Quentin & Clint, Wednesday night

[xp-erverse.livejournal.com]

Quentin is not having a good day. Clint finds him in a tree, drinking his troubles away, and tries to help him sort out the mess. Content warning for discussion of consent.


It was not always silent in the middle of the night at the secluded mutant school, but it was still generally overall pretty quiet and peaceful. Not so this night. A plaintive wail was coming from one of the sturdy oak trees near the front grounds. "I'd like to get down now, please!" it cried. "Hello? Is anybody home?"

Clint stopped walking and blinked slowly for a moment before checking his watch. It was well after midnight. He didn't have Matt's super senses, but it wasn't difficult to follow the voice in the darkness. He reached the base of a tree that looked particularly good for climbing and then looked up at the figure in the high branches. "Uh," he said. "If you want to get down, you should probably start climbing."

"Oh, hey, it's the White Knight!" The owner of the voice poked his head through the leaves that had obscured his face. Even in the dark, his shock of pink hair was visible. "Come to save me again?"

"Hey, DQ," Clint said, quirking an amused smile. "What am I saving you from? Something down here I should be worried about that's got you up there?"

"I don't know how I got up here. One minute I was down there and . . ." Whatever Quentin was going to say next was interrupted by the familiar sound of a liquor bottle being turned upside-down for a big long swig.

"Oh, it's one of those nights," Clint said, letting out a silent sigh before jumping up to catch the lowest branch on the tree. Pulling himself onto it, he stood up and then looked around to place Quentin before he started climbing in earnest. "What's got you drinking whatever you're drinking in a tree you don't remember climbing?"

Quentin blew a raspberry. "Boy trouble. What else drives a man to drink?"

Clint could have answered that so many different ways. Nightmares. Anger. Depression. But 'boy troubles' worked well enough for an underaged kid. "Uh oh," he said, finally coming up even with Quentin and settling himself on the branch beside him. Reaching out, he snagged the bottle of liquor and said, "Sharing is caring," before he took a small sip just to see what it was.

Wincing, because it was kind of awful, Clint handed it back and said, "Somebody turn out to be an asshole? Not wanna go to homecoming with you?"

"Hey!" Quentin protested as he jealously took back the bottle and took another drink. "And no. Turns out I'm the asshole this time. Can you believe it? Today I learned that I'm a rapist," he said nonchalantly. "It's just in my nature. Can't change it. Do you think if I fell down from here right now I'd crack my head open?"

Well, there were a lot of things Clint might have been expecting, but most of those words in what Quentin had just said weren't any of them. Looking down at the ground, glad of the fact that it wasn't cloudy so he had enough light to see by at least, he said, "I think at least three branches would keep you could cracking your skull but you'd wind up with scratches, bruises, and probably a fractured rib or two. You're going to have to explain the rapist thing to me, though."

Quentin did not reply for a while. He barked a harsh laugh when he finally did. "I'm a telepath, you know. I read people's minds. I get into their heads. I can force people to do whatever I want. Can't control it. S'the way it is. There's no such thing as consent when I'm around."

One brow arching very, very slowly despite the fact that, in the dark, it was an expression that would go unappreciated, Clint said, "Uh, that's not actually how telepathy works, most of the time. I mean, in my experience, you'd have to actively be trying to influence others or it'd have to be like instinctive while you're under duress. I'm obviously not an expert, but I don't think teenaged hanky-panky qualifies as rape."

"You don't know that. For all you know, telepathy is always on. I could be in your head and you wouldn't even know it. I might not even know. I didn't know it with Tom," Quentin added softly, staring intently at the bottle in his hands. "Makes sense. Who'd risk their career for meaningless sex with some homo?"

Warning bells started going off in Clint's brain at that. Career implied someone in a position of authority. "Did you just get like a massive shot of I'm gonna find this Tom guy and kill him? Because if not, then I'm pretty sure you're not in my head," he offered. "And I've got precautions set up, anyway. I might not know if you're in there, but you wouldn't find anything that shouldn't be found." He rubbed at the back of his neck and then twisted around on the branch so he could brace his back against the tree trunk. "When did you manifest?"

"Ugh, please," Quentin said, snorting loudly. "Enough with this 'I have to save you so my own otherwise pointless life has some semblance of meaning!' thing you do. It's pathetic. My teek I got, I dunno, three or four years ago. Telepathy just a few months ago, at least as far as I know. Could've been there since the beginning, too, subtly fucking with people on its own."

"It's a fundamental part of my personality," Clint said, shrugging easily as he crossed his feet at the ankle, heels hanging off the branch a bit. "Besides, I never said I'd actually kill him. Though I totally could. It's more fun to fuck with people - actually mess up his career, if it's so damn important to him." He looked out over the woods around them, tracking an owl's flight, a falling leaf, a mouse scurrying along on the ground. "Subtle influence is different from outright control - you get that, right?

"Let's say you're actually in my brain right now. What're you doing? You're not exerting any kind of conscious thought to manipulate me. I mean, maybe you actually want me to go away. I wouldn't mind testing my agility at the moment. Maybe I'm slightly more inclined to actually roll off this branch and see if I can dodge all the ones below me. But there's a thing in my head - that'd be me, my actual self - overriding my daredevil tendencies. It's going, 'Gee, Clint, that'd be fun, but there's this punk kid up here in a tree going through some kind of emotional turmoil and you should probably stick around to make sure he doesn't break his drunk neck trying to get out of this tree later.' So unless you purposefully go into my brain and stick in an order telling me to jump out of this tree right now, I'm not going anywhere, no matter how much I might want to try out the dodging thing.

