Blind Faith – Chapter 1 – Sivan325

Reading Time:
13 Minutes

Chapter 1

It been almost a year since Jean died, and Scott knew that it was all his fault.

Scott was glad when after he was blind, that Hank came to visit him several times, and even taught him how to read braille and he thanked him for that.

Hank gave him a purpose when he needed, even though he lived through hell and the nightmares were just appeared every single day and he found it was hard for him to move on and live his life as normal as he could.

Scott woke up, his heart beating fast, he could feel beads of sweat covering his forehead, and tried to breath calm as the images never leaving his head, as much as he wanted to just move on.

Scott sighed deeply, he knew it was hard to stay at the home, as all he could see was darkness and thinking and reliving it in his nightmares, he felt it took something from him, and he wanted to feel like he was needed.

When Charles visited him last month, asking for him to come back to the academy even though he lost his power.

“Are you sure you up to it?” Hank asked, as he watched the guide with the cane, right before he entered the podium.

“I’ll be okay, thank you.” Scott replied, he sighed before he took a step forward.

Hank glanced toward the professor, as Xavier spoke, “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

“Xavier, I know why you want him to come back, and I’m not sure he’s up to it.” Hank said.

Nearly a year ago, he would have walked the aisles without thinking. He would have stopped beside students to correct their posture during grounding demonstrations or leaned over desks to point out mistakes in their notes.

The guides heard about the rumors and seen the blind guide walking down toward the class, while the guides used their powers, not wishing him to fall down and make it hard for him.

Scott only nodded, he could feel their presences, he could hear their heartbeats.

“What is the first rule?“

A silence swept over the room.

Scott stood in front of the class with one hand on the desk and his dark glasses hiding his eyes, which had been blind for almost a year. He was so familiar with the lecture hall that he didn’t need a cane to navigate the space. He counted as he walked from the door to the podium – twenty-three steps. As he walked from the podium to the whiteboard – six steps. And finally from the front row of desks, where he was set up, to the last row – three rows with twenty-four trainees in each of them, a total of seventy-two.

He could hear the heartbeats of all seventy-two trainees as he was going through the rules when one of them spoke up hesitantly, giving the answer to his question: “A Guide never fights their Sentinel.”

“Wrong.” said Scott.

There was a shift in the room as all of the trainees were somewhat surprised.

“A Guide never lies to their Sentinel,” Scott continued. “You can disagree, you can argue, and you can walk away if you are both safe; however, if your Sentinel asks you if you are afraid, then the answer is always that you are afraid.”

Scott could hear the sound of pencils scrambling through paper as the guides took notes.

Scott explained that “The bond is only created through trust and if you believe that you know more than your Sentinel, you are already losing them.”

Get rid of them!

The phrase hung in the air.

For one brief moment—

Dust from the debris filled the atmosphere.

Burned in his lungs.

“Scott!”

He turned, surprised at hearing Jean’s voice.

She was somewhere in front of him, somewhere behind a veil of smoke and a mountain of twisted steel. Reaching for their psychic connection (the connection that has kept him wrapped in warmth since they were both cadets), he discovered there was no connection.

Just silence…

“Guide Summers?”

Someone was calling out to him. Not Jean; it was someone else, closer.

“Guide Summers?”

Scott opened his eyes. The dust had settled, and the classroom was there again.

Twenty-four heartbeats. Twenty-four trainees.

There was no building collapse and no screaming.

Just a quiet concern.

A young trainee in the front row had started to get up from her seat.

“Sir?” she asked carefully. “Are you… all right?”

Scott realized his hand had clenched around the edge of the podium hard enough that his knuckles ached.

He forced his fingers to relax.

“I’m fine.” It was an automatic lie, he told every time someone asked him.

The students didn’t believe him, he could see it on their faces.

Scott drew a slow breath and straightened his notes, though he knew every word on the page by memory.

“Where were we?”

“The first rule,” someone offered quietly.

A faint smile crossed Scott’s face, practiced enough that it almost looked genuine, “Right.”

He inclined his head toward the sound of the class.

“The first rule,” he said evenly, “is that every Sentinel comes home.”

The words escaped before he could stop them.

Silence swallowed the room.

Scott’s smile vanished, ‘thanks to him, his Sentinel not ever coming home.’

He cleared his throat once.

But before he could add more for the class, he could hear the door opened.

“Class dismissed.” Hank said, turned back seeing the professor talking to Scott before he left with the group for their next class session.

Charles Xavier did not dismiss Scott Summers lightly.

He stood at the back of the lecture theater long after the seventy-two trainees had left, listening to the slow fading echo of footsteps in the corridor outside. The room had a particular stillness once it was empty—chalk dust hanging in the air, chairs still slightly askew from where students had shifted in their seats, the faint scent of ink and paper and too much nervous energy finally released.

Scott remained at the podium.

Of course he did.

One hand rested on the edge of it, not gripping, not leaning, just… there. As if the fixed point of wood and metal was something he could quietly rely on in a world that no longer gave him many of those.

