Greater Than What We Suffer (Part Two)

I wasn't good with grief, or emoting. I was the type to bottle things up. I didn't share how things made me feel. It was probably why Miss Frost had so much trouble with me during our counseling sessions.

We had to miss a session. Class was off for a few days, not just because of the dead kids, but because of the X-Men themselves. I was lucky. Miss Pryde didn't die, even though she'd been run through. That gold kid, Josh, he had some freaky healing powers. He'd grown back everything missing from Jay's wing, which was one thing, but healing the damage done by a big metal sliver in a woman's stomach was something else.

So I didn't lose the only adult that had my back from day one in the Institute to a piece of rogue machinery.

Which was another thing. Apparently the Danger Room got a body while it was trying to kill us. Wasn't that fun? This was the second reason classes had been off for a little while. They had gone looking for it. It stole a Blackbird and went off... somewhere.

Good riddance. Let it be someone else's problem for a bit. Enough bad shit had happened here for the time being. But of course, that wasn't going to happen. In classes, we were already hearing about substitutes preparing to come in to replace some of our teachers who would be going out to try and take the Danger Room thing down.

I didn't want it. Maybe the whole seeing my instructor with a fist-sized hole in her belly and back brought out the bitch in me, but I didn't like the idea of chasing the thing that did it.

"You look like you have a lot on your mind, Mister Marcher."

Oh, yeah. This was still a thing as well. Therapy sessions with Miss Frost. Oh joy. Only now, instead of the topic being my insanity, it was a grief thing.

They were speaking to every student that had been in the Danger Room for the final Field Day event, but I was already having sessions to begin with. This just meant there were real questions to ask me now to see how I was doing.

Who cared how I was doing? I didn't die. I wasn't hurt that badly. Yeah, I was a bit rattled, but I just tried not to think about it much.

I wasn't any more willing to play ball than I had been before all of the unpleasantness happened. But fine. I would lay on her comfy-ass couch and waste a full hour of her time every few days if she wanted. I liked sitting still and resting, even if napping was almost impossible for me.

"I said everything I wanted to already," I told Miss Frost. I didn't even look at her. I was too bust counting dimples in the ceiling.

"And that's all you want to say now?" I don't know what she was aiming for. I wasn't going to emote, if that was what she wanted.

"Yep," If nothing else, I wasn't going to make this process easy, "Saying anything else wouldn't do anything. It wouldn't help anything. Won't bring anyone back. Won't make me feel any better."

Dwelling on the deaths and everything else that happened wouldn't solve a thing. I guess I could understand wanting take sure we were all okay, but I was a 'move along' kind of guy. Things like this just made me crabby.

"You're suppressing," Miss Frost said. She didn't need telepathy for that. I was being obtuse about this session, "That's not healthy, Mister Marcher."

She was so patient though, no matter how contentious I was being. Why wasn't she reacting to all of this? If you were from outside of the Institute, hell, even if you went there, you would have thought she was the biggest ice queen around.

But she didn't flinch. Her or Mister Summers. I mean he didn't because he was a hardass, but if you really looked for it, you could tell he was stricken. Miss Frost, I didn't know why she had to put on the uncaring facade.

I mean come on. Show that you care. I'm not saying she had to cry. I didn't want to see that. But to treat it as business as usual? Don't try to brush it off.

"Do you want me to yell at you? Do you want me to get up and scream in your face how this is your fault and all that crap?" I asked, starting to get my dander up, "I don't care about being right. I care that this didn't have to happen like this! It didn't! And yelling at you would just make you mad, so you could yell back, or give me one of your smartass replies, and you'd feel better, even just a little bit, but I don't want that!"

"What do you want?

That was a good question. I wanted a lot of things. I wanted all of this to have never happened in the first place. I wanted my word to mean something, so that I could believe that when I made a call someone would believe me.

But I couldn't have that, unless someone had a time machine they were willing to let me use. So I had to be a bit more realistic with what I wanted.

"I want you to sit there and think about it. I want you to think about the whole thing. I want you to sit there and have to block out trying to read every student you talk to's mind, so you don't have to see what they saw and feel how they felt the moment we saw Specter and Dryad dead on the floor," I don't know where it came from, but something told me to twist the knife in just a little deeper, "...D'ya talk to the Cuckoos yet?"

It was a low blow. Saying what I said, the way I said it, was the cheapest way to get a reaction that I could ever think of, and there wasn't any good excuse for it. I wanted to see tears. I wanted to see that this affected her just as much as it did the rest of the kids on Mister Summers' squad.

I don't know what Miss Frost was thinking afterwards, whether she thought about mind-fucking me into the next millennium, whether she thought about doing that thing where she turned into diamond to try and beat the shit out of me, or something else. Instead of any of that, she gave me the coldest stare I'd ever gotten from another person.

The silence was eventually broken with one sentence, "We're done here, Mister Marcher."

...I'm a complete asshole.