Family Matters ch 2
Bad end to a bad day. Bad couple of weeks.
Jean has regained her composure, but she keeps glancing towards Logan's room. She's aching to go in there, to help. But it's been made quite clear to her, to both of us, that we are not welcome. Hearing it from Ororo hurt most; they're as close as sisters, I've never seen them have so much as a cross word with each other before now. I can't remember ever seeing Ororo so angry, with her, with us. She's furious about Kurt, but she's also angry that there were Council meetings she didn't know about. And that there was a dangerous terrorist running amok for a fortnight.
Damn Mystique, damn her to hell for all this
I go and make coffee, just for something to do. I spill some of the grounds, they're hard to get hold of, what with being on the moon.
"Damn it." I slam the spoon in the sink.
Jean comes over, puts her arms around me.
"Oh, Scott." she's on the edge of tears again. "He's right. We let him down."
I can think of half a dozen rebuttals, logical, sensible, tactical, I've been rehearsing them in my head. They're all wrong. I breathe in the soft smell of her hair. Think of my strong, kind, gentle friend, reduced to a shaking wreck. I'm still seeing Logan carrying him through the habitat, he didn't look like Kurt, he looked like a victim.
What a mess.
"I know, Jean, we did. We all let him down."
I knew it was a stupid idea, right from the start. This is not his fault, none of it, even though he was the first to suggest it. After she killed him in the Council chamber, he sat there, in the same seat she had shot him in, looked down at his white gloved hands clasped before him, and said the stupid word 'bait'. We, all of us, Council and Captains both, said 'yes'. Not 'no'.
As Logan, and now Ororo, have quite clearly pointed out, protecting Kurt includes protecting him from himself.
Our second error was in not letting his two best friends, the two people closest to him know what was happening. Or or was it continuing once it all started to go south? Or not protecting him better? Or not catching the damn woman?
All of the above.
Gentle Kurt. Except, he's really not all that gentle; he's finely controlled mayhem in a fight, elegant as a dancer but if one of those feet hit you, one hundred and sixty pounds behind it, you're down, particularly as he can follow up with a punch. And another one. And another. And again.
He's just gentle compared to the rest of us, doesn't go looking for trouble or arguments, he's very conflict adverse. Unlike some people.
He's led teams, but he doesn't really enjoy it; he can do it but his real problem is that he doesn't like making hard choices which put others at risk, he also tends to second guess his own decisions. He's a much better fit on The Council, when he can take his time to consider options, strategy; to plan. He's intelligent, observant and experienced and not afraid to tell you when you're wrong (but too politely, sometimes, Kurt, you need to say "that's stupid and dangerous" rather than "I really don't think it's a good idea").
At the end of the day, he's just a nice, decent person that the women love to fuss over and the other guys like to hang out with.
Including our resident psychopath, for some reason I've never been able to fathom.
Pretty sure half the guys on the team have always considered Kurt to be an over-educated bed warmer anyway, kept around by Charles, to keep Logan sweet.
Their relationship is no ones business but their own, but they are close.
Except, Nightcrawler. You know. The nice one. And Wolverine. The not nice one.
Doesn't help that being a protective big brother is ingrained in my bones.
For heavens sake, Kurt, why?
I asked him about it, once, during a night at Harry's Hideaway. He just looked at me, smiled that sweet smile, patted the back of my hand and said. "Don't worry, Scott, he's my friend." As though that explained everything. I didn't understand, I still don't. Kurt is much, much harder to read than Logan. Wolverine has just four base instincts, 'fuck', 'kill', 'eat' and, fortunately for all of us, 'friend'. If you make the cut and end up on the friends list, all is good. But Kurt is all nuance, all hidden under the surface smile, it's much harder to know what's going on in his head.
And we were total fools, all of us, for not telling Logan what was happening to his best friend and he may never forgive us, never quite trust us again. He'll never trust us with Kurt's safety again. This is going to reverberate through the team for years.
He's standing there, in the door to the lounge. Watching us. Eyes hard.
"There'll be another bomb." No preamble, no small talk. "My guess is she's planted it in his habitat. Ready for when he goes home."
It makes sense, fits her modus operandi, I open my mouth to agree but he talks over me.
"I'm goin' down there. Get his stuff. Check it out." He points at Jean, cocks his thumb at his door. "No one goes in there, not you, not anyone. Chuck turns up, tell him to fuck right back where he came from. No one gets near him." He points at me. "You're with me."
I squeeze Jean's hand, then go with him, meek as a lamb.
The bomb is in or under his bible. The evil of it is mind numbing.
It's not a big bomb this time, it doesn't need to be, it's as likely to maim as kill outright.
He's in full Wolverine mode, hard, efficient, he can smell the Semtex, walks nearly straight to it. Then he goes hunting, silently, we don't know if the place is bugged. I'm left to make small talk about packing sweat shirts and how nice the place is. And it is lovely, huge picture windows facing east, Krakoa spread out below, Ororo is living somewhere near here, and Sean and Theresa Cassidy.
Wolverine finds what he's looking for, in one of the drawers. We leave with a small bag of clothes and underwear, he makes a comment about bringing Kurt home tomorrow and we're out of there.
I don't think I draw an deep breath until we're back in the habitat on Luna. That was nerve wracking and it was all of thirty minutes, Kurt's been under that stress for two weeks. Alone. When he wasn't dead, of course. The enormity of what we expected of him comes home to me. Crap.
When we enter the living area, Logan throws something at me, I catch it on reflex but my heart starts pounding when I realise it's metal. Has he lobbed a fucking grenade at me? I look down at the small metal barrel. It's Kurt's Image Inducer.
"Ya should have thought of this two weeks ago, branaic." He growls at me, and picking up the bag of clothes, he goes back into his bedroom."
Of course we should.