FIC: The Player on the Other Side (X-Men: Scott, Erik, Rogue, Logan)
There is a lot more of this story archived on my Dreamwidth account. I began archiving there after Greatest Journal and Insane Journal blew up.
http://rachel-martin.dreamwidth.org/9140.html#cutid1
Title: The Player on the Other Side
Author: Rachel Martin
Status: This is chapter in a novel-length Work In Progress (WIP).
Summary: Movievierse, between X2 and X3. An Army officer is framed for the destruction of Alkali Base. His friends band together to ruin the mutant they consider responsible.
Genre: Romance, adventure.
Characters: The novel is an ensemble piece. Scott/Jean, Scott/Jubilee, Scott/Logan
Disclaimer: A fan story based on the "X-Men" movies and comics. "X-Men" belongs to Marvel Comics and 20th Century Fox. No infringement is intended and no money is being made.
Warning: Adult story.
The Big Decision Blues
Scott's sublet was a fourth-floor walk-up in a narrow five-story tenement on Avenue A between 6th and 7th Streets in Alphabet City. It was a typical tenement apartment of the 1890s. The bathtub was in the ten-by-twelve kitchen, next to the stove and sink. The toilet was in a converted kitchen closet instead of the fourth-floor hallway; that was a 21st century improvement. The twelve-by-fourteen room next to the kitchen was a combination bedroom and living room. Scott had rented the apartment furnished, and the East Indian motif did not displease him. The futon mattress (no frame) wasn't especially uncomfortable. The roaches weren't particularly aggressive. The building's boiler seemed reliable; at least, there always seemed to be sufficient quantities of heat and hot water. The sublet on Avenue A was altogether a much nicer cell than the one he'd been thrown into at the Herman Stark Youth Correctional Facility.
Every day Scott got out of bed before dawn for the sole purpose of crossing off another block on the calendar marking the days of his exile. Once out of bed he would drink coffee and engage in early morning thoughts of suicide. After an unproductive hour or so he would use the razor for the purpose of shaving. He would wash and throw on a pair of jeans or cargo pants and a couple of flannel shirts and a pair of hiking shoes. He would put on a parka and trudge down Avenue A and around the corner to 7th Street and westward into the heart of Greenwich Village and the urban campus of New York University.
Every weekday Scott sat through several graduate level classes at the Steinhardt School of Education. After class he studied in the Bobst Library. Every now and then he'd break out in a cold sweat and feel dizzy and nauseated. Then he'd get up and go across the street to the student union and get something to eat. Often as not a few of his classmates would see him and ask to study with him and he would agree. Tutoring his classmates was the only spot of normality in Scott's life.
In the evenings Scott would go to the Coles Sports Center and run mile after mile on the treadmill or swim lap after lap in the indoor pool. Sometimes when the loneliness got to him he would take a walk up 6th Avenue to 21st Street and do some studying in the Starbuck's cafe. The cafe was situated on a balcony overlooking the stacks of a Barnes & Noble bookstore and seemed to be an unofficial annex of the Bobst Library. Other nights he would go around the corner to 7th Street and drink coffee in a twelve-by-fourteen restaurant run by a Venezuelan family. The oldest daughter, who was also the waitress, had given him a single startled look the first time he'd walked in. Thereafter she'd behaved as though it were quite normal to serve coffee to men wearing glowing red glasses. Quite possibly she thought North America was home to many men with glowing red glasses.
Eventually Scott would make his way back to the sublet on Avenue A. He would stretch out on the futon mattress, which he never bother to roll up in the morning. He would fold his arms under his head and stare up at the ceiling. He would listen to the hiss of the radiator and the sounds of people and traffic on the street below. And Scott would wonder if it were genuinely possible to die of shame.
For many years Scott had believed that the most horrible day of his life was the day his mutation had manifested. And then Jean had died and that day had become the most horrible day of his life. And about twenty-four hours later he thought he had plumbed the depths of horror when Kurt Wagner had clued him in to Jean's infidelity. But he knew now that all of those days had been nothing but the dress rehearsal for the day he would break Charles Xavier's heart.
"Maximum disclosure, minimum delay," Warren had advised crisply, and Scott supposed that Warren, the veteran of a hundred media muggings, would know. "Don't leave anything unsaid for an investigative reporter to say later."
But Scott didn't expect to see any reporters on the front stoop of the tenement. It wasn't a matter for the police. The New York State Department of Education would have been deeply interested, but Mrs. Lee believed in Charles Xavier and she refused to give the great state of New York an excuse to investigate the Institute. Nor did she intend to give the suits in Albany a reason to legislate against mutant teachers and mutant schoolbus drivers and mutant day care providers. "Someone like Miss Munroe should not lose her certificate because of someone like you," Mrs. Lee had said angrily. Mrs. Lee had slapped him and stalked out of Charles' study and Mr. Lee had sighed. He had looked at Scott and said heavily, "If anyone's to blame, I am. I've always known my daughter was a tramp." He, Scott Summers, had managed to destroy the already tenuous relationship between a man and his child, and maybe that was his real sin.
But facing the Lees had been only half as terrible as collecting the little kids and telling them he was leaving. They had been run out on by their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and grandmothers and grandfathers, and now Mr. Summers was running out on them too.
"No," he said, for the twelfth or fifteenth or twentieth time, "I'm not mad at you. You didn't do anything. It's me. I was bad. So now I have to go away."
"If I'm bad, do I have to go away too?" a four-year-old girl asked, and promptly burst into tears.
"No. No," Scott said fiercely. He squatted down and hugged her and said, "This is your home, forever and ever. No one will ever make you go away."
"So why do you have to go?" a six-year-old boy asked in a quavering voice.
"It's different for grown-ups," Scott said. "Grown-ups get punished a lot harder."
The children seemed to pause for a moment of collective wonder. Clearly it had never occurred to them that almighty adults could be brought to justice. Possibly Scott was the first adult they had ever heard admit to wrongdoing.
"Tell the Professor you're sorry," suggested another boy.
"Tell him you'll be good," a girl urged.
"I did," Scott said steadily, because to his way of thinking a man got one opportunity per lifetime to cry in front of kids, and he'd already used his up. "But the rules are a lot tougher when you're a grown-up. And I have to go away."
And if facing the little kids had been a horror, it was nothing compared to facing Bobby Drake. Scott had only to close his eyes to see once more the shock and revulsion on Bobby's face. And yet one Saturday afternoon a courier brought a package of documents to the sublet for Scott's signature, because not only did Scott remain -- technically -- the school's assistant headmaster, but also Bobby Drake's legal guardian. It seemed Bobby had not yet gone to Family Court to demand a do-over. Scott wondered about that.
Scott flipped through the documents in the courier package and dropped them on the kitchen table as though they were radioactive. He put on his parka and walked across the Village to the Starbuck's on 21st Street. He spent the evening drinking coffee and staring at his class notes and wondering if Logan was helping Bobby work through the Infantry Officer's Basic Course books. He wondered how Logan was running the shop classes and the self-defense classes. He wondered if Logan had altered the team's training plan. He wondered if Logan complained about meetings with the trustees or the chick flicks on Movie Night or the coffee in the dining hall. Scott's life was going on. But Logan was living it.
"May I?" a voice asked.
Scott looked up slowly and disbelievingly at the tall, elderly man in the long black cashmere overcoat and homburg. Erik Lensherr pulled out the chair on the other side of the small table and sat down. He took off his hat and gloves and placed them on the table.
Scott automatically reached under his flannel overshirt. His team communicator was no longer clipped to his belt, of course.
"Yes, I suppose you could summon your -- what do you call them? X-Men?" Lensherr smiled. "You could even dial nine-one-one. Of course, I won't go quietly, and the store's rather crowded tonight." He looked around the cafe and over the balustrade into the bookstore. "Have you visited the Mutant Studies section?" He dropped a paperback onto the table. Zombies of the Gene Pool.
Scott said through clenched teeth, "I should kill you for what you did to Charles at Alkali." And oh yeah, the rest of the world.
"But you aren't an X-Man anymore, are you," Lensherr said. "Don't fret, I'm sure your former teammates will avenge him." The mocking half-smile faded from his face. "There's no need for further hostilities between us. . . mein Sohn."
Lensherr looked earnestly across the small table. The aroma of coffee and books filled the air. For a moment Scott was a boy back in the library of the mansion and Dr. Lensherr was reading him another detective novel that was too low-brow for brailling.
Scott thought dispiritedly that Logan had known all along he would wimp out the next time he saw Lensherr. He slumped in his chair. "Well, since I'm off the team, do you think you could tell me who's the mole?"
Lensherr smiled. "Why, Charles, of course." He tapped the side of his head. "Did you think you and Dr. Grey were the only couple with a psi-link?"
Scott sat forward. "You -- you ?" he sputtered, flabbergasted. "You agreed to a link with Charles? After the way you carried on when Jean and I --"
"I was considerably more than seventeen years of age when I gave my consent," said Lensherr, "and my judgement was not clouded by an impending orgasm, as I suspect yours was."
Scott scowled. He suspected Lensherr's real mutant power was the ability to make him feel like an idiot.
"Charles has blocked me for many years," Lensherr said dispassionately. "But I can sense his emotions, occasionally. I can hear a stray thought or two. When the world's most powerful telepath is distraught, one may hear his projections anywhere on the planet."
"If you are that one."
"Yes." Lensherr cocked his head. "I gather there has been much ado about nothing."
"Not nothing," Scott muttered.
"Really, Scott. Isn't it time you gave up your place on the Olympic suffering team? The girl offered you a bit of comfort. Why shouldn't you accept?"
"Because she's a kid. And I'm supposed to be a grown-up."
"She is seventeen, is she not?" Lensherr said silkily. "The same age you were when you became involved with Dr. Grey. Who was just about the same age you are now."
Scott put his elbows on the table and put his head in his hands. After a moment, he said, "Jubilee's my student. Jean wasn't in a position of authority over me"
"Dr. Grey held a privileged position in the mansion," Lensherr said thoughtfully. "She was the daughter of the house, in essence if not in fact. Charles had known her for years and loved her dearly. You, on the other hand, were a newcomer. You had yet to earn a place in Charles' affections. Had you displeased Dr. Grey, she might have prejudiced his opinion of you. She might have persuaded him that you were unworthy of his attention. She might have convinced him to return you to the California Youth Authority."
Scott lifted his head and looked incredulously at Lensherr. "For God's sake. Is that what you think? You think she threatened me? You think she raped me or something?"
