▸ Column · Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, present day — a young mutant whose startle reflex flickers the lights, writing to the headmaster's column.
PROFESSOR X replies.
Replied to by Professor X, with a rebuttal from Magneto.
The letter
The school counselor keeps telling me I'm healing, and inside her office I believe her. Then I go back to the room I share with Marcus — who has never once raised his voice, never gone through my things, never done a single thing the man who raised me did — and I still flinch when he steps up behind me or reaches past me for something on a shelf. When I startle, the lights stutter; I can't help that part either. Two years together. He knows exactly where I come from. But lately there's a look that crosses his face when I pull away, like he's worn out by a thing he can't fix, and I'm terrified my body's alarm system is going to outlast his patience. The clear part of me knows Marcus is safe. The part that grew up in that house never got the memo. Is there anything I can actually do, short of waiting years for time to sand it down?
Professor X replies
Begin with the thing you have been trained to apologize for: that flinch is not a malfunction. It is a sentinel that stood watch over a child no one else was guarding, and it has not yet been told the war is over. You cannot dismiss a loyal soldier by being annoyed with it. You can only show it the new terrain, patiently, until it chooses to lower the rifle itself.
I am a telepath who has made it the law of my life never to enter a mind uninvited. I tell you that not to boast but because of what it taught me: you cannot install safety in a person by force — not even your own, not even for the best of reasons. It is learned from the outside in, against gentle evidence, on a clock that is not yours to command.
So — what can you do? Bring Marcus into the work, not as the man assigned to repair you, but as part of that evidence. Name the flinch aloud when it comes; let him be in on it. And that look you read as exhaustion — I would be far from certain. I have a brother I loved and could not save, and I learned too late that the face I kept reading as anger was, very often, grief at being unable to help. Don't decide Marcus's heart for him. Ask him.
— Professor X
Magneto weighs in
Charles will have you interrogate the soldier. I will not. That alarm is the most honest thing in your letter — it kept a child alive in a house built to harm her, and now you are being asked to dismantle it so that a man's face will stop doing something inconvenient. Hear me: never disarm yourself to keep someone's patience. If Marcus is what you both believe, his patience is not a clock you must outrun — and the hour you are taught to apologize for your own defenses is the hour you have begun, quietly, to surrender. The body remembers because remembering is what survived. Mine still does. Honor it. Let him earn its standing-down. Do not beg it away to be easier to love.
— Magneto
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