Scott and Marie, Friday afternoon

[x-cyclops.livejournal.com]

Scott catches up on some work he's kind of let slide this week. Marie finally gets a chance to catch up with him, and has some hard questions.


Marie walked down the hall, pausing in front of a door she was surprised to find open. "Well, this is the last place Ah though Ah'd find you today. Or this week. Or y'know, this month," she said, the tinge of amusement in her voice quite clear.

Scott snorted at her. "I do have to do some work," he said with a quick smile. Especially since whatever Ororo says, I don't want her diving back into work too quickly. "Besides, Jean's got to reconnect with other people besides me. Having me trailing around behind her while she does that is probably a little off-putting."

"You work? Bah," she said with a grin. "But yeah, Ah can imagine it'd put a damper on her talking with people if you were always there too." Marie's grin faded as she carefully examined his face. "How are you doing with her being back?" It just wasn't worth beating around the bush with some questions.

Scott raised an eyebrow. "Which part of me would you like to answer that?" he asked, good-humoredly enough.

"Ah thought Ah was the only one in here with multiple voices in my head," Marie joked, trying to keep the difficult topic light. "But which parts feel which ways?" she asked, closing the door to the office behind her.

"It was a bad joke, Marie. I'm really glad she's back. I know she and I have a lot we need to talk about," Scott said quietly, "but there's time enough for that."

"Is there?" she said, one of her eyebrows arching. "There's time to figure out somethings, the more personal stuff thats just between you and her but there are others...well, lord Scott, what possesed you to put together you, me and Logan to go after Jean? Ah seriously though about using the parachute on the trip to Tibet." Marie bit her lower lip and glanced away. "Ah don't know where that came from..." It was a blatant lie, but she didn't know how to describe the protective concerns she had for both him and Logan.

Scott raised an eyebrow at her, but gave the question some honest thought before he answered. "You're both fast, tough, not easily injured, and capable of getting in and out of a fight very quickly," he said.

That brought her gaze back to him. "Mm hmm..." Marie forced herself to stop picking at the edge of her glove, clasping her hands behind her back. "And the stuff between you and Logan?" About Jean was left unsaid but obvious.

"And you can call that forcing the issue." There was a strange, level calm in his voice and in his one real eye. "Letting him know what I'm not putting up with anymore."

Marie shrugged. Better to talk about things then let them fester -that's what she felt was really causing the problem here. "An' did it feel effective?"

"Yes. Because now he knows that I know he's got unresolved feelings for my wife. And, well," Scott said, an edge of sarcasm in his voice, "it would be nice to see the end of the mooning and the attempted stabbings."

Marie sighed and rolled her eyes. "So is every mission from now to forever with you two gonna involve a macho 'She's mine' conversation?" She wondered how Jean would feel about those kind of talks. "You can't chose what Logan feels, but Jean chose you. Isn't that enough?"

"I don't care what Logan feels, Marie. What I need to know is that he can be trusted to keep it to himself. No pressuring her, no making himself obnoxious on the subject, no deciding that it's his place to kill her if she's acting a little out of her mind. I don't actually think that's too much to ask."

"He knows better," she said, hoping it was true. "And he wants what's best for her, so Ah doubt he'll go about doing stuff that could destabilize her now that she's gotten herself zen." Marie blinked, her expression growing slightly distant. "Everything he did, it was always because he cared about her, in his way."

And claws through the heart say 'I love you'. "I'm sorry, Marie," Scott said, a little bit more coolly than he'd really intended, "but I don't care. And I don't, honestly, think he does know better. His honor didn't stop him from pursuing her in the first place."

Marie couldn't argue with his comment and sighed unhappily. "But what would it take to make you realize he's different?"

"Probably time and good behavior," Scott said with a certain amount of black humor. "I'm not going to assume that he's different, or that I can trust him on this particular front, because I have no reason to. He hasn't given me one, and to be honest, my default assumption is no longer that people will respect my relationship with Jean." He wasn't that naive anymore.

"Oh?" Marie replied, honestly a little surprised. Not at what it would take for him to trust Logan, but how he felt others viewed his relationship with Jean. "What makes you say that?"

Scott smiled a bit humorlessly. "You know. You unintentionally got a head full of it when we tried our little powers experiment, remember?" He shook his head, settng the file aside, back on its proper pile. "What I'm saying is that when something like that can happen, with someone I'd never dreamed would ever..." He stopped, took a deep breath, and went on more calmly. "It doesn't make me believe in the good will of the man who's been sniffing around Jean since he met her."

Marie blushed crimson as she recalled the memories she'd absorbed from Scott. "But that was different. They were different." She locked eyes with Scott, the flush on her cheeks subsiding. "And he's also different now. You look at Logan and you let what you see confirm the ideas you already have about him. He makes mistakes. We all do. But you don't see the ways he's changed...because he has."

"And if he can change enough to fall back out of love with my wife," Scott said very quietly, "you'll never hear me mention it again."

"Oh Scott, come on. He's not in love with Jean. Not like you mean," Marie replied equally quietly, ignoring a grumble in the back of her mind that wasn't so sure. "Ah thought you at least knew that."

