AN ACCIDENTAL INTERCEPTION
Of Fate:  Pomp and Circumstance
Minisinoo

Ororo was the first awake, a bit startled.  "Frank -- "

" -- is fine.  Warren returned him safely home, and while Henry is wounded, he is not incapacitated.  He set Francesco's leg, gave him some pain-killers, and ordered him to rest.  You should join him."

Nodding, Ororo got out, followed by Scott and Jean, stupid with lack of sleep, though Scott retained enough presence of mind to fetch Xavier's wheelchair for him.  Xavier thanked him, then shooed him off.  As tired as Charles was himself, he had age on his side.  He never slept more than five hours on any given night, and was perfectly comfortable with that.  His first order of business was to discover what was known, what wasn't known, and what would be necessary to do, in order to protect his children.  

Upstairs, Jean barely pulled off her shoes before collapsing on her bed.  Yet she dozed and woke, dozed and woke, fitful in the heat and clammy with sweat, until finally, in the late-afternoon, she woke a final time and left her room.  Pushing open a door catty-corner down the hall, she entered Scott's room without knocking.  Why she'd come there, she couldn't have explained, but at some primal level, Scott represented comfort to her.  The westering sun fell in the window, making stark blocks of butter yellow on the mahogany furniture and the carpets.  Scott lay sprawled on his stomach, on top of the sheets.  He'd taken off his shirt but that was all, and he looked to be as warm as she, his face all flushed and his hair damp.  His duffle bag lay in a chair where he'd dropped it before they'd left, but otherwise, the room had an appearance of hibernation, decorated by the generic and what had been left behind.  Scott no longer lived here.  It struck her like blow beneath the breastbone.  

She crawled up onto the bed anyway, and he woke a little, peering at her through his goggles.  She could see the faint light of his open eyes.  "Jean?"  His voice was throaty with sleep.  

"Bad dreams," she replied and snuggled down beside him without asking, her back to his front while his arm snaked around her to pull her closer, like a plush toy, as chaste as siblings.  She cried a little.  "I've missed you."  He didn't reply, just stirred her hair with his breath and his fingers.  After a while, she slept.  So did he.  

They woke again after the sun had gone down, their internal time clocks all disjointed.  She turned to face him in the dimness of the bedroom and they lay nose to nose.  His breath was sour with sleep.  "Have you ever seen someone die?" he asked, blunt with his shock.  

"Yes," she replied, almost without thinking.  

He blinked -- she could see the light behind his goggles disappear and reappear -- then he said, "Yeah, I guess so.  Dumb question.  You're a doctor."

But that hadn't, actually, been what she'd meant.  "No," she said now.  "I mean, yes, sure, as a doctor.  But once before, too."  She stopped; he waited.  She'd never before told him about Annie.  It was her private nightmare, and he'd been young, a boy; she'd automatically protected him.  But here, now, that fell away.  She no longer saw him like a little brother, sometimes annoying, but dear.  He was a man -- young, but a man -- and last night, she'd bowed to his command of the situation without even thinking about it.  He was her equal, her leader sometimes, her confidant.  Her friend.  

"Annie," she said now, as if that one name were ripe with the explanation of her whole self, and in a way, it was.  "Annie Richardson.  She lived across the street from me -- well, sort of across the street.  It's hard to explain.  Her parents taught at Bard, too.  We lived in the 'faculty ghetto,' but Annandale-on-Hudson isn't big and I think most of the town is involved with the college in some way."  

"Like an air force base."  

"A little.  Annie was my best friend."  Jean smiled.  "I liked being at her house; I liked her parents.  It was an escape for me.  Her mom was the antithesis of mine -- utterly 1960's Flower Child.  Kate and Larry -- her parents -- had met in San Francisco in some kind of co-op, then had Annie.  Her real name wasn't even Annie, but 'Anahita' after some Persian goddess."  

"I don't blame her for going by Annie."  

"I don't think she minded, really.  She liked being different, but the fact that her parents had never formally married was a bigger scandal in our sleepy, little New England town.  They were the kind of people you couldn't help but like, if you got to know them, but most people still talked about them behind their backs.  "

"You liked the exotic."  It wasn't a question.  

She didn't give it a direct answer.  "Over at Annie's house, I was allowed to do things my mother wouldn't even consider -- bounce on the bed, run around outside with no shoes, eat spaghetti with my fingers, and play with tarot cards."  She fell silent then, lost in speculative memory of what her life might have been, if not for an errant Frisbee and a speeding car.  

When some time had passed, Scott finally prompted, "What happened?"  The question was soft and gentle in the room's twilight.  

"I felt her die."  

"You felt her die?"

Jean touched her forehead, as if somehow her fingertips could brush away the telepathic gift that had driven her mad.  "I was ten; she'd just turned eleven.  It was the summer before we went to middle school.  We were playing outside.  It was twilight -- that time when it's too dark too see clearly but it's not really night yet.  My mother had called me twice for dinner and I'd been ignoring her; we were playing Frisbee and listening to the radio over at Annie's house.  I can remember just what was playing, too.  REO Speedwagon, 'Keep on Loving You.'  I still can't listen to that goddamn song."  

She closed her eyes.  He didn't push her, just waited while she circled this, tested the boundaries of old pain.  He kept an arm around her, draped over her shoulder, and patted her back.  

"I threw the Frisbee a little too hard, and it was too dark to see well, so Annie missed it and went running after it.  Down the block a ways lived this boy -- Terry Watson.  He was a senior, and had this ugly old brown Impala, and he always used to come tearing around our corner with it like a bat out of hell."  

And even though Scott had never heard this story before, he could guess what was coming.  He held her a little closer.  

"He hit her."  It was simple.  Three words, delivered flat.  Scott moved his hand up to run fingers through her thin hair.  In the background, he could hear the hum of the fan, stirring limpid air.  "I'm sorry," he said finally, words pulled out by the weight of Jean's silence.  

