All 10 chapters of Climb the Wind, their associated images, and notes: Climb the Wind homepage X-Men: The Movie belongs to Marvel and 20th Century Fox.

Grey Bard says:  "From start to finish . . . terrifying and pulse pounding, heartbreaking and oddly triumphant." Summary: Climb the Wind is a full-length novel of 83,000 words, told in alternating first-person by Scott Summers (Cyclops) and Logan (Wolverine).  The novel's theme is based on Homer's Iliad.  Can honor be vice as well as virtue?  Homer's answer was -- in the right circumstances -- YES.  Climb the Wind is my attempt to explore what might break an honorable man like Cyclops and drive him to atrocity.  As such, this is a dark tale with adult themes; reader discretion is recommended.  I don't pull any punches -- though I wouldn’t call it, in the end, a tragedy.  The story contains both action-adventure and internal character development.  It's not torture-fic, angst-fic, or character-death-fic.  It's a much older genre:  it chronicles the descent and redeption of the hero.  Therefore, it deals with combat trauma, violence, and the ravages of grief.  Jean Grey is killed within the first three pages, yet her presence remains throughout.  The third "main character" of the novel is, in fact, Jean.  But the novel is about far more than horror.  It's also about loyalty, compassion, friendship, and the earth-shaking love that draws us to one another, even across the divider of death.

Select Passages from chapters
(BEWARE: these passage may contain adult and disturbing images)

From Chapter 1 -- Logan:

They finally left. Unshackled him, dumped him on the floor, and left. They didn't dress him. I did that. After I cleaned him up. He tried to fight my hands like he'd fought them, but he was far too out of it. I didn't want to waste water but I was going to get him as clean as I could, dammit. His lips were bitten through. I realized now that it hadn't just been lack of water that had cracked them before. He'd done this every time. No sound. Nothing to give himself away. Goddamn idiot. What did that prove? But underneath my anger was awe, and respect. He'd resisted in the only way he'd been able to.

I dribbled a little more water into him, then sat with him on the floor, not touching. Just there. He lay with his back to me. He didn't weep, but he shuddered sometimes. It wasn't grief. It was fury. I could smell it. Periodically, it shook his whole frame. I tried touching him once but he jerked away and I didn't touch him again. We didn't say anything at all. What the hell was there to say? What words could begin to encompass what he'd suffered in front of me? The leader of the X-Men had been kicked around, spat on, and gang raped. They'd taken everything from him -- his wife (or as close as made no difference), his power, and now his dignity. He was twenty-seven years old and stripped down to nothing, except his rage.
 

From Chapter 2 -- Logan:

I entered ready to fight but there was nothing left to fight. Summers had managed fine on his own, optic blasts or no. His expression was . . . interesting. A mix of vindicated satisfaction and fascinated horror. I wondered if he'd ever killed a man before with hands, not eyes. For that matter, I wondered if he'd ever killed a man period. But one of the two I'd left for him was definitely dead. Very messily dead with a broken skull and blood staining the edge of the cot. The other had been flung to the floor about five feet from him. Seeing it was me, Summers relaxed and squatted back down to face his captive. The guy -­ big, undistinguished federal type ­- had a broken nose and naked loathing on his face. By contrast, Summers was utterly cold, head tilted sideways a little, and for a moment ­- with those sharp cheekbones and deep-set eyes -­ he looked like a bird of prey. "We gotta go," I told him. "Bring the goon."

"I'm not finished yet." The kid's tone gave me the willies.

"Scott" -­ I used his given name on purpose -­ "this ain't the time. Bring him."

"Not yet. He's going to tell me where the computer core is." And like a striking snake, his right hand exploded out in a smooth chop directly to the guy's ear. "Aren't you?" Summers asked. The goon spit at him. Summers boxed both ears that time, one instantly after the other. It reminded me that he was a Shotakan sho dan -­ a first degree black belt -­ when he wasn't too weak and dazed to employ it.

"We can question him on the way," I said. "If we don't go, we won't ever get to the computer core." Lure him.

Common sense came to the fore long enough. Grabbing the guard by the ear he'd just hit, Summers yanked him up and swung him around. "Move." As they passed me out the door, I handed him the pistol, one of the new police-issue M9 9mm Berretas. He took it, smiled, and shoved it against the back of the goon's head. "Feel that? Different kind of gun, you son of a bitch. If you so much as peep when I'm not asking you a question, I'll shove it up your ass and pull the trigger."

