On the edge
Just pushing and pushing and pushing! How many times do I have to say, "Leave me alone," before they do?
Phone's off the hook. Router's off. TV's off. Windows and doors locked. Try to come and save me now, you ungrateful bastards. I'm doing this for your own good, and what do I get? Pushed into hysterics in a mom-and-pop bookstore in downtown Salem Center, New York.
I'm not - I am not worth that, Scott Summers. Not worth anything at this point except my job. So leave me alone. Go try your dashing and oh-so-proper nobility on someone your own genome. This H. sap ain't havin' it.
Goddamned Newsweek. Push my story back to the new year, will you? All right. See if you get another choice interview out of me or the Friends ever again. I can do that to you. Just watch.
Just watch.
12/13/2005
Logfile from Leah of X-Men MUCK.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scott's grip on the phone is cool, if firm as he dials, carefully, a number he's left neglected for perhaps a little too long. A few newspapers are spread (neatly) on the bed. Ring.
Leah sits up on the couch in her apartment. Her hand splays out on the cushion next to her, groping for the phone, without her attention following the reach: she's reading a fat sheaf of stapled papers balanced on one crossed knee. She brings up the phone while still skimming, hits the talk button, and mutters, "Hello?"
"Hello, this is Scott," Scott returns with brisk, efficient voice. "Can we talk?"
"Summers? --Sorry, guess you're the only Scott I know right now." Leah pushes lightness, amusement, unconcern over the line. However, she puts her reading down and slumps back into the cushions and pillows on a bitten-back sigh, and her eyes squeeze shut, like her free hand around her other knee. "Sure, what's up? How are you?"
"I . . . yes. I suppose I am." Scott places one hand on the end table and gives the wall a careful examination. "I'm fine. But it . . . occurred to me that we should probably speak about the whole John Grey incident."
A long, slow exhalation. Then, cautiously, Leah says, "Should we?"
"I think we should."
Leah bites her lower lip to punctuate a scowl. She scrubs most of her sullenness out of her voice, however, in a retreat to that wan, empty lightness. "Okay. Go ahead."
"You're in pretty deep, aren't you," Scott says, without inflection.
"No," Leah replies calmly. "I'm not flying Friends colors over here, Scott."
"That's not what I asked."
A baffled snarl creeps into Leah's otherwise level voice. "What did you ask, then? I'm not a mind-reader, unlike some people."
"I'm not among them. That's why I want to know how you wrote this article about John Grey. I don't believe you're a Friend, Leah."
Leah breathes out another deliberate stretch of air. "I was taken from my home to an undisclosed location. There was a man with a gun. He wanted me to interview Dr. Grey. I did. I was returned to my home."
"Is this the first time you've been approached like this?"
"I have not done any other interviews with hostages, no."
"I mean, is this the first time you've been approached at gunpoint?" Scott pauses. "By the Friends."
"I..." Leah bends over an arm clutched around her middle. Her breath saws at the line. "Scott, I really don't want to have this conversation. Don't make me hang up on you."
Scott allows a pause and inclines his head a scarce inch from the phone. Then. "I'm worried, Leah."
Leah asks very, very quietly, "About Dr. Grey?"
"Dr. Grey is fine. I'm worried about you."
A long silence. When Leah speaks, it's still very quiet, but it's also very tight. "Did you and your -- friends bust him out? Save him like you did me, from Magneto?"
"Yes."
Leah chuckles. "Extracurricular activities. Okay. Sure. Don't worry about me, buddy. I'm doing fine. Got something I wrote pushed back until next month, but that's the Christmas season for you."
"Leah." Scott lets earnestness creep into his voice. "We could fix this."
Harshly: "I sincerely, sincerely doubt that. What's there to fix?" Leah pushes herself up to her feet -- paper flutters useless white wings on the way to the floor -- and paces around the couch to the windows. A shorter, bitter laugh. "You gonna put me in Witness Protection? Something like that? Too late: Rossi already offered. You knights in shining armor."
"The Friends are -- listen, you want protection, you will have it. And more than, frankly, Rossi can offer you. He's limited somewhat by his job. I'm -- I'm not. In the same way." Scott takes a breath. "They wouldn't be able to touch you. We've dealt with worse."
"Scott," Leah warns in her reporter's voice. But softer then, with a friend's touch: "Don't be giving away the keys to the kingdom. Not a secure line, and ... and think about who you're talking to." A little despair, there, or else self-loathing.
