xp_logs | LOG: [Scott, Haller] Why does campus orientation include the pub?

As promised, Haller is shown the campus by the headmaster, who shares a few choice words of advice. ...not much of it reassuring.

"I'm going to try not to read into the fact that we're ending the school tour at a pub," Jim said, pausing at the threshold to stamp the snow from his shoes.

"It was one of those weeks, last week," Scott murmured, doing the same, and then waving at Harry, who was, as always, at the bar. "Although given the quality of the Scotch at the wake, I'm surprised I'm not still hungover."

Jim sighed as he removed his coat, following Scott to one of the booths. "I'd heard about that. I'm sorry for the timing -- if it hadn't been so close to the start of term I'd have pushed back my flight a few days . . ."

Scott shook his head as he sat down, taking the seat that allowed him to keep his back to the corner and his eyes on the door, without thinking about it. "There wasn't any need," he said quietly. "To push the flight back, I mean. Better that you got here and started to get settled in, even if some of your fellow staff wasn't quite as welcoming as they should have been." He offered a brief smile. "Hence Harry's, I suppose. I figured the least I could do was buy you a beer."

Jim smiled faintly. "Don't worry about it. I do better with low-key arrivals anyway. And considering my past visits, I wasn't really expecting a particularly jubilant reception."

"Nonsense," Scott said wryly. "Blowing things up, setting them on fire... it's come to be standard operating procedure around the school these days. You were just a precursor."

"Ah, so when the kids ask I can say I wasn't out of control, just ahead of my time." Jim settled back in the booth, regarding the headmaster with curiosity. He smiled. "I hate to say it, but I was sort of relieved when the professor told me I wasn't the only one who blew out the occasional wall. I didn't even recognize you without the glasses." Jim raised a hand to his temple, indicating Scott's left eye. "That recent?"

"November. We were doing riot control in Seattle, and I got in the way of a Molotov cocktail," Scott said, not quite lightly. "Still trying to get the blasts back under control."

Jim blinked, then nodded. "The G8. Charles mentioned you and some of the students were there." He could remember seeing the news footage in a bar in Edinburgh. There was something disorienting about seeing such an event televised, both for the open display of mutant powers and the unreality of the riot itself. Jim shook his head and forced the memory aside. "You'll get a handle on it," he said, and felt confident in doing so. He raised his right hand, the back and side of which still bore the faint red mottling of past burns, and gave Scott another grin. "I'm not really the person to talk to about control. At least you're immune to your own powers."

Scott smiled as Harry brought over a pair of beers. "There is that. Although I tell you, my energy-controllers - that's one of the classes I've been teaching - are just insufferable. Apparently it gives them all kinds of pleasure to see me going through the same thing they are."

"At least they're paying attention, even if it is because of schadenfreude." The beer was mellower than what he'd become accustomed to, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Jim was grateful Scott didn't favor the chewable sort. He'd had enough Guinness to last a lifetime. "Charles suggested I consider a class or two on psionics if I do well this semester, but I don't know. Treating patients is one thing, but trying to teach -- I'm not sure I'm the best role model."

"Don't rush into anything," Scott said with a bleak sort of humor. "The last new psi we imported was a great teacher - until he burned out and decided he wasn't doing it anymore. The kids are terribly hard on the will to do good, at times."

"I've come to both acknowledge and accept the joys of pacing myself," Jim assured him with a smile. "Charles suggested I take up counselor as a way to ease off my last job without going completely cold-turkey. Apparently he thinks it's important I have contact with people who aren't comatose, emotionally traumatized, or completely withdrawn from reality. Though I'm starting to suspect there will be less of these than I originally thought."

"We have emotional trauma to spare, yes. Although lately it's been the staff a little more than the kids. You should have been here this fall, though." Scott paused, then lifted his beer. "Scratch that, actually. No one wanted to be here this fall."

Jim narrowly avoided snorting his beer. "I don't know what I'm laughing about," he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. "I'm the idiot who just signed on for the new year. How many counselors have there been so far?"

"Uhh... a few," Scott temporized. "Wanda will be delighted to have someone to take over for her, although she was focusing more on helping with college applications and the like anyway. She's also trying to do four jobs at once, though."

"I'm not much help with anything beyond the individual head," Jim admitted, shaking his own. "Unless any of the students are trying to decide on a mental institution in the United Kingdom, that is, but I'm hoping my presence will preclude that." He eyed Scott over his beer in a suspicious manner. "Was that 'a few' as in 'I don't remember right now,' or 'a few' as in 'if he doesn't already know, two days before the start of term is too late'?"

"Well, you know. They all start to blur into one another after a while..." Scott gazed at Jim. "You're not buying this, are you?"

