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xp_logs2006-04-17 02:32 pm
x-cyclops.livejournal.com) wrote in xp_logs2006-04-17 02:32 pm
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Scott and Forge, Monday afternoon
Forge gets called down to the headmaster's office to get that expected lecture on ethics. Only it's not quite what he expected. Unfortunately, it also doesn't really get through to him. We can't say Scott didn't try.
Forge leaned against the wall by the headmaster's door. Through the open door opposite him, he could see Ms. Munroe's empty desk. Of course she'd be taking the day off, he figured. Even though she'd spent less than twelve hours as one of Masque's victims, Forge understood the desire to seclude oneself after having that sense of self so grievously violated.
He hummed quietly to himself, checking his watch. Mr. Summers had sent the "My office. Now." note about twenty minutes prior, pulling him out of his Government class. Not that Forge wasn't happy to avoid yet another discussion about the role of a quorum in Senate proceedings, but he had a distinct feeling that congratulations were not waiting for him on the other side of the door.
Figuring he'd given Mr. Summers enough time to practice a proper haranguing, Forge rapped his metal knuckles on the door loudly.
"Come in, Forge," was the answer from inside, and Forge opened the door to see Scott standing at one of the filing cabinets, moving through the contents with a methodical sort of slowness, as if he knew precisely what he was looking for but wasn't in any rush to find it. "Sit down," Scott, without looking at Forge, said quietly and half-distractedly. He inclined his head at the small couch instead of the chair opposite the desk.
Hm, Forge thought. Perhaps this wasn't going to be a standard lecture. Taking a seat on the couch, he folded his left leg across his lap, fingers brushing over connections habitually. Patiently, he waited for Mr. Summers to get around to saying his piece. He'd learned not to try and rush the headmaster when he had something to say or a point to make. After all, Scott had been doing this job for longer than Forge had been a student, and would likely carry on long after Forge graduated.
"I want to tell you a story," Scott said, frowning as he continued to fail to find the file he wanted. All right, so possibly he have just kept it in the database to begin with, but that way led incidents like the finding of his Kobayashi Maru files and this... this was something personal. He hadn't wanted to justify himself. "You're free to take it as patronizing if you like, or a half-assed attempt at equating your situation and the one I'm going to tell you about - I can't stop you. All I can do is tell you that I don't mean for it to sound patronizing, and I really do think there's more of a parallel than you realize. Deciding whether or not to take that on faith is up to you."
"I'm all ears, sir," Forge replied, leaning back into the couch. He didn't want to appear disrespectful - he knew Mr. Summers wasn't in the habit of making frivolous points.
"I think I've told you before that I was twenty-one when I started leading the X-Men," Scott said, continuing to leaf through the drawer, file after file. His voice was quiet, even. "I was very committed to the Professor's ideals at that age. Not that I'm not now, but there's a level of committment you can have when you're... just starting out on a road, that's a little more difficult seven years down the line when you've seen as much as I have. A sort of unquestioning faith."
There. His fingers stilled, and he stared down at the file for a moment before he removed it carefully from the drawer, fingers gliding over the front of it almost hesitantly. He supposed he really needed to keep it somewhere else, now that he had a secretary. He didn't want Dani stumbling over it by accident.
"About six months after we... started operations, for lack of a better description," he said, taking the file over to the desk and setting it down, "the Professor got a call for help from a woman in a little town upstate. I don't know how she got his phone number, how she knew to ask him for help, but the call came one morning, and by that afternoon Jean and Storm and Hank and I were headed off to meet with her and bring her back her. Her and her children." Scott swallowed and opened the file. The police report was on top. Just as he'd left it.
"It was her husband," he said steadily, "that was the problem. He hadn't realized, before their marriage, that she was a mutant. She had a very minor physical mutation, that wasn't outwardly obvious. Her children were identical twins. Two little girls. Similar mutation to their mother, but it had progressed further in them. She had lungs that didn't work quite the same way as ours do. They had gills and webbed hands and feet, and... not quite scales, but skin that was just the slightest bit irridescent, and differently textured. They were beautiful little girls, really. Six weeks old."
He picked up the pictures. "We got to the house and they were gone, all three of them," Scott continued quietly. "He had them. The Professor directed us after the car, but we didn't have the Blackbird back then. He'd driven to a nearby pond, and by the time we got there, he'd killed all three of them and thrown their bodies in the water."
