Scott and Forge, Tuesday afternoon

[x-cyclops.livejournal.com]

Forge is looking for a bit of an escape, and decides that Scott could probably use one too. A rather lively game of chess ensues.


The door to the headmaster's office was open just enough for Forge to tell that the room was occupied. Hearing just the sound of pen on paper, he glanced quickly around, then darted inside. Swiftly, he shut the door and leaned against it furtively, checking the room quickly before sliding into a seat across from Scott.

"Hey, boss," Forge quipped, trying (and failing) to sound casual, "you got a few minutes?"

Scott looked up, raising an eyebrow. "A few," he said, setting the paperwork aside and his pen down. "Please tell me this isn't a security problem. And that you didn't notice anything alarming on your monitors."

"Oh god no," Forge said with a sigh of relief. "Unless you count the other staff members continually dropping into my office and asking to see the footage from the self-defense class incident. If I never hear those two names in conjunction again... well, you probably know how it is. But no, nothing alarming. Just..." he hunched his shoulders and looked somewhat sheepish, "okay, I'm trying to avoid everyone asking about what happened with Logan and Crystal. So I figured I'd head to the one place no one willingly goes."

Smiling, he reached down to the floor, then placed a small box on Scott's desk and opened it. "So, how about a game of chess?"

"The whole discretion thing sucks, doesn't it? Wait until we have one of those situations where we get to let them all in on something after the fact, and get told what horrible people we are for keeping them all in the dark. Because everyone is entitled to know everything, you know." Scott closed his mouth, almost meekly. "Um, yes. Chess would be nice."

Forge unfolded the board, deftly setting up the pieces. "Most of them understand, you know? It's just certain folks who have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement that... you know, hell with it. Save the shop talk for the staff meeting." He rested his chin on his hand, then casually moved a pawn forward. "I noticed you've been running a lot of diagnostics on the jet. Think you'll be taking her up flying sometime soon?"

"Possibly when I'm done tweaking the engines," Scott said, studying the board for a moment before he made a move in response. "Why? Want to come along?" His tone was not quite teasing.

"Wouldn't turn it down," Forge deadpanned, his eyes focused on the board. "Been up in the jet enough to know it's a fine piece of machinery. I assume Miss Munroe told you about the time we had to make an emergency landing then jumpstart it with a lightning bolt?" He smiled, then advanced another piece in an easily-recognizable opening gambit. "Crazy times."

Scott, oddly, refrained from taking the opening Forge had just left him. "Oh, yes, I remember that. Ororo still hasn't heard the last of that. My poor plane..." He laughed softly, finally making a move. "Well. Not 'my' plane, although I feel a certain affection for her."

Forge arched an eyebrow as he assessed the situation on the board. A few moves later, and he'd captured two of Scott's pawns, but sacrificed a knight in the process. "You know," he said in a distracted tone as he slid a rook forward to threaten some of his opponent's pieces, "I must have played about a hundred games with the Professor. Did you realize he never uses the same opening gambit twice? He said he started doing that when Doug was beating him nine games out of ten."

"I've played chess with the Professor for... ten years, now," Scott said, with a small smirk that meant 'yes, I know how badly I just dated myself'. "Never managed to beat him very often. Remind me never to play with Doug if he had a win/loss ratio like that with Charles." He tilted his head, studying the board.

Forge's knowing grin turned to a frown when Scott slid a bishop across the board, neatly capturing his rook and seizing control of the left half of the board. Tapping his fingers together, he debated castling to protect his king, and possibly yield more board position, or making a counterattack directly for Scott's more valuable pieces.

"Any time Doug gets haughty about his predictive analysis skills, I just challenge him to beat my high score at pinball," he quipped, deciding on a conservative pawn advance. "You do what you can with the advantages you've got, right? Asynchronous warfare. You suggested that to me, remember?"

"... I possibly have read far too much military history in my life. Ah, well." Scott couldn't help a faint smile at the memory of that conversation, however. "Speaking of the Professor," he said, "he's going to be sending me off to Washington in a week or two. To attend a conference on his behalf."

"Oh?" Forge's interest was piqued, but not enough to forget to set up a defense with his queen as he anticipated Scott's next move. "Just like Dr. Grey used to, huh?"

He looked up as soon as he'd spoken, hand poised above his pieces. "I'm sorry, was that - how's she - things aren't still... I mean, you're getting by okay?"

