Summary:  Though one of the most powerful alpha mutants on the planet, Cyclops' gift comes with a curse:  no one can ever look into his naked eyes again.  Due to a childhood brain injury, only ruby quartz can deflect the destructive capability of his optic blasts.  But what if another way were found?  Who would Scott Summers be, freed from Cyclops' visor?

Warnings:  In Part One, "Micky Blue Eyes," there's description of a medical procedure that may turn the stomachs of the especially squeamish, but that's all.  Part Two, however, "Body Memory," is all about the impact of the physical on relationships and people.  We are more than our minds.  If graphic sexual description in stories bugs you, don't read it.  It's not smut, however.

Notes:  They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  In this case, it was worth about 9000.  I'd never heard of nor seen Jimmy Marsden before X-Men, and it was only after the film came out that I ran across an image of him (the one at right) without the glasses.  Being the same age as Famke Janssen, who plays Jean, my first thought was, "But, but . . . he's a kid!"  And thereon hangs a tale.

Scott's history here follows the film/novelization in which (apparently) his parents are alive -­ contra comic canon.  Even in the comic, Scott's full name was never given.  And while we all know that comic Scott's eyes are brown, Jimmy Marsden's eyes are (a very vivid) blue.  I'm going with the actor's actual eye color.  My sincere thanks to Crys Wimmer (a nurse) and her husband (an Ophthalmology technician) for their corrections to the information on cataract surgery.

And whatever the students are saying, Logan had nothing to do with it.

Now, understand, I had seen pictures of Scott's eyes -­ pictures from before.  A lot of pictures.  He'd been an extremely attractive young man and adolescent vanity had ensured that he hadn't fled when the cameras came out.  These days, he does.  He hates to see himself behind reflective red, so he's the one who takes the pictures, and amateur black-and-white photography has become one of his hobbies -­ revenge by Minolta on a world of color that he can no longer see.  In fact, for a while, to catch him on film became a game among the students, who chased him with 35mms like teenaged paparazzi until the day he ripped Bobby Drake's out of his hands and smashed it against the atrium wall.  He's always so very controlled -- almost mild.  Except when he isn't.  They'd quit chasing him after that.

Yet I'd seen his high school year-books, and his personal photo albums, and the white-and-red Wal-mart processing paper packets stuffed with undated images of events he never talked about, containing the faces of people he wouldn't name.  Scott after never looked at these pictures any more than he willingly permitted his own to be taken.  I don't think he wanted to be reminded of what he'd lost.  But I'd asked him once, after we'd started dating, if I could see a picture of him "BV" (before visor), and he'd shrugged and gone into a closet, opened a few of the boxes he'd brought from his parents' house when he'd left San Diego for New York, and dug around in them.  Coming back with one, he'd dropped it on his bed.  "Here."  Then he'd left his bedroom.  We never did look at those pictures together, though I asked, begged, and even promised sex on his bike at three in the morning, when we could be certain no one would surprise us in the garage.  (He has a few vanilla fantasies and I'm a telepath.)  It's the only time he's ever turned down a direct request from me that wasn't potentially dangerous (at least to the body).  He said, "No," and that was that.

But it was while looking through that box of albums and mixed-up mementos from high school and college -­ a pressed carnation once blue and now brown; his acceptance letter to Berkeley; his GRE scores for the graduate degree he never completed (the man had gotten a 780 on the logic portion for crying out loud); his old Hawaiian shirt from his college band; and a sports Letter for volleyball -­ that I found a birth certificate for one Michael Scott Summers.

He'd never told me that Scott wasn't his first name.  It annoyed me for some trivial reason.

I called him on it later, over supper at the "teachers" table in the mansion's dining hall.  "So, Micky Blue Eyes," I began as I took my usual seat across from him, "when did you become 'Scott'?"

Ororo actually spit juice out her nose and Hank barked.  (People really can bark when they laugh; it sounds ridiculous.  It's even more ridiculous when the one doing it has blue fur.)  But Scott just glanced over at me, the corners of his mouth tipping up in that way he has when half amused and half annoyed.  "I became Scott when my family moved from Omaha to San Diego.  Do you have any idea how popular the name 'Michael' is?  There were eleven -­ count them, eleven ­- in my grade alone, back in Omaha.  At least I didn't have to share 'Scott' with half my class."  He paused to put salt on his fries and added, "And I was never Micky, Mick, or Mikey. Just plain Mike Summers, thank you."

Ooof.  That's the sound of wind being knocked out of my sails.  His reply was so very Scott.  Calm, rational, logical.  It made me feel stupid and petty.  Of course, my needling had been stupid and petty, so I deserved it.

But you see, that's how I started calling him 'Micky Blue Eyes.'  Never again in public, or to his face.  But I did it in the privacy of my own thoughts.  Scott Summers was my boyfriend, and later, my fiancé; the man I made love to at night and whose socks and shirts and BVDs I sorted by day; the man who would look right at me while playing bass when I was talking to him, and not hear a word I said; the man who could build bookshelves, fly jets, fix cars, and teach History of Technology with the kind of passion that made sixteen-year-olds actually care why bronze had been rare and expensive in antiquity, how rice-paddy farming had come to be, why horses were choked by oxen yokes, and why the wheel was never invented in the Americas.  Math is his specialization, history of engineering his passion.  He took a degree and teaching certificate in math for Xavier, because the professor had needed a math teacher.  He gave up a degree in anthropology for me, because of love.  It's the one thing that Xavier has never forgiven me for.  It took me a long time and an operation to understand that I'd never forgiven Scott, either.

