Wednesday evening, Pietro and Scott

[x-ccelerate.livejournal.com]

After another day of recompiling his Magneto files, Pietro finds he has something he needs to talk about; Scott provides a sympathetic ear, then shamelessly manipulates him into Social Interaction.



The knock on Scott's suite door was almost diffident, and Pietro cast frequent looks up and down the corridor, hoping no one would catch him waiting like an errant delivery boy. He could only imagine what the mansion rumor mill would make of this.

"Come in," Scott called. He was sprawled in an armchair, reading - a book, actually, not paperwork. It was not the time of night for paperwork. Jean had stepped out for a bit, and the last thing he wanted was for her to come back and find him working. "Pietro," he said, closing the book and managing to keep the surprise off his face as he saw who stepped in. "Everything all right?"

"Is your wife due back soon?" Pietro asked rather than answer. "I think . . . I think I need to talk." His jaw clenched. "I'm still compiling my files on my father, you know. Have to read through them, to make sure everything's there."

One look at the expression on Pietro's face, and a second to process his words, and Scott was reaching down the link to Jean, asking her to delay her return for a while. It took less a moment, and he smiled slightly at Pietro, setting the book aside and gesturing at one of the other chairs.

"She'll be a while. Anything to drink?" He kept his voice level, quiet and undemanding.

"No." Pietro sank into the chair, eyes on his knees, and said nothing for a moment. "It's not what's in the files, you know. You'd think it would be, you'd think it'd be my failures keeping me up nights, but it's not." He chuckled, raw in his throat. "I know there's any number of people around here who would find that . . . unsatisfying, but three years of control aren't undone in two months. My successes, now . . . it's funny how the mind works."

"I'm not sure I'm following." It was an invitation to elaborate, and Scott folded his hands together, waiting.

"Everything in the files . . . those are the times I couldn't stop him, or I had to stand by. When all that was left was to document his crimes, so that one day I could do . . . what I'm doing. But I couldn't let those bother me at the time. My cover demanded nothing less than perfection. Then there were the times I--ha--won, when I stopped him. The times you know about. More you don't. I sweated blood, often enough . . . but it was allowed that I be upset. I'd questioned him, after all. Defied him, very nearly. Tested the limit of his fatherly indulgence. So I can feel those, because I could feel them, in ways I . . . can't the others, yet." Pietro smiled dryly. "I suppose that means I'm not entirely a lost cause."

Scott gazed across at him, a barely perceptible tightness to his jaw the only outward sign of the effect Pietro's words had had on him. I wish a number of people around here were here to hear this... Then again, Pietro wouldn't be saying it, if it hadn't been just the two of them. Fully conscious of just how much he was being allowed to see, here, Scott was careful about his choice of words when he responded.

"It's like you said," he finally said, slowly. "You couldn't let yourself process a lot of it, or you wouldn't have been able to continue. What did hit home, despite that... you're feeling it first. It only makes sense."

Pietro was silent again, for longer; the silence threatened to drag, in fact, before he broke it. "Norilsk," he muttered. "That's the one that keeps coming back, for all that it was arguably my most bloodless victory. It was a complete non-starter, dead on the planning table. But if it hadn't been . . . I doubt even your people could have pulled off an eleventh-hour save.

"Norilsk," he continued more firmly, "bears the dubious distinction of being the second-largest city in the world above the Arctic Circle. It's very much a company town, built on top of some of the largest nickel deposits in the world." He smiled faintly. "It's also one of the most sickening monuments to human greed I've ever heard of; the entire area is so badly polluted that the city makes a profitable side business out of salvaging platinum and palladium from the local soil. That's one of the reasons the Russians closed the city to visitors a few years ago.

"The other, of course, is that the mountains also play host to a number of ICBM silos." Pietro grimaced. "Thus my father's interest in the place."

Scott winced at the implications. "I'm assuming they were willing to salvage more than heavy metals from the soil, if your father was interested in it..." he said, not quite dryly.

Pietro gave Scott an incredulous look, and exasperation leaked into his tone. "Summers, the Norilsk Trivia Minute was my way of easing up to the topic. My father didn't care about the pollution, or at least not more than to make a note that it wouldn't be allowed in the new world order. He didn't even care about the nickel mines, except insofar as he always appreciates an operating theater full of ferromagnetic material. Here's another piece of trivia for you. The Russian R-36M missile is capable of carrying a payload of up to ten nuclear warheads, each of which has a yield of . . . oh, call it roughly seven hundred kilotons." His mouth twisted into a bitter smirk. "Or to put it in short, easily-understood words: my father wanted lots and lots of nukes. I think there's actually a television show on this season that takes as its basic premise the kind of thing he wanted to do with them."

"So what happened?"

"I talked. Very fast. You can imagine the scene, I'm sure. I may never forget it." Pietro leaned back, closing his eyes. "Mystique, already picking targets. Sabretooth, hoping the silos were manned, or that he'd get a chance to play in Norilsk itself before we left. Toad, very nearly humping his chair at the thought of getting to mess around with weapons of mass destruction. My father standing over us all, mushroom clouds in his eyes. And . . . me. The only person there with any objection to putting fifty, sixty, who-knows-how-many cities to the nuclear torch. And I had to stop it right there, because only the five of us knew, and I had to do it in some way that made sense." He laughed. "Well. That made sense to Father. One of my favorite things about being free of him, I never have to see the world his way again."

Scott managed to hide his shudder. "How you kept your sanity at times, I'll never know," he said, under his breath, and then went on in a more normal tone. "How did you convince him?"