Scott was giving Forge a very tolerant look. "I'm just fine," he said, and smiled - although the smile quirked into something oddly sad just before it faded. "Getting used to the one-person suite again."

"I hear that," Forge replied, slightly chastened. "It's something, though. I mean, I have class three days a week, I'm in the lab at least six hours a day, plus running all the security checks from my office - yeah, okay, did it weird you out the first time you actually had an office? Because it weirds me out some days. So it's not like I'd actually see a roommate if I still had one. Angelo and I cross paths a few times in the suite, but with all his work and the hours I keep, it's kind of the perfect arrangement, you know? And he brings over leftover's from his mom's, which is pretty cool. Oh, check," Forge said, moving a rook forward to capture one of Scott's pawns.

"You'll get used to the office," Scott said wisely. "I felt like the biggest imposter in the world when I first sat down in mine. I keep looking around waiting for the real owner of the place to march in and tell me to clear out, like I was still a student." He grinned. "I may not have been possessed of a whole lot of self-confidence in my early twenties."

Forge nodded, watching as Scott pondered a few moves, then interposed a knight in front of his king. Almost instantly Forge moved his hand to capture the piece and place Scott back in check, but stopped. If he took the knight, Scott could easily take his rook and place him in check. A seemingly obvious sacrifice, concealing a far greater gambit.

"Iiiiinteresting," Forge mumbled, looking at his board position. He didn't possess Doug's gift for reducing the board to a series of likely moves and pattern analysis, nor did he grasp the deeper levels of the game like the Professor. He looked at chess as what it was - a game, with rules and rationally thought-out series of maneuvers. He played each piece for what it was capable of, in the overall scheme of a larger tactic.

Which, he realized, was exactly how Scott was playing the game.

The thought made him smile as he moved his remaining knight into a feint, locking down Scott's more dangerous pieces but leaving the king still unthreatened. "But you made it out of your early twenties," Forge posed, lacing his fingers together, metal over flesh. "I haven't even gotten there yet. And you had the X-Men, and the school, and a relationship on top of that - so I suppose in comparison I'm not working myself too hard."

"Do you feel like you're overworking yourself?" Scott looked up at him, the look in his real eye very intent. "That's a serious question. Do yourself a favor and make sure you're honest about it from the get-go..." That way, you never wind up turning into me. "There always seems like there's too much to do, and too little time. It's the way of our little corner of the world."

For a moment, Forge had to make sure he wasn't sitting across from the Professor or Doctor Samson. Always taking a statement and rephrasing it as a question. "I suppose... I want to say there's more I could be doing, but that's not right. I'm working on not becoming a lab hermit. I want to know that what I do matters, and not just saving the day in a crisis. You're right, there's too little time. And I want to spend it doing the right thing."

He leaned back, brushing his hands through his hair and frowning when he realized he was about two weeks overdue for a haircut. "I've been thinking about priorities and how I've had them all mixed up these past two years. Spent so much time trying to make up for mistakes that I've been ignoring what's right around me."

Scott grinned suddenly, almost wryly. "Oh, can I ever relate to that," he said, shaking his head. "You don't even want to know how much time I've spent over the last few years hating myself for not being able to-" He paused, then shrugged to himself. "People I care about tend to have exceptionally crappy things happen to them. I've spent so much time beating myself up for not being... oh, omniescent enough." He shook his head again, just slightly. "It's made me do some pretty dumb things," he muttered, more to himself than to Forge as he made another, careful move.

"Well, that's good," Forge said with a sigh of relief before catching Scott's raised eyebrow. "I mean, not the doing dumb things, but that I'm not the only one. But if I've learned anything, it's that in retrospect, things you might consider dumb at the time work out for the best later."

With that, Forge reached out and took his queen between two mechanical fingers, moving it across the board and lightly knocking down one of Scott's bishops. "Checkmate."

"So it is." Scott chuckled, tipping over his king. "I think I'm out of practice. We should do this again," he said - spontaneously, but meaning it. "New chess partners are always a good thing." He eyed the door. "And you know, that game went fairly quickly, so I don't think anyone would really mind if we made it best two out of three."

Forge smiled, turning the board around and rearranging the pieces. "If you can abuse your magic headmaster powers to get Lorna to deliver dinner, you're on."