Library Conversations (rp for cyke_out)

[a_sloane]

The library was quickly becoming a favorite place, which disconcerted Arvin Sloane to some degree. He hated being predictable. Still. It reminded him of Zurich, not of Los Angeles, which he found preferable, and yet had an atmosphere of its own. The mysterious Charles Xavier, who had come and gone before Sloane moved into the mansion, must have created it, and it was entertaining and challenging to identify hidden doors, books that didn't belong, which one one but an avid reader would notice, and sometimes just to enjoy the quiet.

Sloane had forgotten how teenagers could be. He had missed both Sydney's and Nadia's teenage years, and there had been no reason to involve himself with others. Sometimes he thought teaching them was being locked up with ten to fifteen versions of Marshall Flinkman and Julian Sark; they were either over eager, or sullen and unsubtly sarkastic. Irina, he remembered, had taught when playing Laura Bristow, and she had raised Sark. Clearly, she was even stronger than Sloane had always thought her to be.

So here he was, retreating in the library, looking forward to working on his idea for infiltrating and invading first the Sentinel outside and then SHIELD which was supposed to be a surprise gift for his, well, hosts, when realizing this time, he wasn't alone. There was already someone in the library. Scott Summers. Looking somewhat harrassed himself.

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[a-sloane.livejournal.com]

Sloane, who isn't standing far from Scott, makes the additional step that allows him to put his hand on Scott's shoulder.

"There is no stronger bond than between parent and child," he says softly.

It's not a calculated gesture, at this point, though ironically what allows him to make it had been in part calculated; the fact that he told Scott and Emma about his dead daughter, though he had paid for this particular calculation as he had known he would, with the old pain coming back in full force. Still, the fact they know makes for one of the few spontanous gestures he allowed himself since arriving here. It's something that some new aquaintances find surprising because his demeanour is otherwise quite old fashioned, but Arvin Sloane has always been a physical man towards people he feels sympathy for; Jack and Sydney Bristow could testify.

"Actually," he continues, stepping back again before it could become presumptous, "I was just looking for a quiet retreat before my next class. But there's no need to go. I should get out and catch some fresh air anyway; it looks like we'll have rain again tomorrow."

[cyke-out.livejournal.com]

Scott is mildly surprised to feel Sloane's touch, but it's not a bad surprise. All the relationships in his life seem so complicated, now, this show of pure sympathy from a near stranger moves him.

He doesn't deserve it, of course. He hadn't been thinking, until Sloane's reaction, of what Sloane had said about his own family.

"I'm glad -- " he says, turning back to Sloane. "That is to say, you're lucky if that's been your experience. Well, not -- not lucky, obviously. I'm sorry for your loss, but -- I grew up in an orphanage. I hardly had a relationship with my father. I have a son and a daughter myself and --" To oversimplify things, grossly. "-- I've abandoned him, at least twice -- no, three time. As for my daughter -- when I first knew who she was, I rejected her." He shakes his head. "Obviously, there were other things -- other people -- I was more attached to."

Responding at last to Sloane's final overture, he says, "If you want to go, don't let me keep you."

[a-sloane.livejournal.com]

If I had known...

Nadia says in Sloane's mind. He doesn't leave; it's fairly obvious that Scott Summers needs to talk to someone who isn't a family member or an old friend, and as he observed earlier, the rest of the staff here are all involved with each other since ages.

(At this point, Dr. Judy Barnett would make a terse observation along the lines of pots and kettles, and point out that there was a reason Jack Bristow sent a psychiatrist to his old friend Arvin, and it wasn't so Sloane could have sex with her. But Dr. Barnett isn't here.)

"My daughter Nadia grew up in an orphanage as well," Sloane says, telling himself it is only to allow Scott to talk further. "I did not know she existed until well into her adulthood. When we finally found each other, I - I managed to fail her in a fairly unforgivable way, and she told me that if she had known who I was, she'd have tried everything to get adopted." There is an odd sense of pride along with the regret when he says this; Nadia striking out verbally when she was helpless to do so otherwise, and trying her best to trick him had been when he truly believed, emotionally as well as rationally, that she was his and Irina's daughter. "And yet she chose to join me later, and saved my life in doing so. I don't think we ever deserve our children, Scott, not in the sense of being worthy of them, but -"

He remembers the birthday, Nadia's last birthday, the celebration at his house at Sydney's suggestion, the toast he gave.

" - The Chinese have a saying: "One joy scatters a thousand griefs." We only had a brief time together, and yet she brought such joy in my life. Obviously, I did not know your father, and I do not know your children. But I can't imagine that you did not share moments of joy with either of them, as well as grief. And both joy and grief make them a part of you, and you a part of them."

She'll make us proud, Elena said, so sure he was on her side. Elena had been the one who actually had raised Nadia in that orphanage, as much as anyone had, and yet Elena had not hesitated to turn her into a zombie. Looking at Elena had carried something of the horror of looking at one's own reflection; he knew too well he had come close, so close, to the same sin when injecting Nadia with the Rambaldi fluid until it was either her life or the revelation. Sloane watches Scott, and wonders who raised him, in the orphanage or later. Who had been his Elena. Charles Xavier?

"Are your children still alive?"

[cyke-out.livejournal.com]

Sloane's response, once again, takes Scott by surprise -- he realizes that he had constructed a rather simplistic, sentimenal story around Sloane's dead daughter.

