Regaining lost ground

[Bobby Drake]

Thap.. thap… thap… thap… thap…

Despite his best efforts to focus on his body, Bobby’s mind is jarred into self-awareness by the slight pain that attends each rhythmic impact, making him too aware of his rubbery legs and shortness of breath to make this anything but a tedious and unpleasant exercise. He hasn’t been this out of shape since he first arrived at the Institute, and he’s pretty sure he’d be sweating buckets if he didn’t have his cryonic powers back; as it stands he’s red-faced and gasping for air like a beached fish.

"…fuck it…" he rasps faintly. "…not ready… for this… yet…" He punches the STOP button and lets his arms hold up most of his weight as the treadmill slows, trying not to think about the pathetic impression he’s giving the other kids in the gym. Finally it beeps to a stop, displaying a total distance and time that he doesn’t even bother looking at.

OK… well, we can add ‘regular exercise’ to the list of things I wasn’t doing while doped. He remembers the period between injecting himself in the Baxter Building and waking up in the medbay, but the memories are weird and unreliable, as if they’d happened to somebody else… so he’d hoped that his lack of recollection of even stepping foot in the gym during that time had just been a memory glitch. No such luck. Five months out of conditioning…and recovering from the damned shoulder injury before that… it’ll take me weeks to get back into any kind of shape.

Which he fully intends to do. They say you don’t start getting better ‘till you’ve really hit bottom… well, I’d say my brain-damaged performance this year qualifies. In the last six months he’s lost his mutant abilities, his physical conditioning, a good chunk of whatever mental stability he’d had to begin with, his status as an X-Man, any real chance of graduating in June, and John – but he’s gotten his powers back, and he’s going to treat that as a good omen. The rest of it… well, he’ll tackle them as the opportunity arises.

It occurs to him as he notices the covert glances he gets from other people using the gym equipment that he’s also lost any reputation he might have had as anything other than a complete nutjob. Great. They’re probably still expecting the Amazing Flattened Affect Man. Well, that’s something I can do something about, anyway. He waves cheerfully to the nearest few and greets them casually as he saunters back towards the lockers, ready to stop and chat if anybody shows any interest.

[Laurie Collins]

The death of the gym teacher’s determination to keep Laurie in a general gym class had occurred, she suspected, two days ago, at approximately two in the afternoon, when in the middle of a game of tag football the entire class had suddenly shrieked in unison and darted away from a pass arcing down the field. Today she’d come down and found a note asking her to go to the basement gymnasium and exercise as she saw fit. It had started off very well she thought- she’d sat on some sort of machine where you stuck your feet under a cushioned bar and lifted them against resistance for most of the period while reading Fight Club which wasn’t really her sort of book overall but which seemed to be requisite cultural knowledge and after the latest variation of the “the first rule of Fight Club is don’t talk about Fight Club” joke that had gone right over her head until someone explained (it had been a Chuck Norris joke but even greater cultural understanding was not enough of an inducement to watch Walker Texas Ranger) she’d decided she had better get on that. So she’d had physical exercise and no one had thrown anything at her or made her jump over things or hit things with sticks or throw things at other people and she’d read an interesting book. Now she’s lifting a small hand-held five pound weight with one hand and holding up her book with the other, because she thinks it would probably be silly and uneven to exercise her legs and not her arms.

When she hears Bob’s greeting called in the general direction of the crowd of students she’s on the outskirts of she jumps in surprise, fumbles her book, and lets go of the weight to steady it. The weight impacts the floor with a loud, metallic clunk and rolls quickly away from its incompetent handler towards Bob’s unsuspecting foot as Laurie blushes and raises her newly freed hand half way up as if intending to cover her face and then not quite finishing the gesture at the last moment.

“…hi.” she says, returning his greeting after a moment of stunned silence caused both by embarrassment over her truly spectacular clumsiness and awkwardness since the last time she’d seen him he’d been dying and for a few months before that had been some sort of strange, emotionless, cyborg-person and what exactly does one say then anyway? ‘Glad you’re not dead?’, ‘So, have any interesting Freudian dreams in coma-land?’ in the end she settles for- “Uh, sorry if that hit you. Apparently I’m hazardous in gym-class-situations no matter where you put me.” the last with a sort of tentative half-smile to show she’s joking, if a bit weakly. She’s loosened up a little since her conversation with Bob on her second day of attendance, though to be fair it would have been hard for her to get more uptight.

