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When Scott Summers fell, Charles Xavier caught him on the blade of his knife.
A metaphorical knife, of course. Charles would maintain his pacifist lie to the end of time, but you only had to peer close at Scott’s memories to see the cracks.
Gabe was a big one. Less of a crack, more of a chasm. In the aftermath of the confrontation on the Moon, Scott could see them as if underlined in his head, and he often wondered if he was making it up to reconcile with himself, with the insurmountable guilt of killing someone whose identity and morals and ideals were welded to yours in battle.
During Emma’s only prison visit, she’d looked at him darkly, scornfully and regretfully and truthfully, and said, “Yes.” There had been no question, but he knew when he was projecting. He had been thinking about Charles, and the cracks, and if they’d always been there if you were looking. And she’d been honest with him.
He didn’t thank her, for tainting the image of his mentor and surrogate father, the man he had murdered. He simply sat back and thought about the stiff boy with the weight of the world on his shoulders and the man who’d encouraged it. The man who’d known better than Scott how close he was falling apart, but preferred to watch and wait until he was ready to be pieced back together in his image.
He thought about love and trust and respect, and the differences. About who he'd been and who he was and who Charles wanted from him, and about who he was going to be.
Undeniably, he loved Charles, and that would be his burden to bear. A life surrounded by telepaths, and he had a lot more thinking to do.
He thought in the way only a man who hadn't had a thought to himself since he was a teenager could, about ethics and boundaries and the grey areas in between.
When it came down to it, there was only one line he could confidently draw.
And it was a line under Charles Xavier’s dream.
—
He was shrouded in death. His mistakes were his shadows, and he was waiting on one of them smothering him.
Fighting was what he was good at, what he was trained for. There was blood on his hands, hands burnt with Phoenix fire, and there was no happy ending to be had.
Mutants were what he had left. For his sins, he owed them his existence. His reputation was worth nothing, his feelings were better buried, his friends joined him or died, or joined him and then died.
It had to stop. He was running on borrowed time, and he came to his knees. He rued the day he met Charles Xavier. He wondered if he could’ve ever been anything else, kept his eyes shut and ignored everyone else’s suffering as well as his own, found a corner of his mind dark enough to hide in.
He got up, eventually, not with a battle cry but with a shudder. If he had to kill to help mutants, he would still do it. His regrets were worthless, but his life was not. The lives he had touched were worth his crimes, and for those that weren’t he’d kill and persuade and follow until they were, until he died with a bullet in his back and a revolution at his feet.
Jean waited for him to piece himself together. They were different people, at different stages in their different lives, but they had a choice, and he wanted to make it.
They’d been dead. They’d craved it and cursed it. They were death, yet they defied it.
They had grown apart. They had broken promises. A lifetime ago, they’d stared at the remnants of their marriage and handed each other hammers.
He had loved Emma, for all her hard edges. He had gone too far for even her, and he had not known where that left him. He had loved Madelyne, longer ago: more mistakes, more scars. More obvious links to Jean, to losing yourself in somebody who resembled your dead love in your guilt and grief, to a vicious cycle of hurt and betrayal neither of them stopped because they were trapped in its embrace.
He had loved Logan, and Jean had too. She was in his head, or he was in her’s, and there would be no secrets this time, especially not that one. They were still different, but they could now acknowledge that they’d been unhappy last time and they needed new foundations.
Knowing that her moral high ground was rocky, that she had been one step from inviting Logan not just into her mind but her bed was rubbing salt into his wounds, twice. But he was not angry, and the honesty was more powerful than the lie that had driven them apart.
Jean thought a lot about Charles. It hummed beneath her skull and painted memories in his head, and he saw suppressed telepathy and meltdowns and sticky fingers where they didn’t belong. Yet again, he saw love and devotion and a tie between all of them.
Second chances too. All around, she saw them in their brave new world, and she made him see them too. The chip on his shoulder was eased, and she kissed him with the assurance that she had loved the loyal teenager and the angry vigilante but she loved him the most for being the both.
And, when they were done picking each other apart and figuring out where one’s thoughts ended and the other’s began, Scott went to find Logan.
—
Sometimes, Scott wondered if things would be different if Logan had only been able to look him in the eye.
But things weren’t different and, everything taken into consideration, when it came to Logan he’d always shown too much self-control.
