A/N - From CC: JD! Hi there! SO happy you're here to join us, and really glad you're enjoying the little moments, too.
As far as PC and triggers, etc … I haven't had any pushback on Logan in the armor, and I'd probably ignore it if I got any. I'm following his history, and lord knows he's had enough push back in the comics by the people that trained him calling him not good enough (but then why did they give him the title, I ask?) Personally, I don't think it's cultural appropriation if you are the kind of person that is adopting those values into your life as Logan does. (or tries very hard to.) He lived in Japan for so long and learned the old ways, and studied and did everything he could to integrate - until he ultimately left, so no, I don't think that quite fits. He's honoring that culture, not stealing from it.
I think that very ugly term would fit more if it was just dress up. Or if he was doing it for shock factor. But in my head, anyhow, this was totally him following the old path and meeting Shin (who is also armored) on the bridge like in the old tales. Old school samurai show down (at least how it looks in my head from the old texts - not the movies).
Now. In a side note (bc I am a history geek and I dig this stuff) they've discovered that the typical samurai back in the day didn't actually LOOK very Japanese. They were pale, SHORT (average height 5'2" - 5'4"), bulky, hairy guys, so … even though it might have been accidental in Logan's history, it turns out … very. Freaky. Accurate. He IS what the Samurai of old were supposed to look like, so I'm gonna go ahead and take it as a win.
From robbie: *nodding along to what CC said* Both of us also do what we can in our own writing to be true to character backgrounds and to respect them. That's all we can do is try to be respectful.
Also, I love that you picked out our philosophical/political dialogue. CC and I have a lot of political discussions (I'm more liberal and she's more conservative) and I'm a political science student so some of this stuff is CATNIP to me and I'm glad it translates well :D MUCH LOVE
Chapter 6: "Meanwhile in Westchester"
Jana was looking through her phone over breakfast that morning, doing a horrible job of pretending like she wasn't totally jealous. Leslie Ann had been sending her pictures of her Japan trip: the beautifully-dressed geishas casually walking through Kyoto, the ceremonial tea service, shots from the kabuki theatre, snow cones on the beautiful arched bridges that dotted the city … it was endless.
Jana let out a wistful sigh as she slipped her phone back into her pocket. She liked having Leslie Ann as a best friend. The girl was the most innocent and happy soul she'd ever met. But it was impossible not to be jealous of her. Not just because her powers were so amazing. Or because she had such an amazing family, including freaking Cyclops. Or because the teachers all loved her. She just ... Leslie Ann was just like that. People liked to have her around and include her in things, and Jana couldn't help being jealous that she didn't have to work as hard for it.
It was impossible to hate Leslie Ann for it, though. And she really did look like she was having a good time. Plus, Jana knew her best friend had been having a hard time for the past few months — she deserved a break.
"Alright, is the breakfast just horrible or something?" asked a new voice as one of the newer kids, Brandon, sat down beside her with his own plate of scrambled eggs. "Because I knew Miss Annie went with her sister for a weekend girls' trip, but it can't be that bad."
Jana shoved her phone his way so he could see the pictures for himself.
Brandon looked over some of the pictures. "Well, that looks like fun," he said mildly.
"It really does," she agreed. "Why don't any of the other teachers do individual field trips to exotic places?" she muttered.
Brandon shrugged. "I thought that was the whole point of being on the junior squad. Don't you get to travel?"
"The whole point of being on the junior squad is to help people and learn to be an X-Man," she pointed out. "This … this is just … vacationing with Wolverine. Who gets to do that?"
"Well, where do you want to go?" he asked.
She shrugged up both shoulders, her eyes wide for just a second. "I …I don't know," she said. "But something like that would be cool."
Brandon tipped his head to the side and then nodded. "Alright, yeah. That would be cool. But how about ... I got a car? Have you ever seen the Statue of Liberty? I talked to lots of kids who have never seen half the big stuff in New York for how close we live to it."
"I saw it from Battery Park," she said, shrugging. "Put a buck into those things … you know the things that let you look across the river?"
"That's so not the same," Brandon pointed out.
"I couldn't afford the ferry ride," she defended. "It was go sightseeing or eat. I chose to eat."
"See, this is why I want to play professional basketball. Being an X-Man is great, but the benefits suck," he teased.
She waved her hand at him. "No, this was before I came here."
"Well, we should fix that," Brandon decided.
"You're hilarious."
