Xaviers!

Will sat, crosslegged, in the danger room, his eyes closed.

He was not alone, as several other Wills had come out of the mirror for this, dressed in jumpsuits and pouring over of Will's sketches on graph paper, using the functions of the Danger Room itself to edit and adjust, arguing all the while.

But the first Will kept out of it, his eyes closed, taking deep, performative breaths.

"I see you brought a whole team by yourself." Miriam comments dryly as she steps into the room.

"Good morning to you too, Miriam," the central Will said, not opening his eyes quite yet. "Enjoying the feeling of grass under your toes and the sun on your face?"

"Not in here, I'm not. Unless your idea of a dry dock is a spring meadow."

"I just meant, like, in general. You know, life, and your return to it."

"Might be some meadows in here today, though, depending on how things go."

"Yes. It's been... quite nice actually." she admits. She's still very much more comfortable in expressing misery rather than happiness.

"Take some advice for one who has come back to the living -- if you're anything like me, you're going to want to eat two of everything now that you have working tastebuds back. But do it in moderation, or you'll end up spilling it all back out on the cafeteria floor."

Will still hadn't closed his eyes, and it wouldn't take a skilled telepath to catch the focus and nerves radiating off of him, even as he deflected it with some playful barbs.

"I do believe purging to fit more went out of style two-thousand years ago." she says as she walks closer to the central Will.

"Are you done deflecting from how raw your nerves are now or do you need a little longer?"

Will started to quip a comeback at that, but just sighed instead.

"This is a big ask," he said, instead. "It's levels beyond any sort of complexity I've ever done."

"Hence the corps of engineers, I suppose?" she says, glancing around at the other Wills. "Although I'd argue this still counts as going at it alone."

"It's..." he said, hesitating again.

"I mean, you understand not wanting to show weakness in front of people who are counting on you, right?"

"I don't even like showing weakness in front of people who aren't. And you don't have to do this. I'm certainly not going to set foot in whatever hole they end up tearing into reality."

"It was my idea," he said, getting a little more flustered and upset, his eyes opening for the first time. "But I wasn't expecting everyone else to throw themselves into danger, as well."

"It's because they trust you. More than you trust yourself, I reckon. But if you need help from somebody who's not yourself, I'm willing to lend a hand. It's the least I can do to keep two of the people I actually give a damn about safe while they throw themselves headfirst into the unknown."

Will eyed Miriam for a while, trying to parse that last sentence.

"I don't know...this is...a little embarrassing and personal."

"I wouldn't know anything about that." Miriam snarks but... in a nice way?

Will eyed Miriam again -- her attitude was catching him off guard.

"Alright then, if you want to stay and help for a while," he said, with a shrug of his shoulders.

"The size is the first problem. It took me years to do a sports car, and you may have noticed me not doing any 18-wheelers; I've seen Robin grab one or two and that pooped her out for days. But a submarine? Those motherfuckers are huge. And if we're talking Sam, and Vic, and Tosh and who knows who else, not to mention protective equipment and shielding and weapons and hopefully some place they can stretch and an airlock..." he rambled, before catching his breath.

"We're talking tons. Tons and tons. And it has to be able to withstand pressure from the outside without squishing everyone in the middle into a fine paste; and it's got to be able to do that without flexing or bending in shape to keep all the external equipment in fine form while being a submarine. And we're talking doing all that for something...what, 40 feet long? At a minimum? No one's asking for a Typhoon class or something here, but good lord, right? I've never done anything on this scale. I'm fairly sure it's possible, but I mean, Jesus."

"Right. Well, I don't know the first thing about submarine design but if I understood the headmistress right then you're going into a space where being structurally sound is not just an engineering problem. So maybe before we start casting a frame we should make sure the steel isn't going to buckle from embarrassment?"

"I thought you weren't going along," Will deadpanned.

"Yeah, well, if survival hinged on my emotional stability we'd all be doomed no matter what and that's just one more reason why I'm not going. You normally thrive under peoples' expectations so scope aside, what's so different about this?"

"Other than the fact that other people's lives are in the balance; that if I fail at something I've never even done before, we lose multiple friends to a horrible, agonizing death? Other than that, I think I'm probably OK."

"You wanted to take on all the risk yourself and now that the others are joining you you're scared of failing them. I... I get that. I feel that way any time someone doesn't withdraw from me to keep themselves from getting hurt. I didn't ask anybody to take that risk, they just... kind of do and I don't know what to do about that either."

Will again eyed Miriam.

"Alright, is this about Sam? Me? Or a third mystery someone you've managed to sneak past the mirror?"

"You, Sam, I don't know. I'm trying to deal with it and part of that is doing what I can to make sure neither one of you disappear on me on some insane venture."

"You're dating an Irish death goddess and you're....," he said, trailing off before picking back up again "...an interdimensional blob of dough. You haven't exactly picked the safest people to attach yourself to."

"I have no idea what you and me are. Hell I have no idea what Sam and me are. In case you hadn't noticed, I'm extraordinarily terrible at this even if you give me a several months head-start."

Will's eyes narrowed, and the other Wills turned to listen in to the two of them sitting on the floor.

"...How many times have we had this conversation, Miriam?"

Miriam freezes for just a second.

"Not as many as you might think. It's not exactly something I enjoy because it tends to go poorly."

"...And how many other conversations have we had?

Why don't you catch me up on your, erm, 'several months head start'," Will said, crossing his arms.

"I'm not trying to keep anything from you." she says defensively. "A couple of times the question of what exactly we are came up and I had the same answer as I do now. I don't know. I didn't have any grand talks with anybody because I'm sure as hell not going to put myself through that when they'll be inevitably wiped from existence."

Will looked at Miriam dubiously.

"Well, alright. I can't force you to talk about what happened when time didn't happen," he said, after a moment.

"I just don't think it'd help anybody to talk about some of the things that happened. Bored, lonely and consequence free are not circumstances that make for... great choices. I never did anything people didn't want to do, but when you're a telepath that's... a malleable concept and I probably crossed a line once or twice."

"And you'd rather I just assume what the lines were rather than talk about it. Fair enough," Will nodded, closing his eyes again.

"I didn't think it would ever matter and it strayed a little close to what you've been avoiding talking about so don't give me this attitude."

"I don't think I've been avoiding talking about anything," Will frowned. "I slipped up and snarked at your dimensional alternate's choice of nightlife, and bristled at the idea that you thought you'd been through what I've been through. If you want gory details, I'm sure I could provide."

"All I said was that I saw the memories of what you went through and that even that was bad enough already! See? This is why I don't talk about this shit, it always goes poorly!"

Will sighed.

"That is not all you said, but I presume my memory of things is clearer, without four months of God-knows-what in between."

He stood up, stretching a little bit. "I think I'd better get back to work here, Miriam. You can have the Danger Room for whatever it is you wanted when you came in here; I'll work things out elsewhere."

"I came in here to help you, which I've clearly done a terrible job at. I'm not even entirely sure why you're mad at me!"

"You're the one bringing up months that never happened, filled with things you can't tell me about, and accuse me of avoiding talking about...something!" Will said, hands on hips, the other three Wills looking on awkwardly as WillPrime raised his voice.

"Twice you've blown up at me over things Melpomene did to you and both times you didn't really want to talk about it. And that's why I'd rather not talk about a small handful of days I spend doing things with you that were probably a little too close to things she's done to you for either of us to handle well in the cold hard light of day. That's not fair to you, knowing you wouldn't remember anything, but that's why I shouldn't have brought it up in the first place. It just made things worse."