He walked over and handed Forge the pictures of the bodies, the ones he'd kept, and sat down on the arm of the couch, watching the young man. The pictures were horrific. The bastard had shot his wife in the head, but the babies... he hadn't given his daughters the same mercy.
"But," Scott went on, "he hadn't gotten back into his cart to leave yet. He was still there. Watching the bodies sink." He wondered, for a moment, if Forge had guessed yet where he was going with this.
Forge took one glance at the photos then averted his gaze, eyes screwed shut. Taking a few deep breaths, he made sure to place the photographs face-down before opening his eyes again. "What did you do?" he asked quietly.
"Hank and Jean ran for the water, of course. In case there was anything that could be done." Jean had been crying as she ran, however; she'd known. "Ororo helped me grab the husband. He was sobbing, I'm not sure why. It wasn't remorse. We got him down on the ground, and then she went over to help Jean."
I've got him, Ororo. Help Jean and Hank.
Scott swallowed. "I saw what he'd done through Jean's eyes, and I... no," he corrected himself meticulously, "I didn't snap. I can't and won't give myself that out. I knew precisely what I was doing." That was why he'd sent Ororo over to help Jean, after all. He'd seen the bodies, as he'd pulled the car up beside the man's van. Dead weight, sinking to the bottom of the pond. He'd known what Jean had known.
"I dragged him to the edge of the water," Scott said simply, "and I held his head under. He was a big guy, a lot bigger than me. Kicked and struggled, of course, but I had a good strong grip on him. I remember being very calm. I thought it was the ideal solution. We were all in civilian clothes, see - it was supposed to be a nice, easy pick-up. We could have been the innocent drivers-by who saw what he was doing and tried to stop him. And in the struggle... I had it all fall into place in my head, all in a split-second. The perfect strategy."
Forge sat there for a moment in the silence. "You could have killed him," he said plainly. "He murdered his family, you could have taken justice right there." He swallowed roughly, unsure of whether he wanted to hear the end of Scott's tale. "...did you?"
"No," Scott said simply. "And you're right, I could have. Hank was in the middle of the pond, trying to swim back with the mother's body. Jean and Ororo were with the babies, and they didn't react as quickly as they could have. By the time they were running over to stop me, he was starting to stop struggling. But I stopped," he said, "because I heard Charles in my mind, and he told me that there came a time when you had to decide whether or not you were going to be better than the monster."
Forge said nothing. "Except there's a little more to it than that," Scott went on after a moment. "The truth is, there's not just one time. There are many times. For people like us, living lives like we do, we face that choice repeatedly. Mostly because to so much of society, we are the monsters. It's a kind of cosmic irony, really." Scott tilted his head slightly, gazing down at Forge. "It's a very different situation than yours, obviously," he went on, his tone a bit more brisk. "Nothing had been done to me that day. I hadn't had to sit around in pain for a week and watch my friends suffering too, all because of one particular monster. And you knew what you were doing in the infirmary. You weren't going to kill him. You were just going to make him suffer. An eye for an eye, fear for fear. For me, it would have been death for death. More final, more sure to destroy my life if I'd gone through with it. But," Scott concluded quietly, "for both of us, what we decided made us less than who we are. Who we should be."
Forge listened in silence, up until Scott's conclusion. Letting that sink in, his face grew taut with emotion. "You're right," he said tersely. "You don't know what it was like. He's going to go to prison, and whatever happens to him there I figure he's earned. But what I did, he earned that as well. And if getting a shot or two in on him makes me less than who I should be?" Forge stood up, hands clenching in front of him angrily. "Who decides who I should be? I'm not a saint, I don't have whatever gene makes the Professor capable of unconditional forgiveness towards his fellow man. I am not wired to just turn the other cheek, sir. It's not just about me - he hurt my friends, all those other people. Mutant or human, that makes them my people. Ask any one of them what they think about what I did. See what they say. Then judge."
He reached down, picking up the photographs and looking at each of them slowly before handing the stack to Scott. "The difference, Mr. Summers, is that I can look at the victims now and see that they all want the same justice. You didn't get that opportunity and for that I am sorry. But don't try and tell me that makes me less of a person for seeking it."
