Scott and Pietro, Monday morning

[x-cyclops.livejournal.com]

Pietro comes across Scott in the gym - and, somewhat incidentally, finds out that he wasn't the only one who had a fairly crappy July this year. He has a predictable reaction and a less predictable reaction. Scott's a bit startled, thankfully in the good way.


He had come back from Youra in a relatively settled frame of mind, all things considered, Scott supposed. He'd been a little wound up - circling in the Blackbird while his team did all the hard work hadn't been the most enjoyable experience ever, to put it mildly - but not overly so.

But he'd dreamed, last night, about the first time they'd been on Youra, and Konstantakis in the bunker. Which was probably why he found himself here in the gym hammering away at the heavy bag instead of his usual morning run or swim. No harm, no foul, Scott told himself. It would settle him down, and then he'd go about his day.

The sound of fists against the heavy bag nearly sent Pietro right back out the gym door--the last thing he was in the mood for was someone else's trauma, and that sound was very nearly Morse code for "I am having a horrible time and am trying to fix it by chewing up my hands."

The hell with it, he decided; he was perfectly well entitled to use the gym like anyone else, and allowing himself to be chased out was hardly worthy of him.

"Summers," he said, eyebrows raising as he caught sight of who was making use of the official frustration proxy. "Isn't it a little early to be sweating out the pent-up tension?"

Scott paused, smiling a bit quizzically at Pietro before dragging a gloved hand over his forehead in an attempt to wipe away the aforementioned sweat. "Is it ever too early for that? It was a tense weekend," he went on before Pietro could come up with a typically Pietro-ish response to what was after all a rhetorical question. "If I don't want to be twitchy all week, I need to burn some of it off."

"Even so, one would think as a married man . . ." Pietro's voice died as he got a closer look at Scott; the sleeveless T-shirt the other man had on gave an excellent view of what Pietro immediately recognized as the scars from electrode burns. ". . . ah. Speaking of burning things off, and unless you want the student body knowing their headmaster was worked over by a professional, you might want to invest in different workout clothes."

Scott had been turning back to the bag but stopped at Pietro's words, his head jerking around a little too quickly before he caught himself. "You should see me with the shirt off. There's a reason that if I swim, I do it when no one else is around." Had he just made a joke? Okay, so it was a pretty lousy joke. The residual twitchiness from Greece had been replaced, all at once, by an entirely different and yet familiar sort of tension that seemed to be situated right between his eyes.

Scott turned back away from the bag, pulling off his gloves and unwinding the wrappings on his hands. "Besides," he said, just as casually, "they already know. I sort of snapped and said something about it in public, not too long afterwards."

"Ah, well, you can hardly have been in your right mind." Pietro hesistated, forehead creasing. "I won't pry, if you don't want to talk about it, Summers, but I . . . since I'm just finding out now, the timing is . . ." He took a deep breath. "Was it . . . was this something I might have prevented?"

Scott gave him a startled look, which faded again almost immediately. Of course Pietro would wonder, he told himself. He shook his head. "No," he said, more quietly as he finished pulling the wrappings off his hands. "Nothing to do with you, or your father... old business from Alkali Lake, though, which is kind of ironic, I suppose. I'd overheard something I didn't remember hearing, and one of Stryker's former associates wanted to know more."

"McKenna's people should have cleaned that mess up already," Pietro observed acerbically. "It's not as if they haven't had the time." He paused for a long moment, watching Scott, jaw set. "I don't ever again want to hear you tell me you don't think you could have handled what I've been through, Summers. I've seen men broken, or seen the aftermath, more often than I care to think about; I've very seldom seen them stand back up and reclaim themselves afterward, and especially not in only a few months. False modesty does not become you."

It wasn't that he was habitually dishonest with Pietro; their relationship over the last few years would never have gotten off the ground if that had been the case. But he had always controlled his reactions fairly carefully, not wanting to put any additional pressure on the other man. It had been a pattern he'd followed very closely since Pietro had wound up at the mansion, for different but equally valid reasons.

