Author's Note: Lol yes—I realize I kind of jumped ahead into X3's business, but it's so hard to tell how much time is supposed to have passed between the movies. 2 years? And some change? Who's to say. Enjoy some familiar angst here and the return of some John POV.

Chapter 12: Breaking sad

The day they returned from Jean's house with the empty wheelchair was a day that broke a lot of us.

The actual funeral somehow managed to be worse. So many faces, so many former students. Silent and grave and facing his.

Everyone normal was crying, tears and bubbles of contained sobs bursting out among the students and faculty alike. Kitty cried immediately at the sight of the gathering in the backyard. Rogue's face glistened every time it caught the sun. Bobby—inadvisably, I thought—put an arm around each of them.

I wasn't there because of course, I couldn't do it. Couldn't sit there with the only people I had to mourn the man who'd brought me to them. Couldn't get myself to step back out into that backyard again for the service. The best I could do was a few steps out from under the ivy, facing them instead, feeling at once very distant and too close up. Exposed.

At least Grace had a good excuse. Jubilee had driven her into town to get donuts and lessen the weight in the air of everyone else's feelings. She'd started to offer to bring me with them, but one look at Grace's face told me enough to know I would ruin it.

Rogue had come by to get me that morning and all I'd been able to do was shake my head and say I'd see her later. I felt very far away from everyone for reasons that were hard to explain. It had been so easy to feel at home here, so easy to slot into a place from that first day in the living room. But I spent the morning watching the crowd of mutants in black stream through the mansion and found myself searching for a feeling that wasn't fraud.

So as my friends took their seats among Xavier's old students and Storm began her prepared, and I'm sure lovely, eulogy, I watched from the shade. Logan stood a few paces away. He'd looked up as I'd appeared at the door and looked away just easily when I didn't say a word. I stopped a few paces out, in the shadow of one of the stone outcroppings, as far as I could bring myself to go.

I never walked further out than the terrace anymore.

Rogue caught my eye for a moment, eyes flicking up and finding me there. She nodded slightly, as though to say this was fine, and then dropped her head again to the rose in her hands.

I stared across the crowd and wondered at how many people's lives the Professor had touched to fill such a big space. Then I stared at all of the green and remembered every feeling I had learned for the first time in it, every painful sweet thing I'd been able to experience because a stranger had come to collect me from a police station, and felt whatever was left in me drop completely through my chest.

Storm had been talking and then it was over. I didn't hear a word.

My stomach and throat were so tight I could barely swallow.

I was moving before I realized what I was doing. Away from the trees, away from my friends, everyone I had left. Without a thought, my body turned and walked away. I was supposed to be stronger. I should've been grateful for everything that had been provided for me, be working to fill the gap that would now stretch in Xavier's absence instead of leaving it to break apart the place that made so much possible.

But the panic in my chest wasn't just this. It was everything. it was the greater series of disasters that I thought had faded into the distance but felt entirely too close again. John's back shrinking into the forest in the snow, his face when Magneto asked him his name, his face when Magneto asked mine. My father's voice, detached and emotionless, Xavier announcing he'd tracked down my last living family member, my mother talking about staying in the fight.

Everything was wrong all over again. Sharp, bright, distorted by time and frustration. I leaned against a wood paneled wall—I'd been so close, maybe halfway to privacy, but found even that wasn't worth it—and sank slowly to the ground in the middle of the empty hallway. I would just take a second. No one would see if I just took a second. The floor was solid beneath me and that helped. Tears were already trickling out the sides of my eyes, whatever was in my throat breaking out in sounds I was embarrassed to hear. Whatever it was that had gathered deep down there over the past few months was forcing its way out of my body now, one way or the other. I found alarmingly that I didn't care.

Xavier was gone. Scott was gone. John was a different kind of gone. Jean was whatever she was and there was a possibility that what she was now wanted to kill us all, too. My mother was dead and my father her murderer, me his murderer, her failure protector, their custom-made monster. Everyone had someone but I was alone, left behind one way or another by everyone who had seen me up close.

Ok. I mean, I knew this wasn't really true. I had a dramatic best friend and her well-meaning boyfriend, a psychotic zapper who kept trying to make me breakfast (a process she referred to as "calibrating" the toaster and Storm referred to as "destroying school property"), Lydia's admiration, Grace's knowing eyes, Jones' casual camaraderie. It was just that here at emotional rock bottom, it was hard to remember.

Ironically, this was all yet another thing Xavier had seen coming. He had once during an afternoon in his office when I'd shown up, sweaty from hours in the downstairs gym, said mysteriously that grief could be a moody thing, soft and slow and then all at once, leaving us devastated in its wake.

