xp_logs | Scott and Madelyn, Monday night

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Scott brings Madelyn down some coffee while she's on the night shift. She feeds him the evil truth-inducing cookies of doom. The conversation isn't really as funny as that makes it sound.

"Still on night shifts, huh?" Scott asked from the doorway, raising one of the cups of coffee he held with a brief smile as Madelyn looked up at him. "I ran into Moira wandering upstairs a couple of hours ago muttering about how the coffeemaker down here was broken. Figured that you might welcome the caffeine in a more palatable form than Hank's soda."

"I'd offer to have your children, only knowing this place we'd get interrupted at the good part," Madelyn told him, practically bouncing out of her seat to take one of the mugs. Wonderful coffee - and Scott had used the good stuff, too. "We kicked Moira off the night roster for a while. She needs the rest, and it was either that or ban her entirely from coffee again, and she didn't like that idea."

"She's been looking pretty tired lately," Scott said, smiling again at Maddie's approving look as she sipped the coffee. "I can't imagine she's thrilled to have Nathan away for the week, either..." But the implications of banning Moira from coffee sank in and Scott frowned, hoping that it wasn't her ulcer flaring back up again. He'd have to make a point of tracking her down tomorrow. Maybe with lunch.

"Alison wasn't thrilled to have Haroun away either, but they're both being philosophical about it. Which is all we can do, basically." Madelyn raised an inquiring eyebrow at Scott. "How are you coping with sitting this one out?" she asked, partly to draw attention away from Moira's health, since she'd agreed to keep the news quiet for now, and partly because Scott did look tired and worried himself. Moreso than usual.

Scott shrugged. "Charles okayed the plan. I'm worried, but I always worry." There was just increasingly less of a point to getting worked up about it one way or the other. "How's the coffee?" he asked, knowing she'd know he was changing the subject.

"All the better for being my first cup tonight - you were right about the coffee maker and Hank's soda." Madelyn shuddered a little. "Jolt is an evil thing. I think I ruined any taste I had for it when Alison was critical." A slight smile played around her lips as she acknowledged his changing of the subject, and so she neatly threw another one at him. "Have you talked to Betsy at all, lately? She checked herself out of medlab again."

Scott sighed. "Not beyond small talk," he said quietly, sipping at his own coffee. "I check on her. She tells me she's fine. I--well, it's natural, I gather. After what she's been through." He shrugged again, his eyes dropping to the medlab floor as he raised the cup to his lips again. "Important thing's seeing her through the rest of her recovery. I suppose I'll see if she really means it, after..."

Wordlessly Madelyn lay her hand on his shoulder. "Betsy's never been one to acknowledge when something's wrong," she said at last. "It's part of what makes her such a terrible patient. And psionic injuries... well, they're insanely complicated to us headblind folks. I wouldn't give up entirely yet."

He raised his own hand, laying it over hers where it rested on his shoulder and managing a ghost of a smile, even if he couldn't quite meet Madelyn's eyes. "It makes too much sense, though." There wasn't any unsteadiness in his voice. Just weary acceptance. Each subsequent conversation with Betsy, if you could call them that, had worn away his resistance to the idea. "How many times do you go through something horrible all by yourself before you start wondering just what the point of having a relationship is, if the other person can't ever do anything to help you?" Madelyn looked as though she might answer, but he sighed. "This isn't me on a self-flagellating kick, Maddie, really. I'm not going to stop trying to help her. I just--" He bit his lip, wrestling briefly with the words. "I just don't think this is going to turn out well for us, in the end. Which is okay, as long as she's all right."

She nodded, unable to do anything but accept his words - they held too much truth. Sometimes love wasn't enough; she'd seen that often enough in both her jobs. "Whatever happens," she said at last. "Whether you two make it as a couple in the end or not... you don't have to go through it by yourself."

Scott shrugged again, knowing the diffidence wasn't particularly convincing. "It's not that I don't appreciate the sentiment, Maddie," he said, clinging to the small smile almost defensively. "But really, I'm okay. It's probably best for her in the end."

"Okay, now I am going to thwap you," Madelyn said, with an eye roll and doing just that. Lightly, though - there was to be no spilling of the precious coffee. "Since you're in that phase of things, I think chocolate's in order. I'll treat you to my stash of home baked ones my mom sent back with me. Did you know chocolate's an anti-depressant? Seriously, it has an amino acid in it that's needed for seratonin production..." Still babbling in this vein, Madelyn steered Scott inside her office and towards the couch.

