Heyoka: Chapter 8
by Minisinoo
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Notes: They're Marvel's (mostly), not mine. If you've gotten this far, I don't suppose I need to warn you about blood. The song lyrics are from Bill Miller's amazing "Ghostdance," off his album of the same name. Indians know how to dance and how to pray. See Part I for other disclaimers.
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Cyclops had pushed away the part of him that felt. Amputated at the neck, so his brain could work without the distraction of emotion. The distraction of guilt. It was what he had to do. It was the mask of command. He showed them what they needed to see because they depended on him; they went forward at his order to the risk of their lives. So his visor had become his mask, his shield, and right now, he wasn't Scott Summers. He was Cyclops.
"Come back with your shield or on it," Spartan mothers had once told their sons. He'd always come back with it. And brought them back, too.
He wasn't going to bring her back this time. She was slipping out of his grasp. Like Odysseus, shouting across the waves. Taunting.
The problem was that, in the Odyssey, cyclops was a fool. Tricked. Left blind and alone and in pain on his island.
Scott hadn't picked the name cyclops for himself.
"Jean," he whispered as he watched her laugh at something in her own mind, then cough her life out. Blood sprayed his face, his visor. He couldn't see for the blood, had to yank the visor off and throw it away, grab the sunglasses he still had in his breast pocket.
No more visor. Nor more shield. Just Scott Summers again. He tried to pretend his hands weren't shaking as he propped Jean against his chest so she wouldn't drown on the blood filling her lungs. At a voice from the door "Let me through!" he looked up. Then Gracie burst in under Ororo's arm, dropped down beside him. "I can keep her from dying. Get out of my way."
He remembered a silly story he'd heard once about grace. Grace was like grits in a southern breakfast diner. You didn't ask for it, it just came.
Grace had come.
Unlike that afternoon with Jake O'Dell, she didn't hesitate. Her hands went down on Jean's, right over scarlet sheet strips, right over the sliced gut beneath. Then her head went back like it did when she sat out on the lawn in the mornings, looking up at the sun. "Ho uway tinkte. Wokiksuye wiconi, Jean Grey!"
Abruptly, Jean's body arched in Summer's grasp and she cried out.
"Come on, winchinchala." That from Logan, who held on to Gracie's shoulders from behind. But Summers wasn't looking at Logan. He was watching Gracie's face, agony pushing past itself into peace. Her full mouth was open a little and sweat had started on her upper lip. All the noise in the hall had gone silent. Two dozen faces in the doorway, seen over Gracie's shoulder, Ororo's arm and the professor's chair blocking them from getting in, from getting in the way.
He looked down finally to see if it was working, if Grace was beating death, but couldn't tell anything for the makeshift bandages. There was no new blood but that was the best he could say.
When he looked up again, Grace's whole face was damp and she was shaking as if she tried to lift a weight far too heavy, nonetheless for a handful of heartbeats, he thought they just might win it. Then he felt the bleeding start again, welling warm under his hands. Sluggish. Slow. But fresh. "Grace!"
"Not strong enough," she whispered.
"Yes, you are, darlin'." Logan. "You're a Sioux woman."
She laughed, almost breathless, repeated, "Not strong enough."
For some minutes, Summers had been aware of the professor's presence in his mind. Xavier was watching through Scott's eyes. Now he could feel the professor touch Grace, and knew that she was telling the truth. She wasn't strong enough.
Do something!, he screamed in his own head, because he couldn't do anything himself. He couldn't save her. He was just Scott Summers. Not Cyclops. Not fearless. His mask of command was covered with Jean's blood and he was terrified.
Michael Jordan doesn't play without a team, Scott.
For a moment, Summers had no idea what the old man was talking about. Then he remembered a weeks-ago conversation about basketball and powers and blond angel boys with wings.
"Rogue!" His own voice in the deathly silence startled him. He didn't know from where this idea blooming in his head had come, but it wasn't the professor's. Maybe the part of his brain that he couldn't shut off, the part that was trained to analyze, think, plan, had provided him with the answer to snatching victory.
Grace had slumped back against Logan. She would lose consciousness soon. Then the sluggish flow would begin pumping with the speed of Jean's heart, out all over his hands and his knees and the floor, all over their hopes and visions. "Rogue!" he yelled again at the top of his voice.