I can't even begin to describe the rage and hate in Summers' voice. This wasn't Cyclops. This kid didn't have to be in control the way he was normally. No power to master, no glasses, no visor. Just that rage. It drove him.
 

From Chapter 4 -- Scott:

For long minutes, I just breathed, tried not to think much. Demerol made that easy. I considered going back to sleep, but didn't really want to. It was too hard to wake each time. If I could go back to sleep and stay there, I wouldn't hesitate.

I shifted a bit, to see if my body still worked right. Things hurt in an unspecified way. I found it more comfortable to lay on my side, but had to be careful of the IV in my hand, not catch it under me and yank it out. I'd always been such a good patient. Of course, it helped if the inspiration was getting your doctor to smile at you.

Dammit. Every thought. Everything. Everything came back to Jean. I tried to cry, but couldn't even do that. The drugs. They took away pain. All kinds of pain. But right then, I wanted my pain. Strange. To want pain, but I did. The pain was what I had left and I clutched it to me, my phantom lover in her place. Everything my captors had done to me in that cell had, in a twisted way, helped. They'd made me hurt in my body as much as I hurt in my heart. How they'd done that -­ it had just given me another reason to kill them. Death and pain incarnate. I was the Rider on the Pale Horse. I'd brought their apocalypse.
 

From Chapter 5 -- Logan:

But on that fifth day, McCoy had forced him up, made him walk around on McCoy's arm, then on mine when he'd noticed I was there. I'm still the only one he lets touch him without argument. He'll put up with Ro, and suffer McCoy. But if I'm around, he just looks at me with those eyes I've come to hate. Pale gun-metal blue.  Sometimes flat and feeling-less, sometimes so full of pain, they make you want to hurt yourself. Watching him is like standing at the grave of a child.

We'd passed the door to Jean's office as we'd circled the lab; he'd hesitated, then gone on. Later, when I'd come out of the bathroom after taking a piss -­ two minutes at the toilet maybe, three tops -­ I'd found his room empty. Panicked, I'd called McCoy and the professor, then gone up and down the hall, looking in every nook and cranny until McCoy came barreling down to join me at the same time as I'd felt the brush of the professor's mind. He is in Jean's office.

We'd burst in there. He'd looked up at us from where he stood by her desk, his fingers stroking the carved wooden nameplate. He'd made it himself. Dr. Jean E. Grey. Letters etched fine in wine-brown cherry, cut by the power of the sun channeled out his eyes. He carves wood to remind himself that he's more than an organic weapon. He did the main banister pillar last summer. Young Piotr Rasputin -­ our resident artist -­ had drawn the pattern thin in white chalk, then Summers had cut it out. A dragon coiled about an X. It had taken Summers a week. It was beautiful.

Now, he'd picked up the nameplate, fingers closed convulsively around it, his palm obscuring her surname as if he would claim her finally. Dr. Jean E . . . . "Get out," he'd said, very calmly.

There was nothing amiss; I'd taken stock as soon as I'd entered. He'd touched nothing beyond the nameplate and the pictures on her desk. She'd had two pictures, one of him, one of them both sitting on a bench together, her in his lap. He'd turned the pictures face down, but that was all.

"Get out," he'd repeated. "I'm not going to do myself in." It was said sarcastically. "If I'd really wanted to, I'd already be dead. You're not that good. Now leave me the fuck alone." So I'd grabbed McCoy's arm and hauled him, protesting, out the door.

Summers now slept at night in Jean's office, made the leather couch his bed. He spent most of his time in there, in fact. Sometimes, he locked the door on us.  Sometimes he left it cracked and I would find him reading her mystery novels, the ones she'd left down there, though he'd never much cared for them before. John Le Carre and Tony Hillerman.

Today -­ day eight -­ he'd walked out of the office, a book in his hand:  Donna Tartt's The Secret History. "'Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that shadowy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?'" He read from the book, right at the beginning. "'I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this:  a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.'"

He'd snapped the book shut. "What do you think mine is, Logan? Fatal stupidity?" His voice was tight, like he balanced on the edge of something. He suffered wild emotional swings these days:  apathy into sudden anger, cynicism into sick humor.

I could've ignored him and probably should have, but couldn't resist replying, "No, your fatal flaw is your own sense of honor." I'd kept my eyes on the newspaper that I'd been reading. "You lived by it, built your world on it, until it broke you. Now you're trying to get it back."

