He thought about it for about as much spare time as he had, before writing, "I've been working hard myself, and that has definitely helped. But while I'm not ready to talk about it either, I have started to think that while burying yourself in work is better than the alternative, it doesn't help you escape forever. I ultimately have ended up with something that has worked for me so far, and I hope you can do the same."
It was true, too. He knew that he was okay in the current situation of living without Jean during the day and spending his nights with her, on some strange subconscious journey that he was pretty damn sure would eventually have an outcome, even if it made waking up hard. Of course, half of it wasn't something he'd consciously chosen, so he couldn't direct anyone to try it.
All in all, it had been a harder email to write than it should've been. It meant he didn't have time to do more on the bus than look over and make a few quick responses to the other various messages that had come in overnight. A quick glance over the headlines confirmed that no real further news had come out regarding the Cure.
At one point he was besieged by the feeling he was being spied on. He crossly thought, Go away, Ms. Frost, I have enough to deal with today, and the feeling faded.
(He would never be entirely certain, later, if it had really been her or not.)
The first thing he received when he walked into the school was side looks, from teachers and students alike. Three people greeted him with Morning, Mr. Summers, and it felt heavily loaded all three times.
Michelle Xi joined him just as he was walking into his classroom, and she had a big smile on, even if the air around her ears wasn't quite smoke-free. "I just want to tell you," she said. "I won't need the seat by the window for much longer. Now that the Cure isn't forever, my parents have finally agreed to let me take it! We might get it done as early as next weekend."
"I'm glad to hear that," he said to her, and he was. This, he thought, was why this was partly good news, maybe more than any other reason. The Cure was a very different thing when people could be flexible in their use of it.
She still had to sit by the window now, though, and when it was so cold outside too. At least Neal Marray, who had been in the classroom already, moved to the adjacent desk to talk to her. He, too, looked like he was in a very good mood. Maybe he'd even pay attention in class today. Or he might get downright disruptive if he was excited enough. Scott wasn't sure he'd entirely blame him this time.
As the other students filtered in, Scott tried to gauge how they were reacting to the news, the mutant students especially. Not all of them were giving visible reactions, of course. Bernie Yu was one of the last in, and he at least looked better than he had the previous evening.
He was pretty sure he wouldn't get away with it, but when everyone was seated, on principle, he still started, "We're going to continue on today with percentages-"
Several cross exclamations cut him off, and Peach Zhu, the girl he'd spotted that first day with the too big eyes, and usually didn't speak in class, said, "Mr. Summers, please. We all know that's not what anyone's going to be concentrating on right now. Not with you."
And she was right, as the chorus of agreements from her classmates reminded him. Giving in, he said, "All right. We can talk about this for at least a few minutes, though I still want to teach you about percentages today. But what do you want me to say? I know there are some obvious questions, so: I am not retaking the Cure immediately. I may do so at some other time in the future; I don't know yet. I maintain that it is not wrong to choose to take the Cure, but I remain worried about people, especially children, being pressured to take it, even if it would no longer deprive them of their powers forever."
"Pressured?" One girl came closing to shrieking it. Her name was Nora Wolfe, and Scott was pretty sure she'd never had any involvement with mutation. "That's what you call it? I thought you would know better. I mean, didn't you teach at a school where most of the students were abused or kicked out of their homes for being mutants? And it's perfectly legal in every single state for parents to force their children to submit to the Cure. And this isn't going to fix that at all. It's just going to mean countless teenagers will be dragged against their will into the operating room again and again and again and again! Think of the trauma!"
"Nora," Neal started, sounding impatient, and maybe just a little too dismissive.
"She's not wrong," Scott said, because she wasn't. "I do think it should be illegal for anyone to be forced to take the Cure, especially those who are still minors-and no, I don't approve of what my comrades did even to Magneto, after I had already left their company. I understand why they did it, but that's not the same as approving." He'd prepared that statement long ago, just in case anyone asked, and noone had before today, but he'd smelled it coming from Nora.
