Scott and Lorna, Tuesday morning

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Lorna shows up with the breakfast tray, only to discover that the dinner tray is still there. She decides that Scott's used up his grace period, so she dissolves the hinges on the door. (Like anyone really thought she'd need Cain if worse came to worse.)


He really should have opened the curtains, Scott supposed, but he hadn't felt like it. Showering - he hadn't bothered to shave - had been as far as he was willing to go in terms of his usual morning routine, and then he just hadn't cared enough to bother with anything else. The TV was off, the blinds were closed... it was quiet and dim and he liked it that way, quite honestly. He could just let his mind drift and not think.

The tray from last night was still sitting outside the door. That was two meals now and Scott had just officially passed her moping grace period. Lorna's eyes narrowed and she knocked twice on the door. "Scott, it's Lorna. I have breakfast." She counted to thirty, expecting the same silence that had greeted her the last two times. When she got it, she knocked again, harder this time, at the same time dissolving the hinges.

The door fell in. "Good morning, sunshine."

"If Cain asks, that's your fault," Scott said hoarsely, not moving from the couch. "And I don't want breakfast, Lorna. Just go away and leave me alone." He'd been more than half-expecting this, of course. But he just really, honestly wasn't hungry.

"I'll fix it. Nothing's wrong with it really. I just took away the hinges." Her cheerful front was patently false…and she meant it to be. Ignoring the protestations that he wasn't hungry she set the tray on his lap and held out the fork to him. "It's rather boring fare, I'm afraid. I was in a hurry."

There was a tray on his lap. There was a tray on his lap, and she was pushing the fork at him, and he had this feeling that force-feeding could possibly be involved if he didn't eat. Oh, well. He picked up the tray, leaning forward and setting it on the coffee table, ignoring her.

Lorna resisted the urge to stab him with the fork and reminded herself that this wasn't hit fault and that he deserved some sympathy for whatever the hell it was that Jean had done this time. "Scott, I get that you don't want to eat. Hell, I get that better than anyone else in this school. And I'm not going to force you. Well, not yet." Might as well be honest. Haller had told her not to mention Jean. Lorna really should learn to follow advice, particularly when she'd asked for it in the first place. "But while it's gratifying as a woman who left a Summers to know that it destroys them totally. I'm not going to let her destroy you."

"Shut up." He was up off the couch in a surprisingly fluid motion for someone who'd done a whole lot of sitting around for the last twenty-four hours. "Just... shut up, Lorna. You left my brother, yes." Humiliatingly, his voice cracked. "You didn't turn around and sleep with... with Shiro and then send him the videotape." It wasn't a perfect parallel, but it worked.

The revelation set her back on her heels, just for a moment. "No, Alex just thinks that I slept with Remy," Lorna snapped back then scowled, not having intended to tell anyone about that. Ever. "Do you know what he's doing? I'll tell you one thing, it's not sulking in his room like a pathetic child, refusing to take care of himself." Mailani had been viciously upset with her. But kept tabs on Alex anyway. "Jean's a bitch, Scott. Anyone who does that to someone is unworthy of the time it takes to say their name. You want to sulk, be my guest. But you're going to eat something so that the people around here who care about you don't have to spend time worrying that you're making yourself sick."

"I'm sulking, am I?" He gave a harsh bark of laughter. "Here I thought I was doing the right thing. Confining myself to quarters... okay, a semblance of quarters, because I trashed the usual quarters, until I could be trusted to be able to walk past Bobby in the hall and not blast him into the nearest wall. Until I could come out and put a good face on all of this, and not have someone drugging my coffee and shipping me down to the infirmary because they think I need to catch up on my sleep!" He was not shouting at her. He wasn't.

"And except for the part where you aren't eating, you're doing just fine. I'm hardly one to complain about someone preferring their own company to others'." She held out the fork to him again, posture vaguely challenging. "But take care of yourself, Scott."

"I can afford to miss a few meals. It's not going to do me any permanent damage. Besides," he said restlessly, turning away, "I think I picked up some sort of stomach bug from the kids."

"Except for the part where the kids are all freakishly healthy right now. I was the last one sick and you didn't see me while I was." Lorna let go of the fork and grabbed his shoulder instead. "It's not about missing a couple meals. I know exactly how long someone can go without food. I still need you to sit down and eat."

"Why?" It was irrational, he knew, all of this was completely irrational on his part. But he didn't feel like being rational just yet. Hence why he was still in this room. "Why do you need me to sit down and eat? Why do any of you need me to look after myself?"

"Well, for one thing if you balk then David might realize that I'm pretty powerless and stop listening to me when I scold him for skipping meals. And we can't have that because he's skin and bones as it is." Lorna sighed. "Mostly I need you to look after yourself because this sucks enough without compounding it by abusing your body."

