The night's dinner seemed primed to be just as ordinary as any other night. Anna sat at Kitty's right who was at the head of the table. Only scraps were left of Kitty's food while Anna still had a near-full plate left before her. To Anna's right were the boys, Kurt and Evan. Both were huddled around a phone sharing a pair of earbuds. Opposite Anna were Scott and Jean.
Typically Scott would talk at Jean about some mundane thing that would make paint peal in an effort just to get away from him. However, tonight Scott was spooning his lintel soup into his mouth with one hand while flipping through some yellowed paged, dog-eared, book that had to have been born before the thought of a computer. Anna eventually caught a glimpse of the sepia-tone cover and saw it had a picture of an old-looking car with wood siding traveling down a mountain pass at what had to be a then a screaming fast 45 miles an hour. The title read "From carburetors to sparkplugs, everything you need to know about car repair." She would be lying if she said she wasn't at least a little touched he was taking the car repair so seriously.
As for Jean, her typically bright eyes were overcast with gray, and her hair was clumped and greasy. She rested her head on one hand and scrolled through her phone with the other. Her soup had long gone cold since she last took a spoon full a half hour ago.
The adult's side of the table was typical aside from Logan's absence. No one had mentioned it or even drawn attention to it despite the largest glaring sign was how bland the soup was and how hard the bread had been. Logan was a man born to cook and would never let such sub-par food leave his kitchen… or a meal with so little meat.
A silence had fallen between Ororo and Xavier. Neither of them had produced a book or was scrolling through a phone. Instead, they just sat and politely sipped at their meal, and every once in a while, they might make the occasional hushed comment between them.
Anna looked at Kitty and once she got her attention, she nodded. Kitty nodded back and stood. "Whelp, thanks for dinner!" Kitty collected her dishes and Anna joined her. "Roomie and I got a group project we got to work on that's due tomorrow, so we're going to head to our room." The girls were already dumping their utensils in a bin as Kitty finished explaining.
"Ah, very well." Xavier smiled. "Have a good evening you two. Sleep well."
"You too!" Kitty grabbed Anna's hand and led her through the threshold, into the hallway beyond, then into the main hall.
Anna pulled Kitty close. "Where are we going? His office is the other way."
"Doy!" Kitty looked behind Anna and continued up the stairs. "Don't you think it would look weird if we just started walking down the complete opposite way of our room immediately?" At the top of the stairs, Kitty pulled Anna to the right towards the boy's wing and suddenly stopped. "Okay, this should be about right."
"Right for what?"
"I tried this earlier. If I phase down, we should land right in front of Xavier's office door."
"Wait… if you can just phase us through walls and doors," Anna pointed at her wrist," why are we bothering with Evan's special watches?"
"Because phasing more than just me is a serious pain. Imagine carrying someone up a river filled with logs and rocks and sharks. It's not fun and I could probably only do it once before I totally zonk." Kitty sucked in a breath through her nose and looked at Anna. "You ready?"
Anna clasped her hand tight around Kitty's. "Yeah. Go for it."
Kitty swallowed, looked ahead, and relaxed her shoulders. Anna felt a sudden sensation of getting shorter. She glanced down and saw her feet had disappeared and the floor was working on her knees. A breath later the floor was at her neck and then she was between levels of the mansion. She saw bright pink insulation, wires, and crisscrossing pipes till eventually there was light again. They dropped to the ground in a heap atop one another and Anna could hear Kitty panting. When Anna finally managed to right herself, she saw the other girl's face was covered in sweat.
"Hey," Anna whispered, "are you going to be alright?"
Kitty pushed herself up into a sitting position, her head loose on her shoulders. She sucked in a long breath and another after that. "Yeah." She nodded. "Help me up, please?" When she raised her hand, Anna pulled her to her feet.
This time it was Anna who looked down the hallway a watched to see if their fall had gathered any attention. After staring at the bare carpet and peach-painted walls for a near minute, she turned her attention to the door before them with a gold placard reading 'Xavier's Office.' She held her watch wrist to the door handle, heard a snap from the deadbolt within the wood, and saw the screen of her watch go green. "Wow. Good job, Ev."
Anna took hold of the golden knob and twisted. Pressing her shoulder to the door, she used it as a shield as she slowly pushed into the dark room beyond. Instead of following Anna's lead, Kitty zipped past Anna and once inside, grabbed Anna by the arm and gave her a sharp tug. As soon as Anna's body was clear of the door, Kitty shut the door firmly behind them.
