xp_logs | Quentin & Clint | Mid-Morning Tuesday (backdated)

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Clint and Quentin come across one another while running. They have a conversation that doesn't end in pure vitriol.

Quentin felt like he was going crazy. He had to get out before he said or did something that everyone would regret. Drinking or smoking himself stupid wasn't going to work this time, though. Too much angry, nervous energy. He needed to work it off. So he dug through his dresser to find shorts and a ratty old tank top, laced up his well-worn running shoes, grabbed a water bottle and his earbuds and phone, and was out the door.

An hour later he wasn't quite sure where he was. It was still wooded and green so he hadn't gone in the direction of the town, but he'd lost sight of the mansion quite a while earlier. He couldn't still be on Xavier's property, was he? No way it went that far.

Well, even if he was lost, at least he'd gotten away from everyone. That was all he wanted.

Clint was coming back from the other direction, having trekked out into the woods for a quiet run, himself. No headphones for him, though, just the woods and his desire run out some of the stress he'd absorbed by osmosis. Shitty things happening everywhere were common place, but he hadn't expected everything to explode the night before the way it had. It was like nobody was paying attention to what anybody else was actually saying or why they were saying it.

Shaking his head, he came around a bend in the path and saw someone else there, which meant he wound up half-stopping, half skidding to the side to avoid an outright collision. "Shit, sorry," Clint said, bending over for a moment to catch his breath. He'd been running for a while.

It was a testament to how much he'd exhausted himself that Quentin had not sensed the presence of another mind approaching him. Fat lot of good it did him. All that tranquility he'd built threatened to come tumbling down now. Just the sight of another person, another one of the horde of deaf fools who were so proudly patting themselves on the back for following the Xavier hivemind was enough to seriously test what tenuous control he had over himself.

The telepath growled and stepped aside to pass Clint and continue his run. He would have been able to if he had better hydrated himself; an agonizing pain ran down his left leg and it seized up, sending him to his knees.

Clint winced in sympathy and pulled his water bottle off the armband it was attached to and sat it on the ground next to the younger man as he moved to assist with the cramp. "Drink some water in a minute, if you can," he said, then quirked an eyebrow. "I'm Clint. Are your powers such that I shouldn't touch you?"

Quentin almost refused the offer on principle, but his own bottle was empty and he was not going to get back if this charley horse didn't stop. He grudgingly accepted and, possibly more out of pique than anything else, drained half of it. "I know who you are," he replied, panting. "Gonna rub this in my face, too? Maybe suggest I lead a peaceful protest and write a sternly worded editorial to raise awareness for the perils of dehydration?"

Snorting softly, Clint reached out and started working the muscle out of its cramp. "That's not really my style," he said, finally straightening Quentin's leg out fully. "I will suggest you go easy on that, though, and hydrate better before sprinting into the middle of nowhere."

It would have been awfully childish if Quentin kicked Clint in the face. He had the reach and the opportunity. And it's probably what everyone would have expected him to do, too. But tempting though it was, the gentle massage was relieving the pain, and besides, even if Clint was just another mindless drone spouting the party rhetoric, he was nice to look at. Sometimes that's all that mattered.

"Thanks for the suggestion. Do you have anything useful to say or?"

Quirking a small half-smile, Clint shrugged and said, "You're not wrong. You're not completely right, either, but you're definitely not wrong. And minimizing anybody else's experiences is always a shit way to go about conducting an argument. So I'm sorry yesterday sucked so hard."

"You're sorry. Lovely. While you sat by and cheered on everyone else as they ganged up on me. Well, thanks. That means a lot now." Quentin jerked his leg out of Clint's grasp and awkwardly got back to his feet. He winced at the pressure put on the cramped leg. "You all think I'm just some young, pink-headed idiot who's never seen the world beyond Tumblr. Well, fuck you. You don't know me, you don't know what I've been through, and you don't get to decide how I get to feel or what I get to say."

