Chapter 7: Fear itself

All I could hear were the screams.

And then stampeding footsteps, glass breaking, people stumbling down the hallways. I felt myself jerk awake instantly—it was a cold night and I was sleeping lightly anyways—but Rogue struggled awake against the stupor of the middle of the night. I swung my feet to the cold floor and was shaking her shoulders in moments. Beyond our room, I could hear the doors of other rooms in the hall being slammed open, more people running.

"What? What is it?" She finally said, groggy as hell.

"I think we're being attacked."

She was up in a heartbeat and we were both out the door, joining the throng of students streaming down the oak-paneled hallways.

It was chaos.

"Where's Bobby?"

Of course it was her first question.

I didn't see him up ahead, but since it didn't seem our floor was being attacked yet, I figured we had a second to spare. Besides: where Bobby was, John was.

I saw Rogue's hair flit in the direction of their room and followed after her. It was harder getting closer, because although we were going with the flow of people trying to get downstairs, we were fighting the current the closer we got to the room.

Doors kept slamming at every turn we made, more and more faces appearing in the hallway, alive with panic. One of the younger kids tripped and fell, almost began crying. Colossus swept him up in a heartbeat and carried him toward the stairs. I made a mental note that he wasn't an absolute jerk.

"Rogue!"

We found John and Bobby in the upstairs corridor, Bobby and Rogue already running at each other, their normally awkward near-touch way of interacting forgotten for the moment.

John grimaced at the display, as though it was a stupid thing to worry about in the moment. Maybe it was, but I avoided his eyes anyway, embarrassed I'd been an instant away from doing the same, flooded with relief to crash into him around a corner. I fiddled with my wrists, feeling awkward and out of place in a way I hadn't for a long time.

"We gotta get out of here," Rogue was saying to Bobby, who was already nodding.

"This way," he said to all of us, raising his eyebrows at John as the two of us just stood there, further apart than usual.

We made toward the elevator in another hall, Bobby having been at the school the longest and insisting periodically along the way that for this reason, he knew where to go. Rogue was singularly focused on following him, though her eyes scanned each new corner with barely concealed urgency, which I knew was likely an eye out for Logan.

In the elevator, John stepped closer to me and I ignored him, annoyed and hurt for reasons that felt embarrassingly stupid.

The elevator opened with a "ding" at the ground floor and shortly upon racing out, we stumbled into Logan. There were other footsteps in the mansion now, everywhere in the darkness, warning that soldiers were near.

"Logan!" Rogue yelled.

He replied immediately that we needed to get out of there. When he gestured to a secret exit that had come open in the wall panel beside him, everyone but me looked surprised.

While Logan and Rogue argued, John watched me.

"Cel, you ok?" he asked lowly, corners of his mouth twitching upward as though ready to laugh whatever it was off.

I shrugged.

"Of course, yeah, awesome."

He had been rolling his eyes again at the Logan-Rogue show of affection and did a double-take to pause on my face, smirk faltering—but then we were moving into the secret passageway and it hardly mattered, because somehow the dark and wet space that we entered on the other side brought a flood of cold panic to my stomach that overcame everything else.

What happened next was a blur to me, really, lost in the cool press of panic that had me pinned against the walls of the tunnel, uncertain of reality. John argued with Rogue to leave Logan be as the older man turned to face the attackers head on, and Bobby froze a wall of ice between them as compromise.

I stood by in the tunnel and felt my body shift into the mode of survival I had known so well in my time before Xavier's, silently assessing. My feet were cold but covered. I was wearing the shorts and shirt I'd slept in, but if forced to go on the run, I could pull my hair up and pretend to be going to the gym if we needed to interact with people. I had eaten late last night, I could go without food for a bit if needed. I would be fine. My body knew how to survive, even if the heart stupidly attached to this comfortable new life refused to relinquish the wheel.