"Easy, Kitty!" Anna pried Kitty's hand off her arm and rubbed the finger indents in her flesh.
"I am NOT risking us getting caught doing this." Kitty ignited her watch light and played it off the walls. "I think there is a light switch over there." Anna navigated by Kitty's light, flipped the switch, and the room was plunged into a comfortable low-watt light.
It had been a while since Anna had actually been in Xavier's office, but it was more or less as she remembered. He had his great dark wood desk in the center, with his pens and documents neatly arranged atop. A monitor for his desktop computer sat catty corner to the user's right of the desk, and two uncomfortable-looking chairs sat before the intimidating front. To the left and right of the desk were walls buttressed with tall shelves that stretched floor to ceiling with books, and behind the desk was a window presently covered by a long golden curtan.
"Right," Kitty mumbled. "So what is it we're looking for?"
"Anything." Anna pulled the jump-drive Evan had given her earlier that day out of her back pocket and looked at Kitty. "Try to see what you can find on the desk and I'll try his computer. Let's try not to be in here too long, and try not to move too much around." The girls rushed to the desk, Kitty scoured the top and Anna looked around underneath for a computer tower to plug the jump-drive into.
"Wow."
"What?" Anna fumbled in the darkness under the desk till caught hold of some tightly wound wires. She followed them to a cabinet within the desk. "Gotcha!"
"Anna, you should check this out."
Anna pushed herself to her feet and blew her hair out of her face. "What - what the hell?"
Before the pair was Xavier's desk calendar, but where most people would write the name of appointments or holidays, Xavier had written random numbers, letters, and hyphens.
"Every day is filled with something." Kitty leaned in close. "His writing is so small.
"It's got to be code of some sort."
"Either that or he's an alien."
A bright flash of light made Anna's heart skip. She snapped her neck in Kitty's direction and found her taking a picture of the day calender. "Kitty!"
"Sorry! Forgot to turn off the flash."
Anna shook her head, knelt down, and got back to the cabinet she'd just discovered. The nob took a little fiddling, but it eventually came lose with a twist. She was then presented with a sleek-looking computer tower. "Nice." She found the USB slot and jammed in the jump-drive. When she returned to the surface, Kitty was already halfway through riffling through the stacks of paper on Xavier's desk. Anna clicked the monitor on. "Find anything else?"
"I can't tell. It's all random papers… I don't really have time to read all of them."
"Just take a picture of anything that looks interesting." Anna gritted her teeth at the other girl, "And make sure the damn flash is off this time." The monitor glowed and a user login prompt appeared on the screen with random numbers and letters scrolling in quick succesion in the username and password input. "I don't know what's happening, but it's doing something."
"I think these are just invoices." Kitty flicked through a few different papers on the desk. "This one is talking about stuff like laundry detergent and food we got in the kitchen. Then there's all this other weird stuff. Maybe stuff for the Danger Room?"
"Can I see?" Anna plucked the paper from Kitty's offered hand and read. "This stuff has names on it with a lot of vowels…" She pointed at one. "I can read steel and rivets… the Danger Room would make sense for these."
"He probably needs to buy all kinds of weird stuff from a house full of budding freaks." Kitty took the paper back from Anna and tucked it back in the pile where she found it. "Alright, Mr. Desk, let's see what you've got for me." Kitty pushed her hand towards one of the drawers and her fingers curled as they ran into the surface. "What the?" She tried again and her fingers only pressed into the lacquered wood of the desk.
"What's wrong?"
"I can't phase through the desk!"
"Are you sure you aren't still just wore out from before?"
Kitty turned around and pushed her hand through the wall under the window with ease. "It's not me."
"What?" Anna tried one of the drawers and found it locked. "No way. You seriously can't phase through this thing?"
Kitty tried the same drawer Anna and just tried to open, but her palm went flat as she tried to press it through the unforgiving material.
"Has this ever happened before?"
"No. Not even once. I've been able to phase through anything I've tried!"
"Crap!"
"Hey!" Kitty touched Anna's shoulder and pointed at the monitor.
Anna followed Kitty's finger and saw a background with a great big silver 'X' looking back at her. "Good job, boy genius!" Anna felt around for a keyboard and mouse, found them in the cabinet next to the tower, and navigated around the screen. She found only two icons on the home screen, a files explorer and an internet browser shortcut. She accessed the files explorer and a wall of files opened up to her all with more strange code like the one they found on the day planner.