Lensherr shrugged.
"That's insane," Scott said angrily. "I wanted to be with Jean. I acted of my own free will."
"As did the Lee girl?"
"She trusted me. She trusted me to say no." Scott looked at Lensherr. "The way I trusted you to say no."
Lensherr appeared uncomfortable for the first time. "You were suffering merely from an acute case of hero worship," he snapped.
"So was Jubilee."
Lensherr made no reply. He picked up his homburg and turned it around in his hands. Eventually he said, "Quite possibly I have wronged you."
"Ya think?"
"When you approached me that day, I ought to have asked myself if your behavior had some greater significance. I refused to even consider the possibility. You see, I was so determined you should be heterosexual."
Scott said blankly, "What?"
"Oh, you've heard the old canard. Homosexuals must not be allowed to adopt or teach or coach Little League, because somehow we will manage to turn straight boys queer. It would be too ironic if I had managed to turn a queer boy straight."
Scott said, at last, "Well, if you wanted me to be straight, why'd you get so damn crazy when I hooked up with Jean?"
"Because I knew she would break your heart," Lensherr said simply. "I'm sure you've been informed of the sleeping arrangements at my little encampment in the Catskills."
Scott said nothing.
"Come with me, son." Lensherr looked intently at him. "There's nothing left for you in the human world." A note of bitterness entered his voice. "You'll never be good enough for Charles. Trust me."
Scott looked down at the tabletop. "I have to try." Because he couldn't bear to be the kind of son who was good enough for Erik Lensherr.
Lensherr sighed. He extracted a pen from his coat pocket and pulled a napkin toward himself. He printed something on the napkin and pushed it back to Scott. Scott looked down at it. A hotmail address. He supposed that Kitty, given this miniscule clue and enough time, could possibly run down Lensherr's whereabouts. But he did not intend to pass the hotmail address to Kitty. He wasn't an X-Man anymore. He didn't have to fight Lensherr anymore. It was the first cheerful thought he'd had in many weeks.
"When you're ready," Lensherr said. He stood up, pulled on his gloves and picked up his hat. He walked down the stairs leading from the balcony to the bookstore. Scott watched over the balustrade as he made his way through the stacks and left.
Scott looked away and down at the paperback Lensherr had left on the tabletop. Zombies of the Gene Pool. He couldn't bring himself to flip the book over and read the blurb on the back cover.
He picked up the napkin with Lensherr's hotmail address. He folded it and stowed it securely in a pocket of his cargo pants.
He collected his class notes and stuffed them into his backpack and left.
____________
Snow began to fall as Scott trudged through the East Village on the way back to Avenue A. Against his will he remembered snowball fights with Jean in Central Park. He had been an undergraduate at NYU and she had been working on her doctoral thesis at Columbia. In his sophomore year he had moved out of the dorms and into her apartment on the Upper West Side. He remembered going to concerts in Central Park with Jean. He remembered standing with Jean in the crowds lining Broadway to watch the Thanksgiving Day Parade before driving home to Westchester for dinner. He remembered. . . so many things, thousands of good times, good memories, all as phony as any of Jason's illusions.
He preferred to remember meandering through the East Village with Rogue on the day Logan had deserted her. Scott detoured through St. Mark's Place on the way back to Avenue A and wondered if he should finally confront the shop clerk who had asked Rogue what it was like to fuck a mutie. Getting angry seemed like too much work. He kept walking. He turned the corner onto Avenue A and walked halfway down the avenue and stopped. Parked in front of his tenement was his rebuilt nineteen-sixty-four-and-a-half Mustang coupe. He turned his head. Sitting on the stoop of the tenement in her green hooded cloak was Rogue.
For a wild moment Scott wondered if he was having some kind of long-term reaction to Stryker's bug juice. He walked the last few steps to the tenement and stood on the bottom step and stared up at her.
"What are you doing here?" he blurted out, and a moment later he realized how ungracious he sounded, but he was too truly surprised to pick and choose his words.
She stood up and pushed back the hood of her cape. The big white fluffy flakes drifted into her hair and sparkled like crystal ornaments under the harsh light affixed over the tenement's front door.
"Rogue," he said. He tried to sound like Mr. Summers. "You shouldn't have come here."
She stood on the stoop and looked gravely down at him and said nothing.
"Rogue," he said harshly. "Don't you have someplace better to be?"
She said, "Don't I owe you dinner?"
Rogue and Scott ate a very late dinner in the Venezuelan restaurant on 7th Street. They sat at one of the seven tiny tables and Scott explained that he'd never actually eaten anything there. The nice waitress brought them a couple of meat and cheese-filled arepas. Rogue's eyes followed every forkful of food from Scott's plate to his mouth and somewhat self-consciously he cleaned his plate. He felt distinctly queasy afterwards but the waitress brought him a cup of good strong coffee. He sipped the coffee and his stomach began to settle down.
"Now," Rogue said briskly. She dug into her purse and pulled out a sheet of folded notepaper. Bewilderedly Scott accepted it. "How are you fixed for money? How bad is your rent? Do you know all the places where you can get something to eat?" She nodded at the folded paper in Scott's hand.
Scott blinked. Intellectually he knew Rogue was no sheltered little Southern miss. He knew she had been on the road for over a year before hooking up with Logan at some truck stop in Alberta. And yet he turned her questions over in his mind. They were not the sort of questions that a child had the right to put to an adult. Scott knew if he answered Rogue, she would, in that moment, cease to be a child to him. She would become another adult, a peer. . . a friend.
Rogue's eyes narrowed. "It's murder putting someone like you out on the street and that is just exactly what I said to Logan."
Scott repressed an awful urge to laugh. He couldn't laugh in the face of such concern. But he said, "Someone like me?" and he said, "I'm not exactly out on the street," and he said, "Logan?"
"Come on, Scott," she said. She said "Scott," not "Mr. Summers." She said, "Come on, Scott, I know everything about you that Erik knows. I know you were home-schooled by your mama till you were fourteen."
"Yeah. Well." Scott shrugged. "You're kind of forgetting where I went to finishing school."
She asked -- hesitantly, because Mutant High etiquette specifically forbade the asking of this question -- "Do you ever hear from your parents?"
"My parents are Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr," Scott said, "and I haven't heard from Charles, no."
She looked sharply at him. "Erik?"
"He came out of the woodwork to pay his condolences." Scott grimaced. "And also to gloat."
She shook her head. "No," she muttered. "I don't care. I'm not on duty and we are not going to talk about Magneto." Rogue looked up and directly into the ruby-quartz lenses. "How are you doing? Really?"
"I'm okay," he said slowly. "I am, really. I'm still drawing my salary --" although, of course, he was now paying for his room and board out of that salary, and his rent ate up more than half his monthly net income. "Technically I'm on sabbatical." And at her inquiring look he elaborated, "I'm taking classes at NYU. I only have my provisional teacher's certificate, and I have to have a graduate degree to get the permanent certificate. I was trying to take classes part-time at night but it wasn't working out. . . ." He tried to smile. "Magneto just had to mutate the world on the night of my organizational theory exam."
Rogue ignored his attempt at humor. "How are you paying for your classes?"
"My savings," he said. Well, no one could accuse him of profiting by Jean's death. It would be seven or ten years before he collected on Jean's life insurance, if ever. Neither he nor Charles nor any member of the Board of Trustees had been able to think of a way to report Jean's death to the appropriate authorities. After several days' debate, Charles had reported her as a missing person. The police had come to the mansion and looked around the suite she had shared with Scott. They had questioned the adults. They had questioned the children. The children had not said the right things. Charles had made the cops think they was hearing the right things. But the whole first week following Jean's death was beginning to blur in his memory like a watercolor.
Rogue looked away and asked the waitress to bring her a cup of coffee too.
And after the nice Venezuelan girl had set the mug down on the table, Rogue asked, "So you're coming back to teach?" She did not say anything about the X-Men.
"Maybe," Scott said. He tried to inject a little optimism into his voice. "The Board of Trustees will, uh, 're-visit the situation,' in June. After --"
"After Jubilee graduates," Rogue finished.
They drank coffee and listened to joropo music. It occurred to Scott that many of the ingredients for happiness were to be found in this little restaurant, good music and good food and good company. He looked across the table at Rogue, so smart and strong and brave and practical, the kind of woman who settled frontiers, and he thought Logan was the goddest-damnedest stupidest man on the face of the earth.
She said, "What?"
He said, "I was thinking Bobby is a lucky man." And he remembered Bobby's shocked face and he stopped smiling.
"He misses you," Rogue said quietly. "I mean, he hates you. But he misses you."
Scott thought, I miss him too. And he thought, I miss me too. He said, "Why don't you hate me?"
"Well," she said. "Maybe because I never thought you were God." She stirred her coffee around and said, "Actually people are starting to get pretty pissed at Jubilee."
"No." Scott sat up straight in his chair. "No, Rogue. Don't get sucked into that shit. That blame-the-victim bullshit."
"Well, I guess that's the problem, isn't it," she said mildly. "Who's the victim."
"Well, I'm not. Look. I'm the grown-up. And that means if the Olsen twins get naked and beg me to fuck them, I'm supposed to say no. Because I'm the grown-up."
"Jubilee's legal," Rogue pointed out in the same mild voice. "She's seventeen. Same age you were when you started sleeping with Dr. Grey."
Scott wondered why in the name of God Rogue had to absorb the memories of Erik Lensherr, of all people. "That's different," he snapped. "I'm a guy."
"Now look who's being a chauvenist pig," Rogue said, but she smiled. And she said nothing as Scott paid for dinner.
Scott and Rogue walked back to Avenue A through the gently falling snow. The big fat flakes were melting as soon as they hit the pavement. Still, Scott looked up worriedly at the sky as he opened the door of the Mustang for Rogue and helped her into the driver's seat. He shut the door after her and a second later he knocked on the window. Rogue cranked the window down and stuck her head out.
"Are you gonna be okay driving in this?" he asked. "Because it might be worse up in Westchester."
"I'll be fine," Rogue said patiently.
"Yeah, right. You're from Mississippi. What do you know about driving in snow?"
"Are you worried about me or your car?"
"Oh, man, that's low," he said, and she laughed. "Look, you be careful. If it gets any worse, you just pull over and call Bobby. Make him come and get you."
"Oh, yeah, sure," Rogue said, and rolled her eyes. "Like he'd ever let me live that down."
"Hey, I'm serious. Are you going to be all right?"