Silence. He hadn't expected that. He'd expected me to be snide, or to coddle him. I'd heard the office door open, then snick shut.
 

From Chapter 6 -- Scott:

I couldn't read for long. These past few days, I could do nothing for long and leaving the paper and Logan behind, I spent the afternoon prowling the lower levels. Instead of feeling dead as I had for the past two weeks since we'd returned, I felt jittery, as if I'd drunk two pots of coffee, or like a pressure cooker about to blow. Something was building up in me, the need to act, to get some kind of closure. It had been a month, for god's sake, and Jean still hadn't had a funeral. But then, if our lives weren't normal, why should I expect that our deaths would be? We had no goddamn body. When do you stop waiting, though? It was time to stop waiting.

I wandered at loose ends from room to room and thought about funerals. I might have gone above ground, but then I'd be condemned to the glasses again as soon as the energy built up enough in my body. I didn't want that, so I stayed below.

At one point, I turned a corner to find the professor sitting there. No chance encounter. He was clearly looking for me. Backing up the chair, he said, Come Scott, inside my head, and motored away. Perforce, I followed. I'd known this would come eventually; I couldn't avoid him forever. He'd let me for a while, or maybe he'd been avoiding me. I don't know. I'd hurt him, two weeks ago. I'd said words that couldn't be unsaid. I wasn't sure that I wanted to unsay them, however. Not because I wanted to hurt him -­ though if I were honest, a part of me did want that -­ but because I'd spoken the truth. He wasn't my father. Teacher, yes, mentor, and once, hero. Maybe he still was my hero. But he wasn't my father. I had a father, much as we might not get along, and I didn't feel like playing games of nomenclature any more. Jean's death had imploded the fairy-tale we'd all constructed here. I wasn't Cyclops and I wasn't his son. I was Scott Summers, math teacher, mutant vigilante, apparent government target, and now, widower. Let's call things what they were.
 

From Chapter 9 -- Scott:

I'm not sure who was dreading the first of May more -­ me or the rest of the mansion. May Day. My wedding day, or it should have been. . . .

. . . . When I entered the hall, the faces of the ones waiting were apprehensive. Jubilee, Kitty, and Rogue sat on the edge of a wooden table in the middle, with something spread across their laps. A big piece of cloth. I spotted Logan standing in a corner. I'm sure he was watching over Rogue. The professor was there, too, with Ro, Frank, and Hank. Every muscle in my body had tensed to bear whatever I was going to have to bear. And here I thought I'd escape this day relatively unscathed.

They were all looking at Jubilee. It must have been her show. I leaned into the jamb and crossed my arms, raised an eyebrow and waited. She cleared her throat. Jubilee at a loss for words: would wonders never cease? "We, um, have a present for you," she began. "It was supposed to be for you and Dr. Grey -­ " Abruptly, her fair-gold skin went red. "I mean, um, I mean -­ "

"It was supposed to have been a wedding present," I supplied.

"Yeah." She glanced over her shoulder at Bobby, who just nodded his head at her, his face solemn. That explained a lot. Jubilee might be running the show, but Drake was behind it.

"And?" I said, trying my best not to sound snappish. I didn't succeed.

"We weren't gonna finish it," Rogue said, taking up the narrative, "but then we decided we might should. What's the point of letting it rot in the attic?"

"Rogue did most of the work," Kitty added, and taking the cloth from Rogue and Jubilee, she hopped down from the table to walk across and offer it to me. "Piotr designed the top and all the rest of us sewed on it a little, even the professor. But I think Rogue had to rip out most of our stuff and sew it all over again." Smiling, she glanced back at her friend. "We even got some of the pictures on the back from students who'd graduated already, like Mr. Worthington and Mr. Placido. So it was kinda a whole school project."

I took the gift from her and unfolded it to reveal a beautiful quilt, the top a pattern of interlocking circles. "It is from the Amish wedding ring pattern," Piotr explained. "I did change it a little bit." He'd put Xs in some of the circles, and the colors were red, black and white. Colors I could see.

I ran my palms over it. The stitches had all been done by hand, no machine work this. My God. It was a labor of hours and hours. How many nights had they sat up to work on this quilt, then come sleepy to class the next day? "It's beautiful," I whispered.

"Turn it over, Scott," Bobby said.

