Worthington Penthouse, New York, Earth 10005, Monday Afternoon (Monday Evening, Fandom Time)
While Warren searched his father's office--and had politely told her that no, he really didn't need help--Karla prowled about his old bedroom, looking and poking and examining at this part of Warren's life she'd never expected to see. This had been his room since he was old enough to have one of his own, and she could see layers of his life here, like fossils frozen in layers of sediment. On the shelf, a battered old car, bright red and sleek, looking like it once saw a lot of use. Her fingers traced wobbly letters carved into the wooden desk in the corner: Warren Kenneth Worthington III. Thick accounting texts lined the back of the desk, like stodgy tutors in a row, but when she moved a few, a yellowed and forgotten comic book fell out from where it had been shoved behind them.
The room itself felt old and unused, for all that Warren had only been gone for a matter of months in this dimension. No, not unused--abandoned. Its occupant had gone, but other than a business like cleaning to keep it from getting musty, nothing had been touched. But that vital spark, that something that kept a room feeling lived in and dynamic, that had left when Warren had and their brief sojourn here wasn't enough to bring that back. Even his psychic scent had nearly been eradicated, covered and erased by the harsh scent of chemicals and cleaners. The sheets smelled like fake flowers and the kind of fresh air only found in bottles, but when she pressed her face into the comforter, she could catch the faintest hint of the male who'd slept beneath it for so long.
She wandered around this space, poking at books and touching forgotten knick-knacks, looking at bare walls and cold surroundings. The picture she was drawing from it was a lonely one, not that this came as any surprise, and a rather hollow one as well. The room was empty, devoid of anything that suggested Warren had a personality of his own. There were objects here, things that announced, 'Yes, a person lives here or once did,' but nothing that said who that person was.
Karla thought of her own room, back at the dorms; pictures of friends stuck on the corkboard on her door, her frog tank on the dresser, her comforter with New Gotham's skyline silhouetted across it, herbs in clusters hanging from the walls, clothes discarded on the floor or kicked under her bed, trashy romance novels lying dog-eared next to her bed, or half-hidden under a pillow...Her room probably didn't paint the most flattering picture of who she was, but it did give plenty of insight into her personality. This room? Was almost as sterile as the cleaning products that had been so recently used in it.
It saddened her, to see what his room had been like. To see just how cut off from everything he really had been.
Warren
Warren hadn't found much in his father's office, really. It was as organized and well-kept as it had always been, but there was a week's worth of messages sitting on the machine, waiting to be answered. Warren had listened through each one, and by the end, all that he'd really ascertained was that he was probably on the wrong side of the country at the moment, and that the whole mess with the cure was...
Well, it was getting messier. Which explained his father's absence, but not enough. Not to a point where he felt comfortable just saying that his dad was busy and brushing it all off in favor of heading back to Fandom.
He was biting the inside of his cheek as he made his way back into his old room. He couldn't exactly rent a hotel room without grabbing attention, especially not after the stunt he'd pulled breaking through the window back in San Francisco, but he sure as hell didn't feel comfortable staying here. Here just left his skin crawling and his wings cramping.
"He's not here."
Clearly.
Karla
Startled from her reverie, Karla spun around to face him, her fingers jerking back from the wood of his desk as if it burned. "I hope you don't mind I'm looking around," she said lamely, gesturing to his room.
It was a large room, spacious--too large, actually, for the amount of stuff within. It also had a giant window with blinds firmly drawn and closed. She was willing to bet that it was only the cleaning staff that kept those blinds from being mired in dust.
"Err, that is, I mean, did you find anything to suggest where he might be?"
Warren
His eyebrow twitched up a little bit. It wasn't like there was anything to really look at, in here. She'd seen the inside of a room that was, if claustrophobic, more his than any living space he'd ever had before. Now that she was here, it seemed... Well, not so much a violation, really. He'd only slept and studied, in here.