Rogue smiled up at him, then. She said gently, "I'll be all right if you'll be all right. Do we have a deal?"
Scott swallowed. "Deal," he said, and he stepped back from the car.
______________
Rogue's visit served only to re-energize Scott's homesickness. Two weeks later he was almost sorry she had ever found him. He felt nearly overwhelmed by the need to turn back the clock, to take back his old life, to go home. He no longer dared walk anywhere near Grand Central Station and the Metro-North trains to Westchester.
He daydreamed in class. He couldn't focus on his assignments. He sat at a cafeteria table in the student union and stared at the napkin with Erik Lensherr's hotmail address. He sat at the Starbuck's cafe and studied maps of Nevada and Colorado and Alaska instead of his textbooks. Scott wasn't sure where he wanted to go but he knew he couldn't go on living in limbo.
He bought the map of Colorado and stuck it into his backpack and trudged southeast across Greenwich Village to Alphabet City. Despite the cold and the dark the sidewalks were crowded, because not everyone was a loser who had nowhere to go on a Friday night but a bookstore. Scott thought about stopping to see a movie. He thought about dropping in at the student union. Getting a life seemed like too much work. He kept walking. He walked down 7th Street and turned the corner onto Avenue A. He stopped.
The Institute's Land Rover was parked in front of the tenement. Leaning against the Land Rover was Logan. He had on a heavy sheepskin jacket and a cowboy hat tugged down over his forehead. He was smoking one of his foul cigars. Scott wondered how long Logan had been waiting for him. Mostly he wondered what could be so urgent that Logan would drive down to the city to see him.
He said, "Logan," in a conversational voice. Scott knew he didn't need to yell. Logan had the hearing of a dog. He said, "Logan," and Logan raised his head and stared steadily at him as he ran up Avenue A.
Scott skidded to a halt on the sidewalk between the tenement and the Land Rover and he said the first thing that came to his mind. "Is Bobby okay?"
"Fine," Logan said around the cigar stump. He took it out of his mouth and dropped it in the gutter.
"Oh," Scott said. He caught his breath and another, terrible thought came to him. He said, "Is Charles okay?"
Logan shrugged. "Good enough."
"Everyone's okay?"
"Yup."
"Oh," Scott said again. Feeling relieved but perplexed, he stared at Logan. "So what are you doing here?"
Logan pushed the cowboy hat back on his head. "You don't believe in answering your phone, do you."
"Don't have a phone in my apartment."
"I mean your cell phone." Logan reached inside his jacket and pulled out his team communicator.
"I left it in my locker on the sub-levels. With my visors."
"You mean the damn thing's been ringing in your locker all this time?"
"Well, I didn't think anyone would be paging Cyclops."
"You ever check your email?"
"No," Scott said. "I set it on automatic forward to Ororo."
Logan looked like he'd just swallowed a lemon. He stuffed the communicator back into his jacket. Turning, he grabbed the handle to the driver's side door of the Land Rover. "Aw, quit yer whining and get out."
Scott stared at Logan. "You came all the way down here to tell me that?"
"I'm talking to him," Logan said, and he gestured inside the vehicle. Gus, the superannuated school mascot, poked his head out the door. He caught sight of Scott and began barking joyously. Of course, Gus also barked joyously at the mailman, the property tax assessor, and the anti-mutant protestors who gathered outside the gates of the mansion. Gus was indiscriminate in his affections.
"You brought Gus?"
"No," Logan said testily. "Well, come on. Out." The golden retriever stopped barking and looked pitifully up at Logan.
"He needs help getting out," Scott said. "He can't climb up and down anymore. How'd he get in the car in the first place?"
"How does he get up and down the stairs in the mansion?" Logan countered.
"He takes the elevator."
"How -- Forget it." Logan scooped Gus off the car seat and deposited him on the sidewalk. Gus rushed up to Scott. Scott squatted down and hugged the dog and allowed himself to be slobbered upon.
"Well, if ya don't mind," Logan snapped, "could we have this touchin' little reunion inside? Cuz I just about froze my ass off waiting for you to show up."
Scott wondered again why Logan had waited at all. He unlocked the front door of the tenement and stood in the hall and waited for Logan to produce some urgent document for his signature. Logan pushed past him and began climbing the stairs. Scott stood in the hall for another moment before picking Gus up and carrying him to the fourth floor.
Inside the sublet, Scott stowed Gus in the bedroom and shut the door. He turned and watched Logan prowl around the kitchen. Scott's heart sank as he wondered what Jubilee had been doing or saying. He could only suppose Logan had been sent to look for some sign of communication between himself and the girl, a letter maybe, as if Jubilee had ever composed so much as an email since the invention of text messaging. But Logan didn't trash the sublet looking for some unspecified evidence of wrongdoing. He didn't dump out Scott's backpack. He didn't actually touch anything. He simply looked. He even opened up the fridge and looked, as if Scott might be keeping love letters in the fridge. Eventually Logan sat down uninvited at the small kitchen table. Scott waited for him to deliver a message of doom from Sebastian Shaw or another member of the Board of Trustees. Logan said nothing. He studied the tabletop. Moment after moment ticked by. Scott's bewilderment deepened. He sat down in the chair on the other side of the table. It occurred to him that if Logan didn't say anything in the next five minutes he would simply pick up his backpack and leave.
Logan lifted his head and looked at Scott. "Summers," he said quietly. "You gotta quit being mad at Jean. Cuz the next stop is jail."
Scott stared at him. "Jean? What's she got to do with anything?" He added, "I'm not angry with her. I haven't thought about her in months."
"She didn't cheat on you," Logan said, as though Scott had not spoken at all.
Scott remembered the unwritten addendum to Logan's employment contract. There seemed no use in mentioning it. He was certainly in no position to enforce it.
"Summers," Logan said. "She loved you."
"Oh," Scott said. He got up and looked around the kitchen for his financial management textbook.
"I don't know why you can't believe it was Mystique." Logan scrubbed his hands over his face. "She pretended to be Bobby. She pretended to be a U.S. Senator. Don't tell me that bitch never pulled any shit on you when she was living at the Institute."
Scott paused. After a moment he said, "Yeah, she did."
Logan blinked. "Well, okay, then." He slapped the palms of his hands down on the table.
"She used to make herself look like Jean to get into my pants. But I wasn't at the camp, was I."
"She made herself look like Jean to get into my pants," Logan said through gritted teeth.
"No," Scott said. "If she wanted to get into your pants, she would have made herself look like Rogue."
Scott found his financial management book and stuffed it into his backpack. He picked up his parka.
Logan got up out of his chair. He grabbed the parka out of Scott's hands and threw it on the floor. He kicked Scott's backpack across the small kitchen. "I'm not finished," he snarled.
Scott took a deep breath. "Why'd you come here? What do you want from me? I mean, what more do you want?"
"What I want is for you to start using your head, college boy."
Scott tried to walk around Logan to the door. "You stupid shit," Logan said, and he grabbed Scott by the front of his flannel overshirt. Scott decided he was very tired of being mauled by Logan. He briefly considered flipping Logan to the floor and tearing the ligaments of his knee and maybe stomping his larynx, but what would be the point? Everything would knit itself together again in a few seconds.
Logan slammed Scott's back against the door. "Heard from Uncle Erik lately? Did he stop by to drop off some recruiting brochures?" Logan yanked Scott forward. "You're off the team, you're out of the school, you're not even living on the property anymore. You and Chuck ain't talking and your pesky girlfriend is out of the picture. Now you just gotta ask yourself, who's the happiest man in America?" He slammed Scott against the door again. "C'mon, Summers, you're a smart boy. Start connecting the dots. Yeah, you got stabbed in the back, but it wasn't me and it wasn't Jean. It was dear old Uncle Erik."
"No."
"Yes."
"Logan, listen to your damn self. Do you seriously think Jubilee is on Magneto's payroll?"
"Oh, I'm sure he never saw that one coming. No, I bet he thought you would kill me, Summers. You're the only guy on earth who can, you know that. He thought you'd kill me, and Jean too."
"No."
"Yes. He sent Mystique to my tent. He knew some idiot would tell you. And he knows what a jealous son of a bitch you are. He was sure you'd kill us --"
("lovers' quarrel")
"-- and then you'd panic and run for it. Cuz you are never going back to jail, are you? And where else would you go? Who else would take you in? Who but good old Uncle Erik?"
"No," Scott whispered.
"What, you don't believe Magneto would fuck you over but you think Jean would?" Logan's face twisted. "You are a real piece of work, Summers. It's all your goddamn fault, everything that happened, because you never believed her. You never trusted her. You always thought she was gonna run off with somebody, didn't you? Me, the mailman, somebody. You set your own goddamn self up. You walked right into it. You got nobody else to blame, not me, not Jean, not even Lensherr."
"Oh, God," Scott said unsteadily.
"You stupid little shit." Logan yanked Scott forward. "She was never gonna leave you. You think she was gonna leave you for me? It was you, Summers, it was always you, it was never anybody else."
Logan abruptly fell silent. He stood, breathing heavily, fists clenched in Scott's shirt. Scott stared at him.
They stared at each other.
Logan let go of Scott's shirt. His hands dropped to his sides. He stepped back.
Scott said blankly, "She's dead, Logan."
"Yeah," Logan muttered. He turned and picked up his jacket. He pulled it on and zipped it up.
Scott raised his voice. "She's dead," he repeated incredulously.
"Yeah," Logan said. He shoved his hands into his pockets. He stared at Scott. "Yeah, I know."
"You know?"
"Yeah."
"You know what happened?"
Logan paused. "She held back the water and she lifted the jet," he said finally, gently. "She was a hero. She died to save us."
"No." Scott gripped his head between his hands. He felt as though he were walking the edge between insanity and enlightenment. "That's not true. That didn't happen. Everybody keeps lying. Why does everybody keep lying?"
Logan sighed. He looked very tired, suddenly. "It's easier, I guess."
"What happened?" Scott screamed furiously. "Tell me what happened!"
"You know what happened. She killed herself." Logan looked steadily into the ruby quartz lenses. "She didn't have to get out of the jet to lift it. If anybody shoulda got out of the jet, it was Bobby. I ain't saying I blame him. But maybe he coulda froze the water. And Storm. Maybe she coulda whipped up a hurricane. I'm ain't blaming her either. All I'm saying is, Jean didn't have to be the lone ranger. She didn't have to stop Kurt from saving her ass. She committed suicide."
