Logs:Stereoscopic Pair

Stereoscopic Pair
Dramatis Personae Kitty, Scott
In Absentia	2023-06-29 Let's hope we both get what we want.
Location <XAV> Hangar - Xs Sub-Basement
The underground hanger is cavernous, a vast vertical shaft rising upwards towards the surface, where massive hanger doors close it off from the world above. Reflective yellow stripes and circles diagram out the hanger floor, serving as guides for whatever vehicles may happen to be in attendance, while various storerooms and maintenance bays branch off from the chamber proper. In its off-hours, the hangar is not lit more brightly than is necessary to make the reflective markings on the cement stand out in the dark, but all the lights are on in the maintenance bay closest to the door, where Scott is dissecting a spare combustor. His motorcycle jacket is hanging on the back of a rolling chair at a desk, leaving him in a plain heather-gray tee; even with the industrial-strength air circulator in the corner his hair is sticking up with sweat, and adding to the slightly unkempt look he always develops with a little stubble. He's not making much progress now -- most of the components have been laid out on a table or on the floor, but Scott himself is squinting at his phone, held out a few feet away from his face, trying tortuously to use the keyboard with his middle finger (his thumb and forefinger are both smudged with soot.) It would probably be easier to use his laptop, which is sitting on the counter playing a tinny Dad Rock™ playlist, but maybe he's unwilling to step through his neat array of plane parts. He tilts his head, reading the email back to himself silently, until he spots a typo and tries, several times, to move the blinky thing into the right spot. "Whatcha doing?" How long has Kitty been watching Scott's technological agony? She's leaning against the bay door, arms crossed with a pack of hair ties in one hand, gym bag at her feet. She's dressed for training, sweat-wicking tanktop and athletic leggings and well-worn sneakers, hair braided in twin plaits tight to her head. Is not training, clearly, at this moment -- her jewelry is on, for one, gold Star of David on her collar and jade bangle around her left wrist, and this is one level too deep for the gym, one turn too far for the Danger Room. She looks down at the plane parts, at the laptop stranded on the other side of them from Scott. "...I can walk you the laptop. Or a paper towel. Both?" Scott jerks his head with alarm, looking toward the door, then, "Kitty." This is not much of a greeting -- he says it in a flat, cautious tone -- but then she didn't give much of one either. Behind his glasses he is flicking his gaze indecisively between her and his phone screen, before he apparently makes up his mind and sets his phone down. "Sending an email." His lips press into what probably isn't a smile after he says that, but he tilts her an almost sheepish nod. "I got…" he plucks a greasy, sooty rag with two fingers off the toolcart next to him and then says, "Could you throw me a clean rag, actually." Kitty tucks the hair ties into the waist of her leggings, plucks up a clean rag, goes to toss it underhand across all the components -- changes her mind and walks it over instead, minding her step only so much as to make sure she's not stepping through anything obviously electronic. Holds it out to Scott, very obviously peeking over at his phone screen. "Is this --" she waves her free hand at the phone, "-- about the new students, or..." Her face scrunches up, the question left unfinished. "Thanks." Scott blots first at his forehead, then the back of his neck, then drapes the rag over one shoulder, settling back against the table. He follows Kitty's gaze down to his phone, and turns off the screen. "Probably another empty lead," he says ruefully, but -- suddenly, a little sharply -- then he looks up at her again, his expression shifting into quiet disquiet. "Are you doing alright?" he asks, abruptly. "With… all of this. I…" he shrugs one shoulder, then folds his arms. A crease is forming between his pinched brows. "I should have been checking in. On all of you." "You were emailing Antarctica. You were busy." Kitty's smile is only a little forced. "I hope you were checking in with Matt and Jax more than little old me. And Shane. And Daiki. And --" Kitty cuts herself off with a frown. Changes tact. "Why wouldn't I be alright? Relative to, like, everyone else, I'm having a perfectly normal time." "I faxed Antarctica." Did he really? If he's joking, he's not letting on; he's still looking at Kitty intently, tapping one index finger lightly against his bicep. "Nobody," he says, after a pause, "is having a normal time." But he just shrugs again, this time with both shoulders, now looking just a little bit past her, though he hasn't moved his head. "I wanted to ask," he says noncommittally. "What are you doing down here?" "Some people are having dead moms come back to life, some people have been getting swords from Magneto, and I am revising my dissertation. Normal, around here, is extremely relative." There is a twitch upwards in her lips at fax, gone again a moment later. "Replacing Jean's hair tie stash in the 'Bird. I broke her last one." Kitty retrieves the pack from her waistband, waggles it once in front of Scott's glasses. "If I wanted to give you a piece of my mind, I would have checked your office first. Don't worry." Scott smiles at normal is relative, slimly and fleetingly. His gaze, pulled to the hair ties by the wiggling motion and the crinkle of plastic, skips away again. "I wasn't worried," he says. "You're -- I encourage the X-Men to voice their opinions on my leadership." This is said as though it is -- somehow, despite who he's talking to -- an abstraction to him; for a moment he doesn't so much as blink, before he adds, "Why didn't you tell me you were checking out the mafia?" "Because I wasn't checking out the mafia," Kitty corrects, quick and sharp. "I'm not Italian. I was poking the Jewish Mob and the Chicago