"I think he's probably at the Worthington Labs facility in San Francisco," he ventured, letting the topic of the room drop entirely. "But I don't want to go running off until I know what's actually going on, or if he is even there, either. He could be anywhere across the country with all that's going on, for all I know."
Karla
"Can you call different branches of the company and check?" Karla asked. "And there was nothing in his day-planner or his calendar that would say?"
She figured that he already had checked those, yes, but it was so awkward. Trying to think of something topical to say. Something that wasn't disheartening or thoughtless, or about the GIANT ELEPHANT in the room with them.
It was like a matched set. One was named 'Your Father is in Danger' and the other was named 'We Need to Talk.' Neither was a helpful topic right now.
"Did you get any idea about what was going on with him before he disappeared?" This time, as opposed to disappearing due to the Nothing.
Warren
"All I know is what the news sites were telling me," Warren admitted softly. "Increased civil unrest as a result of the cure being distributed to mutants. Protests. Riots... Mostly around Alcatraz. His calendars don't have anything specific marked on them. He probably had to put everything down and go somewhere in a hurry."
But where? California? D.C.? There were too many damn options, and all of this was... it was beyond dangerous.
"I tried calling other branches, but nobody is really sure."
Karla
"Well, then," Karla said softly, sitting down on the edge of his bed. "We need to find somewhere that has answers. If we're talking something big with mutants, then we need to go where people would presumably know a lot about them."
And had some impressive telepaths among their ranks as well. And, as a special bonus, didn't hate Karla!
"I, umm, promise not to throw any nurses out of the infirmary, no matter how asinine their comments are."
Warren
"They'll probably appreciate that," Warren acknowledged, nodding faintly. "Especially since we'd be dealing with an entirely different group of X-Men, if you're thinking what I think you're thinking."
After all, Warren himself certainly wasn't one of the founding members, here.
"You get an option today. Crowded, uncomfortable train, or crowded, uncomfortable bus. Choose carefully."
Yes, he had left The Bee back on the island. His goal was to draw as little attention to himself as possible. The Bee was not what any sane persons would consider 'subtle.'
Karla
"Train," Karla said, having more experience with trains than she did with buses. She and Ben had gone through...some country...together in a train, going to babysit Bean as part of their agreement with Peter. Which was just more reason she should punch Peter in the face at every possible opportunity.
She was tempted to ask Warren to promise not to bitch about the train the same way Ben had, but seeing his drawn and tired face, she swallowed the joke back. There was a time for appropriate jokes and that time was not now.
"Would you like me to--" her offer to look up train schedules was forestalled by her heel kicking into something soft under the bed, hidden by blankets. "Wha--?"
Warren
"Hm...?"
'If you would like me to wha,' was not exactly where he'd been expecting that sentence to wind up, no. It actually got him to look confused for a moment, which was a slight improvement over the 'haven't slept in a month' look that he'd been sporting lately.
Karla
Karla wasn't paying attention to him anyway. Instead, she'd hopped off the bed, crouched down on the floor, and peering under the bed for whatever it was that she'd kicked.
It took a moment of digging, and then she was sitting backwards on her heels, holding up...a bear?
It was roughly bear-shaped, anyway, with ratty brown fur and a pair of dulled glass eyes. But the thing that Karla noticed most was the scents. Unlike the everything else in the scrubbed and artificial room, this bear actually smelled and felt real. Without even thinking about it, she gathered it close and inhaled deeply. Yes, there, even after so many years, were psychic scents. Trust, happiness, tears, fear, pain, elation, love...this lump of matted, dusty fur of smelled of Warren and childhood.
Warren
Warren almost gave an incredulous little laugh as Karla pulled the bear out from under his bed. He hadn't seen Buddy in years. Hadn't really given him much thought even before he'd run away, really. And there he was, in Karla's hands, while she...
... While she sat there, huffing bear.
"It's... just an old toy," he said, tilting his head a little, half wanting to introduce her to Buddy, to that little piece of normal that he'd had in his life since he was a little kid. And the other half of him had a million reasons not to. His dad was still missing. He was tired. He was still carrying the weight of his guilt over taking away her ability to choose, while at the same time sinking his claws into the fact that he'd do it again in a heartbeat, if he was ever faced with the same situation again.