The girl was climbing past the professor's wheelchair, into the room, brown eyes wide with fascinated horror at the sight of all that blood. "Touch Grace," he ordered. "With your bare hands."
"I might kill her, I "
"Do it!"
"But "
"Do it, dammit!"
"Do what he says, Marie." That from Logan. "Hurry."
She nodded and knelt in the pool of red, ripped off her glove and put a hand to Grace's neck, but tentative, ready to yank it away. The Indian woman shuddered once, gasped, and Marie pulled back. Logan grabbed her wrist safe above the hem of her sleeve and put the hand on bare copper skin again. Gracie shuddered once more but that was all. Instinct and experience transformed the poison touch, and Summers let out the breath he'd been holding. He hadn't wanted to sacrifice one woman in the hopes of saving another, but you didn't win battles without taking risks. He locked eyes with Logan.
The wolverine knew what he wanted, would try anything to save Jean. If Cyclops ordered him to let Rogue suck out all his healing power for Grace to use, he would. Without thinking twice, trusting Cyclops even without the visor, he yanked Marie's other glove off and gripped her hand. Tight.
His whole body jerked.
And then . . . nothing. He was holding Rogue's hand as hard as flesh could meld with flesh but nothing else happened. This, even Scott hadn't expected. Gracie had somehow changed Rogue, turned her from killer into conductor where she had never been able to do it before. But then, Jean hadn't had a chance to try her Rogue-experiments on the one who healed and the one who could heal himself.
Matter and anti-matter.
It hadn't been Summer's thought. It was Logan's. Logan's on the edge of laughter, followed by, We're powering the Enterprise. Set a course, winchinchala.
Xavier had linked all their minds together, placed them like a crown on Grace, and Scott saw a sudden vivid image of a loom. Gracie's beading loom. Rogue was the loom and the professor the strings. Grace chose her beads, starting backwards in the West with Logan the wolverine, black for the Direction that the dead passed on their way to the Spirit World. She placed Logan there, the man who couldn't die, blocking Jean's escape.
Cyclops was next. Gracie saw him as brown and blue, earth and water. The man with lightening in his eyes was, to her heart-sight, the one with rock power. Inyan. She set him at the center of her pattern and they all rested on him like Jean's body did. Gracie made him sacred ground. The earth opened under him and he passed inside. Time ceased to exist inside visions.
Grace reached for Ororo next, set her at the North, the power of storm and sky, of winter before rebirth in spring. Summers could see Storm's eyes go white like two milky pony beads as she came forward to grip Logan's hand. Non-existent wind lifted her hair.
Then the East. The Direction of the World. Red. Like Indian power. Like the Red Road they walked now. John Proudstar. He came forward, out of the pack of kids, gripped Ororo's free hand and raised his arms at his sides like a thunderbird ready to carry them all home. The Red Thunderbird. Wakinyan sha.
Last, the South. Yellow warmth. Bobby Drake the smiling boy with the eyes and touch of ice. Unexpected choice, but Drake came to grip Proudstar's free hand, then with his other, he dared to lay a palm on the face of the South that could melt him. Rogue. Twining himself in her loom.
The hoop was complete. Grace had beaded them into a medicine wheel. An X on its side was a medicine wheel.
Wokiksuye wiconi, Jean Grey. Remember Life. Cyclops sat at the center of the hoop with Jean against his chest and an unlooked for grace at his right hand. He held them up. The professor had become Gracie's strings, Rogue was the loom, but Cyclops held them up.
In his arms, Jean stirred, opened her eyes, spoke in wonder. "Scott?"
Way off down the hall came a man's voice. "Did someone here call 911 for an emergency?"
"No," Summers whispered, but not to the man. "No, we're all fine. We're going to be fine." Even the baby in Jean's womb. He knew, grace of Grace, that the baby was still alive. The knives had gone in high, through her stomach and diaphragm, missed the child inside its mother. They were all alive. "I wanna go where the dead are raised . . ." He sang quiet words that he found now in Grace's own mind. "Where the mountain lion lays down with the lamb . . . No guns, no wars, no hateful noise, just a victory dance, we'll never taste defeat. Where there's nothing done or said that can't be forgiven, where every step you take is on sacred ground. Walk away from death to the land of the living, where all the lost tribes are finally found. Where are you going? To a ghostdance in the snow. I am a mighty warrior. And I'm finally coming home." This was their tribe. His tribe. And they were going to be okay. He'd see to it. Cyclops could bear them up. With or without his visor.
