Log: Scott/Garrison

[x-dominion.livejournal.com]

Garrison takes his won beers down to the beach room, and runs into Scott, who manages to get a little more details out of the Canadian about his unsettled nature after both missions.


It just sat in the corner. How could something that didn't move
constantly need to be tuned every time he picked it up? Garrison
scowled as he tried a G chord, sighed, and went back to working on the
pegs. He was, well for the lack of a better word, on a beach.
Wandering around the mansion, he could have sworn he heard the ocean
behind a door. While convinced it was just himself going mad, he
nevertheless decided to check it out, and found a room in the basement
to have been converted into a sort of fake beach lounge.

Personally, he thought it was brilliant. While the Danger Room could
look like all sorts of things, it never lost that artificial feel, and
was in pretty heavy rotation between team training and powers classes.
This little gem was a genius resource for people to relax and let of
some steam. You had to admire the Professor. So there he had gone,
with his guitar and a six pack and his old torn 'I AM CANADIAN'
t-shirt. Now if only the damn thing would tune right.

"You found my hideaway," came Scott's voice from behind him. "Well,"
he amended as he moved further onto the beach, "not my hideaway, but
there've been times they've had to drag me out of here." He gestured
to the sunlamps. "The UV. I'm usually bordering on Seasonal Affective
Disorder in the winter."

"Oh god, this is the part where you tell me you're Californian, and I
have to choose between killing you or myself with the guitar. And, no
offense Scott, but let's face it." Garrison regarded him solemnly.
"It's you."

He tried another chord, and scowled. Someone was sneaking in and
untuning this thing, he swore. He twisted a peg, and lobbed a bottle
over at Scott. "It's Canadian beer. Go slow. Your Bud addled system
might take a while to check up."

"Alaskan, actually," Scott said with a brief smile, sitting down in
the chair next to Garrison's and helping himself to a beer. "Which I
know makes the 'sinks into depression with lack of sunlight' thing
pretty funny. But it's powers-related." The beer was indeed quite a
bit stronger than the norm down at Harry's. "Whenever I get
particularly cranky I get well-meaning young women going 'Scott? Do
you need to swap out the lightbulbs in your office again? We have
extra full-spectrum bulbs if you need them, Scott...'"

"Ah seasonal depression. Never got that myself, but fortunately my
trips above the Artic circle have been limited to a few days at a
time." He tried another chord and made some more adjustments. "How did
you end up from Alaska down here? Or are Xavier's scouting trips in
the habit of visiting the armpit of the world?"

"Nevada to here, actually - it's a long story, involving a plane crash
and entirely too much time spent as a ward of the state," Scott said
wryly. "I didn't know I was from Alaska until a couple of years ago,
when Charles found my grandparents. Severe head injury at an
impressionable age." He took another sip of beer. "Phillip and Deborah
- the grandparents - own a charter air service in Anchorage. I have a
standing job offer, just in case I ever get bored of life down here."

"Yeah, palatial estate, hot wife, no rent or bills, private stealth
superjet... offer like that I'm amazed you're still here myself. Ah!"
Garrison said triumphantly. The chord finally was sounding like it was
supposed to. Only fifteen minutes to make that happen. He tried not to
sigh and picked up his beer.

"For bored, substitute 'have my third nervous breakdown'." Scott
paused, deliberately. "Or is it fourth? I don't know if the PTSD I
came back from my summer vacation with actually counts." He could feel
his mood improving already, being under the sunlamps. Or maybe it was
the beer. "Alaska looks very good sometimes, dark winters or no dark
winters."

"Ah, like they tell us on the first day of the Academy. If you can't
take the joke, you shouldn't have joined the force." Garrison settled
the guitar across his legs and started to strum. It was his way of
bleeding off stress, and these days, that seemed to be all he had.
Despite his jokes to Scott, the young man was shaken. The only mission
he'd been on that seemed to go right, his role had been in the middle
of fellow cops, not with the X-Men. "And six months straight of sun?
No thanks. I like sleeping on a human schedule."

"I don't think I've slept on a human schedule for... nine years?
Undisturbed sleep and I kind of parted ways around the time Charles
stuck me in charge of the team." Scott knew perfectly well that what
he was seeing was a facade. He could have wished for a better
beginning for Garrison with the team, but something he'd learned in
those nine years was that you rarely got what you wished for. And when
you did, more often than not, it was everything you wanted in the
worst possible way. "I have, I'm proud to say, overcome the urge to
combat insomnia with paperwork. I sort of realized I was actually
overcomplicating the administrative side of things just to have
something to do when I couldn't sleep and didn't want to think."