But at that point, I still saw Scott as responsible, dependable, fiercely private, a logician with the soul of an artist, a young man with the heavy weight of command in his voice.  Micky Blue Eyes had been a fresh-faced grinning angel imp whose irises were the color of summer.  Pun intended.

God, he'd been more beautiful than Warren was now.

I thought that seeing those albums would satisfy my curiosity, end it.  Except it hadn't.  Later, when the need to see him -­ to see his eyes -­ grew too great, I would go into his closet (then our closet), fetch down that box when he wasn't there, and look at pictures.  My Micky Blue Eyes.  But pictures are pictures.  Flat.  Two-dimensional.  And these were Scott at seventeen and sixteen and even younger, a sky-eyed kid.  They weren't my Scott in all his complex, adult mystery behind red.
 
 
 
 

So why did getting my wish ­- to see those eyes in his living face -­ destroy us?

It's a complicated tale, as complicated as he is, as complicated as I am, a woman eight years her lover's senior but only recently aware of what that means, what it cost.  A price I didn't want him to pay.

But let me begin with how I got to see those eyes in the first place.

It started with Hank McCoy.  A couple of months after the incident with Magneto at the Statue of Liberty, Hank returned to the school from sabbatical.  Logan was still off chasing his tail in Canada and waiting for a little girl to grow up.  We were delighted to see Hank, half because he gave relief from doubled-up classes and work in the lab, but also just because he was Hank, our over-educated, quirky Beast.  As much my mentor as the professor, I loved him like an uncle -­ his wacky humor; his big, gentle hands and blue fur; his slow smile; and the amusement in his voice when he and Scott went off on one of their ridiculous theoretical-philosophic arguments over the price of rice in China, or whatever had been on the front page of the newspaper that morning.  He's the only person I know with whom Scott finds it impossible to become angry.

In any case, one evening after supper, Hank knocked at the door of the room that Scott and I shared.  Scott let him in because I was still in the bathroom brushing my teeth, and Hank plopped all of his three-hundred pounds in the leather office chair at the desk in the corner.  The chair groaned.

"How'd you like to get rid of your glasses?"  Hank asked Scott without preamble.

I sprayed the mirror with toothpaste.  Dropping the brush and hurrying out, I was just in time to see Scott sit down slowly on the bed, his body rocking back a little as if accepting the impact of a heavy object.  "I could see colors?"

That was his first question, about the thing he most fiercely denies that he misses.  To see colors.

"No," Hank said, gently.  Sadly.  He understands.  "I'm sorry."

Scott just nodded once.  "Then explain."

"Cataract surgery.  With a twist."

"Huh?" I said from my place in the bathroom doorway.

The old Hank-grin let loose then. "It came to me, Jeannie. Stars and garters!  I have no idea why it didn't before.  Elegantly simple.  If we can replace his current eye lenses with artificial lenses that have a micro-layer of rose quartz attached -- a very similar procedure to cataract surgery -- he won’t require the glasses.  I think."

When Hank says 'I think,' it worries me.  Hank was now blue, instead of just unusually large and hulking, because he and Bruce Banner had acted first on one of their infamous ideas, and thought only later.  Not to mention that any surgeon attempting to operate on Scott's eyes would first have to survive the operation.

A "mere blip" to Hank.

I think I love him so dearly because the man is irrepressible.

And that day, Scott needed it.  He needed hope.  As it turned out, we were two years away from making Hank's theory become a reality.

But they did it, Hank and Scott and Xavier together.  They built some contraption (I am not an engineer, so don't ask me how it worked) that would contain the power of Scott's eyes, or really, the energy in Scott's head, long enough for Hank to operate.  They also had to build what amounted to a permanent visor with imbedded triggers. It's behind his ear, like a hearing aide.  Very small, unobtrusive.  No one can tell that it's actually implanted in bone.  I worry about that, as a doctor.  I worried then and I still worry at the invasive cost of the procedure that gave Scott back his eyes.

But the day came at last when all was ready, done, prepared; Xavier and Scott's machine had been triple tested (because Scott was like that), and Hank had completed the artificial lenses.  Those floated in solution, down in the lab, little clear circles of red.  I caught Scott looking at them the day before, turning the bottle in his square, strong hands, an expression on his face somewhere between wonder and mild disgust.  He does better with emergency situations than in controlled blood-letting like surgery -­ the opposite of most of us.  If he ever had to watch an autopsy, I think the fearless leader of the X-Men would fall over in a dead faint.

So Cyclops was going under the knife, and would emerge with a blank face.  A whole face.  He would never see our colors, but we would, at last, see his.  Very early on the morning of surgery, long before he even woke up (do you honestly think I slept?), the students had begun to gather in the chapel.  Some prayed, some sat, some lit candles.  When he woke, I took him down there because I wanted him to know.  He didn't realize what it was about until he glanced in, saw them there, then turned around to walk rapidly away.

He never cries in front of them.

It was Rogue who explained it to them -- to the new ones, the children who had not been there long enough to understand Scott, to understand why the older kids so loved this stern-faced man with the occasional smile of a Puck.  She had her own prickly alpha wolf to interpret, so she could fathom mine a little better.  Logan had been home almost a year by that point.  He hadn't come back for me.  Instead, he paced around the mansion, taught kids how to keep from getting themselves gutted, and watched and waited while his Marie turned from a girl into a woman.  As I'd once watched and waited for a boy to become a man who I wasn't afraid to touch.

