It's All In Your Head: Part Twenty Two

by sevenall

The debriefing was strange, even for Elizabeth's standards. With Scott and Jean flanking the Professor behind the desk, she had the couch all to herself. It felt uncomfortably similar to a psych session. She received a print-out of Bishop's mission report, which was brief, to the point and concealed a great deal of pain.

"Do you agree with the facts in this document ?" Scott asked.

There was nothing in there about Kwannon or the magic lake. Her deadly surge of power was mentioned but not explained. Other than that, the report was complete, down to documenting her outburst at Bishop verbatim.

"Yes."

"Charges may be brought against you. Against us."

The face below the ruby-quartz visor gave away nothing.

"Yes."

"Is that all you have to say?" Jean snapped harshly. "I mean, you could at least try ‘I'm sorry'."

Here they went again. She had been back for mere hours and already Jean tried to play the blame-game. Elizabeth decided to go for the jugular without further niceties.

"And what good would that do? Please enlighten me as to how an apology brings about resurrection. You know both that and genocide better than I do."

"You...you...," Jean sputtered.

"Ladies," Scott said, disgusted.

Elizabeth closed her eyes, looking for restraint on the inside of her eyelids. Parts of her wanted to reconnect to the magical matrix and burn the other woman to a husk, suck her down into a neverending vortex. She suddenly realised that that was the test. The Professor, sitting quietly between Jean and Scott, was in all probability monitoring her responses and increasing her levels of bitch hormones to get a worst-case scenario.

"Let's cut the crap," she said. "You want to know the risk of a repeat performance. I can tell you, it's almost non-existent."

"Almost?"

Scott's eye-brows rose to visibility above the visor.

"Almost," she admitted.

While it was highly improbable that Kwannon would come back from the dead yet another time, it wasn't impossible. Nothing was.

"Neither the FoH or we have anything to gain should this go public. For us, it would undermine twenty years of work to improve the relationship between mutants and non-mutants. For them, it would attract attention to...er...decidedly illegal activities in their former compound. I understand you succeeded in putting a stop to those activities."

"Yes."

"Our legal staff and that of the FoH have been working on a compromise."

And she had thought no one could look more shamed than Hank had. A compromise with the FoH. Talk about dealing with the devil.

"We'll pay for the damages and...er...the distress caused. Also, as you are the main culprit, there are measures to be taken."

<Ah. The interesting stuff at last.>

Elizabeth suspected their reasoning had a fundamental error: if she wasn't as powerful as they thought, there was no need of those measures, if she was, they couldn't force her to do anything.

"I thought I might go home," she offered. "Muir, I mean."

"That would be an acceptable solution," Scott agreed, obviously relieved that she'd made it easy on him. "The psychic blast was geographically limited. Muir Island is comparably isolated, while the NY area..."

"Okay, so if I did it again I would only kill off Excalibur and a lot of sheep," Elizabeth interjected coolly. "But do I have a choice in this ?"

Silence. Finally, Scott said:

"Not really."

"Thought so."

"Well, then," Jean said through clenched teeth. "Perhaps we could be dismissed, sir?"

The ‘sir' was spit out with enough venom to make it an insult. Without waiting for permission, she made for the door. Scott followed her, but paused with his hand on the door-handle.

"Betsy, I must know," he began, heedless of the lethal look Jean gave him, "when you met Him, did He say anything about Her?"

Him being Sinister, and Her being Madelyn, Elizabeth would rather not have answered him in Jean's presence.

"No, he didn't," she told him reluctantly.

Jean huffed, in disbelief or outrage or both, and stalked down the hall, pictures and mirrors shattering in her wake. Scott hurried after her. Elizabeth rubbed her temples and wondered why everybody was worried about her mental health but never questioned Jean's.

The Professor spoke for the first time since she had entered the room. How odd. As a rule, he was alert and interrogative during a briefing. Perhaps he had been kept unusually busy screwing up her hormone levels.

"Are you comfortable?"

"Comfortable enough."

"Not cold?"

"No."

"Henry related some recent conversations to me."

"Yes?"

She tried to sound encouraging rather than annoyed.

"He blamed himself for your condition. I set him straight." A joyless laughter. "The blame lies entirely on myself. I have done you terrible damage. I continue to do so. I flatter myself that I have given something back to most of my students, in return for their trust. To you, I have not. To you, I have been poison."

Elizabeth hadn't expected that. But his repentance was of no use to her, anymore. And if he wanted absolution, he had come to the wrong person.

<No. Eat remorse until you choke on it, you bastard.>

"I might hate you," she said, guarding her face and voice alike, "if I thought I had the time. If I thought there was a chance we might meet and reconcile before the end, I'd make you crawl, I'd make you beg. But I won't waste as much as another hour on you."

She rose, leaned across the desk, into his face.

"You are poison to me," she breathed. "For that, I forgive you. For ever coming near me or mine again, I won't."

He crumbled, then. His head bowed, deeper and deeper until his forehead touched the desk. But he didn't cry. She had thought he might.

[next part]

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