New Years: Woodland Conversations
X-Men: Movieverse 2 - Sunday, January 10, 2010, 1:11 PM
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It is cold enough in New York this afternoon that simply breathing is enough to leave dragon-trails of steam lingering in the air. Pete has added cigarette smoke to this Smaug effect, retreating out from the claustrophobia of idealist central under the pretense of needing a smoke break. He wanders, apparently aimless, cataloguing his surroundings with an air of thoroughly false distraction. Verdict the first: the grounds are BIG.
BIG indeed, with the lawns alone accounting for two acres of now winter-brown grass wrapping the grand old house on the hill. Cold as it is, the bulk of the teenagers that remain over the holidays are indoors, exclaiming over X-Boxes and cute classmates as teenagers are wont to do. Off in the distance, the faint sound of thudding horse hooves carries well from the stables and the woods in the crisp air, speaking to the insanity of the horsey set. And somewhat nearer, the excited yap-bark of a dog can be heard, mingled with a giggle from over by an old oak with a treehouse in.
The yap-bark draws Pete's attention before the giggling does, and lacking any other concrete destination, he angles vaguely over towards it. There is, perhaps, a hint of wariness in his approach (does the velociraptor-dog /yap/?), though it is muted to the point of nigh-invisibility.
The dino-dog is not out today, it seems, for what comes bounding towards Pete with his head cocked over his shoulder to bark at a second dog is a gloriously fluffy male golden retriever, bounding over small drifts of old snow with coat flying wildly and legs at full extension. Bark! Bark bark! An answering bark, shading closer to the yip side of things, comes from a complete and utter mutt that's got traces of corgi somewhere in his ancestry to explain small size and a batlike pair of ears. The source of the giggles is leaning with his hand on the smaller dog's collar, attempting to restrain his leaping. A boy of about six, red hair still with the high brightness of youth, he's calling an exhortation of "Pancake! You can't get Pickles! He's gotta get the stick!" Although dressed warmly, there's a somewhat haphazard quality to his clothing, with boots on the wrong feet and his jacket layered over a scarf so long that it's either meant for an adult or is a gift from a visiting Time Lord. The laughter and the advance continues, until Nate bumps up against the wariness that is Pete. He goggles. "Hi."
Though the hint of amusement in Pete's expression at the large, fluffy dog and the smaller batlike dog is by no means unguarded, it is, perhaps, far closer than the norm. It veils again and shades slightly wry as he catches sight of the oddly-dressed small person restraining the smaller of the dogs, and the wariness takes on a hint of unease. Children are problematic. "Hello," he replies. And then, because damned if he's going to be rendered uncomfortably speechless by someone too young to see over the the steering wheel of a car, let alone have a driver's license, "So, are you the master of the estate, then?"
The child in question does not go away. Nate flashes Pete a grin and wanders closer, trusting that even unfamiliar faces are safe ones, behind the walls of his home. "Naw," says he, taking in man and manner and cigarette with equal fascination. "I'm Nate. It's The Professor that's in charge here." Capital letters audible, he wanders closer still, pausing to let loose a whining Pancake, who promptly closes the gap to go sniff interrogatively at Pete's shoes. Staring upwards with grave solemnity, Nate wonders, "Are you Kitty's -boyfriend-?"
"I am," Pete confirms. He crouches down, extending a hand for the dog to sniff at instead. Hello, dog. If it puts him closer to eye-level with Nate, this is entirely coincidence. "Pete Wisdom, to spare you the awkward epithets. You'd be Dr Grey's son, yeah?"
A slobbery pink tongue flashes out, bathing Pete's hand with canine cooties as Pancake barks. Pickles, meanwhile, has come snuffling up to the rear, tongue lolling and tail wagging as he deposits a stick. "What's an epithet?" Nate wonders, reflex curiosity attached to the new word. His own identity, can, apparently, wait a little longer.
Pete snorts quietly at the doggy hello, and reaches up to scratch behind Pancake's GIANT EARS once he's relatively sure he won't be chewed on for his efforts. Nate's question gives him pause, and he blinks in bemusement at the boy before answering with a belated, "It's something used to identify someone by /what/ they are. Sort of a stand-in for a name."
