OOC: Logs! Madrox and Amp
X-Men: Movieverse 2 - Thursday, December 20, 2007, 11:49 PM
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=NYC= Room 240 |Madrox| - Holloway Hall - Emerson University
You see nothing special.
[This room is set watchable. Use alias Madrox to watch here.]
[Exits : [O]ut]
[Players : Madrox ]
It is nominally the holidays and when it is nominally the holidays, it is a right to spread out languidly on one's crappy saggy couch and channel surf dully. Click, click, click. The plastic and grease remains of two TV dinners are littered in out of the way places on the floor, shoved up against the lee of the couch. A trenchcoat is sprawled next to the end table. It is a controlled kind of sloppy, all of it.
It is indeed the holidays, and when it is indeed the holidays, it is right and proper, if one is a woman of a certain age and position, that one go visiting the sick, the injured, the related, or the former students living in apartments. Jean is not alone. She is accompanied by a wicker basket that promises holiday goodies, and is thus left to shuffle it into a rest on her hip as she lifts a hand and knocks at the door.
Madrox pauses. And after that pause, he does not turn off the TV, nor change the manner of his spread-out. Just changes the channel. "It's open," he calls through the door. One is perhaps used to walk in after walk in. Some of which knock.
Jean, knocking having thus garnered her an answer, enters. "I come bearing gifts," is the first phrase out of her mouth, perhaps as placation for the intrusion of Dr. Grey, Unwanted Authority Figure. "How's it going?" is the second.
"Oh. Uh!" Jamie clicks the TV off with a jerk of his finger against the remote and sits up straight. There isn't much to be done about the mess, but he does stand up in a semi-formal greeting kind of way. "Hi. Um. Thanks, I'm just fine. I'm sorry, I would have cleaned up."
"People who come by uninvited," Jean points out, extending the Christmas basket with a crooked smile. "Don't get to have a say in what the place they're visiting looks like. Besides," she shares, with a glance to the couch and a "May I?" interjected. "You should have seen what -my- college dorm looked like."
"Yeah, sure. My crappy couch is your crappy couch," Jamie says distractedly as he settles back on the couch, less sprawled. More tight. "I'm not here very often. But when I am, whoosh. You know. Uh."
Jean appreciates the tight. It means she needn't compete with Madrox as well as clutter for couch space. "Small spaces," she replies. "They fill up fast. But how are you doing?" she asks, apparently easy small talk.
"Fine," Jamie repeats, as is probably . . . expectable. "My life has been relatively quiet, the Jack thing aside, which is quite finished."
"Goodbye, farewell, and amen," Jean agrees. "I'm relieved, even if I'm still wishing I would've been in a place to do more. But you all handled it," she assures, eyes closing slightly as she sinks into the couch. "And now Autumn's being enrolled at the school, so I guess I get to help with the cleanup after all."
"Well. You could have handled Jack in about half the time I did-- I mean, hell, I didn't handle him at all." Jamie shrugs his shoulders high and links his fingers together, looking down into them. "This part's important, anyway. Autumn is going to hurt like hell."
"True. But you all of you learned that you can work as a team," Jean assures, possibly assuring herself at the same time. "And by calling in Detective Rossi, you proved that society does too still work. But yeah," she admits, gone quiet and meditative as she opens her eyes again, to focus on a prewrapped sausage poking out at an angle from the gift basket. "We can help her, but there's no magic bullets this time. And that's a hard thing, when you would give almost anything for a quick way to kill the hurt."
"Please, give Jeremy the credit for all of that. He really stepped up." Jamie unlinks and relinks his fingers, as if not certain what else to do with them. He side-glances at the sausage. "But, yeah. No magic bullets for anything. You get enough mental trauma or abuse and you're working it out on your own at some level."
"You were suspicious at the start." Jean does not bring up herself that Jamie ended up rather, ah, -not- by later on. "That was something that gave Jeremy the confidence that he wasn't alone in thinking things were up. But he really -was- together, by the end, by the time he came to me."