Jim raised his glass and eyed the other man through the amber liquid. "Let's put it this way: you may not need to worry that I'll pick up too many stray thoughts, but you're also not that great a liar." He sighed and lowered the beer. "Just tell me if it's more or less than six."

"Less than six." Scott paused. "Four, including Wanda."

"Well, that's not . . . so bad." Or so he was telling himself, along with a strict advisory against asking about the time-span of said turnover. "How many are still around?" He thought about the tone of Scott's voice and added, "And coherent?"

"Uhhh... two... and a half, maybe? No, three." Pete was coherent. Just subdued. Which was worrying.

"I get the feeling I might want to talk to them, if I can." He was also getting the feeling the professor was just a little bit evil. It made sense that Jim should take on the position given his area of expertise, but this was starting to sound suspiciously like trial by fire. It was beginning to dawn on him that "normal" problems might be every bit as wearing as the sort he was used to dealing with.

"Even ordinary problems are life or death from the inside," he said aloud, frowning slightly. "I forget that sometimes."

"Well, the fewer problems, ordinary or not, that come to the point where I've got to deal with them, the better," Scott said, taking a sip of his beer. "I don't actually like being Captain Fuckwad."

Jim blinked at him. "I'll take that to mean either your job is stressful or you were the one to pick the losing codename out of the bag. Though with the eyepatch it does give you a nice pirate motif to work with."

"My job... I can't do the real job," Scott said regretfully, "not really. Not right now, at least. You'd think that would make me even more eager to do the headmaster stuff."

Jim chuckled. "That might have something to do with the fact that you referred to the team stuff as your 'real' job," he suggested gently. "I don't know if that was a Freudian slip or not, but either way, it seems to be where your priorities are."

"Is that bad of me?" Scott asked, chagrined. "It just seems like... well, they're here, and more often than not lately... thankfully, they're safe. The kids, I mean."

Jim shook his head with a grin. "There's nothing wrong with being more interested in one type of job than the another. It's just personal preference." He shrugged, eyes scanning the framed poster over Scott's head. "And sometimes it's hard enough just doing what you want to be doing. I -- well, I've known for a while now that I want to work with kids. I knew going into it that it would be hard because I'd been through it myself, and I was okay with that. It's something someone has to -- someone should do, and I can do it. But we've been doing it for the last two years, and by the end I just felt so . . . tired." He rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably. "It's not that I hated it, or lost sight of why I started doing it in the first place, but it wears you down." He smiled in a self-deprecating way. "I don't know how Charles does it without burning out, but I'm hoping it'll rub off."

Scott tilted his head a little, noticing the odd pronoun shift. "Wears you down... good way to put it," he said with a sigh. "I keep hoping that's reversible. Not that I ever related well with the kids anyway, but... yeah. And Charles is a freak of nature in the best possible sense of the phrase."

"One which all other freaks should aspire to," Jim agreed, grinning. "Once when I was confessing to second thoughts about my line of work he pointed out that it's difficult to keep perspective on something when you hit a rough patch and still spend all of your time immersed in it. It doesn't get any better if you don't have time to catch up and recover. It's mental and emotional exhaustion."

"I've had a chance to stop and recover," Scott said, then gestured at the eye patch. "Because I was more or less actually recovering. And I suppose that's what I keep coming back to... the work I do at the school needs doing. The teaching, I'm still very fond of. The disciplinarian crap..." He sighed. "I need to talk to Ororo more, see how she seems to deal with it with such grace."

Jim had met Ororo; she'd stayed behind with the students while most of the staff were at the funeral, and she'd greeted him with a calm, if tired, smile. "Some people are gifted," Jim said. "And then some just bottle it up inside until they quietly explode. The actual level of frustration is about the same." His blue and brown eyes crinkled at Scott's expression, though he managed to keep a straight face. "But I gather that's not news to you."

Scott looked thoughtfully at Jim. "If I shared a nicely unspecific, not-so-hypothetical case with you, could I get your thoughts on it? The student involved isn't a student any longer."

Jim nodded. "Unspecific and not-hypothetical is fine. I could use a good example of what I'm getting myself into, anyway."

"You have a student who is... empathetic. In a functional way. He's had a terrible background - abuse, mistreatment, that's led to no sense of right and wrong when it comes to the use of his power. He does..." Scott sighed, but forced himself to go on. "A number of very atrocious things. Some intentional, some not. It necessitates actually inhibiting his powers while he deals with the ramifications. A number of very atrocious things are done TO him. Eventually," Scott said, feeling a bit of a pang, "he starts to get himself under control, develop a more healthy attitude. Then his... girlfriend, with whom he shares a bond that goes beyond both the physical and the transitory emotional, rips that bond out by the root and leaves him sobbing on the floor."