By the time we got to the garage and were climbing into the back of Cyclop's car, the reality that we were on the run from our own home and on the brink of capture by what appeared to be a secret military was terrifyingly real. I wondered what they would do to us if they caught us.

I kept hearing my father's voice. "Oh Celia, I don't know what has gotten into your mother tonight. That looks like it must hurt."

I wondered if it would be as bad. My chest hurt already. I could hear our breathing, imagined I could hear our heartbeats.

"I don't like uncomfortable silences," I heard John's voice say.

I glanced at the clock to realize ten full minutes had passed with us driving into the night. I was frozen, my whole body stiff against the side door. John reached between the awkward chatter of Logan and Rogue to hit the radio but a blast of boy band music met his efforts.

Logan rolled his eyes in the rearview mirror. I looked back out the window again.

"Sit back," he said, grabbing a device that had appeared from the console.

John sat back in the seat beside me, grumbling, but I felt him grab my hand and squeeze it sharply. And I remembered that I wasn't the only one with a list of disasters and a body that knew survival mode. We didn't look at each other as I slipped my hand further into his, squeezing back.

I didn't want to learn how the universe planned on restoring balance. I didn't want to be ripped away from this. I was just beginning to breathe better, to find who I was when I wasn't surviving.

Were there any homes that weren't eventually crime scenes?

All at once John adjusted his body to make space for me to lean into him, one hand closing around mine and the other at my knee, gently but firmly, and I realized he was scared too. And I sighed and hoped that the bad feeling in my stomach was just Rogue's undercooked cake from the night before.

Everyone's moods took a turn for both the worse and weird upon arriving at Bobby's house.

It was nice. The house, I mean. A nice little suburb outside of Boston, house complete with sliding glass door and a back deck. Bobby was fidgety, his worlds crashing together probably not in precisely the way he'd imagined. Rogue was surprisingly steady behind him as we entered the house.

"Mom? Ronnie?" Bobby called.

I forgot sometimes that Rogue considered herself without a family now, too. She'd made that decision, leaving home.

As we crossed the threshold of the front door, I sensed John tense up beside me and he fell back to let me walk in front of him, putting off entering until the last minute.

I didn't blame him. My own reaction to the house was harsher than I expected it to be. It wasn't that it was very much like ours was, but there were things about being in a family home that stung you right in the open wounds of memory. The weirdest things—like when we walked on the plush carpet in the living room, the kind so many suburban homes in America sport—I suddenly felt like I really might throw up. Like I might be about to turn a corner and see my mother with glassy eyes sprinting after imaginary me and crashing toward the floor. Like my father might be waiting.

I tried to remember how to breathe. It took remembering that everyone was too distracted to notice and too worried about their own problems to help if I ended up passing out to motivate me at first, and then I had air in my lungs again. Slowly. The nausea didn't fade and I was scared to swallow it down, so I followed John's shadow to distract myself.

I needed him but knew instinctively that entering the house meant he was already far away in his own mind, back in foster kid hell, back to being left behind for what he was, and tried to tamp down my panic enough to seem normal.

"I'll go get you some clothes," Bobby said from behind my lowered head.

I nodded in his direction and Rogue followed him up the stairs in a trance of her own. Looked like suburbia was memory lane for all of us misfit mutant kids. There was no need at the moment to try to look normal. No one was sparing a glance from their own old anxieties to notice.

John was on the other side of the stairs staring at what looked like a family photo. I wanted badly to curl into him while everyone was out of the room, if only to make my stomach settle, but his eyes were gone in a way I'd never seen them before. It was an angry kind of sad, but a sad nonetheless, and I remembered that sad wasn't a part of himself that John would have ever show at school. Mutant high was a lifesaver, literally, for so many of us…but it was still a school, and it was one that we didn't often have the luxury of escaping from.

"Are you ok?" I asked quietly, reaching a hand to his shoulder, face behind his shoulder blade, feeling like I was intruding…which was another thing that was strange, because as much as that feeling typically sat with me, I never felt that way around John.

