xp_logs | Angelo and Scott, Wednesday morning

Angelo and Scott meet while out running. Words are exchanged.

Just because it wasn't as comfortable to do long runs anymore on a knee that had been dislocated twice in the last three years didn't mean that he shouldn't do them. Just meant he needed to suck it up and ignore the pain. Jean would definitely not approve, Scott thought, making the turn back towards the mansion. But so long as he didn't push it far enough to do any real damage... I think I really am a bit of a masochist.

Angelo had also taken to running recently, both with and without Joyita. He'd left her in the stables kennel, today, intending to go back and let her get her own exercise later. He slowed a little as he noticed Scott, but didn't stop.

Apart from the knee, he felt pretty good, Scott reflected. All of that swimming wasn't a bad substitute, although really, doing both was the best idea. If there was one thing he had to be, especially after the mess that had been 2006, it was as physically fit as anyone else on the team.

The hesitation didn't last long before Angelo moved back up to his previous pace, calling out. "Hey, Scott."

Still, it had been a little easier at twenty-five. "Angelo," Scott said, breathing hard. "No dog today?"

"She gets her run later", he said casually. "This way, I don't have to worry about what to do with her if she gets tired before I do."

"Good call. Can't have a worn-out dog." Scott cut back his pace a little; conversation wasn't going to be possible unless he did.

"People'd yell at me", Angelo agreed with a crooked grin. "An' I get to take it as far as I want without her."

"Good to see you're keeping up the fitness routine, even on the bench." A little blunt, but, well, he'd been feeling particularly blunt and undiplomatic lately. Let Ororo be the diplomat. She was much better at it than him anyway.

Angelo looked at him sideways, but nodded. "I've still got trainin' on the schedule. Might's well be doin' somethin' in those times."

"True. Still, you have other things you were supposed to be doing with the spare time, too."

That was met with silence for a while. Finally, "I've been havin' more sessions with Jack."

"That's good," was Scott's reply. Just because he was asking, didn't mean he had any intention of nagging.

"But I don't know", Angelo continued. "When I'll come back off the bench. If I will."

Scott thought about it for a moment as they ran, then decided the calculated jab was worth the risk. If it led to him getting punched or something, so much the better. At least the younger man would be displaying some signs of life rather than endless navel-gazing. "That sounds to me like you've half-convinced yourself to give up on us."

Angelo skidded to a halt, stung. "I haven't. It's not you I'd be givin' up on. I just don't know if I'm gonna be fit for it again. Don't even know anymore if I ever really was."

"Angelo, that's a load of bullshit," Scott said. Not stopping. Let's see if he follows me...

He did, but it was slower than before, almost reluctant. "It's not. You gave me the leathers 'cause I did good in Moscow. But stuff keeps happenin' I can't take, an' I keep screwin' up, an' I'm benched for a while for whatever reason, an' it just happens again an' again."

"Angelo, I have smiled and waved as X-Men have headed off to Snow Valley, or the West Coast Annex, or away from the life entirely. I've always said that I don't want anyone here who doesn't want to be here, and if they truly believe their place is elsewhere, then I'm fully in support of them making the choice that's right for them. So why," Scott said, "do you think I'm telling you you're full of crap and giving up?"

"'Cause you believe it", he admitted grudgingly. "You think I belong here. But what if I want to give up? I'm tired, Scott, an' it's not goin' to get any better."

"I didn't think you were that weak."

Angelo's head snapped up on pure indignant reflex at that comment, but quickly dropped again. "Neither did I", he said quietly.

"'I'm tired, Scott,'" Scott said, in a more than passable mimicry of the man behind him. "'It's not going to get any better.' It's entirely possible to sit in your corner and whine - believe me, I know - but you're absolutely no good to yourself or anyone else while you're doing it. I wrote the book on being a useless navel-gazing waste of mansion space, so I know."

"I don't want to waste anybody's space", was the flat response. "If I'm not gonna be teachin' an' I'm not gonna be team, I'll quit an' I'm gone. Lorna got a place outside, I can too."

"You're going to quit teaching, too? What's next, provoking Nathan into firing you?" Scott shot a look back over his shoulder at Angelo. "I'd like to know what you think you did to deserve losing everything you worked so hard for."

"He threatened to. I said I'd show up anyway. That's the one thing I'd commute back for." He shrugged. "You know what I did. You benched me for it. An' I'm not fit to teach when I snap at the kids on the journals."

"I benched you because you'd gone through a considerable trauma and couldn't trust your own reactions until you sorted through some things. It wasn't punishment, and if you took from our conversation than it was, I'm going to beat the crap out of you."

"Not punishment", Angelo said in a monotone, and the pace of his running picked up a little. "Okay. But whatever words you dress it up in, I'm benched 'cause I'm not stable enough to be in the field."

Scott threw his head back and laughed. Loudly. He staggered to a stop, half bent-over, wheezing slightly. "Oh, fuck. You're not stable enough? What team are you talking about? The one led by the claustrophobe and the recovering PTSD case? With the woman possessed by herself, and the other PTSD case, and the other other PTSD case... I could go on for a while here."

"I didn't say I was the only one." He didn't stop running, even when he caught up with Scott and passed him, feet thudding hard in the dirt. "Damaged's not the same as unstable. You know that."

"And who the hell said you were unstable, huh?" Scott called out after him, sounding angry again. "Another self-diagnosis, Dr. Espinosa? Jack's going to be annoyed, you trying to do his job!"

"I lose it at people for tiny things", Angelo yelled over his shoulder. "I don't know which side of me's goin' to react to stuff half the time until it does. I snap an' kill people - or try - when they hurt my own. Pretty much adds up to unstable, doesn't it?"

