Scott and Haller, Monday morning

[x-cyclops.livejournal.com]

Scott gets a videotape in the mail from Jean. Scott snaps and trashes his suite. Jim is the first one to respond to the noise, and finds out what happened. He manages to get Scott out of the wreckage and into a guest suite, even if he's not able to do much about the broken heart.


As with most of the places he'd lived and worked in the past decade, property damage was always a potentiality at Xavier's, but Jim was startled to hear breaking noises issuing from a suite on the staff level. Not just the staff level, he realized as he darted down the corridoor, but from the headmaster's suite.

An attack? he wondered, skidding to a stop in front of Scott's door. There were still crashing noises emanating from the room. He reached out to the doorknob, then stopped. No. Don't jump to conclusions. Cautiously, Jim unwound his defenses and ventured a probe, just enough to determine any sign of intrusion or attack.

What he found was Scott, and Scott alone. There was no trace of psychic assault, but the mind he touched was anything but quiet. Anger, and grief, and betrayal, and a sick, gnawing heartache so deep it cut at the core of his being. Jim terminated the probe, and beyond the closed door something shattered.

Cathartic destruction. He remembered what that was like. Jim withdrew his hand, and waited.

The noise within ceased. Jim counted to ten to make certain it was over, then, softly, knocked on the door.

Scott was sitting on the floor in front of the couch when the knock came. The coffee table was... over there, in a few pieces, and the couch had a hole in it. He wondered if any of the walls had any holes in them. A few optic blasts had slipped out.

Walls or floors. Given what he'd done to the bed.

The knock came again, and Scott swallowed, scrubbing at his face with his hands, trying to wipe away... what? "Go away."

He remembered what that was like, too. "It's David," Jim said, making no move to open the door. "And right now I think going away isn't in anyone's best interest. May I come in?"

David. If he let David in, David would be the only person he had to let in. No one else would have to see, because they would assume David was handling it. Scott gave a cracked laugh, rubbing at the scars on his face repeatedly, almost hard enough to bruise. "If you can get the door open."

He had to push. There was debris from what had probably been a bookshelf blocking the doorway, but he managed to wedge it open far enough to squirm through. Jim closed the door behind him, and then, mindful of how he'd always felt, locked it.

"I'm keeping a mind on the hall. We won't be disturbed if you don't want to be." Jim took a seat on the floor across from Scott. There wasn't really anywhere else to sit, anyway. He crossed his legs in front of him, hands in his lap. "What happened?" he asked.

Scott looked involuntarily in the direction of the shattered TV. Amazingly, the VCR was intact, and his good eye blurred with tears again. He took a deep, shuddering breath, nearly choking on the anger.

"Jean. Sent me a videotape."

"Of what?" Jim's tone was soft, neutral. Scott was upset, and from the emotions he'd gleaned he had an idea of why, but the words needed to be said. If they weren't, they would only stay in Scott's mind. And when we're in pain, our mind can be our own worst enemy.

"Of her in bed." His jaw tried to lock on the next words, but he forced them out. "With Bobby."

That he hadn't been expecting, but Jim managed to keep his surprise to barely a flicker of the eyes. His surprise wasn't the issue right now. "I'm sorry," he said quietly.

"You're sorry. That's great. I'm sure everyone will be very, very sorry. Except for my wife and that little bastard Drake..." The words were angry, but his tone wasn't, and his voice broke even as he trailed off. "What the hell did I do?" Scott choked out, resting his head in his shaking hands. "What the hell did I do, or not do, that warranted this?" And even if Jean had been angry enough to do this, why would Bobby have... how could Bobby have...

Jim sighed. "Sometimes we didn't do anything. Anything at all." He knotted his hands in his lap. "And sometimes I think that's worse than deserving it."

"I-" The words just wouldn't come all of a sudden, and Scott was reducing to shaking his head, as if part of him wanted to deny that he'd ever sat down and put that tape in the VCR to begin with. "She... and Bobby? Bobby. He's-" His voice departed again, and Scott was suddenly and irrationally terrified, as if the ground was shifting under his feet. Bobby would only have slept with Jean if it didn't matter to him, and if it didn't matter to him maybe it didn't matter to anyone else, and they'd all just been watching, waiting for him to stop handling this and do this, lose it like this...

