Angelo, Amanda - Thursday afternoon
Nov. 1st, 2007 02:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsAmanda makes good her threat promise and arrives at the mansion to catch Angelo in the act of being Stoic. Or possibly Stupid.
Angelo might have been confined to his suite, reluctantly but without much choice but to do what he was told, but that didn't mean he had to stay in bed - whatever his mother wanted him to believe.
His body, however, was being a lot more convincing just by being uncooperative. Moving at anything more than a snail's pace made him dizzy and sent shooting pains through his head, and he still couldn't seem to focus right. But still, he persevered.
"Are you even meant to be up?" came a very familiar voice from the doorway of the bedroom. Amanda stood there, slightly breathless since she'd run up several flights of stairs to get here. What information she'd had had been sketchy, so she wasn't sure how hurt he'd gotten, but the cast on his ankle was evidence enough that it hadn't been a soft landing. "You don't look like you should be up."
He'd only made it about six inches from the bed at that point but he froze, looking guiltily in her direction. "Maybe? I was bored."
"I swear, you could be missing a leg and you'd still be trying to walk around." Her tone was teasing, but there was a sudden brightness to her eyes. Taking in the crutches and the definite wobble, she frowned a little. "Right. You, off that foot. I'm pretty sure they would have told you nothing strenuous for the first little while, and it looks like you got hit on the head as well. And I can distract you plenty so you won't be bored."
"My head hit somethin'", he corrected, frowning slightly. It seemed important, for some reason. "I think, anyway. It was Toad. But this isn't strenuous, I'm goin' slow."
"Laurie said you had lung problems too, so this is plenty strenuous," she countered, crossing her arms over her chest and following with that particularly stubborn jut to her jaw anyone who knew her recognised. "You're just as bad as Nate. If I have to tie you to the bed, you're gunna take it easy for a few days at least."
"Cough's a lot better", he said mulishly, then looked worried. "What's Nate been doin'? Burned his brain out again."
"I meant generally, what with the sneaking out of medlab and trying to teach with his brain fried and all the rest. Specifically, he's one of the less-bad ones. Powers overload, bruised, battered, exhausted... the usual. Nothing broken, tho', which is better than you're doing. Now, do I have to make you get back into bed, or are you going to be sensible?" Worry at the condition he was in - and relief at seeing him worried about Nathan, which was Standard Operating Procedure for Angelo, which meant he was okay-ish - sharpened her tone a little.
He glanced between her and the main room, not quite willing to give up his efforts now he'd managed to get out of bed. "...how about the couch? That good enough?"
She paused, gauging the distance as he had. "Only if you let me help?" she suggested, almost plaintively, seeing his stubbornness. "If you've got a concussion, falling over and hitting your head on the coffee table is not an option. I promise I won't feel you up too much?" The last was said with the mock-innocent expression she knew tended to turn people to jelly when she wanted something.
"You can help", he agreed, not quite as much like a concession as he might have liked. There were dwarves with hobnailed boots in his head again, or he might have been more appreciative of both the words and the expression.
The words were barely out of his mouth before she was at his side, slipping under the arm on the broken ankle side and wrapping her arm around his waist. There was a pause, however, as the contact finally cracked some of her demeanour and she pressed her face to his side, momentarily overcome. "I thought I'd lost you," came the soft admission.
Angelo looked down at her, not sure what best to do. Finally, awkwardly, he put all his weight on his good foot for long enough to swing the other arm - crutch and all - around her in a hug. "I'm here", he said quietly. "An' I'm gonna be okay."
Her arm tightened around him, and she nodded, without pulling her face away. Then the awkwardness - and the precariousness - of their position registered, and she straightened, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. "This isn't getting you to the couch any quicker, is it? Couch first, mushiness second," she said in a brisk, irreverent tone that her work colleagues would have recognised as her 'job' voice. "You want me to take one crutch so you can lean on me if you start keeling over?"
"...um." He looked uncertain, eyeing the crutches. "Think it'd really be easier?"