If he’d just kissed him, once, instead of punching him, he wouldn’t be waiting to knock on the door, knowing Logan could smell his nerves, feeling like a teenager again.
It'd always been so easy to punch Logan, laughably so. You can’t hit some affectionately, but every blow Scott dealt him was with the intent one day he’d come to his senses and stop loving someone who hated his very being with such intensity. Every punch Logan landed, he tried to convince himself he had spent too much time with Jean.
Years of pain and denial, of Logan’s blood on his and Emma’s sheets, and his bone too. Years that could’ve been spared if he just swallowed his pride and kissed him.
Scott knocked on the door, and Logan all but ripped it off the hinges opening it, and they would’ve been nose to nose if not for Logan’s height.
He looked up at Scott with the world’s worst attempt at nonchalance, and said, “Where’s Jeannie?”
This was it. He was leaning against the doorframe, firing his shot. “Busy. Never far. She sends her love.”
“And give her mine,” Logan said slowly, and Scott smiled, even wider at Logan’s poorly disguised confusion.
Years of biting down his feelings, and to what end? Logan was always his fatal flaw, most likely to kill him.
He took the opportunity to move past Logan into his shabby apartment, collapsing onto a beige couch like any other, inhaling cheap beer and dried blood and Logan, and Logan watched him dangerously.
Scott was covered in metaphorical burns, they both were, and he was about to hand Logan a match.
“I think,” he said, with the strength of layers of lies peeling back, “that we should stop using Jean when we’re too scared to say things to each other. So, while Jean undeniably loves you, I do too.” It swelled in his throat. “I love you. Always have. Do with that what you will.”
Logan dropped like a dead weight next to Scott, voice scratchy and every feature of his unscarred brow mapped in Scott’s memory like a vow. “Scotty. Heck.”
And then, he kissed him. It was fierce enough to draw blood, violent in nature and beautiful how they moulded together like it was always meant to be. There was intimacy in living in someone’s head, but there was intimacy in such raw emotion that matched it, in pouring your longing into another person’s heart.
“Slim,” Logan breathed, delicate in a way Scott hadn’t known he could be, cradling his cheek in his hand and seeing Scott in his civilian sunglasses and faded blue shirt. Scott, ablaze and smoking, but here nonetheless. “Love you too, you know. Always.”
It was not what Scott’s nightmares had been about. It was not a broken jaw and a tangled mess of limbs fighting on the floor as they called each other names and slashed desperately looking for enough pain to match their own.
He had found Logan, again but also for the first time, on a random Wednesday with a clear sky, fisting his hand in his vest like he had a claim to stake, falling into Logan’s smirk and kissing it away like he hadn’t been playing roulette over whether he was going to be pushed away.
“Tomorrow,” Scott promised, unable to fully believe the armful of Logan and their noses touching, drinking each other in, “we talk. Okay?”
Logan returned gruffly, “Okay.” And that was that, the simplest thing they’d ever done.
—
In the morning, Logan and Scott sat on the edge of Logan’s bed, half-dressed and smelling of each other if Logan’s pleased sniff was taken as evidence, and they talked.
Scott couldn’t look at him. He stared at the floor, feeling ten inches tall, and ripped into his bloody, beating heart and rooted around for bullets, pulling them out one by one for Logan’s display.
They were ugly, but they had stopped crippling him and started killing him, and he couldn't live without Logan in the same way he’d die before he ever lost Jean again.
He looked at Logan and drew in a ragged breath, and tried to shake the deep instilled urge to crash his walls down, to correct his posture and issue orders before he went too far. In the end, he only issued one order, in a flat voice, rubbing the bridge of his nose and sighing. “No interruptions. Please. I don’t want to fight, I just want to… to…”
“To feel,” Logan supplemented, and Scott nodded. It was as good a word as any.