[Bobby Drake]

Bobby looks up, startled, at the sound of Laurie’s hand-weight dropping to the floor, then watches the thing roll pathetically towards him until he stops it with his foot, then back up at her, bemused. "You know, you could just say --"

> "…hi."

He nods, grinning a little. "Exactly. Though I’ll give the weight thing points for being a novel greeting. Is there a note attached to it, or is it more of a symbolic message?" For a moment he considers kicking the weight up with his foot and catching it, but the burning feeling in his thigh-muscles warns him that it might be a really bad idea, so instead he bends over to pick it up and makes a show of inspecting it for clues before handing it back to her and nodding in the direction of her book.

"’Fight Club’, huh? That’s quite a long way from, um, was it ‘Letters to a Young Poet’? No, something else by the same guy… Eliot? No, that’s not it…" he shrugs a little sheepishly, his attempt to recall their first meeting disrupted by unreliable memory, and for just a moment he misses the ability to look that sort of thing up just by thinking about it, like he could have a month ago.

The irony doesn’t escape him, though: a month ago it never would have occurred to him to make friendly conversation, except as some kind of experimental protocol; a month ago he wouldn’t be enjoying the exercise of trying to make a pretty girl smile. On the whole, he’s happier this way – especially with his original powers back. (Though, remembering that conversation and her anxiety about manipulating the emotions of others, he wonders whether she preferred his “emotionless zombie” state…and promptly puts the question on his “don’t want to know the answer” pile.)

"…anyway, is the book any good? The movie was all right, though to tell you the truth I’ve kinda lost my taste for violent movies." …they never get it right., he manages not to add out loud, as it falls firmly into the “things too weird to actually say” category.

[Laurie Collins]

"Exactly. Though I’ll give the weight thing points for being a novel greeting. Is there a note attached to it, or is it more of a symbolic message?"

Laurie looks down, hunching her shoulders a bit in a half shrug, but glances quickly back up at him through a curtain of blonde hair partially shielding her face to smile slightly at his joking and slowly reaches out a hand to take the weight back. After more exposure to people her own age she’s lost some of the overly-serious demeanor from the last time they spoke but she’s still too shy around Bob to joke back, can’t help but be conscious that three weeks ago he almost died right in front of her.

Books, however, are obviously a different matter and she looks back up more directly as he switches the focus to the one in her hand.

"’Fight Club’, huh? That’s quite a long way from, um, was it ‘Letters to a Young Poet’? No, something else by the same guy… Eliot? No, that’s not it…"

“Ah, yes, well Fight Club seems to be part of the whole cultural lexicon you know? Yesterday my lab partner was trying to joke around with me or something I guess and said ‘you know Chuck Norris is allowed to talk about Fight Club’ so I asked him what Fight Club was and why non-Chuck Norris people couldn’t talk about it and he looked at me like I had three heads so I am reading Fight Club now to avoid the three-head look.” she informs him rather breathily in one of her strange tongue-tied to ramble-y in under sixty seconds moments. “Oh, and it was The Book of Monastic Life by Rilke but the bit I showed you was from Letters to a Young Poet and…um…T.S. Eliot is a good poet too so…still correct!” she says optimistically giving him another slightly sheepish smile and shrugging again.

"…anyway, is the book any good? The movie was all right, though to tell you the truth I’ve kinda lost my taste for violent movies."

Her smile falters at the last sentence and she bites her lip for a moment, scenes from the invasion and riot springing readily from a place far closer to the front of her mind than is comfortable. “I guess I sort of know what you mean…” she says quietly, eyes flicking quickly away from his face, focusing on nothing for a moment as she visibly composes herself. She’s gotten better at controlling her pheromones in the past few months, most of the time she knows when she’s emitting and can stop herself from letting a really strong emotion out, but it still takes concentration and the subtler forms of control are still beyond her to notice or contain. “But, uhm, yeah, I guess it’s okay.” she adds, shaking herself out of her bout of unusual, even for her, solemnity, “I mean, Palahniuk is a great writer and it’s a good story but it’s…well it’s a little weird reading about people who want to be different and unleash their…primal urges and whatnot.”