"The left front fender.  It knocked her back into the yard.  I ran over to her and Terry had stopped the car.  He was yelling at us, at her, but he was scared more than angry.  He wanted to blame her for being in the road, instead of himself for driving too fast, because he knew this wasn't a little thing.  It wasn't a speeding ticket.  

"And I knew that, Scott.  I didn't guess it; I wasn't told that later.  I knew it, felt it, saw it in his mind.  I yelled back at him to go call an ambulance.  By that time, people were coming out of their houses, and Annie's mother was screaming.  I knew what all of them were thinking -- the shock, the fear, even the sick interest.  

"Annie was bleeding everywhere, or that's what it seemed like to me then.  You see it in accident victims a lot -- a little blood forced out of the nose, mouth, ears, and eyes by the impact.  It breaks the tiny capillaries in thin membranes.  It scared me, and I could feel her hurting.  I'd pulled her up into my lap and held on.  Now, I'd know better than to do that, but I don't think it would have made a difference.  One whole side of her ribcage had been broken and the bones had punctured her right lung.  She drowned on her own blood, but that took about five or ten minutes.  Her mother was just hysterical, so I held her instead.  She couldn't talk because she didn't have any air, and she was so frightened.  There's no fear like not being able to breathe, and she didn't really know what was happening; it hurt too much for her to think, but she was pretty sure she was dying and she didn't want to die.  So she was clutching at me" -- Jean demonstrated unconsciously by gripping Scott's upper arms -- "and then the blood stared coming out of her mouth . . . a lot more than had at first."  Jean touched her chin, then began to cry.  

"Shhh," Scott said, pulling her head against his shoulder because he really had no idea what else to do.  What was he supposed to say to this?  EJ would know, but Scott felt inadequate.  

After some time had passed, Jean quieted, and said, "It was dark, where she went, but not scary.  You hear people talk about white lights and all that, but I never saw any lights.  We just kind of . . . sank down.  Like we were at the bottom of a well -- sitting cross-legged at the bottom of a well.  And it didn't hurt there.  It felt good.  We were holding hands, just like friends do, but I knew she had to go.  She didn't say anything to me -- there wasn't any, 'I must go, but you must stay!' sermon.  It was just . . . like at the end of the day, when I knew I'd have to go in soon, and I didn't want to.  I'd rather have stayed with Annie, but it just wasn't an option.  I felt her slip away finally.  Her fingers left mine and she went . . . somewhere else.  Maybe she saw the white light there, I don't know.  

"Anyway, where I was, it was warm and dark and it didn't hurt and I just wasn't too interested in waking up.  

"So I didn't.  Not for a long time.  Sixteen months."  She felt his arms tense.  "When Annie died I was ten.  When I woke up again, I was twelve, and there were other people in my head.  I thought I'd died after all, and gone straight to hell.  I couldn't even tell what was me, and what wasn't.  Forget sixteen personalities.  I had hundreds.  Whoever came near -- nurses, patients, doctors.  They put me in a sanitarium because they thought I was psychotic.  'Dissociative disorder with aspects of bipolar I' was my diagnosis.  So I was out of my mind, my parents consulted half the psychiatrists in the State of New York, and Sarah -- my older sister -- was left pretty much to fend for herself.  It's probably no great surprise that there isn't much love lost between Sarah and me now.  It's not easy to be the sibling of a chronically ill child."  

Abruptly, Jean sat up, sliding out of his arms to push her hair back from her face.  "So now you know the story of Crazy Jean."  

"You're not crazy," Scott said from the bed.  "You survived."  

"Barely.  Dad heard about the professor through a mutual friend, and called him in desperation for a fourteenth opinion . . . forget second or third.  Of course the professor knew exactly what was wrong with me.  He shut down the telepathy entirely, like catching a roach under a Tupperware bowl."  

Scott didn't miss the comparison of her gift to a parasite.  

"Then, of course, the TK exploded.  I was out of the hospital by then, and the professor had explained to my parents what I was.  It's a good thing the telepathy and telekinesis didn't happen at once, or the doctors would've decided I was possessed, not just nuttier than a fruitcake.  Can you imagine?"

"How old were you then?"

"Fifteen."  

"You mean you made up all that school you lost in two years before college?"  Scott was astonished.  

Her smile was wry.  "Three, actually.  I went to college a year late, like you.  But it's not that surprising.  It wasn't like I had anything else to do with my time, like oh, say, dates or football games or school dances.  I never went to high school, Scott; I had private tutors.  And I was able to do a little school in the psych ward.  Plus, telepathy gives you a certain advantage.  I picked up all kinds of odd things right out of people's heads.  But I wonder if maybe what happened with Annie isn't why I went into medicine.  I never want to be helpless like that again, dammit."  

Scott nodded, having heard of other people who became doctors for similar reason.  In any case, and despite her disparaging comments, he was still astonished by how quickly she'd made up her educational void.  He'd known she was smart, but it had never before come home to him quite so concretely.  

Reaching out, he gripped one of her long hands again and rubbed the top of it with his thumb.  "I think you're amazing."  Frank, Ororo, now Jean . . . it made his own previous life seem blissfully easy, and the guilt of good fortune wrapped bands around his chest and squeezed until Jean lay back down beside him and stroked his cheek.  

"Don't knock being normal, Scott.  It's something about you that I've always liked -- you're this perfectly normal guy.  It's . . . nice . . . to have a friend like that."  

Her hand was soft and he was suddenly very conscious of the fact that she was lying in his bed, touching his face.  It struck right out of his mind any question of how she'd known he was feeling guilty.  Three years ago, this would have been a fantasy come true.  Now . . . he wasn't sure what he felt.  She continued to stroke his cheek and he caressed her in turn, her shoulder, her arm, her hair.  Their legs were intertwined.  There was more in it than mere sibling attachment, but paramount was their need for human connection in the face of death, a reminder that their own hearts still beat.  After a while, comfortable and still tired, first Scott, then Jean, fell asleep.  

When they woke again, it was the middle of the night.  As he'd fallen asleep first, Scott also woke first and tried to get out of bed without disturbing her, intending to shower, but she woke anyway and raised her head to look around in the moonlit room.  "Unh?"

