Don't own it, all the usual stuff.
John knows he is an egoist. He is not an egomaniac, no matter how many different people throw the term at him. Now, in this filthy camp in the green-tinged light, people call themselves egomaniacs because it makes them seem important, higher than they really are. John has no need for that kind of inflation. He stands at the right hand of a God-maker and controls the most destructive and essential element.
He is feared; he is powerful. These are facts like his control over light and heat. No one questions his control anymore; no one belittles his power. These are not what make him an egoist.
It is the little leather-bound book that he keeps inside his jacket that makes him an egoist. The one full of soft, handwritten pages that he sneaks out late at night. He thumbs through the pages and keeps a tiny flare close enough to warm the pages but not burn them. Magneto keeps dozens of books scattered throughout the base, Nietzsche and Shakespeare and others and has offered John the use of his library. Neither of them has ever touched the books, but they remain little packets of normalcy that stay safely packed away in trunks and backpacks and tents. They serve as reminders of a time when words were enough.
John has never touched Magneto's books, although he carries several of them as a courtesy. He prefers to reread his own work. His own lines, written in his own hand in soft black ink across tan pages. They are not complete stories; those he had to leave in a thick binder at Xavier's. All he has is his poetry, single snapshots of lust and love and jealousy. Verse after verse begging to be The One, celebrating little touches, cursing Her. He reads it and feels the joy and hurt rush over him, as strong as the first time. He pulls his blanket over his head and uses his old bic, and it feels just like he's back at school, waiting for Bobby to come back from a meeting or a date. He reads them over and over again, turning to specific ones depending on his mood, because no one can capture the feelings John craves better than himself.
When he wakes from a rare good dream, he always tries to capture it in verse, or even prose. Needs to have good memories in there too, the ones from school he never bothered to record because he was too busy living. He needs them in the thin warm journal, because he's too much of an egoist for anyone's surrogate joy to do.