"How long will she be asleep?" Xavier asked.
Jean shrugged, pushed back hair still matted at the ends with her own blood. They'd gotten her out of her shredded, wet clothes and cleaned her up a little, but that was all she'd let them do before having John Proudstar carry Grace down to the med lab once again, while the professor and Ororo had gotten rid of the emergency personnel. Summers himself had carried Jean, healed but still too weak to move far on her own. Rogue with Logan had followed in their wake, and Drake, too. The boy had won that right. In the lab, Jean had hooked up Grace to an IV while Logan had supported her and Scott had fetched what she needed. He knew the lab better than Logan, but he didn't resent the wolverine. That ugly part of him had broken and died in the hoop, been reborn as something else. They'd been so focused on saving Jean that he was only now beginning to grasp the depth of what had been made, held together by an empath and a telepath. Feelings and thoughts. The body and the mind made the soul. He couldn't hate another part of his soul.
Now, Xavier and Ororo had arrived in the lab. "I don't know how long she'll sleep," Jean said to the professor's question. "It all went through her. Through Rogue, too." She glanced around at the girl.
"I'm fine," Rogue said. "Better'n fine." She smiled at Logan, and at Bobby, the two men who had touched poison skin and lived.
"Rogue was simply the conductor," the professor said now. "It was from the rest of you that Grace took the power."
Logan was nodding. "Yeah, I feel like I got kicked in the head. Twice."
So did Summers.
"I think we all need to clean up and sleep," Jean said. "We look like we've been through a war."
"We have," Summers replied and she nodded.
Thus it was the Sunday before Thanksgiving that Logan returned, that Jean and Scott fought their final quarrel, that Jean almost died, and that Grace Kills-his-Horse constructed a sacred hoop of X-Men to save her. Given that no one got to bed until well after midnight, the professor decided to cancel all classes on Monday. They needed that twenty-four hours to find their new balance.
Grace remained unconscious, and Marie watched over her during the night while exhausted adults slept. All the power of four directions had flowed through Rogue that evening, and there was nothing in the world that would put her to sleep short of drugs. When Summers appeared in the lab after ten the next morning to change the IV (among the emergency first-aid skills he'd learned from Jean a long time ago), he found Marie still up, reading a book and sitting with feet propped on the edge of the bed that held Grace. She smiled at him with bright eyes and pulled her feet down. "How's Dr. Grey? How are you?"
"I'm fine. Dr. Grey is fine. She's still asleep." But that was only an assumption because the bedroom door had been closed. Summers hadn't slept there last night. He didn't explain that to Rogue. There would be time to explain it later. Maybe. "Go get something to eat, Marie."
She nodded and started off, then turned and came back. He glanced at her. "Yes?"
Raising one end of the scarf she habitually wore around her neck, she placed cocoa silk against his scratchy cheek, then stood on tiptoe to kiss him, brief. "She'll be okay," she said. "She's got her ancestors looking out for her. She told me so once." And then Rogue slipped out.
He went to sit by Grace.
She was very pale, although pale for Grace would have been a suntan on him. Someone, probably Marie, had gotten her out of the bloody clothes and into a hospital-style gown, washed her skin down. But Jean's blood still hid, dry now, under her nails. Short nails, without polish. Pragmatic hands, square, meant for work. Gracie didn't wear spike heels and short skirts. She would never look like Jean; her body had already born a child. He caught one of her hands in both his and brought it up to his mouth, rested his lips against the fingers wrapped loose over his. Pragmatic hands fit well into his own. He didn't care about the heels. Much.
But he did wonder a little what she might look like in them.
"I'm waiting for you to wake up," he whispered. There was no response in her face. He freed a hand to stroke her cheek with his thumb. Lakota cheekbones. The thought made him smile. "I still owe you a trip to the ocean."
He sat there until mid-afternoon when Ororo came to relieve him.
Then he went upstairs to face Jean.
