xp_logs | Scott and Jack Leary, Thursday afternoon

x-cyclops.livejournal.com posting in

Scott may only be really talking to the one person whose job it is to listen to him these days, but at least he is talking.

Scott walked into Jack Leary's office in a considerably more distracted state than he'd expected to be. But when he'd pulled into the parking lot and gotten off his bike, he'd realized that he had come all the way from the mansion with no helmet. Which was bizarre, and completely unlike him, and very, very unsafe - but he hadn't even noticed until he was here. Which bothered him. Quite a bit, as a matter of fact.

"Afternoon," he muttered distractedly to Jack.

"Good afternoon," Jack replied, noticing that Scott did not appear as pulled together as he usually did. "How have things been going?"

"Um. It's been a week." Scott sat down in the usual chair, blinking at the older man. "I just drove here, on my bike, with no helmet," he said abruptly. "I don't do that sort of thing. I am Mr. Safety. The kids would be lining up to mock me."

"That does seem unusual for you," he agreed, a look of mild concern crossing his face. "I'm glad you arrived safely, but let's look at what could have caused that slip in your normal routine. Has anything unusual happened since our last visit?"

"I've been distracted. One of the kids... no," Scott corrected himself with a sigh, "one of the team wound up in the infirmary this week. Shiro's been taking some sort of drug that made him lose control of his powers. I had to try and talk him out of killing his dealer... I didn't manage it, of course, because he was entirely out of his fucking mind. A couple of the others, um, subdued him before he could do anything that was going to utterly destroy his life."

Jack nodded as Scott spoke and then said, "That sounds like it was very difficult for you to handle. I noticed that you changed from calling this Shiro a kid to calling him a member of the team...tell me about that."

"Well, he was a student, before he was a member of the team." Scott made a face, slouching in the chair and rubbing at the back of his neck. His muscles were sore today, again. It was cloudy out there. "Ororo and I were talking about it, after it happened... I wound up trying to get civilians out of the building. Shiro kind of set it on fire." He shook his head quizzically, irritated at himself; his mind was wandering again. "Anyway. She kept talking about the students. I was... I couldn't figure out why that's what she was focusing on, when Shiro's of age and no longer our responsibility at least in that sense. I suppose," he conceded after a moment's pause, "she was just thinking in terms of the drug itself, and whether any of the others might use it... oh, hell, I don't know." The last words came out sounding more aggravated than he intended, and Scott grimaced.

"So to you, the fact that he is currently on the team outweighs the face that he was a former student? Those are two differing relationships that do not share a power differential." Jack paused for a moment, making eye contact with Scott. "I'm wondering if this situation wasn't more difficult for you because you had both relationships with Shiro."

Scott's jaw tightened and he looked away for a moment, trying to think of what exactly to say to that. "I... have been pretty damned proud of him over the course of the last year," he finally said, slowly. "To be perfectly frank, he used to be quite the little bastard. Hot-tempered, arrogant, full of himself... I could go on." He'd been trying not to make this comparison, because it hurt in some obscure sort of way, but he'd promised Jack back at the start that he'd try and be honest about how he felt about things. "But I watched him grow up. I mean, he's still not the friendliest person in black leather, but he learned how to be part of a team. He really... absorbed the fact that there was more to self-discipline than he thought there was." Scott's voice faltered briefly. "But now he's messed himself up so horribly, and I don't quite know how to react."

"So this student that you get to see transform from a hot-headed adolescent into a functional, successful adult made a mistake," Jack said. "And you are taking it pretty hard."

"I'm not beating myself up in guilt," Scott said, and his mouth twisted. "I don't do that anymore," he muttered more quietly, feeling the same surge of disgust as he thought of how he might have reacted a few months ago. Why had it never occurred to him how selfish he'd been, turning everyone else's pain into self-loathing diatribes about how he'd failed them? "It just makes me so damned sad. It's just one more thing... I thought I'd done well, teaching him. For all I know he started taking this damned drug because he learned too much from me, and thought that he had to push himself beyond his limits to do what was necessary."

"Well, you don't know why he started taking the drug, so there's no point in blaming yourself," Jack pointed out. "Just because he slipped does not mean you didn't teach him well. Part of being human is to make mistakes and learn from them." Jack sighed. "Unfortunately, it does sound as though this young man made a rather poor choice that could have longer lasting results, but it will be important to explore with him why he felt it necessary."

Scott nodded a bit jerkily. He had drawn in on himself as he spoke, and his posture in the chair, slouched or not, was visibly tense now. "No one died," he muttered after a moment. "I was useless, though. Like I was going to talk a drug addict down. I didn't even think before I went in there, you know?" he burst out suddenly, sounding almost angry. "Charles was in my head, telling me what was happening, and then I was on the bike heading into New York. And I just... part of me didn't want to come back, afterwards."

Jack mentally winced, careful not to display any sign of it physically. "If you had worked closely with Shiro, then you had a chance of talking him down. And just because you were not successful at talking him fown does not mean you were useless. Didn't you say you pulled people from the building?"

Scott opened his mouth and then closed it again, looking disturbed. "I suppose part of me's seeing that as an afterthought. Which isn't quite fair, because the people working downstairs in the deli at least were innocent bystanders. Of course, they just had to be shooed in the direction of the door. The drug dealer needed carrying," he muttered, rubbing at the scars on the side of his face. "I was just so... I was angry, and worried, and it was like I couldn't let go of it afterwards. Not in the usual way, either. I was pacing back and forth in my room for hours, I was so wound up."

"Why?"

"I don't know." More uncertainty surfaced in his voice. "It's been... easier lately, in some ways. I know we talked about that last week. I've had some good talks with a couple of our new students, and it's been really encouraging." And what had happened with Shiro was... well, not at all encouraging. But something else, too. There was something else, he just couldn't think of how to put it.

