Reminisce: Chapter Seven
The Not So Distant Future:
He chased after her, moving down the mansion’s half-lit hall. The girl in her dark, dresslike nightgown was just ahead of him, but though Logan was all but panting with the effort to hurry he couldn’t close the distance between them. Never had his legs felt so heavy; not since his last encounter with Magneto had his body seemed so unwilling to obey their owner’s will. The carpet sucked at his feet and with each step they seemed more unwilling to let go.
She had turned had turned to look at him while he’d had his eyes on the floor. He’d just missed it--catching the curve of her cheek, an ear. Curls of brown hair shifted between her shoulder blades like a wind-ruffled curtain. The nightgown she had on was almost long enough to be considered unfashionable, but her feet were bare. Her heel was a soft pink, her ankle trim. The rugs didn’t hold her at all; she almost seemed to glide.
He watched her turned a corner. It took him years to do the same. Losing sight of her, even briefly, made him want to shout, but his tongue lay stubbornly against his lower teeth. He had to reach her. He needed to reach her. He had to tell her how incredibly wrong he had been, how very, very sorry he was.
He tried using the wall to pull himself forward, but succeeded only in yanking a painting off its hook. Its frame cracked with the kind of heavy sound that spoke of expense. Cement-footed, he rounded the corner, and was shocked to find the girl closer. She’d stopped at a door. One of the student bedrooms. She opened it and went inside without sparing a glance for her persuer. The wrenching sensation under his rib cage from not being able to see her was compensated with the triumph of knowing that these rooms had only one exit. By the time his fingers closed over the knob, he was breathing harshly, feeling sweat crawl down his back. Logan flung the door open--he’d expected it to be heavier; it crashed against the wall. The room was windowless, filled with nighttime shapes--beds and blanketed bodies. None of them hers. He stumbled into something, a desk, and heard a stack of books tumble to the floor, and the tinkle of glass. Where was she? Where was she? Where was--
“Where is she?”
“Who?” cried one of the figures from their bed.
They had taken her away. They’d hidden her. They had done something to her. Anger shook its way up his chest, his throat, rattling between his clenched teeth. “You’re gonna tell me.”
“I don’t know! Oh my god--I don’t know!”
“Logan!”
”Logan! Wake up, you’re scaring them-”
And suddenly, there was another woman there. A redhead. She was holding his arm with both hands, trying to keep it at his side. A burning sensation in his knuckles let him know that his claws were out--they twitched against his hip, sliced through his sweatpants.
Somebody had turned on the light. In the sudden glaring brightness, Logan turned from the little figure, cowering against the headboard, to the woman. “Where is she? What did you do?”
“There isn’t anybody. She’s not real. You’re having a dream.” Abruptly, she dropped his arm--a tiny part of Logan registered that her nails must have been digging into the muscle, at least half an inch deep--before little moons of blood healed and she was using the same hands to take hold of his face. Gently but firmly, those fingernails pressing against his temples. “You have to stop this, Logan. Wake up.”
Makeupless, puffy-eyed, in a bathrobe tied in a careless knot, Jean looked like a stranger. He jerked his head out of her grip, turned to look at the room--at the floor, strewn with bottles of nail polish, books, a lamp with a smashed bulb. At Kitty, hugging a pillow to her stomach--Jubilee was peering around the side of the wardrobe, hands raised in the defensive posture he had taught her. What the hell?
“Ju--are you two alright?
After a long time, they gave timid nods, one after the other.
“Are--are you? Alright?” asked Jubilee. She hadn’t lowered her arms.
“I’m--”
“Go,” said Jean, drawing his attention back to her. “I’ll settle the girls, and then we will discuss what happened here.”
Not knowing what else to do, worried that he would make the girls more afraid by staying, he did what she said. As he left, Jean was moving her hands--the objects on the floor were lifting into the air, moving back to their tables, arranged perhaps a little more neatly than they’d been before.
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“I don’t know what’s happening to me, Jean.”
“Sleepwalking happens to a lot of people.”
“I was trying to find--”
“You were asleep, Logan.”
“I’ve never had a dream like this.”
“You’re having dreams like the rest of us, dreams that don’t make sense, dreams your brain just cobbled together.”
“There was someone there. I’ve seen her--”
“You didn’t. Listen, you have to pull yourself together, Logan. I need you. The students need you.”