"Well, he'll be getting his powers back along with the rest of them, won't he?" said Tom Ziegler. "And when he's no doubt all the more mad at everyone who isn't a mutant, and probably everyone who took the Cure even once, too. I'm afraid what your old friends did made the whole thing worse, Mr. Summers."
That exact thought might well have kept Ororo up for more than a few nights by now. "Hopefully they won't try that again, but are currently preparing to deal with it, because that is their job. And our job, today, is percentages. If anyone feels the need to talk to me further, you can do so after class."
A couple of the students looked disgruntled at that, but none of them made any protest. And from there, the class mostly went on as normal. He thought most of them even learned a decent amount about percentages that morning.
He'd expected that to be the most complicated part of the day, especially since he'd already gotten the talk with the principal out of the way. For the rest of the morning not much else happened out of the ordinary. There weren't even any related emails when he checked right before lunch.
Instead of staying at his desk, he went to eat in the staff room, just to get any more questions or remarks over with. When he came in, it was just old Mr. Agora and Mrs. Kim, the two oldest members of the faculty, who'd make it a point not to ask. Mrs. Kim didn't even talk to him much at all, though Mr. Agora asked him how his morning had been, and told him a little bit about how his Spanish classes had gone.
However, he'd only just begun eating when in came Mrs. Todd, the history teacher who might or might not have been a former mutant. He actually hadn't expected his day to include her in any significant manner. Even now, his first assumption was she'd sit down next to Mrs. Kim and ignore him, and he certainly wouldn't force her to do otherwise. He'd supposed if she had taken the Cure, she'd probably just take it again.
But instead she went straight over to where he was taking the second bite of his turkey sandwich, and said, "You're talking to me. Right now. Outside. We've both got time, I believe."
Scott fought back the momentary impulse to protest, and got up. He continued to eat his sandwich as they went out, ignore her looks of distaste. It wasn't like he was happy about this happening to him for the second day in a row.
When they were outside the building, she started, "I'm not sure saying this to you won't get me fired, but when I know what you're no doubt saying to our students, let me advise you that if you say or do anything that is likely to do damage to my career, I'll get a lawyer."
The depth to which she'd gotten him wrong stunned Scott, but he quickly gathered himself together to swallow his bite of sandwich and say, "I would certainly never do that to any of my fellow teachers, especially not for doing something I've done half of myself, although I assume from your behavior you will be retaking the Cure, which I will not at this time. I've never judged you, Mrs. Todd. I have never judged any mutants or former mutants for that kind of decision and I never will."
She looked less than convinced. Scott was tempted to let it go, tell her he had nothing further to say and go back in. There was a good chance anything he said would fall on deaf ears, and he was aware, in a way he wouldn't have been once, that he didn't need to justify himself to her.
But he'd never be able to give up just like that. So he added, "If you want to know what I'm saying to the students, well, I told them I'm not judging, but I also expressed my strong disapproval to anyone, minors especially, being forced to the take the Cure, and if you disagree with me on the latter point, quite frankly I have nothing to say to you."
"Of course I don't, not on that!" she replied, and Scott honestly believed her. "I just..."
"Don't trust me," Scott finished for her, mostly because he was now getting really annoyed. "Which is not my fault, and a different man would tell you it's not his problem, Mrs. Todd. As it is, I'm not sure what I can do to change that. Can you tell me? If you can't, than I'm going back in."
He'd successfully shamed her. He could tell by the way she lowered her head and said, "I don't know, Mr. Summers. I still don't know you very well."
"If you ever want to, my door is open," he replied, and it was, though he still assumed she wouldn't. He didn't linger for a response, but just walked back inside, and she didn't follow.
He didn't go back to the staff room either, but headed back to his classroom, finishing his sandwich as he went. The conversation with Mrs. Todd had been enough.
