LOG: [Yvette, Marius] Treehouse

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Tuesday afternoon a long-coming confrontation finally occurs.



The treehouse was cold, but Yvette was finding she didn't need to bundle up against the cold, the hardness of her skin protecting her from the extremes of the elements. The rest of the students were in class, so she'd chosen to hide herself away for a while with a book. Yeats, this time. She was quietly reading aloud to herself, stumbling a little over the more difficult English words, when she heard the crunch of footsteps in the snow below her.

As he climbed Marius considered that manipulating the rungs of a treehouse through winter gloves and cold-stiffened fingers had ample cause to be considered a sport in itself. Nonetheless, it wasn't exactly an avoidable one. The distinctive taloned footprints in the snow made it quite clear where the girl he was looking for had gone, and he was getting enough heat from a certain other one to make it clear that though taking his time to think things over was reportedly a welcome change, the comments of 'Stop being a wuss and just do it already!' were getting rather pointed.

And Marius was just tired of avoiding.

The murmuring in the treehouse had stopped as he began to climb the ladder, so his presence had not gone unnoticed. Nonetheless, precautions were probably best. Marius carefully curled his hand securely around one rung while he raised the other to rap. The muffled thud of his gloved fist against the wood was less impressive than he'd like, but ah well. "Pardon for the interrupt. I have the pleasure of entrance?"

There was a startled squeak, and then silence before the muffled scritch of claws against wood above his head. Then the trap door was opened, with Yvette's small pointed face conveying as much puzzlement as someone with hardened facial features could. "Um, hello?" she said politely to the strange boy on the ladder. She'd seen him from a distance, here and there, but he wasn't any of the people she'd met so far. Then she remembered hanging off a ladder wasn't really a comfortable place for introductions, so she stepped back, the door open fully. "Please to be coming in. It is being cold, yes?"

"Yes, rather. Cheers." Marius pulled himself up, keeping himself to the far side of the trapdoor. There were more reasons not to accidentally brush the girl than he could even count. He settled on the floor a good distance from her, legs crossed. Marius cleared his throat. "Apologies. We haven't had a proper introduction, and the fault is mine. I would be Marius Laverne. Ah, mate to Jennie-whom-you-share-a-flat-with. I wasn't so much myself when last we met. In several respects."

Yvette tilted her head at that. He spoke differently to a lot of the people in the school, and she was having trouble parsing what he was saying. And she certainly would have remembered meeting him before - she had a good memory for faces and names. "I am... being pleased to meet you, Mr. Marius," she offered hesitantly, taking note of the way he had kept his distance and not offering her hand, even gloved. Some people had powers that meant they couldn't touch too, she knew. Maybe he was one of these.

"Suppose this would be the third time, technically. Second time was a few months ago in the kitchen, when I so gallantly abandoned you to pick up a drawerful of cutlery. Time before that was . . . not here. Can't say as I take offence at the lack of recognition. Looks have evolved a bit since then. Mostly the face was covered. An' I had hair, of course. The hair was quite distinctive. " Marius paused, then raised his arm. Working slowly, he hooked his fingers around the cuff of one glove and peeled it off. He held up his hand for her, palm-out, to display the shiny white pitting in the olive skin the size of a silver-dollar. "An' . . . had more here'n scars."

Obviously this was one of the more bizarre meetings she'd ever had, and that was saying something considering how she'd met Tommy and Mr. Logan. "I am not being understan..." Yvette began, but then her words trailed off as the world seemed to get very cold and distant. Images unspooled behind her eyes, fuzzy and vague as is coming from a great distance. Grey skin. Orange eyes. And hands, touching her, lifting her gently from a wheelchair to a bed, feeding her, wiping her skin with towels that shredded on contact with her bare skin...

Marius jerked in alarm as the tiny girl abruptly folded, the floorboards beneath her scoured by razor-edged hair as her head fell between her knees. Sod sod idiot bloody idiot what've I done now-- The boy shot across the small room, his hands outstretched to touch her, and then froze. Feeding on her that first time, and drawing his hand away a mass of blood . . .

Marius jerked his hands away from her and set his knuckles against the floor, closed despite the fact there was no thing left on them to need control. "Penny! Oi, please, Penny!"

