xp_logs | Log: Clarice & Garrison

After all the i's are dotted and the t's crossed on her X-Men Mission report, Clarice goes to Harry's to celebrate her first time as a team leader on a mission. By doing her best to get drunk and disorderly. Garrison however, helps.

Harry had seen the look the little purple girl was giving him and anyone else who dared to glance her direction, she was well on her way to being drunk and looking for a fight. So he avoided asking questions, but he was glad he had called Xavier's and gave the guy who answered a heads up about her needing a ride, and instead he filled her glass up again. She wasn't a regular here, but he'd seen her from time to time over the years, it was hard to forget a girl with purple skin. Normally she had vodka and cranberry, virgin margaritas or other girlie drinks. Tonight she was drinking rum neat and very seriously interested in getting blitzed.

"You know you're going to puke, right?" The stool next to her slid out, and Garrison slipped into the spot at the bar beside her. "I mean, seriously, especially for someone used to drinking little frou-frou cocktails like you, the rum has just enough natural sugar in it to let your body soak it up faster, but not enough to jack your metabolism into 'twee' mode and let you dance it off or whatever it is you do. So, being a poison, there is only one way to get rid of it. Thanks Briar." He took a sip of the beer that the waitress had slid in front of him. "The good old Oral Expulsion Express. I hope you didn't have anything with hot sauce for dinner."

"Awesome," she muttered, downing another shot. "Sounds like fun. Let's do it!" she added in a faux-perky voice, signaling another shot. Who needed a liver? "While I'm at it, let's see if I can get alcohol poisoning, drink charcoal and get my stomach pumped! That'd be super-fab!" Anything to make the damn images seared into her brain go away.

"You know, Harry will cut you off before that point. Also, it's not the healthiest way to spend an evening; drinking enough alone to go blind until the paramedics arrive. Here, finish up and I'll buy you a cup of coffee or something."

He had a point. "I am the damn EMT," she reminded him. "Not done yet," Clarice added sullenly, though she did finish her shot of rum. She knew exactly why the rum was gone. It was because she was doing her damnedest to drink it. "After I get nicely blitzed, I'm going to beat the shit out of people," She turned to Garrison, "Wanna be first?"

"I usually demand dinner and a show first." Kane said, taking another long pull from his glass. Was every woman in the mansion taking lessons in anger management from Cammie and Morgan? " Any particular reason you're planning to go all Tyler Durden?"

She nodded. Drunk and disorderly was not really her normal method for dealing with things, "Last mission," she said, "I took Crystal and Laurie and some soldiers on a medical aid assignment. At the prison? Masque was there doing his....art work," Clarice blanched at that, her normally purple skin going significantly paler. She sniffed and blinked back tears, "I did what had to be done...but it sucks ass."

"Read the report. Really that bad, eh?" Garrison wasn't about to challenge her. He'd seen a few photos from the last time Masque had been involved in some... experimentation, and he couldn't imagine he got any less vile in prison. "Hell of a thing to have to face, especially when you're the one at the head of the team."

"First time," she explained, taking the water Harry put in front of her automatically and took a sip, "First time as the head. I killed some of them. A lot of them. The soldiers did too. Most were already dead. Some weren't. Some we weren't sure. So we just...I ordered them all killed. And X-Men don't kill. But to live like that...I couldn't do that. And now I just see it everywhere," she was openly crying now, uncaring who saw her. "And with Crystal and Laurie...our most inexperienced. I'm a failure and a hypocrite."

"A really shitty drinker, sure, but a failure?" Kane shook his head, lacing his fingers together and leaning on the bar itself. He cocked his head, at the same level as where hers was. "X-Men don't kill is a fine sentiment, Clarice, but we live in a world that isn't that simple. It's not as easy as saying we can bop everyone on the head and drag them to jail by their capes. Sometimes, the reality is going to have to be that deaths are involved." He took another sip, fitting together the thoughts in his head. "X-Men don't kill isn't a rule. It's an operational imparitive. It means we don't base our solutions around taking out some threat permenantly. We don't get to make things as simple as letting Logan snickt off Magneto's head and calling it a day. We do everything we can first, and when that doesn't work, we do what we have to. The X-Men have killed before; in self-defense, by accident, when there was no other choice. Did you see any other option?"

"We could have let them live," she acknowledged, "Tried to get Masque to undo what he did, if it was even possible. If he would even do it, which I doubt. He's mad. And disagreeable. Plus, he wanted revenge and even if we tortured him, it wouldn't have done any good. But what quality of life would they have? If it were me...I'd want death. But still. I ordered people killed. I killed," she sighed, "I just never...mercy killing or not, it was killing Garrison."

"Yeah, but that's different than murder, Clarice." Kane said. "Look, I know. I made the decision to take Apocalypse all the way out when he escaped. Don't think that I didn't spend weeks trying to decide whether or not that made me a killer. Unfortunately, the only answer that I could come up with is that why we do something matters almost as much as what we do. It's not very comforting, but it is true, eh."

"Then why does it bother me so much?" she asked, wiping her eyes. In truth, she'd been telling herself it wasn't murder since she gave the order and it sounded as hollow now as it had then. At least Garrison understood where she was coming from, "I feel like...I don't know. Like I should see threstrals or something. Like I'm going to be kicked off the team for what I did. Or arrested or something. A neon sign on my head."

"If it didn't bother you this much, that's when you should be kicked off the team." He nudged her lightly. "It's not going to be easy, Clarice, and the next, oh, three months or so of therapy aren't going to be any kind of picnic, but you'll get there. The trouble is that we're not soldiers. Yours truly aside, you're not even cops. We don't have all the same mechanizisms they do to handle death and the reality that killing and being killed are part of our decision to be X-Men. So when it happens, each person has to confront it their own way. The important thing is that you don't have to be alone when you do it."

Clarice thought about that for a very long few minutes. He was making a strange sort of sense. The kind she might've made had their situations been reversed, "I'm still taking Jack, John and Jose with me," she decided. "And beating the shit out of you in the back alley."

"Yeah, alright. Probably better I make you throw up now instead of later."