"What the heck," Kitty whispered over Anna's shoulder.
Anna took a photo with her phone, "There are so many files…" She clicked a folder and found a text document within. She tried opening the text document and it prompted her with another password login. "Damn. Guess Ev's magic drive only goes so far."
Kitty pointed at the screen. "Maybe try the one with the latest date."
Anna scrolled down, clicked the file, and found three images within a folder. She clicked on one of the images, and a grainy photo appeared of a large truck with something long being loaded in the back with the help of a hand truck and a couple of guys.
"It's all black and white. I think it might be from a security camera?"
Anna took another picture with her camera and then switched to the next photo. It was of the truck pulling away with a strange logo on the rear door. She snapped another picture. The next photo was of a man with slick black hair smoking a cigarette in a concrete yard while dozens of people in uniforms moved large crates around him. Another picture snap. "I think this is all we're going to get out of here for now." Anna yanked the jump-drive out of the computer and the screen flickered before returning to the user login prompt. She jammed the power button with her thumb and watched the screen till it turned black.
"I'm going to check the shelves before we go. People always hide stuff in books." Kitty rushed one of the shelves and reached as high as she could.
"Kitty, I don't think we have enough time to check every book."
"I'm not. I've got an idea." Anna watched as Kitty waved a phased hand through row after row of books. When she finished with one shelf, she went after the other to the right of the desk.
"Kitty, we need to get going before-" Anna paused when she heard a thud. She looked and saw Kitty's hand, still phased through the mid-row of the right shelf, was held in place by an unseen force.
Kitty looked back at her and smiled. "Told you people always hide stuff in books." She started pulling individual books till finally, Anna heard a soft pop, and 5 books, bound together, swung outward like a door. She rushed to Kitty's side and pulled the door open the rest of the way. Before them sat a long, squat-looking safe with a keypad and a little lever. "How much you wanna bet?" Kitty rested her hand on the face of the safe and when she pushed into it, nothing happened.
"That figures."
"What is this stuff?"
"We could probably research it and try to figure it out." Anna stood back and was about to take a picture of it when she heard the door slam behind her.
"You two having fun?"
Anna and Kitty snapped their necks back to find Jean standing before the shut door. Eyes two balls of fire, she looked between the two of them and slipped off her chunky turquoise earrings. "What are you two doing in here?" She looked into Kitty's eyes. "Speak!"
Kitty pressed her hands into her chest. "I - I don't… I -" She backed away as Jean stepped closer until her back was flush with the wall. "I - I," Kitty's lips quivered and soon only a shallow rasp vibrated from her throat.
Jean turned her attention to Anna. "What do you have to say for yourself?"
It was then Anna realized how tall Jean was. Before she thought they were relatively the same build, but as the other girl got closer, Anna found her shadow swallowing her whole. "It - It was my idea! Kitty wasn't involved - it was my idea!" The phone was snapped out of Anna's hands and Jean scrolled through the recent photos.
"What is this? Explain!"
"There was a fight between Xavier and Logan and I needed to know why!" The words felt like they were being forced out of Anna's mouth like a vacuum hose was being shoved down her throat. "Xavier has always been seedy! I thought I could find out why!"
Jean's eyes resembled two glowing embers floating in pools of veiny white. Staring into them, it felt as if someone was driving a hot needle between Anna's eyes. Her mouth went dry and her legs felt rooted to the ground. She wanted to say something, even scream, but her lips wouldn't move and her lungs wouldn't collect the air to do so. She only felt her heart beat faster and faster in her chest till she began to shake.
The next Jean blinked, Anna's body went slack. All her muscles collapsed in on each other all at once and she just managed to catch herself before she fell to the ground. Jean turned away from the girls. She approached Xavier's desk and laid her hands flat on it. She drooped her head and sighed. Her long red hair fell past her slender shoulders and rested upon a pile of neatly stacked papers. She eventually righted herself and fell rather than sat into one of the two chairs facing Xavier's desk.
"Sit down… please," Jean said after a short while. Anna and Kitty glanced at each other, seemingly trying to find the answer to their situation in the other's face. Finally, Anna took the chair next to Jean and Jean levitated the papers out of the way for Kitty to sit down on the desk.
