ax_main | Teddy and Scott, Backdated to April 5th

After talking to Jean, Teddy comes to talk to Scott.

Hands in his pockets, Teddy stood on the path that wound its way around the school grounds. He kicked at a small rock and it bounced along in front of him, as he scanned the area for one shape in particular.

If you want an objective analysis from someone who was there, Jean had said -- he did, and he didn't. The Professor had been kind during the debriefing, Billy kept trying to distract him from overthinking, but Scott had done this before, and he didn't pull punches. If anyone could be counted on to tell Teddy exactly what he thought... And ducking away from hearing a hard truth never changed what the truth actually was.

Teddy kicked the rock again and shook his head at himself. Speaking of overthinking. He was just checking in on a teammate, and hopefully taking advantage of his expertise. It didn't have to be any more of a big deal than that. Okay. Find Scott, see if he felt like talking. No problem.

Scott finished his five mile run, and slowed to a walk to cool down and catch his breath. His time was getting better and better, but there was always room to improve. He saw Teddy, kicking at the ground and looking contemplative, and nodded in silent greeting.

Face-the-music time. Teddy lifted his head and nodded back. Scott wasn't likely to wander over and start chatting without a specific reason, so Teddy paused, waiting until Scott drew closer. "How's it going?"

The other teen shrugged a bit, still catching his breath. "It's going, I guess." Scott had spent his entire run trying to convince himself to go talk to the Professor about his little Essex problem. He was running out of plausible excuses not to. "How're you, Altman?"

"Hanging in." The cool spring breeze toyed with his bangs and he pushed them out of the way. "Thinking about stuff. I was chatting with Jean earlier today, in the studio? She's good at putting things in perspective." He really didn't think he had to explain what sort of thinking, or what kinds of things. What else could Teddy possibly be fixating on, given the last few days?

Scott raised his eyebrows a bit, not entirely sure where this was going. He had some idea, of course. The mission had been...rough. But that didn't necessarily explain why Teddy wanted to talk to him about it. "Jean's good at that kind of thing," he agreed slowly.

Teddy squared his worries away, setting his shoulders firm. Jean was good at it, and she'd been right, and if he wanted to get Scott's opinion, now was the time to do it. "I know we already debriefed, and all that, but there are some questions I can't seem to shake. You've led missions before -- what's your take? On what happened once we got into the guard room, and after that. I keep going over other options, trying to figure out what I should have done differently."

To say that Scott hadn't thought about the mission since it had all gone down would have been a substantial lie. He'd wrestled with it in his head for days, not just in general, but in relation to his own actions. He'd shot the legs out from under people who needed to flee the building - people who had been shooting at he and Hulking to be sure, but people nonetheless. Had he been wrong? Was there a wrong? And how had they ended up there to begin with?

"That's a broad question," he hedged. He was trying not to be a controlling dickhead. The Professor had made his choices for a reason. "What in particular was bothering you?"

"Body count," Teddy said simply, and his heart ached. For so many different reasons, but most especially at the idea that it didn't have to have gone down that way. "It was probably stupid or naive of me, but I kept thinking we could get in and get out, and no-one would have to die. Maybe we'd get enough evidence in the data dump to get them arrested, let the justice system sort things out the way it's supposed to.

"I hadn't anticipated the way things went down-" He didn't want to blame Cal, he couldn't. Not when the guy had been through so much hell. And yet he had even more blood on his hands now. "But we knew going in what kind of things were probably going on in there. So maybe I should have planned for panic. Had a backup idea to knock the guards out or something so that they wouldn't have made themselves easy targets." Teddy blew out a puff of air in frustration, and watched a bird soar across the sky.

"You couldn't have known what he'd do when he got the collar off," Scott pointed out slowly. The only way around what Cal had done would have been not to uncollar him at all. Which would have entailed a risk of a different sort. "In an ideal world, we would have had more complete intel and reconnaissance. We didn't. And as a result, the mission didn't exactly go according to plan."

It was clear, after all, that they both agreed on that point. "People were hurt, but those people put themselves in the position to be hurt. They were guys who volunteered to jail innocent kids and turn them into science experiments and military-type test subjects. And you didn't kill them."

"No, but I didn't stop someone else from doing it, which -- no, I know it doesn't amount to the same thing, but the result is still a lot of people dead. Bad people, yeah, but still people." Teddy frowned, thinking out loud more than anything else.

They were there because of their own choices, but then, so were the Friends of Humanity in Montana. The Brotherhood didn't go in there expecting to find explosives either, and people died. So did that make X-Force's mission alright and the Brotherhood's not because X-Force's goal had been to save people, while the Brotherhood did what they did in order to intimidate? Or because the Right's crimes were more hands-on? Or was there no difference at all? He was sure that last one wasn't true, he just couldn't specifically define why.

But then, none of that philosophizing was why he'd come looking for Scott. Maybe it was something to talk about in Ethics, and watch everyone's heads explode. "Tactically speaking, what call would you have made?" Teddy asked, leaving the bigger morality questions behind -- at least for now.

"With hindsight, it would be easy to say I wouldn't have uncollared Cal," Scott said. "But I don't know that that's fair. And I don't know that I wouldn't have let him loose.

"I might have structured the teams differently. I might have instructed a more forceful response when things began to go off-kilter. But who the fuck knows if that would have been any better?"

