Sunday evening, Pietro and Scott

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Scott isn't quite done being yelled at, as Pietro demonstrates at length.



Pietro usually knocked before entering someone else's rooms. He valued his own privacy too much to invade someone else's willy-nilly. Today, however, he just pushed Scott's door open and walked in, leveling a flat glare at the man on the couch. "I told Dayspring I was going to bounce your head off a wall," he said. "I bounced one of the Preservers off a tree in Mexico, you know. I'm quite good at it."

Scott had put his laptop away a while ago. He was still sore and tired, and not much into the whole idea of doing anything productive just now. The transitory impulse to find some work to do had passed quickly. "If you bounce my head off the wall," he said, "I think my wife will probably drown you in the lake. Despite the fact that she's still angry with me."

"Are you sure? Because I think if I manage to jog some thought loose in there she might actually thank me." Pietro gritted his teeth. "You gave up on us. You gave up on me. In all the time we've known each other, you've never done that to me. I find I don't like the taste of it."

Scott stared blankly at the ceiling for a moment, and then sat up, trying not to wince overtly. "This is going to keep happening, isn't it?" he said, more to himself than to Pietro. "I'm going to keep finding out that I somehow mortally offended everyone in highly personal ways. Which is really kind of funny, since I was just trying to go die in peace where I wouldn't blow anyone else up with me!"

Pietro shook his head disgustedly. "You don't get to make that decision while your people are still out there putting their lives on the line to save yours. You particularly don't get to make that decision when we're all done risking our lives and the only thing standing between you and your cure is a few minor glitches with the transport. We had him in custody, Summers. If you'd bothered waiting half an hour for me to finish lashing a functional jet engine together, that whole business with hurling Marko out of the Blackbird at your wreckage could have been completely avoided. Congratulations, Summers: you managed to find a way to make martyrdom even more idiotic."

"Did I have any way of knowing that?" Scott snapped right back at him. His hands were a little unsteady, and he clenched them into fists at his sides. "All I knew is that I woke up yesterday morning, the federal personnel were in the process of bugging out, Jean wouldn't leave, and I felt like I was about to explode."

"Well, Xavier told us what you'd gone off to do. Possibly if you hadn't been in such a flaming hurry to end it all, you could've asked him, or asked your wife, how we were doing. Not the dramatic solution, maybe, but again I point out how much trouble it would have saved." Pietro sighed, leaning against the wall. "I would have run the bastard back if it had taken much longer than it did. While there was breath in my body, there was breath in yours."

"My fever was something like 105, Pietro. You can probably take a stab at how clear-headed I was." It wasn't quite a concession. He still wasn't sure that he'd done the wrong thing. If they'd been even an hour later getting to Florida, it would have been too later, and it was much better that it would have happened offshore like that.

"Most people don't go suicidal when they're running a little fever," Pietro grumbled. "We were almost there, Summers. We probably lifted off the ground about the same time you did."

"I did not go suicidal," Scott protested a bit feebly. "I just... decided to blow up somewhere else."

"Because you'd given up on every solution except your own death," Pietro said patiently. "Sounds like the definition of 'suicidal' I'm familiar with."

"Why is it that everyone feels the need to hammer me with this? I mean, it's not like I'm ever going to find myself in that situation again."

Pietro raised an eyebrow. "Because we care about you, you colossal twit. And I for one have been fairly comprehensively terrified and worried since that bastard got to you, which you then proceeded to compound by pulling a stunt so moronic that had you died I would even now be nominating you for a Darwin Award. Your proper response isn't 'It's not going to happen to me again,' it's 'I'm very sorry for worrying you and I'll try not to be quite so stupid in future.' And in your wife's case, you should combine that with something suitably expensive to make up for the black eye."

Scott was giving him a rather odd look. I must have scared the crap out of him, listen to him... "I'm sorry," he said. It was easy, mostly because he meant it, regardless of the fact that he still thought he'd made the right choice at the time.

"Don't do it again," Pietro said, his glare momentarily renewed. "I don't have enough friends to start burying them. Or holding memorial services because we couldn't find enough bits to bury."

"You do have a vivid way of expressing yourself at times," Scott muttered, sinking back into the cushions of the couch. "No more apparently suicidal decisions. All right."

"I'll hold you to that." Pietro sighed again. "Notice any complications? We did cut things a little closer than I would have liked."

Scott shrugged. "I check out as fine. I don't remember much past trying to land the plane, but that's probably only to be expected. I didn't manage to give myself any sort of esoteric radiation poisoning or anything, according to Amelia. Moira wants to run regular tests for the next few weeks."

"Here's hoping, then. At least we won't run into any more of that flavor of mutant suicide bomber." Pietro smiled thinly. "And if there's anything left of the Preservers' command structure, they're nursing a serious bloody nose."

"I'm just hoping that I was the last bomb made," Scott said with a bleak sort of humor. "If nothing else, taking that capability away from them... well, it's something. A very big something."

"That it is," Pietro replied. "Well, I should let you get back to your rest. Give some thought to that expensive apology, though, hm? She rather deserves it."