"Why?" Scott asked bewilderedly. "Why?" and he thought if he could just get the answer to that question, if somebody could just calmly explain to him why Jean hated him so, he could fix all the things that were wrong with himself and Jean wouldn't have to kill herself after all.
"I don't know why. It wasn't anything we did, you and me. If we were driving her that crazy, she coulda just run off with Worthington."
"Oh, God," Scott said, and he staggered. Logan caught hold of him. They overbalanced and fell heavily together onto the kitchen floor.
"Hey," Logan said. "Hey. She was never gonna run off with Worthington."
And to Scott's way of thinking, a man got one opportunity per lifetime to cry in front of another man, and he'd already used his up. But he started to cry.
"Why?" he pleaded, because he knew Logan knew the answer. Logan hated him. Logan hated him for all the same reasons Jean hated him. Why wouldn't Logan just tell him? Why did Logan have to be an asshole?
"Hey," Logan said. Awkwardly he put his arms around Scott. "She didn't mean it. She was gonna come back home. She was gonna live with you down the hall."
"I don't care where she lives," Scott said, and he couldn't seem to catch his breath. Logan pounded him on the back. He sucked in a great big deep gulp of air and he said, "I don't care if she's living with you, I just want her to be living. I just want there to be some place where she's alive. I just want her to be alive. I just want her to be alive."
Logan said, "I know." He said, "I know." He kept saying, "I know."
_____________
Logan wondered why he was lying on a futon mattress on the floor of a sublet in Alphabet City. Specifically, he wondered why he was lying with Scott Summers on a futon mattress on the floor of a sublet in Alphabet City. Well, aside from the fact that they were nominally straight. He might have stabbed Summers to death. Summers might have blasted him into the East River. Mutually Assured Destruction. It seemed to work for Bill and Hillary.
Summers slept unresistingly inside the adamantium cage of Logan's arms and legs. His breathing had an almost drugged quality to it and Logan guessed he would not wake for a few hours more. He stared thoughtfully at the back of Summers' head. The collar of the flannel overshirt nearly covered the ugly little crater created by William Stryker's bug juice. The brown hair flopped messily over the ruby-quartz glasses. Logan wondered exactly how unsafe it was for Summers to sleep in his glasses. It had to be uncomfortable. Logan wasn't feeling too comfortable himself. His dick felt like it was going to poke a hole right through his jeans. His belt buckle was digging into his abdomen. He felt grimy under the layers of shirts and overshirts. And he hadn't slept with his boots on since moving into the mansion.
But concentrating on his physical discomfort was not going to get him around the fact that Summers was an uptight self-righteous son of a bitch. Well -- not self-righteous any more. Now he was a self-flagellating son of a bitch. And Summers was not exactly the kind of guy who believed in giving people their space. Actually he was the kind of guy who gave the word "clutchy" a whole new world of meaning. A person needed to think twice before getting involved with Summers. A person couldn't just disappear for six or twelve months to, say, search for clues to his mysterious past. Summers was apt to come after the aforementioned person with a baseball bat and a big net.
Logan carefully unwound himself from around Summers. He rolled over and found himself nearly nose-to-nose with Gus the Wonder Dog. Gus lifted his head and stared soulfully at Logan
"Don't get too cozy, bub," Logan said, sotte voce. "I ain't bringing you back next week."
Gus slobbered happily over Logan's face.
Logan got up and since he was already completely dressed he carried Gus down the four flights of stairs to the street below and took the retriever for a long walk through Alphabet City. Gus earnestly endeavored to befriend every crack dealer in Tompkins Square Park. On the way in Logan stopped to pick up a couple of papers and some breakfast fixings at the Korean deli across the street from Summers' building. Incredibly, to Logan, the deli was open at five-thirty in the morning on a Saturday. "Damn," Logan said to the clerk, "don't you guys ever take a break?" The clerk, a young man about Summers' age, shrugged and smiled and said, "No English."
With various muttered imprecations, Logan carried Gus up the four flights of stairs to Summers' floor. He left Gus whining piteously on the top step and went back downstairs to retrieve the sack of groceries he had left on the bottom step. Inside the sublet Logan opened up a can of hash, slopped it onto a plate, and set the plate down on the cracked linoleum. He brewed a pot of coffee. He filled the claw-footed bathtub and rummaged through the plastic milk crates Summers kept his clothes in. Amid the tightie-whities he found several pairs of oversized -- for Summers -- boxers, what the guy used to sleep in, probably, and a lot of big, baggy -- for Summers -- flannel shirts. Logan tossed the purloined clothing and his jeans over the back of a kitchen chair and thought that Summers was looking thinner than even a guy nicknamed Slim ought to look.
Still wearing the clothes he had fallen asleep in, Summers stumbled into the kitchen about thirty minutes later. Logan was sitting in the tub and dexterously juggling a cigar, a mug of coffee, and the Daily News. After a couple of blinks Summers cracked open the airshaft window and poured himself a cup of coffee. Summers' hair stuck up in tufts all over his head. All he needed were the footie pajamas.
Logan nodded toward the sack of groceries on the kitchen table. "It's your turn to cook."
"Gosh," Summers said dryly, "I guess I slept through the day it was your turn."
But he got up and toasted some bread and scrambled some eggs and fried some bacon. He started hand-feeding the bacon to Gus. Logan climbed out of the tub to defend his breakfast from the four-legged bandit. Summers kept his eyes on Gus as Logan toweled off and dressed, or at least, he kept his head turned in the dog's direction. Logan couldn't remember Summers ever acting so nicey-nice when they had shared a locker room at the Institute.
Most of Summers' breakfast ended up in the dog's belly. Logan didn't say anything. He suspected it was still the biggest meal Summers had eaten since the day Charles Xavier had banished him from the Institute. He said instead, "So what do you do around here on weekends?"
Summers shrugged. "Hang out at the bookstore."
Logan peeled the entertainment section from his paper and threw it across the tiny table. It hit Summers splat in the face. "Try again," Logan said.
So Saturday evening they crowded into a probably illegal basement bar on Second Avenue and listened to a Brooklyn band that called itself Hold Steady. They drank microbrews, also from Brooklyn, and Logan smoked his cigars. No one in the basement complained about Logan's cigars, probably because the stench was completely overpowered by the odor of pot. The audience smoked and drank and the lead singer rasped, "Half the crowd's calling out for 'Born to Run' and the other half's calling out for 'Born to Lose,' Baby, we were born to choose, We got the last-call, bar-band, really-really-big-decision blues."
And around midnight even Logan's lungs couldn't process any more second-hand pot and he extracted Summers from the crowd and propelled him onto the street. Summers was staggering under a confluence of substances and Logan rolled his eyes and got an arm around the other man's shoulders. He helped Summers walk to Avenue A and up the four flights of stairs to his sublet, and it occurred to Logan that maybe it was time to start thinking of Summers as Scott.
They shared the futon mattress again that night. The shoes and jeans and overshirts came off this time, although the boxers and the T-shirts didn't. Scott stayed on one side of the mattress and Logan stayed on the other. Scott talked almost compulsively about Jean and Logan folded his arms behind his head and murmured, "Yeah?" and "Huh" and "No kidding." Eventually and inevitably Scott talked himself into a crying jag, but he cried altogether more quietly this time.
Logan woke around four in the morning to find himself wrapped around Scott like a particularly hairy wool blanket. Scott reeked of stale cigarette smoke and pot and beer and sweat and tears. Logan studied the blindfolded face for a long time and wondered if even he could re-trace the circuitous path by which he had come to share this lumpy mattress with his one-time enemy.
Scott was exceptionally quiet over his morning coffee. He sat at the small kitchen table and kept his head resolutely bowed over the A section of the Times. Logan glanced at him over the top of the Daily News and shrugged to himself. Scott, being Scott, would not just accept whatever it was that was happening between them. Scott would have to think it to death. He would have to analyze it. He would have to agonize over it, for, oh, a year and a half, probably. Logan was not unduly perturbed. If there was any one commodity Logan possessed in great quantity, it was time.
But the cold wind funneling down the cross streets seemed to blow away Scott's fears and doubts for at least a few minutes. He stood on the sidewalk in front of the tenement and patted Gus and smiled. Gus barked a couple of times and his barks echoed emptily up and down Avenue A. Even Alphabet City gets quiet just before dawn on Sunday. Logan couldn't see any lit windows, except, of course, at the Korean deli. The avenue was lifeless but for four clean-cut boyz from the burbs still clustered around somebody's mommy's mini-van. They were sucking on weed and drinking Bud and loudly and earnestly debating the great philosophical question of the 21st century: Christina Aguillera or Britney Spears?
Logan tuned the boys out and focused on Scott. Scott had pulled on the same stinking clothes he'd worn to the basement bar the night before. He was unwashed and unshaven and his shaggy brown hair was finger-combed. He looked like John Allerdyce's older badder brother. He didn't look like Cyclops. He didn't even look very much like Scott Summers. And yet he was, both of them, all of them, Cyclops and Scott and Sir Galahad and Joan of Arc, the hero forever, even in tarnished armor.
Logan turned away abruptly. He opened the back door of the Land Rover and gestured to Gus. "Well, get in."
Gus sat on the sidewalk and looked woefully up at him. Logan swore under his breath and picked up the golden retriever. "Better say goodbye to Ol' Yeller," he said to Scott, "cuz the next stop's the glue factory."
"That's horses," Scott said. "And don't talk like that in front of Gus." He petted the dog's head. Gus enthusiastically licked Scott's hands and face. "Yuck," Scott said, stepping back.
Logan stowed Gus in the back seat and shut the door. He turned around and looked at Scott. Scott looked uncertainly at him.
"See ya Friday," Logan said abruptly. He opened the driver's side door and got in and yanked it shut. As he pulled away from the curb he saw Scott's thoughtful expression in the rearview mirror. And that was so fucked up, so wrong, so not what he ought to see, Scott Summers in his rearview mirror.
Sighing, Logan pulled the wheel to the right. He merged onto 14th Street and headed for the FDR Drive and north to Westchester.
So Logan never saw the four wasted mama's boys suddenly sober up. He never saw Lieutenant Billy Schiller pull the trank gun out from under his duster and fire as Scott turned to climb the steps to the tenement. He didn't see Private Dumaney, Private Van Der Meer and Specialist Rivera, all lately of Alkali Base, help Schiller load Scott into the rear of the mini-van and drive toward Houston Street and the Holland Tunnel.
