Scott and Ororo - Backdated

[ax_storm]

Ororo jumps at the opportunity to meet the boy her roommate's mentioned. Unsurprisingly, they get along.


Tray in hand, Ororo turned around to look at the cafeteria and assess her options. Several were tempting, but when she spotted the boy eating alone at a table... Well, she'd been curious about him for long enough. Jean only had good things to say.

She walked over to Scott Summers's table and asked, "Mind if I join you?"

Scott glanced up from his tray. "I guess not." He didn't know her particularly well, and it was a free country after all. "Ororo, right?"

"Yes," Ororo confirmed, taking a seat across from him. "Scott." It wasn't a question so much as a greeting and an acknowledgment; it would be about as difficult to mistake him for someone else as it would her.

He nodded in acknowledgement. "You're Jean Grey's roommate, right?"

"Yes," Ororo confirmed with a smile, and wasted no time getting started on her plate. She swallowed, then added, "She said good things about you."

She...she had? Scott tried not to let himself be pleased by it. If Jean had said nice things about him, that meant he'd tricked her somehow, and he shouldn't be proud of that. "She seems like a nice person. She's probably been more complimentary than I deserve." He said.

"So you weren't nice to her," Ororo sort of asked, watching him as she kept on eating.

Scott blinked at that. "I mean, I think I was?" He shoveled some mac and cheese into his mouth thoughtfully.

"Guess you deserved those compliments, then," Ororo concluded simply, although there was a twinkle of playfulness in her blue eyes.

He snorted softly in amusement. "I'm not sure not being an asshole deserves a cookie," he said. He changed the subject, for his own comfort. "So how is the school treating you?"

"It's not being an asshole either," Ororo replied, because she couldn't quite help herself. But she moved on immediately, since he wanted to. "I like it. How is it treating you?"

He shrugged. "It's louder than it used to be," he admitted a bit dryly. "But there's a roof over my head, I'm fed," he ate another spoon of Mac and cheese to make the point, "and they're at least trying to educate me. Could be worse."

"Only trying?" she asked curiously.

"I'm not exactly the scholar type," he said. If it bothered him, it didn't show. "So what do you like about it?"

"The roof and the food are nice," she agreed with his earlier assessment. "But I like the message best. The community, and the outlook."

"What about it appeals to you?" He asked.

Ororo had more often been the one asking others those questions, so far, but she did not mind that the tables were reversed. She took a second to think over her answer, not because she was unsure, but because she wanted to say it right. "A lot of the students here, they need a place like this to learn to be themselves. And the overall objective - peaceful cohabitation with the rest of the population. That is a good objective. Difficult, but good."

"Necessary, even," Scott said, agreeing with her and taking it a step further. He polished off his pasta and switched to the fried chicken on his tray.

"Necessary," Ororo echoed, trying out the sound of it.

He nodded, crunching into his fried chicken. "Since you're so gung-ho, are you joining the Professor's new little scout troop?"

"I have - drunk the Kool-Aid, apparently," Ororo confirmed, reusing the idiom Tamara had taught her. "Yes. I plan to." He sounded skeptical of the entire idea, but he had just called the Professor's objective necessary. "Are you?"

"In the absence of some better solution? Yes. Someone has to." Scott said, nodding.

Ororo raised an eyebrow at him. "Sacrificing yourself for the masses."

He raised an eyebrow right back. "Nothing so martyr-y," he said. "Just saying it like it is. Someone has to, or we'll all end up involved eventually anyway, so I will do it because I can. Or at least I can try. I don't exactly intend to sacrifice anything."

Ororo was still not sure that she liked the way he talked about it, but it might be that it was a language issue. Still, she wanted to understand. "It is one thing to do a thing because you can do it, another because you want to." This sort of thing? It had to be both. "What do you intend, Scott?"

"I intend to help Professor Xavier prevent a war between mutants and non-mutants. Because it's a war we would lose. Because we aren't any better than them. Because it's the right thing to do. Because he's asked us to." Scott said, voice firm though quiet.

Ororo smiled frankly at his answer, and the quiet determination in his voice. It had to be burning in his eyes, too, behind those glasses of his. "Jean was right."

He blinked. "About what?"

"You're a good person," Ororo replied. So maybe Jean hadn't said it quite like that, but she had said that Ororo would like him, and Ororo liked good people.

Scott shifted a little, looking for all the world like a person who had not received a lot of compliments. "Thanks," he said, before quickly shifting the subject. "So what is it you do?"

Ororo smiled again. "Weather control. You?"

He carefully tapped his glasses. "Optic blasts. So what all does weather control entail?"

