Chapter 9: Leftovers

"Let me go, Celia."

I'd followed instead, vaguely not in control of my actions, soles thin on the snow.

"Where are you going?"

Ice had washed through my stomach at the anger in his eyes.

"I just need to be alone right now, ok?"

I'd shut down automatically at the sound of a raised voice. John had never yelled at me. Never yelled at anyone in front of me.

It was so cold, the wind whipping at us off the mountain.

"Aren't you sick of their shit?" but he wasn't really looking at me anymore. "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?"

No, I'd wanted a break. Wanted to be taken care of for a while. Wanted to be a character secondary to the plot, where I thought it seemed safer.

"We live in a school, John. A school is supposed to be a safe place for learning, not a guerrilla training facility."

"And that's going so well so far, right?" He'd said, looking at me now, frowning.

I couldn't find my footing, couldn't explain myself without the other things there now wasn't time for.

"Just because something doesn't work out perfectly right away doesn't mean it isn't still the better thing to do."

He'd stared at me across the snow, face closed and angry.

"I'm not sure what's right, right now."

My fingers were numb.

"John, it's cold."

"I just need to be alone." His eyes had snagged on mine for just a second before he walked away to the trees.

And I'd just stood there, like an idiot. Like someone who had believed I could keep this. Until that numb auto-pilot, that old friend from years of 24/7 survival, crept back to life and led me back to the jet.

Present Day:

The school was quiet after Alkali Lake.

Scott did nothing but stare out windows, and walked back and forth between his room and the Professor's office, head down. After two days, he stayed in his room. Logan was moody and smoked twice as many cigars.

I don't remember what I did. Survival brain was back. I ate meals, went to class, fell asleep, woke up again. The older students were deemed aged out of roommates shortly after our return, as though Alkali Lake had been some morbid graduation ceremony. I had packed my things into a box, moved to a new room next door to Rogue's new room, then left that box in a corner.

I had been wrong about so many things. Let myself get too comfortable.

When you've spent your life near rock bottom, you forget what falling feels like.

If I'd cried am embarrassing amount after the Lake, I kept it to myself. But that was nothing new. Another of my endearing psychotic habits I'd unpacked again from home. Dry eyes had always kept the game from escalating, kept that line alive between pawn and prey.

Anyway, I stayed in my room a lot.

Grace, the pre-teen empath, was still putting the entire length of the mansion between us as often as possible several weeks later.

Everyone else seemed consumed by their own thoughts. Rogue by concerns about her and Bobby, Bobby by Rogue's concerns about them and a sensitive, unmentionable anger about John, Kitty by Kitty's general angst, and everyone by thoughts of what would come next.

We had never lost a teacher the way we lost Jean, and it seemed to disrupt the natural order of the school. What was once rock solid no longer seemed infallible. Jubilee seemed potentially to be the only student near our age who was either seemingly unbothered or dealing with it in another way. Colossus, who bench pressed any object at the slightest suggestion (and more typically, none) and seemed constantly poised to goad anyone nearby into conflict, I avoided.

This, it turned out, had been a smart move while it lasted.

An afternoon months later found an odd collection of us in the living room, many eating lunch. A combination that would never have been permitted in the Before Time when anyone had the willpower to enforce rules. The television was playing the news. Jones sat in his usual corner, characteristically as far from the rest as physically possible, uncharacteristically ignoring the screen.

"Oh, look, it's your shitty ex-boyfriend," Jubilee said, pointing to the news. Kitty pulled a face at her bluntness, carefully avoiding eye contact with me.

And there he was. Brand new combat boots and all. Like he needed to dress like he was going into war. A tree behind him was on fire. I felt that frustrated gnaw in my gut again at how much easier this would be if I could hate him. If my eyes weren't automatically sweeping his figure, like I was still reading his cues from across the room.

Like I still believed I was someone he cared about.

But I couldn't stop. It was same curve of his face, same dark eyes, same mouth. I could still feel his arms around me from the last day anything had been ok, still picture the softened look in his eyes the nights it was just us, smiles close, trading half-truths, clothes on the ground.

"Where do you think we'll be…?" Something cold and hard clawed at my stomach. Maybe he had known even then. Been biding his time. Ready to leave, even as I asked him about the future with the cautious optimism of someone who'd only recently acquired one.

He had always been such an anchor to me. I'd thought—

On screen, one of the other Brotherhood mutants was saying something, but the volume was turned down and the closed captioning off. John made a face at whatever was said, and it was so startling close to Kitty's from moments earlier that I almost laughed out loud. Then he just looked cold and angry again, a closed sneer.