"It doesn't make sense. A lot of times people don't. And we're left paying for it, and trying to understand why." Why had Bobby done it? Why had Jean sent the tape? It didn't matter right now. All that mattered was what it had done to Scott. Jim shook his head. "Sometimes there's nothing you can do but accept."

"Accept." Scott gave another cracked laugh that came out as more of a wheeze. The vice around his chest was just squeezing tighter and tighter. "I can't. I can't accept this. I can't. How do I... even if she's... I still have to go out there and look at him. Pretend I can..." Scott closed his eyes, shuddering, resting his head in his hands again. "It's too much." His voice cracked again. "It's too much! I should have l-left. Just walked out the damned door, not done this..."

This is just a session. This is not watching a man's heart tearing in half. "You can still leave," Jim said gently. "You have enough to deal with in your own head without dealing with what other people think on top of it. If you want to leave, to go away until you can handle other people again without feeling like you're breaking apart yourself -- go. You don't even have to say why. Everyone will understand." He smiled faintly. "I don't think anyone will blame you for the room, either."

The sound of running water intruded itself on Scott's misery, all at once, and he looked up and over at Horatio's tank, only to see that it was intact, shockingly. About the only thing in the room that was. The little turtle was swimming back and forth frantically, clearly spooked.

"I can't. You don't get it. Without her, without this place... there is no me, David." It sounded bizarre and more than vaguely psychotic, but it was the truth. "I built... I re-built everything around the school and the team and her..."

"No. I get it." Jim was silent for a moment, following the man's gaze to the tank. The soothing trickle of water filled the room. "You can't live only for someone else," he said at last. "Charles told me that, once. He was right. The more you live for other people, the less you have for yourself. The less you are as yourself. When you reduce yourself to what others need, there'll be nothing left of you, good or bad. Because you won't allow there to be."

"Why should there be?" It came out on a rush of mingled grief and fury, and Scott pushed himself to his feet, swaying a little before he headed into the washroom to splash some water on his face. Had to pull himself together.

"I was nothing before Charles found me," he said shakily as he re-emerged. "Everything important that I've ever done, everything that I've ever been, is here. And I thought... I thought she was part of that," he said hoarsely, the grief winning out again. "I thought... I was stupid, I should have known better."

"What you are is an X-Man and a teacher," Jim said, looking up at him, "but that's not who you are. You're Scott Summers, and he's a human being. Human beings deserve more." He smiled crookedly, dropping his eyes to the carpet. "I -- don't know what to say about Jean. Which half she belongs to, or what you should do, but -- I do know how you feel. More than you know. Before all this, I was . . . worse than nothing. The things I did, the people I hurt -- it all came back on me, and I found out what I was too late. Everything since has been repair. But. . ."

Jim exhaled slowly, then raised mismatched eyes to the other man's one. "Something Charles has tried to show me is that it's not wrong to have a life of my own. Even after everything I did. I'm paying it back now because I choose to, not because I owe it to . . . someone else. Because I want to. As myself. Maybe it's not right that I'm alive, but I am. And there are obligations that come with life -- to yourself, before anyone else."

Moving more slowly, because his head was still spinning just a little and he didn't want to fall on his face, Scott came back over and sat down in the spot where he'd been sitting before.

"I don't know what to do." The words tore themselves free, and the pain in his chest would not ease, no matter how much he told himself to pull it together. "If she'd just... if she'd just sent me a tape of her and some stranger, it would have been bad enough, but I think I could have..." Scott's breath caught in his chest on a half-sob.

His instinct in these situations was to reach out telepathically, but he didn't want to risk it -- not knowing Scott had shared a link with Jean, and that the contact might trigger memories. Instead, Jim only leaned forward to lay one hand on Scott's shoulder. "It's okay," he said, squeezing gently for the briefest of moments, "if you don't know what to do. You'll feel how you feel. Give yourself some time, see how you react. If you feel you need to be somewhere else to decide that --just go. But it'll come how it comes."

