Scott and Logan - Smooth Jazz

[x-wolverine.livejournal.com]

Just before Terry goes on-stage, Logan and Scott have a little conversation. Logan looks for a little guidance, but Scott gets Socratic on him.



Logan eased into his seat warily, holding his whiskey in its tumbler close to him so as to not spill a drop. He was uneasy about being in this sort of a crowd - older, more upscale, more respectable. Still, this was his promise to himself - to get out more, to experience more of life than pool hustling, fight clubs, and roadside bars. Hopefully Terry wouldn't hold his appearance against him or take it as him mocking her - he knew he wasn't well-liked among the pups.

Scott was slouched in a seat on the other side of the club. He'd come on his own, and hadn't been looking for any of the others who'd be here from the mansion. He was feeling decidedly under the weather again today, and while he wanted to be here to support Terry, he wasn't quite up to being social. Your own damned fault, Summers, he thought, trying to ignore the ache of his muscles and focus on the club around him.

A passer-by's wake-breeze brought a familiar smell to Logan's sensitive nose and with a shrug he got back up and threaded his way through the patrons until he found what he was looking for. He sank into a chair oposite of Scott and tipped his hat to the other man. "Evenin', Scott." he said in a friendly tone.

"Logan." Scott was sticking to ice water. Putting any kind of chemical into his system at this point would not be a good idea. "I saw you said you were coming. Terry should be up in a bit."

"Yeah." he said, settling himself to be more comfortable. "Had nothing better to do so I figured that I'd see if the kid's any good." he said with a shrug. "Not that I'd know good from bad, but what the hell, right?" he said good-naturedly. He noted Scott's drink of choice with some amusement.

"Didn't think you were ever lacking something to do on a Friday night, Logan," Scott said, ignoring Logan's glance at his drink. He didn't feel like explaining.

"Pool gets old, I've been told I'm too close to the line on overtraining, and Marie's got the school thing." he said sourly. "And after Kyle's thing it wouldn't be right to go find a bar to fight in." he said.

"Well, that covers four of what, a thousand options?" Scott shook his head. "Not that listening to Terry isn't considerably better than the vast majority of those options."

Logan tried not to grind his teeth into powder. Regenerating teeth was a giant annoyance. "You got any suggestions?" he asked, more acerbically than he'd intended. "A little jazz, even if it sucks, is a way to make one night go by."

"Suggestions? On a general level, rather than just for tonight?" Scott took a sip of his ice water. "I don't know, Logan. There are all kinds of suggestions I could make, but they're my suggestions."

"I know what I'm doin' tonight." he said. "General suggestions. Who knows, Slim, I might even listen to you." he teased with just the hint of a grin. Then he washed that grin down with a nice sip of his whiskey.

"Since when do you need to be told what to do, Logan? I don't think that worked all that well the last time, did it? We tried to fit you into a mold that didn't work for you." And you got strangled by a sixteen year-old girl. "Maybe this makes me sound too much like Charles," Scott said, watching Terry appear to do her sound check, "but I kind of suspect things might go a little better if more of the initiative comes from you."

"You're in command. So command." he growled, then sighed. "I got one thing I'm good at. And that's the application of violence. That didn't work out too well for me, considering. So unless you need a woodcarver, I got nothin'." he shrugged. He did shift his attention to Terry, curious as to what the Irish girl was going to perform.

"Bullshit. You have whatever you choose to have." There were a number of things he could have suggested, but as he'd said to Logan, he wasn't going to suggest them. "You want something new to do with your time, you decide what that's going to be, figure out whether it's going to work, and then make it happen. Might do you a lot of good to take a little control over your life and push your own boundaries. You can be awfully passive at times, Logan."

"If I were passive I'd have lay down and died seventeen years ago when I busted out of Weapon-X." he growled. "I chose what I wanted." he said. "And it got all fucked up. What kind of a commander are you, anyway? Or you enjoyin' watching me twist?"

"I'm not enjoying this conversation at all, quite frankly. And what kind of commander am I?" Scott saluted him ironically with the water glass. "No one's commander at the moment... or did you forget that? And okay, maybe you're not passive. Just stuck in a rut and not particularly interested in getting out of it."

"I have to stay under discipline." he said through gritted teeth. He should have remembered that Scott was offline and out of the chain of command. Stupid! "But, as you just reminded me, your opinion means fuck-all. I'm not one of your students." he pointed out. "Looks like the kid's goin' on soon."

"My opinion means fuck-all to Wolverine. I would hope that by now, it should mean something to Logan. Although," Scott said, taking another minute sip of his water - his stomach was churning, and he didn't think it was the conversation, "I suppose when Logan is busy hiding behind Wolverine, that sort of response is only to be expected."

"Logan was a name Heather chose out of a book." Logan observed. "Don't push your issues on me, Slim."

"Dodge if you like. The point remains, you're hiding. You don't even see the irony - you were looking to me for answers, and if I'd been willing to give them you would have taken them. From me, of all people." Scott let the glass rest against the side of his face for a moment. It was nice and cool. "Try thinking outside the box. It's not actually that scary."

"Big words from a man still hiding from everything he ever was." Logan retorted just as Terry stepped up to the stage. "So what kind of jazz do you think she'll play?"

Scott wasn't the type to need the last word, and besides, Logan's retort hadn't stung in the slightest. Just defensive crap, that was all. "Not a clue," he said.