and all that nearness turned to stone...

[Laurie Collins]

"So, here’s my difficulty, Laurie… perhaps you can clear it up for me. You keep talking as if it were 2007. It isn’t. It’s twenty years after that. Your ‘Bobby Drake’ isn’t some long-lost relative of mine; I am Robert Drake… Frank Sinatra and Rilke and all. Laurie Collins, who is now in her mid-30s, went into hiding years ago. Xavier’s Institute in Westchester was demolished not long after that. So maybe you can explain to me how a teenager claiming to be Laurie turns up in my facility remembering twenty-year-old events as if they were yesterday?"

Laurie stands up again suddenly from the slumped, seated position she'd sunken into over the course of the past hour, head already shaking in denial. "No." she says quietly, but more firmly than she's said most anything else since she's arrived. "I mean, okay, maybe it is the future maybe we all got...I don't know teleported forward twenty years because of some...mutant thing... or put in stasis and suddenly released or...whatever...I guess I could believe that but..." she waves her hands vaguely to indicate the cell, the camp, the whole situation. "But this is the future? And you're Bob in it?" she shakes her head again, half-formed thoughts about this all being a ploy to get some real information out of her flitting through her suddenly suspicious mind. But he looks so much like Bob, acts so much like him. And he was as confused as me...no. No way.

"If you're...if this is some kind of trick..." she stumbles on, "Well you're picking the wrong person to use. I mean, Bob's the person who probably worked the hardest to shut down the Neverland Camp back before I even got to the Institute. He's the one who's always ready with the ethics and really wants to be an X-man for the right reasons and he's...he's a good person. This place..." she shudders slightly, remembering the threats and casual violence of her short processing, the glimpses she'd caught of other prisoners, "He'd never work here so you can just...try something else." she finishes, crossing her arms over her stomach and hunching defensively, defiance and fear and uncertainty all swirling up in her stomach and showing on her face.

[Bobby Drake]

> " I mean, okay, maybe … we all got...I don't know teleported forward twenty years because of some...mutant thing... But this is the future? And you're Bob in it? … I mean, Bob's the person who probably worked the hardest to shut down the Neverland Camp back before I even got to the Institute. He's the one who's always ready with the ethics and really wants to be an X-man for the right reasons and he's...he's a good person. This place… he'd never work here so you can just...try something else. "

Drake just stares incredulously at that little speech, not sure what to say.

To his surprise, he’s taking it at face value, the metaphysical implications notwithstanding. He supposes he wouldn’t have believed it either, back when he was a teenager, if someone had told him he’d be running a Mutant Containment Camp 20 years later.

But he’s been through a hell of a lot more than Bobby the teenager ever had, and damned if he’s going to try to explain the ethical compromises he’s had to make to someone who hasn’t had to live through it all himself. "Then you don’t know “Bob” as well as you think you do, Miss Collins. You’re right, I fought harder than anybody to keep it from coming down to a war. But once it did – well, remember that your Bob fought against the mutant armies when they attacked Alcatraz, and helped stop Magneto from destroying Neverland. I never wanted a war, but when it happened I knew what side I was on, and it wasn’t your father’s. If that makes me a traitor, well… Magneto said the same thing twenty years ago. I didn’t buy it then, I don’t buy it now."

He shakes his head then, adding "And I can’t believe I’m standing here trying to justify my choices to you of all people. I’d hold off on the moral judgement were I you, Miss Collins, until you learn more about your own future… there are questions you haven’t lived with long enough."

Afterwards, he berates himself for letting her take control of the interrogation like that – he hasn’t been snookered that badly since he was a rookie. Of course, it doesn’t help that he’s said essentially the same things to himself, more than once. Maybe he did take a wrong road somewhere… but this is where he is, and he can’t think of a better path than the one he’s taking.