Ororo smiled; it served her right. Give a short answer, get a short answer. "Probably everything you could think of. Winds, temperature, clouds, lightning..." And of course, everything you could do with control over those things.

His eyebrows rose. That...that was pretty broad in scope and definitely impressive. "Are you impervious to your own mutation at all? Like, if you dropped the temperature down to freezing, would you be freezing too, or would you not feel it?" He asked curiously.

"I can regulate my own temperature," Ororo answered, which was neither one of his options, technically. "So, what kind of blasts?"

"Force blasts." The unstoppable death-gaze kind of blasts, really, though he refrained from saying it. The Professor kept telling him to think of his mutation as a gift, but it wasn't exactly a habit yet. "No heat. Cannons, basically, not lasers."

"What are the glasses made of?" Ororo asked curiously. She assumed he wore them to keep the blasts in question contained, but what kind of material could take that kind of force?

He hadn't been much of a geologist before, and he still wasn't, but ruby quartz was a close friend of his so he'd taken some time to learn about it, and the natural stone it was based on, rose quartz. "Ruby quartz," he said. "It absorbs the impact."

Ororo's eyebrows raised. That sounded like a very powerful... quartz. That was like crystal, wasn't it? "Impressive." And risky, if those glasses glasses were all that stood between the rest of the world and his blasts, but she doubted that he needed her to tell him that. He seemed like the sort to be very, very aware of that.

"I am lucky to be somewhere like here. It's not exactly like high-grade ruby quartz that's thin enough to see through comes easy or cheap," he admitted. His first glasses, before they had perfected the process, had been a nightmare. Heavy, thick, and made it hard to see. If they hadn't reduced the frequency of his headaches, he would have given up on them long before his mutation actually manifested, and that....well, it had been disastrous anyway but it could have been worse.

"Luckier than most of us," Ororo acknowledged. Most of them did not need that sort of high-end equipment, but it did not mean that they were not lucky to start with. She paused, then added, "Rumor is, you were the first one here."

He nodded. "For a few months it was just me. Believe me, this place is ten times creepier at night when it's just you and the Professor in the entire house."

Ororo's lips twisted in an amused smirk. "I can see why you'd say that."

"I was consistently on the lookout for my grisly horror-film-esque end," Scott said dryly.

Ororo chuckled. "I'm glad it didn't happen."

He smirked, "Yet."

"I pity the poor creature who decides to hit this school," Ororo replied, still amused at the idea.

"Because it could be a haunted museum, or because it's full of kids with paranoid tendencies and mutant powers?" Scott asked.

"Option B," Ororo confirmed with a nod, lips still quirked up in a small smile.

He chuckled. "I guess that makes sense."

"We're a dangerous bunch." She finished her plate and picked up the apple she had grabbed for dessert. "So the staff only came in when more kids arrived?"

Scott ate a spoonful of cobbler. "Just before, basically, but yeah. Before then, it was just me, and you don't exactly need a full staff for just me." Though arguably you did. He'd been, and still could be, a handful.

"You must know Professor Xavier well," Ororo stated. It was not a calculating statement; coming from her, it sounded like a good thing, to feel happy about. "Better than any of us."

"For all that the Professor can be a generous man, he's not exactly the personal sharing type." Something Scott understood, being similarly inclined, even though it could also be frustrating.

"Someone doesn't have to tell you their life's story for you to get an idea of who they are," Ororo replied simply. She smiled a little. "It helps, but..."

Scott had to give her that one. "Fair enough. Well, he's a telepathic mutant who is definitely past middle-aged who is taking in a bunch of high schoolers. What can we discern from that?" Not because he hadn't made his own judgments and conclusions, but he was curious to know hers.

"I believe what he says," Ororo answered... if not exactly the question, at least the conversation. "That he wants to help us, and that he wants peaceful coexistence. I don't think he's perfect, for all his smarts, but I think he's doing his best. He's a good man living in a hard time. None of our choices are easy."

"I think he's genuine, about his goals, for what it's worth," Scott agreed. No one was perfect. Xavier certainly wasn't, though Scott owed him so much he doubted the man's imperfections would ever stand in his way of doing for the man what needed to be done.

"Sounds like we're on the same page about him," Ororo noted with a small, friendly smile. It was nice to find somebody else who was.

Scott nodded. "Always nice to be reassured you're not going crazy," he said, smirking slightly. By Scott standards, it was basically smiling.

"Or you're not alone in your brand of craziness," Ororo pointed out, smile stretching into something broader, halfway between amusement and friendly challenge.

"Po-tay-to, po-tah-to," Scott said, sounding not at all concerned. He ate another spoonful of the cobbler. But, after swallowing, he smirked back.

At that, Ororo laughed.