Chapter Text
@XavierConfessions is back for another year. submit your confessions, secrets, and burning questions. we see everything. we say nothing. welcome home. 🖤
The thing about Xavier's was that it had a smell.
Not a bad smell — nothing like the locker room or the chemistry lab after someone knocked over the wrong beaker. It was wood polish and old stone and the particular weight of recycled air that came from a building that had been holding people's secrets since 1886. Remy had walked back through those doors six times now, counting the first time his father drove him up the long gravel approach and told him to make something of himself, which was the kind of thing Jean-Luc LeBeau said instead of goodbye. He'd been eleven then. He was sixteen now. He had been making something of himself every day in between and it had started to feel less like an achievement and more like a job.
He breathed it in on the threshold of the main hall and thought, here we go again.
August 25th. Eleven a.m. The main hall was already full of the particular chaos that was Xavier's on opening day — parents making themselves important, younger students wide-eyed and trying not to show it, older students performing the ease they'd spent summers practicing. Remy moved through all of it the way he moved through a defensive line: read the angles, find the gaps, don't let anyone clock that you're doing it.
He was good at this. He'd always been good at this. The problem, which he did not examine too closely on the first day back, was that being good at moving through a room without being truly seen was not the same thing as being invisible. It just felt like it, sometimes.
"LeBeau."
He turned. John Allerdyce was standing just inside the doors with Bobby Drake at his shoulder, the two of them arriving the way they always arrived after a summer in Boston — together, already mid-conversation, slightly annoying about it. John had the expression he'd been perfecting since they were eleven: somewhere between amused and exhausted, a look that said he had already assessed the situation and found it exactly as tedious as expected. He was wearing a gray t-shirt and had a duffel bag over one shoulder and looked, as he always looked at the start of a year, like someone who had arrived because he had nowhere better to be and had made his peace with that.
Remy was the only person at Xavier's who knew that was not entirely an act.
"You're late," John said.
"I'm exactly on time."
"There's a difference?"
"Not at Xavier's," Remy said, and John almost smiled, which was as good as it got with John before noon.
Bobby was already grinning. He had the kind of grin that showed up before the joke did, which was either endearing or exhausting depending on the day. Today it was endearing. Most days it was endearing, if Remy was being honest, which he generally preferred not to be about Bobby because it complicated a situation he was already not examining.
"He's been saying that for twenty minutes," Bobby said. "Exactly on time. I timed it. We've been here twenty minutes."
"You've been early for twenty minutes," Remy said. "That's your problem."
"My problem is I have a roommate who complains the entire drive from Boston that we're going to be late and then we get here and we're not late and he won't admit it."
John said, "I didn't complain. I observed."
"You observed for four hours."
"The observations were accurate."
Remy looked between them. This was also the way they always arrived — mid-argument about something that was not actually an argument, the particular easy friction of two people who had been in each other's company long enough that disagreement had become a form of affection. He had watched it for five years. He had learned to find it mostly charming and occasionally unbearable, and he had learned something else about it over the last year that he was keeping in the place where he kept things he wasn't examining, which was a place that was getting quite full.
"Are you two done?" he said.
"We're never done," Bobby said cheerfully.
They fell into step together without discussing it. This was the thing about five years of friendship — some things had stopped requiring conversation. The route from the main hall to the junior corridor, the understanding that none of them would mention the summer until they'd had at least one meal back in the dining hall, the way John would take the left side of any hallway and Remy would take the right and Bobby would somehow end up in the middle without ever seeming to choose it. Architecture of a friendship built so long ago none of them could remember building it.
The main hall was doing what it always did in the first hour — sorting itself. The freshmen clustering near the check-in tables. The sophomores performing a confidence they'd half-earned. The seniors moving through it all with the authority of people who were leaving and knew it. And the juniors — his year — landing somewhere in between, past the worst of the uncertainty but not yet at the ease of knowing the end was in sight.
He was halfway across the hall when he saw her.