What I didn't yet realize on a chilly morning in May was that he never really had.

It was Ororo who sat with him, held his hand while he waited for Hank and I to prep ourselves for surgery and the professor to prep the machine that would keep his deadly gift inside his skull for an hour or so.  The entire surgery including the controller implant would take far longer than that, but replacing his lenses was a simple matter, requiring only half an hour total -­ done in countless hospitals around the country daily ­- and once done, his eyes could be safely bandaged.

Hank hadn't wanted me to assist.  I don't know who he thought could; we didn't have a nurse.  And I'd be damned if I sat this one out, and told him so.  I wanted to help give Scott back his eyes.  I had absolutely no hint of what it would mean.  We were all excited.

When I went out to fetch him, dressed now in one of the filched blue hospital gowns we kept in the lab, Ororo was telling him bad lawyer jokes (I'm not kidding), and Logan was there, too, holding up a wall.  They like each other, Scott and Logan.  They'll never admit it, but they do.  Once they quit clashing over me, they adopted periodic testosterone flexing as a peculiar expression of mutual respect.  Scott needs someone around who doesn't take him seriously.  It's good for his ego, which is always threatening to over-extend itself.  I love him, but I know his faults.  He's too good at too many things, too smart, too handsome.  It makes him cocky.  But gentleness and a deep-rooted concern for justice save him from hubris, that and his wonderful rare smile that makes you smile back at him before you realize it because it springs out of his heart and soul and warms up a room.  He'll never be sympathetic like the professor, but we don't need two professors.  We need a Scott.  Even Logan knows that and Logan was here to keep Scott from spazzing, because he knew Scott would never admit to fear with Logan in the room.

Truth was, this could be a fantastic disaster.  We could blind him, damage the ocular nerve or cause some other sort of permanent condition.  The chances of the lens replacement going wrong were vanishingly small, but it could happen.  Surgery, however routine, is always about chances.  But it was that damn box we were inserting into his head -- and everything that went with it -- that worried me.

When they saw me, Logan and Ororo, they slipped out, Ororo kissing Scott's cheek before she went.  His eyes had fixed on me behind red quartz.  He smiled, full and white.  "I trust you," he said.  "I trust you and Hank both."  That was all.  My commanding officer had put himself in my hands.  It made me cry a little.  I came over, kissed him, and told him to close his eyes.  Then I took off his glasses for the last time, and brushed my fingers over those cheekbones as I did so.  He laid down on the gurney so I could give him anesthesia, and I told him to count backwards from ten.  He got to negative seven.  Most people are out before three, but Scott fights.  He hates to lose control.  Once he was out, I administered a retrobulbar block by needle into the muscle cone under the eye, to keep it from moving, then shaved just behind his right ear, where the implant would go, and took him in.

Cataract surgery is, as noted, a simple, routine procedure.  Normally the patient isn't even put under, just has a local and the block, but in Scott's case, it was absolutely necessary for the "suppressor," or whatever the hell they were calling the machine, to work.  They put it on his head, a band of black that fit over his brows with little twinkling lights, like a prop from Star Trek.  And even if not for the problem of Scott's powers, he'd have had to be out because when we were done with his eyes, Hank was going to saw into the skull behind his ear to insert the controller implant.  I hated to see them put that thing in his head.

But now, with the suppressor in place, we opened each eye wide with a lid speculum and cut a slit in the top, normally three centimeters but in this case four and a half because the ruby quartz kept the lens from bending.  Then we emulsified his old lens, irrigated the cavity to remove the debris, and inserted the thin artificial lens with its ruby quartz protective covering.  Normally, stitches weren't necessary, but with a slit wider than usual, it took a few.  It sounds grotesque, I suppose, but that's how it's done.  Very simple.

I focused on the mechanics of the procedure, not on Scott-my-lover, who breathed quiet and dreamed, perhaps, while we made irrevocable changes in his body.  Once we were done with the eye operation, we bandaged them and put his visor on.  Under normal circumstances, he'd have had his vision back immediately, but Hank had decided to make him wait twelve hours, just to be on the safe side.  Then the bandages would come off and we could see whether or not this had worked.

Then Hank lifted the bone saw and the little black box.  I helped with that, too, although it was much harder to distance myself from the grind of serrated surgical steel cutting a hole in his skull.  This was the truly dangerous part.  We were playing very close to Scott's brain -- any slip and no telling what would happen.

Nothing slipped.  Hank is good at what he does, though for the life of me, I don't understand half the mechanics behind this fusion of flesh and metal and nearly microscopic nanotech that joins the controller to the eye lenses so that Scott can still be Cyclops when all this is over.  They're giving him a machine to do what his brain is too damaged to do.  Scott understands it.  The professor does a little.  And Hank, of course.  But me, I'm a simple physician and bio-geneticist.  I'm not even technically a surgeon, though I did my rotation years ago.  Yet, like I told Hank, I'd be damned if I was going to sit this one out.

The whole operation, from beginning to end, took almost ten hours, nine tenths of it concerned with the controller and the delicate work there.  Hank and I had been fitted out with catheters, like brain surgeons, because we couldn't take a bathroom break while there was a hole in Scott's head.

