Ya know I spent years wondering about it. Wondering at the whys and the hows and the what fors. Years of fighting my inner demons while I watched the slim girl I’d picked up grow into a beautiful woman. Now I’m standing here staring out the window at the group of people below.
The greenery of the lawn is broken by the sea of black and stone. I’ve watched girls and boys grow into women and men strong enough to fight for our kind. I’ve watched young men fade into old, bitter shells long before their time, seen and heard the effects of grief on them.
I still see it as I stare below me. The only problem is I have no idea how to respond. I can’t tell them I’m grieving, that I understand what they feel. How do you tell a woman you’ve watched grow up, have babies of her own, fight Magneto, and Apocalypse, the Registration Act, and humanity itself for the right to be that you have no idea what it means to lose a mate.
It’s these kinds of days that I stay away, I hide in our rooms and watch as a friend, a teammate is laid to rest but I do not weep. I can’t. I don’t mourn for them.
I glance over my shoulder at the dark haired angel that sits at her desk busy working on the next set of training sequences. Like me she’s watched too many die, seen too much of life’s darkness to really understand how devastating it is to someone who hasn’t seen as much as we have.
That the man they’re laying to rest was her first serious boyfriend should reach her but it doesn’t. Last night she looked me in the eye and told me straight out that she didn’t feel a damn bit of remorse or loss. She’d long since learned that death was merely the last stage of life and nothing would ever change that.
I asked her once when that annoyin’ Cajun died if she’d feel different if she were in Yella’s place. If she was the one standing there beside a hole in the ground would she feel any different?
A soft smile, a shrug of her shoulders and she moved to sit in my lap. Her words still haunt me because they’re true.
“Immortality is part of us Logan. For some they strive to have it, they want to live a long life. For others it’s just another hurdle. If it were you that were being buried then I wouldn’t be standing there. I’d be there with you. Our kind watches over those who fade like cut flowers. When our time comes around those we knew, those we cared about will have been long gone. I feel sad that Kitty’s suffering but I can’t cry for her. I won’t cry for her.”
Now I stand here and watch as Kitty sobs into the shoulder of her grandson. No, we don’t cry for those down there. We can’t cry because we’ll never walk that road and yet we’ve walked it a thousand and one times. From the moment that we met we’ve both killed, we’ve both saved, and we’ve both died. Yet through it all we stand together and we watch over those whose lives are on a short track. We’ll have time to grieve…after all we are merely observers in life, our kind doesn’t participate.
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