Charles watched him for a moment longer than necessary. Scott had gotten good at hiding it—the exhaustion, the strain, the way grief lived under his skin like a second pulse—but Charles had known him long enough to recognize the small tells. The fraction of a pause before he moved. The way his shoulders stayed just a little too rigid when the room emptied. The careful stillness that looked like control if you didn’t know what it cost to maintain.

“You can tell me you’re fine again,” Charles said at last, stepping down from the aisle toward the stage, his cane tapping softly against the floor. “But I would prefer honesty, if you have any left to spare.”

Scott gave a faint, practiced smile in response, the kind that had once convinced entire faculty boards and now barely fooled the air around him.

“I’m okay,” he replied.

“That wasn’t my question.”

Scott exhaled through his nose, turning slightly in Charles’s direction without truly orienting to him—his hearing did most of the work now, and both of them knew it. “Then you already know the answer.”

Charles stopped a few steps from the stage.

“Yes,” he said gently. “I do.”

The silence that followed was not uncomfortable. It never was between them. It was the kind of silence that carried weight instead of tension, familiarity instead of distance. Charles had spent years learning which silences Scott used to protect himself and which ones he used because there was simply nothing left to say.

“This class went well,” Charles added after a moment.

“It went according to plan,” Scott corrected.

“And the difference?”

Scott tilted his head slightly, as if considering how much truth to allow into the room.

“One suggests I was present,” he said quietly. “The other suggests I was adequate.”

Charles almost smiled at that. Almost.

“You were both,” he said. “Seventy-two Guides-in-training listened to you for over an hour without losing focus. That is not adequacy, Scott. That is leadership.”

Scott’s expression didn’t change, but something in his jaw tightened just slightly. Praise always landed awkwardly with him now, as if it had nowhere to settle.

“I’m not a leader anymore, I lost it when Jean died.” Scott said with a crack voice.

“I will say this only once,” Charles continued, softer now, “and then I will stop interfering in your lecture under the assumption that you will ignore me regardless.”

Scott’s posture shifted slightly, that got his attention.

Charles stepped closer to the edge of the stage, resting one hand lightly on the railing. “You are allowed to teach from the podium if it helps you,” he said. “You are allowed to structure your classes in whatever way keeps you steady. I will not ask you to do more than you are able.”

A pause.

“But?” Scott asked.

Then, carefully, “But I am going to ask you to do one thing for me.”

Scott frowned slightly.

“I don’t take requests.”

“I know.”

“That’s why you phrased it like that.”

Charles allowed himself a small sigh. “Yes.”

Another pause stretched between them, longer this time. Scott adjusted the strap of his satchel, the subtle movement betraying that he was listening more closely now.

“What is it?”

Scott’s question was quiet, almost resigned. He had known Charles long enough to recognize when the older man was circling a conversation instead of walking straight into it. Whatever he wanted to say, he had been weighing it since before the lecture ended.

Charles rested both hands on the handle of his cane, choosing his words with unusual care. “I’d like to ask one small favor of you,” he began. “The next time you stand in front of your students… don’t tell them that every Sentinel comes home.”

The request settled over the room with surprising weight.

Scott’s fingers tightened almost imperceptibly around the folded cane in his hand. He didn’t answer immediately. The silence stretched between them, broken only by the muffled sounds drifting in from the corridor outside—the scrape of chairs from another classroom, distant conversations, the academy continuing with its day as though the words Charles had spoken hadn’t shifted something fundamental.

When Scott finally spoke, his voice was softer than before.

“It’s a principle.”

Charles inclined his head. “It’s an ideal,” he corrected gently. “And ideals are important. They give people something to strive toward. But they’re only useful if the person teaching them still believes they’re possible.”

Scott lowered his head slightly.

The words landed exactly where Charles had intended them to—not as criticism, but as truth. Painful, unavoidable truth.

After nearly a year, Scott had become remarkably skilled at pretending he believed in things he no longer trusted. Hope. Recovery. Happy endings. He could lecture about them for hours, explain the theory behind them with practiced confidence, and watch his students write every word into their notebooks.

Believing them himself was another matter entirely.

“I don’t tell them lies,” Scott said after a long pause.

“I know you don’t.”

“I tell them what they’re supposed to aim for.”

“And what are you aiming for, Scott?”

The question wasn’t confrontational. Charles had asked it quietly, almost gently, which somehow made it harder to avoid. There was no accusation behind it, no expectation of the right answer. Only concern.

Scott searched for a response and found nothing.

His silence answered well enough.

Charles sighed almost inaudibly before continuing. “Then perhaps I should phrase my request differently.”

Scott looked in his direction, though the dark lenses of his glasses revealed nothing.

“I’m listening.”

“I’d rather you tell them something true.”

A faint, humorless smile touched Scott’s face.

“That,” he admitted, “is a dangerous request.”

“It usually is.”

For several moments neither of them spoke.

