Chapter Text
Scott woke up with a sense of immediate dread, compounded by the taste of stale iron lingering in his too-dry mouth. Shifting around under his washed out green sheets and trying to find a position that eased the drumbeat of the headache heating up behind his eyes, he blinked a few times behind his visor. Grimacing, he wondered if leaving it on overnight - at the cost of his more comfortable sleep visor, which was still sitting neatly on the shelf near the bathroom - was going to become a habit.
He rolled over onto his front, ignoring the visor’s pull at his temples in favor of curling up and yanking at the pillows scattered across the bed to cushion his body under the comforter, and wondered if perhaps the Scott of the night before had left the visor on to make some kind of point. After all, the sleep visor was a good deal easier to slide off without thinking about it, and hadn’t been designed to be as tamper-proof as his day-to-day visor.
Burying his face into the softest pillow near the headboard, he tried to find his way back to blissful unconsciousness, fighting the figments and flashes of their most recent mission that insisted on dancing across his inner eye, triggering an uncomfortable shiver deep in his stomach. Refusing to admit - even to himself - that he was fighting a losing battle with waking, he groaned.
Although his quarters were fairly far away from the main body of the school, at the end of a hallway only a few people ever had cause to go down, he could hear the distant sound of teenagers arguing loudly. It was accompanied by a tinny rendition of Genie in a Bottle that could only come from a portable radio, suggesting he had slept far past his usual 7 a.m. alarm. Still, since he only had one class to teach before lunch, he briefly considered pulling the pillow over his head and trying to return to blissful unconsciousness, but the pressure on his bladder forced him to get up, wincing as he stood up ungracefully and stretched, the joints in his elbows and shoulders cracking.
He stepped slowly away from the bed, adjusting the visor with the heel of his hand and averting his gaze from the side of the bed that had once been Jean’s. Stretching again, he yawned, and made his way to the bathroom, casting a disparaging glance at the neatly placed sleep visor as he did so.
More than a year had gone by since her passing, and he had learned to live with her absence, although he still thought about her often. After all the years in the mansion, he couldn’t stop seeing her shadow and her presence in all the areas of the school they had shared for so long, but the ghosts and the memories seemed almost friendly now, less inclined to punch him with the overwhelming force that had threatened to break him in the first months after she was gone. And yet, there were moments that still made him feel bruised and stiff with grief, and the sight of the empty bed in the morning was one of them.
The bed was one of the only things he'd taken from their shared quarters when he moved into his new ones, and he couldn’t face getting rid of it. The rest of his furniture was a mismatched collection of old mansion furniture and cheap pine bits and pieces he'd picked up from a store in town. It was strange, really, he'd always been the one who had wanted to keep a consistent modern style in their quarters, clean and understated, a contrast to the chaos and unpredictability they faced as a team.
Yawning again, he slowly started going about his morning routine in the bathroom, the crack of the toilet lid against ceramic loud in the silence. He rinsed out a cup he’d left on the rim of the old-fashioned wash basin to drink three cups of water from the bathroom faucet, water spilling down his chin as he tried to quench his thirst. After his final greedy sip he put the glass down, ignoring the way it clinked against an empty brown bottle that hadn't been there yesterday morning, and stared at his reflection in the mirror, rubbing his face.
He suspected the ruby quartz tint from his visor stopped him from seeing how pale he really looked, although his scratchy stubble and the tension lines on his forehead would be evident to anyone. Stepping into a shower with a punishing temperature somewhere between hot and scalding, as well as a shave with the last of his good shaving cream, made him feel slightly more human.
As he brushed his teeth, he reflected on the fact that at least his visor would hide the shadows under his eyes from the students and his fellow teachers, although of course there was no way to hide everything from Charles - a distinct disadvantage of having a telepath as a boss. Not that his students would say anything - despite the last mission, which could not be described by any means as a success, he could see in their eyes that they still saw him as a somewhat distanced leader. Even in the moments where he stood before them as a boring politics and communications teacher pushing forty, and they pushed the boundaries as they would do with any teacher, the shadow of his role as leader of the X-Men was always there, cast into sharp relief behind him, regardless of how wretched or tired or hungover he felt.