"You were the victim, Forge. You decided that gave you the right to play judge - admittedly, not just for yourself, but for everyone else he hurt. Does that change the fact," Scott said, his expression and tone not altering, "that you've done the same thing before? Does the fact that you didn't hurt him badly change that? Or does it just illustrate the same pattern of behavior?" He shook his head slowly. "I'm sorry. I think very highly of you, Forge, and I always have. But what you chose to do - yes, it does make you less of a person. You chose to terrorize him like you were terrorized. You proved to him that we are no different from him, just like Kyle and Manuel proved the same thing to Tommy back in the fall."
"And who else has a right to?" Forge snapped back. "You think I didn't consider that? I did a bit of homework before coming down here, you know." He pulled his PDA out of a pocket, tapping the screen intently. "Robert Alan Fielder, convicted in 1990 in a juvenile court in Independence, Missouri. Three counts of assault and aggravated mayhem." He looked up at Scott with an arched eyebrow. "That means battery where loss of limb - or an eye - is involved," he added before holding up his metal arm. "I ran his fingerprints through VICAP, popped his record. You want to talk to me about patterns of behavior, Marius is still down there working around the clock putting people back together from what this bastard's done. Accuse me of stooping, fine. Guilty as charged. You see this?" He pointed at his face. "This is my Not Giving A Crap face. My conscience is clear. But do not try and tell me I've lowered myself to his level. Not until it's you on that table getting put back together again."
"Why do you think they don't put victims on juries in this country, Forge?" Too much to hope, he supposed. The trauma was still too fresh, and maybe he'd been wrong to try this approach in the first place, but he'd hoped... Scott straightened slightly, ignoring the pain in his stomach. He reached down for the pictures. "This was revenge. This wasn't justice, however you've got it tricked out in your mind."
He rose slowly, to hide the fact that really, he kind of wanted to double over. "But I'll stop," he said very quietly. "There's no point in continuing, since I've crossed the line into self-righteous, in your eyes. I suppose the disclaimer at the beginning of this conversation really had no point." He laid the pictures back in the file, closed it gently. "You're grounded for a month," he said quietly. "You'll be seeing Doctor Samson and the Professor regularly, although that's as much for post-traumatic counseling as for this. And every weekday for the next two weeks, you will spend two hours a day assisting Doctor Voght in the infirmary. Whatever she wants you to do. I imagine it will involve helping her help Masque's victims while Marius repairs the damage. I suppose I'll just hope that maybe, you might start to understand why we make the choice to help and protect, rather than punish."
Forge nodded. "I figured as much. And I do understand, sir. Even if I don't necessarily agree. Not everyone's geared to be that open hand of forgiveness and tolerance, and I mean no disrespect to you or the Professor by saying that. Maybe a hand can form a fist for a reason. And maybe the Professor or Dr. Samson can explain that to me."
He sighed, hunching his shoulders. "I don't know if you're going to believe me, but I want to see him remorseful, I want to see him change into something better - but I also want it to hurt. Because it should. Tommy had to pay for the mistakes he made, I had to pay for the mistakes I made - so should he. And maybe you think it wasn't my place to decide that." Forge shrugged. "Looks like we come down on different sides of that one. But I can respect your viewpoint, even if I'm not exactly sharing it right now."
"Mmm." Scott didn't turn away from the desk. "I want you to think about one more thing, Forge, once you leave. About who and what you are. You build things," he said, picking up the file and bringing it back over to the filing cabinet. "You create. At its best, that can be a wonderful thing. Something that brings hope. You've shown us that a number of times since you've come here, and I know it's important to you. Not to misuse that gift - to be true to what it means to you, how important it is to how you see yourself." Scott swallowed on a surge of nausea. "Think about that, and then try and reconcile it with what you did down in the infirmary today."
That gave Forge some pause for thought. "I... I will," he said. "I'll go check in with Dr. Voght."
Had that gotten through? Scott hoped, even if it was just a little. "You can go," he said, sliding the file back into the drawer where he'd found it. "Fair warning - she's very angry at you, and she's liable to have you doing the most menial and unpleasant tasks she can find."
Forge turned around and smiled defiantly at Scott. "The day that Czarina Voght becomes too much for me to handle, well, that'll be a sad day for everyone."