I could feel his mouth on my neck in silent apology. "I'm never mad at you."

I felt nauseous.

"Cool, great, awesome," I chirped, turning from the screen. I'll take meaningless adjectives for $400, Alec.

I tried to escape into the kitchen but a body blocked my way. I had all of a second to think that this could not be good before I was proven correct. Colossus and a couple of others were turning into the room, clearly returning from a game in the backyard and bringing the rank smell of stale sweat with them.

"Leaving so soon, angel?" Colossus said.

Kitty liked to claim that Piotr was too sensitive to be a jerk. That it was a front he put on to compensate. Lately he seemed to be testing the boundaries of this theory. The others around him shifted their weight a little, not sure whether to laugh but starting to. The smirk on his still-sweaty face said Colossus knew as well as I did that he would never have braved borrowing the nickname before. When someone else had been around to hear him.

"What's the matter—something upsetting on the news? I could cheer you up, you know."

When the quiet pricks of anger that had been lurking in my veins all afternoon spilled over, I didn't stop them. I braced against the force instead—more raw power than I had let slip out in my entire time here, in most of my life—as a beam of energy burst from my right palm, so quickly I'd barely registered the strength of it before it was smacking straight across Colossus's angular face.

Before anyone fully comprehended what had happened, Colossus was thrown across the room into a bookshelf, unprepared for any kind of blow and in his non-metallic state, hands clenched around his stinging eyes. There was a crack that sounded suspiciously expensive.

A few of the younger kids looked up at the noise. Rogue was on her feet. Bobby stared unmoving from the couch as though he'd never seen me before.

I felt myself flush from embarrassment. It was a childish loss of control. Literally, because it was the sort of thing a younger mutant would have done upon just arriving at Xavier's. But I had never learned to control it, not really, not the full strength of my powers. I had fiddled at the edges for nearly a year, procrastinating, fearful and in denial, pretending all I could do was cast some pretty lasers, heal some cuts, and run a decent mile under duress.

Pretending I didn't know what else there might be. How deep the well inside me went, if I looked too closely.

Colossus, still conscious, stayed slumped against the broken shelf as though in shock, eyes on the ground as though he were still buffering. I took a breath as it started to settle in me what I had done. Rogue moved toward me in my peripheral vision. I jumped hastily around the wreckage to exit the way I'd initially intended.

"I prefer my men showered, metalhead," I mumbled coldly, unable to shake off the vulnerability that had crept around my shoulders and up my neck.

There was a beat and then a burst of laughter behind me as I left the room and I almost sighed with relief. Of course, when you're an ass as often as Piotr Rasputin, laughter at your expense borders on a public service.

I glanced back, remembering that Rogue had been moving toward me. I felt a stab of guilt at leaving her hanging. It seemed to be all I did these days. And like the friend I had done nothing to earn, she continued to let me, seeming to understand over the past few months my need to be just out of reach.

I'd been nothing but weird, sullen, and grouchy since Alkali Lake, and all but cordoned myself off in my room whenever possible.

Rogue was a good friend for giving me space. I was annoyed at myself for being such an ass in return. I resolved to talk to her later, creak that door open again. Be a little more human.

At the moment, it was hard enough pushing away the bizarre dread and guilt and heartache that had set in immediately after hearing the crack of something splitting as Colossus was thrown across the room. As I had thrown him across the room. I had been putting off dealing with my powers for long enough. I was too tired to be scared anymore. It was time.

I climbed with one hand on the polished wooden banister to the second floor, head tipped down against the current of students headed down for an afternoon snack, trying to forget how immediately personal it had felt to be called "angel". Like it was an invasion of privacy, that stupid nickname, repeated often enough for everyone to know.

Like I had expected to only ever hear one person call me that and the universe had broken a promise to me by letting someone else.

Heart heavy and painful again, I counted the doorways down to my room through dim eyes and shut the door behind me, still nauseous.

When the nausea didn't fade by the next day, I wondered if I was pregnant, and cried. Then I remembered there was no way I could be, and cried about that too.

I was getting very dehydrated.

When I couldn't find Rogue, my shame from the previous afternoon started to crop up in other annoying efforts to make it up to everyone who hadn't asked. So when one of the younger kids was cry-screaming on the front steps because Flea found bubblegum somewhere and blew it straight into her hair while racing down a hallway, I was the one hunched over a bathroom sink with olive oil and a comb, doing such a poor job of comforting her that I think she eventually stopped crying out of sympathy.