The Korean deli owner's nephew saw everything from the back of his uncle's shop, but he was an illegal immigrant and too frightened of the police to call them.
http://rachel-martin.dreamwidth.org/9140.html#cutid1
Title: The Player on the Other Side
Author: Rachel Martin
Status: This is chapter in a novel-length Work In Progress (WIP).
Summary: Movievierse, between X2 and X3. An Army officer is framed for the destruction of Alkali Base. His friends band together to ruin the mutant they consider responsible.
Genre: Romance, adventure.
Characters: The novel is an ensemble piece. Scott/Jean, Scott/Jubilee, Scott/Logan
Disclaimer: A fan story based on the "X-Men" movies and comics. "X-Men" belongs to Marvel Comics and 20th Century Fox. No infringement is intended and no money is being made.
Warning: Adult story.
The Big Decision Blues
Scott's sublet was a fourth-floor walk-up in a narrow five-story tenement on Avenue A between 6th and 7th Streets in Alphabet City. It was a typical tenement apartment of the 1890s. The bathtub was in the ten-by-twelve kitchen, next to the stove and sink. The toilet was in a converted kitchen closet instead of the fourth-floor hallway; that was a 21st century improvement. The twelve-by-fourteen room next to the kitchen was a combination bedroom and living room. Scott had rented the apartment furnished, and the East Indian motif did not displease him. The futon mattress (no frame) wasn't especially uncomfortable. The roaches weren't particularly aggressive. The building's boiler seemed reliable; at least, there always seemed to be sufficient quantities of heat and hot water. The sublet on Avenue A was altogether a much nicer cell than the one he'd been thrown into at the Herman Stark Youth Correctional Facility.
Every day Scott got out of bed before dawn for the sole purpose of crossing off another block on the calendar marking the days of his exile. Once out of bed he would drink coffee and engage in early morning thoughts of suicide. After an unproductive hour or so he would use the razor for the purpose of shaving. He would wash and throw on a pair of jeans or cargo pants and a couple of flannel shirts and a pair of hiking shoes. He would put on a parka and trudge down Avenue A and around the corner to 7th Street and westward into the heart of Greenwich Village and the urban campus of New York University.
Every weekday Scott sat through several graduate level classes at the Steinhardt School of Education. After class he studied in the Bobst Library. Every now and then he'd break out in a cold sweat and feel dizzy and nauseated. Then he'd get up and go across the street to the student union and get something to eat. Often as not a few of his classmates would see him and ask to study with him and he would agree. Tutoring his classmates was the only spot of normality in Scott's life.
In the evenings Scott would go to the Coles Sports Center and run mile after mile on the treadmill or swim lap after lap in the indoor pool. Sometimes when the loneliness got to him he would take a walk up 6th Avenue to 21st Street and do some studying in the Starbuck's cafe. The cafe was situated on a balcony overlooking the stacks of a Barnes & Noble bookstore and seemed to be an unofficial annex of the Bobst Library. Other nights he would go around the corner to 7th Street and drink coffee in a twelve-by-fourteen restaurant run by a Venezuelan family. The oldest daughter, who was also the waitress, had given him a single startled look the first time he'd walked in. Thereafter she'd behaved as though it were quite normal to serve coffee to men wearing glowing red glasses. Quite possibly she thought North America was home to many men with glowing red glasses.
Eventually Scott would make his way back to the sublet on Avenue A. He would stretch out on the futon mattress, which he never bother to roll up in the morning. He would fold his arms under his head and stare up at the ceiling. He would listen to the hiss of the radiator and the sounds of people and traffic on the street below. And Scott would wonder if it were genuinely possible to die of shame.
For many years Scott had believed that the most horrible day of his life was the day his mutation had manifested. And then Jean had died and that day had become the most horrible day of his life. And about twenty-four hours later he thought he had plumbed the depths of horror when Kurt Wagner had clued him in to Jean's infidelity. But he knew now that all of those days had been nothing but the dress rehearsal for the day he would break Charles Xavier's heart.
"Maximum disclosure, minimum delay," Warren had advised crisply, and Scott supposed that Warren, the veteran of a hundred media muggings, would know. "Don't leave anything unsaid for an investigative reporter to say later."
But Scott didn't expect to see any reporters on the front stoop of the tenement. It wasn't a matter for the police. The New York State Department of Education would have been deeply interested, but Mrs. Lee believed in Charles Xavier and she refused to give the great state of New York an excuse to investigate the Institute. Nor did she intend to give the suits in Albany a reason to legislate against mutant teachers and mutant schoolbus drivers and mutant day care providers. "Someone like Miss Munroe should not lose her certificate because of someone like you," Mrs. Lee had said angrily. Mrs. Lee had slapped him and stalked out of Charles' study and Mr. Lee had sighed. He had looked at Scott and said heavily, "If anyone's to blame, I am. I've always known my daughter was a tramp." He, Scott Summers, had managed to destroy the already tenuous relationship between a man and his child, and maybe that was his real sin.
But facing the Lees had been only half as terrible as collecting the little kids and telling them he was leaving. They had been run out on by their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and grandmothers and grandfathers, and now Mr. Summers was running out on them too.
"No," he said, for the twelfth or fifteenth or twentieth time, "I'm not mad at you. You didn't do anything. It's me. I was bad. So now I have to go away."
"If I'm bad, do I have to go away too?" a four-year-old girl asked, and promptly burst into tears.
"No. No," Scott said fiercely. He squatted down and hugged her and said, "This is your home, forever and ever. No one will ever make you go away."
"So why do you have to go?" a six-year-old boy asked in a quavering voice.
"It's different for grown-ups," Scott said. "Grown-ups get punished a lot harder."
The children seemed to pause for a moment of collective wonder. Clearly it had never occurred to them that almighty adults could be brought to justice. Possibly Scott was the first adult they had ever heard admit to wrongdoing.
"Tell the Professor you're sorry," suggested another boy.
"Tell him you'll be good," a girl urged.
"I did," Scott said steadily, because to his way of thinking a man got one opportunity per lifetime to cry in front of kids, and he'd already used his up. "But the rules are a lot tougher when you're a grown-up. And I have to go away."
And if facing the little kids had been a horror, it was nothing compared to facing Bobby Drake. Scott had only to close his eyes to see once more the shock and revulsion on Bobby's face. And yet one Saturday afternoon a courier brought a package of documents to the sublet for Scott's signature, because not only did Scott remain -- technically -- the school's assistant headmaster, but also Bobby Drake's legal guardian. It seemed Bobby had not yet gone to Family Court to demand a do-over. Scott wondered about that.
Scott flipped through the documents in the courier package and dropped them on the kitchen table as though they were radioactive. He put on his parka and walked across the Village to the Starbuck's on 21st Street. He spent the evening drinking coffee and staring at his class notes and wondering if Logan was helping Bobby work through the Infantry Officer's Basic Course books. He wondered how Logan was running the shop classes and the self-defense classes. He wondered if Logan had altered the team's training plan. He wondered if Logan complained about meetings with the trustees or the chick flicks on Movie Night or the coffee in the dining hall. Scott's life was going on. But Logan was living it.
"May I?" a voice asked.
Scott looked up slowly and disbelievingly at the tall, elderly man in the long black cashmere overcoat and homburg. Erik Lensherr pulled out the chair on the other side of the small table and sat down. He took off his hat and gloves and placed them on the table.
Scott automatically reached under his flannel overshirt. His team communicator was no longer clipped to his belt, of course.
"Yes, I suppose you could summon your -- what do you call them? X-Men?" Lensherr smiled. "You could even dial nine-one-one. Of course, I won't go quietly, and the store's rather crowded tonight." He looked around the cafe and over the balustrade into the bookstore. "Have you visited the Mutant Studies section?" He dropped a paperback onto the table. Zombies of the Gene Pool.
Scott said through clenched teeth, "I should kill you for what you did to Charles at Alkali." And oh yeah, the rest of the world.
"But you aren't an X-Man anymore, are you," Lensherr said. "Don't fret, I'm sure your former teammates will avenge him." The mocking half-smile faded from his face. "There's no need for further hostilities between us. . . mein Sohn."
Lensherr looked earnestly across the small table. The aroma of coffee and books filled the air. For a moment Scott was a boy back in the library of the mansion and Dr. Lensherr was reading him another detective novel that was too low-brow for brailling.
Scott thought dispiritedly that Logan had known all along he would wimp out the next time he saw Lensherr. He slumped in his chair. "Well, since I'm off the team, do you think you could tell me who's the mole?"
Lensherr smiled. "Why, Charles, of course." He tapped the side of his head. "Did you think you and Dr. Grey were the only couple with a psi-link?"
Scott sat forward. "You -- you ?" he sputtered, flabbergasted. "You agreed to a link with Charles? After the way you carried on when Jean and I --"
"I was considerably more than seventeen years of age when I gave my consent," said Lensherr, "and my judgement was not clouded by an impending orgasm, as I suspect yours was."
Scott scowled. He suspected Lensherr's real mutant power was the ability to make him feel like an idiot.
"Charles has blocked me for many years," Lensherr said dispassionately. "But I can sense his emotions, occasionally. I can hear a stray thought or two. When the world's most powerful telepath is distraught, one may hear his projections anywhere on the planet."
"If you are that one."
"Yes." Lensherr cocked his head. "I gather there has been much ado about nothing."
"Not nothing," Scott muttered.
"Really, Scott. Isn't it time you gave up your place on the Olympic suffering team? The girl offered you a bit of comfort. Why shouldn't you accept?"
"Because she's a kid. And I'm supposed to be a grown-up."
"She is seventeen, is she not?" Lensherr said silkily. "The same age you were when you became involved with Dr. Grey. Who was just about the same age you are now."
Scott put his elbows on the table and put his head in his hands. After a moment, he said, "Jubilee's my student. Jean wasn't in a position of authority over me"
"Dr. Grey held a privileged position in the mansion," Lensherr said thoughtfully. "She was the daughter of the house, in essence if not in fact. Charles had known her for years and loved her dearly. You, on the other hand, were a newcomer. You had yet to earn a place in Charles' affections. Had you displeased Dr. Grey, she might have prejudiced his opinion of you. She might have persuaded him that you were unworthy of his attention. She might have convinced him to return you to the California Youth Authority."
Scott lifted his head and looked incredulously at Lensherr. "For God's sake. Is that what you think? You think she threatened me? You think she raped me or something?"
Lensherr shrugged.
