Jack and Pietro, backdated to November 18
Nov. 18th, 2014 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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om_mainPietro must grovel for bringing Steve to Jack on his birthday. Jack = not impressed.
Pietro wasted no time upon return from Italy. It had been beautiful, glorious, everything he'd imagined. But once he'd kissed (... and more) Remy and petted Oliver, he headed straight to find Jack.
He hated making apologies, and there was a lot to apologize here for. But he'd done it often enough that he was good at it, at least. He knocked on the door, hoping to find dude in. "Jack? Jack, hey, I'm here to grovel."
Jack had been typing away at his computer, but paused at that. Pietro was due back from Italy today, but Jack hadn't exactly been expecting him. Not after how they'd left things back on Jack's birthday (a situation he'd been happily not thinking about during Pietro's absence).
"So noted," he called dryly through the door, not sure yet if he really wanted to have this conversation.
"Jaaaack," Pietro said with a sigh--all the cavalierness he'd been very, very careful to show the last time he'd seen Jack utterly gone, now. "Come on, man. I'm just gonna keep bugging you."
Which was... not entirely true. If Jack really didn't want to see him, well, Pietro couldn't blame him much. But this was Jack, and Jack was cranky, and sometimes he just needed that extra push--aka annoyance--to get him to let Pietro in.
Gritting his teeth, Jack pushed up from his desk and strode across the room, pulling the door open harshly. There were plenty of things Jack wanted to say, but for the moment he limited himself to demanding, "What?"
"I'm sorry about your birthday," Pietro said immediately, looking it, too. He knew the whole big blue eyes and pouty pink lips didn't work on Jack now like it might've a while back, but it was in earnest. "And I said I'd present myself for punishment, so I'm here. And sorry."
"Sorry for what, exactly?" Jack asked, tone icy as he feigned ignorance. "Refresh my memory."
"For telling Steve without asking you first," Pietro responded, zero hesitation.
Jaw set, Jack looked him over with hard eyes. It wasn't the exact answer he was looking for, but it was honest. It was a start.
Without a word, he turned and stalked back into the room, leaving the door open for Pietro to follow.
A little sigh of relief escaped Pietro--though he was faaaar from through this gauntlet. Jack was gonna make him pay, because Jack. But Jack... was worth it. And deserved it, in this case. Pietro closed the door behind him, then leaned back against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. "You want to say stuff, or should I first?"
Jack flipped his desk chair around to face Pietro and sat down, legs propped out in front of him and arms crossing across his chest. "Well, seeing as I have exactly nothing to say to you at the moment," he said coldly, "maybe you should start."
"Okay, that's fair," Pietro said, even but--again, in direct contrast to last time--not remotely chirpy. "So I guess I could explain why I did it. Which is not an excuse, by the way, because I know it was shitty. But it wasn't thoughtless.
"I know you wanna say it was no big deal, but last year was a big deal, and I was really worried about you. If the whole leaving the country thing hadn't coincided with it, I wouldn't have thought to bring Steve into it. But basically I knew you'd be all fucked up and self-destructive, and I didn't like the idea of leaving the morning after without being sure you were with someone who cared--" A slight pause there, barely a beat, but a long thought process for Pietro. "Someone who probably cares as much as I do."
Pietro didn't trust Jean-Paul with his friends, because as far as he was concerned, Jean-Paul had zero understanding of that relationship and what it meant to him. (No, he would never, ever forgive him for badmouthing his best friend to him. Literally. Never. Who did that?!) And Curtis had his own issues with Jack. Steve was the only safe choice.
Jack's expression hadn't changed throughout that explanation. The reality was, he didn't care why Pietro had done it. He especially didn't care to hear things like 'fucked up' and 'self-destructive' added to it. "Well you got one thing right," he said pointedly. "It was shitty."
"Yeah," Pietro admitted. It was. If he had it to do all over again, he'd still have done the same thing, but that didn't mean it wasn't shitty. It was just less shitty than the alternative. "That's why I'm apologizing for it. I really am sorry."
Jack sat silently for a minute, knowing full well that it would be an eternity for Pietro. Let him stew; Jack needed to think. Sorry just wasn't cutting it.
"You knew," he said finally, voice still cold. "You knew what that day would do to me. You were the only person I'd ever explained any of it to."