"It's a little like love," he'd said, smiling like this was a joke I would be let into later. "Personally I'd rather have the latter."

You were wrong. They both suck and I hate them. Come back and fight me about it.

I didn't even care if by some post-death miracle he could hear me.

I missed things I hadn't even liked. A lecture with the Professor, only half the class plus Kitty listening. Another afternoon session in which Xavier asked if I remembered anything new about that night and I, nauseous, lied to his face. The Professor's eyes on us on a morning after Bobby and I had swapped rooms, an unspoken reminder that while he couldn't read my mind, he could still read John's. I missed other things. Things made possible by this place. The unsteady happiness of making friends for the first time, a safe place to sleep, the implacable focus of John's eyes even across a room, his hands resting at my hips, the easy smile that felt like it was always for me.

New grief was twisted up with earlier grief, the old skin of myself I had refused to face. I missed everything. It made me so sad I needed to hit something. So angry I was crying instead. It wasn't fair.

I hit my head hard against the wall, straightened my legs out in front of me, and wondered if there was a way to make tea without moving.

John POV:

"Think of it as a pirated livestream," Callisto had said.

Security at the mansion was apparently slightly more lax than usual for the Professor's funeral. Mutant students from all corners seemed to have returned to the school for the funeral, summoned by the untimely destruction of the first man to hand them structure and meaning.

"We live in an age of darkness. A world full of fear, hate, and intolerance. But in every age, there are those who fight against it," the figure of Storm was saying in the projection, to a solemn crowd.

He'd been the first for John too, technically, had him picked up from a detention center when he was thrown out of a fifth foster home for setting a toaster oven on fire. Well, not really. The Professor had accidentally let it slip once that they'd already been in the area on another mission when they had dropped by. The mere coincidence of John's arrival at the school had creased him for so long. John stared at the projection of the school between the trees and wondered when it had been overtaken by everything else. Sure, the Professor had only picked him up by accident, but he was probably also the reason he was alive. He was the reason John had escaped the endless juvie to foster care cycle he'd been numbly waiting out, the reason he'd met and found a friend in Bobby, met Celia…John shook his head at the screen, like there would suddenly be no risk of seeing them there.

They'd strung someone's tent between two trees to watch, though many in the crowd were confused as to why. Magneto's relationship with the Professor was difficult to track, but he seemed attentive enough to Storm's eulogy.

"Charles Xavier was born to a world divided—a world he tried to heal, a mission he never saw accomplished. It seems the destiny of great man to see their goals unfulfilled."

The backyard itself was filled with chairs, lined up in front of a tombstone with a flame before it. A number of the mutant guests seated held roses, themselves dressed in black. John looked at the screen for half a second and knew Celia wasn't there. The pit of his stomach dropped, disappointment and concern and something else, as he glanced across the screen to be sure.

"Charles was more than a mutant, more than a teacher. He was a friend."

Nope, there was Bobby, there was Rogue, there was Bobby holding Kitty's hand. Oh, you poor idiot. There were a number of alumni and Colossus and Storm, but Celia was nowhere to be found.

Then the camera panned to another angle, one that showed the crowd of black facing the school Xavier had fought so hard to build and maintain, and John stopped breathing for just a second.

"When we were afraid, he gave us strength." Storm was saying, the camera holding her perfectly centered, the background of the school draped around her like its own ivy.

But John ignored her, because there, the only other person on the back deck apart from Logan, who struck his own moody stance against the stone. There, arms crossed, head bowed, leaning into the shadow of an outcropping of the stone building. Celia was there, after all. Far away, and deeply pixilated until the camera adjusted to a better long-range focus, but there. And looking very alone.

John stared hard at the corner of her frame that the camera kept as it focused on Storm speaking.

"And when we were alone, he gave us a family."

Was she eating enough? She looked thin. Unlike herself. There was something about her posture that was wrong and it bothered him. If they would just show her face.

He felt that telltale preemptive prickling and knew Magneto was approaching, quietly surveying the screen himself.

"A real shame," was all he said.

"He may be gone, but his teachings live on through us, his students. Wherever we may go, we must carry on his vision."

John swallowed what he wanted to say and said instead but with the same anger. "If I had been there—"

"Be serious," Magneto interrupted, chuckling. "You should know better by now, Pyro. There was no way you were going."

John tried to ignore the sting to his pride even as he knew it had been coming. True, once the anger had burned off, he had to rally for some enthusiasm for the camp he'd ended up in. But that didn't make open doubt in his ability to contribute to a cause sting any less than it had when he'd been a student of the X-Men.