“You always put me on a pedestal,” he began, quietly. “Your rival. Your ally. The wrong to your right, and more often the other way round. But that didn't break me.” He took a deep breath, more tired than scared to admit to Logan that he was broken, and he’d had a hand in breaking him. “You put Charles on a pedestal too. My father, in all but blood. Your father, in all but intent. You put him above everyone else, your symbol of who you wanted to be, your perfect image not to be tainted. And then you had the audacity to accuse me of not hating myself enough, even though you know. You know I knew that you couldn’t possibly mean it, that I was poisoning myself inside with what I’d done and did everyday. I lived with it, you didn’t. Because you misunderstood why I hated him. Why I hated myself so much. You hated me and you, you loved Charles, and you never stopped to think.” The words stung, and he pinched the skin of his leg. “Be a good man, Scott. Be Charles, and do the right thing. Except we’re not so different, me and Charles. You forget I was his first child soldier. The legacy of your precious school was tarnished long before I went rogue. I was a boy, and I idolised Charles, and he loved it. He made me who I am. If I went rogue, if I went too far, it was his doing for I am, and will always be, as much him as me. I have a purpose. I have always had a purpose. I am Cyclops before I am Scott. I am their martyr before I am a man. I am property of Xavier, and of the dream, and look at how not being that person worked out for me. I have regrets. I am sorry that I punched you around rather than faced my feelings for you, that our species suffered because I was too insecure to have this conversation, but I am not sorry for my fight. I have been Charles, and Erik, and now I’m being me. It gets people killed, as you artfully told me, but I’m trying because the cost of not is too high. The cost for me, as an individual, not just as a mutant. This is me, laid bare to you. This is me, making my promise to you. You have seen me falling apart, you have refused to let me talk you into killing me, however close you came, and then you have threatened to kill me as a teenager. It is all so messy, and I doubt we will ever be at peace. But I am at peace with this: I love you. If you killed me, I’d love you still. And I do not know where we go from here, but Jean has an idea and I’d like to try. You and me and Jean. I think this world owes us that.”
There was a long passage of silence after that. Logan was caught up in Scott’s words, unmoving but thrown out of his orbit, faced with a problem he couldn’t stab or kiss his way out of. This much truth was utterly uncharacteristic of both of them, even if they were both theoretically capable of toppling revolutions with speeches and claws.
He was not going to spurn Scott now, he could tell. Neither of them was losing this fight, if it was even that. They had an unwritten duty to, once in their lives, be these people.
Logan cleared his throat. “When I threatened to kill you, time-displaced you, it wasn’t personal. I had finally talked myself into hating you with every fibre of my being, and I was faced with a you that I had never met, that I wasn’t obligated to, that I didn’t love, and it felt easier. Like maybe if I killed you I wouldn’t have to remember who you were, and I’d have Charles to guide me out of the mess. I mean, Scotty, I hated you. I really did. The dream was my last chance. You always saw inside me, at the killer behind the smoke screens. Everyone knows the lives on my record, but it was different with you- you understood the pain and grief and sincerity, the difficult choices and the mask of a leader. And… Chuck. I used to think we owed him our futures, but I think he owes us. As a species, as a team, as his children. He made me feel like I could be a hero, if only I were more like him. The idea of his perfect soldier, where the killing was excused and the weight was easier… but it wasn’t.” He swallowed, bit his tongue. “Chuck made it easier, but he wasn’t there because you’d killed him. Sure, Jean killed billions of aliens, but what you did stung more because it was Chuck. You lost control and you saw Chuck in a different light, and it cost all of us. But not like it cost you, I don’t think. I might have killed you then, but he wouldn’t have had me do it. So I followed the legacy, you know how that goes as well as me. We both died, we both came back. Ruth asked me to look after you, and so did Cable. I… I know Emma pushed us together, psychically, but I would’ve come. I told you I’d follow you to Hell if you asked. And you asked. But I took the easy option, I got mad, I let you pin me down and blast me and I thought maybe that time you’d kill me. But I misjudged you. Misjudged what was still on your shoulders. You know this. That when it came down to it, I’d rather die by your side or have you kill me than continue without you. I love you, Slim. All you had to do was ask. I’ll push you and I’ll stab you and I’ll fight you, but if you tell me to stop… You or Jean. And you’ve asked. So, it’s time we go home. Not to a building full of ghosts, but to each other, to decades of us… and the hope that this time it sticks. I’m with you, Scott Summers, rain or shine.” His voice dropped softly, closing the tentative distance between them and kissing Scott’s cheek hesitantly. “Fall apart, if you like. We’ll figure it out. We always do. Even when I hate you, I love you. I have you.”