Finally it was done.  Hank declared that, as far as he could tell at this point, it was a complete success.  Everything had gone off without a hitch.  Scott would have his eyes out from under black metal and quartz, and the X-Men would still have our Cyclops.

And who says miracles never happen?  Exhausted though I was, I went to tell the students in the chapel and the den and the dining hall.  There was much cheering, whooping and celebrating.  Scott woke a few hours later around eight-thirty, woozy still from pain killers, but insisting on seeing 'his' kids.  Well, not seeing them.  He had gauze around his face and his visor on.  But he could hear them and touch them.  They trooped through our bedroom to grip his hands and giggle at the shaved spot in his hair, do the things that teenagers do when they're excited and happy.  He was happy, too.  They made him smile, and that made me smile.

But that night after everyone had gone, he clutched at me while we lay in bed.  Temporarily blind, and scared, he was drowning in the nightmare he’d known at seventeen.  All I could do was repeat to him what Hank had said:  there was absolutely no reason to expect anything had gone wrong.  He'd be able to see again.  I repeated that over and over.

The next day dawned clear and bright, without the usual muggy heat of a New York July.  A beautiful day for bandages to come off.  We made it a private little ceremony attended by four and held outside, where red optic blasts could do the least damage if something went wrong.  Scott, Hank, me and Professor Xavier ­- not even Ororo.  She understood, I think.  The rest in the mansion would know soon enough.  Some of the kids were back in the chapel.  Hank was too excited to stand himself, or be stood by us.  Scott sat white-lipped.  Xavier held his left hand and I held the right as Hank removed the bandages.  When Hank was done, instead of telling Scott himself, he nodded to Xavier.  It seemed fitting.

"Open your eyes, Scott."

And he did.

No red.  No blast of scarlet light.  Nothing.

Just blue.  Micky Blue Eyes.

"I can see," he whispered, awed.  "It's still a little fuzzy, but I can see.  And I'm not killing anything."

I cried.  I cried for the simple, phlegmatic horror of what he'd just said, and I cried because there on a field in Westchester, New York, I saw my lover's eyes for the first time.  And I fell out of love.

My strong and beautiful one, my fearless one, my commanding officer, my dependable, logical, faithful lover, was a boy ­- a boy with eyes like the summer sky above us and a face even younger than his twenty-seven years, smooth and shocking in its fine-boned beauty.  Even more shocking in its youth without the camouflage of black metal and rose quartz.

This was not my Scott.

I was thirty-five.  He was twenty-seven going on seventeen; he had ten years of living hidden behind a visor from which to unbend himself.  I wanted a man, not a boy.  Am I wrong for that?  Am I cruel?

My heart broke that day.  It's been in pieces ever since, waiting for Scott to put it back together.  Not Micky Blue Eyes.  I got up and walked away because he'd know.  At the time, he'd just thought me overwrought.  And I had been.  It took me five days to tell him why, to tell him that I couldn't look in a mirror and see our young-old faces side by side.  I didn't know this boy.  I didn't love this boy who'd left his passion and his dreams behind at Berkeley to teach math, fly a black jet, and be my lap dog.  I want a man who belongs to himself.

I cried for us both as he moved his things out of our room; I cried because he wouldn't.  Some wounds go too deep.
 
 
 
 
 

It's been six months now.  He's healing, and so am I.  I don't think he hates me anymore.  He can talk to me now without trying to draw my emotional blood, and sometimes we even laugh.  He can pass my room and his stride doesn't catch.

He's stolen all the girls' hearts at the school.  I knew he would.  Like groupies at a rock concert, they sigh when he walks into class.  They'd sign up for bean counting if he taught it.  I find this funny, and it hurts a little less now to see their dazed faces.  You'd think they'd have gotten over it after six months.  You'd think I would, too, but I haven't.  He is the grinning, fresh-faced angel boy who leads the X-Men.

He's just not my angel.

I am like Logan.  I'm waiting for my child to grow up, to become the man I thought I saw, and loved, and maybe, will love again.  So Logan and I measure our days in patience, together.  We trade a look, a smile.  We know what we're waiting for.  The students don't understand, assume we're in love with each other.  Some have even suggested that I left Scott to go to Logan.  How absurd.

I left Micky Blue Eyes to wait for Scott.

I think he may finally have figured it out.  I spoke to him at breakfast this morning and he told me he's been accepted at CUNY for the fall, and had found a man in the anthropology department there willing to direct his thesis.  Xavier is giving him time off from teaching.  He's got at least three more semester's worth of classes to complete, and a dissertation to write.  He's doing research on bellows temperatures and the relative percentage of tin and copper in bronze found on Cyprus and around the Mediterranean, with a committee composed of chemists, engineers and archaeologists.  I didn't understand a word of it, but I loved listening to him try to explain it to me.  This is the man who carries a pocket-sized Periodic Table in his wallet just in case he needs to consult it.  He's crazy.  Then he smiled at me, asked if I'd meet him in the garage tonight.  At three.  In the morning.  By the bike.

He was bringing a box of pictures.

Dr. Scott Summers.  I think I like the sound of that.  So what if his eyes are blue.

BODY MEMORY
Minisinoo
 

It's partly his mutation, partly a relic of two months of blindness.  He has a gift for movement, placement, direction -- he doesn't see like you and I.  Some of it's the lack of color, but I've looked at the world through his eyes and it's more.  Movement is sharper, leaping out, and the edges of things are clearer, like black and white photography of marble.  Photographing marble in color runs it all together in cream and white and reflected light, while using black and white lets in the gray, gives sculpture form and definition.