Outfit. You can't just call all organized crime the mafia." She bristles, almost, at -- well, it's not the conflation, probably, by the way the heat leaves her tone after not Italian. She leans back against the counter, hits pause on the Dad Rock still playing away. "... Besides, it wasn't me looking, really." This is faintly bitter. "My dad did most of the asking." The correction -- maybe because it comes so quick, maybe because it didn't occur to Scott that there are Other Mobs -- raises his eyebrows out of their frown. He is quiet, for a moment, conspicuously now the music has been turned off. "The professor mentioned he was in town," he says, after a moment. "Did he." In Kitty's normally warm voice this sounds oddly flat. Perhaps she is thinking something Very Loud and Very Rude at a telepath elsewhere in the mansion. Perhaps not. "He moved to Queens, end of January. When-- no, how did that come up?" Scott's brows knit seamlessly back into the frown they just left -- probably he is already regretting broaching the topic. He is silent for a moment -- perhaps he, too, has something to say to a telepath somewhere in the mansion. It is probably less rude. After a moment his eyes fix on Kitty again, calm and deliberate. "It was after our disagreement at Jax's party. He told me you'd asked your father for help, looking for the kids. I didn't know." "Our --" Kitty's eyes go wide. "Oh, God, I'm sorry, I was drunk and exhausted, I -- whatever I said, probably you should ignore --" She stumbles back into the countertop, freezes, slowly extracts herself from the metal. Her eyes are looking up, now, as if to summon Charles from upstairs. "-- The combination," she says, very slowly, as is she's pulling each word out from somewhere deep, "of kids going missing, and my dad being around, has not been, uh, super great for me." Her fingers curl against the countertop. "But I should have told you I was following that thread, at least. Matt and Jax knew but --" she lifts one shoulder, small. "-- that's not teamwork if I only tell part of the team." "It's fine." Scott is too quick to say this, too decisive -- what he probably intended as an airy dismissal lands a little heavily, even as his expression loosens slightly. He takes a step forward when she stumbles back, unfolding his arms, but is stopped by his own array of parts on the floor -- as Kitty extricates herself from the counter, he settles back against the table, his own hands uneasily gripping the metal edge on either side of him. "I gathered," he says quietly. "You don't have to explain." His head dips in a nod that he doesn't quite pull back from. "Sometimes," he admits, "with all our differences, it's hard to remember that, at the end of the day, we're still on the same team. Or --" he frowns, just for a moment. "We should be." "Don't I?" Kitty is not meeting Scott's tinted gaze. "This isn't the first time students disappearing has affected my ability to --" One hand flings out, gesturing vaguely towards the jet just behind the doors. "-- do this. It's just extra obvious this time, because they've been missing longer than I was, now, and my dad makes me act crazy." Her hand drops, gaze rising now to look at Scott, biting ever so slightly at her bottom lip. "I thought that being different people was part of the point. If the Professor wanted a vigilante group with all the same opinions, I think this school would look very different." Her brows pinch for a moment. "...Being on the raid team doesn't make them any less X-Men." Scott goes to scrub his face with one hand, but aborts the moment just in time, and wipes his greasy/sooty fingers on his rag instead; though he was probably using the movement just to skirt eye contact, he drags his gaze back onto Kitty, though now she's not looking at him. His eyebrows set over his glasses. "If you're struggling to balance the X-Men missions and your own wellbeing, I want to be aware of it," he says. "So I can -- help. If I can. I don't want you to feel like you have to justify yourself to me. I'm not…" Just what he's not, he doesn't say -- he shrugs, again, his hand dropping back against the table's surface. The set of his jaw tightens like he's literally biting something back. Finally he says, "No, it doesn't. You're right." "My boss? You're kind of my boss, Scott. Some things I do have to justify. Even if it's so you can --" The hitch here is very brief, "-- help." Kitty's eyes flick to Scott's jaw and the clenching there, then back up-- past Scott, up to the ceilling. "We should have been helping them, not mining the folks Jax brought home for X-men. But you know that. B'ezrat Hashem, DC is going to shut down Prometheus and let Jax come home. But if that doesn't happen..." Kitty pushes off the counter, standing straight when she informs Scott -- "If they'll have me, I'm joining them. Is that going to be a problem?" "You don't need to prove anything to me to make me want to help you." Scott is losing his devoted stillness now, his hands tensing and untensing on the edge of the table, his eyes trained on Kitty but not really looking at her. He is keeping his face carefully neutral, but his jaw is still working, though for a moment he doesn't say anything. Not to Kitty, at least. "If it wasn't a problem for your friends, why should it be a problem for you, Kitty? If they'll have you, I'm sure you'll be a great addition to Jackson's team." His gaze stutters off her, then back, behind the ruby lenses. "But I would prefer," he adds, "not to see our team divide any further." Kitty's eyes widen for one brief moment, her expression not exactly lighting up but warming ever so slightly -- before it shutters, hard, at Scott's last comment. "I would have preferred to stop leaving our teammates to be brutalized and killed sometime in the last decade. So. Let's hope we both get what we want." Kitty's steps do not break the silence of the room, even where her foot should be hitting Scott's assorted components as she walks through them again, back to -- and through -- the door.