Logan was right about decades of unexplored emotion and hatred, but there was only one way to look at it with hindsight, and Scott was done hiding from the past. He kissed Logan, and for the first time in a history of utopias, paradise felt within reach.
—
In a cheap motel, it is the company that matters.
All of Scott’s company were prone to nightmares. They’d been pushed to the brink of tolerance and pulled back over the white hot threshold too many times, and parts of them had healed all wrong.
He had never known Jean so fragile. He’d spent more than his lifetime by her side, and for the first time he was drowning with her rather than using her body as a raft. For all the strength of having everything, it made the fear worse.
The first time he dreamed one of Logan’s dreams, he was in Japan dripping in blood and he woke up gasping and pulled his sweat-soaked companions to his chest, trying to absolve a history of hurt in a moment.
Jean was trembling with the weight of a guilt that was not her’s, but strong enough to seize her mind and bleed through it. Logan was still, hair sticking up and out, his eyes were dark.
The same night, Scott dreamt he was sat by his own grave, trapped in his own mind by not his self-hatred but everyone else’s prejudice, and Jean couldn’t meet his eye.
His dreams were the worst. In his deep subconscious, every sin he’d ever committed was unveiled, and amplified. In his nightmares, he was in a prison cell and Logan did stab him, claws sliding from his chest slick with blood and Scott dizzy with longing. He was on fire and he let himself burn.
He remembered himself, as a teenager so full of purpose and so certain of his fate. He thought of that boy before his eyes, recoiling in disgust, and he pictured Logan stabbing him too, wet blood tainting spandex.
Cyclops was right. Cyclops was wrong.
Scott woke up with Logan’s legs tangled with his and Jean’s head on his chest, and he knew he had a new purpose.
The setting changed. A new dynasty rose from the ashes of a species, and he made his choice.
He had died enough for his cause to die once for them too, to die with whom he loved, and for them, and then he woke up.
He’d woken up before. To a worse world, to a world he couldn’t help but break as he tried to fix it.
He woke up to Jean and Logan, to regenerative goo and a rock in space he could lay claim to.
There was beer in the fridge. There were enough beds to go days without making one. There was a future to be had, and the house he was building it in did not have blood on the walls.
There was Jean, and there was Logan.
“How is this going to work?” Logan had asked, gruffly, on the first motel room night, body heat like a furnace and all of them too tired to do much but stare at each other.
“We all love each other, and want to be together,” Jean whispered into the dark, “how else should it work?”
Turned out it was as inevitable as that.
—
A flutter of feathers hit the surface of the Moon, and Scott found himself with a chestful of Warren, smelling of cologne and his business suit shredded at the chest.
He hugged his old friend, carefully as if he was crumbling, because it looked like maybe this time he was, and stared into the depths of blue eyes that knew him so well. For the first time in however many years, he saw a rich boy with tousled hair and flushed cheeks, and he felt like the orphan with a sharp voice and the beginnings of pressure on his back.
Scott saw Warren, as he had been and as he was now, watched him pull back and act as if he’d hadn’t desperately sought familiar contact a second ago, adjusting his tie.
“I heard you’d gone mad,” Warren told him cheekily, the humour not quite carrying through, “Seems they were right. You, Logan, Jean, and the Moon?”
“Careful,” he replied, falling into step next to him, “one is a telepath and one has super senses.”
Warren smirked. “I’d like to see either of them try. I still go blue when I’m angry.” He shrugged, dismissing the question before Scott even asked it. Perhaps it was not a wound, but a scab he was afraid to pick open. “I’m surprised you’re not dressed for battle yourself.”
“We have a few more days until the whole brigade arrives on Krakoa, so I’m off-duty,” he replied, suddenly selfishly conscious of his khakis, and Logan’s oversized shirt. He sighed, and looked over at Warren again, at blonde hair and an expression he had forgotten how to read. “It’s good to see you, Angel.”
“Likewise, Cyclops.”
There was a look, a flash of memory, a stab of blood, a rustle of wings. They didn’t talk about how if different cards had been played, it could be Warren that Jean was waiting for. They didn’t talk about who Warren would have sided with had they still been speaking during the days of mutant against mutant. They didn’t talk about how they hadn’t been speaking, how they had drifted from who they were meant to be and become who they were.
They were connected by the string of fate, and Scott wasn’t going to let Warren cut himself loose.
