Always X Men

On the last evening of the year, Professor Xavier kept a tradition.

It was not a complicated one. After dinner, when the table was still warm with the last cups of tea and the fire in the great hall had burned down to orange coals, he asked the X-Men to stay for a moment. No debrief. No agenda. Just the eight of them in the room they ate and talked and argued and made up in, with the snow falling outside and the year almost done.

He asked them each one question.

"What surprised you most this year?"

Logan went first, because he sat nearest the door. He thought for a moment — with Logan, thinking looked like two minutes of absolute stillness.

"How quiet it can be here," he said. Nothing else. It was, for Logan, quite a complete statement.

Rogue went next. She had her gloves on, as always, folded in her lap under the table. She looked at the fire.

"That I can still be surprised," she said. "I thought I'd run out of room for it."

She may or may not have glanced toward the other end of the table when she said it. Remy LeBeau studied the ceiling with particular attention during this moment.

Kurt Wagner — Nightcrawler — leaned forward in his chair. His pointed tail wound once around the chair leg, which it did when he was thinking carefully. He had blue-grey skin and yellow eyes and smelled faintly of the sulfur that came with his teleportation, and he had spent most of his life in places that asked him to be less visible, to keep those things to himself, to try not to startle people.

"Nobody has ever asked me to hide any of that," he said, gesturing at himself. "Here. Nobody once asked."

He said it plainly, without drama, the way people say things that are simply true.

Jean Grey said joy was louder than worry. She was a telepath, awash in other people's feelings her whole life — fear and sadness were familiar. But happiness had a completely different sound. Bright and warm. She liked it considerably more.

Hank McCoy cleared his throat. "I was surprised," he said, with enormous dignity, "that the boiler broke eleven times." He paused. "I fixed it eleven times." He spread his large blue hands. "It has still broken eleven times."

The room laughed. He had intended this.

Ororo Munroe was quiet for a moment before she spoke. "I was away twice this year — once in Nairobi, once in Edinburgh. And both times, at a certain point, I began to feel something go quiet inside me that I hadn't noticed was present until it was gone." She paused. "I think I was feeling the absence of this place. The hills. The drive. The particular way the house smells in the morning." She looked at her tea. "I didn't know it had become home until I was away from it."

Scott Summers was always last. He was last because he needed the time. He was not always slow with words — in a mission debrief or a training exercise, he was precise and fast. But for things like this, for the soft places in a conversation, he moved carefully and he took the time he needed.

He looked at the table for a moment. Then he looked up — at Logan and Rogue and Kurt and Jean and Hank and Ororo — and at Professor Xavier at the head of the table, who had started all of this before any of them arrived, who had sat alone in Cerebro looking for the kind of minds that needed to be found.

"There's a feeling I've had this year," Scott said. "I don't have a tactical word for it. It doesn't show up in a debrief. It's not readiness, or confidence, or certainty." He stopped. "It's something else."

Kurt Wagner, who was very curious and very sincere, asked: "What is it called?"

Scott looked at him. Then at all of them.

"Family," he said.

The fire popped once.

Outside, snow was falling on the Xavier School lawn, soft and steady, covering the frozen garden and the long front drive and the wrought-iron gate with the letter X worked into it. The oak trees along the drive had gone white. The lights in the mansion windows made warm rectangles on the snow.

Xavier sat at the head of the table and looked at eight faces — each one different from the others, each one marked by a year of the world asking difficult things, each one still here.

He thought of the first letter he had sent each of them — careful and hopeful — and how long it had taken each of them to believe it. How much of that believing had been done here, by each other.

"Again next year?" he said.

"Obviously," said Logan.

Professor Charles Xavier, headmaster of the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, smiled.

Outside, the snow fell.

Inside, the X-Men were home.

Goodnight. You belong exactly where you are.