Joining The X Men

Once upon a time, on a wide, tree-lined road in Westchester, New York, there stood a mansion.

It was a very grand mansion — tall and old, with iron gates at the end of the drive and long windows that caught the afternoon sun and threw it across the lawns in bright gold squares. From the outside, it looked like a school. Which it was. Sort of. The sign above the gate read: Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.

And the morning Logan walked through those iron gates for the first time, he stopped in the middle of the driveway and stared.

He had seen a great many things in his long life. He had seen mountains and wars and wilderness so remote no map had ever named it. He was not easily surprised.

But he had never seen anything quite like this.

Through the front windows of the school, he could see a girl levitating three books at once, her eyes closed in concentration, her lips moving slightly as though she was counting. On the steps, a boy with a blue sheen to his skin was bouncing a tennis ball off the wall — except he was doing it while standing upside-down on the ceiling. On the lawn, two students were quietly arguing about something, and every time the taller one waved her hands, the flower beds rustled like something underground was listening.

Logan stood very still. His arms crossed. His expression carefully neutral.

"You get used to it," said a warm voice behind him.

He turned. Professor Charles Xavier sat in his wheelchair at the top of the front steps, smiling in that particular way he had — as if he could already see a joke that hadn't happened yet. His eyes were the color of still water, and they were very kind.

"Come inside," said Professor Xavier. "There's someone I'd like you to meet. Several someones, actually."

The hallways of Xavier's school smelled of old wood and chalk and something faintly like ozone — the particular smell of rooms where remarkable things were regularly happening. Xavier led the way, and Logan followed, taking in everything with his senses turned up high: the soft sounds of voices behind closed doors, the faint hum of machines somewhere below, the way even the quietest footstep echoed in those tall-ceilinged rooms.

They found the others in a large common room on the ground floor.

Scott Summers was standing near the window with his arms folded, wearing his ruby-red visor the way some people wear glasses — just part of his face, perfectly natural. He nodded at Logan with the serious, measuring look of someone who is calculating whether you will be useful. His name was Cyclops, and he was the team leader, and he was, it must be said, very good at it. He was also, Logan immediately decided, going to be mildly irritating.

Jean Grey sat on the arm of the sofa, and she smiled at Logan with a warmth that was completely real — no performance, no reservation. She was a telepath and a telekinetic, which meant she could read thoughts and move objects just by thinking about them. Logan had the feeling, standing near her, that she already knew rather more about him than he had said out loud. That was fine. He had no great secrets. Only old ones.

Ororo Munroe stood near the fireplace, and when she shook Logan's hand she was perfectly steady and calm, the way a person is when they are used to remarkable things being perfectly ordinary. Her name was Storm, and she could control the weather — clouds, lightning, wind — with a gesture and a thought. She looked at Logan with quiet, clear eyes that reminded him of the wide Alberta sky.

And in the corner, reading three books at once with the easy multi-tasking of someone whose brain runs rather faster than average, sat Hank McCoy — Beast — who was covered in blue fur, built like a particularly intelligent bear, and who said "How do you do" in a voice that would have been perfectly at home in a university lecture hall.

Logan stood in the middle of all of them and felt, for one strange moment, something he had not felt in a very long time.

He almost felt like he might fit here.

Almost.

It took weeks. Not days. He and Scott Summers argued about nearly everything — when to go in, how to go in, whether Logan's method of going in (directly and quickly) was preferable to Scott's method (planned, coordinated, strategic). They were like two instruments trying to play the same song in different keys. The whole house could hear it.

But Logan watched the others. He watched Jean make sure every single teammate was all right after a hard day. He watched Ororo walk a frightened new student through the gardens in the rain, calm and patient, not leaving until the fear was smaller. He watched Professor Xavier hold meetings in his office that ran long into the evening, wrestling with how to keep every one of his students safe in a world that did not always welcome them.

He saw what this place was.

It was not just a school. It was a family. A strange, loud, sometimes-arguing-in-the-hallways, occasionally-crashing-things family. But a real one.

And one morning, Logan found himself in the equipment room, looking at the blue and yellow uniform hanging on the peg with his name on the tag.

He put it on. He looked in the mirror.

He had spent more years than he could properly count looking for something to believe in. Something sturdy enough to be worth the cost of standing up for. He had fought in wars. He had wandered in wilderness. He had been many things to many people — soldier, laborer, lone traveler — and none of it had felt quite right.

This did.

He straightened his collar. He walked out of the equipment room and back into the hall.

"Nice uniform," said Jean, passing by with a stack of papers.

"It'll do," said Logan.

But in the reflection of the window, just for a moment, he smiled.

Good night, little one. The best part of any great adventure is finding the people who make it worth having.