Scott and Cain, Friday

[x-cyclops.livejournal.com]

Scott has a little accident. Fortunately, the only thing in the way is a poor, innocent wall. Cain arrives to survey the damage and decides that Scott needs some practice. Outside.


He was going to sit right here on the stairs, Scott thought, one hand covering his good eye. (It was very tightly closed, but he figured that the more protection, the better.) He was going to sit here, with his eye closed, until someone found him and promised to bring him something, anything, a fucking ruby-quartz monocle if need be, so that this wouldn't happen again.

The fringe benefit of keeping his eye closed was that he didn't have to look at what he'd just done to the wall. The student who'd startled him had scrambled away, saying something in a high-pitched, terrified-sounding voice about getting help. There weren't any moans of the injured or anything, and no one was announcing that he'd just killed their best friend, so clearly there hadn't been anyone walking by outside. Small mercies.

Peering through the hole in the wall, Cain kept his hands laced behind his back, ducking his head in to look at the damage. There weren't any burns, nothing was melted or warped. It was like someone had fired a bullet through the wall - a nice mostly clean hole the size of a dinner plate. Drywall was still cracking and falling around the exit hole, though. And the window into the east lawn had shattered into a million little pieces.

Shaking his head, Cain walked around the corner to lean over Scott, making a scolding 'tsk' noise. "Lemme guess, you were just cleaning it and it went off?"

The sound of Cain's footsteps had been unmistakable, even before he'd spoken. "Very funny," Scott said, and what had been supposed to come out as a growl sounded more tight and anxious than anything else. "No one was in the way, right? I just... I came around the corner and one of the kids surprised me."

"No one but a poor innocent thankfully-non-loadbearing wall," Cain answered. "Suppose I could read you the riot act about not using your funky eye beams indoors, and believe me, I've been waiting to. But man, you look all pathetic like that. Stand up," he ordered. "You probably know this place blindfolded anyway, right now you're blocking the stairs."

Scott swallowed the immediate retort and lowered the hand covering his eye reluctantly. Keeping the eye closed, he stood up, reaching out to the wall beside him, mentally reviewing distances and stepping carefully away from the stairs.

"I'll... come back and help fix it," he said, already calculating the easiest way to get down to the infirmary. "Just have to figure out... something, to cover my eye first."

Placing a hand on the back of Scott's neck firmly, Cain steered him away from the stairs, towards the door out into the back yard. "Like hell. We keep harping on the kids here to get confidence in their powers to get control. So get your scrawny ass out to the woodshed. We're gonna get this thing of yours under control," Cain said with a shrug, "or I'm gonna get an entire winter's worth of kindling split."

Balking was not an option. He had a sudden mental image of Cain picking him up by the scruff of the neck and dragging him off to the woodshed anyway if he tried. Rather stubbornly, however, Scott kept his eye closed as they walked.

Walking out across the back lawn, Cain pointed Scott in the general direction of the woodpile, just to be safe. "Okay, just 'cause you ain't got people in front of you don't mean you still ain't gotta learn how to control your beam thingy. You keep blowing holes in the walls, Chuck's just gonna smile at you and offer you tea. Me, I'm going to get a mite pissed off if this becomes a habit." Unseen, he smiled widely, thoroughly enjoying the chance to boss around his team leader. "So open your damn eye already."

Scott heard the smile, and tried not to grind his teeth. But Cain wouldn't be telling him to open his eye if there was anyone in front of him, he tried to reason with himself. Unless Cain himself was in front of him, which hardly matter, since he'd probably shrug off the optic blast even if it did hit him.

"Fine." Scott took a deep, slightly shaky breath and opened his eye.

Nothing.

"Damn it." Scott told himself to stop clenching his jaw. It did not at all feel good, when he did that. "This is driving me crazy."

Reaching into his shirt pocket, Cain pulled out a small chunk of what looked like stained glass, reflecting crimson in the light. Scratched and pitted, he'd pulled it out of the concrete monorail pillar after Scott's injury. He held it up, watching the light reflect through it.

"Funny, ain't it?" he said in a far-away voice. "Little piece of red gem that holds everything together. Break it, and everything changes." Casually, he flipped the shard like a coin over to Scott. "So y'ain't got your crutch anymore. You don't need it. It's like if Chuck got his legs fixed and got out of that chair tomorrow, you wouldn't expect him to be runnin' wind sprints on Monday."