"I know," Pietro agreed, "and that's why I'm apologizing. I didn't tell him anything--I know, I know, him seeing you like that is bad enough.
"But I couldn't leave you alone. I couldn't."
"You should have," Jack replied angrily. "I didn't want you or Jean-Paul or anyone there. That's kind of the point. And the absolute worst thing you could have done was drag Steve into it. He didn't need to know."
"I'm sure he didn't need to know anything you didn't want him to," Pietro said. He was also sure that shit would be the undoing of their relationship, if anything was--shit only ever hit the fan with him and Remy when one of them withheld that kind of thing... and Remy's past was full of it, so yeah. He knew. Too well. "But we're gonna have to agree to disagree on whether or not it was the worst thing I could've done. I couldn't, in good conscience, have done anything else.
"But that doesn't mean I'm not sorry. Because I really am."
"Sorry doesn't help," Jack retorted, unimpressed. More accurately, crushing down the part of him that wanted to understand and go easy on Pietro and staying pissed off. "You all think that I'm broken - fucked up and self-destructive - and now, so does he. Now he's hurt that I kept something from him. You think he wants to hear that I was trying to protect him?"
"I don't know what he wants to hear; I don't know anything about him except he cares about you." Pietro hated to admit it, but it was true. He trusted Jack's instincts on that... mostly. Jack had, after all, at one time liked him, too. "And being fucked up and self-destructive occasionally is not broken. You've been through some serious shit, it's taken its toll--anyone who thinks differently of you for it--or anyone else here in that position--is trash.
"Which--is not an excuse for looping him in," Pietro rushed to add, holding up both hands. "Or any reason not to be mad at me for it. I just wanna make it clear that it doesn't--it's not, like, diminishing."
And there it was again, that 'it's not your fault' attitude that made Jack sick. It wasn't just that he'd experienced bad things - a thousand times worse, he'd caused them. "Oh yeah, it makes great pillow talk. 'Gee, did I tell you about the time I got my whole family killed? Hey, you'll never forgive the guy who killed your sister, right?'" Jack glared at Pietro, letting his words have plenty of bite. "Yeah, I'm sure he sees me just the same way now."
Pietro had a lot to say to all of that, but that last bit made him stand up straight. He narrowed his eyes; if he'd been a cat, his fur would've been on end. "What did he say to you?"
"Doesn't matter," Jack shot back. If Pietro thought he could drag Steve into this and then get mad at him, he had another thing coming.
"It does," Pietro said, looking at Jack like he'd lost his mind. Again. "If he made you feel shittier about it, then I have even more to apologize for than I thought. I mean I don't know him but I did peg him for a decent human being." What would he have done, if he hadn't? Pietro had no fucking idea, but he guessed it wasn't worth considering.
"Well he didn't set up a breakfast meeting to discuss it, if that's what you mean," Jack replied coldly, referring to Pietro's 'intervention' of sorts from the year before.
Pietro gritted his teeth. Apparently he needed to have a little talk with Steve. "I'm sorry. I thought he could handle--you, basically." He'd thought Jack wouldn't choose someone who couldn't. Apparently... no.
"I don't need a handler," Jack all but yelled. He managed not to add But I do need him. "And of course Steve's a 'decent human being' - that's why he shouldn't be caught up in all this crap. That's why he shouldn't be involved with me at all."
"Not handle you like 'control and calm you', handle you like 'understand and accept you'--as in handle the truth." Pietro raked a hand through his hair, frustration finally leaking around the calm he'd been trying so, so hard to maintain. Whatever, he'd talk to Steve later. And be nice about. At first. Probably. "Jack, I swear to god, every fucking conversation with you that's about you is like going to war."
It wasn't the first time Pietro had noticed it, but it was the worst, probably. It was like knowing Jack was an offense in itself, something Jack felt the need to punish him for constantly. And Pietro deserved punishment, yeah, but not for that. Of that, he was fairly certain.
So before Jack could interject, Pietro made a 'cutting off' gesture and, much more calmly of a sudden, said: "So just forget all that. I know what I did was shitty; you know that I did it because to me, it was the lesser of every available evil. I'm sorry, and I'll do whatever you want to make it up to you, if I can. That is the whole point, okay?"
