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The mind loses its subtleties when you’re asleep. Scott’s waking mind was a carefully crafted museum of absolute nothingness.
It was fun and games to taunt him about the rooms containing every woman he’d ever given a wayward look, from Emma’s suite with cracked mirrors and bloody sheets, to Jean’s sunlit balcony with its empty crib. It was not fun and games to peel away the shallow layers of memory and organised feelings, the mindscape stuck in place like a photograph in a scrapbook.
This was in part conscious. Scott had not had a thought of his own since he was a teenager, between Charles’ sticky fingers and Jean’s psychic link and Madelyne’s blazing fire and Emma’s constant touch. It was in part unconscious, hardwired into him as a survival instinct.
Nothing about Scott was ever superficial, so Emma pressed at his mind until she found the box and then she hit the jackpot.
Uptight Scott, reserved Scott. But simple Scott? No. The white room was neatly packed with cubes containing all aspects of his personality, people he loved, battle strategies. Still, it was the black box that interested Emma.
If she looked at the room out of the corner of her eye, it was on fire. The flames had wings, like tiny phoenix birds.
When Scott was asleep, the fire didn’t hide. It burned, its smoke travelling through the walls into the room where Madelyne sat in a demonic circle with a baby bump.
When he was asleep, there were twice as many rooms. On the roof, Warren lay on a lounger bare-chested and his wings spread like a real biblical angel. Emma felt the whole construct disintegrating under her mental probes, white tiles spreading over every room and familiar faces fading with a smile.
Scott’s mind was not beautiful. It was a red pulse, scarred and marred with angry lines, and his shields were like ruby quartz. When she did delve inside, to the initial house of horrors (or past attractions) she still struggled to understand how Scott could remain so mentally defined by fickle emotions and feelings when he was so political, so eternally conflicted by what had been drilled into him and what he experienced first hand.
It was love. She touched the walls of his mind as he slept, and as they crumbled, her mind flooded with a torrent of years of Jean’s bed hair and, beyond that, Alex’s bone-crushing hugs and Hank’s absent-minded rants.
It was his love, disguised as plain attraction but the undercurrent to every thought he possessed, defining his every action: love for his wives, his family, his friends that were his family, his people.
So, Emma stood in the room where all the paths in his head ended, and she surveyed the black box—levitating as Scott’s psychic shields weakened, spilling black goo—and she pulled.
She bared her teeth, feeling no give or take, and Scott’s mind manifested its defence in a short stab of telepathic resistance.
Climbing out of the box as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Wolverine unsheathed his claws. “You want a show, bub?”
She reeled backwards, taking a glance at the real Scott asleep in their bed before returning, and turned hard as a diamond. “I’m not here for you.”
“You’re here for Scotty and what he doesn’t want to give,” he growled, “and I won’t let you win when those are the stakes.”
He charged at her, but she manipulated the mindscape around them, his claws piercing a box of memory and assaulting him with a plane crash, a boy and a brother in a parachute.
Emma sighed. “You don’t even like Scott anymore, Logan.” She trapped him under the weight of Scott’s memories, under Jean’s death and their wedding just to be petty. “Besides, you’re hurting him like this. Influencing his dreams, letting old trauma free.” A manipulative edge creeped into her voice.
“And what exactly are you trying to do?”
“Figure this out!” she exclaimed. “For a man that claims to love me, Scott has a lot of secrets.” She watched him spear a memory with his claws, of Bobby and a snowball fight. “Why you? Of all his ghosts, why you? He. Hates. You.”
“Slim? Hating me? Of course he does.” Logan chuckled. “You claim to love Scott like Scotty loves you. You think you can handle this? Go ahead. Because as much as he hates me, he loves me too.”
The mindscape splintered with the revelation, the black box exploding in a burst of dark colour covering everything, suffocating Emma with its contents.
Trade secrets flashed her by, weak memories giving way to summer days on the lawn of the mansion, counting the freckles on Jean’s back… and Logan, kissing Scott in the shade of the tree because the idea of getting caught made the younger man seethe. Logan yelling at Scott, not about strategy but about unspoken tension, which led way to confessions and casual touch and a hatred only to be reckoned with by the equal love.
Emma saw Logan through Scott’s rose-tinted glasses, the deep pull of attraction, the first Danger Room kiss, the look on Jean’s face as she read his mind and couldn’t condone Scott for her same crime. She saw optic beams melting flesh, fracturing bones, and the sick feeling it gave Scott to cave in Logan’s skull knowing it made it all so much easier to pretend that way. She saw Logan presenting Scott with a rose and never speaking of it again, she felt the double betrayal of watching Jean in Logan’s arms and the rain on her face as she sat so close yet too far in a graveyard.
She felt two souls pass each other by, destined to lead lives on different paths and always put duty and love for everyone else first. She saw Scott’s grief at Logan’s death, his drunken denial, the way he kissed Emma too rough when he remembered the sinking loneliness it had brought.
She understood, as if it were her life she was watching on replay, two people who valued actions over words as a scapegoat never to confront their feelings except for the once when Scott whispered it into the small of Logan’s back and he reciprocated weeks later over toast and butter.
As the mindscape faded away, she sat hunched in a ball in the white sheets as Scott tossed and turned at the mental upheaval. She stared at the creases of his face, and she shed a single tear for a love that wasn’t her own, and never touched that black box again.
In the dead of that night, she’d never loved Scott more and less, and she’d never understood Jean better.