Doug and Forge

[x-cypher.livejournal.com]

Forge comes down to the lab and discovers Doug there. They play some chess, he asks about what happened to Doug, tries to get a rise out of him, and provides some encouragement at the end.



Forge wandered into the electronics lab, idly checking the ambient temperature and humidity in the climate-controlled enclosure. While not kept to medical "clean-room" standards, this particular workshop was one of the cleanest (if not neatest-kept) places in the mansion's basement complex. A few clicks of a remote set the temperature subtly lower and cued up a suprisingly low-volume soundtrack of cello music as the X-Men's resident inventor walked around to do a quick inventory.

One thing he noticed out of the corner of his eye was that the office connecting the electronics lab to the chemistry lab seemed to be surplus one blond linguist. An offhand comment from Marie-Ange over coffee earlier in the day had led Forge to realize that whatever Doug had gone through in the battle at the New York Stock Exchange had affected the other man deeply. Enough to drive him away from the crowds in the mansion - the kind of social interaction Doug Ramsey normally thrived on. In its own way, Forge thought, it would be as incongruous as if he himself were to develop a pathological aversion to the garage.

Opening a locker and withdrawing a small box, he walked through to the office and nodded to where Doug sat on the couch. "If you're going to nap," he said jovially, "make sure Paige doesn't catch you. She'll go all mother-hen."

Doug looked up from his laptop and shrugged noncommittally at Forge. For the past few days, he'd slept in the suite he and Marie-Ange had moved into, for the most part, but violent nightmares and insomnia had occasionally sent him down to Forge's lab area. The quiet whir of machines was generally more soothing than anything upstairs in the mansion. And if he managed to rest, he slept on the couch in the office area. "If I nap, I don't really care who does what," he noted candidly. Sleep had been in short supply since the events in New York City, and he walked around with bags under his eyes made even more prominent by the shocking paleness of his skin.

Forge blinked in astonishment. He'd seen Doug angry, exhausted, and near falling-down drunk before, but this level of apathy was frightening. "Dude," he said after a long pause. "Angie told me what happened with Ignativn... Iggitaniv... meat computer lady. Pretty ballsy move. Although you look like shit."

That was a rather appropriate expression, given how his body had actually been digested by Mastermold, and then he'd managed to get it to 'crap' him back out. "I'm not surprised," he replied. "Brain's still all..." he waved a hand at his head to signify how jumbled up things were inside his skull.

Forge hooked a small wheeled cart with his foot, pulling it in between himself and Doug, then opened the case to reveal a familiar 8-by-8 black and white grid. He tapped a button on the side, and thirty-two holographic chess pieces sprang into life above the board. Another button press spun the pieces about in midair, finally slowing with the 'white' pieces towards Doug.

"Alexander Kotov," he said casually. "The Russian grandmaster, he wrote a book on chess. The Professor had me studying it a while back. And he pointed out something that folks now call Kotov Syndrome. It's when you spend so long strategizing a move, and then realize that you're running low on time, so you do something rash. Sometimes it works, most of the time... not so much."

He nodded at the pieces. "So how did you do it?"

Doug clicked a remote that matched the one Forge had been carrying around to cue the lights and music, and all the lights dimmed to the point where all the pair of young men could see was the board, and the music stopped. He shrugged diffidently and pushed a pawn forward. "Removing all distractions."

"Pawn to king's bishop five," Forge responded almost automatically, shifting a piece into the classic Sicilian Defense. "At least you've still got language," he commented, scratching at his unshaven chin as he focused on the board that was now the only light in the office. "Hey, remember when we were rebuilding Haroun? Kitty came up with that fractal memory design, I spent thirty-six hours straight on circuit fabrication and you hard-coded all the programming onto it? Man, we were an awesome team. Well, you and me, anyway. Kitty was good eye candy, but meh."

"I completely lost the ability to talk," Doug recalled. "That kinda sucked." He pressed his attack with a single-minded purpose. "Kitty did pretty well considering she didn't have a mutant power backing her up for those purposes," he riposted. "Not everyone can be you, after all."