They were going to pretend the good old days were still good old days, to save them both.
Scott shoved his hands deep in his pockets, breaking the silence. “Join us for dinner? You can get back to saving the world one meeting at a time later.”
Warren faltered. Said, with emotion, with pain and wistfulness and everything repressed, “Slim.”
He touched Warren’s shoulder, lightly. For all their mistakes, they were still within each other’s reach.
“How’d you figure it out, Scott?”
Starting, Scott almost pulled back, but Warren's breath hitched and he slowly wrapped both of his arms around Warren's back, taking care with his wings. “I had a choice. And I couldn’t not choose them, Warren.”
“I’ve made wrong choices,” Warren muttered the words into Scott’s hair, but it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. “So many. So much blood, so much death.”
“Perhaps,” Scott agreed. “I’ve made terrible choices too. As myself, as someone else, as myself trying to convince myself it was someone else.”
Warren withdrew, taking a shaky step back. “Scott. How… how-“
“Because I’m not alone, I’ve never been alone.” Scott tried to gesture to aid his argument. “Mutantkind is an island now, but you’re not. You’re just a mutant, and your life cannot be measured in worthiness, and if it could you would not be your own judge.” He met Warren’s blue eyes the best that he could. “I have known you, Warren, and I would like to know you again. So, please… come to dinner. Just this once, just for an evening, the world can save its own damned self.”
—
In many ways, Hope had always been a miracle. Their saviour, a handle thrust on someone too young to pretend to bear the burden, and their last chance.
They’d had a lot of last chances, as a species and as a family. They were running out, so they had to make them count.
But, looking at Hope in the Hatchery with the Cerebro helmet resting on her knees, the miracle that came to Scott’s mind was that she was not related by blood to Jean.
Blood was not thicker than water, not in Scott’s experience, not in years of fighting alongside a family in all but name. Blood was a weapon, a sick sign of someone’s actions. Blood was for bodies and guilt, not for family.
“Stop monologuing,” Hope snapped, rubbing her temples, then lowering her voice. “Sorry. Long day. I’m still mimicking Charles, he’s around here somewhere.”
He and Hope had spent a lot of their shared history at each other’s throats. Nathan was her father, but he was Nathan’s father, not her grandfather.
She angled a look at him, mostly curious in expression. “Didn’t you hear, Cyke? It’s a brave new world.”
“Hope.” He said it, unsure of what it meant, and it hung between them awkward and heavy like another impossible mission.
“Scott,” she returned, eventually, laced with finality. “It’s alright. We’re good.” Standing, she discarded the helmet and ran her fingers through her hair.
He faltered, yet to find his footing. To him, this place still felt like death, like the choke of coming back and the unknown of what it meant for the him that had died, for not knowing who he was again to any extent. “Where are you going?”
“I’m rather afraid she’s making way for me. Hello, son.”
Scott let Charles wander into his view rather than turn. It was still odd to see him walking, to feel him at the edge of his thoughts hovering, to be confronted with the horror that was now and forever his fault.
“Professor.”
He did not call him father, and Charles did not mention it. If it was anyone else, Scott might have branded it regret.
He interrupted Charles before he began his spiel, spoke forcefully yet with a wavering voice, “I cannot forgive you. You will not find peace with me.”
“People like us will never find peace,” Charles said in return, “and we also tire of apologies, and forgiveness, Scott. I am already at peace, with every decision I have made. You will find no forgiveness here either.” He sighed, and Scott winced. “Scott. What I have to offer you is trust. A future, a past… but most importantly this present. Our present, the moment we are living in. This moment.”
Scott sighed too, but Charles was unflinching. “I… Charles. This isn’t… I’m not that boy.”
“You are a soldier,” Charles remarked. “You have made your own mistakes. You are what you are, Scott, and so am I.”
This man was at the core of Scott’s personality, his being and his beliefs and his actions, but Scott was who he was. He was this man’s soldier, and his own, and he’d been given another last chance to lift another burden.
It was all stuck in his throat, all the good this man had driven him to, the evil he’d nurtured until Scott had exploded.
There was no such thing as a hero. Each and every one of them would sooner kill than die, even now, and Scott was staring in the face someone he had killed, someone for whom once he’d have happily died.
So he nodded. It would be enough. It had to be.