Jim winced at the summary. He'd dealt with the occasional low-level empath, and he had a feeling he knew one of the contributing factors. "Are his powers controllable? By him, I mean."

"Not initially. We - I say we even though I had nothing to do with it - managed to teach him, to an extent. But what happened..." Scott shook his head. "It just broke his desire, maybe even his ability to live according to any kind of ethical norm. Just before he graduated, he used his powers on another student, one who was in a great deal of emotional turmoil at the time. It was one of the contributing factors that drove this other boy to attempt suicide."

Scott paused to take a sip of his beer. "I was the one who had to talk to him, in the end," he said heavily. "And I lost it. He was two weeks away from graduation, and he told me that I could feel free to expel him, and he'd go out into the world and use his powers to get what he wanted anyway. I had to threaten him, with the team. Told him that if he didn't promise not to do anything like that again while he was under our roof - because he didn't bat an eye to hear that the other boy had tried to kill himself - that I would expel him, and keep track of him as a potential threat."

Jim had gone very still at the mention of the suicide attempt, frowning. A projective empath. I've never worked with a projective empath. If what he'd encountered with the few he had met was any indication, that was a blessing. He sighed and glanced down at his drink. "From how the conversation started, I assume he didn't."

"No, he made the promise. But told me that I'd just proven yet again to him that we're all about force, and forcing our way of things on people... forcing them into the mold we want." Scott's shoulders slumped a little. "It was a conflict, between me and the me that wears leathers. He was still one of my students. We still owed him... something more, I suppose, to put it bluntly. But I looked in his eyes, saw the absolute lack of any sort of remorse for what he'd done, and it was like he was right back to where he was at the beginning of his time here. Like nothing we'd done had made any difference... except worse, because he HAD learned better, but had gotten too banged around by the winds of fate to care anymore." And that wasn't even touching the issue of Alphonso. "There was a lot more to it," Scott said softly, "but I was the one who had to look him in the eyes and make the decision that it was over, that he didn't get the effort or the understanding anymore."

Jim studied his beer for a long moment before finally raising it to his mouth for another drink. "I think," Jim said slowly, "that I understand one of the reasons Charles asked me to take the job. The student body's gotten big enough that the staff has to specialize now. Try to take on everything, and you end up accomplishing nothing. Or at least, the successes are so mixed with the failures that it seems like that's the case. That's what got to me, in the end." He smiled faintly at Scott. "That student -- I can speak to him, if he'll agree to it. If he's anything like the empaths I've worked with, and with as traumatic a past as you say, then I believe he could use my help. He may not accept it, but I'll extend the offer. As myself, not a representative of the school. I think Charles would be willing to support me on this."

"Best to go through Charles on that," Scott said with a nod. "He and Leonard are the only ones who are keeping in contact with the young man in question on a regular basis." Scott shrugged again. "I think part of the problem, as well, is how much more active the other side of our operations has been. There were a couple of months this summer we were burning through jet fuel like there was no tomorrow."

Jim laughed, a little guiltily. "I was thinking of asking about that, actually. Not on a regular basis, of course, but I don't usually get the chance to use my telepathy for anything other than treating patients, and that's -- right now that's not my primary concern. But I've participated in a few search-and-rescue operations in the past, and they were . . ." he smiled a little, embarrassed. "Let's just say that therapy is a long process, and there's something to be said for instant gratification. Every once in a while."

"I'd be happy to talk with you about it more," Scott said, and meant it. "Um, back at the mansion, obviously... but we can always use more people with your particular gifts." He caught himself scratching at the scars around the eyepatch, and forced himself to stop.

"I'm a little -- handicapped," Jim admitted, grateful for the unreserved sincerity in Scott's reply, "but I would like to help. If I can."

"The will to do that's the important thing. The how usually takes care of itself." Scott looked a bit embarrassed at his own choice of words. "Or, you know, we work with you on the how until it's second-nature. Either/or."

"Thank you. I appreciate it. Really." Jim feigned scratching his forehead to give himself an excuse to drop his gaze. Something about the man's consideration made him feel acutely awkward.

There was something oddly familiar in the reaction, a hesitancy that made Scott smile a bit. "It's not all bad, you know," he said conversationally, deliberately shifting the subject. "We haven't had a demon invasion for... over a year, actually. I think. They all kind of blur into each other after a while."

Jim snorted. "I find myself looking forward to demons that don't exist solely inside of someone's head. That can't be a good sign."

"Very bad sign," Scott said sagely, saluting him with the beer before he took another sip. "Although really, as of late, all of our demons have been that type. They're kind of easier to deal with when they're right out there all scaley and overtly evil."

"That does sound nice. --Damn." Jim leaned over and let his forehead thump against the tabletop. "'Why yes, a demon invasion sounds like a pleasant change of pace.' Oh yeah. It was definitely time for that sabbatical."