"Hey, sleepyhead."  

"Scott?"  Then she remembered and pushed herself up, slightly embarrassed.  "Oh.  Uh, sorry about barging in on you last night."  

He'd turned to smile at her.  "Hey, I don't mind.  What are friends for?"

And she smiled back.  They'd edged a little past the usual boundaries for friends the evening before, but if he was content not to go there, so was she.  Exhaustion both physical and emotional had left her vulnerable, and while she didn't regret for a minute telling him about Annie, the sensual session that had followed had left her confused.  However much she cared for him -- and she always seemed to be brought back around by circumstance to how deeply that caring went -- she'd never returned his infatuation.  At least, not consciously.  Her adolescence in a psych ward had schooled her well in how to shut away thoughts that weren't socially acceptable, and so she liked to forget that her first reaction to him, lying on his back in the mud after she'd hit him with her car, had been purely visceral.  He'd been a pretty boy, and he'd become a prettier man, and the chemistry of attraction was neither predictable nor inclined to respect social boundaries.  She'd never allowed herself to consider acting on it, though, nor had even allowed herself to recognize precisely what she felt.  The chasm of age and life experience had been as real as the attraction, so sublimation had become the name of the game.  Yet it was harder to sublimate when he wasn't a boy any more.  

"I'm going to go shower," he said now.  

"I should, too.  I'll head back to my room.  Meet me in the staff kitchen for a little breakfast at midnight?"

"You bet."  

So she left him to himself, and whatever his easy responses, his own feelings upon waking beside her had been just as confused as hers.  He'd thought himself over her, at least in any romantic sense.  After all, his feelings for Clarice had been real and profound -- his first true love.  Jean had been just a crush, however powerful.  And he'd dated women since Clarice, if none with any seriousness.  But Jean . . .  

Inside his room's little private bath, he leaned a fist against the door and just breathed.  "Get a grip," he muttered to himself.  It would be beyond foolish for him to fall back into that hopeless pursuit.  Jean was almost thirty and he was barely legal.  She'd have no more interest in him now than she'd had three and a half years ago.  The problem was -- it wasn't a little crush any more.  And if he were honest with himself, it hadn't been a little crush for some time.  Perhaps his fey melancholia over the past year hadn't been due only to his breakup with Clarice, or his impending graduation, but to his lapsed contact with Jean.  

"You are a complete and total idiot," he told himself, leaning back against the door and banging his skull lightly against the wood.  Against all good sense, yes, indeed, he'd fallen for Jean Grey all over again, but not the angelic vision he'd considered her when he'd been eighteen.  Her tragedy drew him, but so did her strength.  She was everything he'd ever wanted.  And too old for him.  

Doffing his 'mission' clothing, he climbed into the shower, rinsing away sweat and frustrated lust, then got out to dress before heading downstairs.  He wasn't, it seemed, the only one awake, though Jean wasn't yet there.  He found Ororo at the stove in the kitchen, making food for Francesco.  He eyed it skeptically, though it was only soup.  "Is that going to be edible?"

"Up yours," she said pleasantly, finishing her task while he grabbed a box of microwavable pancakes out of the freezer and popped four in the toaster oven.  Frank sat at the eat-in table, his eyes focused on the far wall.  He spoke neither to Scott nor Ororo, and Scott was jolted back into reality and what had happened less than twenty-four hours ago.  

When his pancakes were done, he took butter, syrup and pancakes to the table and sat by his friend.  "Hey," he said.  "How's the leg?"

"Broken," Frank replied with rare (for him) wit.  He turned to focus those Italian-black eyes on Scott.  "What happened at Fort Tryon should not have happened."  

Scott thought about that.  "You told me once that futures can be predicted, but never 'the future.'"

"True.  But there are the more probable and the less probable."  

Scott chewed on that along with a bite of his pancakes.  "I screwed up, didn't I?  When I shot him."  Guilt struck like the impact of a brown Impala.  

But Frank shook his head.  "Not you only."  It wasn't precisely polite, but when a Seeing took Frank, he forgot to be polite.  "It should not have ended as it ended.  He should have stopped when I did not move.  He should have stopped."  

"That's why you didn't obey my order to get out of the way?"

And the term 'order' surprised Scott.  He hadn't been in charge; how could it have been an order?  Yet Frank didn't object, said only, "Yes, exactly.  You should not have shot him.  Fighting him brought the guard.  But then the next branching point was whether or not we let him escape.  In the probable futures, he did not hit me.  He stopped.  We stopped him."  

Though Scott had known Frank for years, in many ways, he still didn't fully understand Frank's gift, and Frank spoke now as if he were a god, knowing what might have happened and what should have happened as well as what had happened.  Their Italian Apollo.  

Which thought brought him to a sudden and painful question.  With a glance towards the door -- Jean still hadn't arrived, but Ororo was finished with the soup and had brought it over -- he asked, "How much did you see, Frank?"

Frank studied Scott a beat, then bent to blow on his soup and tried a sip.  "I saw variations on the outcome of our trip to the park."  

"That's all?  You didn't . . . you didn't see the explosion?"  As Frank was constantly reminding them all, he did not see everything.  

But now, he didn't answer and Ororo's glance at Scott was sharp with reproof.  Suddenly alarmed, Scott reached over to grab Frank's wrist.  "Fuck it, Frank.  Tell me you didn't know about the explosion.  Please tell me."  

"I knew," Frank said.  

And Scott released him to sit back, too shocked, too angry, and too . . . what?  Afraid.  Too afraid to reply immediately.  "Why?" he asked when he got his voice back.  

Frank didn't look at him but concentrated on his soup while Ororo continued to glare with that unique protectiveness she reserved only for Francesco.  "There are crossroads," Frank began.  "Pivotal events.  This was one such."  His voice was harsh.  "So -- did I save those I knew?  Or did I prevent a war?  Which would you have chosen?"

"Wasn't there a third option?"

Frank looked up.  "No."  It was unequivocal.  