Penny. It was the name that registered, and glowing blue eyes fluttered open, their light shuttered then exposed, on-off-on-off. She looked up at the boy's worried face, and reached out to just barely brush his cheek with one gloved talon. "You are not being grey any more," she said, voice still a little faint and far-away. "And your hair, it is different. But your nose, it is being the same."

At any other time Marius would have flinched at the touch, and not only because of the person initiating it, but right now he was just relieved. Relieved that whatever that had been, it had been momentary -- and that his clumsy attempt at reconciliation hadn't just become one more incident on his long list of crimes against Yvette.

"Yes," Marius said, his voice only slightly strangled as the feather-light touch on his cheek withdrew. "Yes, yes it is that. Famously." He shook himself out of his shock and back to the present. "But -- but you all right?" You remember?

Yvette sat up, a small sigh escaping at the sight of the damage her hair had caused. "I am being fine," she assured him, although she felt a little wobbly still and stayed sitting on the floor. "Mr. Haller, he is saying that it is being hard, to remember. But I am remembering, a little." Hotels, mostly, expensive ones. A succession of young women, nurses. Jennie, looking thinner than she did now. And another boy, with glowing red eyes and a strange accent. "You are being helping me? When I am being... not-awake?" She tried to remember more, how they had met, but that was a blank spot still. "And I am not hurting you, when you are touching me. But that is different now, yes?"

"Yeah. Different. Then I was . . . borrowin'." Marius flexed his hands against the floor unconsciously. "Well. No. To say that accords me far too much generosity. Time I met you, there was no life I could live without another mutant there to succor me on their good will. Any mutant. By the end all I could think was I wanted it done with. From you, I just took." He forced himself to meet the girl's blank blue stare with his yellow. "An' for that, I will never have enough sorry."

She stared at him, trying to process what he was saying, her body dropping unconsciously into that almost predatory crouch it seemed made for now. "You are... being needing the help?" she asked slowly, only the need for comprehension in her voice. "From me, my... powers?"

"Yeah. Suppose that's the accurate assessment." Marius averted his eyes to look at his ungloved hand, opening and closing stiff fingers around the taut tissue of the scar. "My powers . . . aren't so much the controllable sort. Then, anyway. Tried to find one to borrow that could fix all that was goin' wrong with me. Yours was the only one I ever did find."

He remembered being in the infirmary in misery and exhaustion after June's final respiratory arrest, staring at the ceiling tiles as he listened to the respirator Forge had made for him. Hssshh, hssshh. Relentless, inevitable. The only sound that had reached his ears as he lay in the sweat-soaked sheets cataloguing every weight and inch of a body breaking itself apart piece by piece, and knowing only one thing:

I don't want to die like this.

"I hadn't the right to take help from you that wasn't offered," Marius said, slowly closing his fist and resettling it on the cold boards beneath him, "but for gettin' it then, at that time, I . . . owe you. An' more than apologies."

Her glance dropped to his hand, drawn to the movement, and then tracked to her own hands, the long talons brushing the floor. Sometimes her body seemed an alien thing, something that belonged to someone else. Every time she looked in the mirror, a foreign mask looked back at her, something not even really human. A prison she'd been trapped in.

But her prison had helped someone else escape their own. There might not have been permission asked and given, he might have taken it from her, but there was still the part where she had helped. Her power had done something other than hurting another person - again, a flash of memory, the scarlet of blood bright in her mind.

"You are not having the right, no," she said, and his expression tightened fractionally. "But I am being glad you are taking the help." She held out her hand, palm up, and flexed her fingers slowly. "This is being me now, and I am being afraid, all the time. Because I cannot be touching the people, I will be making them hurt. But you... you I am not hurting, I am helping. This... is being important." She wasn't saying it well - the language barrier was frustrating her. But hopefully he'd understand. "You are not needing to be saying apologies any more, Marius."

His first thought was Well, that's . . . shockingly virtuous, but, to his surprise, Marius realized he could grasp the edge of her reasons. Masque's attacks seemed like a lifetime ago, but he could still remember how useless he had felt when he'd left the group early that night after Jay's concert and returned to the message every one of his suitemates was in the infirmary. And how it had felt to finally, finally be able to use his mutation for something other than just taking. Marius slowly inclined his head.