For a moment, when he was leaving at the end of the day, he thought he saw Mrs. Todd and two other teachers staring at him from the other end of one of the hallways. Then he looked again, and the three of them were turned towards each other in what gave off the impression of an intense conversation. Too intense, really. Scott walked away anyway.
Even his students had stopped trying to use the topic to take up class time by the second week. He did quietly listen for any remarks they made in his earshot about taking or not taking the Cure, but so far Michelle had been the only one who had spoken of it where he could hear.
Anyway, most of their minds were probably now more on the upcoming winter break. It made them more inattentive than usual during the class, and harder to quiet at the beginning of it.
He did hear a little bit about their plans there. Most of them were pretty simple; these weren't kids who left New York City very much. But the bright blue-haired girl, who had the name of Meifeng Chen and called herself Lana, was going with her family to Spain, much to the envy of a few classmates.
Scott himself was starting to think about how he was going to spend the holidays. It was probably going to be one of the quietest Christmases he'd ever had. Still, he would send his old colleagues presents, plus the Maximoffs, and maybe he'd even get a few in return. Between one thing and another he'd gone nowhere besides Manhattan a handful of times and Brooklyn once since settling in Queens, and he was thinking he might make it a point to set foot outside the city sometime during the break. Especially if Emma Frost started barging in on his mind too often, although he wasn't sure how far he'd have to go to escape her range.
He had occasionally felt what he'd thought was her brushing against his mind. He wasn't completely sure, though, and he'd mostly been trying to ignore it.
Until there came the morning when he was in the middle of reviewing his plans for the days' classes, and a student who wasn't in any of his classes walked in. At first he thought the boy had found the wrong room, and he started, "Um, this is Room..."
"Ms. Frost has something you'll want," the boy said in a terrifying monotone. "She has left it with the doorman of her building, and she suggests you get it before you go home tonight." He turned and walked back out as Scott just gaped, because really, what else could he have done in that moment?
He briefly considered not going, or at least making her work for it. But he really would rather not give her the extra incentive to go fiddling with his head again. Besides, he kind of wanted to give her a piece of his mind, in a way slightly more literal than usual if need be.
So that was what he did first. When he left the school, he went over to the entrance of the office building. He tood in front of it, loudly thinking MISS FROST MISS FROST MISS FROST, until he felt her presence in his mind. Then he thought Do what you want with me, but would you at least be kind enough to not get any of the school's students mixed up in this? They're just kids. He then let himself feel the full extent of the horror and rage, and he hoped she got hit with every mite of it.
Maybe she did, but he probably should've known better than to hope it would make her repent any. Instead an annoyed The boy was a mutant; this could save his life landed in his head as her response, followed by Get what I've left for you and maybe you'll understand why.
Scott took a moment to idly wonder if it was possible to lie telepathically. Before he was hit with, No, it's not, unfortunately. That felt pretty genuine.
He generally did like to have all the information before evaluating a situation. So he made no further arguments then, but went inside and went up to the man at the desk. Obviously she'd told him to expect him, and he looked vaguely intrigued as he handed Scott a flash drive, but he asked no questions.
Scott traveled home with the drive slipped into his wallet, and his phone delivering no news that stood out. There were some Congessional hearings going on about the Cure and whether it had been marketed deceptively.
The drive turned out to contain a few dozen PDFs that, from the labels, looked to be related to the Sentinel program. There was also a readme file, which Scott opened.
It read:
Scott,
Enclosed are new designs for the Sentinels come up with by my boss Sebastian Shaw. They will soon be passed on to the worst people currently in power, and possibly not even just in America; several members of our group suspect they will at least be shared with our allies. As you heard me say back in the park, Shaw believes that we can leverage this to protect ourselves and use their power to acheive our own goals. I have read enough history in depth to know otherwise. I know you X-Men have been trying to get all the information on Sentinels you can, by whatever method you can get away with.
He felt oddly disappointed she'd just ended it there, without even a signature.
