When the wave hit, she didn't cry.
The wave. That's what everyone was calling it. The day Magneto brought the world to its knees. The day Peter spent buried helplessly underneath the waterboarded wreckage of the Sanctum Sanctorum. The day the X-Men…the day Logan didn't come back.
But she didn't cry. Not when she hugged him, not when she watched the familiar motorbike disappear into the distance one last time, and not when she read the letter he left for her. Not once.
She didn't speak to anyone for days after the obituary. But she didn't cry.
Even when she was with the X-Men, she wouldn't cry. She'd just go down to the Danger Room and punch robots until she could feel her heart again.
That's why he asked her to hit him.
He found her by the bleachers at lunch, curled up into a ball with that same blank expression she'd kept on since hearing his name called at the public memorial. She made a fit when he took off her headphones and tugged her up to her feet, stern as steel despite knowing she could walk through him as if he were made of air. But she didn't.
She said no, called him crazy when he insisted, but then looked him right in the eyes. He understood, better than most others would. He understood the emptiness, the void in her chest, understood that it wasn't really a void. It was a fire, and it needed some place to go before it burned her up. Like it had almost burned him.
So she hit him. Gently at first - she didn't want to hurt him - until he told her to give him everything. He could take it, he said. And she knew he could.
Each hit felt harder than the last, slowly running him down till he found it hard to breathe. But he didn't stop her. He just watched her burn her fire out. She soon found it hard to keep going, eyes growing blurrier and breathing growing heavier with each punch she desperately threw at him. But she kept going. She kept punching until she could punch no more.
When she stopped, he rubbed her tear-stained cheek. She collapsed into him, sobbing quietly into his shirt as he wrapped both arms around her waist and held her as tightly as he could.
"It's okay, I got you," he whispered with a kiss to the side of her head. "I got you, just let it out."
He held her for dear life as she cried her heart out.