So when he looked around at Pietro with an entirely unguarded expression that mixed equal parts bewilderment - in all the talking he had done about what had happened to him and the process of recovery, that was the first time anyone had said anything like that to him - and a strange, defensive pain at the memory of how close he'd come a few times to not standing back up, it only lasted for a moment before he wrestled it back into a faint, contemplative smile that was only slightly strained.

"Yes, well. I'm not quite my old, happy-go-lucky self, but I make do." Okay, that hadn't come out right. Scott sighed and gave the heavy bag a push, sending it swinging. "Sorry. That was actually supposed to be a joke."

"Thanks for the clarification," Pietro replied with a very dry look. "And I noticed that you'd changed; I've been wondering about it, and a few things make more sense now. Though I might have known you'd try to toss it off." He arched an eyebrow. "Take the damn compliment, Summers; I don't offer very many."

The faint smile came back, with something closer to a flicker of real humor in it. Scott gave the bag another brief push and Pietro a one-shoulder shrug. "This is true." Thank you. "I suppose it's just hard to wrap my mind around the idea. You know, this weekend was my first real mission in six months?" He laughed a bit wryly. "And it wasn't much of a mission for me - I flew the plane."

"You like flying the plane," Pietro pointed out. "Though I can see where chauffeuring the rest of the team around, then watching them do the actual job would be annoying." He gave Scott a thin smile. "You're just not cut out to be a REMF."

"... no, I suppose I'm not. But I also want to make sure the team has faith that I can do the job. If that means easing my way back in more slowly than I'd like-" And wow, was that a hell of an admission to hear himself saying aloud. "-then that's what I'll do." He paused, then reflected that Pietro might very well understand, considering his protectiveness towards Wanda. "They had Alex, as leverage. It wasn't the best choice I've ever made, but at the time I didn't even think twice about it."

"Has anyone suggested that you should have?" Pietro asked in surprise. "Other than you, I mean; even your hindsight has concussion blasts. He's your brother, of course you couldn't risk him."

"Not in so many words, but what if they'd wanted current details on the school and our security systems?" Scott asked. "I could have saved my brother just to doom every kid in this school." His expression was bleak again as he looked away from Pietro, back at the bag. "I turned the whole thing into a tactical simulation. Ran it a couple of times a week for about two months... kept coming up with all these other alternatives that didn't even occur to me at the time." He looked back at Pietro. "I'm the strategist, Pietro. If I stop being that I'm just a guy who blows holes in things."

"Now you're just fishing for compliments," Pietro retorted. "You should listen to what you're trying to teach these children sometime: you're a husband, you're a teacher, a pilot . . . all kinds of things that, I devoutly hope, have very little to do with blowing holes in things. Though what you and your wife choose to do as consenting adults is, I suppose, not something I should be passing judgment on .. ." He shook his head. "If they'd gotten security details, you would have dealt with it later on. This place isn't exactly a soft target, as Stryker's men would know better than most. You might also have saved every kid in this school just to doom your brother, if you hadn't gone along with them. Would that have been any easier to live with?"

"Of course not." Scott shook his head, then sighed and went over to collect his water bottle. "In any case, Alex's latest unfortunate experience has made him decide he wants to learn how to not to be the boy hostage. If he sticks to it... well, if we can't teach him how to get that 'abduct me' sign off his back, I'd be terribly surprised. It's as much mindset as anything else... and why am I telling you that, you know this." Scott's smile was a little more natural.

"I'm familiar with the theory, yes. And good for him." Pietro laughed softly. "I've always adhered to the 'don't get kidnapped' school of thought myself."

"Yeah, me too..." Scott shook his head, not at Pietro, just to clear it. He still tended to get a little... spacey when he talked about what had happened in July, even under the best of conditions. "Anyway..." He caught himself staring at the scars around his wrists, from the restraints, and then surprised himself with a brief laugh. "You know, you're probably right about the shirt. I'll keep that in mind. Up for breakfast, after you ... do whatever you were planning to do when you walked in here? Jean's doing something frightfully productive in the infirmary, I think."

"Another place I hope not to be visiting soon." Pietro grinned. "And certainly--just give me a few minutes to work out, shower, and change."