She turns away briefly to put her weight back on the rack with comically exaggerated care to make sure it doesn’t fall again.

“So, um, did you get a new roommate? I hear they’re kind of shuffling everyone around.” she adds, trying her hand at this ‘being conversational’ thing because it’s rude to let Bob do all the work and it’s really the only outlet she has for showing that she’s glad he isn’t a robot or dead since it would be a little weird to come out and just say that.

[Bobby Drake]

> " well Fight Club seems to be part of the whole cultural lexicon you know?"

Bobby’s mouth quirks a little at the comment, and the anecdote that follows it. He considers pointing out that among normal teenagers (and the Institute’s residents, while abnormal in myriad ways, are pretty typical in this respect) what’s actually in the “cultural lexicon” is the movie rather than the book, but ultimately decides not to… why spoil her fun?

Besides, it’s not like he would have seen the movie himself if John hadn’t dragged him to every midnight showing in a ten-mile radius, after all. And no, he’s not going to get himself down by thinking about that. A little of that goes a very long way.

> "Oh, and it was The Book of Monastic Life by Rilke"

He snaps his fingers. "Right, Rilke, that’s it… and, yeah, the Book of Monastic Life… I remember now, you were reading it in the chapel." He looks around the gym, then at the book in her hands. "Heh. The Book of Monastic Life in the chapel, Fight Club in the gym… what do you read in the kitchen?"

> "um…T.S. Eliot is a good poet too so…still correct!"

Bobby smiles. "Any chance I can get you to grade my homework for the next month? I might actually graduate in that case; you’re an awfully forgiving grader."

> " it’s a little weird reading about people who want to be different and unleash their…primal urges and whatnot."

"Um… yeah." And just what do you say to that, Drake? The silence stretches out awkwardly as Bobby searches for a new topic until Laurie offers him one… which threatens to stretch the silence out even more awkwardly as he remembers how he lost his previous roommate. Oh, for crying out loud, let it go already, Drake. It happened, it sucks, doesn’t mean you have to go all weepy every time the band plays your song. Time to grow up.

"Yeah, me and Matt – um, Matthew – are roomies now. Do you know him?" He chuckles a little and adds "I mean, of course you know him… it’s not that big a school… I mean, are you guys friends? He’s been around forever but I’ve barely talked to him, beyond losing a bunch of games of one-on-one on the basketball court. I mean, before – well, you know. " Before I stopped being able to have a normal conversation. He blushes suddenly at the memory of the last time he talked to Laurie in this gym, during Jackson’s short-lived Intramurals thing, and suspects in retrospect that he may have been the one to shut it down with his weirdness.

"Anyway, he’s actually pretty cool. Kinda shy, which is pretty funny knowing his sister Toni, but a good kid. And one hell of a musician; we should get him to do a concert for us one of these days."

Before the silence can do more than threaten to grow again, he follows up with “How about you? Rooming with anyone interesting?"

[Laurie Collins]

"Heh. The Book of Monastic Life in the chapel, Fight Club in the gym… what do you read in the kitchen?"

“The Silence of the Lambs.” Laurie responds instantly, completely deadpan, then blushes as her brain- the part of it that exudes awkwardness anyway- catches up with her mouth. It had been so much like the sort of literary and pop culture puns that she and her mother slung back and forth at each other over dinner that the answer had risen automatically before she could remember that she was too awkward to joke.

"Yeah, me and Matt – um, Matthew – are roomies now. Do you know him?"

Crash a shelf of weights collapses as Laurie gives a violent start and knocks into it, sending at least fifteen weights slamming into the ground. She jumps at the noise (and probably exudes the most confusing teenage-girl mixture of pheromones Bob’s ever felt) but doesn’t turn immediately, giving Bob a classic ‘oh shit’ look for a long moment before finally whirling and kneeling down to begin gathering them up, what’s visible of her face through the hair curtaining it off from the side is obviously beet red.