"That's insane," Scott said angrily. "I wanted to be with Jean. I acted of my own free will."
"As did the Lee girl?"
"She trusted me. She trusted me to say no." Scott looked at Lensherr. "The way I trusted you to say no."
Lensherr appeared uncomfortable for the first time. "You were suffering merely from an acute case of hero worship," he snapped.
"So was Jubilee."
Lensherr made no reply. He picked up his homburg and turned it around in his hands. Eventually he said, "Quite possibly I have wronged you."
"Ya think?"
"When you approached me that day, I ought to have asked myself if your behavior had some greater significance. I refused to even consider the possibility. You see, I was so determined you should be heterosexual."
Scott said blankly, "What?"
"Oh, you've heard the old canard. Homosexuals must not be allowed to adopt or teach or coach Little League, because somehow we will manage to turn straight boys queer. It would be too ironic if I had managed to turn a queer boy straight."
Scott said, at last, "Well, if you wanted me to be straight, why'd you get so damn crazy when I hooked up with Jean?"
"Because I knew she would break your heart," Lensherr said simply. "I'm sure you've been informed of the sleeping arrangements at my little encampment in the Catskills."
Scott said nothing.
"Come with me, son." Lensherr looked intently at him. "There's nothing left for you in the human world." A note of bitterness entered his voice. "You'll never be good enough for Charles. Trust me."
Scott looked down at the tabletop. "I have to try." Because he couldn't bear to be the kind of son who was good enough for Erik Lensherr.
Lensherr sighed. He extracted a pen from his coat pocket and pulled a napkin toward himself. He printed something on the napkin and pushed it back to Scott. Scott looked down at it. A hotmail address. He supposed that Kitty, given this miniscule clue and enough time, could possibly run down Lensherr's whereabouts. But he did not intend to pass the hotmail address to Kitty. He wasn't an X-Man anymore. He didn't have to fight Lensherr anymore. It was the first cheerful thought he'd had in many weeks.
"When you're ready," Lensherr said. He stood up, pulled on his gloves and picked up his hat. He walked down the stairs leading from the balcony to the bookstore. Scott watched over the balustrade as he made his way through the stacks and left.
Scott looked away and down at the paperback Lensherr had left on the tabletop. Zombies of the Gene Pool. He couldn't bring himself to flip the book over and read the blurb on the back cover.
He picked up the napkin with Lensherr's hotmail address. He folded it and stowed it securely in a pocket of his cargo pants.
He collected his class notes and stuffed them into his backpack and left.
____________
Snow began to fall as Scott trudged through the East Village on the way back to Avenue A. Against his will he remembered snowball fights with Jean in Central Park. He had been an undergraduate at NYU and she had been working on her doctoral thesis at Columbia. In his sophomore year he had moved out of the dorms and into her apartment on the Upper West Side. He remembered going to concerts in Central Park with Jean. He remembered standing with Jean in the crowds lining Broadway to watch the Thanksgiving Day Parade before driving home to Westchester for dinner. He remembered. . . so many things, thousands of good times, good memories, all as phony as any of Jason's illusions.
He preferred to remember meandering through the East Village with Rogue on the day Logan had deserted her. Scott detoured through St. Mark's Place on the way back to Avenue A and wondered if he should finally confront the shop clerk who had asked Rogue what it was like to fuck a mutie. Getting angry seemed like too much work. He kept walking. He turned the corner onto Avenue A and walked halfway down the avenue and stopped. Parked in front of his tenement was his rebuilt nineteen-sixty-four-and-a-half Mustang coupe. He turned his head. Sitting on the stoop of the tenement in her green hooded cloak was Rogue.
For a wild moment Scott wondered if he was having some kind of long-term reaction to Stryker's bug juice. He walked the last few steps to the tenement and stood on the bottom step and stared up at her.
"What are you doing here?" he blurted out, and a moment later he realized how ungracious he sounded, but he was too truly surprised to pick and choose his words.
She stood up and pushed back the hood of her cape. The big white fluffy flakes drifted into her hair and sparkled like crystal ornaments under the harsh light affixed over the tenement's front door.
"Rogue," he said. He tried to sound like Mr. Summers. "You shouldn't have come here."
She stood on the stoop and looked gravely down at him and said nothing.
"Rogue," he said harshly. "Don't you have someplace better to be?"
She said, "Don't I owe you dinner?"
Rogue and Scott ate a very late dinner in the Venezuelan restaurant on 7th Street. They sat at one of the seven tiny tables and Scott explained that he'd never actually eaten anything there. The nice waitress brought them a couple of meat and cheese-filled arepas. Rogue's eyes followed every forkful of food from Scott's plate to his mouth and somewhat self-consciously he cleaned his plate. He felt distinctly queasy afterwards but the waitress brought him a cup of good strong coffee. He sipped the coffee and his stomach began to settle down.
"Now," Rogue said briskly. She dug into her purse and pulled out a sheet of folded notepaper. Bewilderedly Scott accepted it. "How are you fixed for money? How bad is your rent? Do you know all the places where you can get something to eat?" She nodded at the folded paper in Scott's hand.
Scott blinked. Intellectually he knew Rogue was no sheltered little Southern miss. He knew she had been on the road for over a year before hooking up with Logan at some truck stop in Alberta. And yet he turned her questions over in his mind. They were not the sort of questions that a child had the right to put to an adult. Scott knew if he answered Rogue, she would, in that moment, cease to be a child to him. She would become another adult, a peer. . . a friend.
Rogue's eyes narrowed. "It's murder putting someone like you out on the street and that is just exactly what I said to Logan."
Scott repressed an awful urge to laugh. He couldn't laugh in the face of such concern. But he said, "Someone like me?" and he said, "I'm not exactly out on the street," and he said, "Logan?"
"Come on, Scott," she said. She said "Scott," not "Mr. Summers." She said, "Come on, Scott, I know everything about you that Erik knows. I know you were home-schooled by your mama till you were fourteen."
"Yeah. Well." Scott shrugged. "You're kind of forgetting where I went to finishing school."
She asked -- hesitantly, because Mutant High etiquette specifically forbade the asking of this question -- "Do you ever hear from your parents?"
"My parents are Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr," Scott said, "and I haven't heard from Charles, no."
She looked sharply at him. "Erik?"
"He came out of the woodwork to pay his condolences." Scott grimaced. "And also to gloat."
She shook her head. "No," she muttered. "I don't care. I'm not on duty and we are not going to talk about Magneto." Rogue looked up and directly into the ruby-quartz lenses. "How are you doing? Really?"
"I'm okay," he said slowly. "I am, really. I'm still drawing my salary --" although, of course, he was now paying for his room and board out of that salary, and his rent ate up more than half his monthly net income. "Technically I'm on sabbatical." And at her inquiring look he elaborated, "I'm taking classes at NYU. I only have my provisional teacher's certificate, and I have to have a graduate degree to get the permanent certificate. I was trying to take classes part-time at night but it wasn't working out. . . ." He tried to smile. "Magneto just had to mutate the world on the night of my organizational theory exam."
Rogue ignored his attempt at humor. "How are you paying for your classes?"
"My savings," he said. Well, no one could accuse him of profiting by Jean's death. It would be seven or ten years before he collected on Jean's life insurance, if ever. Neither he nor Charles nor any member of the Board of Trustees had been able to think of a way to report Jean's death to the appropriate authorities. After several days' debate, Charles had reported her as a missing person. The police had come to the mansion and looked around the suite she had shared with Scott. They had questioned the adults. They had questioned the children. The children had not said the right things. Charles had made the cops think they was hearing the right things. But the whole first week following Jean's death was beginning to blur in his memory like a watercolor.
Rogue looked away and asked the waitress to bring her a cup of coffee too.
And after the nice Venezuelan girl had set the mug down on the table, Rogue asked, "So you're coming back to teach?" She did not say anything about the X-Men.
"Maybe," Scott said. He tried to inject a little optimism into his voice. "The Board of Trustees will, uh, 're-visit the situation,' in June. After --"
"After Jubilee graduates," Rogue finished.
They drank coffee and listened to joropo music. It occurred to Scott that many of the ingredients for happiness were to be found in this little restaurant, good music and good food and good company. He looked across the table at Rogue, so smart and strong and brave and practical, the kind of woman who settled frontiers, and he thought Logan was the goddest-damnedest stupidest man on the face of the earth.
She said, "What?"
He said, "I was thinking Bobby is a lucky man." And he remembered Bobby's shocked face and he stopped smiling.
"He misses you," Rogue said quietly. "I mean, he hates you. But he misses you."
Scott thought, I miss him too. And he thought, I miss me too. He said, "Why don't you hate me?"
"Well," she said. "Maybe because I never thought you were God." She stirred her coffee around and said, "Actually people are starting to get pretty pissed at Jubilee."
"No." Scott sat up straight in his chair. "No, Rogue. Don't get sucked into that shit. That blame-the-victim bullshit."
"Well, I guess that's the problem, isn't it," she said mildly. "Who's the victim."
"Well, I'm not. Look. I'm the grown-up. And that means if the Olsen twins get naked and beg me to fuck them, I'm supposed to say no. Because I'm the grown-up."
"Jubilee's legal," Rogue pointed out in the same mild voice. "She's seventeen. Same age you were when you started sleeping with Dr. Grey."
Scott wondered why in the name of God Rogue had to absorb the memories of Erik Lensherr, of all people. "That's different," he snapped. "I'm a guy."
"Now look who's being a chauvenist pig," Rogue said, but she smiled. And she said nothing as Scott paid for dinner.
Scott and Rogue walked back to Avenue A through the gently falling snow. The big fat flakes were melting as soon as they hit the pavement. Still, Scott looked up worriedly at the sky as he opened the door of the Mustang for Rogue and helped her into the driver's seat. He shut the door after her and a second later he knocked on the window. Rogue cranked the window down and stuck her head out.
"Are you gonna be okay driving in this?" he asked. "Because it might be worse up in Westchester."
"I'll be fine," Rogue said patiently.
"Yeah, right. You're from Mississippi. What do you know about driving in snow?"
"Are you worried about me or your car?"
"Oh, man, that's low," he said, and she laughed. "Look, you be careful. If it gets any worse, you just pull over and call Bobby. Make him come and get you."
"Oh, yeah, sure," Rogue said, and rolled her eyes. "Like he'd ever let me live that down."
"Hey, I'm serious. Are you going to be all right?"
Rogue smiled up at him, then. She said gently, "I'll be all right if you'll be all right. Do we have a deal?"