When the last of it had been combed out of her hair, her face was swollen and pink but only looking slightly wet. Her eyes were the kind of big and tired of a long day, and I realized with a jolt that it was the same girl who once ran crying from the room because John cursed by accident. The benefit of time appeared to have given her much sounder reasons for crying.

"You ok?" I asked, hoping the answer is yes because I felt mortally unequipped for anything else.

She nodded, pretty lavender hair, dark with water, falling into her face. I hadn't been able to tell if it was dyed when she first showed up, thinking maybe she had a particularly punk rock parent at home. Now it seemed apparent that it was connected to her mutation. She rubbed at her eyes and I remembered how young she still is. She was barely six when she first got here. Even still, she was a kind of young that struck me as particularly sad in this mansion. Not that she was the only one.

"Could you…do you know how to do braids?" she asked so quietly I almost missed it, eyes on the bath mat.

I blinked. A childhood strategically bereft of most sleepovers left me a little lacking in the doing-each-other's-hair department. When I was called on to help any of the cousins staying with us get ready for school, I'd usually opted for a ponytail and gone about my day.

But I'd braided my own hair. And she just looked so utterly sad.

Ten minutes later, she left the bathroom with two braids so lopsided they barely merited the label, but at least she wasn't crying. I wondered again if I would ever be competent at a task as I wandered toward dinner.

"Look at you, big sister hairdresser."

Draped across a doorway in one of her signature jackets was Jubilee, eyebrows raised. I scowled.

"And I was just wondering where they got the bubble gum…" to her credit, she looked a little sheepish before grinning.

"Hey, someone's got to supply a little trouble around here. This place has been du-ull lately." She drew the word out to two syllables dramatically.

I shook my head at her, neck aching from leaning over for an hour. She followed me as though the lack of an explicit shut-down was an invitation.

"Anyway, could be worse," she said slyly. "it's not like I'm helping them play with fire or anything."

There was a spark in my gut and a flush crept up around my neck, but when I turned to her she looked back unabashed. Winked, even. I shook my head again and continued toward the dining room, wondering if there was still food and if she would continue to follow me if there wasn't.

"Oh come on, Halo. Please don't be mad at me," Jubilee said, step and voice all the good-natured lilt of a puppy looking to play. "It's just weird that nobody ever talks about it, ok? All of this shit happened. I was there that night at the mansion, at the lake—I saw how many people came back. It's messed up that they all just keep pretending that if we don't talk about it it'll go away."

She wasn't wrong. She was one of the six who'd been kidnapped and held in a cell pit for Stryker's experiments, rescued by the Nightcrawler and huddled in a blanket in the corner of the jet for that long and silent ride home. In her defense, I'd heard she took several soldiers down first, with electrical blasts so destructive they took out a whole wall of the mansion that the Professor later had to rebuild.

I paused in the doorway and she stared back at me, expression still bright, almost bouncing on her heels.

"They?" I said after a beat.

She shrugged easily.

"Don't take this the wrong way, but you are not good at pretending. And anyway, you look so tragic these days, it'd be obvious to a total stranger some shit went down."

I snorted and she looked pleased, like I'd finally laughed at her joke.

Neither Rogue nor Bobby was anywhere in sight as we enter the dining room. Actually, most of the tables were empty, and I realized most of the students had taken to eating quietly and then scampering back to their particular corner of the mansion universe, like the events at Alkali Lake left us trapped in some permanent library and everyone was terrified to find out how strict the librarians were.

The only figure in the room at all was a familiar face, the younger girl who'd glared at me from across the jet in confusion as she cried her eyes out the whole way home. Grace raised her eyebrows at me, the same thing obviously on her mind.

"It's a reuniooooon!" Jubilee exclaimed as she rushed me toward the table with plates.

Very few people were immune to the contagious buoyancy of Jubilee, and Grace appeared to be no exception. She cracked a smile as Jubilee quickly foraged leftovers, placing bowls on the table as though this was an ordinary family dinner we sat down to every night.

"You guys sure you want to sit here?" Grace asked sardonically, as Jubilee pulled the top off some leftover stew, poured us some, and began eating directly from the container. "Not scared I'll accidentally reveal your deepest darkest feelings to the whole school?"

She recited the last part like it was something she knew by heart, and I remembered a little of what the last few months were like for Grace. With little control over her powers upon arrival, she had not only sobbed her way through the first month after the Lake but was prone to reacting with immediacy to any sudden emotions from those around her. The early days of her adjustment to her mutation had resulted in not just sudden moods that abruptly disappeared once the true culprit was far enough down the hall, but also onslaughts of temporary infatuation and, on one memorable afternoon, an abruptly overturned couch in the living room.

