Scott and Wanda, Tuesday night

[x-cyclops.livejournal.com]

Scott finally has a talk with Wanda about what happened on Youra. The two of them discuss her powers, and Scott has a plan.


He was getting a little better on these crutches. Scott stopped at Wanda's door, bracing himself carefully and then knocking. "Wanda?" he called. "Are you in?"

Sprawled on her side on the bed, Wanda glanced up from her notes. Pete's notes, actually, ones she was trying to work out. She was fairly positive that did not just say that the student was a chicken. She thought. "Come in," she responded, pushing herself up onto one elbow. With everything that had happened, she hadn't seen Scott since coming back to the mansion.

Scott opened the door, then hobbled in, smiling at her. "Hey. How are you feeling?"

"Less run over than before," was the truthful answer and she slowly sat up. Glancing at his leg, she raised an eyebrow. "And you?"

"Getting there," Scott said briskly. He made his way over to the nearest chair and lowered himself down. "Not nearly fast enough, but then, mind over matter and all that." He smiled at her. "You do look better than you did," he said more quietly.

"I itch," Wanda said, wrinkling her nose just slightly. "And I ache, but I am no longer as bruised as I was coming in. And the marks on my back are healing up nicely. Even if there will probably be some slight scarring."

"I was really hoping it would be a while before you collected your first souvenirs," Scott said with a sigh, then decided that beating around the bush was probably futile. "Wanda... I've been waiting to say this to you for the better part of a week. I'm sorry."

There was no need to ask "for what". It was obvious what he wanted to apologize for. "There is no need for you to apologize, Scott," she said slowly, keeping her eyes locked on him. "This was not your doing."

"Not my doing, no." He could recognize that much; progress had been made. "But you shouldn't have been alone out there."

"Mmm. Perhaps. But we were being stretched thin, even at the beginning."

"True enough." Scott sighed and slouched in the chair. "And I suppose you weren't alone, not really. You had that lieutenant... Land, wasn't that his name? And the first-gen."

Something flickered in her eyes. "Land and Dyson, yes. And Chepaitis was with me when we went to take out their air support and escapes." Two out of the three were dead, right before her eyes. And not a damned thing she could have done to save them. She forced herself to relax. "So no, not truely alone at first."

"But later." Scott regarded her steadily. "From what I understand from your report... the three of you did what you could with a really lousy tactical situation."

"Talk about a rock and a hard place," she agreed, shaking her head. "They just...would not stay down and were harder to herd than demonic cats. That is what we were trying to do, get them away from where they wanted to go. In the end, I had to knock down the wall behind us even...even..." Wanda shook her head again. Land had been dead by then, it had been her only choice.

"You succeeded," Scott said very quietly. "I don't know if you've read any of the reports that came back from the taskforce, but it meant a lot, to preserve those databases. It's one of the reasons that the government's been so successful in returning the children to their families."

Wanda bit her lip at that. She had known they were important but...maybe Cain was right, maybe she had done a good job. "I had not, as of yet. I was planning on it later this week. That...helps."

"It did," Scott said, his voice still low but very firm. "So did what you did at the airfield. I gave you two very critical parts of the deployment plan... even if the conditions of the second weren't what we were expecting them to be."

"Scott, the conditions later on for everyone were not as what we were expecting," Wanda reminded him, voice regaining strength. "No one could have guessed I would have been put into that kind of a situation."

"I'm not blaming myself for not foreseeing what happened," Scott said steadily. And he wasn't. The Masada trigger had been a total wild card, beyond any of their plans. "I'm just... concerned about you. This was hard on a lot of the team, and I know it's got people... doubting. Reassessing."

Sighing, she pushed herself to her feet and wandered over to sit on the window sill. The cool glass was a welcome sensation against her skin and she basked in it for a few seconds. "I won't lie to you, I spent most of the weekend doing that. Wondering if I was making the right decisions. But...I had no choice, Scott. None. I never wanted to kill but it was either that or die and he would go on to kill others." She tried to smile. "I am just a little...grossed out, as they would say, by my powers currently."

"I never want to see you put in that position again," Scott murmured. "Where you're backed into a corner like that and can't see a way out. So," he said with a crooked smile, "I have a suggestion. Well. Several."

"I am very open to suggestions."