Scott swallowed. "Deal," he said, and he stepped back from the car.
______________
Rogue's visit served only to re-energize Scott's homesickness. Two weeks later he was almost sorry she had ever found him. He felt nearly overwhelmed by the need to turn back the clock, to take back his old life, to go home. He no longer dared walk anywhere near Grand Central Station and the Metro-North trains to Westchester.
He daydreamed in class. He couldn't focus on his assignments. He sat at a cafeteria table in the student union and stared at the napkin with Erik Lensherr's hotmail address. He sat at the Starbuck's cafe and studied maps of Nevada and Colorado and Alaska instead of his textbooks. Scott wasn't sure where he wanted to go but he knew he couldn't go on living in limbo.
He bought the map of Colorado and stuck it into his backpack and trudged southeast across Greenwich Village to Alphabet City. Despite the cold and the dark the sidewalks were crowded, because not everyone was a loser who had nowhere to go on a Friday night but a bookstore. Scott thought about stopping to see a movie. He thought about dropping in at the student union. Getting a life seemed like too much work. He kept walking. He walked down 7th Street and turned the corner onto Avenue A. He stopped.
The Institute's Land Rover was parked in front of the tenement. Leaning against the Land Rover was Logan. He had on a heavy sheepskin jacket and a cowboy hat tugged down over his forehead. He was smoking one of his foul cigars. Scott wondered how long Logan had been waiting for him. Mostly he wondered what could be so urgent that Logan would drive down to the city to see him.
He said, "Logan," in a conversational voice. Scott knew he didn't need to yell. Logan had the hearing of a dog. He said, "Logan," and Logan raised his head and stared steadily at him as he ran up Avenue A.
Scott skidded to a halt on the sidewalk between the tenement and the Land Rover and he said the first thing that came to his mind. "Is Bobby okay?"
"Fine," Logan said around the cigar stump. He took it out of his mouth and dropped it in the gutter.
"Oh," Scott said. He caught his breath and another, terrible thought came to him. He said, "Is Charles okay?"
Logan shrugged. "Good enough."
"Everyone's okay?"
"Yup."
"Oh," Scott said again. Feeling relieved but perplexed, he stared at Logan. "So what are you doing here?"
Logan pushed the cowboy hat back on his head. "You don't believe in answering your phone, do you."
"Don't have a phone in my apartment."
"I mean your cell phone." Logan reached inside his jacket and pulled out his team communicator.
"I left it in my locker on the sub-levels. With my visors."
"You mean the damn thing's been ringing in your locker all this time?"
"Well, I didn't think anyone would be paging Cyclops."
"You ever check your email?"
"No," Scott said. "I set it on automatic forward to Ororo."
Logan looked like he'd just swallowed a lemon. He stuffed the communicator back into his jacket. Turning, he grabbed the handle to the driver's side door of the Land Rover. "Aw, quit yer whining and get out."
Scott stared at Logan. "You came all the way down here to tell me that?"
"I'm talking to him," Logan said, and he gestured inside the vehicle. Gus, the superannuated school mascot, poked his head out the door. He caught sight of Scott and began barking joyously. Of course, Gus also barked joyously at the mailman, the property tax assessor, and the anti-mutant protestors who gathered outside the gates of the mansion. Gus was indiscriminate in his affections.
"You brought Gus?"
"No," Logan said testily. "Well, come on. Out." The golden retriever stopped barking and looked pitifully up at Logan.
"He needs help getting out," Scott said. "He can't climb up and down anymore. How'd he get in the car in the first place?"
"How does he get up and down the stairs in the mansion?" Logan countered.
"He takes the elevator."
"How -- Forget it." Logan scooped Gus off the car seat and deposited him on the sidewalk. Gus rushed up to Scott. Scott squatted down and hugged the dog and allowed himself to be slobbered upon.
"Well, if ya don't mind," Logan snapped, "could we have this touchin' little reunion inside? Cuz I just about froze my ass off waiting for you to show up."
Scott wondered again why Logan had waited at all. He unlocked the front door of the tenement and stood in the hall and waited for Logan to produce some urgent document for his signature. Logan pushed past him and began climbing the stairs. Scott stood in the hall for another moment before picking Gus up and carrying him to the fourth floor.
Inside the sublet, Scott stowed Gus in the bedroom and shut the door. He turned and watched Logan prowl around the kitchen. Scott's heart sank as he wondered what Jubilee had been doing or saying. He could only suppose Logan had been sent to look for some sign of communication between himself and the girl, a letter maybe, as if Jubilee had ever composed so much as an email since the invention of text messaging. But Logan didn't trash the sublet looking for some unspecified evidence of wrongdoing. He didn't dump out Scott's backpack. He didn't actually touch anything. He simply looked. He even opened up the fridge and looked, as if Scott might be keeping love letters in the fridge. Eventually Logan sat down uninvited at the small kitchen table. Scott waited for him to deliver a message of doom from Sebastian Shaw or another member of the Board of Trustees. Logan said nothing. He studied the tabletop. Moment after moment ticked by. Scott's bewilderment deepened. He sat down in the chair on the other side of the table. It occurred to him that if Logan didn't say anything in the next five minutes he would simply pick up his backpack and leave.
Logan lifted his head and looked at Scott. "Summers," he said quietly. "You gotta quit being mad at Jean. Cuz the next stop is jail."
Scott stared at him. "Jean? What's she got to do with anything?" He added, "I'm not angry with her. I haven't thought about her in months."
"She didn't cheat on you," Logan said, as though Scott had not spoken at all.
Scott remembered the unwritten addendum to Logan's employment contract. There seemed no use in mentioning it. He was certainly in no position to enforce it.
"Summers," Logan said. "She loved you."
"Oh," Scott said. He got up and looked around the kitchen for his financial management textbook.
"I don't know why you can't believe it was Mystique." Logan scrubbed his hands over his face. "She pretended to be Bobby. She pretended to be a U.S. Senator. Don't tell me that bitch never pulled any shit on you when she was living at the Institute."
Scott paused. After a moment he said, "Yeah, she did."
Logan blinked. "Well, okay, then." He slapped the palms of his hands down on the table.
"She used to make herself look like Jean to get into my pants. But I wasn't at the camp, was I."
"She made herself look like Jean to get into my pants," Logan said through gritted teeth.
"No," Scott said. "If she wanted to get into your pants, she would have made herself look like Rogue."
Scott found his financial management book and stuffed it into his backpack. He picked up his parka.
Logan got up out of his chair. He grabbed the parka out of Scott's hands and threw it on the floor. He kicked Scott's backpack across the small kitchen. "I'm not finished," he snarled.
Scott took a deep breath. "Why'd you come here? What do you want from me? I mean, what more do you want?"
"What I want is for you to start using your head, college boy."
Scott tried to walk around Logan to the door. "You stupid shit," Logan said, and he grabbed Scott by the front of his flannel overshirt. Scott decided he was very tired of being mauled by Logan. He briefly considered flipping Logan to the floor and tearing the ligaments of his knee and maybe stomping his larynx, but what would be the point? Everything would knit itself together again in a few seconds.
Logan slammed Scott's back against the door. "Heard from Uncle Erik lately? Did he stop by to drop off some recruiting brochures?" Logan yanked Scott forward. "You're off the team, you're out of the school, you're not even living on the property anymore. You and Chuck ain't talking and your pesky girlfriend is out of the picture. Now you just gotta ask yourself, who's the happiest man in America?" He slammed Scott against the door again. "C'mon, Summers, you're a smart boy. Start connecting the dots. Yeah, you got stabbed in the back, but it wasn't me and it wasn't Jean. It was dear old Uncle Erik."
"No."
"Yes."
"Logan, listen to your damn self. Do you seriously think Jubilee is on Magneto's payroll?"
"Oh, I'm sure he never saw that one coming. No, I bet he thought you would kill me, Summers. You're the only guy on earth who can, you know that. He thought you'd kill me, and Jean too."
"No."
"Yes. He sent Mystique to my tent. He knew some idiot would tell you. And he knows what a jealous son of a bitch you are. He was sure you'd kill us --"
("lovers' quarrel")
"-- and then you'd panic and run for it. Cuz you are never going back to jail, are you? And where else would you go? Who else would take you in? Who but good old Uncle Erik?"
"No," Scott whispered.
"What, you don't believe Magneto would fuck you over but you think Jean would?" Logan's face twisted. "You are a real piece of work, Summers. It's all your goddamn fault, everything that happened, because you never believed her. You never trusted her. You always thought she was gonna run off with somebody, didn't you? Me, the mailman, somebody. You set your own goddamn self up. You walked right into it. You got nobody else to blame, not me, not Jean, not even Lensherr."
"Oh, God," Scott said unsteadily.
"You stupid little shit." Logan yanked Scott forward. "She was never gonna leave you. You think she was gonna leave you for me? It was you, Summers, it was always you, it was never anybody else."
Logan abruptly fell silent. He stood, breathing heavily, fists clenched in Scott's shirt. Scott stared at him.
They stared at each other.
Logan let go of Scott's shirt. His hands dropped to his sides. He stepped back.
Scott said blankly, "She's dead, Logan."
"Yeah," Logan muttered. He turned and picked up his jacket. He pulled it on and zipped it up.
Scott raised his voice. "She's dead," he repeated incredulously.
"Yeah," Logan said. He shoved his hands into his pockets. He stared at Scott. "Yeah, I know."
"You know?"
"Yeah."
"You know what happened?"
Logan paused. "She held back the water and she lifted the jet," he said finally, gently. "She was a hero. She died to save us."
"No." Scott gripped his head between his hands. He felt as though he were walking the edge between insanity and enlightenment. "That's not true. That didn't happen. Everybody keeps lying. Why does everybody keep lying?"
Logan sighed. He looked very tired, suddenly. "It's easier, I guess."
"What happened?" Scott screamed furiously. "Tell me what happened!"
"You know what happened. She killed herself." Logan looked steadily into the ruby quartz lenses. "She didn't have to get out of the jet to lift it. If anybody shoulda got out of the jet, it was Bobby. I ain't saying I blame him. But maybe he coulda froze the water. And Storm. Maybe she coulda whipped up a hurricane. I'm ain't blaming her either. All I'm saying is, Jean didn't have to be the lone ranger. She didn't have to stop Kurt from saving her ass. She committed suicide."