"You'd never know it by the way he acts when the topic of Jean comes up," Scott said, getting up to take the files back to the cabinet. "The way he sees it, he's suffering in noble silence while Jean denies her essentially passionate nature out of a sense of loyalty to the stick in the mud husband." He glanced back over his shoulder at her with a humorless smile. "You've had him in your head often enough. Am I right?"

Marie sighed in frustration. "It's not so easy to pull apart his thoughts and mine sometimes," she said slowly. "And it's not as cut and dried as all that." She paused and let out another sight. "And y'know, part of it is that he likes gettin' your goat. And you never fail to perform when he brings up Jean."

"Oh, I know that part of it's got to do with me and him, rather than him and Jean. That just makes him an ass." Scott slid the files back into place, closing the drawer, and turned around to look at Marie, leaning back against the filing cabinet. "I don't have the patience for it anymore," he said, calmly but forthrightly. "I don't want to play the game. The little not-a-triangle was one thing three years ago - it's something else entirely now."

"Then stop playing it. Because on that plane, you were," Marie said. "And a lots happened since that time three years ago, y'know?"

"Are you going to give him the same lecture, Marie?" was Scott's cold response. "Or is it my job to be the bigger man?"

"Yes Ah am," she replied. "But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be the bigger man. You're both acting like little boys and that's ridiculous for a school headmaster and someone who's older than most everyone at the school." Crossing her arms over her chest, Marie glared at Scott.

She did have a rather impressive glare, all things considered. But Scott just shook his head and went back to sit down at his desk. "I'm a man who's lost the woman he's loved three times," he said quietly, looking up at her, "and I'm scared to death it'll happen again. And I'm trying very hard to come to terms with the past, and the... involvement of other people in what's happened, but I won't apologize for hating it when salt gets rubbed in the wounds. Or for being protective of her. He tried to kill her, Marie."

Her glare melted away as he spoke. "Oh Scott. It's...it can't be easy, with everything she's been through. And adding anything to the mix, 'specially Logan, just stirs things up more." She blinked as his final words finally registered and certain comments he'd made earlier fell into a different light. "He what?"

"When he first came back. It was just after..." Scott's jaw tightened and he shook his head. "He tracked her down in New York to talk, and tried to gut her. I went to Alaska the day this happened - I didn't know about any of it until I got back."

"That doesn't track," she said, shaking her head. "What did she do? She attacked first, right?" Marie said trying to make sense of it.

"He went to find her, they talked, he decided that there was something wrong and tried to impale her on his claws. Then he decided that maybe she really had just left because she was tired of it all. That," Scott said, his voice clipped, "is what he told me when I got back from Alaska. It doesn't make any more sense to me now than it did in April."

"That doesn't track," she said, knowing she sounded like a broken record. Shaking her head, Marie ran a gloved hand through her hair. "Something's missing from that story," she said finally.

"Well, why don't you ask him? He never explained it to my satisfaction." Hence why I don't trust him around her. Scott shrugged his shoulders irritably, fighting back a sense of resentment. Wasn't he allowed a few days just to bask in her being back?

"Maybe Ah will," she said softly, though she couldn't imagine how she'd begin to broach it. "Ah just...why is everything around her always so complicated?"

Scott closed his eyes, letting the air in his lungs out on a pained sigh. "It doesn't have to be," he said, thinking of how peaceful yesterday had been. How much he'd wished one day could last forever. "I just... I know things happen, in our lives, but surely it's not too much to ask. For the people who are supposed to be our teammates, our family, not to make it harder for us."

Scott opened his eyes again, looking up at her. "I love her," he said steadily. "And if it comes to it, if this life or anyone here gets in the way of putting our life together back together... I can't speak for Jean, but don't have any doubts anymore about what my choice would be."

"That's good," Marie said softly, her voice only slightly wistful. What it would be like to know a love like that... "Ah just wish you'd focus more on that. On how much you love her and how much Ah know she loves you."

Scott gave her a ghost of a smile. "Maybe once I can put her and I back into the context of living day to day around here. Right now I'm still afraid of waking up to find out it's all a dream that she's back."

Marie leaned over and pinched Scott gently, a sad, tight smile on her face. "See? You're wide awake. No worries." Leaning back, her gaze drifted to focus on the trees outside. "But yeah, y'all probably just need time to readjust to life with each other."

"I'll make you a deal," Scott said, thinking about the fact that she was probably quite serious about giving Logan this same lecture. If she was going to insist on stepping in... for her, he'd try to make things a little easier. This couldn't be easy, given her own past relationship with Logan. "I won't initiate any more pissing contests. I can't say I trust him around her, and I can't say the way he looks at her doesn't make him want to optic blast him in the head, but I can take the frustration out on the punching bag. If he doesn't give me any reason for it to be more than frustration."

"Ah'll take that deal," Marie said, her smile growing more relaxed. "Punching bag's easier to clean up."

Scott gave her a slightly awkward smile in return, and wondered whether Jean maybe wasn't finished with her reconnecting for the day. "It's part of life, I know," he said, even as the muscles in his shoulders started to knot up even tighter. "Dealing with the complications."