If they could see the empty beer bottle next to his sink - and the other bottle, which was on the edge of his bedside table, so close to falling onto his pillows that he had nearly woken up to the cold dregs of a bottle of Freshchester Pale Ale hitting him wetly in the face - they might have had a different opinion. Indeed, so might some of his colleagues, particularly the younger and less experienced amongst them. What Charles would say about it was something he had no particular desire to find out, and so he rinsed both bottles out in the sink, depositing them neatly by the sizable collection under the medicine cabinet - not that he had a significant problem, but the recycling collection wasn't for another week, and most people at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters were so nosy it might as well have been another mutant superpower.
Once the bottles had been comprehensively rinsed and securely stashed, he glanced out of the window, breathing deeply and concentrating fully on what it would feel like to be on the balcony outside, in the summer rain currently splashing down across the grounds. It was a technique he had adopted in his late teenage years - replacing something he didn't want to talk about or couldn’t bear the Professor finding about with another strongly felt image, so Charles didn’t pick up on it, or so he hoped. It was never anything deeply emotional or important for the team or a mission, but embarrassments, private, intimate moments, and now, it seemed, the details of his nightly drinking habit. The Professor wasn’t really one to pry, but everyone had their off days, and over the years Scott had learned that there were some things that could be effectively hidden this way, as far as he could tell. It was a theory he’d tested numerous times, albeit never frequently and never - or at least nearly never - with Jean, although he did, in his heart of hearts, feel that everyone was entitled to some secrets from their partner.
His first class of the day passed without incident, except for the audible grumbles of his stomach, and the private resolution to add a stash of protein bars to the contents of his bathroom cabinet. An hour later, at the weekly staff lunch in the school’s cafeteria - or dining room, as Charles called it - he helped himself to an enormous portion of noodles. Once a week - usually on a Friday - the faculty had lunch together with the students, sitting at the head table in a room filled with teenagers. The unspoken rules very much decreed that flashbacks and insomnia were no excuse, or they’d never really all be present. He found himself sitting across from Charles and, as the conversation turned to recent classes and students, he had the opportunity to test his technique again, forcing himself to bring the image of himself on the balcony in the summer rain to the forefront of his mind again, to cover up the afterimages of nightmares and despair still dancing around behind his retinas.
If anything, it worked too well, and he wrenched his mind back to the present with some effort, trying to concentrate on what the Professor was saying about some new gardening project in one of the back corners of the mansion’s grounds and the newest student who had come from an overcrowded tenement block in the city and the connection with Charles’s lessons on philosophy.
“It’s really fascinating, you see,” said the Professor, looking as though he’d found his life’s purpose in community flower beds. “In class, we were looking at Cooper, who explores and rejects the assimilation of garden appreciation to the aesthetic appreciation of art, nature, or of any combination of these…” he continued to expound on his subject, gesturing expansively with a fork that had a precarious noodle dangling off the end, dropping tomato sauce onto his plate. Scott nodded slowly, fighting down the urge to yawn that was straining his jaw and pressing at his cheeks, but between the warmth of the room, the lack of sleep and the ambient noise, together with his mounting headache, it was becoming increasingly challenging.
The image of an ice-cold beer bottle entered his mind like a snake sneaking into a rabbit’s burrow, and for a split second he imagined himself in some secluded corner of the mansion’s grounds where no-one could find him, holding it in his hand, wet with condensation, and taking a few sips before lying down and drifting off to sleep in the afternoon sunlight on the cool wet grass.
He pushed out the image almost as soon as it appeared in his mind - it was really a matter of only a few seconds, but by the time he focused again Charles - who was always adept at reading people, irregardless of his abilities as a telepath - had changed the subject and was talking about whether Scott had plans or if he could drive into Salem Center that evening.
“The kitchen’s running low for the weekend, and Marie needs a ride to her shift at the hotel,” Charles said, and then paused. “Not to mention I need a couple of things from the hardware store if it’s not too much of a bother.”
The idea of adding yet more work onto the end of his day wasn’t anywhere close to appealing, even though it might be a little hypocritical, considering he’d been the one to originally argue that Marie should be able to have a job outside the mansion. Scott glanced away from the other man for a second and stared at the wall, trying to look as though he was mentally going through his schedule and his very important plans for the rest of the day. Charles didn’t take any perceivable notice, and seemed to take his lack of comment for assent.
