Faith And Friends

Once upon a time, in the east wing of the Xavier Institute, at the very end of a long corridor that smelled of old wood and floor wax, there was a small room that most people walked past without noticing.

It had four rows of old wooden pews, salvaged from a church in Salem Center that was being renovated. There was a wooden cross hung on the wall, a single candle in a glass holder on the windowsill, and a small shelf with four books: a Bible, a collection of psalms, a German-language prayer book, and a battered old poem Kurt had carried in his rucksack since his circus days. He had asked Professor Xavier very politely if he might put the room together. Xavier had agreed immediately — he believed quiet places mattered as much as training rooms.

Kurt used the chapel every morning before the school woke up. He walked down the dark corridor in the early hours and sat in the pew nearest the window and opened his book. He read. He was still. He thought about the day ahead and about everything he was grateful for, which was a great deal.

He had examined that grateful quality in himself and wondered at it honestly. He knew what his life had looked like from the outside: the Bavarian village that feared him as an infant, the mob near Stuttgart, the daily reality of moving through the world in a body that announced its difference to every stranger. These were not small things.

And yet. He could not stay bitter. When the bitterness formed — and sometimes it did, in the cold second after someone stared too long, or after a Sentinel's scanner beam found him in a crowd — he would let it sit, acknowledge it as real and earned, and then look for what was also true.

What was also true was enormous. Margali and the circus. Xavier arriving exactly when he was needed. Storm, who called lightning and argued chess and laughed with her whole chest. Colossus, who turned to steel in battle and to careful thoughtfulness at the dinner table. And Wolverine — gruff, private, complicated Wolverine — who was, underneath everything, one of the most loyal people Kurt had ever known.

One morning — the sky the deep blue of almost-dawn — Kurt heard footsteps in the corridor that he recognized: heavy, unhurried, the walk of someone who had given up on sleep and was making the best of it.

A knock. The door opened.

Wolverine stood there. He looked at the pews, the cross, the candle, the book in Kurt's hands.

"You really believe all that?" he said. It was not unkind — just honest, the way Logan always was.

"Yes," Kurt said simply. He moved over on the pew and made room.

Logan sat. Outside, an owl was calling from the pine trees, steady and low. They were quiet for several minutes, which with Wolverine was entirely comfortable.

Eventually Logan said: "You've had a rough go. Since you were a baby." A pause. "You don't seem like it."

Kurt turned to the window. "I think about this," he said carefully. "I believe it comes down to the circus. To Margali and her people." He looked at his three-fingered hands. "When they first saw me — my skin, my tail, my eyes — do you know what they argued about?"

Logan raised an eyebrow.

"Which act I would join." Kurt smiled. "Not whether. Not 'should we keep this strange thing.' Immediately, before anything else, they were debating whether I belonged in the acrobatics or the tumbling. They assumed I was one of them. It wasn't a decision they had to work toward. It was simply something they knew."

The owl called from the pines. Outside, the first pale light was beginning to gather at the edge of the dark sky.

"You got lucky," Logan said.

"Very lucky," Kurt agreed. "Good people showed me something worth believing in, very early. I don't think I'm braver than you. I think the beginning was different. I had proof — early, undeniable proof — that kindness was possible and that I was worth it."

Logan was quiet for a long time.

"That's not nothing," he said.

"No," said Kurt. "It isn't."

The kettle began to boil upstairs. Footsteps, voices — the school was waking up around them. Somewhere, inevitably, the smell of burned toast drifted down the corridor.

In the small chapel at the end of the east wing, the candle burned steadily in its glass holder, and the cross was quiet on its wall, and two very different men sat together in the best kind of company — the kind where no explanations are needed and the silence is warm.

BAMF. Time for breakfast.

And for the record: the knight remains the superior chess piece.