X2: Aftermath

a tag for the movie
by Setcheti

 

 

Disclaimer: Don’t own them and not trying to, but my kids watched both X-Men movies over and over and over again until I eventually just gave up and tagged the last one. 

 

Things just hadn’t been the same since Jean had died.

 

Scott felt like he had something of a right to be melodramatic about losing his one and only love – there had never been anyone before Jean, and he wasn’t sure there could ever be anyone after.  Professor Xavier was leaving him alone about it, so far, and had simply told him that the best way to work through grief was to work through it.  So that was what Scott had been doing since they’d gotten back.

 

He didn’t think the professor had talked to Logan, so far as he knew, but it appeared the Wolverine had already known about the therapeutic value of work.  Logan was still at the mansion, still making himself surprisingly useful around the school…and still obviously grieving for Jean himself.  Scott was trying not to think about that too much.  He knew it was illogical, unreasonable – and he didn’t want to know what the professor would make of it – but in his heart he just couldn’t stand it that Logan had loved her too.  He’d deluded himself before, told himself that guys like Logan were just animals, lustful, unfaithful…but that was all it had been, a self-serving self-delusion, a little boy having a tantrum because someone else loved the person he loved and he’d selfishly wanted her to be his alone.

 

And it had confused him more than anything that Jean had been so…conflicted where Logan was concerned.  Scott hadn’t expected her to ever look away from him, especially not for someone so different; he’d been under the impression that he’d meant the same to Jean that she’d meant to him.  Now he was questioning that.  Had he just been…convenient?  Or maybe, even worse, safe?

 

One thing Logan wasn’t, was safe.  Danger just oozed out of him, from the predatory way he walked to the watchful look in his eyes and the hard edge to his knowing smirk.  Scott still wasn’t sure why the professor was letting someone like that work with all the kids they had here.  It was…a bad example, that’s what it was.  Logan was the antithesis of everything Charles Xavier stood for.

 

So when Scott saw the older man doing anything, he watched him like a hawk and readied himself to intervene.  He hadn’t gotten a chance to step in until the day he came upon Logan and Kurt Wagner in one of the school’s wide corridors looking at a large heap of ice.  “It’s Bobby,” Logan told him with a wave of a callused hand toward the ice,  a worried look on his whiskered face that Scott wasn’t sure how to interpret.  “The kid got really upset and did this to himself, somehow.  We’re not sure if he knows how to get out of it or not, but we can’t leave him like this.”

 

Scott shook his head, more at the perceived stupidity of the two older mutants than at Bobby Drake’s predicament.  The kids were always getting into weird situations because they couldn’t control their powers properly, and mostly they just ended up embarrassed because an instructor had to get them out of it.  Like Scott was about to do now.  “Just stand back, I can melt it,” he said in a bored, albeit smug, voice, reaching for his visor control.

 

“No!” Logan snapped, and startled Scott by slapping down his hand before he could do his thing.  The Canadian dropped down to sit cross-legged on the floor next to the ball of ice and lay a careful hand on it, not flinching from the cold.  “This isn’t an ice shield, you idiot – he’s converted himself all the way over.  Turn that thing on and you’ll kill him.”

 

Logan was pissed, Scott was shocked…and Kurt was ignoring them both.  One of his blue, three-fingered hands was resting on an icy shoulder, and he was leaning close to what he hoped was an ear.  “Young man, can you hear me?” he was saying soothingly.  “It iss me, Kurt Vogner – zhe Nightcrawler, remember?  Vhat can I do to help you?”

 

“You can’t.”  The voice that came out of the ice was small and tearful.  The ice rocked back and forth.  “No one can.  Just…just go away.”

 

“Oh no, I cannot do zat, Robert.”  The clawed blue hand patted the ice.  “Vhat kind of a friend vhould I be if I vent avay and left you vhen you are so upset?  Now tell me vhat is zhe matter and vhy ve cannot fix it.”