“If you could leave around 6 that would do nicely. She has to start her shift by 6:45, and the car she uses seems to be having some trouble.”
Scott closed his eyes for a second, and felt a protest rise up in his throat, a ‘Why can’t someone else do it’ on his tongue ready to go, and exhaustion dragging him down, before his implacable sense of duty and self-sacrifice (some might say sense of self-martyrdom) hit him at the same time as the thought that he could pack up quite a few empty beer bottles into a crate and dispose of them whilst also stocking up, ideally at the dark, cramped shop near the edge of town where he could wear a baseball cap pulled low over his face and no one would talk to him except to mutter the amount he had to pay.
He nodded at Charles, grateful as ever that no emotion in his eyes could betray his thoughts, hidden as they were behind the visor, and that the main emotion Charles would have sensed coming off him was exhaustion and a sense of duty - nothing unusual - praying that he’d successfully managed to suppress a moment of glee mixed with shame, or that it would be written off by the Professor as ambient telepathic noise coming from one of the teenagers around them.
Still, he looked away from Charles and accidentally met Logan’s eyes for a second, blushing for no reason at all as he did. A far cry from his rock-and-roll entrance to the mansion all those years ago, Logan was sitting two people along from the Professor, talking jokingly to Bobby about detentions and who had the best lesson plans.
“You gotta have some structure,” said Iceman, looking every inch the math and accounting instructor that he was most days.
“You gotta have some structure,” Logan replied, looking away from Scott after a second too long. “I’ve just gotta hit the main points, and I don’t need any spreadsheet to tell me how to do that.”
He was wearing a neat short-sleeved linen button-up shirt, a concession to his new role as a history professor - or rather, Scott thought, his jaw tightening again as he saw Logan smirk after looking back and catching his eye for a second time, as a history teacher. No qualifications, barely any classroom experience, no concept of historiography, just the good luck to be a walking, breathing primary source, with a tendency to sneak Scott’s beers - at least the ones left in there - from the fridge in the staff’s communal kitchen (which was off limits to all the students who weren’t part of the official staff, except for Marie, who was 21 and hated beer) and blame it on teenagers sneaking in, conveniently never being able to give any names or provide any suggestions as to how they could have accomplished it.
As if he could read Scott's thoughts, he leaned over and inserted himself into the conversation without invitation.
“Don’t worry bub, you’re only the designated driver for the drop-off. I’ll pick her up in the morning. You can sleep in and enjoy sweet dreams of strategy and danger room scenarios.”
Scott flinched involuntarily, and hated himself for it when he saw Logan's eyes soften for a moment.
“I never took you for an early riser,” he replied, putting an exaggerated sneer into his voice to cover up his moment of weakness and ignoring the obvious fact that everyone sitting at the table knew they had both been called out of their beds in the early hours for missions and various emergencies (school or non-school-related) numerous times, and Logan had never seemed anything less than fresh and alert, regardless of whether he’d been dragged out of the roughest bar in Salem Center or had been deeply asleep in his quarters.
The other man merely shrugged, “What can I say, I guess I’m just lucky. Never needed much sleep. More time for whiskey and cigars.”
“Indeed,” remarked Charles dryly. “I find myself less and less likely to sleep in these days as well. Perhaps it is something that simply comes with advanced age, whether we want it or not.”
Logan chuckled, “Compared to me you’re a young man yet, Professor.”
“Ah, if only my joints would agree,” said Charles wryly, “Alas I fear they have a much more linear understanding of time.”
Logan shrugged, and smirked, “Beats having them full of adamantium.”
Scott simply sat there, feeling almost nauseous with tiredness, the lunchtime noodles slowly sinking in his stomach - not one of the cafeteria staff’s more inspired offerings, and he had a feeling the remnants would resurface in tonight’s cafeteria dinner - and feeling vaguely insulted that he couldn’t come up with a comment to join the repartee taking place around him. The leaden blanket of exhaustion sinking onto him made it difficult to care more than a little though, and once again he thought longingly of his bed, and what it would feel like to just throw himself into it and let the sweet oblivion of sleep take him. Thinking through his two communications lessons that afternoon, he decided to have the kids run their own exercises, stepping in only when necessary - and then maybe he could fit in a nap (or at least a lie down) in the final period before his trip to town with Rogue.