His back stayed tense but I could feel the breath that ran through him, carefully.

"We didn't all have such picture perfect families" he said in a low voice.

He was staring at the photo still. I wondered suddenly if he was including me in the "we." With a shattering feeling in my chest, I remembered that he didn't know. He knew me better than anyone, as I suspected I knew him, but not all the way, not all of the dark places. It wasn't like I had offered up the information. In return for not pressing about the worst of his dreams, I had a home in a person who could know me so intimately without needing me to explain the things that hurt the most. A chance to pretend that I could be alright, could be cared for, could be the kind of person who mattered to someone.

I had left so many holes in his idea of my past that there was little, really, in the story I'd given him. In bits and pieces, on stormy nights, my first time really telling anyone anything meaningful about myself, I had handed him pieces of me in the dark while he slid some of his misgivings back, never quite broaching the biggest ugliness, never quite having the right time.

The holes he had evidently filled with his own quiet insecurities, threading together an optimistic idea of my past. As though I had marched into the mansion an orphan, but every day previous had been something safe, idyllic, suburban. Like I came from a normal family ruined one day by a freak accident, not a slow broiling mind game that had me living on the edge of a knife for my entire childhood.

"John—"

He turned suddenly.

"Sorry," he said, like a spell had broken. He smiled fast at me but it looked wrong, pasted on. I would have taken a smirk. We were both hiding from each other today. "I've gotta stop doing that."

I shook my head.

"It's ok," I said softly, reaching out for the second time in 24 hours to hold the fabric of his t-shirt. "I know a little about how families can be."

I should have just told him right then, but my heart started beating so fast and I couldn't think of a quick enough way to say it. John misunderstood the panic on my face and cupped my face in his hands, pulling me close.

"Listen, there are…some things I haven't told you." I said but my voice was so quiet. It was like being caught in a dream where you know you need to run but your feet are so heavy you can barely move. There was so much I had to tell him that I thought I'd never have time for.

My chest hurt. It was so hard to breathe.

John stared at me hard, his eyes wide. When after a second, I still couldn't speak, he kissed me instead, walking me back until my back hit the opposite wall and he was all that was real to me in the room. I closed my eyes and let kissing him calm me down, running my fingers through his hair. After a moment, he pulled away and waited again, kissing the corner of an eyebrow, then nose, then my jaw, hands pressing my body firmly into his, as though he knew I needed to anchor myself, like we were grounding each other in reality.

I would have confessed to anything at that moment if he'd asked me to.

"John…"

He smiled against my neck, sighing.

And then Bobby's family walked in.

"Drop the knives!" the officer with the gun yelled.

This home visit had gone from bleak to bleaker in no time flat. The silver lining being that Bobby's little brother Ronnie made me glad I had no siblings.

"I can't," Logan growled back and I could hear us all breathing in every millisecond that passes. "Look—"

But as he raised a hand to show the man more clearly (he couldn't see them already from where he was? Was he even looking?), there was the sound of a gunshot and then Logan was on his back, a bullet perfectly in the center of his forehead.

No. No no nono no no no.

My hands were shaking. How did I forget? In my obsession with not becoming like my father, I forgot that the world was full of people who would kill for reasons no better than his. I forgot that so many of them would want to kill me and everyone I cared about. Why hadn't I prepared for this?

Before we could blink, the officer with the gun was yelling at us to get down on the ground. I couldn't move right away. My legs were shaking. The man yelled at us again, gun still pointed at us. Us, four teenagers in our pajamas and some borrowed clothes.

My brain had shut down at the sound of someone yelling. I could hear nothing but Rogue's breath as she knelt by Logan's head, also trembling. Then I met John's wide eyes and realized I was still on my feet. I had forgotten to move. The guns had turned to us now, with Logan down. The blood had drained from John's face. There was something in his face that was raw and desperate and I had never seen there before. It stayed there as I sank with the others to the ground next to Logan's body, the officer still yelling. My eyes stayed on John's—they were the only thing keeping me anchored enough to control my legs—when they hardened and turned to the cop.