“Christ, Jean. The kids--”
“The girls understand. They’re not going to tell anyone, I made sure.”
“You think that matters? You think I care what they tell people? I could have hurt them, Jean.”
“You’d never do that. You’ve had nightmares--”
“But sleepwalking? I mean, what the fuck? What kind of shit could I get into if I’m--”
“You’ve been under so much stress. If you’d just--”
“It can’t happen here, Jean. Not at the school. I can’t just--”
“You’re not--you’re not thinking of leaving. Logan, you said you were going to stick around. You promised. You promised me.”
“I need to talk to the professor. This can’t happen again. The risk--”
“You can’t leave.”
“I can’t risk--”
“Logan, stop. Stop. Stop. Just wait. Come here. It’s going to be okay. We can fix this. I can fix this.”
“Jean, what are you doing?”
“I can fix this. You don’t want to leave.”
“What are you doing?”
“Shhh.”
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A person could get to the roof six ways: by the stairwells, which were located in the old servant’s quarters, now more sensitively called the lower attics; by the fire escapes; by the ivy-wound trellis; or, for the especially desperate or especially weird, the chimneys. Officially, the roof was off-limits. Too high, too uneven, too old. This made it very popular among the students. They had a place between the chimneys, a nook crowded with weather-battered cushions and old towels monogrammed with an ‘R’ and something that may have been a bird, though half the thread had been picked out. It smelled like a barn. Novels, magazines, comic books lay in such a way as to suggest that they may at one time have been stacked, and there was a pizza box from a company that had gone out of business either last month or the one before that.
They must’ve heard Logan coming--swearing, sliding on the crumbling stone, cracking tiles unmeant to support weight like his. (Even as he cursed, he was considering a training session for the terrain). When he reached them, Kitty was frozen in the process of smearing sunscreen between Jubilee’s shoulders. Jubilee, meanwhile, was sitting cross-legged, slapping the lid shut on an old tin cookie jar. She made an odd jerking motion, as if to stow it out of sight, but then reconsidered.
“Logan!” The younger girl exclaimed, almost like a sneeze. She squeezed the bottle of lotion; an arc of white shot out. It got in Jubilee’s hair, but so eager was she to feign normalcy she didn’t acknowledge it.
“Hi, Wolvie. Hey. Hello! Climb here often? We’re just soaking up some healthy vitamins. Do you like my swimsuit? I found it on Ebay. Had to safety pin the strap but I say it’s worth it. Does it make you think of the song? It makes me think of the song. She wore an itsy bitsy teeny--”
He held his hands up in a firm desist gesture.
“I’ve been looking for you two--”
“We’re not doing anything,” Kitty interrupted. Jubilee reached back and swatted her knee.
“Didn’t say you did. Look, I just wanted--”
“Are you going to yell at us?”
“No, I--no. I just wanted to come check. That you’re both--alright.”
“Well, yeah. I think we are.”
“Are you sure?”
“Ye-es?” Jubilee cocked her head. Kitty shook hers at Logan and then began to surreptitiously scrape lotion off her friend’s shoulder.
He wondered if that was really all the apology he’d need to make. It felt inadequate. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Oh, that’s okay, Wolvie. We heard you clomping all over the roof. We just thought you were gonna bust us. Kitty bout nearly phased herself--”
“That is not what I’m saying. I’m talking about last night.”
“We weren’t up here last night.”
“No--I mean, what happened. I’m sorry for what happened last night.” Something about the words as he spoke them reverberated like fingers drummed across his mind. He’d said them before. He was sure he had. “Waking you up like that, it wasn’t right. I was just--”
You didn’t wake me up.” Jubilee gaped at him, then looked over her shoulder at Kitty. “Did--?”
Kitty shook her head, shrugged.
“You don’t remember?” he said, bewildered. Then he found himself asking again, in a harder tone than he’d intended, one which made them sit up with the same shock they’d exhibited at his first approach. “You don’t remember?”
They didn’t answer aloud, just shook their heads. Kitty seemed worried for him. He grimaced. “Nevermind. I was wrong. Just--” With effort, he kept himself from saying forget about it. “--don’t worry about it.”
“Sure, Logan,” said Jubilee. She smiled encouragingly. Not someone inclined to worry about anything for long, the use of his name was the only indication that she was giving this an above-average amount of thought. He thought at best he’d have until dinner before the rest of the school body was giving it an above-average amount of thought too.