In the end, the bell rang before he could follow his train of thought to its conclusion, and he jumped, startled - hardly behavior worthy of the fearless leader of the X-Men - and was immediately annoyed when he saw Logan and the Professor sharing what seemed like it was intended to be an unnoticed glance of concern about him. He cleared his throat and moved over to the coffee urn, balanced precariously on a table near the wall, and filled the nearest mug with the intention of taking it with him to the next lesson and drinking as much as possible before he had to start teaching.
He lifted it in an ironic salute to Logan and Charles as he passed, intending to convey an impression of the solidarity of weary professional adults thanking God it's Friday. He made it all the way to his classroom without spilling anything, and it was only when he put the mug down carefully on his desk that he saw that he’d picked up Storm’s “If it doesn’t move, grade it” mug, which he had secretly always hated. For the few moments before his class of 13 to 15 year olds came storming in, he was tempted to just lay his head down on the desk, pillowed by his lesson plans, or possibly bang it extremely hard on the blackboard, but instead he forced himself to stand up and take a piece of chalk from the top desk drawer.
Once he had finished writing “Communication: Conflict Management Techniques” on the board he turned around to find five teenagers chattering and rooting around in their bags.
“Where’s Mark?” he asked, trying to look stern. “The bell rang five minutes ago, he should be here.”
The students exchanged glances among themselves, before a girl called Jasmine, who had been at the school for nearly three years and could manipulate gravity within ranges of up to a ten foot diameter, spoke up.
“Uh he wasn’t feeling well, Mr. Summers? He decided to go back to his room and sleep? We thought he told you at lunch?”
Scott barely restrained himself from saying “Must be nice” and instead just decided it wasn’t worth the hassle of debating the best routes for dealing with problems like "uh not feeling well”, even if it did mean that the class was an odd number and putting the kids into pairs would likely be impossible.
Gritting his teeth again, he immediately felt the tension rise up to his temples and settle behind his eyes. He tried to summon the cool, calm, clarity he felt leading a mission as Cyclops, but faced with a double period of communication and conflict instead of a band of evil mutants bent on destruction, it failed him entirely.
“Fine. First thing today, we’re moving onto a new topic: Communication and Conflict Management. Please take out your notepads and write down three examples of possible conflict situations that can be resolved by communication, and three tips you would give for someone who had to communicate with others in a difficult situation. Fifteen minutes and no discussion with the person sitting next to you.”
Jasmine’s hand shot up again. “Or with anyone who isn’t sitting next to you, thank you Jasmine.” Her hand went down again.
Scott sat down behind his desk and slumped in his chair. The two kids sitting on the left side of the classroom immediately started muttering to each other, but stopped as soon as he glared at them. As ever, the shadow of his authority as the leader of the X-Men was enough for that, for what it was worth. Still, he felt a pang of guilt at their immediate silence, and spent the rest of the lesson trying to glare as infrequently as possible, remembering when it had been him sitting at a desk in this room trying to help out new kids.
He got through the double period by switching things up between note-taking, discussions that ended before they got too heated, and role plays that he hoped would actually help out the kids if (or when) they ended up in the field, despite the increasing ridiculousness of the scenarios they came up with. They’d started with negotiating with government officials and law enforcement to peacefully resolve conflicts, what to do if there was a conflict between two team members, and how to act in situations requiring cross-cultural understanding, and ended up with a scenario in which someone had eaten the last slice of pizza in the common room, resulting in a hostage situation the president had to come and resolve. Scott got the shyest kid to participate as much as he thought was humanly possible, and even got roped in a few times himself, playing the role of mutant ambassador trying to negotiate a new treaty with humans, and a support group facilitator for mutants dealing with discrimination or prejudice.
All things considered, it had been a highly successful lesson. He was so buoyed up with success, he considered actually trying to have a nap on a secluded corner of the grounds, now that the rain had been gone for a few hours and the sun was shining brightly, but instead just made it to his quarters to collapse on his bed. As his head hit the pillow, it felt like his mind was falling even further, sinking swiftly into an abyss filled with sharp-edged thoughts and jagged images. He couldn’t drag it back up, no matter how hard he tried. Tossing and turning in the warm summer evening, he tried some of the deep breathing exercises that Hank had taught them in a meditation class for students and teachers a few years before.