"It's kind of shitty-- crappy," Jamie is occasionally aware of his audience, "to kick things into motion and leave a kid to follow it through. But good on Jeremy. He's grown up in the last few months, huh?"
"Yeah," Jean agrees, before giving Jamie a sidelong look. "Although, from what I can piece together, your leaving things alone may not have been entirely of your own free will and volition."
Madrox hikes his shrug higher. "It was more than you might think. But it doesn't matter."
"Why not?"
"Because it's over. And I made mistakes and I won't make them again."
"It doesn't mean you have to carry them all by yourself," Jean murmurs, voice and eyes both soft upon him. "Do you have anyone to talk to? Monet?"
Madrox smiles. It's half a smirk, if less a gleeful smirk than a bit too rueful to be a real smile. "I have Monet. Hell, I have myself."
"Yourself... well, I guess you -do- have a unique advantage there," Jean admits, with a flash of a crooked smile. "Just... don't carry it all inside, I guess is what I want to say, if you can take one last bit of advice from an old teacher. Speaking from experience, it leads to crazy."
Madrox unlaces his fingers and lays one against his forehead. At length, "I probably don't carry it inside enough. If you--" Jamie pauses, again, biting something sour off. "I am having some problems. With duplicates. But there's not really much to be done about that."
With a touch of irony and amusement to her smile, Jean offers "I could listen?"
Madrox shrugs. Again. Inevitably. And suddenly unable to just sit, he picks himself up paces toward the television. "It's just - they just keep getting more independent. And I absorb one that's two weeks old and it's like . . . I don't know. They don't come back to me as quickly as they used to. Sometimes, they don't at all."
"Have you misplaced some of them, then?" Jean wonders, looking briefly concerned as she watches Madrox's pacing. "Or is it that they stay as separate entities in your mind when you bring them back in?"
"Well, only one. Not that I know where some of them are post, you know, splitting into forty to find Autumn." Jamie breaks into a lower mutter, "Which was about the most useful thing I did-- /anyway/. They're fighting. My dupes. Sometimes. And it's sometimes weird when I absorb, I mean, it's like I'm /built/ to make it work. I don't know who did what after a few days -- but they come out, and they're . . . I don't know. Something's screwing up." Jamie puts his hand atop his television. A most comprehensible vent!
"Fighting," Jean plucks out of this venting, isolating the word like something interesting on a microscope slide. "With you? With each other?"
"All of that." Jamie is concise this time.
Jean hums, thoughtful and worried all in one alto note. "What kind of something is screwing up?"
"We didn't used to fight-- hell, we didn't used to say /we/. It used to be," Jamie thumps himself on the chest (while still being riiight next to the TV), "just /me/. You know?"
Jean's smile is an odd, odd, inwards-looking little thing. "I do, actually," she says, but doesn't explain. "But when did you first start to notice this?"
Madrox half turns and . . . tilts his head, curious. But persists. As he may as well. "It started a little bit after I went to college. It's been getting progressively worse since, uh, one time I split into forty and couldn't grab some parts of me for two or three weeks after, I guess. It's been a few months since."
"Mmm," says Jean, nodding slowly as speculation fires up and wheels of thought and analysis begin slowly to churn, priming themselves with the incoming facts. "When you first came to college, when it first started that little bit, what were you using dupes for, if anything?"
"Well, uh. Studying. Women. Watching movies." Jamie hooks his hand behind his neck. "And sometimes, they'd do their own thing. It's not like I control them."
"I wonder," says Jean. "If, and correct me if this is way off base, it might be that different experiences make each dupe just a little bit different from you. Like the alternate universe," she pulls out an example. "One event different, two years distance, and everything's changed. Except -you- get to do that without messing with the fabric of reality."
"No, you're right. And imagine!" Jamie spreads his hands wide. "I am my own /personal/ rift in reality. Imagine if you could put a companionable hand on the arm of an alternate Jean and take her in -- all her experiences. /Everything/ she is, is now you."