"Yeah? Well you can start by leaving," Jack told him brashly. Just like last year, Pietro had no idea what he was dealing with, but had made it his business anyway. "Since your apology seems to focus on how I'm a mess and Steve's a terrible person, I don't really want to hear it."
...in truth, surviving Jack's birthday had brought Jack and Steve closer (though only after nearly breaking them both, which had been the exact reason he hadn't wanted Steve involved in the first place).
Pietro sighed and held up both hands. He couldn't help it, though, he had to say, "You're not a mess, you have one night a year of being a mess, which is better than I have; and you're the one saying things that made me think I was wronger than I thought, to involve Steve.
"But, you want me to leave, okay." He turned to open the door. He'd gotten into this mess by not respecting Jack's wishes--for his own good, he still believed (assuming Jack was just overreacting, as usual, instead of Steve actually being a horrible person, but he'd figure that out later), but whatever. Probably the best thing he could do right now was to, you know, prove he could be counted on to respect them, in general, from now on.
Jack almost let Pietro get out the door with that. It was what he wanted, after all. But there was something he needed to add, or Pietro wouldn't see how wrong he was about the whole situation.
"Well, now he knows everything you do, and then some," he said evenly, clearly not pleased about it. "That's what he has to carry now. That's what he has to see, every time he looks at me." And Steve wasn't like Pietro - he had his own baggage, and he hadn't seen Jack the way Pietro had. Jack wanted to protect Steve from that; Pietro had taken that away.
"Just because you think you're a burden, doesn't mean everyone else does, Jack." And if they do, they don't deserve you... but Pietro would talk to Steve soon enough.
Jack resolutely did not respond to that. Pietro didn't know what he was talking about, there was plenty Jack kept from him. It wasn't even to protect him; it was selfish, done to protect himself. If he told Pietro what had happened to Gray - how he'd lost his brother - Pietro would never look at him the same. He'd be horrified.
And that wasn't something Jack could take. Not from Pietro.
"You don't get to make that call," he reminded Pietro, locking his jaw against anything else.
"That's what the apology's for," Pietro reminded Jack, turning the door knob. Of course, if Jack meant he didn't get to decide what he--or even Steve, really, should feel about it, he was wrong. But he was right in general, and for once, being so much in the wrong, Pietro didn't want to argue.
This time Jack let him go, letting the silence follow him out.
Pietro wasted no time upon return from Italy. It had been beautiful, glorious, everything he'd imagined. But once he'd kissed (... and more) Remy and petted Oliver, he headed straight to find Jack.
He hated making apologies, and there was a lot to apologize here for. But he'd done it often enough that he was good at it, at least. He knocked on the door, hoping to find dude in. "Jack? Jack, hey, I'm here to grovel."
Jack had been typing away at his computer, but paused at that. Pietro was due back from Italy today, but Jack hadn't exactly been expecting him. Not after how they'd left things back on Jack's birthday (a situation he'd been happily not thinking about during Pietro's absence).
"So noted," he called dryly through the door, not sure yet if he really wanted to have this conversation.
"Jaaaack," Pietro said with a sigh--all the cavalierness he'd been very, very careful to show the last time he'd seen Jack utterly gone, now. "Come on, man. I'm just gonna keep bugging you."
Which was... not entirely true. If Jack really didn't want to see him, well, Pietro couldn't blame him much. But this was Jack, and Jack was cranky, and sometimes he just needed that extra push--aka annoyance--to get him to let Pietro in.
Gritting his teeth, Jack pushed up from his desk and strode across the room, pulling the door open harshly. There were plenty of things Jack wanted to say, but for the moment he limited himself to demanding, "What?"
"I'm sorry about your birthday," Pietro said immediately, looking it, too. He knew the whole big blue eyes and pouty pink lips didn't work on Jack now like it might've a while back, but it was in earnest. "And I said I'd present myself for punishment, so I'm here. And sorry."
"Sorry for what, exactly?" Jack asked, tone icy as he feigned ignorance. "Refresh my memory."
"For telling Steve without asking you first," Pietro responded, zero hesitation.
Jaw set, Jack looked him over with hard eyes. It wasn't the exact answer he was looking for, but it was honest. It was a start.
Without a word, he turned and stalked back into the room, leaving the door open for Pietro to follow.