Jean stared at the foot of the desk, her eyes utterly devoid of light. "I was born Sebastian Stanford in Bakersfield California." She started with a slight rasp in her voice. "It was pretty early on when I found out I might have been born a boy but I was actually someone else entirely. That, and soon after I discovered I was a mutant to boot. My parents weren't big fans of either so I ended up living with my grandmother in San Fransisco for a while." She pressed her lips together and her eyes got a little more red. "She was a wonderful woman. She never judged. She never made me feel unsafe. The sun followed her everywhere she went."
Jean laced her fingers together in her lap. "She was elderly and got sick. When she passed away my relatives jumped on what little she had like vultures. I was told she left nothing for me, which is hard to believe but I was 12 and didn't have much ground to stand on legally speaking. After that, I guess I managed to fall through the cracks as far as who was to become my legal guardian. No one in my family wanted me and the government never came by asking about me either."
She inhaled, "Gran told me that smart people were always those who were the most adaptable and willing to learn. Well, I knew I wasn't going to get far in life without an education, so I put myself through Junior High and early High School while living in a slum and using an abandoned lot with a mailbox as my mailing address." She drew in another breath, this one was measured and controlled. "As far as food, clothes, and other expenses - I did what I had to in order to get by. I adapted."
Anna watched the fire in Jean's eyes reduce further to dying coals, and the sharp bones in her face become mere rods for spent tired skin to be hung off of. Anna averted her eyes and glanced at Kitty who she found staring into her own lap.
"When I was around 15 I was called to the principal's office of my school. When I arrived, there was a strange man in a wheelchair I'd never seen around there before. He explained who he was, what he could do, and what he planned to do. He offered me one of those pens you both were offered and told me if I ever needed help, I could call him." Jean swallowed. "A few weeks later there was a police raid at the place I was staying. Everyone there was into some bad stuff. I didn't do any of it, but I still got arrested. I didn't have money for a lawyer but I did have that one phone number. I give Xavier a call and that night I'm let go. He meets me on the street outside of the jail and asks if I'm okay. I told him I was and asked if I needed a place to stay.
"He then sets me up with a motel and some cash to get food. I expected he wanted something in return, they always did, but the other foot never dropped. He kept paying for that motel, and for my food, and I finished my semester at school. I finally called him and asked him directly what he wanted from me. He said he wanted nothing other than to offer me a choice. I could keep living the life I was. He said he'd keep paying for the hotel and money for food and clothes, or I could live in this school he was building to help me learn to control my powers. He offered me a life off the street and a chance I never got.
"I didn't have an answer at first. I'd been promised deals that were too good to be true before. I told him I had to think about it. So sure enough, that summer he kept paying for that motel and I kept getting envelopes with cash stuffed through the mail slot in my door. By the time the new school year was coming around, I just couldn't stand the thought of spending another year there. So I called him up again, and we went for a walk in a park. He told me again who he was, where he came from, and what mutants were. It was that night I realized I didn't have a future in San Fransico, it was with Xavier in New York. I realized that because my Gran always me smart people are those who are adaptable and willing to learn. Well, it was time to move on from what was and finally learn who I was. The rest is history."
Anna had never seen Jean so still. It was typical to see her running between projects or to her room to get some sort of crucial schoolwork finished. Her shoulders had fallen, her chest caved in on itself, and her hands limp in her lap. The titan from before was now just a young woman who had seen far too much of life before she was ready.
Jean pulled some of the static out of the when she took another long and controlled breath. "I didn't tell you all that to make you feel sad for me or bad. I just wanted wanted to give you context. I understand you both have your reasons to question Xavier and why he does what he does. Even I don't always know why he does what he does." She paused, "But believe me when I say he's a good man who cares about you, about all of us. He may not always be good at showing it, but he really does try." She ran her hand through her hair. "I don't know what happened between Xavier and Logan, but continuing this path you two are on, sifting through Xaivier's stuff and stealing his notes, isn't going to give you the answers you want. It's only going to hurt him and you in the long run."
Jean looked between them. "I'm going to ask you this once. Stop what you are doing and back off. This is a man who has taken all of us out of bad situations and given us a new life and a chance. If you hate it here so much, no one is keeping you here. You can leave anytime you want. All I ask is that you don't go around trying to hurt the man who saved my life." She looked at Anna's phone and poked the screen a few times before handing it back to her. "I deleted the photos you took."
Anna took her phone back and Jean stood. She slipped her earrings back on, walked to the office door, and rested her hand on the doorknob. "He's not a man who always makes sense." She looked back at them. "But he does truly care about us each of us more than you can imagine. Consider if this is the way you'd like to repay that trust and love." She opened the door and shut it firmly behind her.