Scott caught the shard - and then stared at the piece of ruby quartz, wondering at just how easily he'd done that. Cain was standing on his good side, true, but still... "It's really kind of ironic," he said, without thinking about what he was saying. "I've taught the energy-projectors' class for all these years. I know all the theories about how you control something like my optic blasts... blast, I guess, now. And yet I went along, all that time, never thinking they applied to me."

"Way I understand it," Cain drawled, "you're like a fire hydrant. If you can't stop the flow at the source, you slap on a hose with a nozzle. Your visor. Well, you done gone and busted the hose, so now somehow you figured out how to turn the water main on and off. Well," he gestured to a piece of wood sitting on a nearby stump, "turn it on."

Scott glanced at Cain, and then back at the piece of wood, trying not to let the frustration show on his face. Just turn it on... sure. The piece of wood sat there, almost smugly, as Scott stared at it.

The problem was, he had absolutely no idea how to 'turn it on'.

He thought about the burning sensation that had preceded each 'slip', trying to remember just how it had felt. It had only been momentary, back in the hallway. There'd been more of a sensation of pressure, suddenly and abruptly relieved...

He was always telling his students to visualize. Scott bit his lip and imagined an optic blast disintegrating the piece of wood. Nothing. Damn it....

Cain tried his best not to laugh at the faces that Cyclops, fearless leader of the X-Men, was making. "Okay," he finally chortled, "if you can't blow it up, maybe you'll freeze our enemies in their tracks with those constipated faces. At this rate, you're liable to crap yourself before you get it working."

Scott's head jerked back around in Cain's direction, to deliver the glare that was the only appropriate response to a comment like that.

He wound up delivering a little bit more than that.

Not expecting the blast, Cain was caught rocking on his heels, and knocked flat onto his back by the burst of crimson energy. Blinking to clear his vision, he sat up to where Scott was standing, dumbfounded look on his face, about twenty feet away from where he'd been. Glancing at the furrow he'd made in the lawn, Cain's face screwed up, then he erupted into laughter.

"Holy shit!" he exclaimed, rocking up to his feet and brushing his shirt off. "You hit harder than Rasputin! Come on, try it again!"

Scott gaped at him. He'd just... and Cain had... for a full five seconds, all he could think about was how focused the blast had been. He'd seen the narrowness of the beam as it hit Cain, and how...

Then it struck him that his eye was still open. Scott opened his mouth for the obligatory 'like hell I will!' - and then closed it again. Cain was laughing. And you couldn't hurt Cain... right? Scott narrowed his eye, just a little, trying to remember how it had felt...

*ZAK!*

It felt a lot like getting blasted with a fire hose, Cain decided. He halfway registered the blast ripping a sleeve off his flannel shirt, and shrugged it away. "'s a lot different than Alison's," he remarked. "Lasers kinda tingle a little, you've got more like... it's a big punch. Like a bullet, really."

"It's... concussive force," Scott said a bit distractedly, rubbing at his temple. The ache in the injured side of his face was throbbing more fiercely, after those additional two blasts. Too much pressure on the broken bones? "I remember Moira giving me the explanation about why I don't actually light things on fire with them, years ago..."

"Moira's gonna have your ass if you don't head down to medlab and show her how you're controlling this," Cain said, the twinge of responsibility rearing its head. He jerked a shoulder in the general direction of the mansion. "Go on, get. Figure out how you're gonna get this under control and get back in the saddle."

Cain had a point. He needed to do this again under controlled conditions, have Moira help him figure out just how he was doing it... "I'll come back and help fix the wall," he said, then noticed Cain's shirt. "Um. Sorry about the shirt."

Looking down and tearing the flannel overshirt away, Cain gave a quick bark of laughter, then walked over to Scott. "Listen. I know you ain't Chuck. You try and be, but you're not. But I see a hell of a lot of him in you, and while that might turn on a little light of pride in your heart, it's like a goddamn knife in me. Sometimes you're too damn stupid to give up." He sneered, gesturing at the bandages on Scott's face. "He loses his legs. You lose an eye. You keep going. One day it's gonna get you killed, fighting the good fight. Doing the right thing. So goddamn noble, and every time I see it, it's reminding me of what I ain't." Reaching one large hand out, he shoved Scott gently in the shoulder, pushing him towards the mansion.

"Go on," he repeated quietly. "You get yourself fixed, and you come back from this, and you lead us. Because as much as I might hate you for it, you're one of the few who's got it in you to do it. And god help us, we need you. Now go see Moira, before I decide I owe you a punch or two."