In the end, it was easier than he'd expected. Usually a rotten patient like all doctors, she'd bowed to common sense this time and remained resting in bed, though dressed in sweats to receive visitors. The kids had all trooped by, needing reassurance that she was okay, that the safety of their haven wasn't coming apart at the seams, wasn't as broken as the room had looked last night, with its overturned furniture and blood all over the floor.
He'd knocked on the door and waited for her to say, "Come in." It wasn't his room any more.
The place had been picked up, though one of the bedside lamps was missing (broken), and there was a crack in the wall where his bass had fallen against it. A huge brown stain still marred the middle of the floor between bed and bookshelves. The carpet would have to be ripped out and replaced. Jean was propped up in bed, her glasses on, apparently trying to grade assignments. She gave him a half-smile, but he looked about for his bass instead because he couldn't face her just yet. She'd put it back in its stand and he picked it up to see what damage had been done to it. There was a new dent in the walnut headstock, and a long scratch along the back of the neck. The A-string tuner head had been snapped off, but replacing that was the least of his problems right now.
"I think it's mostly okay," Jean said. "I looked at it last night."
"Yeah, it is. Thanks." He put it back down and took a breath, turned to face her.
But there was nothing to say. Last night had healed Jean, but it hadn't healed them. Or rather, it had, but only by scabbing over the wound and taking away the worst of the pain. For some things, there was no miracle fix. "How's Grace?" Jean asked.
"Fine. I think the proper medicalese is 'resting comfortably.'"
That made her smile, but she didn't look at him as she did it. Instead, she stared out the window over his desk, her hands locked around her drawn-up knees. He noticed suddenly that she wasn't wearing his ring. Then she spoke. "I've decided to keep the baby, Scott."
A dim disappointment opened in his belly not at being a father, but at what that would mean. A loss of grace. Yet he'd gotten good, over the years, at ignoring disappointment, at ignoring any feelings that got in the way of duty. So he nodded, frowned at brown-stained carpet. "I won't leave you to raise it alone."
"I know. That's why I decided to keep it, because I know you'll be there. And I want you to be in this child's life, Scott. I want the baby to know you. There are other parents who do this, manage to be parents without living together. At least we live in the same house. It shouldn't be so hard."
He stared again at her left hand. Blank. It looked very blank without his ring. "Jean, I meant that I mean I'm willing to try again. I'd like us to try again."
"No."
"No?" It sounded stupid but his mind was too sluggish to come up with anything better, and the heaviness in his center had pulled him off balance.
She smiled a little, the same smile that had always used to make his knees weak. It still did. She offered him her hand and he took it, let her draw him down to sit on the bed beside her. She gripped his hand tight, rubbed her thumb over the backs of his fingers and said words to kill him. She tore down his walls and sacked his heart. "It's over, Scott. I think it's been over for a while and we just didn't have the courage to let it lie down and expire. Don't you think it kind of funny that we've been engaged for so long and still hadn't set a date? Why was that?"
Words balled up behind his teeth. She went on, merciless. "I still love you. I always will. It's not the love that died. You've been my friend for eight years, the one person I could always count on. But I don't want to marry you."
"The baby needs a family."
She smiled and shook her head at him. "Oh, Scott. It has one. Isn't that what we all learned last night?" Still smiling, she ran her free hand down the side of his face. "In fact, I thought a lot after I went to bed, laid awake almost until dawn. I've wanted a baby for a while. You know that. You weren't ready, so I waited. But I wanted one. Now I have her. And I can't think of a better man to be her father. I very much want you to be her father. But I don't want to be your wife. And I don't think you really want me to, either." She let the hand at his face fall and took her other hand out of his. Severed. They were severed.
He rubbed his forehead and bit back a protest that would be a lie. If this was freedom, it hurt like hell. He focused on something small because the rest was too big for him to feel yet. "Her?"
"Her. Or him. We always call the unborn 'him,' so I said 'her.'"
"I wouldn't mind a daughter."
"You'll spoil her rotten."
He could feel the sting of sudden tears, tore his glasses off and scrubbed at his closed eyes. Then she was pulling him in, hugging him, and she was weeping, too. They held each other and cried because this was the kind of pain that scalded the soul and needed the aloe embrace of a friend. And they were still that. They would always be that.