—
For them as a species, as a team, as individuals, the potential for such happiness was out of character.
They were used to impossible choices, and looming catastrophe. If someone could not be counted to take a knife in the back for you, they could not be counted on at all.
There was always a war. It was not always this political. You did not always have long stretches of time unsure what to do with yourself, unsure who you were without all guns blazing.
They were different people, because of it. They had tasted peace, and it changed a person just as much as the gruelling pain of existence.
Scott had seen Emma smile, of course. He’d seen her smile as she sunk her teeth into her prey, seen her laugh as she brushed at the cobwebs in his mind, seen her grin to forget the ache in her chest.
Until he saw her and her girls on the beach, white swimsuits boasting of innocence long lost, he didn’t think he’d ever seen her truly happy, lost in the thrall of its potential.
“You’re cynical, darling,” she told him, and he didn’t even start. To him telepathy was as natural as breathing. His wards were strong, and Emma had seen all his secrets long ago and never pressed at his weak spots. She cocked her head, reminding him of a cat lazing around with no intent and all the time in the world, and she laughed. It was a belly laugh, and it was beautiful, and his thoughts made her smile more.
It was jarring, in the best possible way.
“Hello, Emma,” he said, to be polite, careful of the watchful gaze of her five daughters. He couldn’t tell them apart, except for Esme being the one pressing against his mind like a bloodhound on the hunt.
Emma noticed, instinctively, and chided her. “Girls, give us some privacy.” Esme pouted, and another girl gave the mental equivalent of sticking her tongue out, and Scott only felt her presence as it brushed his train of thought as she left. Emma seemed unimpressed, but unsurprised. She was a softer parent than a teacher. “That’s Celeste. Come on, Scott, let’s take a walk.”
She linked her arm around his waist, the gesture not possessive but affectionate, and he let her draw him down the sand towards the tide. Her diamond form flickered in the sunlight, and she watched him slightly bemused. “So that I don’t tan. Living in paradise is high maintenance.”
He made a small sound, and she rolled her eyes. “Scott, darling, you’re practically shouting it. The view doesn’t matter, you’d be in paradise wherever your lovers were.” She reached up to cup his cheek, her hand cool and her gaze hard, and she admitted in a low tone, “I have to say I’m jealous. That you found your paradise, and it wasn’t with me. But I’m sure I’ll get over it. After all, we’ll always be friends.”
“Emma,” he said softly, and she shut him down.
“I don’t need apologies, or empty promises. I have my memories. We made a good team.”
“Emma,” he repeated, feeling his feet sinking into the sand slightly. He kissed the back of her hand, and let it drop. “We made the best team. You will always mean something to me.”
She leaned back casually. “Good. I will always be a thorn in your side, a hand to tousle your hair. It’s…” She sighed, hesitant to do so. “Diamonds are flawless, but I am far from it. You know me, Scott, better than most. And what I’m most jealous of is… your mind.”
He let her elaborate before making a judgment, watched her struggle with her own guard, then sigh again. Happiness was wearing at them, forcing out secrets long buried, and they were all strangers to themselves when it happened. “The Phoenix. A force of cosmic destruction. It didn’t burn what it touched, it set it alight forevermore. Every mind it’s touched, has been changed by the fire, it’s very fabric remoulding aflame. Yours too. I remember it well, you reached out to touch it and you burnt your hand. You were cloaked in smoke, and you were letting it choke you. But it’s gone now. The great fires are nothing more than a gentle flame licking at your feet.”
He felt its phantom as she spoke, the tickle of energy beneath the sand, the warmth threatening to destroy him somehow so tame. He looked her in the eye, and for a moment she looked fragile.
To him, she was an open book whose pages he’d carelessly pulled out. She was bravely beautiful, and it was dangerous.
“Emma, you are not broken.”
With a stern look, she touched his elbow. “No?”’
He leaned into the contact. “No. You’re only burnt.”
—
Krakoa was an oasis of surprises. It was a web of history, and Scott was caught in it.
“Where are you headed?” Laura asked, mask up over her face, dark hair down her back. At her flank, Gabby scoffed an energy bar, dressed in a wrinkled costume.
Scott smiled politely, slightly fondly. “Home.”
“The Moon was a bold move,” Laura declared, examining him closely, “but I suppose we’re exploring more than new horizons, aren’t we?”
