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The remainder of Thursday was quiet—not restful, not peaceful, just quiet like no one knew what to say. Scott only came out of his room to angrily shove a piece of paper at Alex. It was his assignments, which Alex promised to complete.
What was going on with the Summers boys engulfed them both and made them feel separate from the others, which was probably why they kept their distance and Ororo found herself sitting at the dinner table with Ruth, Charles, and Hank.
She never had to be with just the adults. There was no one to goof around with and nobody seemed to want to start a conversation. Cutlery clacking against plates had never been so invasive a sound.
Everything felt like it had fallen apart.
She knew Charles wasn't going to read to her. She was sort of rude about the last story—not that she meant to be. It was a silly story where a boy went traveling with lots of animals. They scared two robbers out of a house and took it over. When the robbers tried to sneak in, one by one the animals scared them off.
The problem was that this story used a lot of words Ororo did not know—like awl, and threshing, and flail when it was a noun—and the story kept saying things like, "That was the cat, you know," and Ororo got upset because the story made her feel stupid. And it knew that.
That night she couldn't sleep. Ororo laid awake until the mansion felt a different sort of quiet. It was a sense one learned to know by instinct, the awareness that everyone was asleep. It was something, just a few years ago, that told Ororo when she should break into a home.
She slipped out of bed and padded down the hall. From outside Scott's room, she heard snuffling noises. She paused. She had never really warmed up to Artie and knew losing the cat would be tough for Scott, but hearing him cry was different. It made her hurt.
She pushed open the door. "Scott?"
He sniffled, but didn't respond.
Ororo made her way over in the dark. She found the edge of the covers and laid down next to Scott. Each lay on their side, face to face and invisible in the darkness.
Neither of them said anything for a long time. Scott was audibly crying and trying to stop. Ororo thought she ought to be comforting him somehow. She wanted to reach out, to hold him maybe, like he had done for her before, but she had never done that. She wasn't sure she knew how. The longer she thought about it but didn't, the more it seemed strange to start.
Finally, when several minutes passed in silence, she said, "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," Scott lied. "I just… my brother's a selfish jerk."
Ororo thought about that and about whether she ought to reply how she wanted to. Alex had done some dumb stuff, she wouldn't deny that… but Sean had been her friend, too. She just folded up how she felt about that. She imagined it like a piece of paper she could fold smaller and smaller until it was almost gone—but Sean used to tug her hair and spar with her in krav maga, and they once ate an entire bowl of cupcake batter together.
The idea of crawling inside a bottle of liquid numb and not looking out of it was pretty appealing, actually.
"You're too hard on people."
"He's done nothing but drink. He stopped going to school. Now Artie…"
"Have you ever done anything bad?" Ororo asked. "I mean really bad. Hurt anybody?"
Scott considered. "Before I knew about my powers, I took my glasses off. I wanted to look at a crane—a truck, not a bird. It was holding a bunch of construction stuff, boards and bricks. They all fell."
"What happened?"
"I managed to blast it. Some people still got hurt from the debris."
Ororo suppressed a disgusted noise. That was his big bad behavior story? No wonder he couldn't forgive his brother.
"The Maasai, the tribe I lived with, called me a goddess. They have so little water and I could bring the rain. I thought I made rain. I can't do that. The rain I brought to my people caused a drought for others. People died."
There was a moment of quiet, then, "You were a kid. You didn't know."
Matter-of-factly, Ororo replied, "They still died." She had learned to live with that, as there was nothing she could do to bring them back. Living with it did not mean denying it. "You've never done anything bad and it makes you mean like a little kid. You don't know how to forgive. What happened… I don't want to sleep like they might come back. Raven's friends. Still better than how Professor Xavier has to feel about it."
Raven had been behind it, had been a player for the Brotherhood of Mutants. If Ruth, Hank, Alex, and Sean were there when the Brotherhood tried to steal Cerebro, they wouldn't have stood a chance. Ororo was still scared from how that night had been, but she and the other students at least knew they were innocents (this time, anyway). They weren't carrying the guilt.
Scott thought for a moment before saying, "I don't blame him."
"You do when you're mad. You're still waiting for people to be perfect. You know Ruth speaks perfect Arabic?"
"Yeah…"
"Israel is like… like a piece of an orange. But every other piece of the orange is Arab, and the orange jacket is Arab, and the bitter white stuff—"
"Pith," Scott interrupted.
"—is Arab. Even the seeds are Arab. They speak Hebrew, but you can tell Israeli tourists. They speak English because their Arabic, Israeli Arabic, has Hebrew in it. Ruth speaks PERFECT Arabic, like an Arab." She waited a moment, but he gave no reaction to that. "Do you really not see why?"
"No. Sorry."
"She was a spy. Israel is—nobody likes Israel very much. I used to target the Israelis, to pick their pockets most because of what everyone says. Ruth is my mom and she's Israeli and I know she spied on Arabs. I don't know where. I don't know if I'm an Arab anymore, I know it's different, but mostly she's my mom and I love her. You overlook things like that. Well… I overlook things like that."
"You know you're supposed to be younger than me, right?"
"You understand this world. I understand people."
Scott sighed. For a few moments they were quiet, but Ororo knew they were not going to sleep yet.
"Artie—" he began, and stopped abruptly as his voice cracked down the middle. He sniffled and gasped before he tried again: "She was the only…"
He sobbed. This time he rolled over, facing away from Ororo, like she wouldn't hear him crying in the dark.
She had heard crying before, of course. Had cried herself as a child, before she locked down that part of herself. She looked down on the girls who cried in the orphanage. It was easier to think them weak and herself strong than acknowledge how much she wished she were one of them.
It wasn't the same with Scott. It was so much worse to hear and Ororo tried to say he was being weak. He was a pansy. He cared about that worthless animal… but she hadn't been worthless to him. And Scott was Ororo's friend. And she knew he wasn't weak.
Listening to her friend suffer was a thousand times worse.
"I'm sure you could have another cat," she tried.
"I don't want another cat."
Well, he couldn't have Artie back… and although Ororo did not see what was so special about the fleabag (which was unfair, Scott had diligently checked Artie for any sign of fleas), she knew Scott had loved it. Not sure what else to do, she pressed herself against his back and slid an arm around him.
It wasn't a real hug.
From the way he gripped her hand, she knew it was as good.