Scott deflates. "Give-- no. I'll . . . could we meet?" He sounds, for a moment, profoundly uncertain.
Leah swallows audibly. "Not here." She looks out the windows. She looks back around the apartment: the soft lighting, the comfortable furniture, the spill of papers. Her face contorts with an expression's stillbirth, and she shakes her head. Hard. "Yeah, okay. You know that bookstore across the street from the tea shop here in town?"
"I think so."
"Fifteen minutes," Leah says and clicks the line dead. She stares at the phone in her hand, shaking thinly but persistently. She heads out a moment later, coat dragged on and lights slapped off.
And Scott is waiting -- not too close to the entrance, but standing next to the stack of Harry Potters and, to appearances, perusing one. His eyes are sidelong behind the glasses, though, toward the door.
Leah brushes right by him, with only a brief stare over the Potter books and a slide of her eyes towards a corner of the store. She saunters that way, fingers trailing over this display, pausing to peruse that one, until she ends up in the fiction aisles, between J and L. She pulls down a Ludlum thriller and starts flipping the pages without seeing them.
Gradually, leisurely, Scott turns a few more pages. And a few more. Then he closes the book with an uninterested whump and makes his way toward the correct fiction aisles.
"Cloak and dagger," Leah says in a low voice when he's close enough. She holds up her book, sparkles a bleak smile at him, and reshelves the volume. "Sorry."
"I'm rather ridiculous at this," Scott mutters. "I'm a schooltea-- so. Tell me what's going on." He says this in an undertone. Clear undertone.
Leah touches his arm briefly. "You're doing way better than I am," she assures him and sidles along the aisle to examine another book with blind eyes. "Protection? For me? Really? And everyone I know, everyone I care about--"
"Sure. I --" Scott closes his eyes and forges on, "I've got some federal ties. Big ones. I'd have to, to be able to walk around exposed like this. We could take care of everyone."
Leah breathes a snort. "Right. And then my niece turns up in the Jersey swamps with a bullet hole through her forehead. If they find the head, that is."
"Damn," Scott hisses. "How many people did they threaten?"
The book (some fat, baroque romance novel with strapping people lacking sufficient clothes on the cover) tumbles out of Leah's stilled, shocked hands. She drops to one knee to get it back; she wipes a brusque forearm over her eyes. Red-rimmed brown glares up at him. "So, now I'm cooked," she says bitterly. "Secret's out. What are you going to do? Cops already had me in interrogation, and Rossi did, too. Is it your turn?"
"I'm not going to interrogate you," Scott says, turning toward her, shielding, his voice coming quicker and more clipped. "You've done nothing wrong. But I need to know what you're up against so I can do something about it and do something now."
Leah mocks, "All by yourself. You and the Superfriends." Her head drops. So does her voice. "...Sorry."
"/Not/ all by myself," Scott insists, and tries to give the insistence weight. "I told you. Just /tell/ me, Leah. We'll take care of it."
Leah looks at the book in her hands. Slowly she stands and puts it back on the shelf with the others. She shakes her head. "I can't."
"Why?"
"Because I don't /trust/ you," Leah bites off, not looking at him. "What if you're wrong? What if people end up dead? I'm keeping things under control so far; no one's gotten hurt. My family's safe. My friends."
"People are going to end up dead, Leah, if they haven't already." Scott tightens. "Just less directly."
Leah's hand on the shelf balls into a fist. "Not my problem."
"You don't mean that."
Leah whirls on him, fist at her side. "How do you know?" Her voice cracks.
"If you didn't care what you were doing, you wouldn't be meeting me here," Scott says lowly, angling his head down.
"Fuck," Leah says with soft, deep sincerity and looks away again.
"You want to get out," Scott reiterates, and his tone is almost merciless.
Mutely Leah looks at him. Her lower lip shivers. She bites it.
Scott looks back. Presumably.
Leah holds the contact, such as it is, through glasses and through unshed tears, for another minute. She breaks it with a duck of her head, a slump of her shoulders. "I'm tired," she whispers. "My head hurts, I don't know which end is up, but I'm doing what I think is /right/. And people I care about are trying to make me /not/. Change me. Make me do other things. Is that fair? Is that right?"
"Do you really think what you're doing is right?" Scott challenges, quietly.
Levelly Leah stares at him. Then nods.
"And you're being blackmailed to do it." Incredulous.