I felt the moment I realized he was still standing because everything in my body went cold.

"You know all those dangerous mutants you hear about on the news?" he said to the seven cop cars surrounding us. "I'm the worst one."

The fire was bigger than I ever remembered seeing it before and I realized he'd known he was capable of this for a long time, that he had been playing by the rules after all, that I had forgotten somehow, like everyone else, that John understood restraint more than he ever let on. The fire carried both cops on the porch off into the woods and was destroying the cars, too, and even in the face of it, all I could think was how desperately relieved I was that John was alive, that he hadn't been shot dead for staying standing.

Then I looked up and realized what was happening. That he had said 'I'm the worst one' like a prophecy he intended to make true and there was no one near us anymore but everything and everyone in front of us was on fire. I couldn't shake that desperate relief that he was alive even as the guilt crept in for feeling relief while everything around us was in flames. Why hadn't I prepared for this? Why hadn't I seen this coming?

Where could we stop?

"Ro—" I managed.

Rogue met my eyes from the other side of Logan's head and nodded, then removed the glove from her hand and clamped her fingers around John's ankle.

Why wasn't I ready? I should have been ready, I thought, as the flames faded from the cars, as the cops desperately rolling around in the grass were suddenly flame-free and on their feet running away. I should have seen this coming. Disaster was the one thing I used to be good at.

The noise that sounded like John choking was the only thing that pulled me out of wherever I was.

"Rogue, stop," I said, "You're hurting him."

She let go with a grimace and I was again painfully, desperately grateful. That the man I was in love with who'd just lit everything on fire hadn't been murdered by my best friend at my request.

John blinked at both of us in a kind of surprise that made my heart hurt. Everything felt so heavy.

You can't save anybody, you useless monster. Nothing's changed.

I still couldn't move, limbs shaking against the porch. As the familiar jet appeared in the sky above us and we all trudged numbly off Bobby's front porch to meet Storm and Jean, I couldn't stop shaking and I couldn't form words. It was only when we were on the jet and seated and Logan started murmuring with the other X-Men that I understood, too late, what the look in John's eyes was.

Something else I should have been prepared for, another old friend I used to know so well.

Pure fear.

I looked up and found he was further away than usual but still had dropped into the seat next to me, and somehow this struck me deepest. Fumbling against the seatbelts, I reached out a hand to lace through his. He jumped and my heart hurt again that he would be so surprised to find someone touching him. His eyes were the same but his face was guarded, and I knew, from experience, that all that fear was still churning underneath.

There wasn't enough privacy to tell him what I thought he might need to hear. And I couldn't think of anything else that wouldn't sound like a lie. So I just laced his fingers through mine and swallowed, hoping that I could find some of the right words before it was too late.

That night, after we'd been shot out of the sky and nearly crash-landed onto Magneto and Mystique, I wondered if Too Late had already arrived.

Storm, Jean, and Logan had immediately convened with them for some kind of strategic regrouping, leaving the rest of us to set up camp. Kurt, the teleporter who kept re-introducing himself by his stage name, lingered quietly on the edges as though still trying to determine what side everyone was on.

No one said a word about what had happened on the Drakes' front porch, but I could feel it in the air somehow.

I was still grateful Rogue had intervened when I couldn't, though her regard for John did not appear to have been improved by the experience. To be fair, I figured it might be asking a lot of her to forget him lighting a small crowd of people on fire, even if they had been about to kill us at the time. Bobby knew him better, but of course was a man and also dealing with the fresh sting of rejection from his entire family. So instead of anything productive, both men paced at opposite sides of the campsite, avoiding eye contact and grumbling at the ground. I tried to follow Rogue's lead in giving them space, deferring to her better social graces.

But they were being deeply unhelpful.

