Boyscout
By walutahanga
Disclaimer: X-men aren't mine. Never will be.
Warning: Spoilers for the third X-men movie.
Summary: Warren has become one of two people who can drive Logan to murder just by breathing.
Warren is quiet at first, preferring to remain in his room. He is reticant, hardly ever speaking unless someone addresses him first. It's hard to believe that someone so quiet could become a point of such fierce contention.
Storm wants him on the team. Logan doesn't. They bicker for weeks. With McCoy gone, and everyone else… gone… there is no one to throw in a deciding vote. There is just the two of them and these days, decisions on how to run the school generally devolve into shouting matches and the students walking on egg-shells for days afterwards.
This one is worse than most.
Storm brings the full authority of team leader to bear on the issue, and Logan brings out his natural ability to be an ass-hole. Lightning crackles ominously in the sky above the mansion for weeks before Logan finally grudgingly mutters that "maybe the wings could be useful in a fight."
He takes on the kid's training himself, and he's not gentle. It takes months for Warren to grow truly comfortable in his own skin - a side effect of avoiding using his body in it's entirety for most of his life - but eventually that subtle grace becomes something deadly, and purple bruises patterned over pale ribs fade to yellow and are not replaced.
This progress is offset by a less pleasing development. As Warren develops confidence, he starts developing lip.
It's nothing that Storm notices. As far as she's concerned, Warren is the politest, most charming boy in the entire school. She takes any opportunity she can get to hold him up as a model of good behaviour to the rest of the students. The students don't help matters. Bobby and Collossus have formed a tight bond with Warren, and the girls think he is the hottest thing since Logan walked in the door. Everyone but Logan seems to have accepted him. As Rogue drawls at one point;
"I don't get why you two don't get along. It's like you just… rub each other up the wrong way or something. I dunno."
Warren has a subtle humour that infuriates Logan. Where Logan snarls, Warren is all cool, amused façade and a well-timed, witty rejoinder. It makes Logan want to drive a fist into that smirking mouth. Warren has become one of only two people in the universe who could drive him to murder just by breathing.
He redoubles his efforts to get Warren off the team. He's openly hostile. He doesn't gift him with a spur-of-the-moment nickname like he did for everyone else – 'Ro, Tin Can, Frosty, Half-Pint – and he stonewalls Storm's attempts to get Warren fitted for a uniform.
The weather grows stormy above the mansion, clouds darkening in the sky, but Logan doesn't back down.
Warren finally confronts him one morning in the garage.
"What is your problem with me, exactly?"
He standing in the doorway; rectangle of daylight outlining his slim form, threading gold through his hair. His slim arms are folded across his narrow chest, nancy-boy hair neatly combed back, not a single hair out of place.
Logan is changing the oil in one of the cars.
"What are you on about?" He says gruffly.
The car was once Scott's, and Logan makes it his business to keep it in perfect condition, just the way One-Eye would have. If you asked him, he couldn't have said precisely why he did it. Maybe just to prove that he can do this – the cars, the school, the team – just as good as Cyclops could.
"You don't want me on the team," Warren says. He moves closer. "You say it's because I'm not enough of a fighter, but I'm damn good and you know it."
His jaw is tight, but he is perfectly controlled. No anger tinges his words. Just frustration.
Logan stands, wiping his hands on a rag.
"It's not how good you are," he hedges, and it's the truth. Being able to fight doesn't make you less vulnerable. Sometimes it makes you more so. Sometimes it draws the monsters in.
"Then what is it?"
"You're too young."
"I'm twenty-five. Bobby and Kitty are barely eighteen. Poitre's turning twenty next month. You have no problem with their age."
"Age in experience, not in years."
Someone else once told Logan that, and he can't quite remember who. No, that's a lie. It was Scott. Something said to piss Logan off when he tried to gain the upper hand by falling back on age as a weighing factor in their never-ending arguments. It had worked. Logan finds some kind of satisfaction in throwing the words back in the face of this young Scott-wannabe.
"They've all had the war come to their doorstep," he says. He thinks of Bobby, who never goes home during the holidays; Kitty, who is so desperate to be an adult so she can't be hurt anymore; Poitr, who holds dark secrets behind that quiet façade. He looks at the kid standing in front of him.
"You are a spoiled rich kid who wants to play at being a soldier."
