Chapter 5: Something that matters
A fun way to get the rumor mill's attention is to show up to class wearing the resident delinquent's leather jacket.
Nobody was more surprised than Bobby, who you'd think would've had more questions when his roommate disappeared every night. But as Rogue put it afterward, patting his shoulder almost in comfort: "Men don't notice things."
It was an adjustment from the simpler privacy of the two of us alone on our walks. The daytime with everyone looking felt wildly uncharted, though this seemed to be case for both of us. John, who'd been kicked out of what he claimed to be a legendary list of foster homes and schools for an array of offenses (most of them fighting, others of them arson), did not hold hands. Except for that occasionally, if a hallway was empty or if he was unusually at ease, he held mine.
Newfound rumor mill fame notwithstanding, I still toed the line, scared the Professor would find some crack in my mysterious psychic immunity and discover that I wasn't Xavier's material after all. I'd convinced myself that my behaving in class and smiling (or trying to) at teachers would help somehow help avoid this scenario.
John did not, though it didn't seem like it would've made any difference. If anything, the teachers seemed almost harder on him than ever before, as though our relationship was somehow evidence of sketchy motives.
I found I didn't really care. If they had taken one look at me and asked no questions, I wasn't sure I put much stock their assessment of character.
Plus, he made an effort where it mattered in discreet ways, like baiting Rogue less often or leaving his jacket on my chair in our coldest class (Scott's). The closest we had to the easy privacy of those first walks were moments we could steal away from everyone else. This was often still in the backyard. On a particularly bad day when one of the Professor's sessions had left me spiraling so badly that I dropped an entire pile of plates at dinner, I found him waiting with tea by the back door, made exactly as I usually did.
He looked at me sometimes, at night or when he thought no one was looking, like he was surprised to still find me there, and I was sure it was a bad idea to trust someone who looked at me like that. But then he'd shift to free up my spot on the couch or remember to pick up an extra chair for a table and I'd sink into that private joy of knowing that someone was making space for me.
Rogue and Bobby joined us occasionally on the back deck, but more often the four of us would grab a meal or hang out in the living room. Rogue continued to treat John with a kind of practiced distance that seemed less out of actual disdain and more out of her continued sense that someone should. Kitty generally avoided us. For one thing, she was just a little younger and a little more eager to please the faculty than the rest of us. For the other, she was absolutely the person who'd sent Storm on her Filch-inspired quest to find students out of bed, and had taken to exiting rooms promptly with a squeak if she saw John or I approaching.
To be fair, John was not the least abrasive with people. The closest he came to a soft spot for anyone was Jones, who showed up one day out of the blue (the way we all did) with the bluntness and excess of information only a ten-year-old insomniac could have.
John and I met him on his first day in the mansion, when he was sitting by our usual spot on the couch. I plopped down next to him while John hovered a few feet away, characteristically wary of children.
"What's your power?" Jones asked me, the moment names were out of the way.
His tone was so sure for such a small kid. He couldn't have been older than elementary school. I wondered whether his parents had voluntarily sent him to the school or whether his story was one of the bleaker ones.
"Complicated, I guess," I said.
He just waited, expectant. John's eyebrows shot up, but he seemed more amused at the kid's brazenly expectant expression than anything else.
"I can control light, project it—"
"Like laser beams?"
I smiled.
"I guess. Nothing that powerful though." Or at least nothing I was willing to see become that powerful.
He nodded, glasses slipping down his nose, as though this was perfectly acceptable.
"I can also heal other people," I said, feeling for some reason compelled to tell him more. "And sometimes, I can see what people are dreaming, if I'm close by."
"That makes sense," he said, face scrunched up as though untangling the reason why.
John and I exchanged glances over the boy's head. I tried not to smile at the jolt in my stomach to see him smiling, in case the kid thought I was mocking him.
"You're like a guardian angel," said Jones.
I laughed without thinking. My mind immediately went to my mom. All those bad nights. Bad days.
"What—why?" I said, shaking my head and trying to laugh off anything on my face.
John was smirking, the handsome idiot.
"You can make dark places light again, and fight with light. And you can heal the wounded, and look out for people in their dreams."
How sad was it that a kid could visualize me more positively than I could?
John fully abandoned the distance he'd put between himself and the kid, still smiling.
"Who are you, again?" he said, leaning way forward.
The boy stared evenly back at John, very matter-of-fact for a scrawny twelve-year-old.
"Jones."
"I think you're onto something, Jones," said John, sitting beside me on the couch, arm looping around my shoulders.
Jones shrugged both of us off and returned to deep rapture with a program on deep sea reptiles.