Scott sees in black and red.  If something moves in a room, he's aware of it, can locate it, place it.  He tracks motion at speeds that to most of us is a blur.  This allowed him to use the visor and helped to surmount the problem of missing peripheral vision before Hank gave him his eyes back.  He remembers direction with an uncanny precision, and he's rarely so distracted that he loses track of where he is.  That operated for him even before his mutation manifested.

Once, when we were driving through southern Illinois and weren't in a hurry, he asked if I'd like to see where his grandparents had lived in an old house on Carbon Lake.  He'd spent summers there as a boy.  Of course I said yes.  He so rarely shares his past with me, I was like a child at Christmas.  He took a turn off the interstate and what proceeded is something I'll never forget.  He felt his way there.  He couldn't recall any street name or highway number.  Nothing abstract.  It was all concrete.  Turn here where the road twists this way, and turn again at a count of two past a little iron-covered bridge.  That's the road; I remember that oak tree bent like that.  He found it.  I was amazed.  I'd figured us lost at least ten times, but he found it.  I asked him how old he was, the last time he'd been there.  "Eight," he said.  He was twenty-four when he felt his way back.

The place was in a beautiful location, though the house had disintegrated with time and been boarded up by posted order of the fire marshal.  We broke in to walk through.  Old faded calico wallpaper and rotted wood.  I couldn't see if he were crying, but I think he was.  When he spoke, his voice was rough.  I'd held his hand and he'd gripped it like a man about to fall.  It was one of the most intimate things we've ever shared, walking through that old condemned house, far more intimate than shedding our clothes for the first time in front of each other.

Scott lives in his body more than most people would believe.  He seems so controlled, intellectual, even calculating.  But he remembers with his body.

"Jean, where's the book I left on the right hand side of the coffee table?"

Not, "Where's Crisis Counseling with Children and Adolescents?" or "Where's the gray psych book I was reading?"  Of course, he can't see gray.  Gray is a shade of pink to Scott.  But that's beside the point . . . or maybe not.  In any case, it's not by title or color or author or picture on the cover that he remembers.  It's by place.  He recalls where he puts things.  It's only if there are two books on the same table that he might use another way to distinguish which he's after.

Body memory.  Physical space.  Direction, speed, trajectory.

Nobody plays pool with Scott.  We all lose.

Me, I can get turned around in a big department store, or exit a shop in a mall and promptly head back in the direction from which we'd just come.  Scott laughs at that.  He can't understand it, but it's a dreamy world that I inhabit.  I fall into windows and pictures and impressions of things -­ whatever has caught my imagination.  I forget where I am because I exist in my mind.  Feelings, instinct.  It's the telepathy.  He lives securely in the physical world.  We once took that Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator, just for fun.  Very Jungian.  I came up INFP -­ introverted, intuitive, feeling and spontaneous.  I could have told anyone that in advance.  Scott was ISTJ -­ introverted, sensing, thinking, judging.  Which I could have told anyone, too.  So opposite, but we complete each other.  He needs me; I need him.  He keeps me from losing myself.  He grounds me.

I have to remind myself of that when I see his young face.  The mind behind it isn't young.  He's regained himself -- regained his easy smile, regained his passion and centeredness.  These are parts of him that got lost somewhere along the way to Xavier's dream, got lost behind rose quartz.  The man I'd loved had been a mannequin of who he really was, but the visor had hidden that, hidden him from all of us, permitting him to remain a child in some ways.

It's easier to live someone else's dream for you than to risk living your own.

Xavier has had to let him grow up, and so have I.  Even telepaths have blind spots.  And Scott has grown up, become a man.  Not even one so different from the one I thought I knew.  But there's an ease to him now, a laughter that was missing.  He's not always afraid of losing his glasses or visor, and that lets him relax.  Such a small thing, to make all the difference in the world.

Are we back together?  Yes.  But he didn't move back in with me.  In fact, he moved out of the mansion altogether, into a little attic apartment near CUNY.  We kicked him out.  If he was at the mansion, people asked him for things. Scott, fix this; Scott, do that; Mr. Summers, can you help me with . . .   He's no good at saying 'no.'  That was always his problem.  He wants to please us all so desperately.  So we moved him into the city, where he stays during the week.  On weekends, he comes home.  Then he shares my bed, but mostly to sleep and let me take care of him.  He doesn't eat enough (Scott's idea of cooking amounts to microwaved hotdogs, or boiled water and ramen noodles), and he doesn't sleep enough, drinks too much coffee.  His place is a scattery of books and unwashed dishes and double-stuff Oreo wrappers, papers and pizza take-out, and his computer.

He's not neat.  That's a myth about Scott.  In his appearance, yes.  He keeps his hair combed, dresses conservatively and his clothes fit him well, but he makes sure to buy things that don't need pressing.  Truth be told, he's a mess. I was the one who kept our room in order.  He's too focused on other things, and too lazy, frankly.  He has that body memory.  He can find things no matter how cluttered his space is and has no incentive to clean up after himself.  In fact, he complains that if I pick up his apartment, he can't find whatever it is he's looking for.  Scott's anal about what he does, not where he lives.  There's a difference.  He subscribes to the theory, "Do it right the first time, or don't bother."  That has nothing to do with keeping his shoes in the closet and his clothes off the floor.