"I think if I had to do that too often, too quickly, I might just lose my grip a little," Jean murmurs, and looks suddenly chilled, arms wrapping around herself on the couch, although she resists the temptation to draw up her legs in a full cocoon. "Maybe... It got progressively worse after you split into forty?" she questions, plucking at past conversation.
Madrox stops again, to watch Jean's reaction at slow and uncertain length. "Well. It isn't that bad. Two weeks isn't two years. But. Yes. I don't think it was the number. It was that some of them decided not to come back. And one ran into Ellen and we know where that ended up."
"How many do you have out right now?" Jean asks next, nibbling thoughtfully on her lower lip.
"At least eight," Jamie admits.
"I..." Jean trails off, and worries her lower lip a little more. "I think you need to reintegrate them all," she states eventually, words a bit rushed. "And then... well, I'd see what happens if you let whatever system regulates the dupes, their personalities, your personality... let it stabilize a bit. That's what I'd try."
"I'm trying to reintegrate them - but I can't /find/ them, sometimes." Jamie massages his forehead a bit. "I've been trying to keep it down, but there's always an emergency, and I'm holding down a detective agency and two jobs and I may do a double major, and there's that one dupe who's been out for two months," Jamie rattless off-- "And hell if I know how any of it works."
"Well," Jean offers, tone a bit odd and eyes mildly wide after this recitation of tasks. "If you need a hand with the load, I'll give what aid I can. Even if it's just moral support if you need it for that two-months case."
"Yeah, uh. Thanks." Jamie's tone/expression goes rueful again as he lets it all trickle down. "/Anyway/. That's why I usually keep it to myself."
"I can see why," Jean replies, a smile appearing, if a crooked one. "I have my own little experiences with 'we', and I don't like talking about it either. But... I'm here if you need a hand."
"You do?" Jamie expresses his curiosity openly, there, if he does try so hard to keep it unpressing. "And I do appreciate it. But it will probably settle."
"Mmhmm," Jean confirms. "Maybe some day I'll tell you about them. But in the meantime, when is the last time you had dinner that didn't come in a box?" she wonders, the classic prelude to an offer to feed the college student.
"Uh." Jamie puts out another pause, but this one is almost jokish. "Gee. It must have been Thanksgiving dinner at Jack's house. So not so long!"
"Pfft, almost a month," Jean waves a hand. "C'mon, get your coat. You need Thai," she informs him.
"So be it," Jamie sighs. But grabs his coat.
Jamie's duplicates are problematic.
X-Men: Movieverse 2 - Sunday, December 23, 2007, 12:05 PM
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=XS= The Roof - Xavier's School
Through a small little door accessed from the attic, one may stand or sit out here on a flat section of the mansion's roof on cool summer evenings, or anytime really, to think. Most of the mansion's grounds can be viewed from here as well as Westchester on, beautiful in the spring and fall when all things are blooming anew or the earthy, patchwork quilt of autumn lays across the land. Visible in the distance is the city skyline of New York. Over by the gardens, a tall oak tree boasts a treehouse in its branches. Someone feeling adventurous could probably jump and make it...
[Exits : [J]ump and [B]ack [I]nside]
'Tis the day before the night before Christmas, and all through the house any self-respecting mice have headed for the hills in the face of a pack of modern American teenagers, and one small boy, all looking forward to just what might be waiting under the tree for them. And, to be fair, looking forward to others' reactions to their own collections. Nate, with the forceful command of a four year old who knows that he's adorable, has informed his mother that she, telepath, ('cause you can hear me Think Things, mum.') is to be exiled from the house for 'at least a millionty minutes' while he, Nate, assembles her present. Jean, amused, has complied. Because it is the nature of a Jean to multi-task, she's taken advantage of this to go sit out on the flat space of the roof, bundled against the cold, and have one of her rigidly-timed cigarettes.