Scott looked down at his pancakes, then pushed the plate away.  He was no longer hungry.  Rising, he left the staff kitchen to wander.  

He hadn't known Bruce Banner, and he'd certainly not held much affection for Ted Roberts.  But they were dead.  And Hank was blue.  And Frank had known but hadn't stopped it.  

He heard the tap-tap of feet behind him and turned, half expecting Jean.  It was Ororo.  She stopped a few feet away.  "It is not your place to judge!"  Her voice was harsher than he'd ever heard it.  "This choice has nearly broken his heart!"

"I'm not judging."  And he wasn't.  Not like she meant.  "But doesn't it make you wonder?  He'd sacrifice us all, wouldn't he?"

"To prevent the death of thousands?  Yes!  Would you wish it to be otherwise?  Do you think he could choose otherwise?  This is what makes him Francesco."  This is what makes me love him.  She didn't say it, but the addendum was obvious.  And from Ororo, queen of emotional independence, the depth of her attachment to this one man was striking.  

"I . . . "  He trailed off.  She came nearer until they stood face to face.  Jean might be older than him, but he doubted she'd ever confront him quite this way.  It was what he admired about Ororo Munroe.  When she believed something, she granted no quarter.  They'd never have made a couple, even if she hadn't had Francesco.  Yet sometimes he wondered.  If matters had fallen out differently, might he have fallen in love with her?  She was magnificent.  But not for him.  Now, he finished, "I don't think I'd want it to be otherwise, no.  But that kind of power . . . doesn't it scare you?"

"In anyone else, yes.  In Frank, no.  Do you fear Professor Xavier's telepathy?"

"No."  And he didn't.  

She nodded once, decisively, then turned on her heel and went back to the kitchen.  He watched the sway of her hair, unbound, rippling like their choices.  Still not hungry, he went on to his own room and spent some time thinking as he packed to return to Berkeley.  He sincerely hoped that neither Hank nor Jean ever learned the truth.  It wouldn't be so philosophical to them.  Scott was also fairly sure that there was more to it all than Frank was admitting.  

Nor was he alone in his suspicions.  Some hours later, when Ororo found herself finally outside with Frank, she asked him, "How will what happened the night before last prevent a war?"   She could imagine only that it would make things more tense, not less.  

It was dawn, and she was working in her garden while Francesco sat on a bench, smoking, his leg elevated beside him.  "Without this team we're building," he said, "there will be a war between mutant and non-mutant.  Yet if Scott doesn't return, there will be no team.  Without the night before last, he wouldn't have returned."  

"Couldn't one of the rest of us create it?"  She didn't think of herself as a leader, but if it came to war or peace, she'd certainly try.  

Frank watched her as she bent over the dahlias, thinning them.  She might, indeed, lead them one day.  She had the strength.  But she was not the one to build them; she was the one to nurture them, as much as it might surprise her to hear that.  "We need Scott," he said.  

"Why do you think this accident with Dr. Banner will make him return?  No one that he knew has died, and the 'mission'" -- her voice was sour -- "was a spectacular failure."  

"He will return," Frank said with the certainty of a pronouncement.  

Ororo eyed him.  "I hate it when you do that."

The body of Bruce Banner was never found.  Neither his mutated body that had fallen into the Hudson, nor the one the police thought they were looking for.  His official status remained 'missing,' and he was wanted for questioning in connection with the explosion of his gravimagnetic field generator.  If the initial feeling had been that he was the victim of an accident, as days passed without evidence of his whereabouts, the mood of the department, the university, and his colleagues shifted.  If he bore no fault, then where was he?  And if he were dead, why couldn't anyone produce a body?  Dead men didn't walk away.  

As the only available survivor of the blast (officially), Jean bore the brunt of the investigative hurricane conducted by both the fire department's arson unit and OSH -- Occupational Safety and Health.  Though everyone in the building was interviewed, Jean was called in for questioning three times, and with each call, OSH grew more and more impatient and accusatory until Xavier sent a lawyer with her the third time.  Matt Murdock had a gift for appearing unthreatening (aided no doubt by his obvious blindness), but he knew his business.  Whenever questions turned hostile, he'd break in quietly to ask, "Excuse me -- but is my client under suspicion of something here?"

And of course, she both was and wasn't.  With at least one dead and millions in property damage, the pressure was on to find a cause.  But the GFG had disintegrated in the blast, and it made arson's job that much more difficult.  They had to determine whether the explosion had resulted from operator error, from a defect in the machine's construction, or was the result of deliberate sabotage.  

Hank was interviewed exactly once, at the mansion.  And the detectives went away without ever realizing that the man they'd just spoken to for almost an hour had been blue and furry.  He hadn't had any additional information to give in relation to the accident, but like Jean, he'd insisted that Bruce Banner would have had no reason to sabotage his own project.  

OSH wasn't entirely convinced, but as no evidence of tampering or sabotage was discovered by arson, the case was labeled an accident and officially closed by the end of July . . .  just before Jean's residency began on the first of August.  Hank had gone into seclusion after the accident, and was eventually sent overseas while a plan was hatched on how to handle his re-introduction into the academic world as an obvious mutant, without assassinating his career in the process.  

Scott's own absence from class had been the easiest to rectify with a simple phone call from the professor.  When he returned to California, he told the whole story to EJ, DeeDee, and Lee, who were equal parts amazed and appalled by what had occurred.  "You mean there's a machine out there that could make you a mutant?" Diane asked.  

"Only if you've got an inactive X-gene in the first place," Scott explained.  "And if Bruce Banner's mutation is any example, maybe some x-genes should stay inactive."  He couldn't imagine what it would be like for someone of Banner's intellect to be reduced to the mind of a four-year-old.  Then again, having the mind of a four-year-old would have spared him knowledge of what he'd lost.  

Just now, though, Scott was concerned for Jean, who had to deal with the loss her academic father and also the hassles of an investigation during what should have been her long-overdue vacation before beginning residency.  So he called her just to talk the very night he returned to Berkeley, and the night after that, and the night after that . . . and thus began a new pattern in the quilt of their history, a contact even closer than what they'd shared their first year.  