After a half hour of this in silence, interrupted only by indistinct muttering on both sides, I dropped the tent I'd been attempting and dragged John by the arm a short distance away.

"Ow what the—"

"Stop it."

He stared at me, face hard. I sighed.

"Look, I'm sorry. I know I'm bad at this," I said. "But can you please just talk to me? The pacing is driving me insane and we're already in the middle of nowhere."

He sighed and ran one hand through his hair.

"What do you want me to say?"

"Anything," I blurt, honestly. Then realizing I was scared of what he might have to say: "Rogue touched your ankle because of me. I'm sorry. I couldn't think of anything else to do. I was panicking. I didn't know—" I didn't know if you would kill everyone and destroy everything, I hadn't realized yet that you were doing it for us, that you thought we were about to die.

I watched John swallow, eyes low. He looked up at me and for a beat the only sound was crickets coming alive in the night around us.

I took a step closer to him.

"I was scared and I freaked out," I said quietly. "I'm glad we're not dead."

Something tugged at his mouth and he nodded slightly, glancing back at the campsite as though evaluating how much privacy we had. The answer was not much.

"It was going to happen eventually," he said, voice low enough that I knew he meant for only me to hear it. "I'm the piece that doesn't fit."

He reached a hand up to run a thumb across my cheek. When he dropped it, as though remembering where we were, I followed it a step closer, so we still weren't touching but I was close enough to see the bags under his eyes, to wonder for the first time if he'd been taking measures of his own to keep me out of those dreams.

"That's not true," I said, voice hoarse.

He shook his head but his eyes were on the ground. We were standing close enough to whisper but positioned as though to hide the intimacy of this conversation, if that was possible in a campsite with eight other people.

"Xavier's isn't for people like me. You have to see it, too," John said. "They sell us all of this motivational bullshit about learning to control our powers, but what they mean is don't use them. Don't be too powerful. Don't be too scary, too threatening. Play nice even when the humans hurt you or kill you or…leave you for dead."

His voice dropped at the last words and I swallowed hard.

He wasn't wrong. Logan, the only adult who didn't seem to play by the Professor's rules, seemed always to be in hot water for not doing so. Storm, probably the most powerful of any of them, toed the line carefully, keeping even the small outlets for her power out of sight and out of mind, those glimmering snow-capped branches hidden in the backyard. There was more than one reason I didn't go looking too far into my powers.

I took a heavy breath, my mouth a thin line. I couldn't disagree with him, and I wasn't in the habit of lying to John. Just omitting.

"I know," I said quietly, and he looked relieved.

John clicked the lighter in his left hand open and shut, thoughtfully, like there was something else.

"It's not just them anymore now, you know," he said roughly, his eyes on the lighter like he had to say the words to it instead of me. "We're adults. We've been eighteen for a while. Soon they'll expect all of us to join up." He nodded vaguely in the direction of Bobby and Rogue, who were hunched over something on the ground, heads toward each other as though in a conversation of their own.

John's face was tight when I turned back to him.

"It won't be us against the professors anymore. I've seen how they operate. There's only one way to be on their side and anyone who isn't is out of line, a monster, a threat. It's not like anyone had high hopes for me but…I think it's pretty clear which of those I am to everyone," he said. His head is pitched forward still as though it will help hide his expression, but I could hear the heaviness, the anger in his voice, see the grief in his eyes sweeping toward where our friends were. "They think I'm a monster now, Cel. There's no going back from that."

"They don't think that," I said, and he gave me a look that said both of us had heard the uncertainty in my voice—that even as I said it, I began to wonder if it was true.

Rogue had always been skeptical of John, but a lot of that had been sort of obligatory on my behalf, and she'd never really known him. He'd been Bobby's friend before I'd arrived and the guy who dated me after I'd arrived. To most other people in the mansion, he was at best a smartass who played with fire and misbehaved in class and at worst someone the rumor mill wondered about. But surely one of the adults had to be paying more attention than that, right?