"Point being - inclination. Influence is one thing. But if someone's got strong enough willpower or moral fiber or sense of self or something else driving them, influence isn't going to be enough to get them to do something they don't want to do. So whatever happened with this asshole, if you actually influenced him, yeah okay, whatevs. You're here to learn about that shit so you won't do it anymore. But. That doesn't make you a rapist." Clint stopped talking and considered that for a bare moment. "At worst, it makes you an opportunist and this a learning experience. But I sincerely doubt you actively forced anyone to have sex with you against their will. You might've just tapped into the fact that he wanted to have sex with you anyway and made him slightly more inclined to do it than he already was and he didn't have the fortitude to be like, 'Oh, hey, I shouldn't do that for reasons.'"

"God, you say a lot of words to say nothing," Quentin commented after draining another large portion of the bottle. He sighed and leaned his head back against the tree. "You're saying that even if autopilot telepaths aren't making someone do what they don't already want to do, they're still making them do it. They wouldn't act on that fucking impulse otherwise. I took away Tom's choice. He could not consent because of me. And besides," he said, and then drained what remained in the bottle, "He didn't want to in the first place. He made that pretty fucking clear."

"No, he still had a choice," Clint said. "That was the whole second chunk of words I said. He wanted to. Or he wouldn't have, whatever was in his head would've stopped him. It didn't. It's like. Okay, like you're out at a club. Wait - there's two people, out at a club, twins. Okay, there's identical twins at a club. One of them is wearing deodorant, the other isn't. They're both dancing all up on you. One smells nice, the other smells awful. You're gonna go for the one that smells nice. Unless you have a body odor fetish. Hm." He paused to consider that for a moment, then shook his head at himself and continued, "You're gonna go with whichever one you're more inclined to go with. Neither of them are coercing you. And if you don't wanna fuck either of them in the bathroom because you have a boyfriend getting drinks at the bar, then being more inclined to fuck one of them isn't going to actually make you do it. And also, Tom sounds like a massive jackass so he was probably lying."

"No no no, that's not how it works!" Quentin swung the bottle wildly as he protested. "Telepathy isn't saying, 'Hey I think you should do this,' it's actually physically really tangibly making someone do something! Even if it's just a little push, it's a push they wouldn't otherwise have and they can't reject it. They can't say no anymore. They can't. It becomes my fault. It's my fault! I made him! I made him not say no!"

"That's a crock," Clint said, reaching over to take the bottle away from Quentin before he hurt himself. He tossed it down to the ground, aiming for a patch of grass and making sure it landed horizontally so it wouldn't shatter. "You have to want to make someone do something they wouldn't otherwise want to do in order to be able to telepathically force them to do it. There's - DQ, there's gotta be a desire on your part to force the issue. And this," Clint gestured at Quentin's drunken state. "This is guilt and remorse and regret, not... whatever you'd be feeling if you'd actually wanted to force someone to do it. You can be in someone's head thinking all you want about wanting to have sex but if they don't want to have it and you're not actively trying to make them want to have it, then it's probably not gonna happen."

Quentin sniffed. Were he even mildly sober, he'd have been thankful that the darkness and the tree obscured his face from Clint. "Maybe I did want it to happen," he said, fighting to keep his voice steady. "Maybe I did and I didn't know I did and that's how it happened. I want to get down now. I need to get down."

Oh, they were hitting that stage of drunkenness. Excellent. Looking down again, Clint checked the route he'd need to take to the ground and then asked, "Are you comfortable pulling a Bella and acting like a spider monkey for like less than sixty seconds while I get you down or do you wanna do this the hard way?"

"Whatever gets me down the fastest." Quentin screwed his eyes shut. His vision was swimming and his stomach lurched so much that he was sure he would simply lose his balance and fall out if he kept them open. "Not like I'm gonna remember this in the morning, anyway, right?"

Shaking his head, Clint shifted over so he was sitting in front of Quentin on the other branch. "C'mon, arms around my neck. I'll never hear the end of this if you fall out of the tree and die."

Quentin did as he was told, accentuated with a loud put-upon sigh. "You'll never hear the end of people cheering you and buying you drinks and sucking your dick."

"More like berating me for being irresponsible," Clint muttered, making sure Quentin had a good hold on him before he started down the tree. "Also. Don't worry, I'll remind you of this and probably hold it over your head for the rest of your life."

"Then do me a favor and just drop me." They were safely down in no time, and Quentin made a beeline for the other side of the three so he could empty the contents of his stomach. Which at this point amounted to just six gummy bears and whatever he had been drinking. He stumbled back around when he was done, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "My fucking hero."

"Just what I've always wanted to be," Clint replied, voice dry. "C'mon, let's head back to the mansion." He detoured briefly to pick up the bottle. "Get some water in you before you die of alcohol poisoning and they decide to yell at me about that, instead."

"I told you, they won't yell, they'll throw you a parade."