"It's never simple, is it?" he muses, then, with the trace of a smile. "Not for people like us, anyway. And yes, we -- Dad and I were reunited, when I was an adult. We got along passably well. He worked -- abroad -- and he asked me to come work with him, once. I almost said 'yes,' but, well, there was a woman. My son's mother. I stayed behind for her, which turned out to be ironic --"

He shakes his head. "Yes," he says, "Yes, Nathan and Rachel are alive." The better modifier would be 'again' rather than 'still,' but even with Sloane's own unlikely abilities, there's too much here that he'd rather not get into. "They're both abroad right now. Pursuing their own interests --" Realizing that he probably doesn't look like he could have a child more than 15 years old or so, at the outside, he adds in a deadpan, "They're precocious."

[a-sloane.livejournal.com]

The linguist in Sloane notices the "my son's mother" phrase instead of the more obvious "wife" and, considering he wasn't married to Irina Derevko, either, draws the wrong conclusion Nathan's mother was an affair, and the right conclusion she wasn't the much mourned Ms. Grey-Summers.

"No, it never is. You must be proud of them, though. To be able to make their own way abroad after... abandonment... speaks highly of their strength and abilities. But of course, you yourself had to find your own way through life, too, growing up in an orphanage. And now you are responsible for other children. I've only been here for a short time, Scott, but judging by what I saw so far, they seem to have complete confidence in you. It must have made your father proud as well - to imagine his son the captain of such an endangered vessel as this school is."

He uses the metaphor because of Scott's earlier mention that his father was a pilot, but also because fragments of a Victorian poem going through his mind - "we are still captains of our fate" - he can't quite place the quote or the poem's author, though.

[cyke-out.livejournal.com]

"Dad was proud of me, I think -- in that very nonspecific kind of way that involved not really understanding what i do." He shrugs. "I'm methodical, he's impatient. He's much more like my brother -- or my daughter for that matter. If we'd tried to work together, we would have gone crazy."

In any case, if Scott is honest with himself, he knows that Christopher Summers was never the father figure that he tried to impress.

He looks up at Sloane. "It sounds like you were proud of your daughter. You said she saved your life. She must have been --" Powerful, a warrior, strong. He suspects, suddenly, that she died on a mission, maybe even trying to save her father's life. "Did she -- well, did she know how you felt? At the end?"

[a-sloane.livejournal.com]

Sloane has a sudden memory of Nadia's blood on his hands, which doesn't make sense; he had stood several feet away from her and Sydney when shooting her. There was no blood when she crumbled. Well, it's not hard to guess that the mind plays tricks and uses appropriate metaphors, he thinks, pushing the image away and ignoring the fact it carries a different sense memory than that night in Svogoda with it as well.

"Not at the end," he says. "She wasn't herself then; she had been drugged by -"

Her aunt. Her foster mother. Who wouldn't have been able to do so if not for Sloane having pursued that particular line of research years earlier.

"- someone who tried to use her as a weapon against everything Nadia held dear."

And before that, she must have believed that he had betrayed her. Ironic that the only way she wouldn't have believed it at the end would have been if she recognized what he did when shooting her; stopping her from killing her sister.

"But a few weeks before, I was in a - well, you could say I had a choice to make."

Explaining about wandering inside one's own memories was probably a bit too convoluted to explain, but then, given everyone's talents here, Scott Summers might actually have had a similar experience himself

"And frankly, I thought I should remain where I was."

I was a good man once, but now I am a monster. There is no place for monsters in this world, Nadia.

"But my daughter thought otherwise. She told me she believed in me."

Nadia's voice, telling him that Emily and Jaqueline were gone, had been for a long time, the choice between a past that never was and thus never could betrayed inside his own mind and reality, embodied by his daughter who had seen the worst he could be in a way he had always been able to prevent Emily from.

I believe in you, Dad.

"So I think - I hope - that she knew."

There's that image again, as false as the memory of Emily carrying a living Jaqueline in her arms, of Nadia's blood on his hands. With an effort, he puts it into the black hole in his mind that swallows what he won't, can't look at, and focuses on Scott again.

"It is not always easy, working with family members," he says, trying not to make it sound like a platitude. "And yet sometimes the results can be... extraordinary, rather because of the differences than inspite of them. Nadia's half sister Sydney and her father spent most of Sydney's adolescence unable to to talk with each other for longer than five minutes, and yet once they started working together, the results were magnificent. Maybe your children and yourself will surprise each other in a similar way, one day."

When those children are grown up, as Sloane has their age rather wrong. Of course he also neglects to mention that magnificent Jack and Sydney cooperation hinged on a) him recruiting Sydney against Jack's wishes and b) both of them working against him. The more recent state of affairs, with Sydney believing Jack killed Irina and freezing him out again for a while before starting to trust him again, gets also edited out of the recount. Besides. Both, in Sloane's mind, prove his point anyway; he knows what is best for his Bristows even if they don't, and what is best for them is working together, with him, even if it is against him.

The practical application here for the Summers clan: there should be a reunion sooner or later. Surely, a mutual foe can be produced?

[cyke-out.livejournal.com]

She wasn't herself. . .

Scott hears the words and shakes his head. How many times has this been true of himself, of people he cares about. "God," he says, "I'm sorry."

He stops speaking for a moment and looks at Sloane, trying to get a good measure of him. He doesn't want to forget that he and Emma have assessed what they could of this man's past, and determined that a lot of it was almost certainly unsavory. Scott needed someone to talk to, and Sloane was providing that, but was it just a way of earning his trust? In any case, the stories, like his own, are almost certainly edited for content and context.

"One of these days," he says, "you and I are going to sit down and tell each other some real stories. Whole stories. But --" He reaches down for his book, remembers the other he came for, and heads to the shelf. "I have a feeling," he says, "that today is not that day. I have what I need. I've been here too long anyway. Enjoy the library, it's what you came for."

And he heads toward the door.