"Oh, like how Mom is called Phoenix sometimes, and Uncle Logan is Wolverine and Daddy is Cyclops." Nate -understands- these epithets, although his young brow furrows a moment later as he admits that "Daddy still has two eyes, though, so--" But whatever line of thought the Nateling is about to wander down is interrupted by a distant call through the trees of "Nathaniel Christopher Grey-Summers!" in the tones of pure Mother. Nate looks briefly guilty, and ducks behind the sheltering wall of Pete.
Pete, though years removed from having any such tone directed to his address, recognizes it well enough. He slants a half-amused, half-suspicious glance in the general direction of the ducking Nate, and wonders, low-voiced, "Sneaking out, are we?" There is one last scratch of the small dog's ears before he stands, the heavy fall of his long wool coat still providing something of a screen for the World's Smallest Time Lord.
As the footsteps of another adult approach, the bark of a golden retriever frisking about them suggests just who it was that ratted Nate out. Jean arrives in a long wool coat of her own, Pickles at her heels and a hint of amusement crooking the corner of her mouth that tempers her tone a little bit. "-Nate-," she informs the Totally Invisible, For Reals six year old hiding behind Pete. "What did your father tell you about taking the dogs out?" There is more in this vein, brief and with the sound of a script that's been rehearsed by both parties, as Nate kicks one booted foot in the snow, drawls out an apology, and consents to go back to the house. With the dogs. "...I hope he wasn't annoying you, Mr. Wisdom," she admits, one hand lifted to tug at a strayed lock of her auburn hair.
"Confusing, mostly," Pete replies. Some measure of tension eases from the set of his shoulders as the small boy departs. Adults, even /telepathic/ adults, are more comfortable company than the young and impressionable. "I think we were in the middle of a vocabulary lesson." He takes a drag of his half-forgotten cigarette, and rolls one shoulder in a shrug. What can you do?
"He does have the reflexes of someone growing up in the middle of a school," Jean offers, watching the small retreating figure with its two canine outriders with a warmth of deep affection lending mobility to her normal serene expression. "And he also has no concept that adults here aren't just communal property for his amusement. Thank you," she offers, a hint of sheepishness touching her lips before she studies his cigarette sidelong, checks her watch, and then goes a-patting through her coat pockets in a ritual set of gestures that Pete shoul recognize.
It is unlikely that Pete would not notice that lapse of serenity, but he does not, at least, make any comment on it. "I haven't met many children who do," he offers in return. It is true enough, though he hasn't actually met many children at /all/. At least, not since he'd been one. The coat-patting ritual is acknowledged with only a hint of vaguely sympathetic amusement - he does indeed recognize it, and only too well.
Eventually, success! A silver cigarette case is extracted from an inside, and the lone survivor within pulled free. "I've been trying to cut down," Jean admits with a wry smile, and a question of "Could I borrow your lighter?" as the cigarette is settled between her fingers in a comfortable hold.
There is no patting search for the lighter - it materializes in a bit of sleight-of-hand, gleaming dull silver and a little battered, and Pete offers it over between two fingers. "Does it work?" he wonders, with the vague curiousity of one for whom the habit has remained largely out of an utter lack of interest in discarding it permanently.
"For a while," Jean answers, taking the lighter with a nod of thanks and applying thumb to striker until she can cup her head and quickly inhale to get her cigarette drawing. She hands it back with a rueful admission of "And then something blows up, catches fire, there's a dinosaur running loose, or one of the students has panicked and gotten their pet cat stuck on the ceiling."
"I think," says Pete, very dryly, "that it's a /bad/ sign, none of this sounding so terribly out of the realm of possibility." He slips the lighter back into his pocket, and settles back on his heels, eyeing Jean with brief, sharp speculation.
"O brave new world," Jean quotes, as she joins in the confederacy of smoking dragons with a last crook of her mouth. "That has such people in it." Breath and smoke rise around her at a measured tempo, the nicotine taken as a slow build as she cants her head under his regard, one eyebrow lifting in interrogative invitation.