The corners of Leah's mouth turn up; her eyes don't match the smile. "Such an ugly word, 'blackmail.' Can we use 'encouragement' instead? And ... well. Someone has to speak for them, so why not me? I'm better than the usual wild-eyed crazy you might get instead."
"Why are you even bothering with this . . . pathetic attempt at justifying yourself?" Scott's incredulity shades into exasperation. "You don't have to be justified. You're being pressured. This is nonsense."
Leah crosses her arms over her chest. "Why? Because you don't like the message? Shoot the messenger?"
"Why are you -- your family will be killed if you don't -- this isn't /willing/, what you're doing." Scott's exasperation heightens.
Leah's voice freezes, and her expression goes stark and salt-pale. "I'm a conservative political journalist, Scott. I believe in small government, strong national security, and mutants not running around throwing cars at crowds or buildings. That hasn't changed."
"But being a spokesperson for murderers isn't quite the same thing, Leah," Scott's voice only tautens.
"Well," says Leah candidly, "I'm pretty sure the current administration has sent men and women to die in battle. Blood on the hands is blood on the hands, dear, however it gets there."
Scott's jaw tics. "Leah, are you trying to offend me so I'll go away?"
Leah asks brightly, "Is it working?"
"No."
"Why /not/?" Leah thumps her fist into the line of book spines and gets that wild stare she just derided. She steps forward to him, staring up intently at the eyes she can't see. "I'm trying so -- goddamned -- /hard/ to get all of you to go away, but you /won't/. Why not? I'm not worth saving, Scott!" Her voice is starting to rise, and her fist is now thumping, unheeded, against the side of her leg in voice-jarring counterpoint to her strident words. "I'm worthless, I'm terrible, I'm a walking fucking crime against humanity -- both species of it! But you all just keep /coming/ -- you don't go away." She thumps his chest now, breathes harshly up at him, and demands, "Why?"
Scott blinks (however invisibly), but just lets her thump and breathe and beat. His voice, when it comes, remains quiet. "Because you are worth saving."
Leah hits him again. "No!" She cries it that time, a whistling shriek that turns heads (what few there are in the store, at this time, in this weather) and turns her away from him. Ignoring them, ignoring him, she runs out onto the sidewalk.
Scott takes a few measured steps after, but after a private moment's deliberation, doesn't follow.
[Log ends.]
Phone's off the hook. Router's off. TV's off. Windows and doors locked. Try to come and save me now, you ungrateful bastards. I'm doing this for your own good, and what do I get? Pushed into hysterics in a mom-and-pop bookstore in downtown Salem Center, New York.
I'm not - I am not worth that, Scott Summers. Not worth anything at this point except my job. So leave me alone. Go try your dashing and oh-so-proper nobility on someone your own genome. This H. sap ain't havin' it.
Goddamned Newsweek. Push my story back to the new year, will you? All right. See if you get another choice interview out of me or the Friends ever again. I can do that to you. Just watch.
Just watch.
12/13/2005
Logfile from Leah of X-Men MUCK.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scott's grip on the phone is cool, if firm as he dials, carefully, a number he's left neglected for perhaps a little too long. A few newspapers are spread (neatly) on the bed. Ring.
Leah sits up on the couch in her apartment. Her hand splays out on the cushion next to her, groping for the phone, without her attention following the reach: she's reading a fat sheaf of stapled papers balanced on one crossed knee. She brings up the phone while still skimming, hits the talk button, and mutters, "Hello?"
"Hello, this is Scott," Scott returns with brisk, efficient voice. "Can we talk?"
"Summers? --Sorry, guess you're the only Scott I know right now." Leah pushes lightness, amusement, unconcern over the line. However, she puts her reading down and slumps back into the cushions and pillows on a bitten-back sigh, and her eyes squeeze shut, like her free hand around her other knee. "Sure, what's up? How are you?"
"I . . . yes. I suppose I am." Scott places one hand on the end table and gives the wall a careful examination. "I'm fine. But it . . . occurred to me that we should probably speak about the whole John Grey incident."
A long, slow exhalation. Then, cautiously, Leah says, "Should we?"
"I think we should."
Leah bites her lower lip to punctuate a scowl. She scrubs most of her sullenness out of her voice, however, in a retreat to that wan, empty lightness. "Okay. Go ahead."
"You're in pretty deep, aren't you," Scott says, without inflection.
"No," Leah replies calmly. "I'm not flying Friends colors over here, Scott."
"That's not what I asked."