Scott sank back down onto the couch, rubbing hard at the scars on the side of his face. "I can't sleep. Even the idea of food is almost enough to make me sick to my stomach. The eye that's not there hurts, and I'm afraid to leave the room because I don't think I'm ever going to be able to pretend that this is all right."

"No one expects you to act like everything is alright. In fact, acting like it is when it clearly isn't is kind of freaky." Lorna hesitated then sat down on the couch too, not too close but within an arm's reach. "What do you want to do? Right now. What would help you?"

"Nothing. Nothing is going to help right now," Scott said, his voice raw with misery all at once. "Jean's made everything really clear, I think. And I know this is stupid, but now I wonder just how many of the rest of you think she was right to leave me, or knew all along..." Why else would Bobby have slept with Jean, unless he didn't care? Unless it had been a foregone conclusion, the end of his marriage, and everyone had been aware of it but him?

"Well, you can mark me as both clueless and confused by it. I thought at first that it was something like my situation but… this is way too vicious. She needs some sense knocked into her. You're sure she's not possessed or something? No funny jewelry?" Lorna leaned over and picked up the glass of orange juice on the tray and handed it to Scott. "Seriously, Scott. If she left and she's doing this… it can't be you. You couldn't have missed this."

"I never listened to her. When she made all those jokes that weren't jokes, apparently, about wanting to run away and join the circus." He didn't make a conscious choice to take the glass, but he was holding it, the chill of the juice registering on him after another long moment. He took a sip, gingerly. "I kept bringing her back," he said more unevenly. "Kept leaning on her so hard. When I lost my eye?" Dependent. Broken. Same thing.

Baby steps. If he finished the glass, she'd try the toast next. "When you lost your eye, you leaned on your wife to take care of you. That's what you're supposed to be able to do. If it had been her instead, you'd have done the same. I was there, Scott. Sickness and in health, good times and bad. If she didn't want that anymore the right thing to do was tell you. Hell, I can even understand her walking out. I did. Punishing you after that? It can't be about you. Why would she have stayed if she really felt like this? Why would she have let it get to this point?"

"But she does feel like this," Scott muttered. He wrapped both hands around the glass, took another small sip. "You forget, we have the link. Had the link," he corrected. "Charles sealed it off, after the last time we talked. When she left me with nosebleeds. She..." He stopped, swallowed. "I never told anyone," he said, his voice almost inaudible, "but she freaked out, when he tried to remove it. He didn't want to risk what she might do accidentally, to me or to herself, if he kept trying to remove it. So he just sealed it off, for now." So now he had a wall in his mind. He wasn't sure whether that was better or worse than a hole.

How would it feel to have someone that close all the time? Always connected to one person no matter what you were doing? Lorna barely hid a shudder. "If she feels like that now, if it's that bad, why didn't you feel it before? You might be dense and buried in your work, Scott, but you're not that dense. Unless she was hiding it from you and if she's hiding it from you then I still say it's got to be something wrong with her." That something, Lorna personally believed, was that Jean needed her own eye taken out. Call it sensitivity training.

"And if it is? I missed it then, too. I always miss it. Jean the first time, and Betsy, and Alex, and-" He stopped, laughed a bit wildly. "I could go on forever, I really could. Fuck." Another laugh, the hysterical edge even more marked, slipped out. "And that's a singularly inappropriate profanity this week, isn't it?"

Lorna handed him the toast. "Okay, so you missed it. How dreadful. You terrible, terrible creature. You trusted your wife to tell you when something was wrong and not turn on you. I'm appalled by your behavior."

"Don't be sarcastic. I'm supposed to see these things. That's why Charles pays the big bucks. I'm supposed to see these things, and fix problems. Instead people keep secrets or tell lies and then I'm the one scrambling to catch up and I can't." His hands were shaking. He set the orange juice down so that he didn't drop it, and, after a moment, the toast as well. "I feel sick," he said at the look she gave him. "That's not just me trying to put you off. I guess it's stress or something."

"That's what you get for thinking you're Superman. You can't actually hold the world together with your bare hands. Eventually your body rebels. Especially when you haven't given it fuel in 24 hours." She rested her hand on his shoulder. "When was the last time you slept? At all?"

"I don't... Sunday night, I think," Scott said a bit disjointedly. Although he hadn't slept well, and hadn't caught up from Vladivostok yet. "Before the tape came. What day is it?"

"Tuesday." Lorna pulled him to his feet. "You need to go to sleep. Can I ask the Professor to help you make sure that you do?" It was the first time her voice had softened at all, the genuine concern behind all her harshness showing through.

"I just didn't want to dream," he whispered, tottering a little as she steered him towards the bed. "So sick of dreaming. Running and running and never finding the way out..." He hadn't even been having those dreams for very long and he was tired of them.

"No, only good dreams. I promise," she assured him, making a mental note. "Rest now. Call me when you wake up."