John leaned close to my ear, breath on my neck, and whispered, "What'd I tell ya, angel?"
John POV:
Celia had always had secrets and John had always known it.
He hadn't known it right away. He'd known that she would be torture for him somehow, when she'd first walked into the living room with the fairytale face and endearing manner. But he'd assumed it would be more of the usual kind. At first glance, he saw the Professor's next poster child—the sequel to Jean, the 2.0 of Kitty—a quick sell on the X-Men brand of peace. She would float through Xavier's with the kind of easy assurance that beautiful people had, probably be mentored personally by Storm, and write him off as fast as everyone always did.
It was only on second glance, after she'd blurted that her parents were dead and that she had nowhere else to go, that he'd recognized the hollow look in her eyes, the quiet distrust, the wariness in her stance, like she was sure the fight wasn't over, and he suspected that she'd be something much worse: something that mattered to him.
A new kind of torture, because so few things did.
It annoyed him immediately, that something could shift so fast in the universe on a weekday afternoon.
The decision to keep his distance from her was made immediately and with discipline. He'd been emitting a general "I couldn't care less" aura for so long that it was both an easy skin to slip into and one that no one questioned. John had never been a people person and played well with few other than Bobby. No one thought anything of it when he could barely look at her for fear of looking too hard.
Everything she did etched into him.
He couldn't have gone on forever like that. It was a relief the night she'd walked out on the back deck without seeing him. He'd thought about slipping back inside and putting off whatever collision course he was on for another day, but she'd been staring into the backyard with that empty, ageless look again that tugged at him, and there hadn't been a choice.
Even once they were together, when he had more pieces of her to work with, John knew she kept secrets, whatever she'd come from that had led her here. When no one was looking, she would kind of lean sideways with a frown, staring down somewhere inside the floor. It unsettled him, but she didn't seem eager to share, and he was in no hurry to scare her off.
If anything, he found himself nudging her out of it when there were other students around, on some instinct that these were moments nobody else was meant to see. Celia would straighten and smile that agreeable smile again, but it was always as though she'd been caught realizing she couldn't hold herself up anymore.
If it were anyone else he would think it was a physical thing. Maybe she was just tired. The school could be a lot to manage, even for a student much better with teachers and much more hard-working than him, like Celia. But he knew her too close-up to believe that was it.
Celia Lange had secrets that he didn't know. And that, more than anything else—the disgruntled feedback from teachers, the annoyed sighs of Kitty or Rogue, Bobby's picturesque New Englandness that seemed somehow to remain intact no matter how much weird shit happened at that school—bothered him the most. Celia's secrets, and the threat that she would forever be slipping into that middle-distance to face them alone, felt like it could kill him.
If he'd been right about anything from first glance, though, it was that she was too good for him. He knew he wasn't alone in knowing it.
It wasn't just that Celia was beautiful. It was that the way she looked meant her bluntness somehow charmed rather than offended. No matter how clearly he saw the stiffness in her shoulders, the tension behind her eyes, the careful sweep of a room as she entered it, she seemed able to pass it off to anyone else with a shrug, a practiced smile, a quip, like amiable deflection was as easy to her as breathing. And people believed her. Because they wanted to.
She was well-liked immediately, by Rogue of all people, who as far as John knew had stopped making friends at Bobby and Logan and only more or less tolerated John's presence because of the former.
But Celia was visibly nervous around children, the sound of a raised voice, outside doors left unlocked, and storms. She didn't speak in class unless it was directly asked of her. It felt like a habit she'd forgotten to shed, from wherever she'd come from before she'd shattered his carefully distanced universe, from a lifetime of ducking into the background. No one else seemed to notice. And teachers liked her, because she worked hard, didn't destroy classrooms, and at least in John's opinion, looked lovely scowling at a book.
John, in comparison, was shuffling by academically, too restless to care and too angry to cooperate with professors, and could barely go a week at a time without reprimand from Storm. Not even just a reprimand in general, but specifically from Storm. Who wasn't even his biggest critic.
One afternoon found Celia waiting for him by the stairwell after class, leaning against the banister, a Physics book open in her hands. She frowned down at it as though suspicious of its motives.
"Hey angel," he said, and she half-smiled as though she'd known all along he'd been there, though he saw her stiffen just before in such a barely noticeable way he wondered why he was sure he hadn't imagined it.
She closed the book and raised her eyes to his, smiling slightly.
"No detention today at all," she noted, eyebrows up. "You losing your touch?"