And then he disappeared - shooting his skin upwards and hauling himself abruptly into a tree.

"What is this crap about sides?" Scott shouted up at him, disgusted. "You get the wrong idea about compartmentalization somewhere along the line or something?"

"Oh, that's easy. I can't be the kid who lived in LA, he really wouldn't fit in, but he never went away. I'm still him, but I make myself not be, 'cept when it all goes to hell." A casual, almost relaxed shrug. "That's when it all breaks down."

"More bullshit. He is you - you are him. You've grown up and changed, but under stress the old ways are so easier. Why not concentrate on seeing it for what it is, rather than tricking out some elaborate, ridiculous explanation about different Angelos?"

"I said I'm still him", Angelo retorted, looking seriously down at Scott. "Everybody's got sides. But the old ways are always gonna be easier, if they were then, an' if I fell back into them once..."

"You mean, you worry about misusing your highly trained powers and skills under emotional stress?" Scott paused, raised an eyebrow. "Wow. That makes you completely and utterly unique."

"But I'm the one where you were worried about it too", he said, voice empty. "You said it yourself. I can't trust my reactions an' that means you can't trust me. So what's the point?"

This was absolutely ridiculous. Angelo was in a tree. "The point is what you want," Scott said bluntly. "Not what you think you can do. Not what you think you're fit to do. What you want to do. Navel-gazing is all well and good in limited quantities. What you're doing now is self-indulgent." And again, I would know...

"I don't want to leave", Angelo admitted. "But if I do, I want it to be on my own choice, not 'cause you finally tell me I can't do it anymore."

Hurray for some sense. "No argument here," Scott said steadily. "But start looking to that future, whatever shape it takes, or you're going to be stuck in this self-lacerating personal hell of yours indefinitely. It took hitting absolute rock bottom for me." Although that had been helped along significantly by Lyman, not that he needed to say that aloud. "See if you can't start climbing back up before you hit the ground, all right? It's much easier."

"Is it? At least when you hit rock bottom, you can't look down." Pensively, he added after a moment, "First time I killed somebody, I threw up. Cried for hours, didn't stop shakin' for days... an' yeah, I was just a kid an' he was my friend an' none of that applies anymore, but none of that happened this time either. An' I can't say I won't do the same thing if somethin' like the tunnels comes up again."

"So let me get this straight - you hated what you did, the circumstances and the act, and yet you feel obligated to do it again, should loved ones or friends or teammates be hurt or in trouble."

"...pretty much. If it comes to a moment that I have to." He was looking levelly down at Scott now.

"So in other words," Scott said with a brief and more than slightly unpleasant smile, "you have a martyr complex."

"Now who's playin' psychologist?" Angelo demanded, but he honestly wasn't ignoring the statement. He just didn't know how to answer it.

Scott ignored the attempted dodge. "You hate doing it - you feel like you're not a good person, because you can, and because you're not a good person and you feel you've let people down in the past, being willing to do something that you hate is your penance."

"An' that makes me a martyr?" He shrugged. "Maybe it does, but I'd think that'd mean dyin' for them. Or rubbin' it in their faces that I'd do it." Not that he wouldn't die for them.

"A martyr suffers before he dies, Angelo," Scott said. "And there are a lot of different ways of killing yourself. Some leave your body perfectly untouched."

"Everybody dies", was the simple response. "I never thought I'd live this long, once."

"You are absolutely obsessed with death, you know that?" Scott snapped, disgusted. "Death and killing and the dark side of your own psyche - I thought you were past the adolescent melodrama."

A slow shrug. "Been on my mind a lot since the tunnels. Got used to it way back when, the whole live fast die young thing. An' then I came here an' I thought I'd get to be a normal person with a normal life someday, but then there was Elpis, with Smichov an' Moscow an' Tel Aviv, an' everythin' that's happened with the team, an' Miguel came back an' brought everythin' we used to be with him, an' then... the tunnels." He swung easily down from his branch, suddenly. "But you're not gettin' it, you're just gettin' pissed, so there's no point. I'm done."

"Oh, I'm getting it," Scott said. "Don't think I'm not. You're turning a challenge - a stumble, into something far worse than it ever needed to be. You're convincing yourself that the situation is unsalvageable. I'm going to say it one more time - it can be salvaged, if you want it to be. But you're never going to make that choice if you keep focusing on beating yourself up over all the ways you think you're a bad person. What you're doing isn't a choice, Angelo - it's just compounding the damage."

"You said I was obsessin'", Angelo said, glancing up at him then back down. "But I'm not. Not on purpose. It's just all there an' it goes round an' round an' it won't go away."

"Then go up to two sessions a week with Jack. Start talking regularly to Charles. Start focusing on something other than death, killing, and shame." Scott made a half-angry, half-helpless gesture. "Get back into the training rotation properly, test out those reactions in the next best thing we have to action. Start keeping some sort of journal, to get it out in black and white so that you can start seeing it from a step back. Read every mission file in the database so that you know how rarely you would ever have had to kill anyone to save a teammate."

He nodded quietly, choosing not to mention his repeated promise to Marie. "Okay."

"And start thinking about the good, too, all right? Remember that you're not a fuck-up with homicidal tendencies," Scott said, and knew they were pretty much at the end of the conversation. He'd been as confrontational as he could afford to be, and if there was any chance Angelo had actually listened to him here, he needed to go away and let him process. "If you see nothing but the bad," he said, turning away, "the bad is going to be all that's there. Puts me in mind of Manuel, seeing nothing but the negative emotions... you don't have that handicap, Angelo, so don't talk yourself into it."

Angelo didn't speak, watching Scott's back as he walked away. Those suggestions for things to do... he was going to be out here for a while longer, he thought. There were things to consider.