Sitting back on his haunches, Clint raised his eyebrows a bit but stayed where he was. "I wasn't cheering on people who ganged up on you. I said that one person had said something well. Which he had. But making the conversation into a competition of who's had the shittier life was pointless and pulled attention away from what was actually important about your post. And you're right, I don't know you. You don't know me, either. So why don't we see about restarting things with an actual introduction?" He stood up and offered the younger man his hand with a quirked brow, "Clint Barton."

Quentin examined Clint's hand like it was toxic or a trap or something. What kind of game was he playing? "Quentin Quire," the telepath warily responded, although he kept his hands firmly on his hips.

Clint wiggled his fingers a little, hand still extended. "Nice to meet you, Quentin."

"Ugh." Quentin offered the limpest, most lackluster handshake he could before withdrawing his hand. "Whatever."

Laughing a little, Clint bent down to pick up his water bottle and stick it back to the armband, then nodded toward the path back toward the mansion. "So I wound up here because my brother wound up here because of Worthington but also because I found a dude in a cryotube and then the cryotube spit him out and he tried to kill me before passing out. What about you?"

Quentin hesitated for a moment before deciding to follow the other man. Either he knew the way back or he'd take him out to the forest and murder him. Both options seemed equally appealing at this point.

"I'm here because after two weeks of constant harassment and assault, I snapped and got trapped in a psionic construct with a bunch of flatscans where they got to live out exactly what they'd been doing to me," Quentin said as if it were no big thing. "Coupla your superheroes who apparently abhor violence came and broke us out, and now I'm here, a fresh mind ready to be shaped and molded to be ready for the Cult of Charles Xavier."

Clint winced. "God, high school is awful. I mean, it is literally the worst. Some kind of rite of passage, right? Ugh. I got in fights with people who were being assholes all the time - I mean, my brother's the blind kid, right? I'm colorblind and a nerd and whatever else they thought made me different enough to pick on. Aside from the debacle yesterday, how're things here turning out? I don't see the actual school part of it or anything. I mean, obviously. But y'know."

Quentin raised a hand to his mouth and gasped in horror. "Wow, that sounds awful. Colorblind and a nerd? I don't know how you possible could have survived. How did you know if you were wearing your Pokemon Blue t-shirt or your Pokemon Red t-shirt?" He dropped his hand and snorted loudly. "I'm moved by your tribulations. Really."

"Hey, not saying mine was worse than yours. But my mild was bad enough, I don't think your extra spicy was a cakewalk," Clint said, eyebrows raised. "What happened to the people who got caught in your psionic net?"

"Construct, not net," Quentin corrected, a hint of pride in his voice. Even if he had not managed to do anything remotely similar since, he at least had come to learn how truly impressive the feat was. "Mind wipe. Or mind blur, I guess, because destroying memories is dangerous and I'm told that not even wannabe Eichmanns deserve the brain cancer or whatever that comes with that. I don't know how much they actually remember, but they at least don't know it was me. So who knows where they are now? Lying dead in a gutter if there's any justice in the world."

"Oh, wannabe SS-Obersturmbannführers?" Clint asked, quirking a small smile despite himself. "All teenagers are basically sociopaths. It's not an inaccurate comparison - the Nazi thing, I mean. Do you actually identify as a pacifist? Or you just don't like violence that results in blood?"

"Where the fuck did you get that idea? Me? A pacifist?" Quentin laughed at the thought. "You didn't actually read anything I wrote, did you? I said this whole thing about 'spilling blood' that got everyone's panties in a twist. Just because I won't play in Dumbledore's Army here doesn't mean I'm a pacifist."

"Is it the... I don't know, the vague expectation that you'll participate in whatever conflicts the teams here are expected to respond to that makes you not want to learn with them?" Clint asked, one eyebrow rising.

"I'm here to learn how to control my mutant power. At the very least for the sake of my own safety and health, because it's pretty damn obvious what happens to people who can literally read and control minds but can't actually control that ability. But that's all. I'm not getting swept up in Chuckles's self-serving war against the supervillains of the world. I'm not one of his little pawns so he can live out whatever end-of-life crisis fantasy he's going through."