Outside the lecture hall, students hurried between afternoon classes, instructors called after stragglers, and somewhere in the distance someone laughed loudly enough to echo through the corridor. Life moved forward with effortless certainty, blissfully unaware that inside the empty theater two men stood discussing the weight of promises neither of them could undo.

Scott shifted his grip on the cane, unfolding it with a practiced click before letting it rest lightly against the floor.

“What truth would you have me teach them?”

Charles didn’t answer immediately.

Instead, he watched the young man who had once been one of the academy’s brightest Guides, now standing in the same lecture hall where he had spent the past eleven months teaching others how to build partnerships he no longer believed he deserved.

When Charles finally spoke, his voice was gentle enough to almost disappear into the quiet.

“Tell them that sometimes a Guide does everything right,” he said. “Sometimes they make every correct decision they can, and they still lose their Sentinel.”

Scott stopped breathing.

Not literally.

Just long enough that Charles noticed.

“And then,” Charles continued, “the hardest part isn’t surviving the loss.”

Scott’s hand tightened around the handle of his cane.

“It’s learning how to live afterward.”

The words lingered in the empty lecture hall.

Scott stared at nothing behind the dark lenses of his glasses, his expression carefully composed despite the emotion threatening to surface beneath it.

After what felt like an eternity, he let out a slow breath.

“That’s not what they want to hear.”

“No,” Charles agreed softly. “It isn’t.”

He took another step closer, his voice warm with a compassion that had never once felt like pity.

“But one day, one of those seventy-two Guides will lose a Sentinel.”

Scott’s shoulders stiffened.

“And when that day comes,” Charles continued, “they won’t need to remember that someone once promised every Sentinel comes home.”

His gaze remained fixed on Scott.

“They’ll need to remember that even after the worst day of their lives… they are still allowed to keep living.”

Scott closed his eyes.

Jean’s smile flashed through his memory with painful clarity.

A laugh. A promise.

A hand slipping from his grasp.

The darkness that had followed.

When he finally found his voice again, it was barely above a whisper.

“I don’t know how to teach that.”

Charles’ expression softened.

“I know.”

Another silence settled between them, gentler this time.

Charles realized there was nothing more to say. Some lessons couldn’t be explained. Some grief couldn’t be reasoned with.

He turned toward the doorway, his cane tapping softly against the polished floor.

“I’ll leave you to your evening,” he said.

Scott gave a small nod, still staring into the darkness that only he could see.

Charles let the silence linger before speaking again.

“The Sentinel’s name is James Howlett.”

Scott frowned almost immediately.

The name stirred something familiar, though not from experience. He had never met the man. He didn’t have to. During the past year, Logan’s reputation had reached every corner of the Institute, carried by mission reports, faculty meetings, and whispered conversations that always seemed to stop the moment Scott entered the room.

“…Logan,” he said quietly.

Charles nodded once.

“Yes.”

Scott fell silent.

He’d heard the stories.

Some of them painted Logan as the Sentinel every team wanted beside them when things went wrong—the one who would charge into impossible situations without a second thought, dragging teammates out alive even if it meant coming back bloodied himself. Others described a man who couldn’t follow orders to save his life, whose instinct was to run toward danger first and explain himself later. There were instructors who admired him, commanders who dreaded assigning him, and more than one Guide who had quietly admitted that trying to keep up with James Howlett was like trying to hold back an avalanche with bare hands.

The official reports weren’t much more helpful.

Exceptional combat instincts.

Repeated acts of insubordination.

Unusually strong protective responses.

Multiple failed Guide evaluations.

No permanent compatibility.

Every file Scott had read contradicted the one before it, yet they all ended with the same conclusion: reassignment.

It should have made the decision easy.

Scott had spent nearly a year avoiding Sentinels altogether. Teaching from behind a podium was one thing; stepping back into the life he’d lost with Jean was another entirely. The specialists still insisted his blindness would improve with time, that the damage from the shattered bond wasn’t permanent. Scott had stopped counting how many times he’d been told to be patient.

Patience had never brought anyone back.

He adjusted his grip on the handle of his cane, his thumb tracing the worn edge without thinking.

Logan.

The name sat uneasily in his mind.

Not because of the stories.

Stories were unreliable.

They grew sharper or softer depending on who told them.

It was the fact that every person who spoke about James Howlett seemed convinced they understood him, yet no two descriptions ever sounded like the same man.

Scott had learned, sometimes painfully, that people rarely fit inside the stories told about them.

Jean certainly hadn’t.

Neither had he.

He drew a slow breath.

Maybe Logan really was every bit as reckless as the reports claimed.

Maybe he was impossible to Guide.

Or maybe, beneath the mountain of commendations, disciplinary actions, and secondhand opinions, there was simply a Sentinel no one had bothered to understand.

Scott wasn’t sure which possibility troubled him more.

For the first time since Charles had spoken the name, he found himself wondering—not whether he should evaluate James Howlett… but what kind of man was hidden beneath the legend everyone seemed so eager to believe.