Ororo looked up at Scott, brows drawn together. "Scott, you're losing it. I don't know if coming back like this, having so much thrown at you at once has been good for you. This isn't the man I used to know standing before me right now." His laughter almost made him sound like he was going mad and that worried her. If only Hank were still around. It wasn't that she didn't feel she could trust Emma Frost, but she had a hell of a lot more faith in Hank than she did in Emma. He'd be able to talk to Scott and really understand what was going on with him. "She could have been saved if she wanted to be," she insisted. "Not in the end, but before she killed Charles, before she went with Magneto. We went there thinking we were going to bring her home and help her. No one could have known what we would find when we got there. You wanna blame someone? Fine, I'll take it." Even if it wasn't her fault, she would take it.
"You think you can do better?" she challenged. "You've been out of the game for seven years. For heaven sake, Scott, your first instinct was to go into an attack completely blind when Laura gave us the information on the people who attacked us. You think I'm doing a fine job at screwing things up? What do you think would have happened if you were the one in charge here? Just what Logan said. They would all end up caught and caged, or worse. And I am not about to see that happen, not while I'm alive to keep it from happening. I am not the liability that everyone wants to paint me out to be here."
It didn't matter what she said at this point and Ororo was smart enough to know as much. He'd probably come into the meeting earlier with it in mind to call her out, to challenge her authority. It was sad, but it spoke volumes as to what his mental status must have gone through since he had last been seen. Her eyebrow quirked at the mention of Laura, a humorless smile tugging up the corner of her mouth. "You think anyone could send that girl anywhere? I knew she'd left and that was about it. I didn't even know she was going to find these people until I saw the fire on the news and got a call from her explaining what was going on. I was trying to find things out my own way, and maybe that was my mistake, but I want to be very clear about X-23 working as her own free agent. Not mine."
Her being a clone of Logan was truly news to her, though thinking about the similarities in their personalities it wasn't so much of a stretch. It raised a dozen more questions, one she'd have to save for Logan or Laura herself. "You want to talk about control here, Scott? You're the one who had no control over anything for the past seven years. The one who just remembered who he was and came home to find everything that was familiar and comforting to him to be gone and destroyed. You don't know anything about what's been done and what is being done because you're still trying to figure yourself out once more. Who doesn't have control right now, Scott? I will tell you you're wrong because you are."
She was back to angry by now. "Now you have the same choice I gave Rogue and Logan. You can either stay here and accept that I'm the one giving orders right now whether you like them or not, whether you agree with them or not...or you can leave. One thing I do know is that you need to take a step back and calm down because right now it's like I'm dealing with a hormonal teenager and not a grown-ass man." She didn't want Scott to leave, she didn't want anyone to leave. But none of them, not Scott, Logan, or Rogue had been there during the past handful of years when she'd had to take care of everything by herself. "None of you can expect to come and go as you please and think I'm just going to fall to your suggestions and demands. It doesn't work that way."