I love him anyway, I love to watch him when he's working, or thinking, the way his brows draw together over eyes I can see now.  He wears a baseball cap backwards on his head while sprawled akimbo on the beanbag chair that's nearly the only furniture his attic apartment has besides a futon couch-bed and desk.  He marks paragraphs, annotating in the margins with his square engineer's script, and talks to himself sometimes.  And he frowns.  I told him once that his face was going to freeze that way and he laughed at me, getting up to kiss me.  Then he pulled me over to the beanbag chair and make love to me with one book digging into my thigh and another under my back.  We scattered his 3x5 cards all over the carpet.

I don't spend much time in his apartment, though.  I have my own work, and all of us have more class responsibilities since he left.  We took them gladly; I don't think he expected that.  He underestimates how much we love him.  He gives and gives and gives, and never thinks to ask for himself.  Finally he did.  He asked to go back to school so he could study what he loved, not just what we needed.  Children can be unconsciously selfish, but they want to please their parents.  And Scott had thought a man's maturity measured by responsibility, by a burial of his own dreams in favor of the professor's needs.

But it's not.  Maturity is to know who you are.  And he didn't.  He knew only who he thought we wanted him to be.  And we -- blind with our contentment and desperation -- had pretended that he was what we wanted.  Cyclops.  Not Scott.

But Cyclops disappeared with his visor.  Storm leads the X-Men now, at least for the time being.  Logan isn't a leader, even though he's eldest, and Hank doesn't want to do it, so it fell to Storm.  We set Scott free.  The professor set Scott free, acted as the father he is in his heart, instead of the mastermind which necessity so often demands.  He's always spent the coin of Scott's loyalty with ruthless force, asked him for too much.  So I bullied Charles into freeing him.  I ranted in his office for half an hour, yelled and cried and accused him of coldness.  Scott had been back at university two months, trying to live at the mansion, trying to keep up his studies and his practice in the Danger Room, called away at odd times to go on a mission because he was field leader and couldn't say, "I have a class this morning; the emergency will have to wait."  He'd already taken one failing grade on a language exam due to a crisis he couldn't explain to the course instructor:  "Oh, I was out fighting mutants, can I take a make up?"  Charles had released him from teaching at the institute, but Scott had still been leader of the X-Men.  What was the point, I asked the professor, in letting Scott return to school when he could only half commit to it?  It was tearing him apart.  So I swore at Charles and said that I hated him for his cruelty.  Keep Scott or let him go, but please decide.

So Xavier had called Scott into his office and asked him to bring his uniform.  Baffled, Scott had come.  I was there, too.  Charles asked him for the uniform back.  Scott thought he was being punished and almost cried until Charles made him kneel down and cradled his head in long hands, kissed his brow.  "I want you to be Scott Summers for a while," he said.  "The universe will go on without you watching over it.  You're free.  Go fly for me."  Then Scott did cry.  But he turned over his uniform and moved out.

That was the day he became a real man instead of just an X-Man.  And that was the day I fell hard in love with him all over again.  Someday he'll return to the team.  Cyclops is still part of him, a part he'll never lose.  But for now, he needs to reclaim what he lost.  So he sits on his beanbag chair or at his desk, puzzles over bronze composition analyses and old copies of Archaeology Reports.  He writes his grant proposals and complains about funding cuts to NEH.  He studies biological anthropology, which he hates, and field methods, which he loves, and quantitative analysis in anthropological data, to which he's indifferent.  He sleeps in the library, listens to Led Zeppelin while he types out papers, and eats cold pizza for breakfast.  It has nothing to do with mutants or saving the world.  He's free, at least for a while.  He hasn't forgotten us, turns up at the mansion frequently on weekends and always for holidays, plays basketball with the boys, and takes me out on his bike.  Last weekend, he helped Hank fix one of the hot water heaters in the kids' wing.  But for now, he flies free and hopes his grants come in, plans to spend the summer digging in Cyprus.  Bobby and St. John have volunteered to help him and Scott arranged for them to get college credit.  I don't even want to think about the trouble they could get into at Cypriot bars where they're old enough to drink even at twenty.  Scott says it'll be good for them ­- to get out of the country and see how people live in other places.  He's right, but I worry.  I suppose I shouldn't.  They'll have Scott to keep them in line.  They think they're going for a holiday to swim in the Aegean and oogle dark Mediterranean girls sunning themselves topless on Cypriot beaches, but I know him.  He'll work their asses off.

But before he does his digs, before he starts his field research, he has to pass his comps and orals.  He did nothing but read for them for three weeks after classes ended, didn't come home at all, just stayed in his apartment.  He read until five in the morning, then fell asleep, woke some time after noon and began to read again until just before sunrise.  It's his natural rhythm, I suppose.  I never thought of Scott as nocturnal, but he couldn't be at the mansion -- another example of him doing what was expected, not what was natural.  Left to his own devices, he's a night creature.

Comps and orals are a hell unique to grad school, like internship and residency are to med school.  All one's years of effort (and money) depend on one's ability to pass three or four written exams, and later, a two-to-three hour oral grilling.  In Scott's case, they're letting him pick up the tests, giving him twenty-four hours to take each home and use his books, then return them.  Naturally, they'll expect more out of him, too, but it helps since he had such a gap between starting his degree and finishing it.  Books are, to Scott, like a security blanket to a toddler.  Body memory, again.  He knows where to find the information in books.  Ask him a question and he walks to a bookshelf, pulls down a text and flips to the right place, looks at the correct side of the page, finds the line or paragraph.  He knows where it should be, can see it in his mind, but he needs to get his hands on it.  So as long as he has his library in its state of mild disarray, he feels more confident.

