xp_logs | Rebuilding - Laurie, Yvette

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As per Kurt's advice, Yvette doesn't automatically flee when Laurie comes into the suite. It takes a little bit of prodding, but talking happens.

Laurie paused on her way, looking around the common room of the suite she shared. There was something, something she should notice but couldn't quite put her finger on. She'd been busy the past several days, helping Mr Marko get the new extention ready for building and just trying to keep herself busy in a way that meant no real time to think about the people who weren't here, or the things that had happened. She had spoken to Dr Samson, and had another session with him next week but it was better by far if she just ignored some things for right now.

Yvette, that's who she'd noticed without really noticing at all. The other girl was curled up on the couch and seemed to be doing her best impersonation of funiture. Laurie frowned, noting that they hadn't talked much since the fight she'd had with Kyle.

"Everything alright?" she asked now, moving around the couch to sit down beside her.

Yvette jumped at the sudden appearance - she'd been scratching away at a notepad very intently with one of her oversized touristy pencils, preferring them sometimes to the rubbery writing aids that had been found for her. The movement made her pencil drag across the paper, digging a hole in it. "L-laurie!" she stuttered. "Am I too noisy? I can go, if you like..." She made a motion to begin collecting her things together.

"I was just on my way out." Laurie replied, eyebrows raising in surprise at the reaction. "Although, even if I wasn't, you wouldn't have to go. This is your suite as well, you know."

"I know..." Yvette seemed about to flee any way, but reminded herself, this was Laurie, her friend. The person who'd helped her with her powers, who'd been there for her when Kyle and Jennie and Marius had been taken. "I do not want to be the bother," she said softly. "You are so angry, and I do not want to... get in the way."

Damn, she hadn't realised what her anger might do to her friends, something that had become readily apparent to her since the fight with Kyle. She needed to get better at this, or else she was going to find herself in a world of trouble the next time.

She recognised how cynical that was but she wasn't yet sure she was ready to hope that she might not lose others. Life had a way of happening, whether you wanted it to or not.

"I'm...well, I'm still angry. But it's not at you, or at anyone else. I'm just sad, and I'm not used to being this helpless. It makes it difficult to be here sometimes with all the reminders but I shouldn't take that out on my friends." Laurie explained, voice lowering as she attempted a soothing tone.

"Even Kyle?" she asked. "You were being very mad at him on the journals. I am not... I do not understand why you were fighting. It seemed you were happy and then you were not." Maybe her English was too bad for the finer nuances, but the feelings had come through plainly.

"Even Kyle." Laurie said, sighing and leaning her head back on the couch. "I was never really happy, it was just a way to ignore how angry I was. Sometimes people don't always like the way they feel, so they try to feel some other way and that makes it easier to cope. But the truth is, the other feeling is still there an no matter how hard you try, it'll keep coming up when you don't pay attention. It's better to just admit that feeling in the first place. So, I'm angry, and now I've admitted it and I hope that'll make it easier to cope with."

"But what did Kyle do, that made you so angry?" Yvette asked, uncurling slightly from the hunched position she'd been in. Talking was good. "If I know, then maybe I can make sure I do not do the same thing?"

"I'm not sure I understand myself." Laurie admitted, a furrowed brow giving voice to a frown briefly before smoothing out again. "I think it's because I feel like they're dead but I'm not sure, because there's no bodies. So I try to think they're alive, even though I feel they're dead but Kyle saying they'd died...It just made me angry because I hadn't decided yet and someone else thinking they're dead too, that just makes it more real, makes me wonder if hoping they're alive is foolish. I don't make much sense, not even to myself, I think."

Yvette was quiet for a long time, processing this. "I understand. I think," she said at last. "It is not foolish, to have that hope. Where we are, who we are, what we can do... there are so many... miracles, is the word? Maybe there will be another, to bring them back to us." It was a small hope - in her time alone, Yvette had come to accept that Forge and Crystal and Medusa wouldn't be coming back. Death... happened.

"I feel so helpless right now." Laurie said, her voice thick with emotion and her eyes suddenly red and moist with the beginning of tears. "I just want them back. I want it all to stop being so hard, and I want my friends back."

Yvette opened her mouth to say something comforting, but there wasn't anything that would make this better. So instead she looked down, checking that her body suit was in place and there was no skin exposed, and then she raised herself up on her knees, putting her arms carefully around her friend's shoulders and careful to keep her face and hair higher than Laurie's own. "It will stop hurting," she said quietly. "Slowly, the little by little."

"I hope so, Yvette." Laurie responded softly, allowing the tears to fall finally. "I hope so."