So... just an old toy. Sorry, Buddy.
Karla
"No, he's not," Karla said softly. She hadn't meant to argue with him, had in fact promised that no matter what happened, she wouldn't so much as raise a peep against him, but...this was no nameless, ignorable old toy. This was something important, powerful. A toy, old beyond its years, practically infused with love was no mere 'old toy.'
"I can understand why you might not want to share everything about him with me," she said, turning to hand the ragged bear up to Warren. "But he's more that that. I can tell."
Buddy Bear
After a moment's hesitation, Warren reached and took the bear from her hands, looking down at him quietly.
"This is Buddy Bear. I've had him since I was, like, three." He gave Buddy a wry little smile, and then shrugged, setting him down on the bed. "He's just always... been there, you know? But he's not much of an adventurer. Not if there's anything bigger than a plastic dinosaur to worry about."
Buddy was a much better cuddler, really.
Karla
"Hi, Buddy," Karla said, her hand reaching out to stroke its fuzzy head and softness in her eyes. "I'm Karla. Pleased to meet you."
Don't laugh! Buddy was the first bit of life she'd seen since she'd gotten into the apartment. The whole place felt as real as the plastic bowl of fruit on dining room tables in a furniture store.
"Shall we go look up train schedule to whatever town Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters is?" she asked.
Warren
"North Salem? Yeah," Warren replied, giving the bear one last, momentary flicker of a smile before he turned to head out of the room. He'd have to use his father's computer to look up train schedules, but it wasn't as though he didn't know all of his dad's passwords for business purposes anyhow. "It's almost a fifty mile trip from Grand Central, so the sooner we get going, the better."
Buddy Bear
Karla obediently trailed him out, listening to him talk about trains and schedules and platforms and taxis and downtown traffic at this hour. She nodded and murmured the right things--and couldn't help but take one more peek into the room, where Buddy was once again waiting patiently for his boy to come back.
Acting on an impulse she couldn't have denied even if she'd wanted to, Karla vanished the bear from off the bed and quietly closed the door behind her.
[Played with the wonderful not_a_parakeet. Who I miss dreadfully. This entire plot was to introduce the character of BUDDY BEAR. Trufax]
The room itself felt old and unused, for all that Warren had only been gone for a matter of months in this dimension. No, not unused--abandoned. Its occupant had gone, but other than a business like cleaning to keep it from getting musty, nothing had been touched. But that vital spark, that something that kept a room feeling lived in and dynamic, that had left when Warren had and their brief sojourn here wasn't enough to bring that back. Even his psychic scent had nearly been eradicated, covered and erased by the harsh scent of chemicals and cleaners. The sheets smelled like fake flowers and the kind of fresh air only found in bottles, but when she pressed her face into the comforter, she could catch the faintest hint of the male who'd slept beneath it for so long.
She wandered around this space, poking at books and touching forgotten knick-knacks, looking at bare walls and cold surroundings. The picture she was drawing from it was a lonely one, not that this came as any surprise, and a rather hollow one as well. The room was empty, devoid of anything that suggested Warren had a personality of his own. There were objects here, things that announced, 'Yes, a person lives here or once did,' but nothing that said who that person was.
Karla thought of her own room, back at the dorms; pictures of friends stuck on the corkboard on her door, her frog tank on the dresser, her comforter with New Gotham's skyline silhouetted across it, herbs in clusters hanging from the walls, clothes discarded on the floor or kicked under her bed, trashy romance novels lying dog-eared next to her bed, or half-hidden under a pillow...Her room probably didn't paint the most flattering picture of who she was, but it did give plenty of insight into her personality. This room? Was almost as sterile as the cleaning products that had been so recently used in it.
It saddened her, to see what his room had been like. To see just how cut off from everything he really had been.