“Um, yes, we um… that is… yes I do know him, um, pretty well. He’s…nice.” she stutters out, still gathering weights, though she looks up as he asks another question-

“How about you? Rooming with anyone interesting?"

That is definitely safer territory. “Oh, yes, I’m rooming with Sofia Mantega.” she responds, nodding slightly as if reassuring herself she’s got the name right. “She’s new but she seems really nice and she has wind powers so I won’t have to worry too much about my pheromones.” she bites her lip slightly thinking about this- she’s never really shared space with anyone but her mom and even then she’d had a lot of time to herself since she and her mother are both fairly solitary people. Still Sofia had seemed really nice and she won’t have to worry about her pheromones…maybe this will be a good thing.

[Bobby Drake]

> "The Silence of the Lambs. "

Bobby stares blankly at Laurie for a second, poleaxed by the deadpan rapid-fire response, then bursts out laughing. "With… mint sauce… I’m guessing?" he manages to gasp out in between bouts of laughter before he finally gets himself under control.

"Oh, my… I haven’t laughed like that in…" he trails off, trying to remember how long it’s been, then becoming a little embarrassed by how long he’s spent trying to remember, and finally makes a big show of sheepishly counting on his fingers before adding "…a very long time. I’m afraid to ask what you read in the bathroom."

The surprising cheeriness turns sour when he mentions Matthew’s name… Oh, hell, are they worst enemies or something? until Bobby recognizes the whole knocking-things-over-and-blushing pattern from his own experience, his memory jogged a fair bit by Laurie’s pheromones, all of which is far more familiar to him than he’d really like to admit.

> "Um, yes, we um… that is… yes I do know him, um, pretty well. He’s…nice."

"Mm… yeah. ‘Nice.’" His mouth quirks in equal doses of amusement and sympathy as he helps pick up the spilled weights, and he can’t resist adding "Cute, too, eh?" with just a hint of waggling eyebrows, just to see what kind of reaction he inspires.

[Laurie Collins]

"Mm… yeah. ‘Nice.’"

Laurie looks up from her weight-gathering, from his tone even she can tell that he’s probably on to her and her blushing intensifies as she ducks her head and struggles to calm her embarrassment and get a cap on her pheromones.

"Cute, too, eh?"

In response to which she drops the weight she’s holding, barely yanking her other hand out of its path in time. Okay, definitely on to me.

“I-I guess so?” she stammers out, collecting the last of the weights and standing up quickly as she replaces them. More than just nice and cute… but I can’t do anything about it except avoid him and upset him. The mental reminder of the current state of affairs between them sobers her and the sheepish smile that’s been lifting the corners of her lips ever so slightly sinks into an absent frown as she rubs the palm of one hand anxiously against the material of the sweatpants covering her thigh. “But, um, I’m sure you’ll get along.” she adds, trying for an unconcerned tone and a smile and probably only half succeeding.

“Anyway… what else is going on?” she segues awkwardly, because really there aren’t many questions she can ask that don’t lead back to the almost-dying thing, even the one she’s settled on isn’t really 100% clear. People should come with a list of suggested topics.

[Bobby Drake]

> " I-I guess so? [..] But, um, I’m sure you’ll get along."

Bobby takes a couple of long, slow breaths to get his emotions – well, OK, most likely her emotions – under control.

It’s hard to tell what’s his and what’s hers – impossible, really – so he’s assuming it’s all her for the moment… especially the stuff about Matthew, since that would be a complication he really doesn’t need in his life right now. (He wonders, idly, how her pheromones would have interacted with his earlier, emotionally impaired, self… and is just as glad to never have put it to the test.)

He can’t quite figure out whether her anxiety about Matthew is ordinary boy-girl stuff, or Mutant High stuff, and either way he feels awkward about intruding. Yeah, he tells himself ironically, which you absolutely should, because you’re eminently qualified to give relationship advice around here.

