Haroun and Paige, DR session

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Paige has her afternoon Danger Room session, and runs into Haroun after. Her paranoia takes a nasty turn, and he gets a full dose of it. Even with him dealing with her in strides, she still manages to make a rather large mess of the situation.


God-dammit, Paige, can't you do anything right? While the chirping noise the Danger Room had made indicated she had completed her objective, today it just seemed to be mocking her, reminding her that it had only been because her muscles moved before she could think. She could still hear it, exiting the locker rooms and pulling her sleeves over her knuckles, and just resisted reaching up to dig the heel of her hand over her right ear, where it seemed to be coming from.

She rounded the corner to find Haroun standing in the doorway to the observation room, looking at her, and Paige's jaw tensed. He'd been watching her practice. Trying to find anything they could use against her, were they? Probably weren't even going to look at her numbers, the fact that any time a trainee increased the number of DR sessions to match hers, she immediately added at least a handful more to her own schedule. No, they wouldn't look at numbers, at statistics, they were just looking for that one time she failed; and since refused to do that, it seemed flinching would have to do.

"Did you get what you need?" she asked coldly, stopping in front of him with her eyes already gone to slits.

Haroun quirked an eyebrow as Paige went immediately for the hostility. "Perhaps." he said noncommittally. "I'll need a self-evaluation on this run, as usual. Think you can have it in my inbox by Thursday?" he asked pleasantly. "And I'd like to use it for the next Bull Session, if you wouldn't mind. I think everyone could learn something from your approach to this sim."

His cheerful reply only earned him a slight flaring of her nostrils as she fought to not bare her teeth. This fake niceness, this pretending... "I always have my logs in by the next day. Or is that another thing you'd just like to forget? I mean, embarrassing me in front of my fellow trainees by pointing out my faults, I could see, but I didn't think of you as the sort who needed their job of coming down on me made easier," she accused, eyes flashing angrily, the ringing in her ears growing louder and the itching beneath her skin getting to be nearly impossible not to react to. "It's becoming terribly obvious how bad a judge of character I am these days."

"I didn't say anything about embarrassing anyone." he added, still keeping up the mild front. "You sure didn't hold back when it was time to analyze Vision or Hydrant's runs." he pointed out. "Why not extend to them the same courtesy? And I know full-well you have been good - to the point of obsession - about getting your self-critiques in the very next day. And I wanted people to see your approach to the open-field problem. Perhaps they could learn something from your approach, which is why we do the Bull Sessions to begin with, remember?"

"It does them no good if I play pretend, as if I don't see their faults," she replied pointedly, an obvious jab. "But I never do it publicly; I write up my observations for them so they may have the time to process them in private." Paige could tell she should be backing off now, some part of her, but the itching was only getting worse, and for some reason it was all his fault. "And if I'm obsessive, which I'm not, it's only because people like you make it impossible for me to be anything else."

"Is that so? I'd love to hear the logic behind this one, Husk. Explain it to me?" he said, casually leaning against the wall and preparing mentally to get bitched at for at least fifteen minutes or so. Man, I wish I could record this stuff. Comedy gold! he thought. "And you're supposed to do it publicly. That's the POINT - to learn to take criticism as well as praise, in addition to getting ideas out on the table to be explored. Were you not paying attention to the Gold and Blue Bull Session that we taped for you trainees?" he asked with another quirked eyebrow.

"How dare you," Paige snarled, her hands flexing by her sides. "How dare you insinuate that I haven't been listening. Make less of what I do, as if I'm just passing through and might do this whole trainee thing on the side. I am fully committed, I do not make stupid mistakes such as not listening." His smirk, which she'd been looking for, the end to this charade, only managed to make her more angry. "I am good at what I do here. I should be; I work hard for it. But it's never enough, is it? Some guy walks in with the ability to throw cars with his brain, or some gal who has these supreme jeep tinkering skills, and somehow I'm right back at the bottom. I've been here working my ass off, being the best at everything I do, and all you can do is come up with one more reason that I'll never be good enough. One more thing for me to drive myself into the ground over, so maybe I can meet your unreachable expectations. Why don't you get it over with? Why won't you just tell me I'm not good enough?!"

"I'm still waiting for some logic. I'm getting a lot of woe-is-me crap and a lot of How-Dare-You, but I'm not hearing any logic. You're supposed to be the smart one, Paige, think it through." he said gently. "Yes, you work hard. Too hard. But you know what? Results count, excuses don't. And I'm hearing a lot of excuses."

"Are you even listening?" Paige shrieked, tossing her hand out in a violent gesture before the pain in her ear got bad enough that she had to cover it, trying to pretend she was brushing back her hair. "I have the results! I run every morning! I weight train, every morning. I take a full class load at the college for an Engineering student, which, I might add, I am not, as well as take classes here. I work on evaluations and all the mental exercises you give me, every day. I do either a DR session or a physical exercise, every day. I do all this, as well as my other normal, teenaged type nonsense, and I do it all exceptionally well. These are not excuses; they are results. I don't know what else you want!"

Haroun smiled. Poor Paige. She still didn't get it. "How about you listen to us. Hear the words that we are saying, instead of just nodding and smiling and adding a note to your Day-Planner." he said with a pleasant smile. "We told you to cut back. You're not cutting back. You tacked more on. Anyone can see that you're flaming out right in front of us."

Paige cried out what could only be described as a cry of agony, the same sort of panic, itching, burning running through her. "I did what you asked. I cut down my hours. You told me I wasn't good enough. So I trained harder. You told me I train too hard. You don't know what you want, so instead you tell me to listen to words you haven't even said!" Her eyes shifted, almost within themselves, all at once searching for something and narrowing her vision until she saw only Haroun. There was a crash as her fist made contact with the wall, a hair from his shoulder, and she wheeled back, turning away. "I don't know what you want anymore!"

As a testament to Haroun's long training in the martial arts, he didn't even flinch as Paige punched the wall next to his shoulder. "And your childish little display there is not helping your case any." he commented dryly. "You are choosing not to understand what we are telling you. Have you ever heard the phrase "Train smarter, not harder"? No, of course you haven't." he said lightly. "The only question as to your dedication is concern over your surplus of it."

Bloodied fist shaking, Paige froze in her retreat to slowly face him, blue eyes gone to a terrible, darker shade. "You think I would choose this?" she asked, just as deliberately as her turn.

Haroun nodded. "Yes, I believe you would." he said to her plainly. "And you have. Results count, excuses don't." he added. "That's what it all boils down to in the end."

"Go to hell." If he couldn't be bothered to see that she had the results without an excuse in sight, if he so plainly wanted to play some messed up Zen warrior role that he wasn't even going to listen to her, wasn't going to answer her one, single question, and instead attack her with accusations... no. Paige shook her head in disgust and headed for the exit.

"You know what you have to do, Paige." he called out after her. He stayed put in the same spot against the wall that he'd been in the entire time. "If you want to be an X-Man, you have to learn to take orders. Not take them the way you want to take them, not just take the parts you like, but all of them."

Part of her wanted to stay, to storm back to him and make him understand, to prove to him that she could take anything they threw at her and was, but looking down at her arm showed a streak of blood soaking through her shirt. In that hesitation, the door slid shut behind her with an ominous thud.