 

More rocking, and with an alarming shift in perception Scott realized that he could actually see Bobby Drake sitting there, head down and arms wrapped around his knees.  “Is this about what happened at your folks’ house, kid?” Logan asked gently, patting as well.  “That really sucked.”

 

The ice-boy shuddered, tiny white flakes shaving off as icy limbs rubbed together from the movement.  “Th-they…they called…”

 

“They didn’t, they were right there talkin’ to you in the living room,” Logan corrected.  “It was your brother who called the cops, not your folks.”

 

Kurt’s dark eyes grew thoughtful.  “Your brossher?  A younger brossher?”  He seemed to sense more than see the nod.  “Ah, I see.”

 

Bobby shook his head, and more flakes flew.  “He hates me.”

 

“Perhaps.”  That surprised Scott, although Logan didn’t look surprised at all.  “He iss gifted too, zhis younger brossher of yours?”

 

Bobby shook his head again.  “He’s…not a mutant.”

 

Kurt’s patting became a firm grip.  “I did not ask you if he vas a mutant, I ask if he vas gifted like you.  You go to special school for zhe gifted, he goes vhere?”

 

The rocking stopped, and the young man’s head came up to look at him in what Scott supposed was disbelief.  Icy eyelids blinked tiny crystalline drops off of frosted eyelashes.  “He…he just goes to school.  To public school, the same one I used to…used to go to.”

 

“Ah, zo he iss not special in zhe least.”  Kurt smiled sympathetically and shook his head at the immediate denial that the boy quickly bit off.  “Iss he perhaps jealous of you, do you zhink?  You are special, young Robert – you are gifted, you go to special school zhat iss expensive, yes?  Your parents pay for zhis.  Zhey must talk about you often, about how special you are.  And you are eldest, too – alvays above him, alvays first in zheir hearts.  So vhen you tell zhem you are a mutant, did zhey run screaming from zhe house in fear?”

 

The boy’s icy face registered shock.  “No!  No, they were just…disappointed.”  His head dropped back to his folded arms with an audible clink of ice on ice.  “She…she asked me if I’d tried…tried not to be a mutant.”  He sniffed.  “I have – a lot.  I couldn’t do it.”

 

“Of course not – a person can only be vhat zhey are,” the older mutant told him, resuming his patting.  “But zhey did not run vrom you?”

 

“They didn’t run or scream or anything,” Logan put in quietly.  “As a matter of fact, I thought they were handling it pretty damned well, considering.”

 

Bobby was shaking his head again.  “I…I sc-scared my mom.”

 

Logan snorted.  “No, you startled her – there’s a difference,” he corrected.  “You probably should have waited until she wasn’t holding the cup before you iced her tea, I bet she dropped it as much because it was cold as anything else.  But even then, she didn’t scream or jump up and run away from you, kid.  And your cat thought it was great.”  He winked at the Nightcrawler over the boy’s bowed head.  “I liked that cat, we should have brought her back here with us.  She wasn’t even scared of me.”

 

Kurt chuckled.  “Animals are zaid to be good judges of character.”  He returned his attention to the boy.  “So your parents vere not frightened of you, your cat vas not frightened of you…and your brossher he runs off to call police.  He vas angry, vas he not?”

 

There was a long moment of silence, then, “Yeah, he was really ticked off.”  Bobby’s voice wasn’t nearly so small and broken now, and when he lifted his head back up there were fewer crystalline drops on his icy cheeks than there had been before.  He uncurled one hand to brush the drops away.  “With…with me gone, he’s been the only child, huh?  He was a real jerk last…last Christmas when I went home.”