Scott sat down on the couch with a sigh. "I'm not depressed," he insisted, sipping at his coffee. "Really. I had an amnesia epiphany and now I don't kick myself for things anymore, remember?" That was beginning to sound a little hollow, though.

"Neither am I, but it doesn't stop me from taking shameless advantage of the excuse," Madelyn said, retrieving the tupperware container from the locked bottom drawer of her filing cabinet. "And it's enough we have Betsy doing the whole 'I'm fine, stop bothering me' thing. You're allowed to admit you're unhappy with the situation, Scott." Setting the container down on the coffee table with an emphatic gesture, Madelyn sat next to him. "Besides, you are being allowed to experience a rare privelege, given only to a few. Monica Bartlet's macadamia and chocolate cookies are not for mere mortals."

"Unhappy with the situation... I suppose I am, but you know, I don't really think it matters one way or the other." Scott reached out and took a cookie, giving it a contemplative look before he took a bite. "Mmm... these are good," he said with a faint smile.

"Possibly not in the long run, but you are allowed to not like it." Madelyn snagged a cookie for herself, and nibbled at it with a blissful expression before giving him a very direct look. "Tell me if I'm being pushy, Scott, but answer me this. Do you love her?"

"I do," he said quietly. "I really do." He took another bite of the cookie, swallowing past a sudden lump in his throat. Why had she had to ask him that? It just made it hurt, and he'd been doing rather well with the whole 'determined numbness' approach.

"So why the hell are you giving me this shit about accepting what comes and things not mattering one way or the other? Even if it is the best thing for her, Scott, and I'm not entirely convinced of that, you're allowed to feel. What you're doing now is backsliding into that whole robotic state you were in before that blow to the head." A little startled by her own vehemence, Madelyn sat back a bit. "Or, um, something to that effect," she added lamely, retreating to her cookie. Cookies made sense and didn't get her riled.

Scott blinked at her, and then nibbled at his cookie for a moment, trying to come up with a reasonable answer for that. "I've been thinking about this," he said finally. "I don't... it's not being a robot, Maddie, and my problem before my little adventure in mind-altering drugs was the fact that I was trying to kill myself with guilt. I'm not doing that anymore. But I'm really, seriously beginning to think that I need to try to stop reacting emotionally to things."

"Uff." Madelyn flopped her head back against the couch, looking up at the ceiling. "I give up," she told the light fixture solemnly. "I really do. What is it with people taking things to extremes in this place!" That out of her system (and the light fixture proving singularly unhelpful, she straightened her head and looked at Scott with a mixture of sympathy and exasperation. "Of course you shouldn't be reacting emotionally to some things, Scott. You can't be a teacher or a team leader if you do. But you know what? This is an emotional situation. This isn't a business partnership we're talking about, we're talking about your relationship. You're going to have an emotional reaction to it, and if you try and suppress that, you're only going to end up back on the same path as you were before, since all your responses are going to be screwed up."

"It's prioritizing, Maddie," Scott said a bit restlessly, not quite understanding the edge of anger that slipped into his voice as he went on. He wasn't angry at her. "The things that are important around here, the things that have to work... am I being a coward, wanting to focus on them?" The anger drained away abruptly, and he clenched his jaw. "I am, aren't I?" he said more quietly. "This is just another type of out-of-proportion reaction."

"What do you think?" Madelyn asked quietly, not reacting to the anger, her voice the same calm tone she used with Haroun when he was running hot on testosterone and on the irrational side. "I don't want to hound you here, Scott, but if you look at the way you're operating... I think you're smart enough to see it's just as maladaptive as the other."

"Damn it." Scott leaned forward and set both the coffee cup and the cookie on the table as his hands shook suddenly. "Damn it," he said, more heatedly, his voice unsteady. "Why can I not just--fuck."

It was like the last of that defensive numbness had been ripped away, and he looked sideways at Madelyn, his jaw clenched even harder. "I suppose this is where you tell me there's a middle ground, right? Except there's not, here. There's never a fucking middle ground." He made an angry gesture, the words coming out faster, spilling over each other as if they were in a rush to be said. "And I suppose it doesn't really matter if I'm acting like a robot, does it, because it doesn't make a damned bit of difference, ever. If I react emotionally, if I don't... the kids still come back in pieces, and there's never a damned thing I can do. No matter how much I plan, how much I try to think through all the possibilities, demons show up, or Magneto attacks a shopping mall, and then I'm just the fucking janitor, trying to clean things up after the fact..." He bit his lip, hard. "And I shouldn't be saying any of this to you, because you're one of the people who really does pick up the pieces... damn it."