"Structured the teams differently?" Teddy seized on that as a thought he hadn't explored ad nauseum yet. "What breakdown do you think would have worked better? I thought-" Don't say 'fighter and rogue,' don't say 'fighter and rogue...' "Disguise powers and a heavy hitter in each group, Billy on the extraction side for quick transport."

Scott looked contemplative at the explanation, before offering, "Jeanne couldn't be a heavy-hitter, though, once we separated. Because she'd have to focus on the computers; it left Shinigami on their own on watch, in essence. I'm still not saying it was the right or wrong call, I just don't know that I would have made the same one."

"Shinigami handled it all pretty well, mind you," Teddy offered in return, not dismissing Scott's idea out of hand. Just... playing with it out loud. "They weren't the ones who ran into trouble. How would you have split things out?"

"Jeanne and Wiccan," Scott mused. "Shinigami with us. It would allow them to possess anyone who got suspicious. Their response time was so fast because they didn't believe us from the start; Shinigami could have slowed that down."

Teddy's immediate internal reaction was one big 'hell no' to being split from Billy, and - hunh, okay. Apparently 'trusting that Billy can handle things' was something he was going to have to work on. (After Limbo -- twice -- could anyone blame him?) But that wasn't the point, was it? Leading meant making the right decisions for the mission, not keeping Billy close just because Teddy had confidence issues.

He nodded. "That wouldn't have stopped Cal from going off the way he did, mind you... Except in that we wouldn't have been able to get his collar off. Which... actually would have stopped the massacre. Only he'd have had no reason to trust us, or go with us, if we didn't." And he was right back to where he'd started, without an easy answer.

"You're right," Scott agreed easily. "But he couldn't have taken the three of us out, and as someone who picked between the devil he knew and the devil he didn't, some kids will take the leap of faith. There are no sure bets though, Altman."

That was the crux of it and, Scott supposed, if there was one less he had learned in his limited time in the field, it was that. "There are just bets that are better and worse. I'm not saying my theory would have worked any better."

"This is where save points would come in handy." Teddy shook his head at himself ruefully. "If at first you don't succeed. Except the stakes are too high for that." He looked over at Scott, the red glasses making his expression impossible to read. "How do you deal with the aftermath?"

"You get..." Scott paused, because he'd been about to say numb, but that wasn't quite right. "...more practice. You learn from what you did before, and you fix things going forward."

"Assuming the Professor ever trusts me with a mission again," Teddy said, without self-pity. Would he trust himself? His conversation with Warren echoed in his ears again. Why did anyone trust kids with any of this? Except that they seemed to be all there was. "Thanks, by the way. For talking this out with me."

"None of us is perfect in the field, and none of us can see what's going to happen before we even get there. If the Professor demanded perfection, after my first mission I would have never been sent out again." Though Scott had wondered, still did, if the fiasco of the werewolf rescue had been why he hadn't led either team into the labs. He left that aside, though. "And it's no problem. So far, there's only a few of us who've been there."

"You, me, TJ and-" Teddy had to think back for a minute. Was there anyone else? Yes, there had been -- the raid on the first Right lab the Professor had known about, the one where Tommy had been held. That had been just before Teddy'd arrived at the school. It felt like a million years ago already. "Jean-Paul. Is that it? That's not a bad group to be a part of." Not bad at all.

"A group that gets it, at least. That... responsibility." Scott wasn't comfortable considering himself good company, especially in this. But he did at least understand where Teddy was coming from.

"I think this was my wake-up call as to just how big that responsibility really is," Teddy admitted. As much as he'd thought about it all in game terms -- because seriously, what other frame of reference did he have before this? -- none of it was a game. He only had to look at the ways in which the survivors had been traumatized to see that, never mind the actual deaths he'd have to carry on his conscience.

Scott nodded a little. He wasn't sure he ever had gone into a mission and hadn't felt the weight of the mantle the Professor had placed on his shoulders, whether Scott had been the leader or not, but he also realized he had come into the whole thing with a different past than most. Not that anything could truly prepare someone to do what X-Force was doing, but he imagined it had to be an even bigger shot to kids who'd grown up like Jean had. "We learn from it, and we get better."

Scott's support meant more than Teddy'd realized it would and some more of the shame -- yeah, shame and embarrassment and concern that he'd be blamed for the mess more than he already blamed himself -- faded. It wasn't gone, but it was more background noise against the understanding that at least someone - more than a few someones - thought he could do better. Thought that he could have the chance to do better. That helped. So he nodded. "I can do that."

"Didn't doubt you could," Scott assured him, clapping him on the shoulder for a second, because it was the kind of reassuring thing he'd seen other people do. "You're alright, Altman."

Teddy ducked his head, and the half-smile that appeared on his face was spontaneous and unfeigned. "Thanks. You're not so bad yourself."

"Y'know," Scott said after a moment. "There are ways to set sims in the DR to leadership mode. I could show you how to use it, if you want."

Had he earned the right? Whether he had or not, it was being offered. "Meaning it gives you a team? Yeah. That could be interesting."

"Gives you a team. They follow your instructions. Hell, they follow them better than some of our actual teammates," Scott said, voice dry. "But it lets you test some stuff out, lets you practice in a way that's less do-or-die."
"In that case, yes. Definitely." Teddy nodded emphatically. Also with a certain amount of internal irritation that he'd never thought to ask about that. "The more scenarios I've tried, the easier it'll be to think on my feet out there."

Scott nodded. "Like everything else, it's better with practice," he agreed.