"Why?" Scott asked bewilderedly. "Why?" and he thought if he could just get the answer to that question, if somebody could just calmly explain to him why Jean hated him so, he could fix all the things that were wrong with himself and Jean wouldn't have to kill herself after all.
"I don't know why. It wasn't anything we did, you and me. If we were driving her that crazy, she coulda just run off with Worthington."
"Oh, God," Scott said, and he staggered. Logan caught hold of him. They overbalanced and fell heavily together onto the kitchen floor.
"Hey," Logan said. "Hey. She was never gonna run off with Worthington."
And to Scott's way of thinking, a man got one opportunity per lifetime to cry in front of another man, and he'd already used his up. But he started to cry.
"Why?" he pleaded, because he knew Logan knew the answer. Logan hated him. Logan hated him for all the same reasons Jean hated him. Why wouldn't Logan just tell him? Why did Logan have to be an asshole?
"Hey," Logan said. Awkwardly he put his arms around Scott. "She didn't mean it. She was gonna come back home. She was gonna live with you down the hall."
"I don't care where she lives," Scott said, and he couldn't seem to catch his breath. Logan pounded him on the back. He sucked in a great big deep gulp of air and he said, "I don't care if she's living with you, I just want her to be living. I just want there to be some place where she's alive. I just want her to be alive. I just want her to be alive."
Logan said, "I know." He said, "I know." He kept saying, "I know."
_____________
Logan wondered why he was lying on a futon mattress on the floor of a sublet in Alphabet City. Specifically, he wondered why he was lying with Scott Summers on a futon mattress on the floor of a sublet in Alphabet City. Well, aside from the fact that they were nominally straight. He might have stabbed Summers to death. Summers might have blasted him into the East River. Mutually Assured Destruction. It seemed to work for Bill and Hillary.
Summers slept unresistingly inside the adamantium cage of Logan's arms and legs. His breathing had an almost drugged quality to it and Logan guessed he would not wake for a few hours more. He stared thoughtfully at the back of Summers' head. The collar of the flannel overshirt nearly covered the ugly little crater created by William Stryker's bug juice. The brown hair flopped messily over the ruby-quartz glasses. Logan wondered exactly how unsafe it was for Summers to sleep in his glasses. It had to be uncomfortable. Logan wasn't feeling too comfortable himself. His dick felt like it was going to poke a hole right through his jeans. His belt buckle was digging into his abdomen. He felt grimy under the layers of shirts and overshirts. And he hadn't slept with his boots on since moving into the mansion.
But concentrating on his physical discomfort was not going to get him around the fact that Summers was an uptight self-righteous son of a bitch. Well -- not self-righteous any more. Now he was a self-flagellating son of a bitch. And Summers was not exactly the kind of guy who believed in giving people their space. Actually he was the kind of guy who gave the word "clutchy" a whole new world of meaning. A person needed to think twice before getting involved with Summers. A person couldn't just disappear for six or twelve months to, say, search for clues to his mysterious past. Summers was apt to come after the aforementioned person with a baseball bat and a big net.
Logan carefully unwound himself from around Summers. He rolled over and found himself nearly nose-to-nose with Gus the Wonder Dog. Gus lifted his head and stared soulfully at Logan
"Don't get too cozy, bub," Logan said, sotte voce. "I ain't bringing you back next week."
Gus slobbered happily over Logan's face.
Logan got up and since he was already completely dressed he carried Gus down the four flights of stairs to the street below and took the retriever for a long walk through Alphabet City. Gus earnestly endeavored to befriend every crack dealer in Tompkins Square Park. On the way in Logan stopped to pick up a couple of papers and some breakfast fixings at the Korean deli across the street from Summers' building. Incredibly, to Logan, the deli was open at five-thirty in the morning on a Saturday. "Damn," Logan said to the clerk, "don't you guys ever take a break?" The clerk, a young man about Summers' age, shrugged and smiled and said, "No English."
With various muttered imprecations, Logan carried Gus up the four flights of stairs to Summers' floor. He left Gus whining piteously on the top step and went back downstairs to retrieve the sack of groceries he had left on the bottom step. Inside the sublet Logan opened up a can of hash, slopped it onto a plate, and set the plate down on the cracked linoleum. He brewed a pot of coffee. He filled the claw-footed bathtub and rummaged through the plastic milk crates Summers kept his clothes in. Amid the tightie-whities he found several pairs of oversized -- for Summers -- boxers, what the guy used to sleep in, probably, and a lot of big, baggy -- for Summers -- flannel shirts. Logan tossed the purloined clothing and his jeans over the back of a kitchen chair and thought that Summers was looking thinner than even a guy nicknamed Slim ought to look.
Still wearing the clothes he had fallen asleep in, Summers stumbled into the kitchen about thirty minutes later. Logan was sitting in the tub and dexterously juggling a cigar, a mug of coffee, and the Daily News. After a couple of blinks Summers cracked open the airshaft window and poured himself a cup of coffee. Summers' hair stuck up in tufts all over his head. All he needed were the footie pajamas.
Logan nodded toward the sack of groceries on the kitchen table. "It's your turn to cook."
"Gosh," Summers said dryly, "I guess I slept through the day it was your turn."
But he got up and toasted some bread and scrambled some eggs and fried some bacon. He started hand-feeding the bacon to Gus. Logan climbed out of the tub to defend his breakfast from the four-legged bandit. Summers kept his eyes on Gus as Logan toweled off and dressed, or at least, he kept his head turned in the dog's direction. Logan couldn't remember Summers ever acting so nicey-nice when they had shared a locker room at the Institute.
Most of Summers' breakfast ended up in the dog's belly. Logan didn't say anything. He suspected it was still the biggest meal Summers had eaten since the day Charles Xavier had banished him from the Institute. He said instead, "So what do you do around here on weekends?"
Summers shrugged. "Hang out at the bookstore."
Logan peeled the entertainment section from his paper and threw it across the tiny table. It hit Summers splat in the face. "Try again," Logan said.
So Saturday evening they crowded into a probably illegal basement bar on Second Avenue and listened to a Brooklyn band that called itself Hold Steady. They drank microbrews, also from Brooklyn, and Logan smoked his cigars. No one in the basement complained about Logan's cigars, probably because the stench was completely overpowered by the odor of pot. The audience smoked and drank and the lead singer rasped, "Half the crowd's calling out for 'Born to Run' and the other half's calling out for 'Born to Lose,' Baby, we were born to choose, We got the last-call, bar-band, really-really-big-decision blues."
And around midnight even Logan's lungs couldn't process any more second-hand pot and he extracted Summers from the crowd and propelled him onto the street. Summers was staggering under a confluence of substances and Logan rolled his eyes and got an arm around the other man's shoulders. He helped Summers walk to Avenue A and up the four flights of stairs to his sublet, and it occurred to Logan that maybe it was time to start thinking of Summers as Scott.
They shared the futon mattress again that night. The shoes and jeans and overshirts came off this time, although the boxers and the T-shirts didn't. Scott stayed on one side of the mattress and Logan stayed on the other. Scott talked almost compulsively about Jean and Logan folded his arms behind his head and murmured, "Yeah?" and "Huh" and "No kidding." Eventually and inevitably Scott talked himself into a crying jag, but he cried altogether more quietly this time.
Logan woke around four in the morning to find himself wrapped around Scott like a particularly hairy wool blanket. Scott reeked of stale cigarette smoke and pot and beer and sweat and tears. Logan studied the blindfolded face for a long time and wondered if even he could re-trace the circuitous path by which he had come to share this lumpy mattress with his one-time enemy.
Scott was exceptionally quiet over his morning coffee. He sat at the small kitchen table and kept his head resolutely bowed over the A section of the Times. Logan glanced at him over the top of the Daily News and shrugged to himself. Scott, being Scott, would not just accept whatever it was that was happening between them. Scott would have to think it to death. He would have to analyze it. He would have to agonize over it, for, oh, a year and a half, probably. Logan was not unduly perturbed. If there was any one commodity Logan possessed in great quantity, it was time.
But the cold wind funneling down the cross streets seemed to blow away Scott's fears and doubts for at least a few minutes. He stood on the sidewalk in front of the tenement and patted Gus and smiled. Gus barked a couple of times and his barks echoed emptily up and down Avenue A. Even Alphabet City gets quiet just before dawn on Sunday. Logan couldn't see any lit windows, except, of course, at the Korean deli. The avenue was lifeless but for four clean-cut boyz from the burbs still clustered around somebody's mommy's mini-van. They were sucking on weed and drinking Bud and loudly and earnestly debating the great philosophical question of the 21st century: Christina Aguillera or Britney Spears?
Logan tuned the boys out and focused on Scott. Scott had pulled on the same stinking clothes he'd worn to the basement bar the night before. He was unwashed and unshaven and his shaggy brown hair was finger-combed. He looked like John Allerdyce's older badder brother. He didn't look like Cyclops. He didn't even look very much like Scott Summers. And yet he was, both of them, all of them, Cyclops and Scott and Sir Galahad and Joan of Arc, the hero forever, even in tarnished armor.
Logan turned away abruptly. He opened the back door of the Land Rover and gestured to Gus. "Well, get in."
Gus sat on the sidewalk and looked woefully up at him. Logan swore under his breath and picked up the golden retriever. "Better say goodbye to Ol' Yeller," he said to Scott, "cuz the next stop's the glue factory."
"That's horses," Scott said. "And don't talk like that in front of Gus." He petted the dog's head. Gus enthusiastically licked Scott's hands and face. "Yuck," Scott said, stepping back.
Logan stowed Gus in the back seat and shut the door. He turned around and looked at Scott. Scott looked uncertainly at him.
"See ya Friday," Logan said abruptly. He opened the driver's side door and got in and yanked it shut. As he pulled away from the curb he saw Scott's thoughtful expression in the rearview mirror. And that was so fucked up, so wrong, so not what he ought to see, Scott Summers in his rearview mirror.
Sighing, Logan pulled the wheel to the right. He merged onto 14th Street and headed for the FDR Drive and north to Westchester.
So Logan never saw the four wasted mama's boys suddenly sober up. He never saw Lieutenant Billy Schiller pull the trank gun out from under his duster and fire as Scott turned to climb the steps to the tenement. He didn't see Private Dumaney, Private Van Der Meer and Specialist Rivera, all lately of Alkali Base, help Schiller load Scott into the rear of the mini-van and drive toward Houston Street and the Holland Tunnel.
The Korean deli owner's nephew saw everything from the back of his uncle's shop, but he was an illegal immigrant and too frightened of the police to call them.