Was she crowding him? Fuck, she was crowding him. "Maybe not?" she admitted, letting go of him entirely. "But if you fall over, I'm not gunna be able to catch you very well if I'm not close. And I can't project the shielding spell yet. Still tends to wind up around me." She was fussing, and she made a visible effort to stop. Angelo was a grown man, if one with a broken ankle, a concussion and unspecified 'lung damage'. "P'raps see how you go and you'll let me know if you get dizzy or something?"
"No no no, you stay there", he said hastily. "I just don't know how it's gonna work. Let's try it this way?"
She ducked under his arm again, a bit more subdued this time. "Just use me like you would the crutch, only my arse isn't the handgrip. Unless you want it to be." Flirting was nice and normal and not at all fussy, right? "Lean on me when you take a step with the good foot, and I'll help you shuffle forward on the bad one, yeah?"
"Sounds like a plan." He relinquished the crutch to her, leaning on her with his hand somewhere at convenient height on her back. Which might or might not have been on her low back. "Right. Let's go."
She grinned a little at the contact, and braced herself as his weight hit her shoulder. Amanda wasn't big, but like Pete, she was wiry, and the training with the Trenchcoat Brigade had made her certainly stronger than she looked. Things were a bit awkward at first, but they managed to shuffle out to the couch.
Angelo settled onto it with would-be hidden relief, dropping his remaining crutch onto the floor, and promptly started to cough.
Amanda was beside him in an instant, dropping the other crutch and helping him sit upright so he could breathe a bit better. "Fuck, love," she said when the fit had subsided. "What happened? You sound horrible."
"Uh", he rasped out sheepishly, "there might've been a few seconds in vacuum involved there. Wasn't my fault, an' Clarice sent one of her discs after me..."
Her hand paused in the action of rubbing his back soothingly. "Vacuum," she said distantly. "You ended up in a vacuum." Then she took a deep shuddering breath, making a mental note to thank Clarice in whatever fashion the pixie wanted. "So," she continued, her voice a little more normal, just a tightness in her expression. "How long with the coughing? There's no permanent damage, is there? And what needs doing to help?" Her fingers itched to just Heal him and be done with it, but she knew better than that.
"Nothin' permanent, the doctors said", he assured her. "Should pass in a few days. Until then... just wait it out. Maybe treat it like a normal cough."
"Normal." It came out a little flatly, but the moment passed as she gave his back a little pat. "You want some tea or something? Water? Painkillers for the head?"
"Water'd be good. Headache comes an' goes." He leaned into her hand. "... don't be like that."
"'M sorry, just a bit freaked out. You just told me you got sucked into space - 's gunna take a bit to get used to." She pressed a kiss to his shoulder and got up, moving to the kitchenette. After a longer moment than it really should have taken, she returned with a glass of water, looking a bit more composed. "Here, love. So... Space, huh? No air, freezing cold, things imploding or exploding or whatever it is they do, I can't remember..." Her voice trembled a little.
He looked round at her, knowing she wasn't okay but not sure what to do about it, and reached carefully for the glass in her hand. "Nothin' imploded or exploded. Come here."
She sat carefully on the couch next to him, as if afraid to jostle him. Or that he'd suddenly not be okay. Her hands she kept firmly in her lap, trying not to twist the hem of her shirt like she was prone to do when anxious. "It just... it didn't seem real, y'know?" she said at last. "The space thing. Too big, too bloody mad. If I thought of it just like a normal fight, I could handle it better, since then you were safer, in a way? But this..." She pressed her lips together to stop the tremble. "'M sorry, love, you're sick and you don't need me freaking out on you. I'll be all right, just give me a sec to pull it back together."
"Not gonna get any worse if you freak out", he said gently. "Or if you touch me."
At that she slid closer, so their shoulders touched. "You won't explode? Or implode?" she asked, only mostly joking. "You'll be okay after all that?"
His arm went around her easily now - there was nothing worse than bruises there, after all. "I'm not gonna break", he promised her. "They said the cough should be gone by the end of the week, an' then there's just the ankle."