He took off his shirt and pants, did sixty seconds of full body stretches, slid his sleep visor on smoothly, and pulled the thinnest sheet over his body, lying down perfectly still and trying not to move, but it was to no avail. Eventually he gave up, heart pounding fast for no reason at all as he lay there flat on his back, eyes opened wide behind ruby quartz, staring at the ceiling.
Fear and anger burning in his chest he heard himself release a near-scream of frustration much more loudly than he intended to, almost exactly at the same time as someone knocked on his door, surprising him and cutting off the rest of his scream into a strangled yelp. There was a moment of silence where he tried not to move at all, or make any noise, heart pounding in his chest, and hoped in vain that it had been a knock at a nearby door and not at his.
The moment of peace was broken by an even louder knock, and what sounded like a louder-than-necessary throat-clearing right in front of his door.
“Hey Scott, you…uh… everything okay in there?” Logan. Of course. Who else would be there to witness his humiliation. Gritting his teeth and muttering curse words he earnestly hoped none of the kids in the mansion knew, he pulled on his pants and dragged himself to the door.
“What is it?” he muttered, staring at the ground and unable to meet Logan’s eyes. When he got no response, he looked up to see something he’d only seen a very few times before - a blush on the shorter man’s face, as his eyes darted over Scott’s lack of top to take in the scene visible through the door behind Scott, the bed positioned in clear view of the door he'd flung open.
For a moment he was confused, but then his eyes widened as he realized what it must look like - the rumpled sheets on the bed, clothes flung onto the floor, the wait for him to pull his pants on before he opened the door half naked looking guilty and sweaty - and even have sounded like, his hoarse scream clearly audible through the door. A thrill of panic raced through his body, coupled with a completely inappropriate frisson that he filed away at the back of his mind to be firmly stored away to be examined at some unspecified future date, or possibly never.
“I was trying to have a nap before the drive.” he said, so quickly it sounded like one long confusing word. For once, Logan seemed to still be lost for words, his eyes fixed firmly on a point behind Scott’s left shoulder, which made Scott deeply uncomfortable. He could handle the joking, the friendly goading, the jabs and sarcastic comments, but this silence from the other man and the tension he felt between was something he didn’t know how to work with, and he found himself rambling to fill it, eyes fixed on the floor again.
“It’s fine. It’s not even a long drive. I’m just. You know. Having trouble sleeping.”
There was another brief pause and Scott’s brain caught up to his mouth.
“So why were you knocking?”
Logan blinked and seemed to finally realize Scott was asking him a question and he should say something.
“I was going to offer to drive Marie in. I’ve got nothing else going on tonight and you seemed - ” he shrugged, and Scott could see the muscles in his shoulder moving under his tight gray t-shirt “- tired.”
“I’m fine,” said Scott automatically, bringing his eyes up to Logan’s face and telling himself to concentrate on the matter at hand. “Just a lot of work to do. But I don’t mind driving Marie in. I haven’t really spent any time with her in a while, and like the Professor said, I need to pick up some supplies.”
Logan leaned against the doorframe, his face coming a little closer to Scott’s, who swallowed reflexively. “You sure?”
“Of course,” said Scottt with a casualness that belied the strain behind his words. “No problem”
“Okay,” replied Logan, stepping back and keeping a light tone that matched Scott’s so closely it seemed like mockery. “Great. See you around, Slim.” and he turned to leave, before looking back one last time, “Nice sleep mask by the way.” And with one final smirk he was gone.
Scott’s hands reached up to touch his face automatically as he realized he still had his sleep visor on - designed for comfort and ergonomics rather than his day-to-day visor that had stability and strength as its core functionality, it unfortunately looked quite a lot like a traditional sleep mask, of the kind favored by elderly ladies in cheap comedy films.
Logan was halfway down the corridor by this point and certainly still within hearing range but Scott couldn’t come up with anything better than shutting the door extremely firmly - halfway to slamming, some might say - and shouting “Ugh” at his quarters in a furious whisper so as not to prompt any more uninvited guests.