She was near the east wall, alone, watching the chaos with the particular stillness of someone who had decided to let the room come to terms with her rather than the other way around. She looked — different, and also exactly herself, which was a thing Remy had not known how to anticipate but which turned out to be simply true. She'd been Artie when she left at the end of sophomore year. She was not Artie now, but she was still the same person, and the building had a memory, and she was standing in the middle of that memory and holding herself very straight.
He changed course without discussing it. John and Bobby followed without being asked, which was also the thing about five years — you didn't always need the explanation.
"Hey," Remy said.
She looked at him. A half-second of something — not quite bracing, not quite relief — and then: "Hey."
"Good summer?"
"Interesting summer," she said. The specific quality of an understatement.
He nodded. "What name are you going by now?"
"A," she said. Just that. Clean, chosen, minimal.
"A," he said, like he was filing it. "Good to have you back, A."
He meant it simply, because it was simple, because A was back and that was a good thing and he didn't see the value in making it more complicated than that. Bobby said something warm beside him and John said something that was blunt and therefore, from John, the highest possible form of welcome, and A's expression did a small thing that she probably didn't know it was doing — something that loosened, fractionally, like a held breath released.
They didn't make a production of it. They moved on. That was also the right thing.
Their rooms were three doors apart in the junior corridor, which was not an accident. Remy had submitted their housing preferences himself at the end of sophomore year, without making a thing of it. John had never mentioned it. Bobby had said thanks once, quietly, in a way that meant more than the word, and Remy had said don't worry about it and they'd both let it go.
Bobby dropped his duffel bag on the floor outside his door and spread his arms wide like he expected someone to walk into them.
John did not walk into them. John looked at the ceiling.
Remy watched this happen and felt the specific, quiet frustration of knowing something he was not allowed to say. He had been feeling it for a year. He had gotten better at the frustration, the same way you got better at anything you practiced enough — not good, exactly, but accustomed. He knew the shape of it now. He knew it settled after a minute.
"Johnny," Bobby said, arms still out.
"Don't call me that."
"Johnny."
"I will put you through that wall."
"No you won't."
John shoved him, which was the same as a hug, for them. Bobby caught his balance and was already laughing, and John had the look he always got — like something had briefly come loose in him that he was already working to put back. The working-to-put-it-back was the part that got Remy every time. He turned away to give him the privacy of it, made himself busy with his room key, and said nothing.
There was a lot that Remy said nothing about. He was very good at it.
**********
Belladonna was waiting for him.
She was wearing white, which she did on the first day every year, and she looked the way she always looked — like the school had been built specifically to frame her. Her blonde hair was down. She had the smile going, the one that was for him specifically, which was warmer than the one she used in public and cooler than the one she'd had two years ago, when things between them had been simpler, and Remy was aware of the temperature difference even if he had no particular language for what it meant.
He was aware of a lot of things he had no particular language for. This was an ongoing situation.
"You didn't text me back," she said.
"I was driving."
"You were driven. There's a difference."
She stepped forward and kissed him and he let it happen the way he let a lot of things happen — with his whole surface and some careful, curtained-off thing underneath. She smelled like the perfume she'd worn since freshman year. He had once loved that smell. Now it was just a smell he associated with her, which was different, and which said something he was not going to examine today because it was the first day and he had made himself a rule about the first day.
"I missed you," she said against his mouth.
"I missed you too," he said, and it was true in the way that lots of things were true — technically, incompletely, from a certain angle. He had missed her the way you missed a place you'd outgrown but still knew better than anywhere else. He was not going to say this. He was also not going to say it to himself in exactly those words, because some thoughts were more useful left vague.
When he looked up, John was watching him over Belladonna's shoulder with an expression that said he knew exactly what Remy was doing. Remy looked back with an expression that said John could mind his own business.
John looked away. He wasn't wrong, though. John was almost never wrong about this kind of thing, which was one of the more inconvenient facts of their friendship.