“That’s classified.”
Laura cocked her head to the side. “I trust you, Cyclops. But I don’t need another emotionally crippled father figure.”
He wondered, not for the first time, if not being able to physically scar meant someone scarred more on the inside. He looked between Laura, headstrong and ferocious, and Gabby, distracted and defiant. The innocence lost could not have been more plain. “Note taken.”
Licking her fingers, Gabby said, “You smell like them.” She lifted her chin, threatening by nature. “Logan and Jean. Like blood and radiation and soil and laundry detergent.” Her wrapper was tucked into her pocket. The island seemed to sigh appreciatively under her feet at the gesture. “What’s it like to love two people that much?”
Her tone was light, and he matched it. “Clarity. You want to shield them from the world. You want to live to spare them the pain of you dying.”
He was conscious of blue skies and beautiful landscapes, of greens and browns and yellows that he cannot see. He was reminded of the Savage Land, of old battles lost and won.
“I don’t feel pain,” Gabby said, almost absent-mindedly, “but I feel Laura’s pain. Is it like that?”
Laura’s body language was intensely protective, and he knew better than anyone what it was like to watch someone push themselves to the limit because they knew it would hurt. Because they know they could take it and worse.
He sighed. “Sometimes. I have brothers too. I love them differently.”
“Like the chicken and the egg,” Gabby said, as if it was ancient wisdom. She paused, and then asked, “Did your brothers let you stay up playing video games?”
“Gabby,” Laura said, “I just caught Kurt’s scent on the wind. Want to go find him and I’ll catch up in a second?”
Gabby nodded, and darted off in a second, a red blur. Laura watched her stoically, and told Scott in a low tone, “We still don’t need another father. Or a father at all.”
“I know.” He recognised his own harsh independence, hard-won, in Laura and he respected it, in respect to the person he’d once been and the person she’d fought hard to be. Not soldiers, but not sure what else. “But I think Logan needs daughters.”
“You think too much. You look after your Wolverine, I’ll keep track of mine. I’m going to regret this, but… don’t break his heart. I hear that’s something you’re likely to do.” She readjusted her wolf-eared mask, and inclined her head at him.
She was waiting, he realised, for an answer. There weren’t the words. There would never be enough words, in any language, for how Scott felt about Logan. Under the heat of Laura’s glare, a familiar furrowed brow he knew better than his own, he settled for just one. “Never.”
—
Family was perhaps the most sensitive topic of all.
There were the obvious answers, of course. There was his son, his young old son, and his daughter from somewhere it had all gone wrong.
One of them, he found in Westchester, at the ashes of a dream Scott did not yet wish to confront, and the other his father found shackled in space.
Nathan, the latter, was armed with as many quips as he had rounds of ammunition, and Scott sat across from him as he watched Jean telekinetically prise his shackles off. His son was nursing a split lip and a bruised ego, but his armour was otherwise intact.
Naturally, Scott knew about armour. It fit together methodically and served a common purpose. It held you together and dented but didn’t break.
As far as armour went, there were less dents in Nathan’s grizzled teenage warrior persona then there had been in Scott’s veteran freedom fighter guise. Either his son’s barbed sarcasm and flirtation was more effective at parrying than pretending the sword didn’t exist, or Scott had succeeded in passing onto him something about emotions other than suppression. You also had to factor Jean into the equation, and she was already scowling at Scott’s train of thought so he stopped before Nathan’s telepathy blocker wore off.
If he was shaken by being arrested for murder on an alien planet and being pumped with blockers just weak enough that he could keep his skeleton intact, Nathan didn’t show it. If anything, he looked bored.
Rachel snorted, and Scott filed that for later. She was leaning against the door, blunt disapproval mirroring the motherly concern on Jean, and her armour was far more visible, and intact.
If nobody could literally touch you without the spikes on your combat suit drawing blood, nobody would see you bleed out. That was the hypothesis, and while noble it was decisively not from Jean.
Only a dozen people could tell, but Rachel’s facial features only looked so much like Jean because of the red hair. There was far more Scott that there that his visor covered up, far more of his uncommon bravery and burning passion.
Again, Rachel laughed to herself, and Scott felt a warm glow to her mind at the edge of his. She was hovering, between all of them, and he reached out mentally and gave her the equivalent of a pinch.