Later, they went, hand in hand, to tell the professor what they'd decided. Xavier probably already had some inkling, but if Summers had learned nothing else about telepaths, he'd learned how much they valued hearing words. So they sat together in front of Xavier's desk, like the morning they'd told him they'd moved in together, like the morning they'd told him they were engaged. But this was evening and they told him that Scott was moving out, and they were keeping the baby, and they were raising it together. "I'm not sure what to say to the students," Summers finished finally. "It'll probably seem a little weird to them. It seems a little weird to me, and I was involved in the decision."
Xavier smiled behind steepled fingers. "I think they're used to 'a little weird.' This is Mutant High, after all."
Classes resumed on Tuesday, before Thanksgiving break began on Wednesday. Ororo and Summers had exams to give. Grace remained unconscious in the medical lab, watched over by students on rotation. Jean Grey gave her fluids and monitored her, but there wasn't much else to do. "Is she going to wake up?" Scott asked Jean late on Tuesday night. He was starting to wonder. It had been almost forty-eight hours.
"She should, but it could be a few more days."
On Wednesday morning, Summers moved his things out of Jean's room, into the one he'd first occupied when he'd returned to the school from Berkeley three and a half years ago. That it happened to be next door to Gracie's room was pure accident that's what he told himself. But when Ororo saw which room it was, she rolled her eyes and laughed at him. She and Logan helped him move. Jean went downstairs to oversee the kids. This was, she said, something she'd prefer to return to as a fait accompli, not watch it happen. It took a long time to detangle their intertwined lives. Too many things were 'theirs,' not his or hers although he was happy to leave Jean with the purple lava lamp the kids had gotten them for Christmas two years ago. Jean had been a child of the seventies, not him. But in the end, there was a stack of 'stuff' they'd have to sort through together, however much she might wish she could wake up to find it done. At least there wasn't an issue of furniture, or not much. The mansion rooms came furnished, but they had a few things of their own. Three cherry-wood bookshelves he'd built by hand. Seven Saturdays had gone into those. They wouldn't be easy to split, and he didn't want to see them split up anyway. But it would kill him if he had to part with them and he knew Jean would want them just as badly. He'd built them for her, or really, for them. Their first furniture. They'd meant the shelves to go in the front room of the quaint little gatehouse on the property back that the professor had intended to deed to them, along with an acre of land, as a wedding present. They hadn't wanted to live in a single room of the mansion forever.
He had to stop a few times during the process, go lock himself in the bathroom and weep. Once Logan knocked to ask if he was okay but he heard Ororo speak to the other man, and Logan went away. Summers needed to lick his wounds himself. Some things, no one could help, least of all a prickly wolverine. He might be willing to think of Logan now as a necessary evil, even a welcome necessary evil. But he'd be damned if he'd let the man see him cry as his old life broke apart.
Because the mansion rooms were furnished, and furnished mostly alike, there was little point in Scott taking a whole chest of drawers down the hall. So they pulled out the drawers themselves and exchanged them for those of the other dresser. Seeing the contents, Logan had frowned at the dividers by which Summers kept his socks and t-shirts and other clothes color segregated, but said nothing. Then they turned to removing the clothes from the closet. Summers handed him a stack of shirts, said, "Keep these exactly in order, please. And make sure they're turned the same way on the rod in the other closet, too."
Logan burst out laughing and made Scott jump at the sound. "I knew you were anal, One Eye, but Jesus Christ! Who the hell cares what way his shirts are turned?"
Summers felt himself flush. It was Ororo who answered. "If the shirts and pants are not kept in that order, Scott cannot know what their color is. Or did you forget that?"
Logan's expression was startled, and vaguely sheepish. "Oh. I didn't I never thought about it. Sorry."
Scott turned away, snapped, "I manage fine. I'm not blind. Just color-blind."
Once, Logan would have responded with, Fuck you. Now, he said simply, "I'll be sure to keep the shirts in the same order," and left.
Scott heard Ororo shift, glanced around. She was watching him with those black eyes. "I don't need pity," he told her.
"And Logan is the last person from whom you will get any. Saying he is sorry is not the same thing as pity." She went back to collecting the CDs he'd set aside as his. Most of the collection, actually. Music hadn't been something he and Jean had shared. He picked up his bass amp and headed for the door. "Scott," she said. He glanced back. "I'll sort your laundry for you, if you need me to." She'd done it once or twice before when Jean had been gone for a long time and he'd needed to wash his clothes. It was a little embarrassing to have her pick through his skivvies and socks along with everything else, but better than arriving in class looking like a preschooler's idea of fashion sense.