"As you are the one owed the apologies, I suppose the say is also yours whether or not you want them. So I'll leave it at that." He tilted his head to regard her, his yellow eyes even more pronounced beneath the drawing of his heavy eyebrows. "But as to the hurtin' . . . you know your power can do rather more than that, right? I've got rather direct experience."

She nodded. "It is being why I am being here," she said simply. "To be learning to not be hurting." Glowing blue eyes flared nova-bright. "Here is being the best place for me to be doing that, I am thinking."

Marius nodded with a grin. "This lot does indeed come in useful at that. I may also recommend them for their fine speciality care of those whose mutations are on the misbehaving end of the scale. Rather wish that one had penetrated a bit earlier, but this wisdom I shall instead be content to pass upon to the next generation. Happily, unlike myself they do not appear to be suffering quite so acutely from a condition of bloody idiot."

Yvette just stared at him, and then a small giggle escaped her. "I am sorry, but I am not understanding the English so very well," she said, sounding more amused than embarrassed. "You are being a very strange person." Then she tilted her head at him, fixing him with that blank stare. "You are being calling me 'Penny'. Jennie too. Please, how are you knowing to be calling me that?"

"Apologies. I have a reputation for difficulty. I shall try to mind myself for coherency." Marius shifted uncomfortably, using his fidget of brushing away now close-shaven hair to disguise the automatic curling of his lip at the memory. "Bloke I found you with . . . I asked him your name. 'Pénitence' was what I got. Bit of a mouthful, so just . . . shortened it. Of course, you're not, so I've now not the faintest idea."

Pénitence. Yvette mouthed the word, puzzled. And then it struck her. Pénitence, Penance... . "It is being... how you say? Nickname? My mother's family, they are calling me Pendim. It is being Albanian word." She decided not to explain just why they had called her that. "Maybe they are being hearing them call me Pendim, at the place I was being when they are taking me from my mother. My aunt and uncle, they are visiting once."

Eh, so what sort of family would bestow a nickname like 'penan--' ah, wait, mine. Right then! Marius bobbed his head amiably. "So there was indeed a logic at work there. Personally I thought they might've just been havin' me on, as this is often not a challenge. Ah, well." His mouth quirked as he gave the small girl an uncharacteristically sheepish smile. "No worries now I've got the real one."

She shrugged a little, eyes flaring. "I am not being minding 'Penny', if you are wanting to be calling me that," she said, a little shyly. Then a note of amusement entered her voice. "And is this meaning you are not being running away from me now?"

Marius snorted a laugh. "Yes, I think this should see us safely past future retreats. Fearsome an opponent as you may be." Who knew the forgiveness of a young Albanian girl would do more good for the mood than a bottle of Polish vodka? Then again, perhaps it's just that the one leaves more of the brain intact. True to his resolution to attempt to lend some coherency to this conversation, however, Marius succeeded in maintaining some semblance of filter and restricted the followup to a lofty look as he pulled the glove back on with great dignity. "Though I feel compelled to point out that the incident in the kitchen can be attributed to extreme physical and emotional disturbance. The doctors have done me a note."

"And I am being, how you say? Taking of the heat? For the mess making." The edge of laughter in her voice was a good indication she wasn't seriously holding a grudge. She stood, or rather raised herself from a full crouch to the half-crouch she usually walked in. "I am being tired, from the remembering. Can you be walking to me back to my room? It is being too cold to be sleeping here," she asked, looking up at his much greater height with those glowing blue eyes.

Marius smacked his forehead. "Ah, bugger -- of course." Marius darted to his feet and to the trapdoor, stooping to hold it open for her. The relief of finally having that massive weight off his shoulders was now warring with an intense wish not to be responsible for Yvette keeling over alone in the snow on the way back to the mansion.

And more, finally face to face with the slight girl once more, the inexplicable desire to see that nothing hurt her again. Ever.

"I'm sure Dr. Voght would have several sarcastic comments in the event of unsupervised collapse," Marius said. His crouch put them almost at eye level, yellow to her blue. "I'll go first. In the event of a fall you can be assured of a soft landing. No worries, history has shown I am distressingly resilient. If worse comes to worse I advise you aim for the head."

She chuckled at that, even through the wave of tiredness. "I will make to try to being landing on your head," she agreed. "Jennie would be to say it is to being knocking of the sense, yes?"

"Yes, frequently. Fortunately the numerous head CTs have always proven clear."