Warren
Warren hadn't found much in his father's office, really. It was as organized and well-kept as it had always been, but there was a week's worth of messages sitting on the machine, waiting to be answered. Warren had listened through each one, and by the end, all that he'd really ascertained was that he was probably on the wrong side of the country at the moment, and that the whole mess with the cure was...
Well, it was getting messier. Which explained his father's absence, but not enough. Not to a point where he felt comfortable just saying that his dad was busy and brushing it all off in favor of heading back to Fandom.
He was biting the inside of his cheek as he made his way back into his old room. He couldn't exactly rent a hotel room without grabbing attention, especially not after the stunt he'd pulled breaking through the window back in San Francisco, but he sure as hell didn't feel comfortable staying here. Here just left his skin crawling and his wings cramping.
"He's not here."
Clearly.
Karla
Startled from her reverie, Karla spun around to face him, her fingers jerking back from the wood of his desk as if it burned. "I hope you don't mind I'm looking around," she said lamely, gesturing to his room.
It was a large room, spacious--too large, actually, for the amount of stuff within. It also had a giant window with blinds firmly drawn and closed. She was willing to bet that it was only the cleaning staff that kept those blinds from being mired in dust.
"Err, that is, I mean, did you find anything to suggest where he might be?"
Warren
His eyebrow twitched up a little bit. It wasn't like there was anything to really look at, in here. She'd seen the inside of a room that was, if claustrophobic, more his than any living space he'd ever had before. Now that she was here, it seemed... Well, not so much a violation, really. He'd only slept and studied, in here.
"I think he's probably at the Worthington Labs facility in San Francisco," he ventured, letting the topic of the room drop entirely. "But I don't want to go running off until I know what's actually going on, or if he is even there, either. He could be anywhere across the country with all that's going on, for all I know."
Karla
"Can you call different branches of the company and check?" Karla asked. "And there was nothing in his day-planner or his calendar that would say?"
She figured that he already had checked those, yes, but it was so awkward. Trying to think of something topical to say. Something that wasn't disheartening or thoughtless, or about the GIANT ELEPHANT in the room with them.
It was like a matched set. One was named 'Your Father is in Danger' and the other was named 'We Need to Talk.' Neither was a helpful topic right now.
"Did you get any idea about what was going on with him before he disappeared?" This time, as opposed to disappearing due to the Nothing.
Warren
"All I know is what the news sites were telling me," Warren admitted softly. "Increased civil unrest as a result of the cure being distributed to mutants. Protests. Riots... Mostly around Alcatraz. His calendars don't have anything specific marked on them. He probably had to put everything down and go somewhere in a hurry."
But where? California? D.C.? There were too many damn options, and all of this was... it was beyond dangerous.
"I tried calling other branches, but nobody is really sure."
Karla
"Well, then," Karla said softly, sitting down on the edge of his bed. "We need to find somewhere that has answers. If we're talking something big with mutants, then we need to go where people would presumably know a lot about them."
And had some impressive telepaths among their ranks as well. And, as a special bonus, didn't hate Karla!
"I, umm, promise not to throw any nurses out of the infirmary, no matter how asinine their comments are."
Warren
"They'll probably appreciate that," Warren acknowledged, nodding faintly. "Especially since we'd be dealing with an entirely different group of X-Men, if you're thinking what I think you're thinking."
After all, Warren himself certainly wasn't one of the founding members, here.
"You get an option today. Crowded, uncomfortable train, or crowded, uncomfortable bus. Choose carefully."
Yes, he had left The Bee back on the island. His goal was to draw as little attention to himself as possible. The Bee was not what any sane persons would consider 'subtle.'
Karla
"Train," Karla said, having more experience with trains than she did with buses. She and Ben had gone through...some country...together in a train, going to babysit Bean as part of their agreement with Peter. Which was just more reason she should punch Peter in the face at every possible opportunity.
She was tempted to ask Warren to promise not to bitch about the train the same way Ben had, but seeing his drawn and tired face, she swallowed the joke back. There was a time for appropriate jokes and that time was not now.
