Log: Illyana and Scott

[x-snowflake.livejournal.com]

Scott and Illyana have a talk following this brief thread with Clarice.


Illyana crossed her arms over stomach in front of Mr Summers' office, trying not to feel like a petulant child. (If you're going to act like one, a pedantic voice told her severely, you're going to feel like one.) It wasn't that she exactly thought threatening Clarice was right, but surely it wasn't worth a visit to Mr Summers, who sounded mad and whose wrath Illyana was not particularly interested in experiencing. She sighed - no doubt dawdling would not be put up with - and knocked firmly on the door, trying not to display the feet-dragging reluctance she felt.

"Come in." It would be Illyana first, apparently, Scott thought as the door opened to reveal an ever-so-slightly sulky-looking blonde. "Shut the door and sit down," he said curtly.

Illyana swallowed a sharp "Yes, sir" , guessing it would not improve her situation, and did as he told, sitting with impeccable posture and a somewhat icy, walled expression. "Yes, Mr Summers?" she managed to say respectfully, though her tone did not hit a particularly cheerful note.

"I'm curious," Scott said. In fact, he was tired still, on edge, and hence more than a little cranky, but he could pretend he was curious. "I'm fairly sure that Doctor Grey sent out an email very much like the one I sent to certain team members from Saturday night. Asking for a certain amount of discretion on the part of those who were involved in a certain incident." He paused a beat. "Where is the discretion in starting a public fight on the journals regarding something that happened during the night in question? And I haven't even gotten started on the whole issue of making public threats."

"I never said anything about Saturday night," Illyana said indignantly, without thinking. "Clarice could have pulled my hair half an hour ago for all I said. It's not as though I got up and started talking about the hospital or the X-Men or anything like that." She stopped - brain catching up to her mouth, and realising how very much she was not making her case - and then added, in a very controlled tone, "Anyway, nobody said anything. I don't think it was sufficiently clear as to give up the secret." She stared at her hands intently, picking at fingernail and trying to control her expression, though she had a sinking feeling that her semi-brief indulgence in pettiness was going to get her a lot more than she'd bargained for.

"You don't think it was sufficiently clear," Scott said, biting off the end of each word. "Well, I guess that makes it all right, then. Never mind that if you had really wanted to argue with Clarice over who pulled whose hair, you could have knocked on her door and done it face-to-face. Never mind that a large number of people around here who don't know what happened on Saturday night are perfectly capable of drawing connections between ostentatiously vague references and other small oddities around here. Like sealed files. And the Blackbird taking off." He pushed himself up from his chair and went over to the window, moving very deliberately. "Never mind that it was completely unnecessary and you were asked not to discuss what happened."

Responses piled up in her mind, some along the lines of, Well, I didn't think that included hair-pulling! and, Nobody here is that smart, and others, darker, wanting to know why, exactly, the Queen of Limbo was letting this guy talk to her like she was five. Suddenly, though, she felt colour rising in her cheeks, betraying her steadfast emotionlessness in the silence after Scott finished speaking. If you're going to act like one, the severe voice in her head repeated (she belatedly recognised it as her survival instinct, disused from months spent not needing it). Illyana found herself nodding once, eyes still focused on her hands, and saying, tersely, "You're right." Sitting rigidly, she couldn't quite bring herself to apologise, but hoped it was kind of implicit anyway.

Scott looked back at her. "I think," he said very slowly, "that it would take a far stupider man than me not to know that you have things that you're dealing with that you're keeping to yourself because you need the space to deal with them in your own time." He paused, but went on when Illyana said nothing. "This is exactly what Alison wants us to give her. And if I'm right, you should understand that impulse... that need, and think before you fire up the journals the next time you want to score points off your classmates in a manner that might jeopardize that."

It would have been better if he'd yelled; yelling she could, and frequently did, tune out. Logic, though, logic made her ears burn with something that approached guilt. Not for threatening to hurt Clarice - that still didn't strike her as particularly shameful - but the way he put it was inarguably... inarguable. "All right," she said, voice dropping and almost approaching inaudible. A strange kind of dignity (how much could one have, when admitting one was wrong, she wondered) kept her very still. She didn't quite dare - out of her narrow former experience with male disciplinarians, or just out of plain embarrassment - look up. It wasn't as though she could refute the fact that she kept things - a lot of things - more than people knew - from the public eye. "I understand," she added stiffly, feeling as though something more was expected.

Scott eyed her for a moment, then nodded. "All right," he echoed her, his voice neutral. "Thank you for being willing to reexamine your behavior. I appreciate that, and I trust we won't have to have another discussion like this anytime soon." He came back and sat down. "Regarding the public threats on the journals - you're grounded for two weeks. Ordinarily, I would make it longer, but the events of the weekend have us all rather stressed, so I'll consider it mitigating circumstances."

"Grounded? For what?" Illyana blurted, eyes moving up sharply as though Mr Summers were joking - and immediately could have smacked herself, expression shifting from confusion to sheer self-directed horror. She'd been twenty seconds to getting to the door and out of this new, uncomfortable, entirely unwanted life experience. Being grounded wasn't even a punishment she considered a punishment. She knew the teachers hated that kind of thing. "Um. I mean." She couldn't find a way to talk herself out of it - I'm sorry, Mr Summers, did I mention I suffer from split personalities? - Can you pretend you didn't hear that? - and sat, eventually choosing to fall silent rather than gibber at him any longer.

"Grounding," Scott said, very patiently, with a perfectly straight face. "That pro forma thing we do when students transgress. We know it doesn't do much good, and you know it doesn't do much good, and really, condemning us to uninterrupted stretches of each other's company is as much a punishment for us at times as it is for you, but appearances have to be maintained."

Illyana eyed him warily. "Uh," she said, clearly both at a loss for words and, mentally, at least, stumbling. "Right. Of course. And, um - great idea." Just shut up, she told herself despairingly, you're definitely making it worse.

Scott decided to take pity on her. "You can go now, Illyana," he said. "Try to find some more peaceable way to entertain yourself, all right? Everyone's much happier that way."

"Yes, sir," she said gratefully and without irony, all but scrambling out of her seat. "Um. Thanks." She was out the door as quickly as though she'd teleported, looking equal parts appalled and mystified with herself.