John exhaled hard but his eyes were soft on mine.

"They do, angel," he said quietly, hand brushing mine. Just slightly, enough to be comforting but subtle enough not to give himself away in public.

That was part of the problem, after all, that John would never show anyone the things about him that were most true. I brushed my fingers against his slightly in understanding. Felt for a moment almost like things had righted. At least he knew I was on his side.

Then Rogue, irritable and tired over where I now saw she and Bobby were trying to coax a fire to life, snapped across the clearing, "You know, you could help."

It wasn't her fault, I know, just bad timing and a day that was long for everyone. Still John's face hardened again and felt that sliver of panic that time is rushing away. He straightened from where he'd been leaning toward me, face the mask of boredom he liked best for other people, and a pile of fire burst from the trickling flame, like someone had turned a faucet. Like it had been there waiting all along for his slightest inclination.

I wondered again if anyone would ever notice that John, ironically, had the most restraint of any of us.

Rogue glared at him in response. Bobby, though his brow lowered in concern, said nothing.

John's eyes were tight. He ignored both of them and said only to me, softly, "they do," and then walked alone toward the jet.

I spent most of the next morning very outside of my own body.

We'd been filled in on the basics of William Stryker, on his son who could make people see and experience things that weren't there. It was a story so eerily familiar that I'd mentally checked out, stopped listening, been wandering somewhere outside of my own skin all morning wondering what about the odds.

When Magneto taunted Rogue about her hair and she started to move toward him with a glove halfway off, I pulled her back with Bobby mostly on instinct. When I wandered back toward John, I found him alone with an entirely too attentive Magneto and a smug-looking Mystique.

"What's your name?" Magneto was asking.

"John."

"What's your real name, John?" he asked, opening the lighter.

There was a pause as a carefully formed flame floated soundlessly to John's outstretched hand, his expression distant. I felt a preemptive kind of sadness.

"Pyro."

I turned away, unwilling to stand there for the rest of the conversation. When there inevitably came a point when we were all seated around the jet, I found myself within range again of the duo and the new subject of curiosity.

"Celia—Halo, is it?" Magneto said, when I took a seat next to John to wait, who wasn't quite looking at anyone but automatically made room.

Mystique's attention was already elsewhere on the jet. I could tell by Magneto's expression that he wasn't really curious about me, that he'd already identified the potential of this group and had no interest in my abilities that appeared middling at best. He was asking because I was sitting next to John, and he was grooming John—a John who was angry, vulnerable, feeling alone—for something.

As bothered as I was by this, I was about to exhale my relief when I heard him ask "What's your last name again?"

I froze, trying to remember how to be convincing.

"Lange," I said shortly.

Magneto tilted his head at me, a glimmer of recognition in his eyes, like he couldn't quite remember but knew there was something.

"Are you sure about that?" he said slowly, voice a dangerous quiet.

I had just enough time to feel that cold dread of time running out, just enough time to see John's head turn toward me in my peripheral vision, before Logan (bless this cat haircut man) brusquely pulled everyone to the table to review strategy.

Later, when Rogue, Bobby, John, and I were left behind with the jet, I saw Jean's eyes flicker to me and wondered how much the Professor confided in her, how much of the reason we were being left behind was because they still weren't sure about me. Weren't sure whether they might be handing Stryker another of his favorite weapon. When Rogue and Bobby started getting into it with John, I hardly noticed because I was so distracted by the memory of Magneto asking for my real last name, that knowing look in Jean's eye, all of those clinical kid-glove sessions with the Professor, carefully poking and prodding.

When John, who did not know any of this, who only knew what was likely waiting for him back at school and that it had just been heavily implied that I was lying about something, finally snapped, I knew there was no one to blame but myself. That it was already Too Late again.

I knew it even when I ran after him off the plane. When I followed him into the snow with no jacket and thin shoes.

I knew it when he walked away.