"Would you like me to--" her offer to look up train schedules was forestalled by her heel kicking into something soft under the bed, hidden by blankets. "Wha--?"
Warren
"Hm...?"
'If you would like me to wha,' was not exactly where he'd been expecting that sentence to wind up, no. It actually got him to look confused for a moment, which was a slight improvement over the 'haven't slept in a month' look that he'd been sporting lately.
Karla
Karla wasn't paying attention to him anyway. Instead, she'd hopped off the bed, crouched down on the floor, and peering under the bed for whatever it was that she'd kicked.
It took a moment of digging, and then she was sitting backwards on her heels, holding up...a bear?
It was roughly bear-shaped, anyway, with ratty brown fur and a pair of dulled glass eyes. But the thing that Karla noticed most was the scents. Unlike the everything else in the scrubbed and artificial room, this bear actually smelled and felt real. Without even thinking about it, she gathered it close and inhaled deeply. Yes, there, even after so many years, were psychic scents. Trust, happiness, tears, fear, pain, elation, love...this lump of matted, dusty fur of smelled of Warren and childhood.
Warren
Warren almost gave an incredulous little laugh as Karla pulled the bear out from under his bed. He hadn't seen Buddy in years. Hadn't really given him much thought even before he'd run away, really. And there he was, in Karla's hands, while she...
... While she sat there, huffing bear.
"It's... just an old toy," he said, tilting his head a little, half wanting to introduce her to Buddy, to that little piece of normal that he'd had in his life since he was a little kid. And the other half of him had a million reasons not to. His dad was still missing. He was tired. He was still carrying the weight of his guilt over taking away her ability to choose, while at the same time sinking his claws into the fact that he'd do it again in a heartbeat, if he was ever faced with the same situation again.
So... just an old toy. Sorry, Buddy.
Karla
"No, he's not," Karla said softly. She hadn't meant to argue with him, had in fact promised that no matter what happened, she wouldn't so much as raise a peep against him, but...this was no nameless, ignorable old toy. This was something important, powerful. A toy, old beyond its years, practically infused with love was no mere 'old toy.'
"I can understand why you might not want to share everything about him with me," she said, turning to hand the ragged bear up to Warren. "But he's more that that. I can tell."
Buddy Bear
After a moment's hesitation, Warren reached and took the bear from her hands, looking down at him quietly.
"This is Buddy Bear. I've had him since I was, like, three." He gave Buddy a wry little smile, and then shrugged, setting him down on the bed. "He's just always... been there, you know? But he's not much of an adventurer. Not if there's anything bigger than a plastic dinosaur to worry about."
Buddy was a much better cuddler, really.
Karla
"Hi, Buddy," Karla said, her hand reaching out to stroke its fuzzy head and softness in her eyes. "I'm Karla. Pleased to meet you."
Don't laugh! Buddy was the first bit of life she'd seen since she'd gotten into the apartment. The whole place felt as real as the plastic bowl of fruit on dining room tables in a furniture store.
"Shall we go look up train schedule to whatever town Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters is?" she asked.
Warren
"North Salem? Yeah," Warren replied, giving the bear one last, momentary flicker of a smile before he turned to head out of the room. He'd have to use his father's computer to look up train schedules, but it wasn't as though he didn't know all of his dad's passwords for business purposes anyhow. "It's almost a fifty mile trip from Grand Central, so the sooner we get going, the better."
Buddy Bear
Karla obediently trailed him out, listening to him talk about trains and schedules and platforms and taxis and downtown traffic at this hour. She nodded and murmured the right things--and couldn't help but take one more peek into the room, where Buddy was once again waiting patiently for his boy to come back.
Acting on an impulse she couldn't have denied even if she'd wanted to, Karla vanished the bear from off the bed and quietly closed the door behind her.
[Played with the wonderful not_a_parakeet. Who I miss dreadfully. This entire plot was to introduce the character of BUDDY BEAR. Trufax]