A baffled snarl creeps into Leah's otherwise level voice. "What did you ask, then? I'm not a mind-reader, unlike some people."
"I'm not among them. That's why I want to know how you wrote this article about John Grey. I don't believe you're a Friend, Leah."
Leah breathes out another deliberate stretch of air. "I was taken from my home to an undisclosed location. There was a man with a gun. He wanted me to interview Dr. Grey. I did. I was returned to my home."
"Is this the first time you've been approached like this?"
"I have not done any other interviews with hostages, no."
"I mean, is this the first time you've been approached at gunpoint?" Scott pauses. "By the Friends."
"I..." Leah bends over an arm clutched around her middle. Her breath saws at the line. "Scott, I really don't want to have this conversation. Don't make me hang up on you."
Scott allows a pause and inclines his head a scarce inch from the phone. Then. "I'm worried, Leah."
Leah asks very, very quietly, "About Dr. Grey?"
"Dr. Grey is fine. I'm worried about you."
A long silence. When Leah speaks, it's still very quiet, but it's also very tight. "Did you and your -- friends bust him out? Save him like you did me, from Magneto?"
"Yes."
Leah chuckles. "Extracurricular activities. Okay. Sure. Don't worry about me, buddy. I'm doing fine. Got something I wrote pushed back until next month, but that's the Christmas season for you."
"Leah." Scott lets earnestness creep into his voice. "We could fix this."
Harshly: "I sincerely, sincerely doubt that. What's there to fix?" Leah pushes herself up to her feet -- paper flutters useless white wings on the way to the floor -- and paces around the couch to the windows. A shorter, bitter laugh. "You gonna put me in Witness Protection? Something like that? Too late: Rossi already offered. You knights in shining armor."
"The Friends are -- listen, you want protection, you will have it. And more than, frankly, Rossi can offer you. He's limited somewhat by his job. I'm -- I'm not. In the same way." Scott takes a breath. "They wouldn't be able to touch you. We've dealt with worse."
"Scott," Leah warns in her reporter's voice. But softer then, with a friend's touch: "Don't be giving away the keys to the kingdom. Not a secure line, and ... and think about who you're talking to." A little despair, there, or else self-loathing.
Scott deflates. "Give-- no. I'll . . . could we meet?" He sounds, for a moment, profoundly uncertain.
Leah swallows audibly. "Not here." She looks out the windows. She looks back around the apartment: the soft lighting, the comfortable furniture, the spill of papers. Her face contorts with an expression's stillbirth, and she shakes her head. Hard. "Yeah, okay. You know that bookstore across the street from the tea shop here in town?"
"I think so."
"Fifteen minutes," Leah says and clicks the line dead. She stares at the phone in her hand, shaking thinly but persistently. She heads out a moment later, coat dragged on and lights slapped off.
And Scott is waiting -- not too close to the entrance, but standing next to the stack of Harry Potters and, to appearances, perusing one. His eyes are sidelong behind the glasses, though, toward the door.
Leah brushes right by him, with only a brief stare over the Potter books and a slide of her eyes towards a corner of the store. She saunters that way, fingers trailing over this display, pausing to peruse that one, until she ends up in the fiction aisles, between J and L. She pulls down a Ludlum thriller and starts flipping the pages without seeing them.
Gradually, leisurely, Scott turns a few more pages. And a few more. Then he closes the book with an uninterested whump and makes his way toward the correct fiction aisles.
"Cloak and dagger," Leah says in a low voice when he's close enough. She holds up her book, sparkles a bleak smile at him, and reshelves the volume. "Sorry."
"I'm rather ridiculous at this," Scott mutters. "I'm a schooltea-- so. Tell me what's going on." He says this in an undertone. Clear undertone.
Leah touches his arm briefly. "You're doing way better than I am," she assures him and sidles along the aisle to examine another book with blind eyes. "Protection? For me? Really? And everyone I know, everyone I care about--"
"Sure. I --" Scott closes his eyes and forges on, "I've got some federal ties. Big ones. I'd have to, to be able to walk around exposed like this. We could take care of everyone."
Leah breathes a snort. "Right. And then my niece turns up in the Jersey swamps with a bullet hole through her forehead. If they find the head, that is."
"Damn," Scott hisses. "How many people did they threaten?"
