Smile Back: Part Two
by Minisinoo
YOU WILL NOT BE EMPEROR
Cyclops:
I don't want to go home. I'm going to lose her again. Not that I really had her, in Tokyo, but I could pretend. I'm the king of pretending, and what is my fucking problem, that I shackle myself to these impossible relationships? First Jean, now Ororo . . . .
Xavier would tell me it's because they're safe. He likes to psychoanalyze me; I'm his pet psychology project, but he's not always right. When all this started, Ororo was not 'safe.' She was *mine*. I got screwed. Literally and then figuratively, and it's mostly Xavier's fault. But I'm too far gone to pull back now, so all I can do is wait. I can be a very stubborn man.
But stubbornness doesn't shield one from pain. When we land at the mansion, Hank is waiting in the hangar and Ororo hurries off the plane to throw herself into his arms. He swings her around, and it goes through me like the proverbial knife.
She's fleeing me; I know it. But why? Because she loves me and it scares her? Or because she doesn't love me and I pushed too hard in Japan? The reason makes or breaks my world.
Peter deplanes after Ro, and they all go off with the professor, to fill him in. I stay to cool down the engines. Jean, who was also there waiting, comes in to help me. She's dressed in a crop-top with a silk-screened Chinese character on the front, black on red. No bra. The cool of the hangar has hardened her nipples under the thin cloth. Once, that would have made my throat go dry. Now, we just exchange meaningless banter as we shut down the plane, but I can feel her watching me and I know she can sense that I'm upset even if she won't go traipsing through my brain without an invitation.
I get out of there before she starts asking questions, tell her that I need to unpack. It's even true, and gives me something to do for a while. Then I tackle the laundry, which has gotten backed up in my absence. We all have our little chores around the mansion, since the professor doesn't have a formal staff. *We* are the staff, and he divides chores evenly and without regard to gender lines. So I mow the lawn, but I also do the laundry. My fellow students may handle their own clothes, but there are lots of other things to be washed: towels, dishrags, table cloths, bed sheets and assorted miscellany. Plus, I do the professor's clothes in addition to my own. He can certainly run a washing machine, but it's easier for me to bend over the basin.
"You wanna talk, Slim?"
I jump and twist around to look. "Hey, cat-feet, give a guy a break. How about a little noise next time?"
Smiling, Jean comes over to help me sort the dirty things in the cramped, old, basement laundry room -- using a camouflage of the mundane to approach the significant. We can discuss my jinxed love life as we sort colors, whites, and brights. I may not be able to tell green from blue, but I can tell pastels from jewel tones. It's the difference between 'shade' and 'tint.' I don't see shade. I do see tint, although light pink and true white are the same color to me. So far, though, I've never ruined the wash, and I know why the professor assigned me this task -- to teach me to work around my handicap, or to ask for help when I need it. "Is there any pink in with the white?"
"No," Jean says. "You're getting better." It's an observation, not a condescension, so I don't snap at her for it. "You want to talk to me?" she asks again after a moment. Push, push. I could tell her to fuck off, I could tell her that there's nothing to talk about, but lying to a telepath is an exercise in stupidity. I'm not sure how objective she can be, though. "I'll just listen," she adds. "No judgments."
"You're reading my mind, Jean."
She grins. "So, sue me. You're not exactly keeping your thoughts to yourself."
"Sorry."
"Don't be. You project when you're upset; most people do. Usually, I ignore it." She glances up, a towel clenched in one hand. Her face is gentle. "But I can't ignore you. I never could."
I'm not sure what to make of that, so I just dump Tide With Bleach into the washer basin and start the water: warm/cold, extra-large load. Signals from Jean have been mixed since I came back from the Savage Land -- approach and re-fucking-pel. I wonder sometimes if our interaction will ever return to something easy. I wonder if I want it to.
I slam a handful of sticky kitchen towels into the washer.
"So -- talk," she says now.
