Illyana; Scott and Illyana, Monday afternoon

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A very bad morning segues into a meeting with the headmaster for Illyana Rasputin.


Monday, March 26. Very early morning.

They didn’t speak, at first.

It might have taken the edge off her growing sense of fear. The storm above them lashed out at the dead landscape, showering it with cold rain. Needless destruction.

Nothing grew here, now.

Every so often, something rustled, reminding her of their audience in the hills, the expanse that had been empty when she first left it. Now full: Teeming with demons, hordes of them. Collected. Organized, roughly, into lines and groups. She could only guess at how many there were, but she had never known them to come together like this.

They were silent. Thousands of them, and none who dared speak first. Her tension translated into the crackle of static electricity in the air.

She finally said, “You shouldn’t have done this.” It didn’t come out cinematically. Her voice was small and tinny in the throne room. She would never feel tall here; that might have been why they were there in the first place.

And he smiled that awful smile with too many teeth and said, “You should have given up earlier.”

They circled. She was wary. He thought he was toying with her, and that gave her new, fresh anger to steel herself with. That it had come to this was unthinkable, particularly in her own castle (in many ways, she thought, her home; but home was two different places and two different things, sometimes).

“I should have stayed, when you came,” the demon went on, watching her watch him. Waiting. “He never did develop the foresight he should have.”

“Side-effect of the evil,” she said briefly, humourlessly, trying to track his movements. Make him come to her. The person who’d taught her that was buried somewhere out there, beneath a legion of demons. Another reason to keep this place, to empty it out again.

He shook his head. She tried not to watch his face, willing her eyes down to what passed for hands, down to the ground, to the actual cloven hooves. “That’s the problem with humans.” A crash of thunder drowned out his next few words: “ -- think that the world works that way. Let me tell you something about the world: It’s about power. Belasco threw it away, but that doesn’t change the nature of the thing. He should have kept you closer. You’re a very special girl, you know.”

She’d had enough. “Shut up,” she said, trying to make it nonchalant, but that same anger worked its way through her tone, lacing it with a seriousness that made him laugh.

“You’re going to open the world up, girl,” he went on, setting those eerie, animal-shine eyes directly on her, nearly compelling her to look back. “You can feel it - can’t you - all those raw edges where you think your soul should be, just waiting to be the right shape. They’re going to come, and you’re the sign of it.” There was almost no warning before he attacked. Just a flicker of movement. She almost went the wrong way, and correcting back lost her valuable seconds; she parried the claws, but her sword didn’t work the way it was supposed to, not against him.

Something was happening.

The ground was pulling away from her. She could feel it: An almost painful sensation of separation, like halfway through pulling off a hangnail - before it hurts, but just as you know it’s going to - something pulling at her centre, putting her off-balance. It really happened that quickly.

It happened like it always happened, when something went wrong: She lost a beat, somewhere, and took a huge fist in the ribs. It knocked her breath out, and with her air went something else: Control, power, confidence, something that made her stumble getting up. She scrambled to her feet, and a claw on a huge hand snagged on her necklace. Jerking back ripped it off, and it fell, nearly in his reach, which was - unthinkable -

The floor flashed, and it was gone.

Her focus was gone, too, for that essential moment, when suddenly her feet could barely graze the ground, and one hand was manouevering ineffectually against the fist curled around the other arm, and something cracked. She recognized it for what it was when the cry of triumph rose from around them, deafening, raucous, drowning out the ringing in her ears.

She’d lost, and she’d be trapped --

He threw her, hard, and she flew back, twisting: Fast, through air that wasn’t hers, clinging to her last reserve of control; somehow kept falling, until the air changed, and the ground racing to meet her changed with it. Some last vestige of ownership, letting her escape. There wasn’t time to remember that she knew this ground, that it was safe. In one moment, she felt her body arc, weightless, and in the next she’d slammed into the ground, with the skin on her belly and her thighs and her hands pressed hard into prickly dead grass -

- Illyana blinked. Focused on the man in front of her. Sighed inwardly, and pulled herself back to the present with what seemed like a monumental effort. Like she was really pulling herself through space and time, from hell to the headmaster's office. "I'm sorry, sir," she said, trying to filter the tiredness out of her voice - it was so easy to mistake for flippancy, and the last thing she wanted was to piss him off. "Could you repeat that?"

Again? Scott wanted to say, but didn't. He even managed not to sigh. "Illyana, I know I warned you at midterm that your grades were slipping," he said patiently, "and that if you didn't start putting some effort into things you weren't going to pass your classes this year. I thought we'd had an understanding. You didn't take me up on the tutoring, but I didn't push because I knew you prefer to work on things on your own..."