"And that's a vision of a world united," Storm was saying.

John stared hard at the corner of the screen, where he could just see the ends of her hair, the shape of her shoulders, her mouth frowning. Logan had turned into the mansion at Storm's final words, but she had stayed a beat longer, arms still crossed. Not crying, not shaking, not touched. He kept trying to decide what it was that was most wrong about the way she was standing. All he could come up with was that it drove him insane to notice how pinned her elbows looked, as though she were holding herself in and together.

And then she too turned and disappeared entirely, before anyone onscreen could approach her.

"We would be fools to send you while there was even the slightest chance that girl would be there," Magneto said next. "She makes you useless."

And John's throat was dry and ears burned and heart felt hollowed out because she had made him so many things and useless had never been one of them.

Celia POV:

"Are you crying?"

I looked up to find Bobby and that full minutes had passed. The hallway was still quiet, the murmur of voices mostly outside. Bobby stood alone in front of me in his funeral clothes. I wondered absently how he'd, as always, somehow lost both girls.

"I don't think I've ever seen you cry before," he said when I didn't respond.

I glared halfheartedly.

"I don't," I said bluntly. "Normally. Having a bit of an off day."

He nodded and I wondered when the last time was that we'd actually talked.

"Rogue's not with you?" I said, when it appeared he wasn't leaving.

"She went to find chocolate," he said. "I think she thought that's where you would be."

I nodded. He stood there just a beat too long again and then slid down the wall next to me.

We stared together toward one of the historic busts that decorated the hallway.

"So," he started, and I almost laughed. "How you been?"

I nodded thoughtfully. "I think I'm close to mastering the French braid," my voice said, cracking. "You?"

I heard him almost laugh and it made my throat feel a tiny bit better.

"Thought this nice boarding school my parents sent me to would have more well-placed benches."

Siryn, who was walking in at just that moment, jumped at the sudden bark of laughter and, shooting an alarmed look at both of us, vanished quickly down a hallway.

We sat in silence a few more beats, the hallway empty again. It occurred to me I should move my legs from where they were splayed out across it. Instead I knocked an elbow at Bobby and he chuckled again.

"Listen," he said, and his voice was serious again but I found it didn't tip me back into despair. "I know I've been kind of an awful friend."

I lowered my brow at him and saw he was pulling at his fingers instead of looking at me.

"John and I got here at the same time, you know. We were the only ones our age here for so long. I know we're…different people, but he was still my best friend, you know?"

He was saying "you know" a lot, so I nodded. He'd made the participation bar helpfully low, even if I had no idea where he was going with this. I was too tired to pretend I didn't want to hear anything on the subject. He wasn't looking at me anyway, face somber and eyes somewhere beyond the hallway.

"When he left, it kept just hitting me that my best friend left like that and left to join those people. I didn't really stop to think much about what it meant to anyone else."

He looked at me finally, and I could see the guilt clearly written across his face.

"Cel," he said, and I felt the lump back in my throat. "Before you, I probably wouldn't have had to."

I swallowed the lump with great difficulty and little success, spoke anyway.

"What are you talking about, Bobby?"

He shook his head.

"You know how he was. No one else really knew him. We were best friends but everyone else was just kind of 'around' to him. He never bothered with anyone else and nobody else really bothered with him," he said.

Rude. When did Bobby get wise?

"And then there was you," he said. "And I just…when he left, I could only think about how it affected me and how mad I was at him and at myself for not doing anything to stop him. I forgot I wasn't the only person John had in the universe anymore."

Something about that broke me again. I stared hard at Xavier's stupid bust of some stupid philosopher and willed myself to stop leaking.

"Didn't exactly do him much good in the end, did it?" I said, voice hoarse. "Having me?"

Bobby was quiet for a moment.

"He loved you. I don't know if he ever said it. But I've never seen him care so much about anything. It was like he suddenly went from nothing in the world touching him to obsessive about everything that touched you. He would've done anything for you, even when it meant playing nice with others...I don't know if either of us can know how much good that probably did."

I was leaking again. Suddenly-Wise Bobby was getting old.

He sighed like he was exhaling something heavy. I waited for him to get up and leave, as exhausted by his sudden wisdom as I was, but he didn't. He was poking at my favorite bruise and it hurt. Because it had been real, after all, and I hadn't imagined it. But that John had loved me and I hadn't imagined it didn't dull the truth that he'd left me behind as though I had.

The footsteps and murmurs of people started rustling back into the hallways as we sat there, legs splayed, backs against the same wall.

"And it isn't the end yet," Bobby said.

I couldn't tell if he was right.