Simultaneously, his wife and children flinched. Scott grinned to himself, until Rachel projected an unwelcome thought about the irony of being emotionally suppressed yet surrounding yourself with telepaths.
“So,” Nathan said, drawing out the word. “Uncle Logan, huh?” He scratched his nose. Scott still couldn’t overcome how young he looked, despite the blood on his hands.
Rachel chimed in. “And three bedrooms that are fooling nobody.”
With a small sigh, Scott leaned back. “Yeah. Logan.” The word lovelorn crossed his mind, not entirely his own thought. He folded his arms. “That’s the least complicated part.”
“But the important part,” Jean insisted, her voice low, “is that we’re all here together. As a family.”
Nathan’s face crinkled in a way that implied he was holding back a laugh. He flexed his metal arm. “You’re serious?”
The moment of silence that followed was deafening. They all knew what he meant, that he was giving them another chance to turn away.
He cleared his throat. “Mom, Dad. Rach. You know my days are numbered, right?”
Nate would grow up and carry the torch of his nation, he would stagger through the flames again and again with nobody at his side or back. He would die and he would kill, and he couldn’t change it at all because it was meant to happen. It had happened. But there’d never be enough closure for his damnation.
“He’s not damned,” Rachel said confrontationally. She set her jaw. “We’re not as broken as you’d think. None of us. And that’s from a telepath.”
Broken. Burnt. Metaphors for feeling lost in your own mind, dead on your feet. Scott knew them all, and he knew they were his to bear.
Maybe, finally, he could carry them without collapsing.
Jean stood and sniffed. She turned to Scott. “I’ve just had a telepathic message from Logan, and he’s absolutely right, dinner is burning.”
For the Summers clan, that was somewhat of a good omen.
—
They didn’t get a lot of visitors on the Moon, unsurprisingly. But, in the lull after the storm, Kate arrived with Illyana’s arm wrapped around her waist and waited whilst Jean rooted around in her head and called for Scott.
Illyana glowered at Scott, then smiled, and he left that pit of snakes alone. At her other side stood Doug, and they leaned into each other with casual intimacy that he’d only ever seen her give Kate, close but different and softer, and Piotr.
Kate marched up to Scott and pulled him into a bone-crushing hug for a mere second before standing back, at ease.
He remembered, then, that once she’d tried to kill him too. He wished he could have spared them all the pain of trying, knowing that they’d end up here, bruised but not bleeding.
“Scott,” she said pleasantly, and he marvelled at her newfound confidence, still with curly hair but no longer a reckless child with knee-high socks.
He smiled, trying to lift the weight from his chest. “Kit- Kate.”
“Yeah,” she shoved her hands deep in the pockets of her red pirate’s coat as she spoke. Behind her, Illyana and Doug were speaking in hushed tones, Illyana leaning on her sword dangerously and Doug using his hands to illustrate his point unfazed. “We’ve all grown up. You too, I think.”
“I’ve always been an old soul, Captain.” He watched her face light up at the title, and he wondered if they ever grew up, really, or if the world just grew up around them and knocked them into shape. If titles meant anything from anyone but the ones you cared about. “I hear good things about you from Emma.”
Kate hummed, busy hands playing with her sword in its sheath. “I hear things about you too. Every mutant thinks they know Cyclops: fearless, logical, strong. Very few know Scott. I thought I did once, but I’m not sure, maybe it was just Cyclops.”
“I am them both. Just like you, I imagine.” He levelled his jaw. “Weakness is a matter of opinion, but so is strength.”
“Scott.” Kate said it like a curse, then like a whisper. “Scott. I’m here to say congratulations. After all you’ve been through, you deserve it. Stop beating yourself up. I know Cyclops better, but it’s Scott we follow.” She straightened up her posture. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
As she turned and rejoined her friends, Scott called after her back. “I don’t deserve that. But I try.” Then, louder, “Thank you.”
With a wicked grin, Kate looked back at him. “Just do me one favour, Scott. This time, don’t break our utopia.”
It was a hidden accusation, a hidden wish, a hidden declaration of everything and nothing. It was not their legacy but his, forged in fire and tested in it, charred and burnt but against the odds still breathing.
“Wasn’t planning on it.”