The X-Project

Discussion has occurred about recent events, and so now one of Xavier's special cases is addressed.


It was always a little cooler by the lake than anywhere else on campus; that meant it was a good place to go when everyone went insane and fought dinosaurs in improbable places, because, Illyana reasoned, they'd all be busy for days fighting for the showers, and would be adverse to the outdoors for the foreseeable future. And since she had both a pounding headache, courtesy of the FSB, and literally no desire to understand the dinosaur issue, she'd come out to sit and watch the water.

Not the most cerebral of activities, but it had been suggested to her recently that thinking was not her forte. Besides, it was actually a little comforting not to be trying to untangle a supernatural disaster for once.

"How does it feel?"

There had been nothing particularly quiet about the approach, and that had been intentional. Attentiveness to the outside world was generally a good indicator of where a person was in their inner one -- especially with one who had a reputation of guardedness.

Jim settled down on the shore several feet away from the girl, setting his sketchbook across his lap. The counselor gave Illyana an apologetic smile and then touched a hand to the bridge of his noise, indicating her mottled bruises. "Your face, I mean."

The guidance counselor – the latest guidance counselor, anyway, the one she'd spent some time avoiding over the last year. She regarded him warily, then decided to just brush it off. "A lot like someone slammed it into a filing cabinet," she said, shrugging. "Funny how that works out."

Jim's smile turned wry. "Sorry. I lose my job if I don't get out at least one 'how do you feel' per conversation whether I'm on the clock or not." His hand fell back to his lap, and he raised one eyebrow at the girl. "So, have you decided when you're going to do the official move now that New York's no longer overrun with dinosaurs?"

Well, wasn't this – inquisitive. She frowned very slightly, as though to discourage the questioning, but it was probably easier to just answer. She was tired, and only an idiot wouldn't know that it showed in the shadows underneath her eyes and the slump of her shoulders. "Yeah. Probably sometime this week or next, unless the dinosaurs make a surprise reappearance." No sense, she figured, in putting it off. It wasn't like she was never coming back, anyway.

There was the defensiveness. Jim nodded. "We can skip the part where you wonder about me having ulterior motives here. I mean, you've talked to Mr. Summers, and you know Mr. Wisdom's contacted the school about arrangements. It's not a big leap. Stuff like this is a lot less stressful when both parties start off on the same level, so we'll just settle on the reality where I'm checking up on you." He prized the mechanical pencil out of the coiled spine of his sketchbook and glanced over at her. "Acceptable?"

The expression that crossed her face - somewhere between dismay and distrust - indicated how she actually felt about that, but then she sighed, reminded of recent discussions regarding (among other things) her attitude toward the staff. "Sure," she said, resignedly. "So, what exactly do you want to know? As tragic mistakes go - " she gestured at the fairly spectacular bruising on her face - "this one wasn't actually that bad."

The pencil came up. "Just so you know, I'm also going to assume that somewhere between being beaten, arrested, losing control of your hell dimension and the lectures you already got the fact you screwed up has been hammered in pretty well, so we can skip past the self-flagellation, too. Deal?"

Illyana gave him a doubtful look, pulling her legs up closer to her torso. "Um, okay. So if we're not going to discuss, uh, that, then . . . " She trailed off with a bemused lift of her shoulders.

Jim smiled again, faintly. "Other stuff. There's less lecture, but more annoying questions. Although not too many, I hope. I'm just trying to get some facts straight. This last year, when your attendance dropped and your grades slipped -- it was because you were fighting for Limbo?"

She went defensive before she could check herself. "Well, yeah. The whole demon rebellion thing kept me a bit busy. I didn't exactly have much time for homework."

"That's what I mean. You spent a year fighting a war, so why did you still show up for class -- when you did, anyway -- or try to set up tutoring with Mr. Summers? Keep coming back here, to the school?" The pencil stretched between the counselor's long fingers, Jim's mismatched eyes on the Russian girl's. "Where you are now is pretty clear. I just wanted to ask what it was like getting here."


"Would you go back to living in hell? I admit, it's quiet, but there's a reason it's not a vacation hot spot." She didn't quite snap, but there was a definite sharpness to her tone. "I just thought it would be over earlier. That's all. And then it wasn't."

Jim nodded, completely unperturbed by the edge in her voice. "Well, yeah. But I was curious what draw sitting through a pop quiz had when you had a civil war on your hands." He paused, looking at her -- not particularly penetrating, not accusing. Just quiet and attentive. "I was wondering if there's anything beyond the knee-jerk 'duh, hell' reasoning here, though I'll give you that's it's a big one. All the really obvious leading is because I want to know if it was the only one."