"I don't even know where to begin," I say over the whoosh of water filling the machine, and I add more towels, making sure they're spread out so they don't ball up and knock the machine off-balance, sending it walking across the laundry room floor.
"What happened in Japan?"
I stop and look around at her. "What makes you think anything 'happened'?"
She hands me a paper clipping she'd had stuffed in her back pocket. A page out of some freakin gossip rag that shows scenes from our trip, including one of Ororo and I dancing. I look it over and hand it back. It's less incriminating than it might have been. "It was just a dance, Jean."
"*Just* a dance? Scott -- you don't dance!"
I close the washer lid and turn around to lean my back against it, cross my arms and ankles. I can look out the door this way, through the basement workroom to the stairwell. If anyone comes down, I'll see them. "She dragged me out there. It was that or argue with her and cause a scene."
Jean just shakes her head. She knows I'm not lying, but she also knows that nothing short of an earthquake would have gotten me onto a dance floor if I hadn't secretly wanted to go.
"We didn't do anything but dance," I reiterate. "Once."
"God! I didn't assume you did do anything else. I'd fall over in a dead faint if you'd done anything else! You don't betray people that way."
I'm sharply reminded of what Ororo told me in the hotel suite in Nashville: that Jean had defended me to the rest of the team when I'd taken off to the Savage Land -- had insisted I wouldn't betray them. But now, her defense seems misplaced. "Maybe not in deed," I say. "Thought is another matter."
"You can't control how you feel, Scott. I know how much you wish you could, how much you wish you could control how you feel about me, about her, about a lot of things. But you can't. It's not possible. Feelings aren't good or bad, they just are. It's what we do about them that matters and you have a knack for doing what's right. But I worry about you still. I wish you'd talk more. You need to talk about how you feel."
This just makes me laugh, and uncrossing my arms, I push away from the washer to pace across the linoleum floor, then pace back. Frustrated energy. Finally I throw up a hand. "Who the hell am I supposed to talk to? *You*?"
"Yes, me."
"Man, that makes a whole fucking lot of sense! Go talk to the girl I had a crush on about the crush I had on her! Jesus! I usually try my best *not* to look like an ass."
She sighs. "That's just it. You try too hard. I don't suppose it ever occurred to you that I might have gone out with you if you'd asked, instead of slinking around like a shy, kicked puppy?"
I lean back up against the washer. "And I told you before, you didn't need an ex-hustler alcoholic druggie for a boyfriend. You can do better than me."
Reaching down, she grabs a bath towel to fling at me. "Bastard! And I told you before that I don't want to be your porcelain Madonna! I don't care who you were, Scott Summers. I admire who you are."
I caught the towel, and now return it to the pile to cover my embarrassment, and my gratitude for her words. "Give it a rest, Jean. We already had this fight. Let's just leave it in the past where it belongs. You don't want to date me anyway."
"How do you know?" She lifts an eyebrow and gives me that smirk she specializes in.
I stare at her a minute, not at all sure what to say to that. She's kidding. I think.
God, what if she's not kidding? I don't even want to consider that. I have my eye on a different woman these days. She senses that she's confused me and looks embarrassed -- a hard thing to do, embarrassing a telepath. It doesn't last long, returns to wry humor. "You really are fixated on Storm, aren't you?"
There are many ways I could answer that -- try to explain it, try to defend it, try to deny it. I opt for the simple. "I'm in love with her."
I don't think she expected that. "*Love?* Bullshit!"
"No -- I think maybe I am, Jean."
She exhales heavily. "I know I said I wouldn't judge, but Scott, that's ridiculous. You are not in love with her; you can't be in love with her. She's as shallow as a baby wading pool. I don't think she's ever had a thought in her head that wasn't about clothes, cars, or boys. She's just jerking you around, jerking Henry around .. . . She's *hurting* people and I don't think she even cares!"
"Yes, she does care. She was trying not to hurt people."
"Oh, really? How is going out with Henry when she's not really interested in him, and leaving you high and dry, not hurting people?"