Oh, to be that age again... wait, no, what am I saying... "Good luck with that," Scott murmured. "The Professor and Doctor Samson will be in touch with you regarding appointments with them." He should have left this to Charles in the first place.
Forge leaned against the wall by the headmaster's door. Through the open door opposite him, he could see Ms. Munroe's empty desk. Of course she'd be taking the day off, he figured. Even though she'd spent less than twelve hours as one of Masque's victims, Forge understood the desire to seclude oneself after having that sense of self so grievously violated.
He hummed quietly to himself, checking his watch. Mr. Summers had sent the "My office. Now." note about twenty minutes prior, pulling him out of his Government class. Not that Forge wasn't happy to avoid yet another discussion about the role of a quorum in Senate proceedings, but he had a distinct feeling that congratulations were not waiting for him on the other side of the door.
Figuring he'd given Mr. Summers enough time to practice a proper haranguing, Forge rapped his metal knuckles on the door loudly.
"Come in, Forge," was the answer from inside, and Forge opened the door to see Scott standing at one of the filing cabinets, moving through the contents with a methodical sort of slowness, as if he knew precisely what he was looking for but wasn't in any rush to find it. "Sit down," Scott, without looking at Forge, said quietly and half-distractedly. He inclined his head at the small couch instead of the chair opposite the desk.
Hm, Forge thought. Perhaps this wasn't going to be a standard lecture. Taking a seat on the couch, he folded his left leg across his lap, fingers brushing over connections habitually. Patiently, he waited for Mr. Summers to get around to saying his piece. He'd learned not to try and rush the headmaster when he had something to say or a point to make. After all, Scott had been doing this job for longer than Forge had been a student, and would likely carry on long after Forge graduated.
"I want to tell you a story," Scott said, frowning as he continued to fail to find the file he wanted. All right, so possibly he have just kept it in the database to begin with, but that way led incidents like the finding of his Kobayashi Maru files and this... this was something personal. He hadn't wanted to justify himself. "You're free to take it as patronizing if you like, or a half-assed attempt at equating your situation and the one I'm going to tell you about - I can't stop you. All I can do is tell you that I don't mean for it to sound patronizing, and I really do think there's more of a parallel than you realize. Deciding whether or not to take that on faith is up to you."
"I'm all ears, sir," Forge replied, leaning back into the couch. He didn't want to appear disrespectful - he knew Mr. Summers wasn't in the habit of making frivolous points.
"I think I've told you before that I was twenty-one when I started leading the X-Men," Scott said, continuing to leaf through the drawer, file after file. His voice was quiet, even. "I was very committed to the Professor's ideals at that age. Not that I'm not now, but there's a level of committment you can have when you're... just starting out on a road, that's a little more difficult seven years down the line when you've seen as much as I have. A sort of unquestioning faith."
There. His fingers stilled, and he stared down at the file for a moment before he removed it carefully from the drawer, fingers gliding over the front of it almost hesitantly. He supposed he really needed to keep it somewhere else, now that he had a secretary. He didn't want Dani stumbling over it by accident.
"About six months after we... started operations, for lack of a better description," he said, taking the file over to the desk and setting it down, "the Professor got a call for help from a woman in a little town upstate. I don't know how she got his phone number, how she knew to ask him for help, but the call came one morning, and by that afternoon Jean and Storm and Hank and I were headed off to meet with her and bring her back her. Her and her children." Scott swallowed and opened the file. The police report was on top. Just as he'd left it.
"It was her husband," he said steadily, "that was the problem. He hadn't realized, before their marriage, that she was a mutant. She had a very minor physical mutation, that wasn't outwardly obvious. Her children were identical twins. Two little girls. Similar mutation to their mother, but it had progressed further in them. She had lungs that didn't work quite the same way as ours do. They had gills and webbed hands and feet, and... not quite scales, but skin that was just the slightest bit irridescent, and differently textured. They were beautiful little girls, really. Six weeks old."
He picked up the pictures. "We got to the house and they were gone, all three of them," Scott continued quietly. "He had them. The Professor directed us after the car, but we didn't have the Blackbird back then. He'd driven to a nearby pond, and by the time we got there, he'd killed all three of them and thrown their bodies in the water."