Pietro raised an eyebrow. "Very carefully." He shook his head again. "I told him . . . that it lacked the elegance of Alkali Lake. That the tunable nature of the Cerebro effect meant that it would kill only the humans, cleanly, allowing the mutants to simply . . . pick up the reins of the world where they had fallen. No loss of information, very little property damage, only a world stopped in its tracks, waiting for its new masters. I told him that while yes, a few dozen strategic nuclear explosions could very well cripple human society to the point where it would surrender to him, we would inherit a broken world, too much of its territory rendered uninhabitable, too much of the infrastructure of society destroyed. And quite possibly too many mutants dead for the survivors to ever accept him as their leader." He laughed, with barely any breath in it. "I told him that this plan was unworthy of him. That I expected better."

Scott smiled, tightly. "A few flaws in his logic there, yes." He watched Pietro for a long moment. "Is he losing patience?" he asked finally, unwillingly. "Looking at an option like this. What he did in San Diego..."

"He's getting frustrated, I think. And desperate." Pietro shrugged. "Let's not forget, he's past eighty. I think he worries that he won't live to see the mutant revolution he wants--and that without him to lead it, our people will lose. He has always been genuinely concerned for the future of mutantkind, in his way. But men like Xavier, McKenna, Barath . . . they keep pushing the world back from the brink, delaying--so Father thinks--the inevitable. And the delay grows intolerable." He snorted. "Also, his sanity's going nowhere but down."

Scott looked down. "They're both getting old," he said quietly. "Him and Charles. The difference is, one's work will live on after him. The other's... won't. And," he said steadily, meeting Pietro's eyes, "what you've been able to do is going to ensure that."

"Maybe then I'll stop waiting for the other shoe to drop." Pietro stretched idly, and flicked a speck of dust off his sleeve. "For all that I've done to bring him down, I still can't see the world without him. He's been this . . . giant shadow over my whole life. My mother's stories. Meeting him for the first time, the awe I felt, the sense of greatness. Then these past few years, every waking moment bent on his destruction. But I can't see past that, I can't imagine it. What the world will be, who I'll be, with him gone."

"We don't know what tomorrow looks like," Scott said after a moment, with a brief smile for his own whimsy. "We do our best to get there, and we wait to find out."

"Very pithy, Summers. The fortune-cookie industry lost a titan when you went into teaching." Pietro sighed. "I suppose there's not really much use even thinking about the future until I've got Cooper off my back."

Scott hesitated before he answered. "Not necessarily. On the grand scale, no - your life's still tied up in finishing the job you started. But that might make it easier for you to start examining your life day-to-day. You've lived constantly on edge, for years," he pointed out. "Part of the problem you have with seeing the future is that it requires an entirely different type of focus than what you've got ingrained."

"I suppose." Pietro sat back thoughtfully, then gave Scott a dubious look. "If I point out that I don't have much of a life right now to examine, you're going to dragoon me into some sort of social activity, aren't you. You probably have a list somewhere."

Scott raised an eyebrow. "Would I do that? I mean, I'm just so totally unfamiliar with the whole concept of becoming fixated on work and having to learn how to relax and enjoy life..."

"And now I get to be the one you take all those lessons out on. Hurray for me." Pietro sighed. "I did make up with Wanda, if that buys me any sort of leniency."

"Leniency, no. Less of the subtle nagging, yes." Scott gave him a crooked, entirely unrepentant grin.

"Subtle nagging. Is that what you call it?" Pietro returned the grin. "I'm reminded that subtlety means something different to a man who can glare through titanium. Very well, what am I in for?"

"Well, we can start with drinks down at Harry's with the few, the proud, and the non-judgemental. The small stuff, you know," Scott said. "If you made up with your sister, perhaps we should invite her and let you watch her drink the rest of us under the table."

Pietro tapped his ankleband. "Nice try, Summers, but my leash doesn't stretch that far. Maybe in a few months when I've appeased the evil federal bitch-queen, though. Next suggestion?"

"We could always bring Harry's to you. Nate's always complaining that the boathouse is too quiet when Moira and the baby are on Muir. We couldn't manage the pool table," Scott said almost merrily, "but you don't want to play pool with me anyway."

"Not an honest game, no." Pietro smiled faintly. "And I have to admit I'm curious to see how many nonjudgemental people you think you have here. I'm fairly sure the only thing I'll be re-examining afterward is the wisdom of letting you drag me into social events, though."

"You really are such a pessimist. Then again, I shouldn't talk." Scott rubbed at his jaw, thinking about just who he might invite to this impromptu evening. It bothered him that the answer wasn't 'the team', but that was life. "It's a pity that I don't think I could get enough non-judgemental and non-telepathic people for poker..."

"I can bluff telepaths," Pietro replied smugly. "I'll understand if you're concerned for your own money, but don't worry on my account."

Scott shook his head at him, smiling. "Maybe I'll keep that in mind as an option, then." His expression grew more serious, then, as he gazed across at Pietro. It struck him to ask the other man if he was going to be okay, but that would probably provoke a very Pietro-ish answer now that the moment had passed - and besides, 'okay' for tonight and okay in general were two very different matters. So Scott just waited.

"That expression makes you look constipated, Summers." Pietro sighed softly. "I'll . . . be all right, I think. At least for the moment. Though what it says that I'm starting to get impatient for the nightmares to start . . ."

"All that says is that you're impatient in general," Scott said lightly, "and we knew that."

"I'm very patient," Pietro corrected him a touch frostily. "It's the rest of the world that's slow." He shook his head. "And I've stolen enough of your time for one day, I think. I'm sure you have more, shall we say, productive things to do with your wife back in town."

"Yes," Scott said with a perfectly straight face, "I can think of several." But he smiled at Pietro as the other man got up. "I'm going to arrange the poker thing. You're not the only one who bluffs well around here - should be interesting to see."