LOG: [Scott, Marius] Training and philosophy all in one

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Scott and Marius experiment with optic blasts in the Danger Room, and have a conversation which serendipitously wanders into the realm of philosophy, motivation, and the intricacies of mutants living in a human world. For about five minutes, and then right back out.



Marius blinked, mildly confused as to why he was suddenly staring at the ceiling.

"Note to self: in future exercises, find solid bracin' before receivin' an optic blast from the instructor."

Scott gave a cough that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. "I thought you were braced," he said, appearing over Marius. "That's what the whole asking you if you were ready thing was meant to accomplish." It was a good thing he'd made it a considerably-less-than-half-power blast.

"An understandable mistake on my part. I was expectin' a bit more in the way of energy an' a bit less in the way of force." Marius peeled himself off the mat, rubbing his chest. It felt like he'd been punched in the sternum. Thankfully, the blast had been wide and diffuse. If the headmaster had seen fit to narrow it he wasn't sure he'd still be in possession of a whole breastbone.

Shrugging off the idea of a newly-ventilated thorax, Marius gave his hands a decisive clap. "Right, energy of the optic nature. A new sort for me. Share with me, O Teacher, the pearls of wisdom gathered amidst your now-thirty-years-on-earth, an' show me how I might unleash this new an' awesome power." He paused. "Which doesn't make your eyes half-itch, does it?"

"Sometimes," Scott said, studying Marius very intently as he got up. "Give it a minute or two and tell me if you feel a headache starting. That, for me, is a lot more common." Much more so, since he'd lost his eye. At least Marius had two to work with.

The boy rubbed his forehead. The itch was deep in the back of his eye; as he waited it began to spread to a dull throb, as if the pain was soaking into the back of his brain. He carefully mapped the feeling.

"Ah, yes, even as we speak I feel the arrival of the tiny men with construction equipment." The boy crushed the heels of his hands against his eyelids in a rather basic massage. He opened his eyes and blinked. "At least I needn't adopt the glasses. Not that they weren't quite fashionable, that is."

"You should have seen my original glasses. Painfully geeky." Scott tilted his head, still studying the younger man. "Do you want to try a blast?" he asked, and then laughed softly. "Not at me. Try the wall."

Marius grinned. "Ah, why not. I'm always up for further options in creative property damage." Cracking his knuckles, Marius turned to the wall as instructed.

He stared at the wall. It stared back. Un-blasted.

After a few long moments and many different variations on a tortured squint, Marius admitted defeat. He turned back to Scott, scratched his head. "Well, this is humbling. It appears I've not got the hang of the optical sort of firin' mechanism. Any advice, or is part of the exercise intended to gauge stoic perseverance?"

"It's actually kind of hard to explain," Scott said a bit quizzically, after a moment. "You have to... push, basically. From the inside of your head out." He gave Marius a wry look. "When I lost my eye and had to learn to actually produce the blasts on cue, absolutely nothing I'd taught any of the energy-projecting students made any sense to me in a practical sense. It was kind of sad."

"Ah. Yes. Seattle. That grand reorganising of personal reality. I should've paid more heed at the time, as it proved a valuable primer in what those of our genetic status may expect." The shift to Marius' tone was ever so slight. He kept his attention locked on the wall, though he found his focus now somewhat less concentrated than what was probably advisable when trying to master a previously untested form of energy-projection.

"Seattle was a messy couple of days," Scott said, sounding almost casual about it. "We've had worse. As a team, I mean." He paused for a moment. "I've had worse, as an individual. Stopping to reflect on that is always a tad disconcerting."

"At the time I'd yet to have the privilege." Marius stared fixedly at the wall, focusing on the itch behind his eyes and the dull pain in his head. "Of course, those days of happy ignorance are long behind me. Since the day of that fateful riot I've been attacked, kidnapped, conditioned, spat upon, refused service, seen mutants sold like so much meat, almost been beaten to death with a well-meanin' mate for daring to socialize . . ." smelled beer-stained breath inches from his face as rusting metal slipped around the joint of one finger--

ZARK.