She made a soft noise and leaned into him, resting her own hand on his knee and her head against his shoulder. "'S good to have you back," she said quietly, the warmth of his arm around her doing more to reassure her than anything else that he was really there and really would be okay. "All of you." She'd go down to the medlab later, check on Marie and Clarice and anyone else who was still there. But later. Much later.
"Good to be back with everyone in one piece", he said, just as quiet. "Fuckin' miracle that we managed it."
"Well, seems like the year for those." Her hand tightened a little on his knee. "What you lot did... it was pretty fucking incredible, really. Going into space, stopping Magneto and the Brotherhood... You can't say you miss the good stuff any more now, you realise?" The last was said almost teasingly.
"We didn't get them, though. Most of them're still out there, we only stopped them for now. But yeah, it was... really somethin', gettin' to go up there."
"Moscow and Washington aren't smoking holes in the ground, so I'd say it's a win." She refrained from poking him. X-Men and their need to beat themselves over the heads with their 'failures'. "Unless you lot went up there looking to take them down permanent, you were always going to run the risk of not taking them all in - there was too much at risk otherwise. And X-Men don't kill." She smiled a little at the last part. "I almost wish I'd been up there with you. Almost - 'm not really that good with the dark."
"I'll take you to the Planetarium when I can walk again", he said almost lightly. "Not quite as good, but it'll do."
There was a giggle, and then Amanda lifted her chin to kiss him on the jaw. There hadn't been a lot of time for shaving, to judge from the stubble. "You're balmy, you know that, right? And I love you for it." She paused, and kissed him again, this time just below the ear. "Among other things. And if it'll help keep you in one place, I'll break out a little nurse's uniform, just for you. It'll be the funny kind of stroke for Forge."
His head tilted, almost unconsciously, into the contact. "Hey, who says Forge ever gets to know about it?"
"You think you're getting off this couch any time soon after the effort it took to get you here?" She did poke him this time, very gently. "'M surprised they let you out of medlab after that whole journal effort."
"I didn't have to get out of bed or anythin' against orders", he said with a crooked grin, twitching automatically away from the poke. "Not for the journals, anyway. Just... borrowed Kurt's Blackberry when he wasn't lookin'. He was right by the bed. As for the water thing, I didn't want to bother them just for that."
"Plonker," she told him affectionately. "Well, now you've got me to spoil you rotten. And that doesn't happen so often, so you'd better make the most of it."
"An' how long do I have you for before Snow Valley drags you back?" he asked, deliberately lightly. "Until the next time someone tries to end the world?" she suggested, equally lightly. "I might have to borrow a toothbrush and some clothes, tho'. I kind of took off without packing when I saw you were back."
"'m sure someone can lend you a toothbrush, or there might be a spare one around here somewhere. An' my clothes are yours if you don't want girls' ones."
"I probably left some stuff here last time I came, too." Amanda snuggled close with a contented noise, careful not to jostle him too much. "'S good to see you, love."
He leaned carefully into the contact, smiling slightly. "Good to see you too."
Angelo might have been confined to his suite, reluctantly but without much choice but to do what he was told, but that didn't mean he had to stay in bed - whatever his mother wanted him to believe.
His body, however, was being a lot more convincing just by being uncooperative. Moving at anything more than a snail's pace made him dizzy and sent shooting pains through his head, and he still couldn't seem to focus right. But still, he persevered.
"Are you even meant to be up?" came a very familiar voice from the doorway of the bedroom. Amanda stood there, slightly breathless since she'd run up several flights of stairs to get here. What information she'd had had been sketchy, so she wasn't sure how hurt he'd gotten, but the cast on his ankle was evidence enough that it hadn't been a soft landing. "You don't look like you should be up."
He'd only made it about six inches from the bed at that point but he froze, looking guiltily in her direction. "Maybe? I was bored."
"I swear, you could be missing a leg and you'd still be trying to walk around." Her tone was teasing, but there was a sudden brightness to her eyes. Taking in the crutches and the definite wobble, she frowned a little. "Right. You, off that foot. I'm pretty sure they would have told you nothing strenuous for the first little while, and it looks like you got hit on the head as well. And I can distract you plenty so you won't be bored."