He nodded. "Thanks, Ro." And walked out.
She called behind him, "Or maybe Gracie can do it." He could hear the grin behind the words.
He didn't reply to that. He wasn't ready to think about another woman right now, even Grace.
She didn't regain consciousness until Thanksgiving. Scott spent the day in her room, watching over her. He hadn't slept much the night before, in an empty bed in a strange room surrounded by all his own things, so he was in no mood for the celebration downstairs. Most of the students were still there. About half didn't have homes to go back to, and the rest lived too far away. Kitty was gone, and Warren, a few others. But most stayed and shared their holiday with each other. Of the adults, only Jean had left for Manhattan. She remained close to her parents. In fact, it had been her parents who had first contacted the professor when it had finally dawned on them that their beloved daughter needed a different kind of help than a psychiatrist and Thorazine to stop the voices in her head. For the past three years, he'd gone home with her on Thanksgiving evening. This year, she went in the morning, and alone, to explain to her mother that she was going to be a mother in turn, but not a wife. Before she had left, she'd removed Gracie's IV and cleared her to be taken back to her own room. This time, Summers had carried her there and no one had said anything about it.
Gossip traveled fast in the mansion. And moving out of his old room, even if just down the hall, wasn't easy to overlook. Everyone at school knew that Mr. Summers and Dr. Grey were no longer a "them." They'd also gathered that what had happened in Dr. Grey's room on Sunday night had something to do with it a rather obvious deduction. The details remained Scott, Jean and Logan's secret.
The kids had also figured out about the baby. Maybe the professor had told them when neither Jean nor Summers had been around, but that wasn't Xavier's way. More likely Drake, Proudstar and Rogue had picked up on it when they'd been made part of Gracie's hoop, the same way that Scott had known the baby was still alive. The Wednesday night before, at supper, Jubilee of all people had approached the teacher's table to smile at Jean, a little tentative. "Dr. Grey? I just wanted to say that, like, I'd be happy to babysit for you after the baby's born." Her glance had taken in Scott as well where he'd been sitting across the table from Jean like he usually did. They'd agreed it was important for the students to see that they didn't hate each other. They just weren't living together any more. "I'm really good with babies," Jubilee had added. "They're so cute."
Scott had watched Jean try not to choke on a sip of tea. "Thank you," she'd said after a moment. "I'll . . . keep it in mind."
"Kitty said she'd babysit, too, before she left with her dad. And Jenn. Rogue would, but well, you know "
"Thank you," Jean said again. "And I'm sure that Marie in gloves would do fine."
Jubilee had retreated. Jean had locked eyes with Scott. He'd shrugged and gone back to his pasta. So, they knew about the baby. They didn't know about the bottle of little white pills. That was fine. They didn't need to know everything.
Then Thursday morning, Jean had left for her parent's place in Manhattan, and Valeria and Ororo took over the kitchen the same as they did every year. There was a certain irony in turkey and sweet potatoes done by an Italian and a Bantu, but as Ororo had put it once, baking turkeys wasn't genetic. She could read directions on a Butterball as well as anyone else.
Scott spent Thanksgiving in Gracie's room, grading math exams and watching her sleep. He hadn't realized how late it had become until someone knocked on the door and he looked up to see the sun had almost set. Grace's room was one on the outside wall, so it had a window. Back in September, before she'd even come, the professor had told Summers to be sure the room set aside for her had a window.
Now, he got up to answer the knock. It was John Proudstar, carrying a plate. "Miss Monroe thought you might like something to eat."
He took the plate. It was warm from an oven. "Thank you, John."
Proudstar nodded. "Just don't call me Squanto."
Summers smiled. "I wouldn't dream of it."
"How's Gracie?"
He glanced around at the bed. "Still asleep."
A pause, then the question. "Is she going to wake up?"
Summers didn't reply immediately. It had been over seventy-two hours and despite Jean's assurances, he was getting nervous. But to Proudstar, he said, "Dr. Grey told me she could wake any time."