There is a brief flicker of amusement to meet the quote. Pete maintains his silence a while longer, long enough to smoke the rest of his cigarette down to the filter, and stub it out. Eventualy, however, there comes a question, utterly even-voiced. "Just how much /are/ psionics influenced by the people around them? In behaviour and thought patterns, that is."
Jean is a half cigarette behind him, and thus her answer is conveniently slowed by the need to take a measured drag from it, holding the smoke for a breath and a space before letting it back into the cold air as her blood pulses with its gifts left behind. "It depends," is her answer, even voice meeting even voice. "Somewhat on the strength and sensitivity of the psionic, but I'd say the bulk of it is like for anyone -- what's the shape and strength of their personality."
Pete makes a low noise of acknowledgement. There is a moment's further narrow-eyed speculation before he frames a reply. "So imprinting on someone else's personality like a bloody orphaned chicken is a bit unusual, then?"
"I would say so, yes," Jean agrees, before treating Pete to narrow-eyed looks of her own. "Nadia?" she wonders. (Perhaps because the image of Tom Sikorski as he has become as a baby chicken is too alien.)
"Nadia," Pete confirms. "She's..." But he cuts off, with a short, sharp wave of one hand that describes in gesture something a little too tangled to easily express. Though his tone is pure exasperation, it is guilt and worry that flicker like heat lightning across the surface of his mind.
"Imprinting on your personality like a bloody orphaned chicken?" Jean suggests, but with only the barest of smiles for the wordplay as she hazards that guess. Smoke and silence curl around her for a time, before she flicks ash at the snow and reflects that "The Nadia of thirteen isn't the best to extrapolate from... but she had a tendency to cherrypick identity even then."
"Parts of it. Having her dig around my skull like she belongs is uncomfortable enough, but..." Pete glances away, expression going flat and grim. "There are things there I'd rather not have anyone walking away with." The self-loathing that frames that, absent though it is from his voice, is perhaps one of them.
Jean's eyebrows raise at that, and there's a reflection of "We really did try and teach her better manners than -that-," in a wry tone, her own mind trembling behind stern shields like a horse at a starting gate. "Are you suggesting she's in need of a little help?"
"I think necessity strangled manners, rather than just knocking it out," Pete says dryly. It is, at least, not terribly /skeptical/ on the subject of psionic manners. "--More than a little. She's a nineteen year old girl who seems to be trying very hard to turn into - well. Something no nineteen year old girl should be, yeah?"
"Happily," says Jean, with a hint of upper crust polish to her words that's driven by dark humour. "I was trained in emergency medicine. I should be able to resuscitate them." She grows more serious from then out, however, giving Pete a long look and a small nod. "She'll have to want to listen, though."
Pete grimaces slightly, and scrubs a hand over his face as though to bury concern. "Which is always the stumbling block," he acknowledges. "/Especially/ for a teenager. Still..." But this, too, goes unfinished, touching too much as it does on confidential information, and zombies and infected and dragons.
"You're more familiar with her now than I am," Jean admits, and if there's a hint of impotent pain in the admission, it's tamped down to nothing more than a deeper drag from her cigarette, and a transient tightening of her shoulders. "However she'd best recieve it, let her know that I'm here for her. Or there for her -- I do have a pilot's licence for more than looking cool to my students."
Pete nods. After a moment, it is his turn to offer, quietly, "Thank you." There is a low snort of amusement. "--At this rate, we should be paying you a retainer."
"Feel free to pass the notion on to your superiors," Jean offers, accepting the thanks with no more fuss than a brief bow of her head. "I've been having a bitch of a time getting research funding..."
"Not enough grants go go around?" The brief betrayal of some understanding of acadaemia marks a shift away to safer topics - as much as mutant spies and superheroes can /have/ safe topics, anyhow. Perhaps, at some point, there is an interruption by returning canines.
There's something about Nadia-player's alts and chickens... Backdated to New Years.