Long Road Home (the_wolverine) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2013-10-19 02:32:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, logan howlett (wolverine), scott summers (cyclops) |
"Yeah. Good luck with that."
Who: Logan and Scott
What: Drinking, talking about stress and piles of shit
When: evening of 10/18
Where: Some dive bar
Rating: Pg-13 for language
Scott Summers was depressed. He could admit that. Not just depressed, miserable. That was the first step to admitting he needed help and he was going to get help from an unlikely source.
Logan stared at the man at his door groggily, then scratched at his bare chest and grumbled. "The fuck you want, Summers?"
"Get dressed, I need a drink."
Logan looked him over, sniffed, then shrugged a shoulder. "Whatever. You're buyin'." He closed the door, only to return a few moments later in jeans and a wife beater. He followed Scott to the man's car and got in. They rode in silence, until Scott pulled into a bar that was missing half the letters on it's sign.
"Shit, you lookin' for trouble?" Logan looked between Scott and the bar, then got out when the man didn't answer. He walked into the bar, lungs filling with the hazy grey smoke that hung in the air, and made his way to the bar. He ordered two bottles of whiskey and jerked his thumb at Scott. "He's payin'."
Scott slapped some money on the bar and took one of the bottles and the glasses, then headed for a corner booth.
Logan sat down across from him and rumbled, "You're a fuck up, you know that?"
"Tell me something I don't know. Everything exploded in my face."
"Yeah." Logan poured himself a glass and knocked it back, watching Scott do the same. "So what?"
Scott leveled a gaze at him through his glasses and over his drink. His expression was serious, but then Logan couldn't remember the last time he'd seen Scott smile. He pointed a beefy finger at him. "You got a hot wife, a baby on the way, a job doin' good work, an' a really smart son who's less of an ass than he is in the dream world, so you had ta have done somethin' right there. Pull your head out of your ass. We ain't gonna do that splittin' shit like in the dreams."
"I don't want there to be sides," Scott replied, starting on his second glass. "But I'm feeling increasingly isolated. A lot of that is my own fault, but it's like I keep getting pushed in a direction I don't want to go in. So I react, and try to change that direction, and end up with people not wanting to speak to me again."
He wasn't sure if any of that made any sense whatsoever, but most of the time emotions and feelings didn't really make sense to begin with. He had no idea how he was going to fix things with his son and his stubbornness had ruined things with Jean. Both things hurt, for different reasons and in different ways. He started on another drink, this one much more slowly.
"The fuck you want me to do about that?" Logan put his glass back on the table, his voice gruff and his expression dry. "You're fuckin' Scott Summers, so act like it."
"Maybe if I knew who he was any more. Maybe if I even wanted to be him any more." Life was a lot more simple, even a year ago.
"Tired of the weight of the world on your shoulders?" Logan sneered.
He was making everyone around him miserable, and he couldn't figure out how to reverse course. "Wishing things could be different."
"You know what I did? Once the dreams stopped givin' me nightly train wreck trauma, I actually listened to the people around me. I took the best parts of that and I put away the bad shit. Instead of lettin' it fester like an infected wound. You jus' buried it, but it's still inside you, eatin' you away. X-Force, M-Day, Utopia, the schism, Dark Phoenix, all of it's still there."
"And what about the real-world trainwreck?"
"Yeah, that's festerin' too." Logan poured another glass and shoved it at Scott. "Since you haven't dealt with the dream pile, you end up with a second steamin' pile."
"I dealt with all that," Scott said. He narrowed his eyes, but took the proffered drink.
"If you'd dealt with it, then Jeanie comin' back wouldn't have fucked you up this badly."
"I don't love her, Logan. There's a part of me that can't even find that emotion anymore. Not for her." Scott thought that Logan might actually attack him over it, but the other man merely shrugged at him.
"That don't matter. Everyone got those three or four people that can fuck them up real good. You jus' need to have your dad or Charles show up to complete the grand trifecta of fucked up. Throw in Kurt, Mariko, Yukio or a couple of others, for me. Emma probably has her own closet."
Scott let out a long sigh and sipped at his drink. The messed up thing was that Jean was like a cross-roads, if they bothered to think about it. She was on that list for both him and Logan, probably Emma too. "The last thing we need is for skeletons to start piling up. I just want a break. A nice long break where I can be a normal man with a normal job and a family that doesn't get attacked or drawn into some dream-related bullshit."
"Yeah. Good luck with that."
"Your words are so wise and useful, Logan."
The older man grinned, his expression feral and amused. "I try."
Scott fell into silence, contemplating his drink, and trying to sort through the mess that was his head, currently. He knew Emma was distressed. He'd hurt others. And part of him was still angry. Angry at himself, angry at the situation, angry at his wife and his son and Jean. Just angry. Fuck, he'd come to Logan, that's how messed up this all was.
"Start with talkin'. Talkin' is good, an' when you're done talkin' maybe you can figure shit out. 'Cause I sure as hell ain't goin' to figure your shit out. I jus' barely finished diggin' out of my own pile."
"There's no separating the worlds. No matter how much we might try, those people are still a part of us." Scott said, his voice even, but sad. "The things we've done, the things we've seen are as strong and vivid as if they happened yesterday. We can step away from them, ignore them, but like it or not those events helped define us. And then the events here. Cerberus and the sentinel, that invasion in the desert, Las Vegas..."
Even Logan shuddered. "You know, I don't think anyone there has dealt with that pile o'shit yet. When there's another Las Vegas..."
"That's what I mean. We've come to expect one disaster after another. No break, no chance to rest, no chance to stress about normal day to day stresses...We end up hyping ourselves up for aliens and terrorists."
"We really gonna let Shepard an' the Avengers have all the fun?" Logan asked.
"Are either of us remotely willing to let innocent people get hurt? Stand by and do nothing when we have the means to do something?" Scott took Logan's silence as an answer, and continued, "My family is fractured, but yours is getting stronger. I've lost Dani to Shepard, and I'm on the cusp of losing my son. And if I lose Nate, really, how long before Emma?"
"So? Shepard is practically part o'the family already."
"I'll talk to Nate tomorrow, before this has time to really fester. Assuming there's anything left to save. As for the rest of it, I don't know." Scott's vision was swimming, but the drinking had done nothing to untie the knot in his stomach. It had only grown tighter. He felt like his world was closing in around him, crumbling to dust.
Logan's bottle was empty by now, so he sat back and studied Scott. He held out his hand. "Gimme your keys. I'm gonna take you home, you're gonna have a fuck-off hangover, an' then you're goin' to let yourself be happy, you miserable sack of self-righteous shit. That runs in your family, swear to fuckin' god."
"Self-righteousness or being miserable?"
"Both." Logan took Scott's keys, and finished the bottle for him.
"Do you think any of it is worth it?"
"Don't know. We ain't done with this world's shit by half." Logan held out his hand, and helped his mortal Frienemy to his feet. Next week they'd probably be punching each other again.
"We should stop by the store on the way back," Scott said. "We're going to need some shovels."