"It involves you and I spending some quality time together." The smile turned very slightly teasing. "I promise to behave, of course..."

Wanda laughed at that, some of the tension easing back out of her shoulders. "But what fun would that be?" she teased.

Still smiling, Scott leaned forward a little, his body language more relaxed than it had been. "I've given your powers a lot of thought over the last week," he said simply. "We've come up with a number of new Danger Room scenarios... ways you could test the limits of your mutation in different simulated conditions, with different variables. I know it's difficult to simulate situations that your powers would recognize as being as... probability-laden as most missions you'd be on, but we've found a few ways around that, I think."

"Interesting." She found herself nodding as she thought about it. More training along those lines would be invaluable. The problem did not lay with control, it lay with application. And situations, of course. The past situation would have been hard to get out of any other way and there was no use in dwelling upon that for too long. "I like how you think..."

"Not just me. Alison and Ororo and Haroun, too... and believe it or not, Nathan actually gave me some suggestions as well. Flat on his back he might be, but he's had experience helping train someone with probability-manipulating powers."

"Ah, Domino?"

Scott nodded briskly. "I know your powers and hers are different, but some of his basic ideas about arranging variables are, I think, applicable to you as well." He smiled at her again - encouragingly, this time. "It's not a question of control," he said, unknowingly echoing her thoughts. "And it's not a question of mindset. It's just a question of exploring the limits of their application. Youra..." He paused, looking thoughtful. "Was close to a completely chaotic system, I suppose."

"Pretty damned close, you would be right. I..." Wanda paused and leaned her head back against the wall. "When I used my powers, there was something in the air. All the variables, all the strings, were so much more intense. I have never seen anything like it before. Especially after the trigger was set and the second gens went insane. It was like a mad house of puppet strings."

"Do you think..." Scott paused, chewing on his lip for a moment. "What do you think changed? Beyond the obvious."

Obviously thinking about it, Wanda frowned in thought. "I am not sure. All the strings became darker, heavier. That tends to mean worse things if I play or manipulate them. Or that something bad is about to happen and it just needs a touch more. They lost their minds and...well, became more animal than human after the trigger."

"What do you mean by bad, Wanda?" Scott pressed, honestly intrigued. "You sound almost like you get an... emotional reaction from certian types of strings?"

"Not an emotional reaction. Because I cannot see what will happen when I mess with the strings, I had to teach myself to read the difference in them. The lighter the strings means that if something is going to happen, it is not going to be harmful. Darker it is, the more harmful and the more destructive."

"Are any of the strings attached to you, ever?"

"No, I cannot actually see my own strings," she mused. "I have never been able to. Safety measure, I suppose...when I was younger and just manifested, I could have easily killed myself if I had strings coming from me."

Scott tilted his head. "Because you don't see them... do you think that means they aren't there?" He stopped, shaking his head quizzically. "I'm sorry. You just gave me more food for thought than I expected, all of a sudden."

"Don't apologize, these are things I have wondered about before as well. I honestly don't know if they're there or not--part of me is a little too leary to test that theory out on myself." Tilting her head, she grinned at him. "Do I want to know?"

"It needs to percolate," Scott said with a chuckle. "Right now, though... well, I think focusing on application-related testing is probably the best thing. Once you're healed up properly, I mean." He smiled. "I can download the scenarios to your team account so you can take a look in advance, though. So you know what sort of thing we have in mind." His voice was firm, yet both encouraging and oddly gentle as he went on. "I want you to be able to take good away from this, Wanda. Not just what you accomplished in the field, either."

Wanda smiled at him as she relaxed further. "At this rate, I believe I will. It will just be a matter of pushing myself past this experience."

"We'll do everything we can to help," Scott said, then grinned. "And by the time we're done, you may be sorry you turned yourself over to my not-so-tender mercies. I'm bad enough left to my own devices, but Nate's a sadist. I'm not even sure it's the morphine."

"Nathan just loves tormenting people," she pointed out. "Especially since he's confined to that bed."

"No tormenting," Scott said very firmly, reaching for his crutches. "Just a whole lot of experimenting. Sound like a plan?"

"Sounds like a good plan." Wanda paused. "And thank you."

Scott held her eyes for a long moment, smiling. "It's what I'm here for," he said more quietly.