Belladonna pulled back and looked at him with the clear, assessing look she sometimes had, the one where he felt briefly like something she was deciding about. "You seem tired," she said.
"Long drive."
"You slept the whole way. Pierre told me."
His driver. Of course she called him. "I seem tired because it's the first day," he said. "Give me until Thursday."
She smiled, the public one this time, which was the signal: conversation over, public face on, we're moving into the corridor now. "Thursday," she agreed, and took his hand, and they walked to lunch together the way they always did, and the hallway noticed the way it always did, and Remy smiled at the right moments the way he always did.
He was very good at the first day. He had a lot of practice.
**********
Lunch was the full production.
The dining hall at Xavier's seated two hundred and twenty students and managed, on the first day back, to feel like it was seating all of them simultaneously at top volume. Remy took his usual table — the one by the east windows that caught afternoon light, the one that had been his since he was thirteen and claimed it and no one had questioned it since — and watched the room arrange itself the way it always did.
Jubilation Lee arrived at eleven minutes past noon, which was late even for her, and immediately started narrating the room to no one in particular.
"Okay, Marcus Webb is back with the haircut, which is an improvement, someone should tell him. Oh, and Darcy Collins transferred out, did anyone know that? I didn't know that. Apparently she went to Dalton. Theresa, did you know that?"
Theresa Cassidy, who had been sitting down for fifteen minutes already with a book open beside her tray, said, "I knew that."
"You didn't tell me?"
"You didn't ask."
"You could have volunteered it."
"I'm telling you now. You're telling yourself now. I'm not sure I'm involved."
Jubilee sat down and immediately picked up her phone, which meant @XavierConfessions was already running and she had already checked it twice. Remy had checked it once, in the car, out of the same helpless reflex that made people poke bruises. The first post of the year was always the same: the welcome back, the announcement, the little pageantry. He hadn't looked since. He would look again later, when the first real posts came in, and he would tell himself he was only looking to see if anyone had said anything stupid, and this would be approximately true.
Kitty dropped her tray next to Jubilee's and said, "Who transferred out?" and Jubilee started over from the beginning with visible pleasure, and Theresa looked at the ceiling with the expression of someone who had made a choice about the person they were in a relationship with and was at peace with the consequences.
Remy had always liked Theresa. She was one of the few people at Xavier's who said exactly as much as she meant and no more, which was rarer than it should have been.
Across the table, John was saying something to Bobby in a low voice. Bobby's expression did something complicated — something that moved through his face quickly, not quickly enough — and then he laughed, and the laugh was real but it was covering something, and Remy noted it and noted it and kept eating his lunch.
A approached the far end of the table. She had her tray and her bag and the specific quality of someone who wasn't sure if the invitation extended to lunch, and Remy said, "There's room," without looking up from his food, because there was room and there didn't need to be a thing made of it. Bobby moved over immediately. A sat down. She ate her lunch and didn't say much and that was fine, because the first day was loud enough already.
Remy ate his lunch and watched all of it and felt, as he sometimes felt in moments like this, the strange doubled sensation of being both completely at home and completely alone.
**********
The afternoon was the standard first-day production: room assignments confirmed, locker combinations reset, the all-school assembly in the main hall where Xavier himself addressed everyone from the podium in the voice that had told a thousand students the same things and somehow always sounded like he meant it specifically for this group, this year, right now.
"Xavier's has always been a place where exceptional young people become exceptional adults," he said. "That process is not comfortable. It is not supposed to be. You are here because someone — your parents, your teachers, or yourselves — recognized that you were capable of more than comfort."
Remy, in the third row, thought about his father's hand on his shoulder at age eleven and the drive up the gravel approach and make something of yourself said to a child who hadn't asked what he was supposed to make. He thought about the six years since then, all the ways he had made something of himself, the careful ongoing construction of Remy LeBeau at Xavier's. He had built it carefully. It fit well. He wore it every day.