A little sigh of relief escaped Pietro--though he was faaaar from through this gauntlet. Jack was gonna make him pay, because Jack. But Jack... was worth it. And deserved it, in this case. Pietro closed the door behind him, then leaned back against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. "You want to say stuff, or should I first?"
Jack flipped his desk chair around to face Pietro and sat down, legs propped out in front of him and arms crossing across his chest. "Well, seeing as I have exactly nothing to say to you at the moment," he said coldly, "maybe you should start."
"Okay, that's fair," Pietro said, even but--again, in direct contrast to last time--not remotely chirpy. "So I guess I could explain why I did it. Which is not an excuse, by the way, because I know it was shitty. But it wasn't thoughtless.
"I know you wanna say it was no big deal, but last year was a big deal, and I was really worried about you. If the whole leaving the country thing hadn't coincided with it, I wouldn't have thought to bring Steve into it. But basically I knew you'd be all fucked up and self-destructive, and I didn't like the idea of leaving the morning after without being sure you were with someone who cared--" A slight pause there, barely a beat, but a long thought process for Pietro. "Someone who probably cares as much as I do."
Pietro didn't trust Jean-Paul with his friends, because as far as he was concerned, Jean-Paul had zero understanding of that relationship and what it meant to him. (No, he would never, ever forgive him for badmouthing his best friend to him. Literally. Never. Who did that?!) And Curtis had his own issues with Jack. Steve was the only safe choice.
Jack's expression hadn't changed throughout that explanation. The reality was, he didn't care why Pietro had done it. He especially didn't care to hear things like 'fucked up' and 'self-destructive' added to it. "Well you got one thing right," he said pointedly. "It was shitty."
"Yeah," Pietro admitted. It was. If he had it to do all over again, he'd still have done the same thing, but that didn't mean it wasn't shitty. It was just less shitty than the alternative. "That's why I'm apologizing for it. I really am sorry."
Jack sat silently for a minute, knowing full well that it would be an eternity for Pietro. Let him stew; Jack needed to think. Sorry just wasn't cutting it.
"You knew," he said finally, voice still cold. "You knew what that day would do to me. You were the only person I'd ever explained any of it to."
"I know," Pietro agreed, "and that's why I'm apologizing. I didn't tell him anything--I know, I know, him seeing you like that is bad enough.
"But I couldn't leave you alone. I couldn't."
"You should have," Jack replied angrily. "I didn't want you or Jean-Paul or anyone there. That's kind of the point. And the absolute worst thing you could have done was drag Steve into it. He didn't need to know."
"I'm sure he didn't need to know anything you didn't want him to," Pietro said. He was also sure that shit would be the undoing of their relationship, if anything was--shit only ever hit the fan with him and Remy when one of them withheld that kind of thing... and Remy's past was full of it, so yeah. He knew. Too well. "But we're gonna have to agree to disagree on whether or not it was the worst thing I could've done. I couldn't, in good conscience, have done anything else.
"But that doesn't mean I'm not sorry. Because I really am."
"Sorry doesn't help," Jack retorted, unimpressed. More accurately, crushing down the part of him that wanted to understand and go easy on Pietro and staying pissed off. "You all think that I'm broken - fucked up and self-destructive - and now, so does he. Now he's hurt that I kept something from him. You think he wants to hear that I was trying to protect him?"
"I don't know what he wants to hear; I don't know anything about him except he cares about you." Pietro hated to admit it, but it was true. He trusted Jack's instincts on that... mostly. Jack had, after all, at one time liked him, too. "And being fucked up and self-destructive occasionally is not broken. You've been through some serious shit, it's taken its toll--anyone who thinks differently of you for it--or anyone else here in that position--is trash.
"Which--is not an excuse for looping him in," Pietro rushed to add, holding up both hands. "Or any reason not to be mad at me for it. I just wanna make it clear that it doesn't--it's not, like, diminishing."
And there it was again, that 'it's not your fault' attitude that made Jack sick. It wasn't just that he'd experienced bad things - a thousand times worse, he'd caused them. "Oh yeah, it makes great pillow talk. 'Gee, did I tell you about the time I got my whole family killed? Hey, you'll never forgive the guy who killed your sister, right?'" Jack glared at Pietro, letting his words have plenty of bite. "Yeah, I'm sure he sees me just the same way now."
Pietro had a lot to say to all of that, but that last bit made him stand up straight. He narrowed his eyes; if he'd been a cat, his fur would've been on end. "What did he say to you?"