EJ observed it with a surprise that really wasn't.  Summers was like a comet where Jean Grey was concerned, circling back from apogee into perigee, the difference this time being that Scott evinced no need to explain away his interest, and no embarrassment for it, either.  

But Scott did begin to experience a certain stress, a pulling between west coast and east.  Talking to Jean regularly kept him apprized of events at the mansion in a way he really hadn't been since his first semester in California, and he felt reunited with his chosen family.  But he wasn't there with them.  Instead, he lived a continent away, in a state of personal flux evoked by his impending graduation and his entry into grad school.  Even Soapbox had gone into hibernation since Rick's departure.  EJ, Scott and Lee still got together to play, but they hadn't yet had the heart to replace Rick.  So Scott moved towards his graduation at summer's end like a man moving through fog.  He could hear voices on either side, but wasn't sure in which direction he should walk.  

Thus, he found himself lying on his bed one lazy afternoon in early August watching the wind tease his room curtains, and listening to Jean complain about the hours she kept now that her residency had started.  He also heard the news of two additions to the mansion fold, both of whom had arrived within days of each other.  

"First, the professor took Ro and Warren down to Norfolk, Virginia to pick up this boy, Rusty Collins, who burned down his own house.  It appears" -- her voice dripped with sour wryness -- "that his father, who's a ship engineer at the naval base, decided to engage in that age-old tradition of getting his son a prostitute for his coming of age."  

"You're kidding?"

"Nope.  Sixteenth birthday gets you a driver's license and a girl."  

Scott almost rolled off the bed, laughing.  What would he have done himself, if his own father had pulled such a stunt on him?  Then again, Chris Summers had probably been well aware that Scott hadn't needed any introduction to sex.  "So what happened?"

"He got a little overexcited and his power manifested."  Then her voice sobered.  "I shouldn't make a joke of it.  His gift seems to be pyrotechnics and he burned the poor girl along with his bedroom.  She's got third-degree burns over sixty percent of her body.  I really doubt she's going to make it, long-term.  Burn recovery from that amount of damage is dicey."  

"God, that's awful.  How is he?"

"Traumatized, as you can imagine.  But despite the age difference, he and Bobby've hit it off.  Bobby's come a long way, and he was the one who spent an afternoon with Rusty, talking to him about bad manifestation experiences.  

"Anyway, two days after Rusty got here, Frank got mugged by this kid.  She's fifteen, been on the streets since she was twelve, and as skinny as a rail because she can barely eat.  It seems that her mutation is an intermittent whole-body force-field.  It's on more often than it's off, and when it's on, nothing can touch her -- including food.  She almost starved to death before she learned to turn it off at all.  She's like a wild cat, won't even give us a name -- calls herself 'Skids.'"

"And she's at the mansion?"

"Yeah.  Mugging Frank apparently comes with an invitation to dinner."  She was laughing, and Scott had to smile, too.  It was just like Francesco to befriend his attacker.  "He probably let her do it, come to think of it," Jean said.  "Now, she's decided he's the best thing since sliced bread and follows him all over the house, and whoo-boy, Ro is jealous."  

Scott grinned wider and moved the cell phone to his other ear.  "Ro's a little proprietary about Frank."  He paused, then added, "So the professor really is starting a school, then?"

"Looks that way.  Ro's headed to college this year, but he's got three new students for fall now, counting Bobby."  

In fact, the mansion would see five new students that fall, but the additional two arrived by way of Jeremiah Haight.  A week after Scott's conversation with Jean about Rusty and Skids, he received a call from EJ's father.  "Eeej isn't here," he said when he answered the house phone.  

"It's you I need to talk to.  I got me a pair of kids down here who I was thinking your professor might be interested in meeting."  

Scott's eyebrows went up at that.  "Who are they?  Where are they?  At your house?"

"One's sleeping in EJ's old room at the moment, name of Julio Rictor.  His mom's from the neighborhood, but his dad's from Mexico.  Kid makes the ground shake.  Literally.  Kind of ironic mutation for LA, but there you go.  It seems his dad chased him out of the house with a shotgun, called him a devil, and JaLisa brought him home to me.  He's in her grade at school -- a junior."  

JaLisa was a junior already?  Scott remembered her as a hyperactive fourteen-year-old.  

"Who's the other?"

"A Chinese kid down at one of the malls who makes light shows for spare change.  I ain't seen her myself, but JaLisa and Violet been down to check her out a few times, and talked to her a bit once.  She always wears yellow, and calls herself Jubilee.  Only a little thing, about thirteen."  

Bobby's age then.  "And they both want to go to New York?"

"Well, we kinda twisted Julio's arm.  It's not like the poor kid has many options.  He's a good boy, too, not like some around here.  I'm going to bring him with me when we come up next week, so he can meet you."  EJ had a party planned for Scott's graduation.  As Berkeley held convocation ceremonies only once a year in the spring, anyone graduating at another time had to wait, or walk early.  It hadn't bothered Scott as he was going on to grad school anyway.  He'd just pick up his diploma from Sproul Hall later.  As far as he was concerned, this wasn't the graduation that counted.  He'd walk when he had three stripes on his sleeve and a fancy hood.  EJ, however, felt the event needed more to mark it than "Good morning, congratulations, you want some coffee?"  So he'd planned a party to celebrate.  

Now, Scott said to Jeremiah, "That sounds like a plan, if it's not an emergency.  Does he have his power under control?  And what about the girl?"

"Julio seems okay, as long as he ain't upset.  The power came when he saw his dad knock his mom around one time too many."  Jeremiah's voice was hard.  "We haven't had any tremors since he got here, though.  As for the girl, well, she put off Violet, and didn't seem too interested in school talk.  I'm going to go have a chat with her myself this weekend, but I doubt I'll have any more luck, so I was thinking that if Charles has time, he might come out to LA and meet her."  

"I'll call him and let him know," Scott said.  