"Ororo wanted me to move into a guest room. I've been sleeping on the couch in here... I couldn't take the bedroom." Scott wiped at his eye again. "Guess I made that question moot, didn't I?" He was trying to cover with humor, because that was what you did, but there was a part of him that wanted to get up and finish the job. Pulverize everything in this room, every memory it held...

Again that faint, crooked smile. "I recommend against sleeping in the wreckage. As comforting as it can be at times. I think a change might be good for you, though. Just for a little while. When you're still trying to grasp the injury it's better not to keep traumatizing the wound."

Scott raised his head and stared at the VCR for a moment. "How did I manage not to break that," he said faintly. "I'm glad about Horatio's tank, but that..."

"You had a lot on your mind," Jim smiled. "But -- I think you knew the VCR wasn't responsible for what you're feeling. Blowing it up would've been . . . childish." He sat back, nodding at the intact tank. "And even when you're venting, it doesn't look like you're that. You gave vent to your feelings without hurting anything. Nothing that couldn't be replaced, anyway."

Scott looked up at the little turtle. "You know, when I bought him," he started unsteadily, "I had all these plans. It was after the fall from hell previous to this one, when I had my nervous breakdown. Recover from a nervous breakdown, buy a turtle - funny, huh?" He swallowed, running a hand through his hair. "But I was going to go to Alkali Lake, to where Jean... to where she died, and say goodbye. Then I was going to go up to Alaska, stay with Phillip and Deborah for a while and try to just... worry about the small things, for a while. But then she came back."

"That doesn't sound like a bad plan. The Alaska aspect, anyway." Jim smiled a little. "I'll even take care of your turtle while you're gone."

"It's so tempting." And it was. It wouldn't be running away. He could go and... not fly. His eye burned with tears again and he wiped at it angrily. "Damn it," he muttered weakly. "I'm going to have nothing left, at this rate..."

Jim shook his head. "You have more left than you think. More than you'd ever have known you had if this hadn't happened." He looked back at the hands resting on his knees. "When you're alone in the dark," he said softly, "that's when you find out how strong you really are."

Scott got up again, slowly, and went over to unplug the filter and light on Horatio's tank. "You said you had a mind on the hall," he said shakily. "Can you make sure... I don't want to see anyone else, David." A cracked laugh slipped out. "I just want to take my turtle and maybe some clothes and move into one of the guest rooms right now."

The telepath nodded, rising to his feet. "I'll just nudge a little aversion at anyone who starts coming near. It's a little unethical, but I think Charles will forgive me. Do you need me to get anything?"

"Couple of changes of clothes, maybe?" Scott asked, and there was more exhaustion than anything else in his voice now. "I don't... I know I'll have to come back here to move more stuff over, but I don't want to have to do it right away." He swallowed, coiling the cords attached to the tank neatly. He should be able to carry it. It wasn't that big. "And please. Do something about that g-goddamned tape. Take it down to the infirmary and stick it in the incinerator. Anything. Just get rid of it, please."

"I think that can be arranged." Jim stepped around the remains of a chair and hit Eject, then slipped the tape into his jacket pocket. In this place, burning seemed like the safest option. He moved towards the area partitioned off as bedroom to retrieve the requested clothing, started to say something, and paused. I might as well, he thought as he stopped in front of the dresser. He's the headmaster and a CO. It's not as if he was talking to David for most of that conversation, anyway.

"Um," he said, opening a drawer, "by the way, you can call me Jim. In private. It's -- it's a little complicated, so I don't like to use it much, but . . ."

Scott looked around from where he was retrieving Horatio's food pellets and stared at the other man for a moment. "Jim," he said a bit uncertainly. "In private. All... all right." There were questions that could have been asked, but right now... no, right now he'd just take the offer, because it clearly meant something, and be glad that the other man was here. "Thanks," he said hoarsely, his voice almost inaudible.

"Thanks," Jim echoed, absurdly. It gets easier, he thought with a distant pang of amazement. He busied himself collecting clothing for a moment before turning back to Scott. "Okay. Ready?"

Horatio bumped against the side of the tank, still clearly distraught, his little clawed feet flailing. "Yeah," Scott whispered and lifted the tank carefully. Maybe he could talk Ororo and Sam into moving more of his stuff over in a couple of days.

Right now, he never wanted to set foot in this suite again.