Illyana looked away from Jim and out over the water, uncomfortable, knowing that she ought to be less obviously affected; it wasn't, she'd concluded, the most effective way to get through a conversation. She strained to keep her tone neutral -- a stress that came through despite her best efforts -- when she said, "I don't know. I just thought maybe I'd better have something to come back to." She wondered when he was going to go away.

"Come back to," the man repeated with no judgment in his voice, only thoughtful note.

The mechanical pencil went to the dirt; there was the crrck of the lead snapping, but the holder seemed to give it no notice. It scratched for a moment, the strokes brief and certain, and then lifted again. Two symbols had been cut into the dirt, equidistance from Illyana: a patch of jagged lines of the sort almost universal for stylized flame, and an X.

"Okay," Jim said, withdrawing his hand. "So we've got two options. Limbo." The pencil tapped the flames. "Earth." The indicating object crossed to the X. Jim raised his blue and brown eyes back to Illyana's bruised face. "So, here's the honest question. When you were writing that note that you'd gone off to think -- which place did it feel like you belonged?"

Illyana couldn't quite hide her reaction to that – eyes widening for a few seconds – and she was quickly losing any illusions that the dismissive noise that followed was going to give her any cover. "What kind of question is that?" she muttered, finding it strangely difficult, and, in the end, impossible to meet the guidance counselor's eyes. Setting that lost battle aside, she settled her gaze on the ground some feet in front of her.

"It's the one that makes you think about why you ended up in the place of dumb mistakes rather than just beating yourself up about the destination." Jim dipped his head, trying to catch her eyes with his own. "It's an important question, though. Which place do you feel like you belong? One, both?" His head tilted more at her continued evasion. "Or are we going with none of the above?"

"Why don't we go with that," she said flatly, finally looking at him as though to drive the point home. She looked away again, down to the shoreline. "I hadn't really thought about it."

"That's too bad. When you're trying to function in two different worlds it usually helps to figure out where you're standing. In broad terms, your experience is universally relatable because we all have personal hells. Of course, in specific terms your hell is an actual hell. So." That faint smile played across Jim's mouth again, but there was no humor there. Only something unreadable. "Going through life knowing you really aren't like anyone can be a little stressful."

"It's fine." She paused, then shrugged, her recent defeat showing more in that unhappy movement than in the bruises on her face. "Well, it's over."

Jim sighed inwardly and set his sketchpad and pencil down on the ground beside him. Normally this was the place he avoided at all costs with the students, but Illyana was . . . well, technically an adult, but mostly it was that she was a special case. With some people you'd never get trust without giving a little first. Or at least, so Jim hoped, because if he was wrong he was setting himself up for an incredibly awkward confession with Charles on demolishing an already borderline-student's faith in the institution.

The counselor's long legs stretched out in front of him as he leaned back on his hands. "You know," he said quietly, "as a rule we try not to pass this one around to the student body, but I'm actually pretty seriously insane." He glanced over at her, his face completely neutral. "Really insane."

The way he said it made her look up again, expecting some kind of humour – or the segue way to a pointed remark. Illyana searched his face, carefully, but found nothing of the sort. "Oh?" she said, warily, after the silence stretched too far.

Jim gave her a half-shrug. "Don't worry, there's a limit to the depths of Teacher Who Shares Too Much I'm going to scrape. Aside from the fact the school's standards aren't so low that they'd hire the type of whack-jobs who're actually dangerous, the details aren't really important. The point is that I have a lot of experience trying to live in a normal world when I'm not. At all." Jim let his eyes drift; some dull-feathered bird skimmed the lake, then dipped in with plunk to retrieve a fish.


"It's exhausting just trying to function like a normal person. And it's almost worse because it's so easy for everyone else. Or that's how it feels, anyway. Yeah, everyone's got personal pain, but it's not the same. You can learn to get by, and even say and do the right things most of the time, but no matter how hard you try there's a limit to how much scar tissue you can actually remove." He turned his attention back to Illyana. "I guess I was just thinking maybe you could relate."

She didn't move, still watching him, but something about her seemed to thaw a little bit. "Well," she finally said, with her tone modulated down: Still cautious, but without giving off an aura of impenetrable hardness. Less tense. "Yeah. I guess so."

Another slight nod. "Okay. Now we're on the same level, then." Jim's weight shifted back, and one knee rose to plant one foot against the ground. He leaned forward again to prop an elbow on it. "I'm not really going to get on you for trying to be self-sufficient and not asking for help, because I can think of a lot of reasons. Not wanting to burden people with stuff they can't actually do anything about is a lot of it. So's the fact that it requires actually asking, and when you ask you can be refused. But mostly it's that when you've got two worlds that're so different the thought of crossing them is terrifying even when they don't involve slopping literal demons or the broken things in your own head all over everyone around you." The corner of the telepath's mouth rose in a half-smile. "When you don't have normal, sometimes the only thing you can fight for is keeping up the illusion."