He walked over and handed Forge the pictures of the bodies, the ones he'd kept, and sat down on the arm of the couch, watching the young man. The pictures were horrific. The bastard had shot his wife in the head, but the babies... he hadn't given his daughters the same mercy.
"But," Scott went on, "he hadn't gotten back into his cart to leave yet. He was still there. Watching the bodies sink." He wondered, for a moment, if Forge had guessed yet where he was going with this.
Forge took one glance at the photos then averted his gaze, eyes screwed shut. Taking a few deep breaths, he made sure to place the photographs face-down before opening his eyes again. "What did you do?" he asked quietly.
"Hank and Jean ran for the water, of course. In case there was anything that could be done." Jean had been crying as she ran, however; she'd known. "Ororo helped me grab the husband. He was sobbing, I'm not sure why. It wasn't remorse. We got him down on the ground, and then she went over to help Jean."
I've got him, Ororo. Help Jean and Hank.
Scott swallowed. "I saw what he'd done through Jean's eyes, and I... no," he corrected himself meticulously, "I didn't snap. I can't and won't give myself that out. I knew precisely what I was doing." That was why he'd sent Ororo over to help Jean, after all. He'd seen the bodies, as he'd pulled the car up beside the man's van. Dead weight, sinking to the bottom of the pond. He'd known what Jean had known.
"I dragged him to the edge of the water," Scott said simply, "and I held his head under. He was a big guy, a lot bigger than me. Kicked and struggled, of course, but I had a good strong grip on him. I remember being very calm. I thought it was the ideal solution. We were all in civilian clothes, see - it was supposed to be a nice, easy pick-up. We could have been the innocent drivers-by who saw what he was doing and tried to stop him. And in the struggle... I had it all fall into place in my head, all in a split-second. The perfect strategy."
Forge sat there for a moment in the silence. "You could have killed him," he said plainly. "He murdered his family, you could have taken justice right there." He swallowed roughly, unsure of whether he wanted to hear the end of Scott's tale. "...did you?"
"No," Scott said simply. "And you're right, I could have. Hank was in the middle of the pond, trying to swim back with the mother's body. Jean and Ororo were with the babies, and they didn't react as quickly as they could have. By the time they were running over to stop me, he was starting to stop struggling. But I stopped," he said, "because I heard Charles in my mind, and he told me that there came a time when you had to decide whether or not you were going to be better than the monster."
Forge said nothing. "Except there's a little more to it than that," Scott went on after a moment. "The truth is, there's not just one time. There are many times. For people like us, living lives like we do, we face that choice repeatedly. Mostly because to so much of society, we are the monsters. It's a kind of cosmic irony, really." Scott tilted his head slightly, gazing down at Forge. "It's a very different situation than yours, obviously," he went on, his tone a bit more brisk. "Nothing had been done to me that day. I hadn't had to sit around in pain for a week and watch my friends suffering too, all because of one particular monster. And you knew what you were doing in the infirmary. You weren't going to kill him. You were just going to make him suffer. An eye for an eye, fear for fear. For me, it would have been death for death. More final, more sure to destroy my life if I'd gone through with it. But," Scott concluded quietly, "for both of us, what we decided made us less than who we are. Who we should be."
Forge listened in silence, up until Scott's conclusion. Letting that sink in, his face grew taut with emotion. "You're right," he said tersely. "You don't know what it was like. He's going to go to prison, and whatever happens to him there I figure he's earned. But what I did, he earned that as well. And if getting a shot or two in on him makes me less than who I should be?" Forge stood up, hands clenching in front of him angrily. "Who decides who I should be? I'm not a saint, I don't have whatever gene makes the Professor capable of unconditional forgiveness towards his fellow man. I am not wired to just turn the other cheek, sir. It's not just about me - he hurt my friends, all those other people. Mutant or human, that makes them my people. Ask any one of them what they think about what I did. See what they say. Then judge."
He reached down, picking up the photographs and looking at each of them slowly before handing the stack to Scott. "The difference, Mr. Summers, is that I can look at the victims now and see that they all want the same justice. You didn't get that opportunity and for that I am sorry. But don't try and tell me that makes me less of a person for seeking it."