Disturbed by someone's presence on the roof, Amp leaves her battered paperback behind and goes to investigate. She hangs back to watch the sounds for identification first, before finally revealing herself. She's minus one coat, just in her camo jacket, though it makes her shiver in the wind. "Can I bum one?"
Jean gives Amp a look not of startlement, for she has her own ways of tracking presences, but of mild consideration and a little bit of arithmetic. "You're 18, right?" she wonders, her own cigarette held with a loose gesture of her right wrist while her left hand pats thoughtfully at her jacket pocket.
"Yeah. Since July." Amp comes to sit down nearby, but definitely not too near. Surface thoughts mutter over memories of cigarettes past, but shy away from a particular presence in them, taking her back to now. "'Legally' adult. Such bullshit."
"Laws don't do too terribly well with specific exceptions," Jean offers, companionably comfortable as she sits on the edge of the roof, black wool coat wrapping her against the wind. Cigarettes and a lighter are offered over forthwith, and she resumes looking out across the snowy expanse of lawn, woods, and the dark grey water of the lake. "And so they draw a line somewhere and hope they get most people on the right side of it."
Amp doesn't have the praticed cup and light of a steady smoker, but she gets it lit in the wind after a couple tries, and she's had enough experience with it she doesn't cough and hack when she draws in her first breath. She hands the lighter back. "Thanks," she says, a little bedgrudgingly. She closes her eyes, the better to concetrate on the viseral sensations of smoking. "If we'd ever had any, I'd be so addicted by now."
The lighter vanishes into Jean's pocket, and she leaves a hand out for the pack of cigarettes as a laugh escapes her. "If I was willing to go back to being the nicotine fiend I was in my last year of residency, I'd be right there with you," she admits. "On the other hand, I suspect everyone likes me better when I'm not tearing heads off the second I hit withdrawl."
Amp takes another long drag, and hands back the pack. "Do I have to have a roommate?" she asks out of the blue. "I'd rather just keep sleeping in the attic."
"If you're here as a guest, you can stay in the attic as long as you like," Jean replies, vanishing the cigarette pack as well, and taking another drag, deep and fast to theoretically spike her blood nicotine. "If you sign up as a student and go to classes, well, then roommate it is, unless you want to explain to fifty-odd teenagers why -they- can't sleep where they want too."
Amp digests that in silence. "I do weird things with sounds when I'm having nightmares." The words are a struggle to admit. "I'm not very roommate friendly."
Jean's answer is a slow and thoughtful nod, accepting both the explanation and the struggle to give it. "A lot of us aren't," she admits. "A former student, Theresa Cassidy, used to run the risk of shattering someone's eardrums if she woke up screaming. We paired her with Kitty, for a while, since she could go intangible."
"That one girl. Cassy's friend. She's a sound user and immune. I think she'd rather drown me in the lake than look at her dead friend all the time, though." There's the cadence of hyperbole in that, fortunately, not truth. She taps some ash into the snow. "I don't actually have the money for it, anyway."
"There are things like scholarships," Jean points out. "Even if your parents weren't willing or able to help out." Her own cigarette is growing a rather impressive chain of ash at the end of it, as yet unnoticed. "And if Mira doesn't work, then there are others. Some of them might be happy with just wearing ear protection -- it's all about tradeoffs, I've been finding."
"It's quiet that's the problem, usually. I shut everything down." The teeth-clenched quality is back. "Dangerous to give away our position." The parental question is ignored completely, but for a flutter in her thoughts.
The flutter is noted, but not touched upon, and Jean finally notices the gathering ash when part of it can hold on no longer and drops to land atop her boot. Tap-tap-tap, and instead it floats free to lose itself in the winds. Cigarette held between her lips, she touches on parents from another angle instead. "I actually got a call from your parents the other day, after the news on the church broke," she admits.
Flutter turns to panic as Amp doesn't know quite what to feel. She drags on her cigarette to stall. "What did they want?"