> " Anyway… what else is going on? "

He laughs at the generic change of subject, but goes along. "You’re asking me? Hell, I’ve been out of commission for weeks." Or months, depending on who you ask. He gestures towards the gym equipment and shrugs, "Mostly just trying to catch up. What with one thing and another I’ve fallen behind on, well, everything." He laughs again at the evasiveness of that… well, ask a generic question, get a generic answer…

"How about you? I mean, other than tall, red, and handsome… are you settling in OK?" He winces at the question, realizing that she’s hardly a new student anymore, and adds "I mean, how’d your first semester go? I’m guessing you aced English Lit, if nothing else…?"

[Laurie Collins]

"Mostly just trying to catch up. What with one thing and another I’ve fallen behind on, well, everything."

Laurie nods, he seems tired even if he isn’t sweating like any normal person would be, and half-hums a probably unconscious sympathetic, “Mmm.” as a sign that she’s listening even if she doesn’t have any reply. It’s a habit she’s picked up without realizing it from her mother who, while outspoken around her daughter or in her defense, is almost as quiet as Laurie herself in the presence of the unknown.

The second comment about Matthew earns him another flustered look and she shrugs, biting her lip hard in the old nervous habit, though she also squints a bit incredulously at him as if to say do you just enjoy feeling like a teenage girl with a crush?

"I mean, how’d your first semester go? I’m guessing you aced English Lit, if nothing else…?"

Which brings up a whole new sort of discomfort and she fidgets in place a little, face taking on a sheepish cast as she answers.

“Oh, well, my grades were okay. Um, A minus in Lit actually since there’s a participation component as well as papers and other such things and I tend to just try to stay out of Mr. Shepardson’s way since my mom, umm…” she trails off and tries to think of a way to phrase this diplomatically before finally giving up and sighing in sheepish resignation. “Well, she sort of, er, hit him.” she finishes in a mutter.

[Bobby Drake]

Bobby starts to feel a little bad for teasing the girl after the seventh or eighth nervous tic and look of consternation, and lets the subject of her obvious attraction to his new roommate drop… but not without making a mental note to follow up with him about it. Bobby Drake, professional matchmaker, at your service! (Except that in retrospect that really isn’t as funny as he’d originally thought.)

Besides, the change of subject is totally worth it.

"Hit him? Seriously? Wow… that’s…" he shakes his head, amused, trying to find the proper word and failing. "That’s something. Yeah, I remember you telling me about your mom… it’s a good thing you turned out to be the one in the family with powers, instead of your folks. Do I even want to know what set her off?"

[Laurie Collins]

“…it’s a good thing you turned out to be the one in the family with powers, instead of your folks.”

Laurie blinks rapidly and stares for a moment, unable to come up with a response, or even an emotion, for the level of irony there. He’s just hitting all the points isn’t he? If it weren’t rude to put all your problems on someone who just got finished almost dying I might just start answering him directly she thinks wryly and makes a noncommittal noise, eyes carefully looking everywhere but at his face. Though maybe I should tell him sometime. He’s nice, he wouldn’t think it meant anything about me would he? He could tell me whether the teachers would be mad I hadn’t brought it up before… but then they’d still want me to find out his name probably and my mom doesn’t need all that dug back up again. She’s been visibly mulling this over and visibly nervous, though she hopes he’ll assume it’s just more of the same with her, and when he continues on she has to jerk herself back to the conversation.

“Do I even want to know what set her off?"

“The invasion.” she says softly, then looks up and gives him a half-smile because it’s strangely, perversely nice not to have some sort of trauma (aside from embarrassment) associated with a part of that event. “I guess I shouldn’t have but I called her when they’d finished with my head, I don’t like making her worry when… well she’s had to worry a lot. It was just sort of automatic though, you know? But, um, anyway she came down right away and saw me and the school and everything and started looking sort of, er, tense, and then she asked where the headmaster was and...well, she went to go hit him.” Laurie concludes, the story coming out in a sort of embarrassed ramble. “Not that she was intending to hit him I don’t think, at first, just yell at him, but she’s sort of over-protective so…yes. She smacked him and yelled at him and then took me home while I was concussed and talked about pulling me out of the school or having me commute from home but I guess the teachers talked her out of it. So now I am here and trying very hard to stay out of Mr. Shepardson’s way since this has been added to the whole calling-his-action-figures-dolls-thing.” she adds, nodding emphatically as punctuation.