"No, really. I got a car. If you don't want to take the ferry, I think I can teleport two people that far if you don't mind feeling really dizzy for, like, half an hour."
She smirked at him and crossed her arms. "Is that your way of saying you're afraid of the boat?"
"I like my feet firmly on the ground, okay?"
She considered him for a moment, only to turn and look at her phone when it chimed with the latest picture from Leslie Ann — the last of the pictures from the day: an endless tunnel of red gates with Leslie, Kate, and K posing in the center with katanas like Charlie's Angels, with little bamfs dangling from the top of the gates.
Brandon looked over her shoulder. "I'm not gonna do that pose when we go to the city."
"You can't arch your back that well," she said dryly before she swiped the picture away and got to her feet. "Let's go. I could use a bagel anyhow."
He grinned at her and got to his feet, totally shocked that she'd agreed to go so easily. "Hope you don't mind — my car doesn't have A/C, so we'll have to drive with the windows down. It's all I could get," he said, shrugging his shoulders up to his ears. "But it's got good gas mileage."
She gave him a dry look for a moment and then shrugged. "Better than hoping you can teleport us there."
"Yeah… I'm getting better," he defended. "I can get as far as I can see."
She shook her head and smirked. "Well, that's better than I can do."
"Well, I can't take people down like you can," he pointed out.
"Yet," she corrected. "Doesn't mean you won't be able to."
"Is that something you scanned from me, or are you just being optimistic?" he asked with a grin.
"No," she said, smirking a little wider. "That's just because you haven't been here as long as I have."
"Yeah, give me a few more years," he said as they headed down to the garage. "I think I might actually get the hang of this whole fighting thing. Think you've got an opening on that team of yours?"
"Maybe after you pass Wolverine's basic defense class," she teased.
"Like I said — gimmie a few more years," he said with an open shrug. "How long did it take you?"
"A semester of busting my butt to pass," she replied.
"See, you've already got me beat. I've been here for a few months, and I got nothing."
"Yeah, but I was really working hard and asking for extra help," she pointed out.
He shook his head. "No wonder you've never been to the Statue of Liberty. Do you ever take a break?"
"That … is not the point," she said.
"It is the point when you're making sad faces at your phone over breakfast," he replied. "I'd take you somewhere nicer, but I spent literally all the money I'd saved up last summer on the car."
"I can kick in too," she replied with a little blush.
"Then maybe we can get some pizza after," he said.
"You're on," Jana agreed, tucking a loose hair behind her ear and biting her lip and deciding that this… could definitely be fun.
Scott was massaging his forehead and tapping his glasses against his desk. He'd taken them out again simply because he was starting to get a solid headache from stress alone, and he didn't want to end up blasting the desk apart because he was having a bad day.
The thing of it was — this was actually a good thing to stress over. He was staring at a mile-high stack of applications and notes taken from phone calls of kids who wanted to come to Westchester, who were looking for either a safe haven or a way that they could learn to use their powers.
That was good. They wanted kids and parents to feel like Westchester was a safe option. The school was supposed to be a beacon of hope and unity and a place for mutants to find safety.
But… there were too many kids and not nearly enough space or staff.
It was strange to think of the school as being too small. When Scott had first arrived in Westchester, he hadn't been able to get over how big it was. It had seemed like a miracle — not just the school but the professor — and if Scott was honest with himself, he knew that he still felt that way about the school. It had always been more than it seemed.
But the world was changing, and Scott found himself struggling to keep up.
There was, of course, the obvious fact that the parents and kids who wanted to come to the institute had to be spurred on by the worry and fear that the Leslie Initiative had caused. With something like that still in the news, it was easy to feel like there simply weren't any options for mutants if they wanted to avoid being captured, tortured, or killed.
That in and of itself wasn't terribly different than other times that the institute had been flooded with kids running away from trouble. There had been plenty of calls before with everything they'd had to face. Once, Kurt had even brought some from another dimension — kids that had been part of an interdimensional slave trade and were being bought and sold based on their potential.
It wasn't new. What was new was the sheer volume of applications coming in.
They should have planned better for something like this. After all, they knew that humankind was moving forward in its evolution, so the rising generation was bound to have more mutants… and then the generation after that would have even more…
They just hadn't expected it to happen so soon. The mutant population had always been small enough that they could handle everything from one central location, and honestly, Scott had always just sort of… assumed the school would be it.