"I digress, she was amazing," Forge corrected himself. "Just not much of a team player. If she'd have been here last week..." He let the sentence hang in the air for a moment. He'd run a barrage of tactical simulations with the mission data gathered during the various encounters with Apocalypse and the Horsemen. If they'd been able to hit the NYSE earlier, shut it down completely, he'd reasoned, perhaps Doug wouldn't have had to take such drastic measures.

A trade of pawns later, and Forge's hand hovered over a piece cautiously. "Dragon variation. Risky," he commented. "You've got your bishop covering the diagonal, which narrows my knight down to the Levenfish gambit, or I can concede advancement on the h-side and..."

He slid a pawn up one square. "You know, Kasparov used this opening a lot. He lost to a computer."

"I got eaten by one." Doug pushed his pawns relentlessly forward, his head bent intently over the game, analyzing each bit of information that the pieces' positions gave to him. Then he looked up at his opponent. Forge generally didn't chatter for the idle nature of it, he usually had a purpose to his statements. "What are you trying to get at, Forge?" he asked directly.

"I'm trying to figure out what you lost," Forge answered just as bluntly. "In the past two minutes, I've insulted one of our former colleagues, called your chess-playing skills derivative, and condescended to trying to offer you strategy. Normally any one of those things would have you snarking back at me, hitting a nerve, getting a rise out of you. What, do I have to head upstairs and go down on your girlfriend before you actually start acting like a human being again?"

"I think she would probably skewer you if you tried that," Doug replied with the slightest of smiles. Forge was trying to make him angry, or jealous, or provoke some sort of emotional reaction. The problem was, it wasn't that Doug was completely emotionless, just that Emma had rearranged things in such a way that they were...muted. Not a distraction. He pushed another piece forward.

"That's what she said... wait a minute..." Forge tried to parse the last set of statements in his brain, then gave up and looked down at the board. "...and that is not your usual Capablanca attack. And hold on..."

He stopped and just stared at the board for a full minute before speaking again. "You're not making a reckless attack," he surmised. "That's a focused variation, the moment I set up the Dragon, you went knight to g4 and then I... mate in thirteen moves, isn't it?"

"Mhm." The pattern of attack had played itself out in his head, each of Forge's responses factoring in and his brain calculating and adjusting in reply. The inventor was a very good chess player, but without distraction, Doug was better. It was just that the cost of working like that was so large, and it was still unclear whether he would be able to get it all back in the end.

With perfunctory precision, Forge reached out one metal finger and brushed the holographic representation of his king, knocking it over and conceding the game. Sitting across the darkened office from Doug, he looked up at his friend, the glow from the chessboard casting both their faces in a harsh light.

"How do you feel?" he asked, wondering if after the whole ordeal, anyone had actually bothered to ask.

"Tired," Doug said in reply. He remembered Emma's question to him from before, and shrugged. "It was worth it, though."

"I know how you feel," Forge said, exhaustion creeping through in his own voice. "You know, it wasn't long after we were working on Haroun, that I... well, you know I hit a pretty low point. Thought I'd given up too much to do the right thing, and felt like I really got the short end of the stick. And a smart man told me a story. Goes like this: guy's walking down the street, and he falls in a hole. Deep hole, steep walls, he can't get out. A doctor passes by, and he calls for help. Doctor writes a prescription and throws it down the hole. No help. Priest comes by, the guy calls for help again. Priest says a prayer and moves on. No help. So then his friend comes by, and the guy calls for help, and his friend jumps right in the hole with him."

Forge chuckled slightly to himself and looked away, remembering. "And the guy says 'hey, are you some kind of moron? Now we're both stuck down here!' And his friend just turns to him and says 'yeah, we are. But I've been down here before, and I know the way out'."

Quietly, Forge held a fist out over the chessboard, knuckles towards Doug. "Sometimes, you just need someone who's been there, man."

Doug looked at the fist for a moment, then reached out and bumped his closed fist against it. Forge was right. He probably understood better than anyone else at the mansion could, because of how similar they were. And maybe, like the guy in the story, Forge could help him find the way out.

Comments

[x-leosamson.livejournal.com]

I so love that story...well used.