I did so. Drake rose to help me spread it atop a table, displaying the backing. It wasn't standard plain-cloth, and I had to sit down on one of the benches before my legs gave way.

They'd had it silk-screened with a collage of pictures. Jean was in all of them, but I was in quite a few despite my policy of avoiding cameras. The pictures marked the passage of the past ten years -­ this was the story of us, of Scott and Jean. Where had they found some of these? They must have snuck into our bedroom to go through our old photo albums. And EJ had to have supplied a few, too, from my college years. "I like that one," Bobby said, pointing out a photo where my hair had been long enough to brush my jaw. "We wouldn't have believed it was you, except for the glasses." It had been taken during Jean's visit to Berkeley to see me, in the spring of my final year. Jean with hair shorter than mine ­- "Easier to take care of on-call" ­- and dyed an artificial fiery red. We'd been caught candid, playing darts. I'd never seen that picture, or if I had, I'd forgotten all about it -­ though I hadn't forgotten that night. In the photo, I stood behind her, bracing her with an arm around her shoulders, my other hand on hers, helping her aim. She'd been leaning back into me, and side on, I could see that she'd been grinning like an imp. But from behind, I hadn't been able to see her grin at the time. It struck me hard, to see it now. She'd been falling for me even then, and maybe our first date, six months later, hadn't been merely her concession to my persistence.

But in truth, that hadn't been our first date. Our first date -­ though we wouldn't have called it that then ­- had come almost five years earlier when I'd taken her to see Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. And in one corner of the quilt back, covered carefully in plastic, were the old ticket stubs. The kids must have filched them out of our scrapbook. I'd been eighteen and trying to apologize for having wrecked her car, so I'd made a pact with Hank to get me tickets; I hadn't realized that nobody but tourists went to see that show. Nonetheless, she'd gone with me and said she'd enjoyed it. I don't think she was lying, but the show hadn't been the reason. Afterward, we'd walked around midtown window-shopping in a newly revitalized and Disneyfied Times Square, visited the rotating bar atop the Marriott to overdose on caffeine with coffee and Death by Double Chocolate cake, and then went to hear a band in the Rockefeller Center plaza. She'd laughed at my stupid jokes, and danced with me in the crush of the plaza crowd. And once, for just a few minutes, she'd let me put an arm around her. I'd lived in a glittering cloud for a week after. And I'd decided that night that I was going to marry Jean Grey. Stupid thing to decide at not-quite-nineteen, but I'd never changed my mind. Sometimes you just knew.

But I hadn't married her, had I?

"Can I be alone, guys?" I asked them. They slipped out quietly, vanished like fog. Rogue hugged me from behind on her way and I gripped her arm atop her gloves, whispered, "Thanks, Marie. I'm glad you finished it." I felt her nod, then she was gone, too. They were all gone, leaving me alone with the quilt.

I spent a long time going over each of the pictures. Jean would have loved this. She'd always wanted a hand-made quilt. Had the girls known that, or was this just a lucky guess? "Look at what they did for us, hon," I whispered at one point into the empty room.

"It makes everything else worth it, doesn't it?"

I spun around. There was no one there. "Christ, you're hearing things now," I said to myself. Folding up the quilt, I headed out and started to go downstairs, but changed my direction and went back to our room instead. This was where the quilt belonged. On our bed.

I hadn't been in here since the day I'd come to fetch my wedding ring, and my dirty clothes were still in the bathroom where I'd left them in a heap after I'd showered. I picked them up now and dumped them in the hamper. Then I just stood there in the middle of the room, the quilt over my arm. Unfolding it, I laid it out on the bed, then collapsed atop and wrapped myself up in it. That was when I cried.

I'd gone all day without crying -­ mostly by dint of distraction. Now, it hit me full force and I cried until my belly hurt and my face was raw. This should have been my wedding night. I'd waited for this for nine years; I'd waited for Jean. Frank, our resident Italian romantic, had told me once that Jean and I had the love affair of a lifetime. Maybe so. But when it's gone, what's left? Lightening doesn't strike the same place twice.
 

The full novel, with associated images, can be found on the Climb the Wind webpage.

Notes:  In highly traumatic combat situations, the ties between men exceed the term ‘friendship’ by modern usage.  I direct readers to Jonathan Shay’s splendid Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character.  He says, "Modern American English makes soldiers' love for special comrades into a problem, because the word love evokes sexual and romantic associations.  But friendship seems too bland for the passion of care that arises between soldiers in combat" (40).