"I kept going over and over in my head what we'd need to do. To help him. It was like if I stopped... if I let myself think about anything but that, I'd just..." Scott made a helpless gesture. "I don't know," he repeated again, more softly. "Eventually I sat down and just crashed. Slept on the couch, in my clothes."

"And that's okay," Jack said gently. "It's perfectly natural to have those moments where you need to just crash. What's important is that you work on picking yourself back up, which is looks to me like you have." The therapist leaned back in his chair, keeping his eyes focused on Scott. "But what would have happened if you'd stopped? If you'd allowed yourself to think about other things?"

"I didn't want to start feeling guilty. Or start thinking too hard about how hard it's going to be for him." Scott's expression was verging on openly upset, now. "I don't have the energy. It sounds like such a stupid, cliched thing to say. But it's like I can do just so much, and if I push too far I wind up sitting in my room staring at the wall, with my kitten gnawing on me trying to snap me out of it."

Jack nodded, glad that Scott was putting some things together on his own. "You can only do so much. And I'm glad to see you realizing that you have limits to what you can do. You are the only one who can truly recognize what they are and try to keep your life as balanced as possible." One of Jack's main concerns from their sessions was Scott's tendency to overload himself.

"'I wish I had the option to do only the parts of my job that I wanted to do'," Scott murmured, Forge's words coming back to him all of a sudden. "One of our graduates said that to me. I told Ororo I felt like a shirker. And I do, but the thought makes me almost more angry than ashamed. How much sense does that make?"

"I think it's perfectly natural to just want to do the parts of a job that are enjoyable. And after all you've been through, it's even more understandable." Jack shifted slightly in his seat, leaning forward. "But I also think it's important to look at why it makes you feel angry. What about it frustrates you?"

"People pull themselves together and get back to work all the time. It's expected. You don't lie around feeling sorry for yourself, and if you do, you're failing the people around you." Put that way, it sounded almost logical.

"Yes, if you are talking about regular everyday tragedies. The death of a parent, a car accident, those type of traumas. What you have been through is so much more than that and the healing process is longer and more intense. You haven't been through one traumatic event, you've been through a series and I wonder if you ever had the time to heal in between." Jack leaned back and looked at Scott expectantly.

Scott's expression was hooded suddenly. "Other people have had hard years," he said. "They've managed. Hell, Nate ran off to Afghanistan two weeks after lobotomizing himself..." But do you really want to be emulating Captain Calamity? "I've been trying to stop packing my days," he said almost defensively, his shoulders hunching a little. "But I don't know that the time to myself doesn't do me more harm than good. When I don't feel like crap, I feel restless. When I don't feel restless, I feel... lonely." There was a catch in his voice that he tried to ignore, although he doubted Jack would.

Jack shook his head. "It does not matter how other people are coping, only how you yourself are dealing with your situation. Two different people can have completely opposite reactions to the same situation." He kept his opinion of Nate's behavior to himself due to confidentiality. "And you are still adjusting to being on your own again," he said as gently as possible.

"I think I'd better keep working on that," Scott said, almost hoarsely. "I think that's probably going to be my permanent state of existence."

"I think that's a little extreme, even if it may feel like that at times." Since this was an issue that had discussed in previous sessions, Jack was a little more aggressive in his approach. "Are you still keeping yourself fairly isolated?" Scott had mentioned running into a few of the children, but Jack suspected the younger man was still spending most of his time avoiding company.

"I don't really have much option in that, you know. I don't have very many people I can or should talk to about anything personal," Scott muttered, rubbing at his forehead. "I can get out and... do things, but it feels fake. Like I'm putting a good face on it."

"It may feel like that now, but it won't have the chance to change unless you do get out and keep doing things," Jack said.

"I've been terrified, with the kids," Scott said slowly. Feeling like he needed to confess that. "Of putting a foot wrong, screwing up with them... it's just so hard to believe I can do these things right, you know? I certainly didn't for a long time..."

"But you also did do things right for a long time," Jack countered.

"Did I?" It sounded almost like a plea, and Scott pressed his lips together tightly, shaking his head angrily. "I don't think I did. I've been thinking about this a lot, this week... I don't think I did much right on any front. The school, the team, the people I love... I can accept that I wasn't responsible for a lot of the things that happened, but that doesn't mean I handled them well." His voice was hollow as he went on. "I took it all too personally."

"What do you mean?" Jack asked.

Oh, those simple little questions that were anything but. "I let it all get to me too much. Or I tried too hard not to let it get to me, and wound up failing to notice it eating away at me." He smiled a bit weakly. "Or both, at different times."

"But you are looking back with a certain kind of hindsight." Jack paused for a moment. "Tell you what. I'm giving you a homework assignment for our next session. I want you to come up with a situation that happened that worked out well and one that didn't. Nothing big, just examples of some regular everyday stuff. And for the one that didn't work out the way you wanted it to, I want you to come up with what you would do differently knowing what you know now."

"...okay." That would be... interesting. Scott straightened in the chair slightly, bemused to realize he felt... less tense, if not actually relaxed. "It's like analyzing tactics," he said suddenly. "Just... using myself as the subject."

"Exactly," Jack said. None of his clients had previously described it that way, but it did make sense and he hoped that meant Scott would take the assignment seriously. Of course, knowing Scott, he needed to be more concerned about the opposite. "I think that may be a good stopping point for today, unless there is something we haven't covered that you want to."

Scott nodded, after a moment, then cracked a slightly more natural smile. "I suppose I should go drive very slowly home. And hope that none of the kids catch me coming in without a helmet and go 'Hah! Hypocrite!'"

(OOC: Thanks again to Avital for socking Jack!)