The book (some fat, baroque romance novel with strapping people lacking sufficient clothes on the cover) tumbles out of Leah's stilled, shocked hands. She drops to one knee to get it back; she wipes a brusque forearm over her eyes. Red-rimmed brown glares up at him. "So, now I'm cooked," she says bitterly. "Secret's out. What are you going to do? Cops already had me in interrogation, and Rossi did, too. Is it your turn?"
"I'm not going to interrogate you," Scott says, turning toward her, shielding, his voice coming quicker and more clipped. "You've done nothing wrong. But I need to know what you're up against so I can do something about it and do something now."
Leah mocks, "All by yourself. You and the Superfriends." Her head drops. So does her voice. "...Sorry."
"/Not/ all by myself," Scott insists, and tries to give the insistence weight. "I told you. Just /tell/ me, Leah. We'll take care of it."
Leah looks at the book in her hands. Slowly she stands and puts it back on the shelf with the others. She shakes her head. "I can't."
"Why?"
"Because I don't /trust/ you," Leah bites off, not looking at him. "What if you're wrong? What if people end up dead? I'm keeping things under control so far; no one's gotten hurt. My family's safe. My friends."
"People are going to end up dead, Leah, if they haven't already." Scott tightens. "Just less directly."
Leah's hand on the shelf balls into a fist. "Not my problem."
"You don't mean that."
Leah whirls on him, fist at her side. "How do you know?" Her voice cracks.
"If you didn't care what you were doing, you wouldn't be meeting me here," Scott says lowly, angling his head down.
"Fuck," Leah says with soft, deep sincerity and looks away again.
"You want to get out," Scott reiterates, and his tone is almost merciless.
Mutely Leah looks at him. Her lower lip shivers. She bites it.
Scott looks back. Presumably.
Leah holds the contact, such as it is, through glasses and through unshed tears, for another minute. She breaks it with a duck of her head, a slump of her shoulders. "I'm tired," she whispers. "My head hurts, I don't know which end is up, but I'm doing what I think is /right/. And people I care about are trying to make me /not/. Change me. Make me do other things. Is that fair? Is that right?"
"Do you really think what you're doing is right?" Scott challenges, quietly.
Levelly Leah stares at him. Then nods.
"And you're being blackmailed to do it." Incredulous.
The corners of Leah's mouth turn up; her eyes don't match the smile. "Such an ugly word, 'blackmail.' Can we use 'encouragement' instead? And ... well. Someone has to speak for them, so why not me? I'm better than the usual wild-eyed crazy you might get instead."
"Why are you even bothering with this . . . pathetic attempt at justifying yourself?" Scott's incredulity shades into exasperation. "You don't have to be justified. You're being pressured. This is nonsense."
Leah crosses her arms over her chest. "Why? Because you don't like the message? Shoot the messenger?"
"Why are you -- your family will be killed if you don't -- this isn't /willing/, what you're doing." Scott's exasperation heightens.
Leah's voice freezes, and her expression goes stark and salt-pale. "I'm a conservative political journalist, Scott. I believe in small government, strong national security, and mutants not running around throwing cars at crowds or buildings. That hasn't changed."
"But being a spokesperson for murderers isn't quite the same thing, Leah," Scott's voice only tautens.
"Well," says Leah candidly, "I'm pretty sure the current administration has sent men and women to die in battle. Blood on the hands is blood on the hands, dear, however it gets there."
Scott's jaw tics. "Leah, are you trying to offend me so I'll go away?"
Leah asks brightly, "Is it working?"
"No."
"Why /not/?" Leah thumps her fist into the line of book spines and gets that wild stare she just derided. She steps forward to him, staring up intently at the eyes she can't see. "I'm trying so -- goddamned -- /hard/ to get all of you to go away, but you /won't/. Why not? I'm not worth saving, Scott!" Her voice is starting to rise, and her fist is now thumping, unheeded, against the side of her leg in voice-jarring counterpoint to her strident words. "I'm worthless, I'm terrible, I'm a walking fucking crime against humanity -- both species of it! But you all just keep /coming/ -- you don't go away." She thumps his chest now, breathes harshly up at him, and demands, "Why?"
Scott blinks (however invisibly), but just lets her thump and breathe and beat. His voice, when it comes, remains quiet. "Because you are worth saving."
Leah hits him again. "No!" She cries it that time, a whistling shriek that turns heads (what few there are in the store, at this time, in this weather) and turns her away from him. Ignoring them, ignoring him, she runs out onto the sidewalk.
Scott takes a few measured steps after, but after a private moment's deliberation, doesn't follow.
[Log ends.]