"You do that.  Or better, tell him to give me a buzz.  I have a feeling there's more than two runaway mutant kids in LA; maybe we can set up something."  

So Scott called the professor with the news, passing on Jeremiah's phone number and observation both.  Then he returned to studying for his final exams.  
 
 
 

Sunlight winked off the gold-foil bear on the side of his blue coffee mug.  Gold and blue -- the colors of Berkeley -- but neither a color he could actually see.  They were locked yet in his memory, though even that was fading with time.  How many years since he'd been able to distinguish anything but red and black?  Four?  What would happen when it was fourteen?  Twenty-four?  Would he still dream in color when he was forty-five instead of twenty-one?  It seemed like a small question, trivial, but it haunted him.  What was life without color?  

Hearing a car drive up outside, he set down the mug on the end table -- a mug he'd bought on his very first trip to the bookstore in his very first semester here.  EJ pushed aside muslin curtains, announcing, "Dad's here," and Scott glanced over at the pile of things -- napkins, plasticware, paper plates and cups -- to be taken below for the lawn party, this time thrown with the full knowledge of their landlady.  She'd likely still peek out the window, but they'd lived here two years, and she knew 'her boys' wouldn't tear the place apart.  "Let's do it, dude," EJ said, already out the door, and Scott pushed himself to his feet with a little sigh, following more slowly, his steps weighed down by a melancholy he found ironic as the guest of honor.  

Outside, a light wind stirred the leaves so that they whispered against one another in dry voices, and mid-morning sun splintered through them to strike the earth in golden shards.  Two cars had drawn up on the gravel drive, the van with Jeremiah and Violet, and a little Honda Civic with the younger Haight girls and a boy sporting cocoa skin, glossy curls, and a shy smile that earned him solicitous attention from JaLisa.  Normally, five could have ridden in the van, but Jeremiah had to leave by mid-afternoon -- he was preaching the next day -- and the girls planned to stay.  All had come early to help set up.  Scott got hugs from the family, then was introduced to the young boy who caused earthquakes.  Julio Rictor seemed soft-spoken and polite, and as melancholy in his own way as Scott.  "You boys go upstairs and talk, and we'll take care of this," Violet told the two of them as she passed by, carrying a sheet cake in shades of red and black and what Scott supposed was white.  Violet was thoughtful that way.  There was a pick, shovel and brush on it, and a half-excavated pot.  

"Did you do that?" Scott asked, surprised.  

She laughed.  "Not hardly.  There's this woman in our church who works for the bakery department.  I don't think there's anything she can't put on a cake."  

She tilted it a faction so that he could see the top better.  "Congratulations" had been scrawled amid the excavation tools, a miniature mortarboard dotting the "i," and his heart lifted.  "Wow."  Why he should be cheered by a cake's decoration he couldn't have explained.  Perhaps it was simply that someone had gone to the trouble.  

Scott took Julio upstairs to the apartment while the Haights set about preparing the yard.  "They're some kinda people, aren't they?" Julio asked while Scott fetched them two Cokes.  

"Yeah, they are."  

"Not too many people in the world like Reverend Haight."  

"No."  

"He told me 'bout this Charles Xavier, say he takes in mutant kids and sends 'em to school."  

"Yes."  

"Why?  He a minister, too?"

The six-hundred dollar question, 'why.'  "No, he's not a minister."  Scott pulled out a stool from the bar and sat down.  Julio remained standing by the window.  He was a tall boy, thin, and had his arms wrapped around his chest in a barrier.  "I've met religious people who weren't kind, and people who weren't religious who had the souls of saints.  I don't think it's a matter of religion.  Charles is a Quaker -- sorta -- but he's also a professor.  He likes teaching, and he's a mutant like us.  He told me once that he can't help everyone in the world, but he can help some, so he does what he can.  You have to focus in order to keep from being . . . I don't know . . . incapacitated by the enormity of it all -- everything you can't fix.  Does that make sense?"

Julio looked over at him with speculation in his eyes, and nodded.  "Jeremiah say he's rich, too."  

"Yeah, he is.  Old money."  

"So what's he want with somebody like me?  I ain't got no money to pay for school."  

"I didn't, either.  He doesn't see the world that way."  

Julio seemed skeptical.  "Everybody see the world that way."  

"Jeremiah doesn't."  

That shut up Julio.  Finally, he said, "So you think I oughta go out there?"

"I think it might be a good idea.  But it's up to you.  I think you should at least talk to the professor, then make up your mind."  

"It helped you, being out there?"

"Yeah.  A lot."  

"How old were you, when you . . . manifested?"  The terminology was clearly awkward yet on his tongue.  

"Seventeen."  

"Older'n me.  Did it scare you?"

"It scared the shit out of me.  I hurt seven people, one of them badly."  

The seemed to surprise the other boy.  "Wow.  So, like, what d'you do?"

"My eyes emit 'optic blasts.'  They're force beams.  Essentially, I drill holes in things.  I drilled a hole in the wall of my high school bathroom by accident, and some people got hit by flying chunks of concrete."  

"Shit."  

"Yeah, pretty much."  

Julio fell silent and Scott sipped Coke, watching him watch the yard below.  It was dim in the house, and warm and stuffy.  They should have opened the windows.  "Your parents toss you out, too, when you turned into a freak?" the younger boy asked finally.  

His question made Scott wince.  "We're not freaks, Julio.  And no, they didn't kick me out for that."  

"So what you need with some rich guy in New York?"

"I needed help learning how to manage what I could do."  Scott tipped the can back and finished it off, then set it down on the counter.  "Besides, you see any of my family hanging around today, or just EJ's?"  The question tasted sharp and slightly vinegary, like sourdough.  

But acid could be shared, and it relaxed the other boy.  "Okay, s'cool.  Sorry."  

They talked a while longer about Xavier, the school, and living in New York while the family that had befriended them both set up a party down below.  After a while, Scott could hear the sound of other cars arriving and the voices of people -- Lee, Clarice and DeeDee, Scott's professor Fred Hand, who wasn't much older than his students, some other friends from school, and then an unexpected voice among them all.  