"I know," she said, trying to remember back to that conversation - it felt like a long time ago. "I've just been - " She stopped, wishing for an insane moment that she could just tell him the truth. The impulse passed. She looked up. "I don't know what happened. I just can't seem to catch up." She spoke without self-pity, but she wasn't able to pull off the dead-straight tone she wanted - not tonight, when her bruises ached and she wanted to just forget that she'd ever gone to high school. Instead, she sounded a little lost, unable to grasp her usual straightforwardness.

He wished she wasn't so unreadable. He couldn't tell what was behind all of this, wasn't picking up on any cues that might have helped him make at least a semi-educated guess. Telepathy was useless with her, or he might have sent her to Charles just to see what the Professor might have picked up passively - reading a student's mind just because her grades were slipping would definitely have been out of line, of course, even if it had been feasible.

"Time to revisit the tutoring idea, maybe?" he suggested, but gently. "I've talked with your teachers, they're perfectly happy to work with you over the summer. It's important to catch up, Illyana. You need to finish high school. It's a first step to... well, just about anything else you might want to do with your life."

Oh, she wished he'd yell. It was easier to ignore; this just made her feel a kind of sick. "Yeah," she said, but a little dully: No point in telling him that the rest of her life was pretty likely to be either short or short and painful, and that trigonometry wasn't going to figure into either scenario. Teachers tended not to appreciate that kind of logic. "I know it's important," she said instead, looking down at her hands. "I'll - ask about the tutoring thing, if you really think it'll help."

"I really think it will," Scott said encouragingly. "You're got ability in spades, Illyana - all of your teachers agree on that score. It's perfectly understandable that you're having some trouble with the classroom context." He was encouraged; if she went for the tutoring option, he had a lot of faith that she'd be able to turn things around. "This sort of approach can only help," he went on, giving her a warm smile. "When it's just you and the teacher, you can
focus on the material a lot more easily, and I suspect that's what you need."

"Right," she said, though it was hard to imagine. She'd agree to anything, just now. "Well, if you think that's what I need, I'll - give it a try." She shrugged awkwardly; dealing with these meetings was never easy, no matter how nice the person was about it. Pretending was getting harder. "I've just never done anything like that before," she added, in case he was expecting some kind of reason for why she'd changed her mind.

"Well, I can promise one thing." He paused, deliberately, before he answered, his smile growing a little. "It won't hurt. Literally or figuratively. You may even be able to focus on some of the things that interest you more, working one-on-one like that." Really, it was something they probably should have tried ages ago with Illyana. It had just seemed more important to try and keep her integrated with the rest of the student body, given her experiences.

She actually cracked a smile at that - almost had to control a burst of hysteria, actually. It wouldn't hurt. Right. Well. That was good. "That sounds good," she said, nodding - half-believing that it would make a difference for a second, and then remembering that the Illyana in this conversation had left the building. "I'll talk to - my teachers." She knew who they were. Generally speaking.

"I'll talk to them to, if you like." Well, he would anyway, if quietly, but asking the question was a sort of test, to see how she'd react. He wanted her to still feel in control, but that didn't mean he was going to leave it entirely up to her. He'd done that once, without ideal results.

Oh, that wasn't going to help. "Well, um. I don't mind doing it." She paused, scrambling inside her head for a good reason why she should. "I mean, I'm the one with the - problem. I should be the one to take steps to fix it."

Scott made a noise that might have been agreement, or just acknowledgement. "I'd like you to check in with me regularly," he said, "or with Ms. Munroe. Every week, preferably. Just to see how things are going, once you start with the individual tutoring."

What was hard was feeling bad. She was doing - whatever she was doing - the point was that she had a reason, and the reason allowed her to nod and say, "That makes sense. Of course." And even intend to do it - if she had the time. Time wasn't something she was really figuring on, though.

With another student he might have gone on to say that his door was open outside of those regular meetings, as well, but he wasn't about to get emboldened by signs of improvement, push too far, and risk jeopardizing any of it. 'I'm glad you see it that way," he said instead, encouragingly. "You can turn this around, Illyana. All it will take is time and work."

Illyana nodded, worrying at the rough edge of a broken nail. "I'll try," she said. "I will."

Scott paused, regarding her carefully - wishing, again, that she wasn't such an unusual teenager. Despite everything, she still wasn't giving anything away. Not in her expression, or in her body language. Either that or he was losing his touch in his old age. Makes sense - the farther away you get from being a teenager yourself, the harder it is to read them.

"Okay," he finally said gently. "That's all we can ask." He smiled. "I'll let you get on with your day," he said, a touch of real amusement in his voice. "I'm sure you've probably had enough of being grilled by the headmaster at this point."

That evoked a slight smile. Usually she couldn't get out of there fast enough, but it would probably look bad if she scrambled out like usual, and she didn't want to have to deal with the end of - all this - just yet. Denial worked. Instead, she said, "Thanks, Mr. Summers," and stood up, heading for the door. Another time, it might have occurred to her to make sure she should leave, but she was out the door without a glance back, already someplace completely different in her head.