It was the one blind spot he had in his plans.
Scott glared down at the applications and paperwork in front of him for a long moment before he got up, slipping his glasses on. He wasn't getting anything done staring at the papers on his desk like he could will them into making the school bigger, and he knew it.
He changed into something more reasonable to go for a run, and by the time he'd lapped the mansion, he was at least feeling a little less like his head was going to burst. But that still left him with one glaring problem.
There had been multiple X-Men teams before, and there were multiple projects in the works. But it wasn't… quite the same as the school itself, and Scott knew it. The safe haven that was the school, the chance that it represented to become something more…
Scott knew he wouldn't be who he was without the professor, without the school. And he wanted to give that feeling to as many people as he could.
He shook his head. They needed more resources. He'd need to pull in other people, find a way to make sure that anyone who wanted to chase the professor's dream still had that opportunity — without overwhelming the current staff and students.
What he didn't want to do was wind up packing a hoard of kids into the school and make them feel like they were cogs in a factory, just a number to the staff. One of the things that Scott was proud of about the school was the fact that they were able to give these kids individual attention, not just with their powers but with their lives.
Scott didn't want to lose that. But he didn't want to turn anyone away, either.
He was thinking in circle and getting absolutely nowhere, and he let out a long breath of frustration and redirected, headed for his suite and for a shower now that he'd had a solid run. But he didn't quite make it there before the twins spotted him and rushed over, with Cody close on their heels.
"Dad, look!" Chance was holding up a handmade card that, to Scott's surprise, was decked in reds and greens.
"What's this?" Scott asked.
"It's for Elin," Chance explained in a perfectly matter-of-fact kind of tone.
Scott smirked, since he had, in fact, seen Elin's name on the card. "Yeah, I see that," he said. "But I meant… isn't it a little early for Christmas? I mean, I know you both like to get presents to each other first, but you're going a little overboard, bud."
Charlie giggled at that. "It's 'cause he likes her," she said, practically singing it and dancing in place.
Chance turned a brilliant red. "Shut up, Charlie."
"Chance," Scott said in a warning tone.
"How come she gets to tease me and I get in trouble for tryna stop it?" Chance asked, throwing both hands up.
Scott shook his head. "You still know better."
Chance rolled his eyes. "Fine." He paused. "But do you think she'll like it?"
"I still don't know why you want to give her a Christmas present in the middle of summer."
But at that, Cody simply burst out laughing. "Because Christmas in July!" he sang out, then doubled over laughing all over again.
Scott couldn't help but smile as well. "Oh, I see."
Chance bounced in place. "So whatdya think?"
"I think it's a very good Christmas in July present," Scott said.
Chance beamed. "That's what I thought," he said before he rushed off, probably to make sure Annie helped him get it to Elin.
Scott shook his head as he watched his kids go. He still couldn't believe how hard Chance was hanging onto that childhood crush. Still.
But it had been just what he needed to break himself out of the funk of trying to figure out what to do with the applications. It certainly hadn't solved the problem, and Scott knew that he was likely in for a few more long nights trying to figure this out. But it had reminded him of what he was doing all of this for.
The rest of it, he was sure, would fall into place.
As for the rest of the junior squad… they'd found themselves kidnapped by a blushing Sylvia and Brye, who had decided they simply couldn't wait any longer.
Which was how Tyler and Tammy found themselves at the county clerk's office to be witnesses for their teammates.
"It's nothing fancy…" Sylvia said, her scales a bright pink. "But with all the stupid with the MRD and everything, we didn't want to wait."
"Besides, everyone else is taking summer trips," Brye said. "We can do the same thing — and make it a honeymoon!"
"It's perfect," Tammy promised, pulling them both into a hug.
"But I hope you both know you've called down the wrath of Kurt and Annie for keeping them out of a wedding and wedding cake," Tyler said with a smirk, getting all three girls at once in a hug.
Brye shrugged. "Annie can make us a cake when we get back."
"And Kurt's surrounded by babies all the time. He'll be fine," Sylvia put in.
"Sure, sure," Tyler laughed. "But seriously, congratulations. It's kind of been a long time coming."
"Since pretty much the day you met," Tammy teased.
Both of the brides were grinning too widely to stop. "True that," Brye said, grabbing Sylvia's hand to pull her into a kiss, which had Tyler smirking and grabbing Tammy to pick her up and kiss her too.
"When in Rome…"