"You were the victim, Forge. You decided that gave you the right to play judge - admittedly, not just for yourself, but for everyone else he hurt. Does that change the fact," Scott said, his expression and tone not altering, "that you've done the same thing before? Does the fact that you didn't hurt him badly change that? Or does it just illustrate the same pattern of behavior?" He shook his head slowly. "I'm sorry. I think very highly of you, Forge, and I always have. But what you chose to do - yes, it does make you less of a person. You chose to terrorize him like you were terrorized. You proved to him that we are no different from him, just like Kyle and Manuel proved the same thing to Tommy back in the fall."
"And who else has a right to?" Forge snapped back. "You think I didn't consider that? I did a bit of homework before coming down here, you know." He pulled his PDA out of a pocket, tapping the screen intently. "Robert Alan Fielder, convicted in 1990 in a juvenile court in Independence, Missouri. Three counts of assault and aggravated mayhem." He looked up at Scott with an arched eyebrow. "That means battery where loss of limb - or an eye - is involved," he added before holding up his metal arm. "I ran his fingerprints through VICAP, popped his record. You want to talk to me about patterns of behavior, Marius is still down there working around the clock putting people back together from what this bastard's done. Accuse me of stooping, fine. Guilty as charged. You see this?" He pointed at his face. "This is my Not Giving A Crap face. My conscience is clear. But do not try and tell me I've lowered myself to his level. Not until it's you on that table getting put back together again."
"Why do you think they don't put victims on juries in this country, Forge?" Too much to hope, he supposed. The trauma was still too fresh, and maybe he'd been wrong to try this approach in the first place, but he'd hoped... Scott straightened slightly, ignoring the pain in his stomach. He reached down for the pictures. "This was revenge. This wasn't justice, however you've got it tricked out in your mind."
He rose slowly, to hide the fact that really, he kind of wanted to double over. "But I'll stop," he said very quietly. "There's no point in continuing, since I've crossed the line into self-righteous, in your eyes. I suppose the disclaimer at the beginning of this conversation really had no point." He laid the pictures back in the file, closed it gently. "You're grounded for a month," he said quietly. "You'll be seeing Doctor Samson and the Professor regularly, although that's as much for post-traumatic counseling as for this. And every weekday for the next two weeks, you will spend two hours a day assisting Doctor Voght in the infirmary. Whatever she wants you to do. I imagine it will involve helping her help Masque's victims while Marius repairs the damage. I suppose I'll just hope that maybe, you might start to understand why we make the choice to help and protect, rather than punish."
Forge nodded. "I figured as much. And I do understand, sir. Even if I don't necessarily agree. Not everyone's geared to be that open hand of forgiveness and tolerance, and I mean no disrespect to you or the Professor by saying that. Maybe a hand can form a fist for a reason. And maybe the Professor or Dr. Samson can explain that to me."
He sighed, hunching his shoulders. "I don't know if you're going to believe me, but I want to see him remorseful, I want to see him change into something better - but I also want it to hurt. Because it should. Tommy had to pay for the mistakes he made, I had to pay for the mistakes I made - so should he. And maybe you think it wasn't my place to decide that." Forge shrugged. "Looks like we come down on different sides of that one. But I can respect your viewpoint, even if I'm not exactly sharing it right now."
"Mmm." Scott didn't turn away from the desk. "I want you to think about one more thing, Forge, once you leave. About who and what you are. You build things," he said, picking up the file and bringing it back over to the filing cabinet. "You create. At its best, that can be a wonderful thing. Something that brings hope. You've shown us that a number of times since you've come here, and I know it's important to you. Not to misuse that gift - to be true to what it means to you, how important it is to how you see yourself." Scott swallowed on a surge of nausea. "Think about that, and then try and reconcile it with what you did down in the infirmary today."
That gave Forge some pause for thought. "I... I will," he said. "I'll go check in with Dr. Voght."
Had that gotten through? Scott hoped, even if it was just a little. "You can go," he said, sliding the file back into the drawer where he'd found it. "Fair warning - she's very angry at you, and she's liable to have you doing the most menial and unpleasant tasks she can find."
Forge turned around and smiled defiantly at Scott. "The day that Czarina Voght becomes too much for me to handle, well, that'll be a sad day for everyone."
Oh, to be that age again... wait, no, what am I saying... "Good luck with that," Scott murmured. "The Professor and Doctor Samson will be in touch with you regarding appointments with them." He should have left this to Charles in the first place.