A reunion.

[girlverine]

Laura stripped off her uniform top and let it drop to the tile floor, the fabric a wet, sticky mess of blood stains and tears that could barely be called a shirt anymore. After the battle with the would-be goddess, Laura actually felt a little...tired. Almost sore, even. Apparently getting punched by a deity was a bit much even for her healing

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[ex_julianhe]

It had taken Julian a while to get away from the base. He'd found out that Laura had been kidnapped while Josh was recovering, and he'd wanted to leave then. Cyclops, with frustrating predictability, had said no. Leave it to Wolverine, he'll take care of it. Even though Laura had been on his team when she was taken and Wolverine still hadn't been able to stop it happening. Julian was less concerned with that and more with what he could do to help. But, according to Cyclops, that was nothing. And then Josh had been all right, and had left again, and shortly after that the base was attacked zombie-versions of the X-Men's dead friends. Julian had fought, but like the others who'd fought with him, they weren't too clear how they had won. It seemed like the battle had ended on another stage, and he had no idea what had actually happened.

What he did know was that the danger was over, and that Wolverine's team had had something to do with it. Rumor was that Laura was safe, that she was back with them, but that was just a rumor. No one seemed to know anything for certain, or if they did they wouldn't answer his questions. That wasn't so unusual considering he was talking about Wolverine's team. No one ever really knew what they were doing. But he wanted to know for sure, and couldn't understand why the hell no one could just give him a straight answer. Eventually, he just stopped asking Cyclops. It was pointless. But just because Cyclops was a walking dead end, didn't mean he was about to stop. If he could find that team for himself, he'd know whether Laura was with them. He didn't see what was so wrong with that.

It was with this argument that he eventually persuaded the Cuckoos to help. They were Cyclops' girls and no question about it, but he'd always been okay with them - Celeste, especially - and when they were satisfied that he only wanted to check on his friends and wasn't after information on whatever Wolverine was doing, they consented to give him the last location they'd known that team was in. Taking a fresh reading would require using Cerebra, and it would be impossible to do that without leaving a record for Cyclops to find. So Julian took what he could get, and set off under his own power.

The X-Men would probably have used their jet. Julian was faster than most jets; at a push, he could break the sound barrier. It occurred to him that the one and only time he'd done that had been to get Laura home. This time, he didn't push himself to that level. It'd be counterproductive, since it tired him out so much that he had to sleep after, and he wanted to see her. But he still went pretty fast, and when he reached the location he started searching. He worked in a wide circle, asking at any hotels he came across. He had just about given up when one secretary seemed to recognise Wolverine's description. She wouldn't give him room numbers, but it sounded like Wolverine's team was here.

Julian headed back outside, staring up at the hotel's many balconied windows. It doesn't take him long to fly up, searching for anything familiar. A lot of the rooms had closed their curtains, which didn't help him; he moved the first couple with his powers but found that the lights were often off inside. Bearing in mind that Laura could have been in any of those rooms, he kept going.

And then, finally, he saw something he thought he recognised. A black top, with white detail, left on the floor. From this distance he couldn't be sure of the material, but the colors struck a chord with him. They were the same colors Wolverine's team had been wearing, except that he didn't think any of them had worn a uniform with exactly that style. He hesitated while he wondered whether it was really Laura's or not, but in the end there was only one way to be sure. He knocked on the glass, wondering who was hiding in there. If it was Laura, he was sure her hearing was good enough to hear the knock. It if wasn't, well...

It was probably a good thing he could fly so fast. Gently, he called out. Weird, trying to be quiet but loud at the same time.

"Laura...? Are you in there?"

[girlverine]

Laura was stepping out of the shower, staring at her reflection across the bathroom to make sure that she had gotten the paint off her face, when she heard the voice. It took her a split second to identify it, masked through the glass and the bathroom door, but it was Julian, she was sure of that. Julian not in the room, but not in the hallway. She sniffed the air a few times to be sure, and then she just stood for a moment.

She wasn't expecting that, not at all. For several moments she remained perfectly still, her mind racing with possibilities. With her X-Force duties, she hadn't actually seen Julian much recently. Not as much as she wanted to, as that little feeling she had somewhere in her stomach whenever he was around wanted her to. But how was he here? Why was he here now?

Her lips pursed for a moment, frowning at the mirror, and then she grabbed a towel off the rack, doing a quick pat down of the water on her body, leaving her dark hair hanging wet down her back. She turned towards the door then stopped, some part of her brain that was getting better at social situations pointing out that walking out into the room where Julian could see her while naked was probably a bit wrong.