"Okay. I don't think anyone's actually going to try to force you into fighting supervillains or anything," Clint pointed out. "It's pretty normal for people to not want to deal with that kind of conflict. Which isn't the same thing as, I dunno, learning self-defense. Which, from what I've seen, basically involves 'shock and or surprise whoever's attacking you, then run away.' What is it about the whole Gen-X thing that's putting you off self-defense?"

"Who are you, my therapist? What's with all these questions?" Another way of asking "why do you care?" although far be it from Quentin to even insinuate that he might have maybe cared about someone else possibly kind of caring.

"I mean, I've been in therapy since I was eleven, so I could probably fake it, but it's not actually something I'm even remotely qualified for," Clint said, amusement obvious. "So far as the questions go - dude, are you that used to people not asking you things to figure out what's going on with you?"

Quentin did not say anything in response, but just raised an eyebrow at Clint, as if to silently say "yes, obviously, can't you tell?" Feeling parched again, he telekinetically reached for Clint's water bottle, removing it from its holster and summoning it to his outstretched hand. "What were you in therapy for?" he asked after he took a swig.

Clint debated the truth for all of five seconds as his water bottle floated away. Then he mentally shrugged and answered. "My mother died when I was born. My dad died when I was four so me and my brother went to live with my grandparents permanently. My granddad died when I was six and my grandma when I was seven. So Barney - my brother, he's six years older than me, he decides that, instead of us getting split up and stuck in foster care, we're gonna run away to the circus. So we did.

"Stayed with them until I was eleven but they got busted by the cops and we got shunted into foster care, anyway. Or I did, Barney got sent to a group home and then he aged out." He paused and considered the rest of it, then shrugged and finished, "Got put with a couple, Andre and Steve. I was with them for a couple years and then, when I was fourteen, Andre's brother died and he got custody of his nephew, Matt. He's here at the mansion, too. There's other things, but that's the gist of it. The big things until I went to college. Ish."

That was a hell of a lot more candor than Quentin expected. And definitely not a story that he would have thought would belong to a guy like this. Which was the point, wasn't it? At least Quentin had the good sense of mind to look contrite about his attitude. "Did you really go to the circus or are you bullshitting me?"

Grinning, Clint held his hand up like he was taking an oath and said, "Totally true. The Carson Carnival of Traveling Wonders." He smiled again as he reached over to snag his water bottle out of the air. "That's where I got into archery."

"Were you one of the freaks? Got like a dead conjoined twin on your ass?"

"That would fit with the general theme of my life so far as you know it," Clint said, nodding along easily. "I mean, 'everybody dies.' But no, I wasn't part of the freak show. Me and Barney worked as roustabouts. Then a couple of the performers decided I wasn't awful at certain things. Had knives thrown at me for a while and then arrows - Jacques and Buck never actually hit me during practice or while we were in the ring." He gave Quentin a pointed look. "I've answered your questions, you wanna answer the one I asked or are we just gonna keep picking through my life's story for the interesting and scandalous?"

"No, no one ever asks about my day," Quentin answered with an indifferent wave of his hand. Like he couldn't be less bothered by this. "But who'd want to? And who the hell would I even want to talk to? No one's opinion matters or has any merit, so who gives a damn?"

"There's a difference between caring and interest," Clint said, his tone almost philosophical. "Plenty of people here show a vague sort of interest, right? But it's obligatory. They make sure you're clothed and fed and educated, but it's because that's like their mandate or whatever, not because they actually care. I'm sure some of them are genuinely caring people, but yeah. There's a difference." So he caught Quentin's eye and asked, "How's your day been?"

Quentin offered Clint a look like he really did have a dead conjoined twin on his ass. "What the hell do you care?"