He smirked and took two steps past her into the empty study, pulling her inside with him until her back was to the wall on the opposite side. Out of sight of the hallway, he brushed his lips against hers, hands around her waist, tugging her into him.
"Am I?" he smirked as her lips parted slightly.
"Hmmm," she answered, eyelids flickering shut as she leaned forward to crash his face to hers, fingers running up his neck and into his hair, pulling him closer.
"Hey Halo!"
John groaned as Colossus came striding down the hallway toward them.
"Sorry to interrupt," Colossus said, looking not sorry at all. "Professor was looking for you. He said something about needing a second session this week. Something about 'opening the mind'?"
Celia frowned. "Ok," she said shortly, but her eyes were somewhere else and John could see the wall she built like it was a screen over her features.
Oblivious to this behavior, Colossus turned to John, whose eyes were still on Celia's expression. "Maybe he's teaching Sex Ed this semester," he said, patting John on the shoulder heartily and then turning into the hallway without another word, laughing at his own joke.
John rolled his eyes, shaking his head at Colossus, who was already halfway down the hall toward a harried-looking Kitty, before turning back to Celia. If she'd heard a word Colossus said after the first few, she gave no sign of it, her whole body tensed upward into her shoulders like she'd forgotten how to exhale. John brushed his thumb over her cheek, catching her eyes again.
"…You ok?" He said, smirk half-cocked but eyes lingering on her face. "The Professor's not bothering you about anything?"
The Professor held private sessions with all of the students. John's were typically fifteen minutes of borderline pleading that he behave himself and not burn anything down followed by five half-hearted minutes on whether he'd thought about the future. Celia's were easily an hour. Always. And she approached them with barely concealed dread.
There was a second in which he was sure she was about to tell him something but couldn't find the words for how, just staring at him with that open, vulnerable expression, leaning her face into his hand. It was over in a heartbeat, doors opening and slamming in the hallway just outside of where they stood, other students joking loudly on their way to lunch. She smiled with effort and glanced down.
"I'm fine," she said, a little too quietly to be believable.
And then as though realizing she that she was utterly unconvincing, she stepped closer and smiled up at him. He pulled his arms around her automatically and she beamed up at him, the discomfort of whatever she couldn't say gone and her smile close to his.
He kissed her firmly, her face in his hands, hair falling onto her forehead. When he pulled away, he kept his hands there as though giving her another second to steady herself, giving himself another second in the warmth. She had her palms on his upper arms, their faces close, as though to anchor herself. His stomach flipped pleasantly.
"Listen, I told Bobby we'd play basketball, but meet me later?"
She smirked a little, a thing he'd noticed her start to do and for which was privately taking full credit.
"Alright," she said, still smirking.
"Meet here?"
"If you're good," she said evenly, blue eyes steady on him, and he felt himself realize, not for the first time, that he was in deep trouble.
All John could hear at first, even though it had been thundering for hours, was the pounding on the door.
When he opened the door finally, in what had to be the middle of the night, he was ready to forget every promise he'd ever made anyone in the building that he would behave better. He was ready to threaten and scream and burn things to a crisp until whoever had woken them up, X-Man, child, or other, was thoroughly terrified, and then deal with the consequences in the morning, even if it meant getting tossed out on his ass.
And then it was Celia.
Her entire body was pressed in the crease of their door against the rest of the hallway, shaking. John was suddenly grateful that Bobby was still in bed.
"…Cel?"
He found himself only using any part of her actual name when it was particularly necessary that he be able to reach her. She turned her eyes toward him but they were as empty as the day she'd arrived. When she'd answered Bobby that her parents were dead, voice a bottomless kind of detached, and then couldn't say anything more about it. Lightning cracked in the distance and the hallway flashed with that eerie storm light as Celia's jaw shook and her mouth moved but nothing came out. All of her body was pressed into that door frame like there was something hunting her on the other side of it.
She was pure terror, something John recognized it from the places and people of an earlier life but was somehow stricken to see on Celia's face. Enough bad homes and kids who'd been in them would have that expression burned into his mind for his entire life.
John was at once sure he knew the kind of panic that rode through her bones and that he couldn't let anyone else.
"Who is it?" he heard Bobby say from inside, where he was still halfheartedly rubbing at his eyes with all the ease of someone whose bad days bottomed out at a lost hockey game.
"Hold on," John said instead.
He grabbed for her hands without looking away. They were clammy and cold in the dark hallway, barely gripping his own. All of her felt oddly small that night. Celia was not a particularly small person. She was shorter than him, thinner, but nothing about her had ever struck him as small. Tonight all of her was collapsed into her shoulders, determined to hunch as much of her into the two-inch door frames as she could. As though she had to hide but knew it was impossible.