The PDFs were as she described, and knowing what he did about the Sentinel Program, they were alarming to see. Especially because Shaw's designs included computer programming that would allow them to adapt to counter the powers of whatever mutant they were fighting. Developed far enough, Scott could see that making them impossible to defeat.
When he emailed them to Ororo, he encrypted it. At the mansion, they'd used email accounts that automatically encrypted everything, but this was the first time he'd done such a thing since leaving. He wished he was sending it on their secure network. A crazy thought hit him about possibly setting up his old account here in his apartment, so he could. He highly doubted this would be the last email he'd send to Ororo about this.
He tried to put the whole thing out of his mind after that. He had plenty of homework to grade, plus it was high time he cleaned a little. He'd let that slip way more than he would have back at the mansion. Also, there were the presents to order, and if he waited much longer, he wouldn't be sure about them getting there in time.
The first two tasks he did manage to focus on, and in between them he similarly ate his dinner and took in the news with little difficulty. There was a little bit about the hearings, and more about the various fraud lawsuits Worthington Labs had been hit with. Those amused Scott, probably more than they should, but wouldn't have any practical results for who knew how long.
It was when he was sat in front of his computer, trying to remember what Ororo's favorite color had been, something he had once memorized without even meaning to, that the feelings hit him. He'd been long trying to ignore the growing feeling of loneliness, as well as the yawning absence of a purpose more noble than just teaching math. Also the fear that one of these days, the X-Men would need him, and he wouldn't be there, though he thought he ought to give them a bit more credit there. But suddenly it was overwhelming, the feeling that he couldn't just stay there, that he'd made the wrong decision all those months ago, even as his brain reminded him why he hadn't, that he needed to get back to where he belonged.
Scott didn't know how long he just sat there, the screen in front of him getting blurry, the mouse shaking in his hand. At some point his mind started to calm, which was when a feeling of general tiredness descended, one he had known all too well on certain days after first losing Jean. He was tempted to just crawl off to bed, where it would just be him and Jean and upstate New York, and he didn't have to deal with any of this until the morning.
But not this time. Tonight, he recognized that this was a problem that wasn't going to go away just like that, and he had to at least make a start when it came to facing it.
Might be a good idea to start this the old-fashioned way too. Especially since getting a paper notepad forced him to actually get up from the desk, and when he had both it and a pen in his hand, he went to sit on the small blue couch he'd picked up at a yard sale two months back and not made nearly enough use of.
On top he wrote Did I do the right thing? Under it made columns for Why I did and Why I didn't.
Filling the first column was painful for the memories. Still, once he started writing, getting the words down was easy enough, as they came out as a short essay where he had to write small to fit it all in. The contents of the second column instead came out as separate sentences, jagged lines such as I am alone in the world and I don't know what I'm doing. Halfway down the paper, he wrote Every time the X-Men fail to save someone I will wonder if it would've been different if I'd been there, which he immediately knew was ridiculous, and also true.
The first thing he noted when he was done was that he at least felt much better having gotten that all out. Still, the second was that he couldn't bring himself to reread a couple of the sentences in both columns, because they were just too painful.
Rereading the other ones, the third thing had to be that the main sentiment expressed in both columns was a feeling of being lost, of not knowing what he was supposed to do when Jean still wasn't there anymore, he'd been useless to the X-Men practically since her death, and he was not someone who would be happy if he gave up on making a difference in the world and just started living for himself.
Which had him immediately writing down in the first column, I am not being of no use to anyone else. I am teaching math, more of the students than not seem to genuinely be learning something, and despite what everyone thinks, it will eventually be of use to some of them, at the very least.
After another moment's thought, he also added, I like to think I'm doing my homeroom students some other good too, the mutant ones especially. I can be fairly confident Michelle's been better than she would've been because of me.
Which was when he found himself writing down a new question: Can I help them further?
It was good to have that question out there, but it wasn't one he would ever know the answer to, unless there came a time when the answer was yes. And even then, he'd have to recognize it, and there was a very strong possibility he wouldn't.
