Teamwork And Honor

Once upon a time, at the end of a long and eventful year, Professor Charles Xavier called the Gathering.

He had been calling it every year since the very first class at his school, and by now it was one of the best-loved traditions of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. On the last full evening of the school year, when the light was long and golden and the smell of summer was coming through every open window, everyone gathered in the main hall — students old and new, X-Men, teachers, all of them together — and they talked about what the year had meant.

Not what they had achieved. What it had taught them.

This particular year, Professor Xavier had something slightly different in mind. He waited for the hall to settle, for the last whispers to quiet, for the last latecomer to slide into a seat at the end of a row. Then he looked across the room to where Logan was sitting near the window — jacket, mug of coffee, arms very slightly less crossed than usual, which was as relaxed as he got in public.

"Logan," said Professor Xavier. "I was hoping you might say a few words."

Logan looked at him. The kind of look that meant: you could have warned me about this. Xavier's expression said, serenely: yes, I could have. Wasn't that interesting.

Logan stood up.

He walked to the front of the hall, and he looked out at the rows of young faces — some of them very new, still learning the layout of the building and the names of the hallways, still adjusting to the extraordinary ordinariness of being in a place where extraordinary things were expected. Some of them had been here for years, and they had the settled ease of people who had found where they belonged. All of them were watching him.

He took a breath.

He told them about Muir Island.

Muir Island is a small island off the northern coast of Scotland, where the North Sea comes in cold and gray and the heather goes purple on the hillsides in autumn. Dr. Moira MacTaggert had her research facility there — a series of buildings that housed some of the most advanced genetics research in the world. Moira was not an X-Man, but she was one of Professor Xavier's oldest and most trusted friends, and her work mattered to all of them.

This had been early in Logan's time with the X-Men — two years in, perhaps a little less, when the team was still learning how to be a team around him and he was still learning, if he was being honest about it, that teams were something he might actually be capable of.

A secondary systems failure at the facility had triggered a cascade: doors sealed, power rerouted, the automated response systems all misfired in sequence. Three of Moira's research staff were trapped in the lower labs. And the weather that night was what the North Sea does when it decides to make a point — waves crashing against the island cliffs, the wind throwing the rain horizontally, visibility down to almost nothing.

The X-Men had been in the Blackbird before the alarm had fully finished sounding.

Logan remembered arriving, remembered the particular quality of the wind off that sea, the smell of brine and electricity and the cold-stone smell of old Scottish coast. He remembered Cyclops at the back of the Blackbird, already three steps into a plan, asking questions that were really instructions in the shape of questions. He remembered Ororo rising from the landing pad into the storm — the storm that was, from her perspective, something to be negotiated with rather than endured — and the way the rain shifted, not to clear but to give them space, a path.

He remembered Jean placing her hand briefly on his arm before he went in and saying nothing at all — but the feeling she gave him, the steadiness she passed from her to him as simply as a person hands over a warm coat, was something he had not fully known how to receive yet and had not fully forgotten since.

He went into the lower labs.

He did not tell the students every detail of those ninety minutes. Some of it was technical — the precise work of cutting through a jammed door here, an obstructed passage there, moving through a facility that had gone dark and wrong in ways that the schematics hadn't quite anticipated. Some of it was simply the work of being calm and being quiet and helping three frightened people who had not expected to be in danger that day find their way to the knowledge that they were going to be all right.

But there was something else, in those lower labs, that Logan had not said aloud to anyone since it happened.

He had been afraid.

Not of being hurt. He had made his peace with being hurt a very long time ago. But afraid of failing. Afraid that the years of operating alone, of relying on nothing but his own judgment, had built in him a habit that would, at a crucial moment, make him less than the team needed. That he would trust himself when he should trust Cyclops's voice in his ear. That he would act when he should wait. That he would take the wrong risk at the wrong time, and someone would pay for it.

He did not say any of that to the students. What he told them was what happened next.

He followed his training. He followed the voice in his earpiece. He extended his claws when they were the right tool and retracted them when they were not. He moved through the dark labs one careful section at a time, and he found the three researchers — cold, shaken, but unharmed — and he brought them up through a service corridor to the surface.

Dr. Moira MacTaggert was waiting on the tarmac in the rain.

She was not a tall woman, and she had red hair plastered flat by the weather, and she was wearing a rain jacket that had not entirely done its job. When Logan came out of the facility door with the last of her researchers, she crossed the tarmac in six strides and took both of his hands in both of hers and held on for a moment.

"Thank you," she said. Simply. Completely. The way a person says thank you when they mean exactly that and nothing needs adding.

Logan had not known what to do with that. He still was not entirely sure.

He looked out at the hall now. At the rows of faces. At the students who were just beginning and the students who were already becoming extraordinary.

"I spent a long time," he said, "believing the only thing I had to offer was the ability to take a hit and keep going."

The hall was very quiet.

"The X-Men showed me that taking a hit and keeping going is worth something only because of what it protects. It's never the point by itself." He paused. He looked at the window, where the last of the evening light was going golden across the lawn. "The point is the people."

He went back to his seat.

Professor Xavier looked at the room full of young people — at the students who were thinking about what Logan had said, turning it over, setting it beside their own experiences, adding it to the collection of things that would eventually, in one way or another, shape the kind of person each of them was going to be.

He folded his hands in his lap.

He smiled the smile he saved for moments that required no comment, because the moment had said everything already.

Outside, the evening came in warm and gold across the lawns of Xavier's school. Fireflies appeared in the long grass at the garden's edge. Somewhere in the maple trees at the boundary of the property, a wood thrush began to sing.

It was a very good evening to be an X-Man.

Sleep softly, little one. The point is always the people. And you — you are very much the point.