She wasn't going to put her mangled costume back on, though. She nudged it with a bare foot lightly, once, and then wrapped the towel around herself instead. It wasn't great, but it covered all the things people insisted on covering. Barely.

And then she pushed the door open, stepped out into her hotel room and paused, seeing Julian...floating outside of her window. Right. Because that was obvious, now that she thought about it. Green eyes just watched him for a few seconds, one hand pressed into her chest to keep her towel held up. And then long legs carried her across the room and she reached out to unlock the window, pushing it open for him.

"...Hi."

[ex_julianhe]

Okay so, nudity, he hadn't expected. And he should have, because hey, he'd seen that top half of her uniform lying on the floor. How he hadn't processed that this would probably mean nudity was beyond him, except that he hadn't really been thinking. He'd been single-minded about just getting here, finding her, and now here she was wearing barely anything at all.

He swallowed, forced his eyes to stay on hers no matter where else they wanted to wander, and climbed through the open window. For a minute he just looked at her, taking in her wet hair and being distracted by the droplets of water decorating her shoulders.

"You were showering," he realised, which was the least helpful thing to say aloud. "I didn't...think...I wanted to find you." This all sounded lame now that he was actually saying it. "You were gone. After the Leper Queen...and they said you were okay but I needed to be sure. For myself."

God, he'd be in all kinds of trouble if anyone found him here. He didn't even really care, so long as he had time to talk to Laura before someone showed up to throw him out. He couldn't understand why she'd been kept from him for so long.

[girlverine]

Laura stepped backwards as Julian climbed inside, keeping one hand pressed into the top of the towel to hold it up as she felt it shift when she moved. On television those things always just stayed up on their own, but this one seemed insistent on falling. Her head was tilted slightly to the side as he spoke, just...watching him, smelling the frustration and irritation and a dozen other emotions rolling off him.

She understood most of it. She had wanted to check on Julian too, after he'd been rescued, but between being captured, and then attack on Utopia and being sent off to fight a goddess there hadn't been time. There never seemed to be time, really. Free moments always seemed to happen at the make-shift X-Force base, rather than the rare occasions they were actually near home.

If that was even the right word anymore.

She waited until he seemed to finish speaking, waited until his heart rate had slowed slightly, before she took a step towards him, bare feet curling into the rug slightly. "...I am fine, Julian." She held up an arm as if to indicate this, the arm that wasn't busy with the towel, anyway.

"...But thank you for wanting to check." She smiled faintly, just for a moment before it was gone. The fact that he had apparently come hunting across the country to look for her was...something. She couldn't even quantify it in her mind. Someone doing that and not wanting to kill her was a change. But doing it because they were worried?

That was completely new.

[ex_julianhe]

His eyes flicked to her arm, frowning a little because he didn’t understand the significance of that. What had been wrong with her arm? Laura never made gestures that didn’t mean anything. He raised a questioning gaze to her face, but then he noticed the way she kept adjusting the towel, and this…was awkward.

“Yeah, well I thought you might’ve been hurt,” he said, as though that was justification for seeing her like this. “And I wanted to find you. I’d have come looking, Laura, they wouldn’t let me.” It seemed important to let her know that. He knew what it was like when the people you expected to be there, weren’t.

…Not that she’d have expected him to be. Or whatever.

“I’m sorry for doing the window thing. I should…let you get dressed.”

[girlverine]

"I was hurt, but I'm fine now." Not that being hurt ever really stuck with Laura. The only time it had even been close was fighting Nimrod, and the dark haired girl was reasonably certain she would have survived that anyway. Not that Julian's assistance had been unappreciated. At all.

Still, something was wrong here, she could sense his discomfort, and while part of her wanted to fix it, part of her was curious enough to push at it too. The problem with smelling other people and using it to judge their emotions was that it was non-specific, and became even more so the more emotionally erratic a person became.

"I can't get dressed yet," she explained with a faint shrug. She hadn't exactly brought extra clothing to fight a goddess, after all. Domino had mentioned something about grabbing clothing from a shop nearby, and Laura had told her to get her something. It was probably a risk, but she rarely cared what she was wearing, as long as it wasn't...jeans. Or bright colors.

"I did not mind the window. Is something wrong?" She asked, stepping closer to him, turning her gaze to peer up at him slightly.

