Greater Than What We Suffer (Part Seven)

Flying in the Blackbird was great, compared to commercial air. We went faster, and better yet, no check-in and check-out process. You just hop off and go about your business.

Besides, the sooner I got away from Logan and Laura, the better. I was pretty sure they wanted to fillet me for interrupting their father/daughter, brother/sister, originator/clone bonding time. Plus, Wolf was going to be pissy because I vanished without telling him where I had gone. He acted like he didn't care, but I knew better. The big, metal softy.

Before I went back to my room though, I swung by the offices of all of my teachers whose classes I'd missed that day. Getting called off to do X-Men stuff had to net you an excuse for your attendance or any of your assignments.

Some were there, some weren't. To my surprise, Miss Pryde was actually there. Lockheed saw me come in and shot a jet of fire my way. Damn mini-dragon. Miss Pryde looked up from her computer and smiled when she saw me, "Lockheed, be nice. Bellamy's had a long day."

"Oh yeah," I yawned as I walked over to her desk, "Thanks for letting me go with Logan to San Francisco today. I didn't get to see my family, but it was still nice to get out of here for a bit."

"I figured as much," She said, gesturing to the chair next to her desk for me to sit down, "You think too much. I figured if you stayed around here for too long, it would eat away at you. It wasn't hard to convince Logan that he could use someone your age to put Laura more at ease."

I eased back, putting my feet up on an open spot near the edge of the desk. Lockheed tried to burn my feet though. Almost knocked me out of the chair, "It was fun, except for the times when I thought Logan would kill me," I paused, "...And the times I thought Laura would kill me."

"He likes you," Miss Pryde tried to assure me, "He wouldn't bother wasting time beating you up every other night if he didn't."

Ah, so she knew about that. I hadn't really gotten around to telling her about my extra practices with our hand-to-hand instructor, "Really?"

"Yep," Miss Pryde said, reaching over to poke me in the sternum, "If he really didn't like you, you'd have three holes in you, right about here," I tended to notice that a lot of jokes about Wolverine wound up having an uncomfortable amount of realism to them. She switched gears and looked at me consolingly, "How you doing, tough guy?"

It was nice that she was concerned, but I had gotten off from the Danger Room crap as well as I possibly could have. She hadn't, "I should be asking you that. You're the one that got rebar shoved through your guts."

She leaned forward and gave me a big grin, "Having a mutant healer does wonders," Indeed. I had to make sure to thank Josh later for saving my favorite teacher's life, "You never answered my question, by the way."

I raised and dropped my shoulders as an indicator of how I was, "I'm okay, I guess. At least things are trying to get settled back down, but it's still so weird around here. I don't know how long this whole funk is going to hang around in the air."

"I just want you to know, if I didn't get to tell you yet, that you did great," Miss Pryde said. Her tone was laced with pride. It felt nice to have someone else be proud of something that I did. Normally, I had to gas myself up when it came to anything that I achieved, "You did just as well as I knew you would, and let me tell you, my expectations were already huge."

I went silent for a second before sending a raised eyebrow her way, "I don't think you're talking about Field Day."

Miss Pryde took off her glasses and set them aside to talk to me seriously, "I'm not. Bel, I've heard about what you did in there," I twitched. I felt it. She saw it, and it showed, "When everything went belly-up, you kept your head. I think I know you by now. When you think about how it all went, you're going to see it as a failure. But it wasn't. Not for you, at least. We failed. We failed you. You didn't do anything wrong, I promise."

With God as my witness, that was the closest I had come to crying since the end of the Field Day finale mayhem. I could feel the pressure swelling up behind my eyes. With all she had said, one sentence more than anything else had almost broken the emotional dam I'd built up to stop anything like that from happening.

I had been waiting for days to hear someone, anyone, say that I didn't fuck up. That they knew I had done my best to keep anyone from getting hurt. I didn't know how much I had needed that until right then, even if it was just said to make me feel better.

"Get some rest," Miss Pryde told me, shooing me away. I think she could tell that I was feeling some kind of way now, "I've still got work to do tonight. We've got squad exercises tomorrow, and now I've got to find something for us to do that doesn't involve the Danger Room that's now free and on the loose."

"I... will," I would try to, at least. The reminder of the effing Danger Room being out in the open world with the vendetta against the people who trained in it that it had was serious nightmare fuel, "I've just got one more place to go before I head back to the dorms."