xp_logs | Cain and Ororo | Tuesday morning

After his run-in with Jennie, Cain stops by to express his concerns about the trainees' stress levels with Ororo.

Making sure to clean the dirt off his boots before heading back into the house, Cain paused in the kitchen to check his small inbox. A few volunteers for the construction work, one of the kids' toilets stopped up again, and his schedule for the week's Danger Room rotations, including another spot with the trainees.

Pondering the morning's events, Cain tucked the schedule into his pocket and headed upstairs. Moments later, he knocked on Ororo's door and stuck his head in. "Bend your ear for a moment, boss lady?"

Ororo glanced up - not from paperwork, but the ever-present news articles that had been making their rounds of the mansion that week. "Of course, Cain, please come in," she said with a nod, folding the newspapers into a tidy pile and pushing them off to one side of her desk. Out of sight, but certainly not out of mind.

"Yeah, so," Cain started, glancing at the expensive-looking chairs in the office and deciding to simply lean against the wall. "I think some of our trainees might be hitting the wall a bit, what with losin' one of their own. Ran into Jennie this morning. Girl's got the textbook thousand-yard stare, and I'll bet that the others ain't far behind. It ain't that we're pushing 'em too hard. It's just that... dealing with this and training, I think it might be a bad idea right now."

"There is certainly no rush for them to pursue training at the moment," Ororo replied. "And their well-being is of course our primary concern." She pursed her lips, picking up a pen to jot down the time and nature of Cain's concern, to best document it for later. "I think an abbreviated schedule might serve all the trainees well... thank you for bringing it to my attention. We will certainly see what we can do to scale back their workload."

"You ever lost one?" Cain said abruptly, his tone softer than his words. He nodded towards the newspapers on Ororo's desk. "Not like this, I mean. A teammate, when you're actually out there. Of course, there's Jean - but she don't count," he clarified. "I was just wondering - you and Summers been doing this a while now. That's a lot of bullets dodged, and one day someone's going to turn left instead of right, or forget to duck when Magneto chucks a Buick at 'em, and how's everyone going to hold together then?"

She didn't know quite what to say to that, not because she hadn't spent hours pondering it, but because all those hours had given her nothing but a vague sense of trepidation and few solutions. "As well as we can manage, I suppose," came the answer finally, though the accompanying shake of her head showed she knew it wasn't much of one. "I know it is an inevitability, but what can one do to prepare? There isn't a training exercise to cover that, or a simulation that can tell you what it is really like. To tell the truth," she confided, "I dread the day when it happens." Not if, but when. The only uncertainty was who.

Cain sighed and nodded his head. "I wasn't much older than some of the younger folks on the team when I went off to the war," he said quietly. "I went into it all gung-ho, one two three four we love the Marine Corps, all that shit. A week past my twenty-first birthday, and I saw the guy in front of me hit a land mine on a patrol. Nothing he could've done, there was no way he could have known it was there. One minute, there Dickie was. The next, we're picking chunks of him out of our fatigues."

His eyes focused on a spot on the wall behind Ororo, lost in memory. "These kids, Ororo, I see them all fired up to get to training and get in that uniform - it's one thing when it's folks like me or Marie who can't be hurt. Or Nate, who's seen people get killed next to him. You ever seen that look he gets after a mission? Like he's a million miles away. I may not want to be all buddy-buddy with these kids, but I sure as hell don't want them turning out like that before they're old enough to buy a beer."

"And yet we cannot make the decision for them," Ororo said, well aware she might be breaking into Cain's inner thoughts with her reply. "We can worry, and we can do our best to keep it from happening, but we cannot stop them from it if that is what they want." At least, that was what she told herself. Whether it was true, well... "At least they have a choice. Others, like Nathan, Remy... they did not." Which possibly explained why she worried over those two men in particular more than anybody else.

After a long pause, Cain nodded. "If this is what they want, then they'll stick with it. You know, when I first learned about the team, what you - we - do, I wasn't exactly keen on Chuck turning my home into a school, just to have his own little recruiting setup. Took some time to see that it ain't like that. Every one of us puts on that uniform, no one pushed us to it." He was silent a moment, then something percolated through his head. "So, you and Remy, huh? Never would have pictured that one. What with you bein'... and him bein' all... you know."

Ororo's expression was very near neutral, though there was a slight twitch to her lips that belied her emotions. "Stranger things have happened," she murmured, giving a small shrug of her shoulders.

"Dinosaurs are strange," Cain responded. "You're talkin' lunacy here. But hey, if it's keeping him out of strange linen closets, best for everyone. Ain't seen him around for a long while, though."

“Neither have I,” Ororo said before she realized it. She at least had the good grace to look somewhat embarrassed. “That is, he has not visited the mansion in some time. And I believe lately he has been… traveling.” Which was a nicer way of saying that she had no idea where he was. “Work with Snow Valley keeps him very busy.”

"I still got some stuff of his, found it in one of the boxes when I moved out of the boathouse," Cain explained. "Oughta drop by the brownstone sometime and drop it off. I think Betsy still owes me a
round anyway."

He pushed off from the wall, nodding to Ororo. "But anyway, like I said, the kids might be pushing the edge a bit lately. Might help if we don't push 'em any further."

“Thank you, Cain.” Whether or not he professed a desire to be ‘buddy-buddy’ with the trainees, Ororo knew he certainly had their best interests at heart and would look out for them as he would any member of the team. It was a reassuring thought. “And thank you for stopping by. My door is always open.”

"And if not," Cain said as he left, "I got the keys."