xp_logs | Pietro and Crystal - Another Royal Meeting (Reply)

Backdated. Crystal and Pietro have their third "first" meeting in the same place where the first one took place.

Whatever else had happened while Attilan was gone, Pietro thought, clearly it hadn't stripped Crystal of her sense of humor. He'd had gratifyingly little trouble arranging an audience--apparently she'd been kind enough to leave his name on a list. And other things, it soon proved, as a royal servant ushered him into a very familiar antechamber and seated him in a very familiar chair.

Hopefully she wouldn't make him wait quite as long as he had the last time they'd met in this room, but all things considered he wouldn't put it past her.

Everything was crazy and chaotic. Well, not everything, and Crystal was well aware of how much crazier things would have been if no one in the outside world had known what happened to Attilan until today. People inside of Attilan had also had time to get used to the "difference in time" idea. Still, it was one thing to hear about something and another matter to actually realize that it was true.

Medusa, Blackagar, and the extended members of the royal family were busy making statements and talking to people about the return. As the princess, Crystal had her own responsibilities to attend to and it took close to forty-five minutes from the time Pietro made his request to the time she was able to head over to the waiting room where he was, well, waiting.

"My apologies for keeping you waiting," Crystal said as she entered the room. "A returning island seems to require as much attention as a disappearing one does, and this time I have duties to fulfill."

"Not surprising. I didn't mind the wait very much." Pietro offered a faint smile. "I knew the chair was comfortable, after all." He tilted his head, looking her over. "You look older. I suppose that shouldn't be a surprise." Actually, what she looked was honed: stubbornness turned into will, all her bright potential given focus and direction. Whatever had happened, and he rather thought it had been a lot, she'd grown all the stronger for it. "I should say, you look good." His lips quirked up. "If I may be so bold, Your Highness."

Crystal raised her eyebrows, stared for a moment, then laughed and smiled a bit as she shook her head. "Oh, no. Are you going to start that up again? I believe that I have been called 'Your Highness' more than enough already. I did a bit of touring the country in disguise and it was quite a relief to not be referred to as 'Your Highness' all of the time."

"You kept me waiting in the antechamber for most of an hour. And I thought you were dead for several weeks. I think I'm entitled." Pietro chuckled. "If you don't want to be annoyed with titles, now you know what to avoid."

"I did not plan on having you or anyone else believe that I was dead," Crystal pointed out with a small laugh. "It is not as if I faked my own death; I did not wish for any of this to happen. Still, I am sorry you believed that I was dead. It was only a month for you, though, not two and a half years."

"Hmph. Don't think you can use the time dilation excuse to win all your arguments." Pietro hesitated. ". . . Summers had to all but drag me back, eventually. Long after it should have been clear that there was nothing to find."

"Drag you back?" Crystal looked at him, confused. "Drag you back from where? Not from Attilan, certainly, and I am fairly certain that you did not run around in circles on the water where it had been previously. What did you do, stay on boats and ships and submarines?"

"No, Portugal," Pietro said with a flash of impatience. "Being the nearest country to the incident, and the place to which all the planes were diverted, it was the natural--even the obvious--place to host the investigation. And I didn't have the clearance to go out on any of the fact-finding missions, or the tools to fake clearance. I had to satisfy myself with cultivating contacts among the people with access. Not my favorite way to go about an investigation."

"Yes, I do recall hearing someone say that the planes which had left Attilan shortly before it disappeared were diverted to Portugal," Crystal said, then raised an eyebrow. "Are you telling me that after your plane landed, instead of returning to Xavier's, you just stayed in Portugal? For however long this 'eventually' was that it took for you to be dragged back to Westchester? Even though you could not participate in any of the official searches and could not find even the slightest bit of information because there was not any information pertaining to Attilan's disappearance to find?"

Pietro folded his arms. "I thought you were dead. What was I supposed to do, just let that pass without even trying to find out how and why?"

"That is what most people did, is it not?" Crystal's thoughts turned to the summer of helplessness she had experienced while Jennie had been missing, of knowing there wasn't anything she could do. She thought, too, of how she had felt when Jennie went missing again with Marius and Kyle and how she had wished to be with them to know what was going on. When she had been kept with Angel, Laurie, and Dani she probably should have felt helpless yet since they were together and she could see them she had been calm and had helped come up with a plan to free them, making the decision to leave Amanda and Angelo behind to lessen the risk to the other students. Finally, she had decided to take matters into her own hands when she searched for Maximus. Even though Pietro hadn't been able to find any information, looking for it would have helped him feel that he was doing something. If she had been able to go look for Jennie either time, or do anything that could possibly help, wouldn't she have done it? "Just how long did it take before Mr. Summers came to haul you away?"

"Three weeks. Three long and excruciatingly frustrating weeks, made not at all better by the occasional idiot reputation-hound who needed to be shown in the face why one does not go around falsely claiming responsibility for a disaster, no matter how high-profile." He shrugged, neither apologizing for nor defending it. "I may have mentioned I don't take well to losing people."

There it was, there was a difference between worrying over someone who was missing and having to deal with someone's death, although in this case there had been two events, an unexplained plane crash and a mysteriously vanishing island country. Crystal had worried that summer because she hadn't known what had happened and when her parents had died she'd known exactly how their deaths came about. The mystery for her had been who or what caused Attilan to disappear, and it hadn't been something she'd concerned herself about for almost two years. To Pietro and the rest of the world, however, there had been many unanswered questions.