 

“He iss jealous, and he iss young,” Kurt confirmed.  “Neizher iss your fault, and nossing you can do vill fix him – it iss for your parents to fix him, vhen zhey can see zhe problem.”  His dark eyes met the eyes of white ice that were turned up to him with a very serious look.  “Vhat iss for you iss to lif your life to zhe fullest, to live zhe very best zhat you can, do you understand?  You cannot change ozhers, only yourself.”  He turned thoughtful again.  “You know…zhere vas man who travelt vith circus vhen I vas zhere, he vas chef vonce and had to give it up because of zhe arzhritis.  But vhen he did not hurt he could make zhe most beautiful sculptures out of ice.  Haf you ever tried to make ice sculpture, Robert?”

 

Bobby shook his head, plainly puzzled, and Scott was surprised to see that he seemed to be regaining some color.  He’d been afraid that the boy might have been permanently transformed.  If Kurt noticed – and Scott was sure he had – he didn’t give any sign.  “Zhis man, he vas artist,” he continued.  “But he had to vork vith block of ice and chop off vith pick.  I vonder if you could make ice grow in shape you vant, vould be much simpler.”

 

“I…I’ve never really tried to do something like that.”  Bobby was starting to uncurl now, distracted by the new idea, and he was now very obviously transforming back to normal.  “But what good is it…”

 

“Vhat good?”  Kurt rolled his eyes.  “Logan, my friend, zhis boy does not know vhat good it iss to be artist vith ice, vhat haf you been teaching him?!”

 

Logan made a face at him.  “I haven’t been teaching him anything.”  He grinned at Bobby.  “Kid, people who can do those fancy ice sculptures make tons of money.  What the creepy crawler here is trying to tell you is that you might just have yourself a sideline – something to fall back on when saving the world isn’t paying the rent.”  He clapped his hand on a shoulder that was now clad in a dripping wet red flannel shirt.  “With some practice, of course.  And I bet the professor would be glad to help you find an outlet if you get good enough.”

 

“Ve vill go practice now and zee,” Kurt said decisively.  He frowned when Bobby shivered.  “But I zhink maybe some dry clozhing first, yes?”

 

Scott finally saw something he could do to help.  “I can take care of that.”  He reached for his visor and made an adjustment, and a wide-angle beam of red light shot out and moved over the shivering boy.   Within moments the clothes were dry and the water had evaporated.  When Bobby and the two older mutants looked at him in surprise, he shrugged.  “Hey, we all practice.  Let’s just say I don’t like cold bathwater much.”

 

“There ya go, see kid?” Logan put in, with a wicked grin for Scott; he hadn’t failed to notice that his clothes, notably the seat of his pants where he’d been sitting on the floor, hadn’t been dried.  “Summers here has a sideline as a bathroom attendant.”  He stood up, as did Kurt, and they pulled the boy up with them.  “Why don’t we go do this practicing in the kitchen where the mess won’t be so bad, and I’ll make us some cocoa.”  He snorted at Scott’s look of disbelief.  “Hey, I’m from Canada, I make the best hot chocolate you’ve ever had in your life – make it better than my old man ever did, he used to tell me so.”

 

Bobby looked at him in surprise.  “You have a father?”

 

Logan snorted again, slinging an arm around the boy’s shoulders.  “Everyone has a father, kid.  My old man was the greatest, too.”  He correctly interpreted the look he was getting.  “Yeah, he knew I was a mutant.  He was special himself, real special, and he was glad I was too – his biggest worry was that I’d get careless because I knew I’d heal so fast if I got hurt.  So I learned to be careful because I didn’t want him to worry.”

 

Scott was beyond shocked; he hadn’t thought Logan remembered anything at all about his past.  “I guess you really do learn something new every day,” he said when the other man saw his openmouthed look and raised a challenging eyebrow at him.  “I always figured you were raised by wolves.”

 

To his even greater surprise, a shadow passed across the Wolverine’s hard face.  “Not by ‘em, in spite of ‘em,” he said cryptically, moving with Bobby and Kurt in the direction of the school’s kitchens.  He called back over his shoulder, “And just for that you aren’t gettin’ any cocoa, Summers.”

