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All is still. Logan has left, and Laura is asleep. Neither the parents nor the boy are near our guest room. Laura’s small, even breaths are the only sound here.
In another time, I would have been able to sense the waves of emotion coming off of Laura as she dreamed, and the muffled thoughts of the family through the walls. The world used to be a canvas smeared with rainbows of comfort, curiosity, surprise, excitement, anger, sadness. It was hard for a telepath to be bored.
Then… I don’t remember exactly what happened, but the good time ended, and my powers were shut off. I went from seeing the joyous kaleidoscope of all of my students and friends, to only knowing the dark rusted walls of the tank where they kept me. Logan and Caliban came, to visit and bring me things, but they always seemed disturbed, only half present. I didn’t need to be a telepath to sense the storm of anger and despair coming from Logan’s eyes. It made me frustrated, makes tears sting my eyes even now, to think of it. I didn’t know why he had changed so much. Was he mad at me?
I move around a little, change my upper body’s position in the bed, just to feel the sensation of skin rustling against soft, warm sheets. The sheets of my old bed, in the tank, were pilled, stiff and worn. Falling apart, like everything was back then. Including me. I’m not there, though. I’m with Logan and Laura, doing something good and noble again, and I tell myself to focus on the feeling of these sheets. They’re not the same as my old ones, and I’m not there. I’m here. I tell myself that until I can breathe easily again.
Why was I there, though? In the tank? There are moth-eaten holes in my brain, but some instinct tells me that the tank is connected to the seizure I had in the hotel earlier - when my skull pinched and I slipped out of my head while the world screamed around me - forget about that - don’t think about that - but it’s connected somehow, to the needles Logan put in my arm, and to the fear in Caliban’s eyes, and to the word Westchester.
What’s Westchester?
When I was a boy as young as Laura, my mother took me to the nursing home where my great grandparents lived. Somehow I remember that, vivid and colorful, better than anything from the last few decades. I called them Granny Great and Grandpa Great. They both had Alzheimer’s, and they were far gone. Losing the ability to walk, to eat without help, hands always trembling, more wrinkled than anyone I had ever seen. Always smiling at me with kindness in their eyes.
From my mother’s stories, Alzheimer’s hadn’t always been so easy. Before a dim peace came over them, when they were earlier in the process of slipping away, it made them and their families confused, scared, angry.
Grandpa Great died first, and by that point, Granny Great didn’t know enough to mourn. It made my family sad, but I was simply curious, because I had never known either of them with their memories intact. My powers hadn’t manifested yet. If they had, maybe I could have probed into their minds and brought some of their memories back. But would that have done more harm than good?
Granny Great didn’t know who Grandpa Great was, by the time that he died. She never had to mourn her husband. She just kept going around in her walker and smiling at people and talking. The last part of her life was a simple, sweet, airy lightness.
I’ve erased some of my students’ traumatic memories, occasionally - Rogue, Jean - and always regretted it. There are some things too important to forget.
Right?
Why does the topic of memory weigh so hard on my brain? Why do I feel inconsolably sad all of a sudden? Again, I return to the present, to the sheets of a new family’s bed and the yellow sliver of light through the bedroom door. Tonight has been a good night, the best I’ve had in a long time. I don’t have to use my powers to sense the love emanating through the house, soaking into Logan and Laura, making their hearts a bit lighter, finally letting Logan smile.
The family all loves each other, so very much. My X-Men were like that, once, in the better time. I’ve missed it, all of their faces and their minds and hearts. They made me want to change the world for them. Even now, their memory inspires me to be better than I am. I want to change Logan’s and Laura’s worlds. I can’t fix Laura’s past, and I don’t know what made Logan change, but with my words and my patient reminders, I can offer to them a more peaceful way.
Suddenly my heart overflows with a multicolor of feelings, and I want to cry out a word that I can’t name. I miss my X-Men. And I miss Erik. The world I inhabited back then had its share of problems, but I loved it, and it felt familiar, real; more than anything does now. I’ve been falling through fog for years, and I don’t know why, or what pushed me over the edge.
The fog is still here tonight, not as heavy as it is sometimes, but always lurking in corners and under shadows. It will never lift completely again. I know that.
But even so, tonight was a wonderful night. The best in a long, long time.
Why, though?
Again, the word drifts up out of the dark: Westchester. I’ve pieced together from context clues that Westchester is where everything went wrong. It’s a deceptively soft word, with that wispy “W”. Maybe ‘Westchester’ is just shorthand for referencing the way the world has inexplicably gradiented from mixed into bad.
I’m a hypocrite. I’ve told Logan over and over again that he needs to trust the world, stick his head out from under the weight of his ever-growing list of woes and fears. I say this, and believe it, but still I’m inexplicably scared of Westchester. For many of those years in the tank, I blocked it out entirely. Now enough is coming back to me to tell that it’s a word with weight. Importance. Westchester is the key to understanding why the good time ended, and the bad time marches on.
It’s the key to knowing why my students, my friends, don’t visit me anymore.
Maybe, in this house, I really am safe. Laura is here, and her presence brings me comfort, and these sheets are soft. Maybe I can conquer my moths and do what I preach, and remember.
Logan tells me not to overexpose my mind, though, or I might have a seizure. Another seizure.
I remember, back in the hotel, vaguely seeing people convulsing, frozen, and telepathically feeling their pain. One second, their minds spun with an intricate tapestry of personhood, and the next, all screamed out in a single voice of agony.
Agony.
I did that.
I… hurt them. Logan said something about, I could have killed people.
I remember that ear-splitting wrongness. And then the memory fades, morphs, from the hotel, back years and years, until I see something… else.
Something I never should have forgotten.
Something I don’t want to remember.
Erik’s face… Jean’s telepathic cries for help… Scott’s pain… Rogue’s pain… Hank… Bobby… oh God… I heard their minds… as they…
Oh. Oh no.
Westchester. I… I did something.
Something unspeakable.