Angry colour floods Warren's face. His fists clench at his sides. His nostrils flare, and his lips thin. Logan waits to see what Warren will do, curious as to whether he'll try to hit him, or stalk out of the garage. The kid does neither.
"At least I'm trying to help," he says coldly. "Or would you rather I sit in my ivory tower with a silver spoon in my mouth?"
Logan just shakes his head.
"You're a good kid," he says, and means it. Warren is the kind of idealist who'll throw himself heart and soul into the cause, and be the type of hero that Logan isn't and can never be.
"Go home," he says, more gently than he intended. "I've got no use for another boy scout."
Warren is quiet and thoughtful for the next couple of days, avoiding Logan. Logan hopes he's thinking about their talk. During the next Danger Room session, he studies Logan as if seeing him for the first time. It nearly gets him a claw through the chest when he doesn't duck quick enough, and Logan yells at him to get his head out of the clouds.
Afterwards, he trails in Logan's wake. Logan gets tired of it very quickly.
"What?" He snarls outside the locker room. He swings round and gets in Warren's face. Warren isn't intimidated.
"I remind you of him, don't I?" He blurts out.
Logan feels a snarl building, a wordless urge to rip and rend and tear until the whole world disappears into a bloody spray of violence.
"Drop it, kid," he says, and walks away.
Warren, braver than he is smart, follows.
"That's it, isn't it. That's why you want me off the team. Because I remind you of Scott and Scott died – "
It feels good to swing round and slam his fist into Warren's face.
The kid hits the ground hard, wings flaring out instinctively, smacking into the lockers. Blood leaks from his nose, but it doesn't make Logan feel better. Because Warren still has those classic good looks – firm jaw, smooth hair, straight nose. He and Scott really look nothing alike, but it's not so much their looks as much as the kind of looks. Logan wonders if Scott's eyes were once blue as well before they turned red as fire.
"I'm not him!" Warren spits, as blood drips from his nose. "I'm no leader. I'm selfish and I hold grudges. I'm an intellectual snob and I like to let loose with no control and no plans for the future."
He pushes himself to his feet, standing painfully. He wipes blood from his nose with his sleeve, and at that moment looks absurdly young. Suddenly this fight is petty, like a scuffle in the school yard.
"I'm not Scott," Warren says again, more quietly.
The anger is rapidly draining out of Logan, leaving a shaking weakness inside him.
He is aware that he should be getting the kid to the infirmiry, or at least reassuring a concerned Bobby and Poitre who have been drawn out of the locker room by the sound of violence.
Instead, he turns and walks away.
He gets trashed at the closest bar.
He picks a fight or two, and it feels good to let loose. No claws. Just fists and frustration burning hollowly in his gut.
He wonders how young Scott was when the Professor recruitted him
('It must burn that a boy like me saved your life')
and has the feeling that it was a lot younger than Warren. He hates the Professor just a little bit for that, adding that to the man's growing list of sins, which now include his contribution to the Phoenix incident, and his refusal to finish Magneto off for good.
Logan gets thrown out of the bar. Finds another one. Drinks some more.
He remembers bickering with Scott. He remembers Scott's prep-school clothes, the infuriating perfectionism, and the ability to go on and on about Teamwork and Respecting The Chain of Command.
He remembers arguments with Warren that fell unthinkingly into a familiar pattern; the banter of insult and rejoinder. Fights where the words "can it, One-Eye" hovered unspoken on his tongue, where he actually opened his mouth to say them and was yanked back from the brink of disaster only by the last-second return of sanity.
The next day, he doesn't say anything to Warren. No apology, and Warren doesn't ask for one.
But Logan suggests to Storm that she get the kid measured up for a uniform because "the wings are going to be a bitch to fit."
Mercifully, she doesn't ask.
He's no easier on Warren in the Danger Room. But he does call him "wings" and even "angel" just to see his lips thin in irritation. It's not "one-eye" or "cyke" but that's okay because Warren isn't Scott. Logan will remind himself of that later.
He'll make himself see the languid grace that Scott never possessed, and the easy charm that Scott would never have been able to produce. It'll be harder when he hears a voice raised in dry humour, or sees Warren helping one of the younger kids with their homework, or decked out in the black leather of the x-men uniform.
He'll try to ignore the guilt when he sends the kid out on his first mission, and try very hard not to think of the moment he let Scott walk out the door for the last time. Maybe he'll even succeed.
Because Warren is reallly nothing like Scott. Not really.