The boy nodded, then glanced down at his hands. "Mr. Summers? Has Gracie ever told you the story of White Buffalo Calf Woman?"
"No."
"It's a Lakota story, not an Apache one, but I know it. White Buffalo Calf Woman came and taught the Lakota people the pipe ways. It changed them, but it made them better. So they honor her. She was a holy woman, a sacred being. One of the powers. Gracie is a little like White Buffalo Calf Woman. She came and her powers changed everything. But I don't know it seems better, y'know? Everything's changed better." He blushed abruptly. "Well, maybe not to you and Dr. Grey."
"It's all right, John. I'm not sure Jean or I would disagree. We aren't angry at each other."
"I know."
Summers wanted to get back to his grading. He really wasn't in the mood to talk. "Thank you for dinner, John," and he started to close the door.
"Mr. Summers?"
"Yes?"
"After Sunday, Bobby and Warren, St. John and me we been talking." Scott didn't say anything, so Proudstar went on. "We been in your karate class for a while. But, well, we'd like to see if we could start real training. As junior X-Men. Dr. Grey she won't be able to fight with the team now, not for a while, and Dr. McCoy is still gone. Logan's back, but you need more people. We're ready."
Summers held up a hand. "I'll think about it."
"But, Mr. Summers "
"Enough, John. I didn't say no. I said I'd think about it." And he shut the door, took his dinner back to the desk by the window that still held the computer Gracie had never turned on. He really had to teach her how to use a computer.
"My Little Cousin has a point, y'know," said a hoarse voice from the bed. It scared him so badly that he dropped his fork and nearly dumped tea on the keyboard.
"Grace!" He jerked around to find her smiling at him, lazy, her eyes cracked open but with dark circles underneath. He went to kneel down by her bed, take her hand in one his and brush his other hand over her widow's peak. Her hair was greasy. "How long have you been awake?"
"Not long. Or really, I've been in and out all afternoon. I'd wake up for a minute or two, but then fall back to sleep." Her voice was very weak, almost a whisper. "I'd open my eyes and see you, sitting at the desk, then I'd doze off again. You were always there. I could hear your pen. Scratch, scratch. You write a lot on their papers."
"I have to; they won't learn if I don't show them what they're doing wrong."
She smiled at that. "How is Jean?"
It was, he thought, the first time he'd ever heard Grace call Jean only by her given name. "She's fine; she went home to her parents for Thanksgiving." He grinned. He couldn't help it. "You almost slept through the turkey, but John brought me some. I'll share."
She shook her head, coughed and he lifted her up, supported her against his shoulder. She felt very light. "Do you want something to drink?" he asked. She nodded and he laid her back down to fetch his tea, bring it over and help her drink a little. "Better?" She nodded.
"I'll pass on the turkey," she said then. "Your Thanksgiving is no holiday for Indians, ain't it?"
He settled himself down on the bed, still holding her. "Why not? I'd think it would be a symbol of hope that we could live together. Your ancestors saved mine, like you saved Jean on Sunday."
She sighed and shook her head against his shoulder. "They weren't my ancestors. My ancestors killed yours at the Little Bighorn, and yours killed mine at Wounded Knee. Tisquanto was a Wampanoag, and his band died two hundred fifty years before from white man smallpox. He knew English so well because he'd been kidnaped by white men and made into a slave." She coughed. He gave her more tea. "Thanksgiving is the story the white man tells himself, so he don't feel so bad, living on stolen land. If you're gonna be a teacher, Scott, you should teach the truth. Now I'm tired. I think I want to sleep again. When I wake up, I'd like to hear how Jean Grey got Logan's knives in her gut, ain't it?"
Frowning, he laid her back down and covered her up. "Sleep, Gracie. And whatever you say, for me, it's worth a thanksgiving that you're awake."
She shook her head at him, smiled faintly, then whispered, "My little cousin was right. You need to think about the next generation. They're ready."
He didn't reply. Instead, he rubbed her brow until she fell asleep again, then went over to the computer and turned it on, accessed the network to look up Thanksgiving. Maybe, next Monday, he'd teach a little history in math class.
He also needed to talk to the professor and Logan, see how long the man was planning to stay this time, find out if he might be willing to take on some students, teach them how to keep from getting themselves killed in a fight.