[Bobby Drake]

His reference to Laurie having the mutant powers in the family clearly makes her nervous, and Bobby wonders for a moment whether he’d accidentally stumbled on the truth. Could her mom be a mutant? That would certainly explain her emphatic defense of Laurie, and her active involvement with the Institute. Yeah, he replies to himself with a sneer, could be, or she could just be a good mom. Not everyone calls the cops on their kids, after all.

Anyway, whatever it is it’s clearly not a subject she’s comfortable discussing, and Bobby figures he’s hit his quota of making people uncomfortable lately, so he lets the subject drop.

He tries very hard not to giggle as Laurie relates the story of her mom and Sheppard after the Invasion … the image of someone’s mom wandering around the Institute after that mess, inspecting the explosive craters with a white glove and poking an umbrella into the wreckage of military grade combat helicopters, is almost too much. Of course, for all he knows Laurie’s mom is a Marine sergeant-major or something, but the image is still funny.

Fortunately, keeping the laughter under control is made easier by the residual nervous-ons Laurie’s still putting out, and even easier by remembering the Invasion itself. Instead he nods attentively and makes concerned-sounding “Mm…” noises. "Well, I’m sure he’s forgotten about the ‘doll’ thing by now," he adds helpfully, if insincerely.

"And really, you can hardly blame your mom for freaking out after all that. We try to schedule our major crises for later in the semester, but sometimes things get out of hand," he adds with an attempt at a grin, and waves his index finger back and forth like a little flagpole as a private joke. Hey, at least she wasn’t here when Stryker kidnapped all the kids… bet her mom would’ve outright exploded at that.

He remembers seeing Laurie in the medbay now… he’d been pretty distracted by Tobias and Toni and being half-electrocuted, but he remembers her with Matthew, and a lot of blood. She’d seemed pretty shaken, and he can’t blame her; he wonders how much of the “pull me out of school” was actually her mother’s idea.

"I, um…" he hesitates a little, suspecting this isn’t a subject she’s entirely comfortable discussing, "I hear you did a good job of protecting yourself from those soldiers who attacked you… especially for someone with no physical powers or combat training. Bet it freaked you out a little too, huh? Sure did me. "

It’s still weird how much he feels like he’s come back from a long vacation when he’s actually been here all along… and never quite so much as when discussing stuff that’s happened. His memories of the Invasion are months old, just like everybody else’s, but during the months when everybody else was processing their feelings it and talking to each other and to counselors, he’d taken an emotional leave of absence, so it’s all kind of stewing around in his head, preserved and fermented. Not for the first time, he reminds himself to call one of the therapists Sheppard had recommended and schedule an appointment or twenty.

[Laurie Collins]

((find the firefly shout out and win...well nothing but ohwell))

"And really, you can hardly blame your mom for freaking out after all that. We try to schedule our major crises for later in the semester, but sometimes things get out of hand,"

The finger-waving accompanying that sentence earns a weak smile from Laurie and she attempts to respond in the same lightly joking vein,

“Yeah well just make sure you’re never the one scheduling them, my mom doesn’t need much reason to decide mutants who aren’t me are dangerous and crises are a pretty good reason.” she mock threatens, then blanches a bit as she realizes the faux pas- while most people would find it normal to consider mutants dangerous an X-man probably wouldn’t and she’s almost relieved when he switches back to grimmer subjects. Almost.

"I, um…I hear you did a good job of protecting yourself from those soldiers who attacked you… especially for someone with no physical powers or combat training.”