Illyana didn't disagree, though she kept her reaction minimal, lifting one hand resignedly. "Or keeping the body count down." She looked away, but when she spoke again, her voice was quiet, and she kept her eyes fixed on something far in the distance. "I've seen what Limbo does to people. It's not actually something I really care to see again."

"The attitude's pretty noble. And some people can even get away with it. But for you the problem is that if nobility keeps you from asking for help and you lose, the world goes down with you. So, good intentions . . ." Jim's scarred hand gestured to the little symbol of flames in the dirt.

Her mouth twisted, glancing down at the makeshift flames in the dirt. "And if I ask for help and any people who could possibly do something if I lose get killed?"

The counselor's eyebrows rose sardonically. "Since we're talking about a handful of people versus the rest of the planet I think some people'd be willing to take one for the team."

Oh, sure. Her face worked as she tried to get around that; failing that, she stuck out her chin. "Okay, fine. Point taken. Consider my danger to society and associated responsibilities duly noted."

"Personally I'm just hoping that now you're going to be working for Pete you'll have better survival instincts than to bring down the Apocalypse. If there's anything left of you after that there probably wouldn't be for long." Jim exhaled slowly, turning back to look out over the lake. "Okay. If you answer one more question, without leading or defensiveness or anything, just honestly, I'll leave you alone. Deal?"

Illyana sighed, glancing over at him, before nodding once. She wouldn't normally promise any such thing, out of safety and on principle, but something about the conversation had left her feeling a little off-balance, more willing than usual. "Okay," she said. "Deal."

"Are you scared?"

The question jarred her visibly, unexpectedly. Then her mouth quirked in a half-smile and she looked down at her hands, collecting herself until she could finally speak. When she did, it was as promised: Undefensive and simple. "Yes. Of course."

The pitched, slightly nasal draw of sarcasm was gone from her voice; it was lighter than he'd ever heard it, or had on those few occasions when she'd let herself be around him enough in the past year that he could hear it. Younger -- and, for the first time, natural. Or what might have been, if not for all she'd been through.

Jim returned the quirk of the girl's mouth with a full smile, and his answer was just as simple and unadorned.

"Then at least you know you're not that far gone."

Illyana raised her eyebrows at him; whatever response she'd expected, that hadn't been it. "Far gone from what?"

The counselor's smile widened almost imperceptibly. "The rest of the world."

Taking up the pencil and sketchpad again, the gawky man rose to his feet. "Okay. I'm keeping my end of the deal. What do you think, maybe once a month?"

"Wait, what?" Illyana stared at him, thrown by the sudden shift. She frowned, an inkling of suspicion crossing her face. "Once a month for . . . ?"

"Just informal check-ins. You can sit uncomfortably, and I'll ask leading questions to make sure you're not in danger of failing to mention an impending armageddon." Jim grinned down at her from his much greater height. "It'll be great."

Illyana had missed something here. She was sure of it. Which was why she heard herself agreeing - "Um, okay?" - before she had really had time to process what she was agreeing to. Not for the first time, she cursed her mouth for working ahead of her head.

Looking down at the confused girl, Jim couldn't help but remember the regret in Scott's voice when they'd had that discussion in the Situation Room -- not just about what Illyana was going through, but that once again a student had buried and pulled away rather than ask for help. It was regret the counselor shared. More than Scott or Ororo, this should have been his catch. Despite his own problems the last year this kind of thing was his responsibility. But he knew, too, that this conversation probably wouldn't even have been possible if Illyana hadn't made the mistakes she had. As much as the people around her might want to help her, final say in this was up to Illyana and her demons. Personal and otherwise.

So. No use for regret, no way to undo the past. The only thing he could do now was try to make sure what had already happened didn't get a chance to worsen or repeat. Xavier's or Snow Valley -- in the end, it didn't really matter which one got through to her. Only that someone had given her the choice.

"Great," Jim said aloud. He swept the dust off his jeans with one hand. "We'll shoot for the end of the month, total crisis situations aside. We'll set up something more solid once you actually do the move and figure out where you are. We'll talk. Or not. That one's up to you." He turned back towards the mansion, raising the marred hand again in a wave, flashing her another one of those quick, crooked smiles. "I'll see you later."

She stared after him for a moment, bemused, before turning her eyes back to the water. It was odd – the conversation had unsettled her – but not in the way she’d have expected. Not dangerously. Something more subtle. Maybe it had been so long since she’d walked the line of over-sharing that she didn’t even recognize it anymore. Or maybe she was tired.

Or maybe she was overthinking it, and ought to stop. She sighed, leaning forward against her legs. Well, at least she hadn’t talked herself into anything worse.