"No way!" he said, surprised.  "Hang on, Julio.  Sorry!"  He hurried over to the door, flinging it open to shout, "Rick!"   Bounding down to the yard below, he slapped his old bandmate on the arm, rocking the smaller man.  "What the fuck are you doing out here from Cincinnati, man?"

Rick Chabon grinned and pushed his glasses up his nose.  "I had to come back to pick up some of my shit from the House, so when EJ said you were having a party, I figured I'd plan to do it this weekend."  

"I'm glad."  The words were brief, but fervent, and Scott glanced behind him, up at the apartment where the boy Julio stood yet at the window above.  He waved the kid down.  Having all of Soapbox together again, even for an afternoon, made his day.  Now he understood why EJ had insisted that they pick up the band platform from Lee's.  "You bring your ax?"

"What d'you think?"  Rick fished in his pocket for a pick and held it up.  "But I'll need to borrow an amplifier."  

Scott slung an arm around Rick's shoulders.  "Not a problem.  I have so missed playing."  He grinned and added, "Thanks."  

"Not a problem," Rick echoed.  "Some things, you just do."  

Rick's arrival wasn't the last surprise of the day.  The grill had just been fired up and steak brought out -- "It's a graduation party; we gotta do better than hamburgers," EJ had said -- when a nice rental drove up, parking behind the line of vehicles on the drive.  Scott glanced at it briefly but wasn't paying attention until Lee pointed with her can of 7-Up.  "Hey, isn't that your friend with the wings?  I still don't get how he hides those things.  Who's the guy in the chair?"

Startled, Scott glanced around to find Warren manhandling the professor's chair through the gravel towards the back lawn, followed by Ororo and Frank.  He was reminded of their first party here almost two years ago.  Stunned, he said, "That's my professor," and went to greet his second set of long-distance guests.  They'd paused on the sidewalk at the yard's edge and Scott bent to embrace Xavier.  "You didn't have to come out here!" he said.  

"Well, no, I didn't have to."  Xavier replied, releasing him.  "But I wasn't aware a question of obligation was involved."  It was spoken lightly, but with a touch of reproof.  "Of course we came, Scott."  

"We're proud of you," Warren said, hugging Scott in turn.  His wings were still racked beneath his sport coat.  

"You going to take that off?" Scott asked, tugging the coat lapel.  

"Maybe."  Uncertain, Warren glanced towards the house.  

"It's okay," Scott said.  "She knows about me."  Warren still seemed dubious, but he let Scott and Frank help him out of the jacket and start unstrapping the rack.  

Jeremiah had approached the small group to greet Xavier.  "Charles!" he said.  "Glad you could make it."  

"You guys plotted this," Scott said while tugging at the leather straps on Warren's harness.  

"Of course they did," Ororo told him, kissing his cheek.  She held a big box in her hands.  "This is from Jean.  She could not come, you know."  

"Yeah, I know.  Residency."  It disappointed him a little, but he had enough other unexpected company, he didn't mind too much.  One rack strap undone, he set to unbuckling another.  

"Open the box!" Frank said from Warren's other side, pushing Scott's hands away, and Scott did as urged.  Inside the box lay a bush-style, oiled leather hat with a braided band, similar to the one he'd accidentally left on a plane the previous year.  A note was attached to it.  Thought you might need a new one.  You can roll this up and put it in a suitcase.  It's 'squashable.' -- Love, Jean.  

Grinning, he popped the hat on his head and Warren snorted.  "Indiana Summers."  The rack had finally come off and the wings slid free; Warren snapped them out to their full expanse, and to predictable gasps of appreciation.  

"Exhibitionist," Scott teased; Warren flipped him off as he headed out into the yard.  

Despite the number of people, the party remained quiet throughout the early afternoon.  Xavier spoke at length with Julio Rictor, then coaxed Mrs. Gale out to sit with him in the shade of a lavender trumpet tree.  Scott hated that tree.  Every spring, it dropped fat, oily blooms on the lawn, but it made good shade in August.  A short while later, Jeremiah and Violet joined them.  

The band had just begun to mosey stageward so they could play once before Jeremiah and Violet had to head back to LA.  EJ's parents had never heard Soapbox perform live, and Scott and Rick were wrestling amplifiers downstairs when a new car drove slowly past the house, went down the street and turned around to come back, parking at the curb.  Scott was busy setting up, and didn't notice, but the four adults sitting under the tree did.  A man and woman in late middle age got out and proceeded with cautious steps across the gravel towards the party in the side yard.  The woman had been blonde once, and still was, but with artificial help.  Her makeup drew attention to long cat-eyes and she wore a fashionable skirt slightly out of place at a cook-out.  The man who followed had dark hair graying at the temples, a fleshy nose, and bushy mustache.  

"Oh, my," Charles Xavier breathed out from beside Jeremiah, who glanced over curiously.  "Were they a surprise, too?"

Puzzled, both the Haights glanced at the newcomers, then at each other.  "I'm not even sure who 'they' are," Jeremiah confessed.  

Xavier's eyebrows went up and then he smiled faintly, even as a voice from the lawn shouted, "Dad!  Mom!"  The order of their naming was, Charles thought, telling.  

At that, Jeremiah sat back in his chair, knees splayed, big hands clasped over his abdomen as he watched Scott leap down from the low band platform to slip between people and meet his mother on the sidewalk bordering the lawn.  They embraced briefly while the elder Summers watched with an expression set in neutral.  When Scott released Katherine Summers, Chris offered a hand to his wayward son, and Scott rocked back slightly on his heels, as if receiving the impact of a heavy object.  Then he took the outstretched offer.  They didn't touch further than that, and their expressions were cautious, but not hostile.  

"Well, well," Jeremiah rumbled, and Xavier could hear the man's thought as clearly as if he'd spoken aloud.  It's about damn time he showed up to something for Scott.  And while Xavier was inclined to agree, he knew that Scott wasn't blameless in the familial spat, and he also knew how much of a concession it was for Scott's father to set foot in the town of Berkeley.  Xavier thought Scott recognized as much, too.  The expression that Jeremiah had interpreted as caution, Xavier named surprise, at least on Scott's part.  It might go some way towards mending fences between father and son.  