She'd since seemed to get a firm handle on her powers, but I'd noticed most of the other mutants nearer to her age still seemed to avoid being near her.

Grace eyed the two of us as though waiting for an answer she already knew. Jubilee's mouth was full, having shoveled an impressive amount of food into her mouth in the moments since we'd sat down. It seemed unlikely this sort of thing would matter to Jubilee, who seemed to have a very healthy relationship with expressing her feelings. Or at least one that often involved fireworks.

I pulled one of the dishes my way.

"I don't have anything left that hasn't already been broadcast to the entire school," I said, mirroring her tone.

Grace bit back a smile.

"Oh, sorry about that," she said, almost shyly.

I shrugged.

"Don't be," I said. "At least I didn't have to explain anything to people afterward. It's not like they could corner me into talking about it by claiming they 'just wanted to know how I was feeling.'"

Jubilee snorted from behind another container of leftovers and Grace's smile seemed to take up half her face.

"In that case, happy to be of service," Grace said brightly. And as she reached for a tray of leftovers herself, it felt like we had all settled into something comfortable that hadn't been there before.

It was such a relief.

We traded a few dark humored comments about that night and that day, Jubilee tossing in her own and periodically interrupting to reach across the table for another dish she'd neglected.

Before long, hours had passed. The sun set and we were still sitting in the kitchen at the same table. A few of the younger kids came and went during that time, shyly sitting elsewhere in the room—coloring at the counter or sipping a chocolate milk by the window—like the sound of three people chattering had become so rare in this place that it now was a fire they were grateful to warm themselves by.

"Isn't it overwhelming?" Jubilee asked Grace, as the last of the young faces shyly edged out of the room. "I mean, how do you deal with feeling what everyone's feeling all of the time?"

"Well it's a lot easier now that they moved her room farther away from me," Grace said, grinning and nodding at me.

Talking to Grace has taken a weight off my shoulders I had forgotten I was carrying. Just because I kept my heartbreak to myself didn't mean everyone was immune to its effects. And the sound of Grace sobbing so uncontrollably, like something had physically broken inside of her, had hit me harder than I liked to admit. A look in the mirror at myself I didn't need. A reminder that as much as I ignored it, shrugged it off, buried it deep, I cared. So much. And it still hurt.

"I said I was sorry about all the crying," I said, reaching for a marshmallow from a bag someone had produced from one of the cabinets.

Jubilee snorted again, flicked some sparks around a marshmallow in her hands until it was crisp, then ate it in one bite.

"Do not light the kitchen on fire, please," I said, pointing at her.

She grinned.

"Awww do you just miss saying that?"

Yes.

"I hate you."

Grace continued as though neither of us had interrupted.

"It was harder at first, when I had no control over it at all. So I couldn't keep anyone's emotions from affecting me immediately, and I couldn't keep them separate from my own. But the Professor has been helping me with it, so now I can just be aware of them without having to always experience them so…um, intensely," she said, and though she very politely didn't look at me, Jubilee threw another grin my way. I rolled my eyes at her. Unfazed, she turned back to Grace.

"So you know what everyone's feeling like all the time, right?" she said, and even though I couldn't tell where this was going I was already nervous it was a plan that would somehow result in property damage.

Grace raised an eyebrow. "Um, yes? That's kind of my whole thing."

For a girl a couple of years younger than both of us, Grace had no qualms about being direct. Jubilee wagged her eyebrows and leaned across the table.

"Have any good gossip?" she whispered conspiratorially, and even though I looked at her incredulously, I couldn't help but turn to Grace with equal curiosity. For once, the mansion gossip couldn't involve me. It had been months since my emotional life was anything worth comment.

"Well actually—"

"Wait! Sorry sorry, but wait."

I shot up from the table to set some water to boil and pulled some tea from the cabinet. They both stared.

"I totally forgot you have this thing with tea," Jubilee said.

"I do not have a 'thing' with tea. I just like it," I said defensively. "It's very relaxing."

"Ok, freak," said Jubilee.

"Says the freak," said Grace. "In a school for freaks."

I rolled my eyes again but was smiling.

"Whatever. This time it's appropriate," I said matter-of-factly, placing two mugs in front of them.

Grace looked at me through narrowed eyes like the preemptive ripple of amusement had just reached her.

"Teatime for teeeatiiiime!" I said, one hand in the air, and it was such an accidentally spot-on impression of Jubilee that Grace fell from her chair laughing and Jubilee was so pleased that a nearby crate of soda exploded and we had to run from the kitchen before anyone came to investigate.