"To see if you were OK, mostly," Jean answers, tap-tap-tapping again despite there being precious little new ash formed yet. "They couldn't get a hold of you, so they figured I might have better luck. They wanted you to come home to them, although I -think- I may have managed to persuade them from physically dragging you and instead leaving it up to you."
Amp chokes, not from the smoke. "They what?" Her hands shakes a little, holding her cigarette.
"Worried and wanted you to come home," Jean supplies. "They still do, of course."
"But--" Amp drops her head. "I can't. The town would go nuts, seeing me like this. Drag me to the camps." She's upset enough that she doesn't realize where she's slipped, there.
"No camps," Jean corrects, tone gentle as she studies the young woman beside her, and carefully, methodically stubs out her cigarette. "And I'm pretty sure they'd find a way to deal with the town. Parents," she notes, with a crooked little half smile and an absent look down at the school below them, where somewhere a small Grey-Summers child is methodically doing things with glue sticks and construction paper. "Have a tendency to move heaven and earth when their kids are involved."
"I'm not their kid." Amp lifts her shaking cigarette and drags, other hand clenched. "Do they really--? And they'd pay for me to come to school?"
"I get an impression they may think differently," quoth the Jean, with a sidelong look, but leaves it at that, instead awarding the actual questio an actual nod, and idly tapping her bootheels against the stone of the wall's edge. "They really. And I'm pretty sure they would, if that's what you want to do. And, as I said, there's always a few scholarships to help."
"I'd test like shit at the moment," Amp says, dismissing the scholarships with a wave of her hand. "You know what her grades were like, I'm sure, but I've had better things to do than keep up with my math skills." She comes around to parents once again, biting her lip. "Can I borrow twenty bucks from you, then? Like it's from them?"
"They're mostly financial need ones, actually," Jean admits. "So I guess 'bursary' would be the technical term, but... yeah," she sums up, terribly articulate as she rubs gloved hands together against the cold. The rubbing slows at the question, and Jean admits that "I don't have my wallet with me, but sure, I guess."
Amp clenches her fingers at the 'I guess', and stubs out her cigarette with a violence that speaks of the effort it took for her to ask the question. "Never mind." Her hands look a little painfully cold, with only bracers and no gloves. Her thoughts are awash with the need to prove herself by buying people presents mixing with the guilty wish to buy herself something or just give up the fight and /steal/ it--
"The 'I guess' wasn't because I don't want to," Jean notes, brows furrowing slightly at the potent bubble of emotions that explodes up from the Amp-seabed at the ill-chosen words. "It just caught me out. I really don't mind."
"Jamie said he'd pay me to help him, but I haven't found anything yet and I don't have /time/. I'll pay you back." Pride, of course. What little Amp has left dies ungracefully.
"Swing by my room with me?" Jean questions, accepting the promise with a little nod, and no questioning. Instead, she carefully swings her legs back up over the edge of the roof, and gets to her feet with only a slight bit of creaking from chilled knees. "If my cat hasn't managed to savage my wallet and hide it somewhere, I'll just be a minute."
Amp nods, silent, and gets up too, clambering in a praticed movement. "How many students /are/ here for Christmas? Jeremy talked like it was a whole big thing."
"I think we've got about... fifteen or so staying?" Jean replies, brushing snow off of the rump of her long coat with a fussy little gesture. "So it's a lot quieter than during the semester, where we're starting to get dangerously close to capacity, but add that to the faculty numbers and the alumni who show up and it's no surprise that Madame Vargas has two turkeys lined up, in addition to the hams."
Amp waits inside for her, as most of the snow soaked through her inadequate coat so there's nothing to brush off. "Christmas is stupid," she says, shortly.
"Oh?" wonders Jean, following not so slowly as to let in excess cold air. Thump, thump, thump down the steps into the attic she goes.
