Kurt and Laurie log

[x-wallflower-.livejournal.com]

Kurt finds Laurie doing her weekly laundry and they speak of wars and battles and other clothing related subjects.



Laurie had come to the mansion with a long history of doing household chores, and so the idea of doing her own laundry had never been particularly daunting. However, that was before she met the mansions laundry facilities. She was almost positive that several of the machines were sentient, if not ghost inhabited.

She'd ended up with only one sock of each pair she'd put in last week and she could have sworn she heard the damn dryer laughing at her. She'd often wondered if perhaps Amanda had left some kind of book behind, perhaps accidentally kicking it under one of the machines but she'd never found any evidence of said papery vessel.

It didn't mean it wasn't there, of course, just that she couldn't find it. For all she knew, magic books could grow legs and do things like hide really well. It gave her something to do while she waited for the wash cycle to complete anyhow. Especially since she'd finished all the new books she'd brought last week and hadn't had a chance to replenish her stock of 'washing room reading'.

The fact that said reading tended toward penny dreadful hard boiled detective novels and the occasional school sponsored 'broadening your horizons beyond crappy teenage romance trash' probably said something about her personality but she was sure if it were bad, someone would have told her something by now…Or run screaming from the house calling for her to be killed for the salvation of them all, whichever was the most fun at the time, she supposed.

It had been, as it were, a rather eventful week. They'd found out their friends from Attilan were alive, and she was so throwing Forge into the lake when he got home, she'd managed to go an entire day without making someone look at her like she was from another planet. This was surely a much greater feat then people merely turning up alive, as all that took was a continuing ability to breath oxygen, her strangeness was almost a mutant power in itself.

Kurt tended to be regular and assiduous about doing his laundry, bachelor or not. After all, having lived as part of a travelling clan, he'd learned long ago that when the chance for a proper wash presented itself, you took it. He smiled at Laurie as he stepped into the room, carrying his bag. "Good morning."

"Guten morgen." Laurie replied, and then grinned. She'd always wanted to use that phrase, and now she'd been able to. This day was turning out quite well.

He blinked, then chuckled. "Very well spoken", he told her honestly. "How are you today?"

"Doing battle with the dryers, but I've got them on the back foot and I think I'll get out of it without any casualties. Alas, I may win the battle but the war is eternal." Laurie replied in a serious tone but the humour glimmering in her eyes was a dead giveaway.

He looked at her, outwardly serious but with a similar expression, then over at the dryers. "What form does this battle take?"

"Mostly it takes the form of me pulling socks out of the back of the dryer where they mysteriously get caught. But there was this one time last week when I was sure it was trying to eat my favourite pair of jeans. I declared that bad form, since jeans are obviously non-combatants and protected by the Xavier convention."

It was possibly one of the silliest conversations she'd had in the past couple of years, and she was enjoying it immensely.

Kurt was really not above being silly when the situation called for it, and anyway, it was fun. "Jeans are non-combatants and yet socks are not?"

"Nooo, you see, socks are the elite of the laundry world. They're the ones you send in when you really want the job done well. Why do you think so many never come back? They're on the front lines all the time."

Laurie was of course, making this up as she went along, it reminded her of games of 'keep off the floor' she used to play as a child, making up more and more elaborate rules until she got bored and drifted away to do something else.

"That does make some kind of sense", Kurt said solemnly. "Though surely they would come back more often, if they are so good?"

"Maybe they're just grunts then." Laurie replied thoughtfully, tapping several fingers against her foot as she pulled them up into a cross legged position.

"It would seem a little more likely. So if your jeans are non-combatants, how do they come to be on the battlefield?"

"Wrong place, wrong time." Laurie replied, gaze shadowed for a moment. "Sometimes even if you're not a fighter, you can still get hurt."

Kurt looked at her sideways, not missing the shadow but not sure what to say now. "...it is true", he admitted after a moment. "For all we all wish it were not."

"That's why we fight though, isn't it? So people don't have to worry about being in the wrong place at the wrong time." Laurie replied, smile small but present again. It was why she'd chosen to ask about the X-men and why she wanted to study to be a doctor. If she could help even one person, then it would all be worth it.

"As far as we are able to prevent it... yes", he told her. "That is why the team exists. And not only the team, of course."

Laurie looked at the dryer as it made a soft ding sound and smiled. It would appear that her laundry had done drying for the day. "Looks like the war is over, at least for now."

"For today", he agreed with a slight smile. "Or at least, this battle. Until the next engagement."

"We'll be as ready as we ever can be." Laurie responded, and pulled her laundry out before placing it in the basket to carry back upstairs. "It was nice talking to you, Mr Sefton."

"And you, Laurie. I will see you soon."