Which is a long way from saying he's sanguine.  I've seen him cooler facing the Brotherhood of Mutants.

I wanted to come in to the city to stay with him while he took the tests, but he said no.  "You don't want to be around me right now, Jean."

"Whatever happened to 'for better or worse'?"

"There's worse, and then there's beyond sane.  I'm in the latter category right now.  I picked up my first exam the day before yesterday at noon, wrote all afternoon and night -­ seventeen pages -­ then took it back to turn it in, came home and slept for fourteen hours.  There's not a lot you could do to help."

"I could make you eat, at least."

"I am eating."

"Scott, be honest.  Do you not want me there because you think you're no fun, or because I'd distract you?  I don't care if you're no fun."

A pause on the phone line.  "Because you'd distract me," he admitted finally.

"Okay.  Then I won't come.  Call me if you need anything."

"I will."

So I wait, frustrated.  I wanted to be there for him like he was there for me.  I used to call him in the middle of the night, when I was doing my residency and he was in grad school the first time.  We were friends long before we were lovers.  That's why he quit and came home to New York -- because I needed him.  I can even name the event that decided it.  The night I lost my first patient on the table.  It's something every doctor faces, and something none of us can prepare for, to feel a life slipping away under our hands and not be able to stop it.  You never forget.  It was a man in his forties, brought in to the emergency room after a bad accident with a semi.  His sports car had folded like an accordion with him still inside, and they'd had to cut him out of it; I doubt anything could have been done to save him with that much blood loss and severe internal trauma, even if they'd got him to us sooner.  But that's reason talking.  It can't counteract the heavy-gut feeling when that line goes flat and nothing you do makes an ounce of difference.  I was the resident in charge and I blamed myself.  After I went out to tell his wife that she was now a widow, I found a dark closet and cried until I was sick, calling Scott on my cell phone and waking him up.  He talked to me for an hour until my beeper called me away again.  I've never forgotten his patience as he told me over and over that death was part of life, and even doctors couldn't save everyone.  It wasn't so much what he said, but that he was there for me in that dark closet.  He held me with his words and his warm voice.  And a month later, he was home to hold me in his arms.

But he hasn't let me do that for him.  I wait, and I don't like it.  It's been three days since I talked to him.  I hope he's eating.  He gets shaky when his blood sugar goes too low.

I'm in the lab running DNA samples when my cell phone rings.  I flip it open.  "Hello?"

"Jean.  Can you come down here?"  His voice sounds odd, tight.

"Are you okay?  Did something happen?"

"Nothing's happened.  I just -­ I need you."

"I have a test I'm running in the lab.  It'll be an hour.  Is that okay?  Do you want me to bring you something to eat?"

"An hour's fine and don't worry about food.  I'll probably be asleep, but I'll leave the door unchained.  Just come on in."

So I rush through the rest of the analysis and leave the lab, letting Hank know where I'm going.  "Is he okay?" Hank asks.

"I don't know.  He says he is."

"Go take care of him, Jeannie."

Traffic is bad into the city, but it always is.  Finding a parking space is even worse than usual.  By the time I reach his apartment door, it's taken me three hours and the sun is setting. I let myself in.  The place smells like pizza and burned coffee and unwashed Scott.  He's left his stereo on but the CD played out long ago.  He's sleeping on his back on the futon couch; he hasn't even pulled it out.  The blinds are closed and a light is on.  Books are scattered around and he needs to do his laundry.  I set down my purse and the bag of bagels I brought him even though he said not to bother.  Picking my way through the mess of socks, papers, slides and journal articles on the floor, I kneel down beside him to watch him sleep.  He hasn't shaved in days.  His lashes are dark on sharp cheekbones and I see his eyes move under his lids, back and forth.  He's dreaming.  I wonder if he's dreaming of me?  One hand lays limp on his chest and his chestnut hair needs washing; I smooth it back and kiss his brow.

His eyes open.  So blue in reflected lamplight.  I'll never tire of seeing his eyes.  "Jean?"

"Yes."  I smile.

He smiles back, that glorious white smile that stole my heart.  He moves a little, inviting me up beside him on the couch and I join him, fitting myself against him, our legs intertwined.  He needs to brush his teeth, but I don't mind.  Much.

"Body's a bull, brain's a lion," he whispers.  "Kill one to feed the other.  I still have one more test tomorrow.  I need my brain back."

I know what he wants now, what he called me there for ­- can feel it pressing insistent against my hip.  Leaning in, I kiss him and he gives a small sigh.  A release of breath against my mouth, a release of himself into my hands.  He needs me to satisfy his lust so he can return his mind to what he must concentrate on.

As I said, Scott lives in his body.  He needs sex like he needs air, though it's not something to which he likes to admit; it implies he's not in full control of himself.  I wouldn't say he has the strongest libido in the world, but there are times that desire consumes him and he hates to masturbate for relief, finds it faintly ridiculous.  So he uses my body to scratch his itch.  He's not rough ­- it's not in him to be rough.  But it is all physical, all in the flesh.  It clears his head.  Then he gets up to get something to eat, or goes to sleep.  I'd find it annoying if I didn't understand him so well.  I'm not an object to him, never that.  He loves me.  I'm as fundamental as breathing and eating.  The six months we spent apart were the hardest of his life, harder than the two he spent blind.  But sometimes hard is good.  I'd do it again.  I'd needed that time, and so had he.  It had made us stronger; it had made us real.