"No, this is the part where I agree with you that sometimes it doesn't matter what we do, we still end up on clean up duty. Both of us." Setting her own coffee down, Madelyn reached for both his hands, holding them tightly against the shakes. "But at least we are there to pick up the pieces. Because someone has to be." She smiled at him, wryly. "Both my careers are heavy with the janitor work, Scott, as much as I wish it was otherwise. There's things I can do to try and prevent the disasters, but in the end, they're going to still happen, whether I do anything or not. And I could beat myself to death with the guilt of not being able to do more, like I did with Alison, but in the end, it still doesn't change anything. As it was pointed out to me, it just makes things worse, since I'm not in a state to do what I actually can do."

"I'm so--" Scott tried to stop there, but Madelyn was giving him that damned encouraging look, and his last bit of reserve took off for parts unknown. "I'm so angry, Maddie. At all of it. I'm not second-guessing myself, I'm not drowning in the guilt, I'm angry." And he was. It was like this internal, acid-edged bonfire suddenly, as if it had gotten stronger because he'd decided to pay attention to it. "I don't know how any of this is supposed to work anymore--I'm losing faith in my ability to do anything good here, Maddie. And that scares me, because if I can't have faith in what we're doing, how is anyone else supposed to?"

Madelyn considered him for a long time, before dropping her eyes to her hands, still holding his tightly. "After Vermont, when we found those kids, I was so angry I wanted to tear the people who had done that to shreds, to make them suffer and suffer until I decided to let them finally die. And when Kurt tried to talk me out of pounding the crap out of the morgue freezers with my bare hands, I slugged him instead. Got a couple of good ones in, because he let me." Taking a breath, she looked up at him. "I get so angry, Scott. Every day. I see things I'm powerless to prevent, and it makes me furious with the world at large. But the anger in and of itself is of no help. I had a very wise professor in med school teach me that you have to take the anger, and make it work for you, use it to fuel you when you should have collapsed hours before. I still have the odd lapse." She shrugged at little at that admission. "You do do good, Scott. I know you can't see it, but you do. You're the voice of calm and reason when all the rest of us are going insane, trying to figure out what happened. Never underestimate the value of someone who picks up the pieces - sure it's preferable to prevent the disaster in the first place, but there's always going to be something we can't stop. Even with super powers."

Scott didn't answer for a moment. Madelyn was making sense, as per usual. Amazingly, a faint smile tugged at his lips. "The voice of calm and reason is a front sometimes, you know," he admitted quietly. "And then sometimes it cracks entirely. Like this latest mess with the Inner Circle..." He shook his head a little, trying to push it out of his mind. "Between the people who think I'm dangerously naive and the people who actually think I can fix things... I just wish..." He took a deep, shaky breath. "There was only ever one person I could ever really be myself with, you know."

"I know." Madelyn's voice softened, the loss in his voice making her heart ache. "She was an amazing woman. I'm sorry I never met her, although I heard a lot about her. But..." She hesitated, not wanting to tread heavily here. "I know at least one person who can handle the whole gory truth of Scott Summers."

"Is this the lead-up to some advice from my favorite doctor?" Scott asked with a slightly wan smile.

"Actually this is your friend telling you that whenever you need her, she's here. With cookies, even." Madelyn's cheeks were the faintest bit pink, as she usually was whenever she was being deep and meaningful, as Carlie put it. "Any time, especially on those crazy night shifts."

"Maddie..." The smile grew a little, despite everything. "Thanks," he said simply, squeezing her hands for a moment before casting a deliberately overdone speculative look at the cookies. "What does your mother put in those, anyway? Sodium pentathol?"

"It's entirely possible. She used to use them as a cure-all for all our childhood and adolescent woes, and even now, I find myself telling her things I didn't even know were bothering me until she asked me how I was doing." Squeezing back she released his hands and sat back a bit, to give him the space he probably needed to pull himself together. "There's also my strange and terrible mind control powers," she added with a grin.

"Ah, right. Those."