"Bugger!" Marius said, eyelids and hands instinctively snapping over his eyes within heartbeats of one another. He stumbled backwards and tripped, heart pounding, to come hard-down on the mat.

"Energy-projection is usually tied to one's emotional state," Marius heard Scott say, his voice getting closer. He crouched down beside the young man sitting on the mats. "You can take your hands away. Highly unlikely that's going to happen again."

"Apologies. Natural reaction to the unexpected optic blast there. First time an' that." Marius felt like an idiot, for reasons not the least of which because the sudden eruption was only a contributing factor to his pounding heart rather than the cause. There was a bit of sheepishness in how he peeled his hands away from his face, though he cracked his eyelids a little slower than strictly necessary; Scott was right next to his face, and he had a natural predisposition to avoid the inadvertent blasting of an instructor. What little shreds of dignity Marius could muster he began to collect about himself as discreetly as possible.

"Apologies," they boy repeated as he rested the heels of his hands against the mat, "been a bit on the twitchy side lately."

Scott raised an eyebrow, but got up and backed away a few steps, giving Marius some room. "Now you know why I don't tend to indulge in the temper tantrums my job would so often warrant," he said wryly, to lighten the situation a little; something else had clearly happened there. "The head feels better, I'm guessing. But get up slowly, you might be a little light-headed."

"Nah, I'm fine." Which, fortunately, wasn't much of a lie. His head felt strangely lighter, though that may have been due to the fact the small men with construction tools had become less enthusiastic. He brushed himself off and decided to proceed under the guise that he had not in fact just fallen on his ass in front of his commanding officer in a moment of unnecessary panic. It was a far more pleasant reality. "Tantrums are a bit unproductive, I find," he continued lightly. "Excess energy is best channeled into some healthy cause. For example, exercise. If one can't be balanced, one may at least be fit."

"I actually go work off the temper on the heavy bag most of the time. I used to just run it off, but I haven't been doing that as much lately." Which well-predated the bum knee, Scott reflected thoughtfully. When precisely had he made the shift to more aggressive forms of stress release? He shook his head slightly, re-focused on Marius. "The urge to yell is there a lot. Mostly because I'm a humorless son of a bitch on some levels and believe, unlike the majority of our teammates, that there are times and places for banter."

"Certainly," Marius agreed, though he did not elaborate that in his estimate that time was 'always.' He exhaled and began to stretch slowly, pulling his arms across his body in a way that was more for the comfort of the motion than any real need to. Something was preying on his mind.

"You ever get angry?" the boy asked, stretching his left arm taut. "At, ah . . . you know. Those not so genetically predisposed as ourselves."

Interesting. Maybe not so unexpected, given the incident with the FoH. "Frequently," Scott said briskly. He caught himself rubbing at the scars on his face, and stopped. "Went through a rather bitter period when I didn't think I was going to fly again, after I lost my eye... it wasn't a mutant who threw the Molotov at my head, after all."

"It's just . . . frustratin'. Forget the bit about protecting the world that hates an' fears, etc. etc.. I'm thinkin' more to do with the lot of us who're just trying to get on with things." Marius released his arms with a frustrated sigh. "That bit a few weeks ago with Forge -- sure, we made it out, right, but we'd had trainin', an' Mr. Sefton on top of it. But if it were some normal bloke who just walked in off the street, unsuspectin' and with no means of preparation . . ." He broke off and shook his head. "I never thought I would, but I'm beginnin' to understand why someone like Masque could do what he did an' see it as justice."

"It's not justice. It's just lashing out," Scott said very seriously. They'd wandered into deep water, here. "If you react out of anger, you don't react justly. It's almost a given."

Marius' curls flew as he shook his head, the motion sending a dull throb of protest through his skull. "Eh, it's been an eventful few months, but my soul is not yet altogether so black an' dead to consider random mutilation a solution of any sort of elegance. I mean only that I now find myself in a far better position to appreciate the view those such as Masque no doubt enjoyed for the better part of their lives." He crossed his arms over his chest and stared through fence of his bangs. "I was quick enough to condemn him, our first go around. Didn't yet know how bad it could be, I suppose."