He flinched at the thought and for just a moment felt that out of body sensation of realization. He was not a student who felt particularly at home here. At Xavier's, he was so used to playing a supporting role that he'd grown accustomed to most people only seeking him out if they were really trying to track down Bobby. But Celia was here for him and only him. She hadn't gone to Rogue. Hadn't gone to the Professor or Jean. She was pressed into his door frame, blind panic in her eyes.
He warmed her fingers between his hands, still in shock but increasingly desperate to stop the shivering.
"Hey—hey," he said, when she kept shaking. "Hang on just a second, ok?"
And then he stole back into the room for a moment, still feeling simultaneously out of his own body and on edge. Bobby was barely awake.
"What's…happening," he said, even as he already was putting his socks on.
"We're just gonna switch for the night, ok?" John said, handing him a flannel, hoping his tone was even. "You go hang out with Rogue. Celia's going to sleep here for a bit."
Bobby nodded like nothing about this was weird. There was only a moment when he was about to pass out into the hallway, that he caught John's eye and seemed to register that what was happening was unusual, but even then, he only gave him a strangely sharp look, like he was seeing something in focus for the first time and registering it to memory, and then disappeared.
John pulled Celia into the room.
"Cel," he said quietly, again trying to keep his tone even, though he sensed it meant little to her either way. "What's going on. What's wrong."
She was shaking so much, like it was impossible to stop. He half-wondered if she'd been outside and caught hypothermia, except she was in her sleep clothes with every appearance of having been dead asleep in her bed in the room she shared with Rogue.
She shook her head, barely able to look him in the eye.
"It was me," she whispered, like she was in a confessional and he was the only one who could hear. No, that wasn't right. Like she was too terrified to go to a confessional, and he was the only one she could tell. "I think he knew I could do it. I think he knew the whole time."
Even with no idea what she was talking about, he felt a chill in his bones. He closed the door to the hallway even as he had to guide her shaking shoulders just inside to do it, walked her to the bed to see if sitting down would help. She backed instantly against the wall by the bed instead, eyes searching the corners of the room.
"Cel—"
He couldn't remember what to do, it had been so long since anyone had turned to him for anything. He stood in front of her in an effort to block out the rest of the room.
"Look at me," he said. "Can you feel the ground under you?"
Her head nodded and then couldn't seem to stop.
"He knew," she said to the ground, like it was listening. "That I was in there."
He pressed her shoulders gently to the wall until her chin rose, then one hand up to hold it as though he was afraid it would drop if he didn't. He searched her eyes for a moment and found more of her in them.
"Listen, you're not there now. You're in Bobby and I's room. I'm right here. It's just us."
She was shaking her head like he was missing the point but at least her eyes were on him now.
"Are you hurt?"
There didn't seem to be any obvious injuries—she'd walked in as evenly as one could while full-body panicking, nothing appeared to be bleeding or broken. Her arms were bare but beyond goosebumps from the cold that he doubted she had noticed, he couldn't see anything wrong.
It took several minutes to get her to lie down. His first thought had been to have her sleep in his bed and he in Bobby's but she couldn't seem to go more than three seconds without her back against something. Every time he thought she might have settled down, she sprang up and scrambled to the wall again.
He settled for her wrapped in the sheets with him outside of them at her back, trying to remember whether anyone had ever taught him how to be comforting.
"It was me," she kept saying, her whole body shaking against his chest.
He waited until the trembling had gone down, until he could understand that she was back in her body, that although he'd somehow been the only person she was willing to confess such a thing to, she was no longer outside of her body while it did it, and then wrapped his arms around her instinctively, as though she shivered from the cold.
"It's ok," he whispered into her hair, like he had the right to comfort anyone.
She shook and sank deeper into the blanket. He hated himself and wrapped his arms more firmly across her.
He couldn't figure out what she was talking about. Had a feeling no one at the mansion would, except maybe the Professor, and there was no way in hell he was ratting her out to him.
When she'd first shown up at the mansion, she'd only said that she hadn't murdered her parents. You don't know what she could've done. Whatever it was, he hadn't seen someone so terrified in years, and this school wasn't filled with kids because they'd won scholarships for trauma-free childhoods.
Whatever it was, he would never hate it as much as he hated seeing that hunted look on her face in the hallway. I don't care.
"It was me…"
He could tell that now she was mostly saying it to herself because her voice was barely a whisper.
"It's ok if it was," he said softly, meaning it.
She didn't say anything but her shoulders finally stopped shaking.