But this tonight isn't love-making.  It's sex.  He needs a body to rub against, get lost in, find his memory through.  I'm that body.  And I don't mind.

So now, I let my mouth move absent over his, use my hands to loosen his t-shirt from his jeans, run palms up under it and over his belly.  His own hands are all over me, my back, my hair, my shoulders, my hips, my breasts; he touches me with abandon, exhaustion-drunk.  I get his shirt off, and mine.  They land on the floor and he unhooks my bra so he can feel the press of my hard nipples against his chest.  His breath has grown a little heavy, but not rough yet.  He sucks at my neck and his unshaved beard scratches; I wonder what the students will think if they see Dr. Grey has a hickey.  I work at his jeans.  Damn 501 Levi button-downs.

"Maybe we should pull the bed out," I say.  Grunting in answer, he rolls over the top of me and to his feet, and rising, I help him open the couch.  Having him standing makes it easier to get his pants off, and his briefs, and me out of my skirt.  His erection bobs a little; it embarrasses him.  He hunches his shoulders when he's naked and never walks around our room without clothes on unless he's just gotten out of the shower.  And not because he's afraid that a student might burst in on us.  My Scott is a prude, at least with regard to his own body.  But I like to look at him.  I caress his angles with my fingers and eyes, and now, make him stretch out on the futon so I can run my palms all over his warm skin.  He closes his eyes and gives himself up to what my hands can give him.  I use my mouth all over him, make him murmur.  He keeps trying to get a hold of me but I don't want to be held still.  I want his body, I want to watch it respond to my tongue and teeth, I want to taste the salt on his skin and the faintly sour-electric of pre-ejaculate, like licking a dime.  I make him cry out when I take his cock in my mouth.

"Jean!"

I can't take him in far; my gag reflex is too well-developed.  Instead, I've learned to suck hard and keep my lips over my teeth so they don't scratch sensitive skin.  He's all purple and warm against my mouth, the head as smooth as satin, and he's the first and only man I've ever done this for, the first I ever wanted to.  I wasn't a virgin for him, and he certainly wasn't for me.  But there are things that belong only to Scott, and performing fellatio is one of them.  He makes me want it -- to feel his pulse beat fast against my tongue, and listen to the soft whistle of an indrawn breath between his teeth.  But he doesn't like to come that way, and I don't much like it, either.  I love him, but I won't swallow.  The few times we pushed that far, I spit it out in the sink after, or into a tissue.  Thank god he wasn't insulted by that.  Semen in quantity tastes terrible.

Right now, he's pulling me up and away, and I've got hair in my mouth.  I spit it out as he rolls on top.  "Condom," I say.  He fumbles in the drawer of the end-table beside the bed couch, pulling out a foil packet to rip it.  I help him put it on; he likes that, likes my fingers down his shaft, even with rubber between.  Then he raises himself on an arm and I spread my thighs, inviting him into me.  Angling a little, he thrusts forward.  There's always a moment my body needs to adjust, to widen and accept him.  He knows this and waits three breaths, four.  "Go on," I whisper then. "Fuck me."

And he does.  That's what this is.  Sex.  Fucking.  A release of physical tension, because he's more than his mind.  He pushes into me and past himself.  I take his body under and he makes me cry out from the friction of his cock against my cleft, from the pound of his pelvic bone against my clitoris, the rub of his chest against my nipples.  My legs are wrapped tightly around his hips and my eyes are closed, my head back against the pillows.  I keen like a cat.

"Come on, Jean," he says.  He doesn't usually talk in sex; it's a measure of his own need when he does, or a measure of his struggle to distract himself from his own approaching orgasm.  "Come on.  Come on.  Scream for me."

And I do.  It breaks over me like a wave and I tighten my thighs, hold his hips still and buck hard while I scream.  My eyes are wide open to see his face.  He's so beautiful when he comes.  He lets out a sound somewhere between a gasp and a grunt and pushes me hard into the futon cushion.  His mouth is open a little, as if he can hold on to the feelings that way.

When we're both done, he collapses on me, heavy, his breath coming in little gasps in my ear.  "Dead bull?" I whisper, and he laughs.

"Very dead bull."

I get up and go into the bathroom to clean off.  Normally, he follows, but not now.  When I come back out, he's asleep again, stark naked.  At least he took off the condom first to toss it in the trash.  Smiling, I wipe him off with a sock and find a fleece blanket to lay over him, making sure his alarm is on.  Then I kiss his cheek, his eyelids.  He murmurs something.  I get dressed, set the bagels where he'll see them when he wakes, and write an invisible note with my finger on his bare chest.  Two words. Love you.

But he knows that.  I wrote it already on every inch of his skin.  I wrote it with my lips and my fingers, my legs and my cunt that held him enclosed.  He'll remember when he wakes.  He'll carry my love with him to his last test, his mind free to think because he has body memory.  Sex isn't always about love.  But sometimes, it is.

Some time after these were written, I was invited by Victoria P. to submit an essay regarding them for Unfit for Society's regular column, "Author's Picks."  If you're particularly curious, you can read my remarks:  "In Their Own Words: Minisinoo"