 

Scott managed a suitably sarcastic reply, but inside he was floundering around in confusion.  He quickly used his visor to dry up the rest of the water from the floor and then headed upstairs to find the professor.  He had some questions to ask.

 

Professor Xavier was waiting for him – which shouldn’t have surprised Scott, since he had never managed to surprise the man in all the time that he’d lived at the mansion.  The older mutant smiled when he came in.  “He isn’t lying about the cocoa, you know.”

 

“I didn’t figure he was.”  Scott flopped down into a chair and stared at the ceiling.  “Explain to me what I just saw, Professor.”

 

“People will always surprise you if given half a chance,” Xavier told him.  “You just hadn’t given him the half-chance yet.  And I minded something Magneto had to say about the way I was interfering with Logan; his memories are returning, but only the most recent ones.  The good ones were farther back, too far for him to access them unassisted.”

 

Scott looked at him then.  “So you…”

 

“Assisted him, yes – although he doesn’t know that and I don’t plan to tell him.”  The professor shrugged.  “Whether any of you understood it at the time or not, when Logan went after Stryker and faced him down – and when he decided not to kill the man himself – he vanquished one of his biggest demons.  But the doubts that Stryker and Magneto introduced into his mind about himself were doing him serious emotional damage, so I counterbalanced their lies with a portion of the truth.”  He smiled.  “Logan’s father was a good man, and the two of them were very close.”

 

“He was a mutant.”

 

“Not really, no.”  Xavier raised an eyebrow for the assumption.  “I believe what Logan said was that his father was special, not that he was a mutant.  But that isn’t important, not really.  What is important is that Logan now remembers a time in his life when he was loved and valued and happy; he has a foundation that he can rest upon when the returning memories are too much.”  The professor shot a sharp look at the leader of his X-Men when Scott didn’t quite hold back a snort.  “You have no idea what he, or Kurt Wagner for that matter, have been put through by that madman Stryker, Scott, and I truly hope you never do come to a full understanding of it,” he admonished.  “You don’t want to hear this, but you’ve led a fairly sheltered life because of me, and although I don’t regret that there are times when I fear I’ve protected you too much.”

 

Scott squirmed; sometimes the professor made him feel as young and unsure as the kids downstairs.  Instead of trying to respond, though, he changed the subject.  “So what do we know about Wagner, anyway?”

 

Xavier gave him another look, disappointed this time.  “Why don’t you ask him yourself?  He’d be more than happy to tell you about himself, if he thought you were interested.”

 

Scott sighed.  “Is he going to be on my team?”

 

“Another question you should be asking him, not me,” the professor countered.  “But I’ll answer it for you anyway – no, he won’t be, unless you happen to need him personally for something.  Kurt has been cloistered in one closed environment or another for most of his life, the school does not seem quite so confining to him as it sometimes does to the rest of you.”  A questioning look from Scott, and Xavier smiled as he shook his head.  “As I already said – ask, Scott.  He enjoys talking about himself, and I won’t deprive him of that.” 

 

“I’m afraid to ask him.”  The admission slipped out before Scott could stop it, and he scowled when Xavier chuckled and shook his head.  He knew the professor hadn’t ‘helped’ him say that with any power save his knowledge of psychology, but that didn’t make him any happier about it.  Scott tossed himself back in the chair with a resigned snort.  “All right, you got me,” he conceded ungracefully.  “I’m afraid of what he has to say – and I’m afraid of what he’s going to think when he starts asking me questions about myself.  Like you said, I’ve been ‘sheltered’.”

 

Xavier steepled his long fingers together thoughtfully, elbows resting on the arms of his wheelchair.  His smile was still amused but also sympathetic.  “In that case, perhaps it would be easier to discuss Kurt’s probable reaction with someone who has already experienced it.  I believe Storm is down in the third floor library putting up some books, you could try there.”

 

Scott recognized a dismissal when he got one, so he just nodded, peeled himself out of the chair and left with a muttered, ‘Thanks,’ tossed over his shoulder, feeling thirteen and hating it.  But he still went down to the library.