“I’ll leave ya to it, then.”
“Okay, Logan.”
“Bye, Logan.”
“Bye, Kitty.” He turned to go, paused, turned back. “By the way, what’s in the box?”
“What box?”
“That box.”
“Oh, this box?”
“That box.”
Jubilee laughed, a little too breathlessly, clutching the tin cookie container to her stomach. “Do you know that movie Seven? With Brad Pitt? What’s in the box? What’s in the box?”
“How bout you let me see it?” He took a few crunching steps across their nest of debris.
“See what?”
“The box.”
“Oh, this--”
“I swear to God.”
She handed it over. Kitty had buried her bright-pink cheeks in her hands, and was refusing to look at either of them. He thought she might literally sink through the floor. Bemused, he ran a thumbnail under the lid, pried it off.
“At least it’s not a severed head,” Jubilee said bracingly.
A pack of cigarettes, two lighters, and a handful of airplane-sized bottles of Maker’s Mark.
“Are we in trouble?”
He looked up. Kitty was staring at him through lotion-sticky fingers. “This is serious,” he growled. He stared at them both, for a long time. They were very still, hardly breathing. He snorted. He stuffed all but two of the cigarettes and a lighter into his pockets, then closed the lid and tossed it back towards the girls.
“So we’re not in trouble?” she asked.
“At least it’s not a severed head.”
Lips quirked, he was leaving for real this time when he stepped on something. He may never have noticed it if his eyes hadn’t been on his feet, if he hadn’t been worried about breaking more of the roof tiles. A sketchbook, water-warped and dirty, half the cover ripped or disintegrated away. He took his shoe off of it, bent down slowly to pick it up. The pages were brown. He turned them.
“This belong to either of you?” He asked lightly, not bothering to look up, not bothering to listen to their answers because he knew they would be no. He left without another word. And took the sketchbook with him.
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“Well this is a surprise. You never visit me down here.” Taking off her glasses, Jean smiled at Logan. Surrounded by bandages and bottles of hydrogen peroxide as small as the airplane whiskeys, she’d been sorting supplies for the first aid kits. She told him she planned to leave them around the school. “Our kids have more accidents than most. Some are too shy to come all the way down here for a little scrape, or afraid to admit they were doing something that would get them in trouble. I’m hoping this will keep those cuts from getting infected.”
“Great idea.” He set the cup of coffee he’d made for her--almond milk, no sugar--on the medical table. He kissed her, lightly, but she leaned up into it, opened her mouth, and so it was a while before he broke away. He’d planned for small-talk, had prepared a reasonable list of topics. But something about the doctor blunted his suspicion--perhaps those puffy bags under her eyes, a sweet human flaw in an otherwise magazine-ready face, or the genuine pleasure she showed at seeing him. It reminded him how long he’d known her, his friend and teammate and lover. He’d seen her the agent of a thousand kindnesses, and knew her, soul-deep, to be incapable of inkindness.
So he asked. Outright.
“Jean, can you tell me what you did to them?”
She jerked away, stepped out of arm’s reach, so immediately, so hard, that he knew was going to have to reevaluate some things he’d known. “What?” she breathed, fear in her eyes but no bewilderment, and perhaps even a little relief, as if she’d been waiting for this precisely terrible question.
“The girls. Kitty and Jubilee. They don’t remember me sleepwalking into their room.”
“Oh. That.” Jean’s expression dulled. Most of the alarm went away and so, strangely, did the relief. “Well, I didn’t like it but it was really for the best, you know.”
“You stole memories from them?”
“Don’t say it like that. They were upset. It was upsetting. I just...encouraged them to forget.”
“How could you do that?” He meant the question in two ways. The first, a genuine how, because she’d ever given any indication, any at all, that her telekinesis had come so far. But he’d also thought her incapable of something like this in a completely different way. “Does the Professor know about this?”
She bit her lip, met his gaze and deliberately raised her chin. There was something petulant in it. “Why should he? This was damage control.”
“Jean, you--”
“I’m not the one who went snarling, claws-out into the bedrooms of bedrooms of two young, innocent girls. That was you. So don’t look at me like I did anything but clean up after your mess.”