In the back row, slightly apart from the junior cluster, A sat with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on the podium. Remy couldn't see her expression from where he was sitting. He didn't need to. He knew the particular quality of someone doing the thing that needed doing regardless of how it felt, because he had been doing it himself for years.
He applauded at the right moments. He always did.
**********
After the assembly the football team had their first unofficial gathering of the year — not a practice, just the thing Logan did every August where he looked at them all for ten seconds and then said, "Same rules, higher expectations, don't make me say it twice." He never said it twice. He had the particular authority of someone who understood that the value of a statement came from saying it once and meaning it.
Bobby fell into step beside Remy on the way back across the quad, the late-August light going golden over the football field, the grass still green in the way it would stop being in six weeks.
"Junior year," Bobby said.
"Junior year," Remy agreed.
Bobby was quiet for a moment, which was unusual. Bobby's natural state was in motion. When he went quiet it meant something was happening underneath the usual surface, and Remy had learned to pay attention to it.
"You think it's going to be different?" Bobby said.
Remy thought about Belladonna's smile that morning, the one that was warmer than the public one and cooler than it used to be. He thought about John's face in the corridor, the careful thing he put back in place when he thought no one was watching. He thought about A at the end of the lunch table, eating quietly, not sure if the invitation was real yet. He thought about the specific sensation of standing in the main hall that morning, breathing in the smell of the place, thinking here we go again.
"I don't know," he said, which was more honest than his usual answer. "Maybe."
Bobby nodded. "Yeah, maybe," he said, and there was something in his voice that Remy recognized because he'd heard it in his own sometimes — something that was not quite hope and not quite resignation and lived in the uncomfortable country between them.
"Bobby—"
"Don't," Bobby said, easy, the grin sliding back into place like a door closing quietly. "It's the first day. Let's not."
Remy let it go. He was good at letting things go. He had been letting things go for two years and he was so practiced at it that sometimes he couldn't remember what he'd let go of. That was probably the point. He wasn't sure anymore.
**********
He was alone in his room at nine-fifteen, the first night back, with the window open and the late-August heat coming in soft and the campus outside gone quiet in the way it went quiet after nine — not silent, never silent, just lower. The group chat on his phone had been running since dinner: a dead mouse, the hot water situation on the third floor, a long debate about the dining hall pasta recipe that he did not have the energy to weigh in on.
Jubilee had submitted a selfie to the confession channel's story with the caption she's back, Westchester, try to contain yourselves, which was not a confession so much as an announcement, which was very Jubilee.
He set the phone face-down and looked at the ceiling and thought about Bobby's voice on the quad. The not-quite-hope. He had been carrying Bobby's secret for a year — had been told it in the careful way Bobby told things, sideways, with humor wrapped around it. He had not set it down. He didn't plan to.
He'd kept John's for longer, though John had never told him anything explicitly. Some things didn't need to be said. You could see them clearly if you were paying attention, and Remy had always been paying attention. He could read a room, a game, a person. He was very good at it. It was almost entirely useless when the people in question were as committed to not-seeing as John was.
He thought about A at the end of the lunch table. The particular quality of someone doing the thing that needed doing. He thought, she came back. that takes something.
His phone lit up with a text from Belladonna. sleep well. tomorrow we make it count. 🖤
He looked at it for a moment. The little black heart, which she used without irony. He typed back, you too. And meant it. And felt the weight of meaning something that wasn't the whole truth, which was different from lying but lived in the same neighborhood.
Outside, the lights in the main hall were still on. They were always on late the first night — the building adjusting to being full again after three months. Xavier's was always on, always running, always watching. It had that quality, this place. It remembered things.
Remy pulled the window almost closed, left a crack for the air, and lay down on top of the covers without getting under them because it was still too warm for that.
Here we go again.
He was asleep before ten, which was early for him. He did not examine what that meant. There was a list of things he was not examining, and it was long, and he had learned that the list got more manageable if you didn't look at it all at once.
Tomorrow, he thought, before he went under. Just the word. No plan attached to it. Tomorrow.