"Forgive me for bringing up the time difference again," Crystal said, not at all apologetic for her second mention of it, "but before Illyana graced us with her delightful presence, I had assumed that the same amout of time had passed for everyone in the rest of the world. Four weeks is a much shorter time than twenty-one months. You should be glad that so much time did not pass for you. Still," she added, smiling faintly as she recalled a conversation from what was to her nearly three years earlier, "I am sorry if I caused you to gain any worry lines."

"That's not--" Pietro gave her a brief, searingly frustrated look, then shook his head, sighing. "I didn't mean to turn this into some sort of, some sort of 'who's been more miserable' contest. I'm not trying to get some kind of credit for chasing my own tail for most of a month. I just . . . I missed you while you were gone. And I'm glad you're not dead, and I'll sleep better knowing you're back in the right dimension. All right? That's what I've been trying to say."

"I would have remained in Attilan for your past six weeks even if it had not switched dimensions," Crystal pointed out. "However, I do realize that there is a difference between knowing that someone is an ocean away and believing that a person is dead. Really, as far as dimensions go, the one where Attilan was transported was quite peaceful. No demons, no gods, no alien lifeforms... in fact, we never saw any other living beings save for ocean wildlife. I am glad that you are glad I am not dead, I think I would be rather disturbed if the opposite were true, and while yes, it was rather silly of you to spend so much time looking for something that did not exist, at the time you could not have known that there was not anything to find in Portugal and I cannot say that I would not have done the same thing."

Pietro had to--and did, quite firmly--remind himself that he liked Crystal's reserve. That it was one of the reasons they got along so well, their being able to bump along comfortably together and keep the rough edges turned inward. But it stung, nevertheless. He'd been something akin to miserable before they'd found out Attilan still existed, and as Crystal had just taken great pains to point out, she'd been gone far longer--why was she so breezy about it, dammit? Was that all their friendship meant to her, in the end?

"Sounds like a lovely vacation spot," he managed finally, his voice just as casual as hers. If there was perhaps a touch of bitterness at the corners of his mouth, well, that wasn't at all out of the ordinary for Pietro. "Far better than most of the alternatives, or so I'm given to understand."

"I did not have the opportunity to do very much vacationing," Crystal replied. The closest she'd come to taking a vacation had been her first month of stunned shock, and then her four month trip around Attilan and hiding out in the abandoned house with Maximus, and she didn't consider that to be much of a vacation. A welcome relief from being called 'Your Highness' every five seconds and the feeling of being able to do things on her own, yes, but not a trip for fun. "Forge seemed to grow bored, though; perhaps he would have preferred one of the more 'exciting' dimensions. Personally, I am glad that we ended up in a 'boring' one. We had enough matters to attend to without needing to worry about fighting off other-dimensional beings. Also, I do not believe that anyone will be able to go there again. It took quite a lot of effort for us to be able to return, and this does not seem to be a repeatable action."

"No plans to turn it into a tourist destination then?" Pietro paused, a bit of genuine amusement leaking into his voice. "You were stuck in the alternate dimension with a bored Forge? Oh, Crystal, my condolences. I suppose 'peaceful' doesn't necessarily preclude 'irritating,' does it?"

"Can you imagine that? Under controlled circumstances, people could go on a week-long vacation without taking any time off of work!" Crystal said with a small laugh, shaking her head. "Forge put his abilities to good use and he became a citizen of Attilan at his own request, but he was still... Forge." She shrugged lightly. "It was not too terrible, all things considered. He had his jobs, I had mine, and he is now visiting his family and will return to Xavier's after that."

"And you? When can I expect a visit?" The corner of Pietro's mouth quirked up. "Unless you haven't quite seen enough of the palace and the island, of course."

"I think I will be able to leave the island in, oh, a year or two? A year or two passing by at the same rate for everyone this time, though." Crystal smiled weakly. "There are still so many things that must be taken care of here before I can go anywhere. Joking aside, if you ask me again in a few weeks, I should have a better, realistic answer. What about you; do you know when you plan on returning to New York, or is Mr. Summers going to need to drag you back to Xavier's again?" A hint of a teasing smile crept onto her face.

Pietro nodded resignedly. "I suppose it is too soon to tell at that. Just as long as I can visit without taking a number and waiting in line with the rest of the supplicants." At her last words he snorted. "As if I'd give Summers the satisfaction. Once was quite enough, thank you."

"Well, I would have to check my appointment calendar to see when I might have a spare moment or two between meeting with all of the 'supplicants'," Crystal replied, finding herself able to slip even more out of the 'interview mode' she'd been in when she'd walked into the antechamber. "We still have to sort out the whole 'it was January to us but August for for everyone else' idea, but I think I have a whole hour free in three months." She hadn't really allowed herself much room for joking the entire time Attilan had been missing from the rest of the world. Sarcastic words aimed at Forge when he'd been acting like an idiot, yes, but not a lot of her real sense of humor. "I do have an already scheduled appointment that I must leave for now, but unless you are planning on leaving before then, perhaps we could meet for lunch tomorrow?"

"I'd like that," Pietro said, relaxing just a little. "Here again tomorrow, then--unless tomorrow is suddenly next January, hm?--or should I meet you somewhere else?"

"If the island disappeared again, and we returned to the same place we just left, 'tomorrow' would still be August, or February perhaps, depending on how you look at it," Crystal explained. "For each day that passed here, twenty-three days passed for the inhabitants of Attilan. Meeting here is fine; why break tradition?"

"Well, if tradition's what you're after, I believe I've been cheated out of a game of hide-and-seek." Pietro grinned. "I'll see you tomorrow."