“Good?” her voice comes out flat but there’s a squeak ready to break the pitch at any moment, just waiting for a fraction less resolve and control and she swallows hard. She hasn’t thought about this in awhile, when she’d told her mom the whole story, how she’d used her pheromones intentionally on someone else, Gail had just replied “Hey, if someone tries to kill you, you try to kill them right back okay?” and then started checking her head-bandage and muttering about useless headmasters. But it wasn’t okay with her. I could tell. Since then she’s just tried to forget it, tell herself it was a bad dream like the bad dreams that still follow from it, and when she answers her tone is a little cold- not with anger but with forced detachment, giving it a slightly eerie cast. “Yes, good. I got scared, they got so scared one of them shot the other one then knocked me unconscious, I woke up just in time to see him bleed to death because they wouldn’t even stop to help their own… it was the first time I used my pheromones on purpose. I made him go to sleep so he wouldn’t…” she shakes her head and lowers her eyes, remembering the sound of someone trying to breath through blood. “And then even after I managed to do that I just stood there while Miss. Craft got stabbed about a foot away and then made a bunch of people cry and throw up so we could get away afterwards. Yeah, I did great.”

“…Bet it freaked you out a little too, huh? Sure did me. "

That bit of sane sounding concern snaps her out of it somehow and she blushes, looking up at him again. “It did… I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said… I mean you have your own problems obviously that aren’t months old and I shouldn’t have been rude...”

[Bobby Drake]

> " Yeah well just make sure you’re never the one scheduling them, my mom doesn’t need much reason to decide mutants who aren’t me are dangerous and crises are a pretty good reason. "

"Eh, I’ll just tell her Sheppard made me do it with his devious mind-control powers. She already doesn’t like him, so it’ll take me off… the… " he trails off and lets his finger drop as her face goes from humorous to worried, and makes a distinct effort to calm his own anxiety, not quite sure what bothered her. "Um… anyway," he adds, trying to recover, "you, um, have any plans for Mother’s Day?"

> " Yes, good. I got scared, they got so scared one of them shot the other one then knocked me unconscious, I woke up just in time to see him bleed to death because they wouldn’t even stop to help their own… it was the first time I used my pheromones on purpose. I made him go to sleep so he wouldn’t…"

For a moment, Bobby’s puzzled by the last part… so he wouldn’t what? Then the “bleeding to death” part sinks in, and he gets the picture. "Oh," he says, not quite sure what to say in the face of the wave of guilt and nausea. Somehow Bobby’d gotten through the whole event without actually killing anyone – not such a huge trick when he considers how basically useless he’d been – which makes any reassurance he might give her seem more than a little hollow. Still, he feels like he ought to say something reassuring. " Are you… I mean, did you talk to anybody about it, afterwards? It’s hard, the first time… I mean, not that we make a habit of it, I mean it’s especially hard… or, well, not that it really gets easier, but… I’m gonna shut up about this now before I did this hole any deeper, OK?"

Yeah. That helped.

> " And then even after I managed to do that I just stood there while Miss. Craft got stabbed about a foot away and then made a bunch of people cry and throw up so we could get away afterwards. Yeah, I did great. "

"Wait, wait, wait, slow down there." This time he’s talking without even thinking, which strangely seems to be an advantage with Laurie, and he likes that.

"You make it sound like you screwed up. You didn’t.

First off, Toni’s got the iron shielding and the superstrength and you’ve got the subtle mental powers; second off, she’s been here longer than the hills and you’d been here a month. Either way it was her job to keep you safe, not the other way around." He meets her gaze for this one; there’s not a lot he knows for sure but he’s on solid ground here. "I’m serious. I’ve sent Toni on field missions, for Christ’s sake. She’s bullet-proof and can punch her way through armor plate. I don’t care how it makes you feel, if one of you’s gonna get stabbed, it should be her every time."

He waves aside her apologies with an airy hand, not wanting to let her change the subject. In some ways she’s absolutely right – her problems are months old, his seem fresh and raw – but it’s actually a weird kind of relief to be of some use to someone for once. He’s one of the older students, after all; he’s an X-Man for crying out loud – or at least he used to be. He ought to be providing support, not asking for it all the time.

"Besides, from what you just said, you provided cover for yourself and a wounded teammate and others to get you all out of a danger zone before anybody else was hurt… with hardly any training and a power you can barely control. Damn, I wish I’d done half as good when Stryker invaded… you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of."