[ex_julianhe]

"No." He maybe said that a little too quickly. No, scratch that; he definitely said it too quickly, and he winced. Julian was damned good at talking to girls, and he knew it. Something about that was making this harder. She looked like she genuinely didn't get why he'd be awkward about seeing her in her towel. He ran a hand through his hair, wondering what he could say that wouldn't come out wrong. By wrong, he meant lecherous.

"Uh, what do you mean you can't get dressed?" Yeah, okay, so that was reaching, but it was a hell of a lot better than saying nothing. "What happened to you, where's the rest of your clothes?"

[girlverine]

Laura just watched him as she waited for him to answer, green eyes slightly narrowed as she tried to figure out what he was thinking. Some of it was obvious, of course, she could smell the reactions on him and she knew that it had to do with how little she was wearing. But the rest of it puzzled her. People always puzzled her in that respect. She could read the hard emotions, not the...middle ones.

She shifted faintly at his question, glancing back towards the bathroom where the remains of her uniform lay on the floor. "My uniform tore during the battle. It tore further when I attempted to remove it. I cannot wear it now, it is falling apart."

[ex_julianhe]

He frowned while she talked. Having a uniform that was ripped to shreds was nothing new to him given that it seemed to be pretty much a staple of every fight he'd ever been in with the X-Men. Which was why spares were usually around.

It hadn't escaped his notice that she hadn't answered his question, either. He stepped forward, trying to ignore the damn towel.

"What battle? What happened to you? Was it the Leper Queen?"

[girlverine]

"No. We were fighting Seline." Laura shook her head. "She was trying to become a Goddess but we were given the ability to harm her through ceremonial magic."

There was a faint hint of puzzlement in Laura's voice as she said that part. She wasn't entirely certain she even believed in things like that. And yet this had obviously worked.

[ex_julianhe]

His eyebrows shot up. There was no question that Julian believed in magic. He'd experienced it personally, both with the Kingmaker and then later, in Limbo. For him it wasn't just some thing that Doctor Doom and Doctor Strange did, hidden from everyone else. He just accepted it as fact.

"Let me guess. That's what all the walking corpses were about. Who did ceremonial magic on you?"

[girlverine]

"Yes. She revived all the dead mutants on Genosha," Laura frowned faintly. There was something inherently 'wrong' about that, beyond the basic boundaries of what was right and wrong that she usually ran by. It felt like...a desecration of something. After a moment of silence she shook it away.

"Warpath. There was a lot of makeup. I've been washing it off." Hence the shower and lack of clothing.

[ex_julianhe]

"You fought her on Genosha." It was a ruin, he'd heard. Before Julian had ever been a mutant, he'd heard about Genosha and what it stood for. What it had been before Magneto took charge there, and what it was like after. It was no small part of why he'd looked up to Magneto, when he was younger.

You should never meet your heroes. That was a lesson he'd learned.

"I'm glad you're okay. The dead guys showed up at home. Wish I could've been fighting them with you instead."

[girlverine]

"X-force handled it fine. You were most likely of significantly more use on Utopia." Laura said that because she thought it was true, but after the words were out some part of her mind that was getting better at the whole 'social interaction' thing pointed out that it had probably been somewhat crass.

She turned to consider him carefully for a moment. "...Thank you for wanting to help me, though." she added. "I would not have objected if you were there as well."

[ex_julianhe]

Yeah, he'd been real useful. Actually, she was right, he'd been fighting with Nori and David and they'd have had a harder time without him. Of course they would, he was one of the most powerful mutants in that place.

So why was he there and not on a team? That never failed to annoy him. It didn't surprise him anymore. Cyclops didn't trust him and Frost had let him down. They didn't want him on one of the teams. Apparently neither did Laura.

He tried to not let that eat him up. Least not while he was with her. He just looked up again, meeting her eyes.

"Being there's useless when the people I like are somewhere else getting kidnapped and fighting vampire goddesses." He let out a huff of air. "And Utopia sucks when you aren't around anyway."

[girlverine]

Laura wasn't entirely sure what to say to that. She missed Julian, but she didn't particularly care about Utopia one way or the other. She wasn't even sure there was a place for her there now, after the things she'd done with X-Force. It was all going to come out eventually, and she had no regrets, but...

People were rarely understanding.

"I'm sorry." She finally said, and she meant it. "I go where I am sent. It...does not involve going there much."

And part of her was glad Julian wasn't on X-Force. Not because he wasn't capable, but just because she didn't want to see him turn into the mass murderer the rest of them already were. Julian seemed to miss her though. Would that trade-off be worth it?

Probably not.

"You can stay here for tonight if you wish. If that would help."