What of ways to decrease that possibility? Scott could only think of keeping his ears open, and of paying close attention to all the various laws and issues affecting them-but the latter he'd already been doing. Unless he started actively trying to get some of them to open up to him more, and he was aware that between his still being a little bit of an object of awe due to his history as an X-Man, and his getting a reputation for being straight-laced and stodgy, he wasn't in the best position for what was already a difficult task with teenagers.
Except that even as he acknowledged how unlikely it was he could manage it, it clicked into place for Scott. He wrote it down, nearly scrawling it across the two columns, I wasn't just a teacher to the students at Xavier's. We were all also parental figures, which many of the kids there didn't have otherwise, and we mentored them heavily, especially those students who looked likely to join the X-Men. It is particularly gladdening for me to think of my homeroom students, but what I've done for even Michelle is so little, compared to what I did for some of them. And that was much more fulfilling than teaching them math.
Then, a little bit below that, Is this another way in which the true purpose of our lives really was to be X-Men, even if we didn't want to devalue the work we did as teachers? The answer came quickly enough, I cannot say for sure it isn't, but I don't think it's just that.
His handwriting was getting a little sloppier; he was more tired than he'd thought. At least everything was still legible. Scott carefully tore the paper off the notepad, and put it away in the biggest drawer in his desk, right in the middle where he could pull it out the quickest. He had the feeling he'd be looking at it a lot.
At least after that he was able to buy the presents. He even finally remembered Ororo's favorite color was dark red.
He was still thinking about everything when he went to bed, and his head was still full of it when he found himself again with Jean, riding their way through more trees, though the ground was rockier than it had been, presumably out of wish to remind him that they were going through the mountains. A few times one or the other of them had suggested they stop to try to scale one of them, but so far neither had gotten the other to agree to it.
It didn't take Scott long to realize he wanted to do it that night. He was running over ways to ask in his brain, trying to figure out which one might get her to finally agree, when she suddenly said, "We're approaching the base of one of the taller ones with a good trail up; we could stay on the bikes for over a third of the way. I think we should try that one."
"Maybe you are just created by my mind after all," Scott couldn't help but comment. "But yes, let's do it."
After months away from the X-Men, Scott was a little less fit than he'd been in the past. As they pushed their bikes up the rising slope, he initially felt his breath grow short, his legs burn. Then Jean reached over and touched him, and suddenly the pain faded, and breathing became a little easier. That hadn't quite been in her abilities, but her doing it now made sense to him in the moment. He might have preferred it if it hadn't.
On the other hand, he didn't entirely mind that Jean looked more beautiful ascending the slope than she probably would've been in real life. The sight of her was practically a glamorous movie shot, completely with her hair, which has grown a bit during their trip, streaming out behind her, the setting sun making her glow, probably more than it even should. Though that made him feel a little detached, aware this wasn't the Jean he'd loved the most.
Maybe, a hopeful part of him thought, it was because Jean was still some actual presence in her mind, and she had just felt like being glamorous that night.
He was so occupied with looking at her that it was a few seconds before he noticed the sky was also darkening-he only realized a breath, maybe two, before thunder cracked above them, and rain came down all at once, so thick that within moments he could barely see Jean. And yet he could still push the bike forward as easily as if the ground was still dry. In fact, when he told his legs to halt, they wouldn't. They kept pedaling at the same pace, as if they were no longer in his control.
Forward he plunged, away from Jean, he thought, but he couldn't even tell for sure, and for a long, long moment, everything went almost black.
He wasn't even sure if light dispelled the darkness, or if it just went away by itself in some strange way. All Scott knew was suddenly, before him, there stood the Sentinels, bearing the new designs from the PDFs. In front of them, there stood another robot, so human-shaped only his burnished dark red surface kept Scott from momentarily thinking he was a man, with a human-like face as well, his expression strangely sad.
Scott woke then, a deep-seated terror lodged in his chest, and the darkness around him more menacing than it had ever felt in his life.