I just shake my head and pull off my visor, rubbing at my eyelids --careful not to let them crack open under the pressure of my fingers. Then I put the visor back on. Jean just vocalized my own questions of a few weeks ago, but I understand better now. It doesn't hurt less, but I understand better. "It was bad timing," I say. "Hank asked her when she was vulnerable. He was trying to be nice, but he put her in a spot, and she was mad, and scared, and didn't know what to do. So she went out with him. Now, she's stuck. Blame the professor for that. Ro does care about Hank, Jean. It's just . . . not romantic. Or, it wasn't."
"And you think it's suddenly become romantic?"
I recall her running off the plane to leap into his arms. "I think she's trying to give him a chance."
She crosses her arms over her breasts, mouth drawn tight with a drawstring of disapproval. "By dancing with you in Japan? She's stringing you *both* along!"
"No, she's not, or that wasn't her intention. We shouldn't have danced together. That was my fault."
"Excuse me? How, exactly? She dragged *you* out to the dance floor and it's *your* fault? Is this some weird form of reverse coercion that I've never heard of before?"
Against my will, I smile, tap my temple, and say, "Look for yourself." Sometimes it's easier just to let her get it out of my head. She accepts the invitation and ruffles through my memories of what happened in Japan. Ro's dress, the walk through the Tokyo streets holding hands, the coffee shop, the dance . . . . She doesn't reply for a while. Then she says, "It's not just *your* fault."
"No. But it's not just Ororo's fault, either. It takes two to tango."
Her shoulders have sagged like the fight's gone out of her. Maybe she's a little less certain now that Cyclops wouldn't betray a fellow team member. After all, what else would one call holding hands with a teammate's girl? "She should still break up with him," Jean says finally.
"No. Maybe she got into it for the wrong reasons, but she likes him, and she owes it to him to try. And I owe it to them both to keep my distance. I wasn't fair to her in Japan. I pushed her."
"She let you."
"Yeah, she did. Like I said, it's both our faults. It got out of hand."
That makes her laugh. "Only you would say a dance was out of hand, Scott."
"It's not the what, Jean. It's the intent."
"And I told you -- you can't control your feelings, just your actions. You controlled your actions."
"So did Ro."
She shrugs in reluctant agreement. "I still don't think it's right. She shouldn't have agreed to go out with him. She should've said no. Maybe it would've hurt him, but he expected her to turn him down. What she's doing now just builds him up to get his bubble burst. I never led you on."
"*What?*" I'm stunned. "*You* never led me on? You have *got* to be kidding!"
Her eyes go wide, and angry. "How did I lead you on?"
"Jean, you are the freakin' queen of flirtation! You say things sometimes and I don't know what the *hell* you mean. *I* can't read your mind."
"Like what? Give me one example!"
"Like less than five minutes ago! I said you didn't want to date me and you said, 'How do you know?' And how am I supposed to interpret that? Were you teasing, or were you serious?"
Remembering, she blinks and is embarrassed all over again. Colossally annoyed, I take three steps forward, grab her by her upper arms, and pull her off balance into me. And I kiss her; it's not platonic. I've taken her by complete surprise, yet she kisses back, half out of sheer curiosity. After a moment, I let her go and she leans away, her eyes huge. "What was that about, Scott?"
"Did you like it?"
She considers. "I don't know. Maybe." She inches forward a little, rises up on tip-toe to study my face, and looks as if she might like to try kissing me again. Against my will, that excites me. "Maybe I could learn to," she admits.
"Ah." I lean back enough to get some personal space, and emotional distance. "Maybe you could learn to. Maybe, if I asked you out and you said 'yes,' you could learn to love me instead of the Wolverine? Maybe Ororo can learn to, as well."
For some reason, it takes her a minute to follow the object lesson, then she says, "Oh," and asks, "And you're *okay* with this? Ororo dating Hank?"
"No. But I'm going to keep my nose out of it and stay away from her better than I did in Japan."
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