 

Storm was there, just like the professor had said she would be, and she looked unhappy to be putting up the books for no reason Scott could fathom…until he remembered that Jean had usually been the one who’d kept the library organized, that was, and kicked himself again for being a selfish bastard when it came to the whole grieving thing.  He wasn’t the only one who’d lost Jean, he’d just been acting like he was.  Grabbing a few books, he started filing them away in their proper places.  “The Professor told me I should come talk to you,” he broached after a moment.  “He said I should ask you about Kurt Wagner.”

 

The white-haired woman froze, and gave him a suspicious look; Scott felt the temperature in the room drop a few degrees.  “And just why would that be?”

 

Scott was taken aback by the edge in her voice, but then he realized that she’d misunderstood him.  “I meant, about his past, and what he thinks about other mutants.”  He just couldn’t let it go at that, though, even though he knew he probably should.  “You aren’t…I mean, you and him…”

 

“Whether we are or aren’t isn’t any of your business,” Storm informed him in a cool voice.  “And if you want to know where the Nightcrawler comes from, why don’t you just ask him?”

 

The leader of the X-Men winced.  “Because I’m afraid he’ll ask me where I come from,” he told her, figuring it was better to just say it straight out than to beat around the bush and have her drag it out of him.  “And I know he’s had it…well, rough.  A lot rougher than me.”

 

“Most of us have had it rougher than you, Scott,” she informed him, not at all harshly, and Scott winced again when he remembered that Storm hadn’t had it all too easy herself.  “But if you’re asking me if Kurt is going to be judgmental because you got off easy…the answer is no, he’s not.  He’s told me more than once that he’s glad the children here are getting to grow up in such a safe place, he sees the school as a sanctuary.”  She raised a silvery eyebrow like a bolt of lightning over one storm-dark eye.  “His only concern has been that we don’t do enough to help the students who’ve come here from rough situations work through their bitterness and anger.  He says it’s not good for them to grow up hating and fearing the rest of the world, and it took me a while but I finally realized he was right. It’s harder for me to let those feelings go, but I know that the children are going to learn from my example whether I’m setting it intentionally or not.  So I’m working on setting the one I want them to copy.”  Storm shrugged and turned back to her books.  “Any more questions?”

 

“Um, no, thanks.”  Scott looked around at the stacks of books again, remembering Jean being there, and then turned and headed for the door.  “I’ll catch you later, Storm.” 

 

She surprised him just as he was leaving, though, her voice carried on a waft of cold air that chilled the back of his neck.  “Ask him about his tattoos…if you need an icebreaker.”

 

Scott winced, but when he turned back around she was gone, leaving him with more questions he couldn’t ask that had answers he probably didn’t want to hear.  Was she sleeping with Wagner?  For a supposedly religious guy the Nightcrawler could be surprisingly…earthy.  Maybe he really did need to ask their newest adult mutant where he’d come from, find out a little more about him, especially if he was going to be staying for a while…

 

A familiar chuckle inside his mind, not intrusive.  He’s staying on as an instructor, Scott – and as our new chaplain.  He told me, and I agree, that one can’t educate the mind and the body effectively without looking to the soul as well.  And we have many wounded souls here, too many.

 

Scott didn’t respond, save for another wince; the light sense of connection reminded him of Jean too.  He felt a sigh, the professor shaking his head, and then the faint presence at the outer ‘public’ edge of his mind faded out.  Scott sighed himself and went down to the garage to check on his new car.  He’d try to catch Wagner later, tonight, after all the kids had gone to bed…and once he was sure Logan was off someplace else.  Scott might be ready to break the ice with the Nightcrawler, but the glacial wall that separated himself and Wolverine wasn’t something he wanted to touch.

 

Because dammit, seeing Logan reminded him of Jean too.  And Scott still didn’t feel like sharing.