"It's not always bad," Scott said, after a moment. "We just see the worst of it. It's kind of a vicious circle, I suppose. Mutants and humans live perfectly ordinary and happy lives with each other, all over the world. But we leap into these situations where it's all gone to hell, and that's what we see."

"It was probability of runnin' into such events while on the off-times that rather inspired me to pursue a life of ill-advised heroism. Whilst my favoured lifestyle isn't precisely risk-free, it's hardly livin' dangerous. Moderately troublesome at best. An' yet." Marius dropped his arms and sighed. "Is it ironic I joined in the sad hopes that I might, for once, proactively seek out hell rather than wait for the inevitable infliction?"

"There's nothing ironic, weird, or questionable about not wanting to sit back and passively take whatever the world wants to throw at you because you're a mutant," Scott said. "For me it's kind of making a point, too. We do what we do to prove to people that we care about the society we share."

Marius raised an eyebrow. "So . . . they may take vital portions of our anatomy, but they shall never take our social conscientiousness?"

"Something like that. Have you ever heard the saying that a woman needs to work twice as hard as a man to be considered half as good?" Scott smiled slightly. "Substitute 'mutant' for woman, and 'baseline human' for man, and the saying sort of works. Although it might be more appropriate to say that we need to be exemplary humans beings in order to be considered human."

"Ah, can't say I so much as take that personally. Durin' the days of the biteybits I often regarded myself with similar difficulty. It is not entirely unreasonable to look upon us with a certain wariness." Marius flicked his hair from his eyes in a perfunctory way. "Still. I shouldn't protest the building of a world with less spitting. Young people of our time have enough weighed against them without knowing the joy of personal insult coupled with an utter disregard for hygiene. Oh, an' a decline in unprovoked attacks shouldn't be sorely missed, either."

Scott gave a slow, rather odd smile. "You think I mean I take that personally?" He stopped, thinking about the idea, and the smile grew slightly. There was a definite edge to it, although it wasn't directed at Marius. "I don't, you know. I take it as a challenge. It's laughing in the face of the people who regard mutants as subhuman, or who construct all those highly elaborate arguments about why our existence needs to be restricted. We put ourselves on the line for them. It makes them look stupid. I get a perverse kind of satisfaction out of it."

"Right. The best revenge being livin' well and that." Marius sighed. "I confess, forging the bridge of fellowship, regardless of protests, never quite came into mind. As one who cares little for abstractions, the fate of humanity is not a particular concern. Mutantkind either, come to that. But people I like, and I find my conscience finds the notion they endure the minimum of suffering inexplicably preferable. Misery comes easily enough without the additional nudge of some a twat in a poncy cape." Marius considered for a moment, then shrugged with a slight smile. "Ah, well. Nice as nobility of the soul may be, I don't imagine the world pays any particular mind."

"When it comes right down to it, we save lives. Everything else is just icing on the cake." Scott smiled a bit wryly. "These philosophical discussions have their place, don't get me wrong. I find it helps, sometimes, when you've had a bad mission, or are sitting at a teammate's bedside, to think about the reasons we do what we do. But when we're out there, there's rarely the chance to do anything but focus on the things - or people - currently going boom."

The faint smile turned into a grin. "Point taken. Though in the event of future bedside tending I would like to state my preference for an attractive female teammate rather than philosophy. Speakin' from experience, when faced with what may possibly be permanent, perhaps fatal, injury questions in the nature of 'was that actually worth it?' are significantly less fortifying than cleavage."

"It's a matter of personal taste," Scott said sagely. "Jean can manage both." In his real eye, there was a spark of rather more open humor than most X-Men were used to seeing from their team leader. "I'm sure you really needed to know that."

"No worries, in situations such as this I find it best to fall back upon the carefully-cultivated skill of self-induced amnesia, honed after years of employment amidst clubs, social gatherings, and, upon a very unfortunate occasion, immediately after the lights are switched on." Ah, banter. The best and surest way to clear his mind of all unwanted thoughts. Which, in Marius' case, encompassed a rather broad range. The boy rolled his shoulders and, with a smile, turned to Scott. "So, right. The joys of optic blasts. Where were we . . ."