rogue's other side. Jean, Scott, and the Professor had all made it, and all of the before-kidnapped children were seated around the jet. One of them eyed me warily as I neared, brown doe eyes distrustful.
Grace, the pre-pubescent empath. Perfect. I gave her a short smile as I passed, like a preemptive apology, and tried to put as much distance between our seats as possible. She looked immediately like she was about to cry. Oh cool, that's what that dying feeling looks like.
I tried to focus on our liftoff status. The adults looked as anxious to leave this place as I was.
"Where's John?" said Rogue from my right.
I kept my eyes on the window. Think of neutral things: water, Switzerland, beige.
"He's with Magneto," Jean said quietly, and I saw her eyes flit in my direction.
Another rock lodged itself in the back of my throat. She had confirmed my worst suspicion. It was the first time I would hear the words said out loud.
Suddenly the jet was colder and crueler than I remembered it being.
Rogue and Bobby's eyes were wide. They looked at each other and then at me, Rogue crossing the room in two steps before pausing, suddenly uncertain. She touched my arm gently after a beat with one gloved hand, forcing me to face her.
"Celia–"
"I know."
She frowned and searched my eyes but I kept looking down to keep from crying. Is this my fault?
"Did he tell you anything?"
I swallowed and stared out the front window at the trees in the distance, at the lengthening crack in the dam, and the shadows of our scrambling teachers in the foreground. I felt the heavy weight in my chest that had been threatening to tear me away with it close a door, quietly, somewhere deep inside.
"He said he needed to be alone."
My voice was so quiet that my two friends were forced to lean close to hear.
Rogue's expressive Southern face fell into a grimace.
"Cel–"
"I don't want to talk about it," I said simply, a silent plea in my eyes.
She grimaced but nodded. No one understood emotion management like Rogue.
Oh, how I'd loved being new Celia with the cool blank slate and adoring friends. I had tried to leave my baggage in the past where it couldn't haunt me. Now it was about to cost me something I had one of those deep-stomach, sinking feelings I would never replace.
This is your fault, you know. All your fault. He hated school, hated feeling useless. Why would he stay? For you? He told you things about his past, like actual, concrete, covers-all-the-major points things, like a normal person. You could literally see his dreams, even though that ability makes zero sense because you can't even make sense as a mutant. You told him basically nothing, you cold, useless monster.
Grace would sob the whole way home, although I gave her as wide a berth as possible in the contained space. I was having a hard time still registering how upset she was.
My own eyes would be dry until I was alone. Old skills died hard, apparently.
We would leave Alkali Lake behind that day, but we left Jean with it, and the shards of something in me drowned with her.