Scott, Ororo, and Pietro - Saturday night

[x-cyclops.livejournal.com]

At the hospital, Scott checks on a still-shocky Ororo, then has a brief and somewhat bitter conversation with Pietro.



It was truly amazing that Ororo had been through enough traumatic and disastrous situations that she was able to function on autopilot now that the conflict with Rory and his minions was over. She felt relatively sure she was going through the motions correctly: speaking with the team, checking to make sure the captured foes were restrained, responding when a question was asked of her and remembering almost none of it. Still, she wasn't too worried - the difficult part was over, right? Somehow that thought didn't console her like it should've.

Hands came down on her shoulders from behind. "It's me," Scott said before she could punch him in the nose - coming up from behind her hadn't been the best idea imaginable, he realized as she looked around at him. The look in her eyes wasn't all that reassuring. "Come on," he said, steering her towards a chair. "Sit down."

"Scott." The sight of a familiar face was enough to rouse Ororo, and she complied easily enough, her leathers barely protesting as she took a seat in the chair. They were somewhat sticky and smelled wrong... vaguely she remembered Hairbag bleeding freely from the many wounds on his face and chest.

"Everything's under control." It was true, to an extent. There was no more active threat, and that was all she needed to be worrying about right now. He did not like the look of her eyes at all. "I've got the relief team here, and we've got the whole hospital secured."

"Thank you." She forced a smile out for him, though it stopped at her lips and didn't touch her eyes at all. "My team... they need to return to the mansion soon, to recuperate. It was a difficult fight."

"Shiro's willing to go back. The others... not so much." He crouched down beside her chair. "They might if you take them back."

Her? Leave now? "Oh, Scott," she said, her smile twisting into something else entirely. "I cannnot do that. I need to stay here."

The smile she got in return was very faint, almost bitter. "I know. Can I convince you to stay put, with your team, and let us take care of things?" Scott paused. "You've all done your part."

Ororo really wasn't in any shape to argue, and she knew Scott was right. "Very well," she said with a nod, her fingers slipping along the smooth metal of the chair's arm.

Scott nodded, giving her a quick up-and-down look. "Are you hurt?" he asked. "Is any of this blood yours?" She'd seemed to be moving all right, but adrenaline could do amazing things.

"No. No, I am fine," Ororo replied, glancing up at Scott once again. 'Fine' being a relative term, of course, but if he had seen any of the mercs, he would know she had gotten off very easy indeed. "The air is dead to me, though. I think I would like to step outside for a moment."

"Let me get someone to go with you," Scott said, hand already going to his com. She got another faint smile. "No arguments." He didn't want any of them to be alone. It was only common sense.

"Very well." She waited for him to finish speaking and then stood stiffly, turning towards the door that would lead her outside. "Thank you, Scott. For..." She trailed off for a moment, then blinked, looking back at him. "For coming here, and helping."

He just nodded. "Just get some fresh air, 'Ro," he said gently. "It'll help."

--

"I ought to have Amelia drug them and teleport them home whether they want to go or not," Scott said under his breath, running a hand through his hair as he glanced back in aggravation at the door to the room where half of the members of the team who'd first gone in after the kids were pretending to rest.

"Sounds an excellent idea to me," Pietro replied dryly. "We might also need to find out if Xavier knows any therapists who give bulk discount rates. Things have been rather steadily getting worse, haven't they? I mean, it's not just my natural cynicism skewing my reading of the files?"

Scott gave a bleak-sounding bark of laughter, leaning back against the wall behind him. "I'll be your colleague in cynicism. I also won't say anything about how it couldn't possibly get worse, because it will, one way or the other." He took a deep breath, closing his eyes. "Dumb, I was phenomenally dumb to let half of them anywhere near this place." Ororo and Kurt with their previous experience with Marius and Jennie, and Nathan with his Mistra background...

Pietro gave Scott an expressionless look then waved his hand over the other man's head as if feeling for something. "No, no pointy hat. I didn't think there'd be one, but you never know whether the Catholics might have decided to ordain a stealth pope."

"Oh, shut up," Scott muttered crossly, batting at Pietro's hand. Missing by a mile, of course. "I told myself that it couldn't possibly be as bad as some of the other situations like this we've seen. I shouldn't have said it." He looked in the other direction, towards the main lab. "I've never seen that look in Moira's eyes before. I hope I never do again."

"It was bad," Pietro agreed. "Aside from underestimating the trauma potential, did you have good reasons to send them in first?"

"Yes. Reasons for each choice, both the inside team and the outside team." He didn't run through them all. Pietro, he thought, just wanted to remind him that he knew he'd had reasons. "I'll quit with the self-flagellation, there's really no point to it except satisfying my masochistic impulses. I still wish I could get them to go home, though. It's not as if we don't have enough people here to keep the place secure while Charles and Moira and Jean are working."

Pietro raised his eyebrows. "So order them home. Are you in charge of this team or not? Dayspring, Munroe, and Wagner aren't going to do any good until they've got their powers back anyway, and the others are shocky at best. All they're doing here is taking up space and indulging their masochistic impulses."

Scott raised an eyebrow right back at him. "Powers or no powers, I don't want any of them having a meltdown if I force the issue."

"Because this would be . . . somehow worse than the meltdowns they're working toward by staying here, seeing all this?" Pietro shrugged. "You never know, some of them might be secretly relieved you're giving them an excuse to leave."

"Shiro's okay with the idea. I might try again with Marie and Terry... the other three are a lost cause, though." Scott shook his head. "The damage is done," he said, sounding a bit weary and looking years older, all of a sudden. "On all sides."

"I suppose it is." Pietro looked around the room consideringly. "I admit, my perspective here is probably a little skewed. I don't want to say numb, exactly, but at the same time I don't find this . . . shattering."

"Me either, really. Disheartening - to the nth degree, really, and every minute that goes by when we don't hear good news from inside that lab digs the knife a little deeper." Scott shook his head again, a bit quizzically. "I don't think I get shattered anymore."

"Good. I'm not sure you can afford to be." Pietro's look was half-amused. "Maybe this is the cynicism talking again, but I doubt this is the last time we'll see things get this bad, and next time we might not have time for anybody to stand around having meltdowns. And somehow I don't see you going too far the other way."

"I can't afford either extreme anymore." Scott took a deep breath and then let it out again. The hospital was secure, everyone was checked on, he'd called the mansion... "All right. Now that we're secure and no one's bleeding to death, I want to go through this hospital room-by-room, see if there's anything we or the proper authorities need to know about." If there was anything else Campbell had been doing.

Pietro grimaced. "Right behind you."