“You’re telling me--you’re telling me, of all the fucking--”
“Don’t you swear at me--”
“--people in this school, that you went inside the minds of two students and played with their memories? Their thoughts? As if it doesn’t matter?”
“Of course it matters,” she cried. She stepped forward and seized his hand, looked up at him imploringly. “I didn’t want to. But I thought it would be better. I just wanted to help. I just wanted to help you.”
Gently, he pulled his hand out of hers.
“I just wanted to help,” she said again, but this time in a snap. She slapped the medical table. Bandages fluttered off the side, onto the floor. “And nobody helps me, do they? I have to do everything here. Everyone is gone, and Charles is sick, and you’re drunk and terrifying our students every time I turn around and--”
Jean covered her mouth with her fingers, spoke through them with her eyes closed. “And I made a decision. And it was wrong, okay. It was wrong. But I did the best I could with what I had."
Pretty tears tumbled over her cheeks, over her fingers. She was bending forward, like a reed under a descending boot. Slowly, he put his hand behind her neck and pulled her head to his shoulder.
“Is there anything else?”
She was shaking, snuffling. “How could there be anything else?’
In the inside pocket of his jacket, it’s edges pressed against both of their chests, was the sketchbook he’d taken from the roof.
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He tried discretion. He asked about the sketchbook as if he’d found it laying around and had but a lazy interest in returning it to its owner. This worked for, perhaps, a week. By the second, he’d gone from pulling aside kids in the art class to the more general student body and word got around (as it tended to do) that The Wolverine was carrying a notepad in his pocket, interrogating students about some doodle he’d found of himself. The rumor devolved (as they tended to do) until people swore it was a dirty drawing, and that he was planning to shishkabob the artist.
They whispered this rumor, of course, because it was The Wolverine but it was loud enough that Bobby Garfield was fighting to keep a straight face when Logan held him back after training.
As he flicked through the dirty pages, the older man gruffly asked, “Have you seen these before? Do you know who did them?”
Bobby’s first, disappointed thought, was that this was a lot more boring than he’d expected. These were just ordinary sketches, good he supposed, what did he know about art? They were smeared with moisture and age, but he recognized still lifes, sculptures, cashiers, kids in desks. About a dozen pictures of the Statue of Liberty, from different points of view, some scribbled out. And four pages of his teacher, not naked, nothing to make fun of later with John. There was one of him behind the wheel of a vehicle, one of him in the garage, one of him, just standing, no sort of background at all. And one of just part of the man’s face, his eyes, so sharply drawn that they seemed to look up at him with a frightening discernment.
Bobby’s smirk wobbled and slipped off his mouth. Were the pictures just a little bit familiar?
To Logan, the boy seemed tied up in an idea more complicated than he’d ever entertained before. He watched him struggle with it for a time and then said, “Well?”
When Bobby turned to him, it was without the daft, mildly alarmed manner with which he tended to face Logan. Instead, there was something shifty, something sly, something bizarrely like jealousy in his expression.
“What is it? You know who this belongs to? C’mon, Iceboy.”
“Nope. Sorry.” Bobby shoved the sketchbook back at him. It was covered in frost.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
I'm typing this from under the rock I crawled under, about the time I realized this would be another very delayed chapter. Graduate school took off like a bullet from a gun, and I have been teaching, taking classes, working, and doing research every conscious moment of the day. Scribbled in a variety of journals, napkins, loose sheets of paper, the back of my hand, this installment is a testament to the magic of espresso and alarm clocks.
That said, at the very least I can promise another chapter within another day or two-- due to length, I felt it would be better to split this one in two.
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That said, at the very least I can promise another chapter within another day or two-- due to length, I felt it would be better to split this one in two.
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Chapter End Notes:
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I have combed this chapter for typos, but it is too late at night and I am too conscious of my flaws to believe I have caught them all. I promise to round up every last error and bury them where they will never see the light of day.
As always, my patient, generous, unfailingly kind readers are my favorite part of this. You guys are incredible. Thank you.
Btw, reviews are my love language!
I have combed this chapter for typos, but it is too late at night and I am too conscious of my flaws to believe I have caught them all. I promise to round up every last error and bury them where they will never see the light of day.
As always, my patient, generous, unfailingly kind readers are my favorite part of this. You guys are incredible. Thank you.
Btw, reviews are my love language!