Shrugging, Clint said, "You're angry and you have lots of reasons for being angry but it doesn't seem like anyone's actually listening. I've been there. It sucks. I was lucky that things turned out for me like they did. Maybe I wanna pay it forward, maybe that white knight complex my therapists tell me I have is rearing its head again, maybe I just happen to agree with you. Maybe I want to make sure you're not going to run off and do something without thinking it through. You don't have to talk to me, but you can if you want."

"Don't worry about that. I wouldn't know where to find Erik Lehnsherr so I can't join his Brotherhood right now. Maybe another day. That was a joke," Quentin added before Clint could react. "Look, and let me preface this by saying I don't know why the hell I'm telling you this, maybe I'm delirious from running, but whatever. My day has fucking sucked. I watched New York's finest enter a neighborhood where they weren't welcome, and beat a guy half to death. And no one except me did anything to try to help him, and the only thing I got in exchange was a brain-splitting migraine. And then I came back here, to the greatest mutant sanctuary, where we're supposed to learn about community and mutual responsibility and everyone tells me nope, I should've just let him be. Not our problem if someone's killed even if we have the means to stop it. The responsibility is only to us lucky privileged few who hide out under Chuckles's skirt and not to the poor assholes who live out there.

"I'm the bad guy because I, the gay Asian mutant, who's spent most of my last seventeen years taunted and threatened and beaten, wanted to stop someone else from living through the same thing. There. Does that answer your fucking question?"

Clint hummed meditatively and bent down to scoop up a few rocks. He tossed them into the trees, watching them ricochet off trees and larger rocks before disappearing into the foliage. "Sort of. How's your head today?"

One of the rocks still in Clint's hand floated up, but Quentin let it fall back to the ground instead of flinging it into Clint's eye. "That's all you can ask? How's my head? See, you don't fucking give a fuck, either. Why'd I even waste my time with you?"

"I can't do anything about the man you saw beaten. I can't do anything about the cops. If I'd been there, I probably would've at least tried to do something. I might've called in a favor from of friend who's still at SHIELD. I could still maybe try that. What I can definitely do is make sure you're hydrated and fed and have Tylenol or Advil if you need it. It's imperfect and it's shitty and I wish I'd been there. But I wasn't." Clint shrugged again, bending down to pick up the rock Quentin had dropped to the ground. "Prioritization. It's not that I don't fucking give a fuck. It's that I give more of a fuck about making sure you're okay now than getting put on hold because my friend at SHIELD's stuck in a meeting or the guy who got beat up is in the ICU or whatever."

"I'm not important!" Quentin protested loudly. He even actually stomped his foot. "I don't give a shit about myself! Not when the flatscans are burning our community, tearing down what we've built for ourselves because we've been kicked out of everywhere else. And not just any flatscans. Police. Who are supposed to keep us safe. If I have to die, or if one of those flatscans has to, to save the life of another mutant, then I'm okay with that. That's my priority and that should be the priority of everyone else who pretends to care about us."

"What good is a dead guy nobody knows, a footnote in the annals of the mutant struggle for fairness and basic human rights?" Clint asked. "Effecting change isn't something you do one time with huge and immediate results. It takes time. It takes organization. It takes more than one person stomping their foot in the middle of the woods.

"Do I think you ought to sit here and write letters to your congressman? Fuck, no. Do I think you should look into what's already been done, what's established, what organizations might exist that could offer you the platform you want so you can actually make a difference? Yeah, sure, if that's the direction you want to take. You're angry and you have every right to be angry because what those cops did was unjust, it was wrong, it is something that needs to be changed. I'm angry about it and I didn't have to witness it." Clint let out a frustrated sound. "But you can't keep reacting. You have to be proactive. You have to think. It's like... fuck, it's like chess - you have to be three or five or seven moves ahead of your opponent or you've lost before you've even started the game."

"Going on a cop killing spree seems pretty proactive to me," Quentin muttered petulantly. More angry bluster, though, not serious rhetoric. He seemed to visibly deflate as he continued talking. "Man, it's just . . . we live with this every day. They're stepping on our necks and each day they step harder. But then it's like people don't even think we're being crushed at all. This was an isolated incident, maybe they weren't actually cops, maybe the guy did something to deserve it. But it's constant, it's our way of life now, and people are already doing all the things you and that Canadian shit-eater said and it doesn't make a damn difference, because it just keeps happening."