"Paper work by choice. Yup, you're obviously crazy." He stopped long
enough to take a pull from his bottle, and then returned to the light
noodling on the acoustic. "My job tends to breed paper, like a
thousand tiny bunnies in a pet store. These days, I just dump my
in-box into someone else's and hope they don't notice."

Scott had the bizarre image of himself as a woodpecker, trying to peck
holes in Garrison's facade to let the light through. Too bad it
seems to be solid oak... "I should introduce you to my inbox
sometime," he said, the banter a delaying tactic while he tried to
think. "I call him Fred. I think he's carnivorous." He eyed the guitar
for a long moment. "I play the sax," he volunteered.

"Let me guess, you moonlight out to play with Oscar Peterson's band on
the side, right?" Garrison said, switching over to another tune. "This
place, man. You had Alison Blaire on staff, and that Cassidy chick is
tearing up the New York alt-press. I'm waiting for one of you to sign
a deal with the Yankees or cure cancer in your spare time, while being
X-Men and teaching full time simultaneously."

"There's a whole lot of juggling around here," Scott said mildly.
"Some people take it to extremes. Like Nate thinking last term that he
could teach three classes on top of being an X-Man, raising a
telekinetic toddler, and helping run a humanitarian organization." He
sipped at his beer. "Somehow we manage not to make too much of a hash
of any one thing, though. Juggling or not. There's not an excess of
spare time around here, though."

"Too much of a hash? The only things that I've seen anyone here screw
up in a major way are interpersonal relationships, and that's usually
inbetween saving the planet and bailing out major American cities.
Which in my mind means you get a pass for that." Garrison stopped
strumming and picked out a few chords, singing lightly under his
breath. As he himself put it, his musical talents were a credit to a
campfire and not much else.

"Yeah, well. There have been times that we've been too busy with stuff
outside these walls and missed important things going on inside. With
the kids, especially. What used to make me crazy was believing that I
should somehow be able to figure out everything that might
happen, and plan for it." Scott paused. "Remember that scenario I
threw you, the one I called the Kobayashi Maru? I have dozens of
those. The no-win situations."

"You know that might be part of the problem. The idea that there is a
win or lose in this." He fumbled a chord, the guitar making an ugly
sound. "Look at Russia. We call winning the fact that more people
didn't die, and that we handed over a bunch of terrorists, who just
might have a legitimate complaint or two, over to a country that wrote
its laws and due process in pencil. We allowed another country to keep
what amounts to a military brainwashing program under wraps so the
world doesn't know about it. Those aren't wins, Scott. Even when you
caught the murder, the victim is still dead." He said bitterly,
repeating one of the very first things taught at the Academy.

"Okay, I thought that you were the cop with the real-world approach to
things and I was the somewhat scary idealistic semi-paramilitary,"
Scott said after a moment, although there was no edge to the words.
"Call me a cynic, but I lost any belief that we can ever do more than
save who we can a while ago. Funnily enough, it dates back to our
first trip to a certain Greek island." He shook his head.
"There is virtually nothing that we do that isn't... tainted somehow.
Whether it's the people we couldn't save, or our inability to do much
to influence what happens after the bullets stop flying." His
expression was oddly tired suddenly, despite the large amounts of UV.
"This isn't the easiest way to make substantive change, Garrison. We
save lives, and maybe, sometimes, we change attitudes - but that's
it."

"You're right. It just feels like it isn't enough." Kane said softly,
his gaze firmly on his fingers as he plunked the strings. He chorded
differently for a moment and started to play a lick, not so much
singing as muttering. "Culled and wooed, bitten chewed. It won't hurt
if you don't move."

Scott waited until the other man had fallen silent again. "It's never
enough," he said more quietly, "but that doesn't mean you don't do it.
Because really, what's the alternative?"

"Three months ago, I might have had an answer for you. Right now, I
don't. I really don't." Garrison picked up a beer and drained it. "And
I don't know if that's how it should be. I used to know, Scott, and now
I don't." He plucked at the guitar as the room lapsed back into silence.