"You came here for a sabbatical? Foolish, foolish man," Scott joked. "They eat people, you know." He paused a beat. "Not the demons. The kids."

"Yes, they do." Jim lifted his head and smiled. "But we love them anyway."

"Yeah," Scott said, drawing the word out almost in a drawl, "we do." He looked up at Jim with a subdued grin. "You'd never know I was a newlywed, would you? Sounding this sour..."

"No one ever said jaded on life meant jaded on love." Jim smiled serenely. "Or so I hear. When did you get married? This winter?"

"Over Christmas. Very suddenly. We were actually supposed to be getting married in October, but then there were kidnappings," Scott said helpfully.

"There's always something," mused Jim. He dredged his memory for what he remembered of Charles' occasional updates over the past few months. "It's -- you married Miss Grey, didn't you?"

"Jean, yes," Scott said with a more natural smile. "Doctor Grey-Summers, now."

He couldn't help laughing at the correction. "I'm going to have to get used to using the staff's first names," Jim said, shaking his head. "Congratulations. I think she was already in med-school by the time I got here. Not sure . . . that period's a little hazy." He smiled again, trying to ignore the nagging suspicion he was starting to blush. "And even if I'd had the chance, I was too nervous to talk to her."

"Mmm. I sympathize. The first time I saw her, I fell down the stairs," Scott said, perfectly serious. "She still occasionally teases me about it."

Jim coughed. "Anyway, congratulations . . . again." Surely the awkwardness would go away at some point. Surely. "Did you at least have a decent honeymoon? Demon and kidnapping-free?"

"... we're holding off on the honeymoon," Scott said a bit sheepishly. "The plan is March break. Which means we might get to it by next Christmas."

"It's good that you're looking at it realistically. Winter-vacations are highly underrated." He smiled. "But I'll do my best to divert the student crises come March. Providing my own head hasn't exploded by that point, that is."

"We've never had any exploding heads. Sprained brains, yes, but no actual exploding heads." Scott gave Jim a thoughtful look. "That's not reassuring, is it?"

Jim waved dismissively. "At this point I think my brain can handle a mere sprain. Maybe even without the flying furniture and random fires this time."

"Oh God." Scott suddenly sunk his face into his hands. "Now I have this mental image of you and Nate competing for the title of Sprained-Brain Champion of the World..."

"Nate?"

"Nathan. Moira's husband. You'll meet him, I'm sure... he plays the recluse but he's not very good at it. Although," Scott conceded with a sigh, "he might be putting more effort into it this week. It was his best friend whose funeral we were attending."

"Ah. I . . . think I remember him." He had a vague memory of a very large man from his days at the Research Center, remembered primarily because of occasionally-gleaned staff gossip concerning his relationship with Moira. Jim hadn't seen Moira since before her marriage; he'd been looking forward to meeting her husband and daughter. It had slipped his mind after he'd learned of the funeral.

"I'll give him some time before subjecting him to my presence, I think," Jim said, mentally kicking himself for his forgetfulness. "I imagine he has enough to deal with at the moment."

"You'll have to meet Rachel, their daughter. Loveliest and scariest little psionic baby in the whole world," Scott said with a chuckle, but didn't deny that giving Nathan a little space might be a good idea. "She decided just before Christmas that she was going to take up flying. At five months old."

Jim raised his eyebrows. "The professor mentioned she'd already manifested psi powers, but he left out the detail about flying. That must lend new terror to parenthood." He'd been curious ever since he'd heard Moira's daughter had been born with functioning telepathy, but he hadn't really considered the ramifications of the telekinesis. He very definitely needed to pay Moira a visit.

"It lends whole new levels to babyproofing, let me put it that way. I know Nathan blames Jean for teaching Rachel how to levitate - this innocent little baby is a shameless mimic, and Jean spent a little too much of the week after I proposed floating around the house."

"We'll try not to set a bad example, then," Jim promised, chuckling into his beer. "Once again, need I mention how grateful I am that I've stopped setting things on fire?"

Again with the odd pronoun shift. "Me too," Scott said, "because Cain would probably sacrifice you to the lawn gods if you lit his lawn on fire. He's very fond of his lawn."

Jim gave him an aggrieved look. "That was only once. And it wouldn't have been nearly as bad if not for the wind."

"You realize you're going to fit in just fine," Scott pointed out. "There's a very large and amiable club of People Who Make Things Go Boom. I think they should give you honorary membership."

"Ah, those days are long gone. Now I'm only eligible for the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award." Jim regarded his now-empty glass and sighed. "Beer kills brain cells. Wonder why I never thought to try that when I was a student. Think of all the property damage that could have been averted by a sixpack."