Amp starts down the attic stairs so her expression can't be seen. "It's all about consumerism, or family togetherness when everyone really just fights or you miss everyone who isn't here." Her voice wobbles, and shies away from a familiar face.
"It's supposed to be a time to reflect on and enjoy who and what you've got with you," Jean muses, her own voice carefully steady, although a wry little sigh escapes her. "Unfortunately, we seem to turn it into what and who you don't have, and how best to get them. Still," she concludes, tone thoughtful. "I guess in the end it's like everything else. What you make of it, and no magic in sight."
"And who do I have?" It's not quite such a sneering tone as the words suggest. Amp is actually thinking seriously about the question. She waits at the foot of the stairs, not knowing where go next.
"Us," Jean offers quietly, slipping Amp a quick glance as she passes her and leads off through the attic and out into the upstairs hall. "If you want us."
"Forgive me if I don't drink the kool-aid immediately this time," Amp says, with a bit of a snap. "I've had my fill of happy little families of kids getting together." She sets her jaw. "I'm not buying into any of this, you know. You feed me, and I'll take whatever fucking classes, but there's no happy family."
"Deal," Jean replies, and, for once, keeps any further attempts at kindly reassurances to herself. A nod directs them both down the length of the faculty's hallway, and thus she leads off, the goal an end-of-the-hall room with the door cracked open just enough to reveal part of the cat flumped across the threshold.
Amp eyes the cat suspiciously. Cats are pointy. Still, an animal is an animal, even to a dog person, and she pats it diffidently. "Jamie said he could help me with a place to stay, actually, if he hires me. So I just need to take enough classes here to get my diploma."
Calico cat Curie stretches at the petting, flexing her claws and yawning to display all of the points at once, before sleepily rolling over to expose belly fluff. Jean, meanwhile, rummages around atop a corner desk, looking for the mythical wallet. The room itself is large, as befits a Victorian-era mansion, although the furnishings seem to be in modern world decor, with a screen hiding where her bed must live, and a fine old fireplace faced by a cream coloured sofa rather than something involving carved wood and uncomfortable buttons. "In that case, I could probably see which of the courses here would be enough for you to take your GED, if you're not worried about college prep."
"I'll go to college if my parents pay for it." Amp rubs the tummy like she would a dog, only to jerk away from a swat. Look but don't touch the cat!
The answer that jerk away gets is an imperious meow. The cat did not say you should stop petting it! Jean muffles a smile as she keeps digging about for her purse, currently potentially located beneath a stack of medical journals by her movements. "Well, in that case I'll get some placement tests together and throw you some course syllabi for the full diploma program. Keeping options open, and all that."
Amp tries petting not on the tummy, but she's deeply suspicious now. "And I have to have a roommate," she says, circling back around to the original subject. "Whatever you do, don't fucking give me her old one."
The cat is pleased. The cat rewards such obedient human behavior with another curlicue twisting that brings her head around that she may groom the petting hand. "Hah, -no-," Jean agrees, on the idea of old roommates of Honor's. "Although, actually... would it bother you to room with Autumn?" she asks.
Amp swallows. "Will she--does she want anything to do with me--" She retreats into herself before she can display even more raw vulnerability.
"Autumn's been wondering the exact same thing about herself," Jean shares, at last extracting her purse from behind and beneath a stack of books on introductory cell biology. "If you have a chance, go see her, and then let me know whether the situation is OK for roommates."
Amp straightens from her crouch over the cat. "I'll try," she says softly, and then just waits, not quite with her hand extended, but with that in her thoughts. Money, please, so she can escape now.
Twenty dollars exactly, no more to seem like charity, no less to seem like disapproval, is freed from Jean's wallet and given over to Amp. "Come see me when you have," she encourages, with a small little smile that suggests it would be soft, if she could believe that would be accepted.
Amp folds the bill and holds it close, so it can't be taken back. "Okay," she says grudgingly. "I have to go shopping now." And with that, she turns and flees.
She will, however, accept money and an education. This is acceptable.