But did Charles Xavier want them mended?  He wasn't sure.  He was old enough, and honest enough, to name what he felt as jealousy.  He'd never been a demonstrative man, perhaps in reaction to the circumstances of his youth, or perhaps to the flood of others' emotions through his mind, but whatever the cause, he played his cards close to his chest.  Nonetheless, a proud, blind boy had stirred his atrophied paternal instincts until he'd come to think of Scott as the son he'd never have.  

But Scott wasn't a Xavier.  He was a Summers, and his real father had appeared finally to renew that claim of blood -- and Charles resented it.  Jeremiah might be more straightforward in his disapproval, but it sprang from purer motives.  A dark part of Xavier wanted the rift between Scott and Chris to continue so he would have no competition for Scott's filial devotion.  That there would be a competition was his natural assumption from a childhood in which he'd been forced to contend for his mother's affection with her second husband, a cruel man who'd brought a child of his own into the marriage, and had wanted the estate for Cain.  Charles had been Abel, and had suffered for it.  If he'd escaped literal death, some days he wondered if the figurative death of a childless old age wasn't just as final?  In any case, his mind turned naturally to internecine expectations.  

Violet must have noticed something.  She was no telepath, but Charles had learned long ago that body language could speak just as loudly to those gifted in reading it.  Jeremiah had already risen to approach Scott and his parents, as had EJ, and even Mrs. Gale.  In their absence, Violet leaned over.  "You don't look none too happy to see them."  

Xavier gave her a tight smile.  "Not unhappy, merely surprised.  If you didn't invite them, and I didn't invite them -- and I sincerely doubt that Scott invited them -- how did they know to come?"

And why? went unspoken.  

Violet pondered that.  A handsome woman even in her early fifties, she had the smooth, high forehead and wide cheekbones of her East African ancestors, though she'd gone stocky with age.  Her face would never have been labeled 'delicate.'  She was strong, in spirit and in features.  When younger, she'd been a woman to turn heads, and her daughters -- and son -- had inherited her looks.  Tempered now by years as a minister's wife, she reminded Xavier of the upper crust matrons of New York society, but with none of their restrictive affectations.  Aloud, she said, "I know Scott still calls his mother pretty regular.  He might not go home, but they talk, and this party wasn't a secret, even if a few on the guest list were.  If it were my boy graduating, especially graduating magna cum laude, I'd be there.  Wouldn't matter if we'd parted ways.  Some things a parent just doesn't miss, no matter what.  Well, not most parents."  

Yet her words didn't ease Charles's mind, merely confirmed what he'd feared.  When all was said and done, Scott's parents had returned to claim him.  

And Violet seemed to follow that, though Charles was quite sure he hadn't projected.  More evidence of her ability to read his face instead of his mind.  "You know," she said, almost conversationally, "I got four kids -- four.  Each is different.  Each is special.  Asking me to choose . . . I couldn't do it.  Most kids, they got two parents if they're lucky, and they love 'em both.  Asking them to choose'd be cruel.  But some kids -- they got more than two.  They don't want to choose, neither."  Picked up her red plastic cup, she rose.  "I need more tea."  

More amused than offended, Charles found himself smiling.  It had been more years than he cared to count since he'd been on the receiving end of a lecture.  Turning his chair, he wheeled himself towards the small crowd at the edge of the lawn.  
 

The sudden evening song of crickets broke loud over the yard, interrupting conversation with its force.  Words stumbled, then picked up again, and as the day slipped toward evening, the air had cooled slightly.  The grill had been shut and moved aside; guests munched on left-overs and sat in lawn chairs.  

Scott and his father occupied the platform where the band had played earlier and would play again shortly.  Mrs. Gale had retreated back inside, and Jeremiah and Violet Haight had departed not long ago.  Scott was faintly relieved by that.  

There were, Scott reflected, two types of ministers -- the pastoral variety and the prophetic variety.  Jeremiah belonged to the latter group.  At one point shortly before he'd left, he'd drawn Christopher Summers off beyond the garage, hidden from the lawn and the gathering.  And if neither Scott nor EJ (nor anyone else) had heard what had been said there, the expressions of both men when they'd emerged had been hard like granite, unyielding, and they hadn't spoken again, even when Jeremiah had left.  Violet and Kate had made more of an effort to be civil, but it was strained, a veneer of feminine politeness skimming the top off curdled relations.  EJ was inclined (naturally) to side with his parents, leaving Scott caught in the middle, so he'd retreated into the professor's shadow until the Haights had departed and EJ had gone upstairs, chased by Clarice who, bless her heart, had noticed Scott's discomfort.  Freed at last, Scott had sat down beside his father on the band platform.  Chris had been nursing a bottle of root beer; he never drank alcohol, not any more.  They hadn't said anything, the silence not quite awkward, not quite companionable.  Time had passed.

Now, Scott realized that they shared the exact same posture:  half-bent forward, chins up, elbows on knees, hands loose between.  He considered moving, then changed his mind.  

It was honest, this echo of his father.  He echoed Chris Summers in many ways, deep-down ways, but the surface of things always interfered.  It was, after all, the surface of things that tended to collide, rubbing up against each other and causing friction.  Sometimes he wondered how they could be too much alike to be so different.  Pick any critical political issue and they'd be on opposite sides, often -- and ironically -- for the same basic set of reasons.  They shared values, not opinions, and for that, he'd always had to respect his father, even when infuriated by him.  Yet he wondered if Chris respected him, or merely found him a disappointment?  He didn't know how to ask, and doubted his father knew how to say.  Perhaps Chris's presence here, in Berkeley, said enough.  

So father and son sat in identical postures and watched the yard without speaking, because healing didn't always require explanations, and presence mattered more than pomp and circumstance.  

Go on to Chapter 14: "Turn, and Turn, and Turn Again"