"It's..." Clint frowned. "It's the human condition or something, it's human nature. I don't know. If it doesn't impact you directly, you don't really pay attention to it. And so many people got hurt on M-Day, so many people died. That's a lot of impact. That's a dynamic paradigm shift in general public opinion and thought process, right? The underlying assumptions people used to make, the fact that we could count on at least some people not hating us immediately - M-Day took that away. Mutants are automatically feared now. It's a shoot first, ask questions later situation and I hate it, I really do, but that guy was lucky they didn't just get their sniper to drop him where he stood.

"M-Day set mutants as a species back at least forty years in the civil rights game. So you have to go into these situations understanding where your opponents are coming from just the same as you know where you and your own people are coming from. It's the whole cliche - know your enemy. Know them, understand them, and you'll find their weaknesses, find out what you can exploit." Clint paused long enough to toss his last rock into the woods, watching it bounce off five trees before dropping out of sight. "What do you do now that you've got this anger and this drive and this desire to help mutants in general? Think about it before you answer with something flippant. Really think. What can you, a seventeen year old Asian gay mutant, do to help mutants avoid a repeat of what happened to that guy in District X?"

Quentin had opened his mouth to reply, but shut it when Clint warned him against flippancy. "I don't know," he admitted after a long moment of silent contemplation. "What's there even to do? What can anyone do when not only is the system itself set up against you, but the counter-systems are, too?"

"Play it smart," Clint said. "Look at the bigger picture. Find out who the guy was who got beaten up, find out who the cops were who did the beating, get one of our friends here at the mansion to track and trace and watch them. Follow them. Find out who they're connected to - was the attack in District-X a one off or related to something bigger? Are they members of an anti-mutant group like Friends of Humanity? Where do they meet? Who're the other members? What're their platforms or tenets? How big is the group?" Then he smiled, a slow and not particularly friendly expression. "Infiltrate and take them apart from the inside out, one asshole at a time, in such a way that they don't know it's you, they never even suspect."

"That sounds nice, but you're missing the most likely and obvious option," Quentin warned. "You're giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they're not just run-of-the-mill pigs and that the NYPD isn't protecting them. Like, you know, they do with every other racist murderer they give a gun and badge to. I can't breathe. Sound familiar?"

"Oh, absolutely," Clint said, nodding again. "But you're missing the part where you take that assumption and shove it out the window. What I'm saying you do is you assume everyone in the NYPD is guilty. Every single one of them. You act like you know they've done every bad thing they could possibly do. And then you pretend like you don't feel that way. You make them like you. You make them trust you. And when you've got their secrets, when you've got the proof you need, you go to the one or two people who've demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that they aren't one of those run-of-the-mill pigs and you give them a copy of the proof. Never all of it, never the originals. You keep those backlogged and hidden so you've got it if it turns out you were wrong about those people you thought you could trust. Set up contingencies, redundancies, failsafes. And then you expose them."

"You . . . are really fucking slick, aren't you?" Quentin asked, showing off for the first time that he actually was capable of smiling. "Giving advice on how to take down the NYPD. You make it sound almost plausible." Although, with a better handle on his telepathy, maybe it was plausible.

Laughing almost despite himself, Clint said, "Quentin, that kind of thing's been happening to one degree or another for thousands of years. It's called 'being a spy.' So it's definitely plausible. But it would take time and patience and the knowledge of what you actually need to accomplish your goal. And probably what you were willing to do or let happen in the course of your investigation. Blowing your cover because one of the people you're trying to win over wants you to help him with a thing he's doing... you'd need to see which side of the fence you fell on so far as the 'ends justify the means' debate goes."

Quentin nodded thoughtfully. "So tell me more about overthrowing the racist bourgeois regime and bringing power back to the people who deserve it."