"Doesn't matter," Jack shot back. If Pietro thought he could drag Steve into this and then get mad at him, he had another thing coming.
"It does," Pietro said, looking at Jack like he'd lost his mind. Again. "If he made you feel shittier about it, then I have even more to apologize for than I thought. I mean I don't know him but I did peg him for a decent human being." What would he have done, if he hadn't? Pietro had no fucking idea, but he guessed it wasn't worth considering.
"Well he didn't set up a breakfast meeting to discuss it, if that's what you mean," Jack replied coldly, referring to Pietro's 'intervention' of sorts from the year before.
Pietro gritted his teeth. Apparently he needed to have a little talk with Steve. "I'm sorry. I thought he could handle--you, basically." He'd thought Jack wouldn't choose someone who couldn't. Apparently... no.
"I don't need a handler," Jack all but yelled. He managed not to add But I do need him. "And of course Steve's a 'decent human being' - that's why he shouldn't be caught up in all this crap. That's why he shouldn't be involved with me at all."
"Not handle you like 'control and calm you', handle you like 'understand and accept you'--as in handle the truth." Pietro raked a hand through his hair, frustration finally leaking around the calm he'd been trying so, so hard to maintain. Whatever, he'd talk to Steve later. And be nice about. At first. Probably. "Jack, I swear to god, every fucking conversation with you that's about you is like going to war."
It wasn't the first time Pietro had noticed it, but it was the worst, probably. It was like knowing Jack was an offense in itself, something Jack felt the need to punish him for constantly. And Pietro deserved punishment, yeah, but not for that. Of that, he was fairly certain.
So before Jack could interject, Pietro made a 'cutting off' gesture and, much more calmly of a sudden, said: "So just forget all that. I know what I did was shitty; you know that I did it because to me, it was the lesser of every available evil. I'm sorry, and I'll do whatever you want to make it up to you, if I can. That is the whole point, okay?"
"Yeah? Well you can start by leaving," Jack told him brashly. Just like last year, Pietro had no idea what he was dealing with, but had made it his business anyway. "Since your apology seems to focus on how I'm a mess and Steve's a terrible person, I don't really want to hear it."
...in truth, surviving Jack's birthday had brought Jack and Steve closer (though only after nearly breaking them both, which had been the exact reason he hadn't wanted Steve involved in the first place).
Pietro sighed and held up both hands. He couldn't help it, though, he had to say, "You're not a mess, you have one night a year of being a mess, which is better than I have; and you're the one saying things that made me think I was wronger than I thought, to involve Steve.
"But, you want me to leave, okay." He turned to open the door. He'd gotten into this mess by not respecting Jack's wishes--for his own good, he still believed (assuming Jack was just overreacting, as usual, instead of Steve actually being a horrible person, but he'd figure that out later), but whatever. Probably the best thing he could do right now was to, you know, prove he could be counted on to respect them, in general, from now on.
Jack almost let Pietro get out the door with that. It was what he wanted, after all. But there was something he needed to add, or Pietro wouldn't see how wrong he was about the whole situation.
"Well, now he knows everything you do, and then some," he said evenly, clearly not pleased about it. "That's what he has to carry now. That's what he has to see, every time he looks at me." And Steve wasn't like Pietro - he had his own baggage, and he hadn't seen Jack the way Pietro had. Jack wanted to protect Steve from that; Pietro had taken that away.
"Just because you think you're a burden, doesn't mean everyone else does, Jack." And if they do, they don't deserve you... but Pietro would talk to Steve soon enough.
Jack resolutely did not respond to that. Pietro didn't know what he was talking about, there was plenty Jack kept from him. It wasn't even to protect him; it was selfish, done to protect himself. If he told Pietro what had happened to Gray - how he'd lost his brother - Pietro would never look at him the same. He'd be horrified.
And that wasn't something Jack could take. Not from Pietro.
"You don't get to make that call," he reminded Pietro, locking his jaw against anything else.
"That's what the apology's for," Pietro reminded Jack, turning the door knob. Of course, if Jack meant he didn't get to decide what he--or even Steve, really, should feel about it, he was wrong. But he was right in general, and for once, being so much in the wrong, Pietro didn't want to argue.
This time Jack let him go, letting the silence follow him out.