"My head hit somethin'", he corrected, frowning slightly. It seemed important, for some reason. "I think, anyway. It was Toad. But this isn't strenuous, I'm goin' slow."
"Laurie said you had lung problems too, so this is plenty strenuous," she countered, crossing her arms over her chest and following with that particularly stubborn jut to her jaw anyone who knew her recognised. "You're just as bad as Nate. If I have to tie you to the bed, you're gunna take it easy for a few days at least."
"Cough's a lot better", he said mulishly, then looked worried. "What's Nate been doin'? Burned his brain out again."
"I meant generally, what with the sneaking out of medlab and trying to teach with his brain fried and all the rest. Specifically, he's one of the less-bad ones. Powers overload, bruised, battered, exhausted... the usual. Nothing broken, tho', which is better than you're doing. Now, do I have to make you get back into bed, or are you going to be sensible?" Worry at the condition he was in - and relief at seeing him worried about Nathan, which was Standard Operating Procedure for Angelo, which meant he was okay-ish - sharpened her tone a little.
He glanced between her and the main room, not quite willing to give up his efforts now he'd managed to get out of bed. "...how about the couch? That good enough?"
She paused, gauging the distance as he had. "Only if you let me help?" she suggested, almost plaintively, seeing his stubbornness. "If you've got a concussion, falling over and hitting your head on the coffee table is not an option. I promise I won't feel you up too much?" The last was said with the mock-innocent expression she knew tended to turn people to jelly when she wanted something.
"You can help", he agreed, not quite as much like a concession as he might have liked. There were dwarves with hobnailed boots in his head again, or he might have been more appreciative of both the words and the expression.
The words were barely out of his mouth before she was at his side, slipping under the arm on the broken ankle side and wrapping her arm around his waist. There was a pause, however, as the contact finally cracked some of her demeanour and she pressed her face to his side, momentarily overcome. "I thought I'd lost you," came the soft admission.
Angelo looked down at her, not sure what best to do. Finally, awkwardly, he put all his weight on his good foot for long enough to swing the other arm - crutch and all - around her in a hug. "I'm here", he said quietly. "An' I'm gonna be okay."
Her arm tightened around him, and she nodded, without pulling her face away. Then the awkwardness - and the precariousness - of their position registered, and she straightened, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. "This isn't getting you to the couch any quicker, is it? Couch first, mushiness second," she said in a brisk, irreverent tone that her work colleagues would have recognised as her 'job' voice. "You want me to take one crutch so you can lean on me if you start keeling over?"
"...um." He looked uncertain, eyeing the crutches. "Think it'd really be easier?"
Was she crowding him? Fuck, she was crowding him. "Maybe not?" she admitted, letting go of him entirely. "But if you fall over, I'm not gunna be able to catch you very well if I'm not close. And I can't project the shielding spell yet. Still tends to wind up around me." She was fussing, and she made a visible effort to stop. Angelo was a grown man, if one with a broken ankle, a concussion and unspecified 'lung damage'. "P'raps see how you go and you'll let me know if you get dizzy or something?"
"No no no, you stay there", he said hastily. "I just don't know how it's gonna work. Let's try it this way?"
She ducked under his arm again, a bit more subdued this time. "Just use me like you would the crutch, only my arse isn't the handgrip. Unless you want it to be." Flirting was nice and normal and not at all fussy, right? "Lean on me when you take a step with the good foot, and I'll help you shuffle forward on the bad one, yeah?"
"Sounds like a plan." He relinquished the crutch to her, leaning on her with his hand somewhere at convenient height on her back. Which might or might not have been on her low back. "Right. Let's go."
She grinned a little at the contact, and braced herself as his weight hit her shoulder. Amanda wasn't big, but like Pete, she was wiry, and the training with the Trenchcoat Brigade had made her certainly stronger than she looked. Things were a bit awkward at first, but they managed to shuffle out to the couch.
Angelo settled onto it with would-be hidden relief, dropping his remaining crutch onto the floor, and promptly started to cough.
Amanda was beside him in an instant, dropping the other crutch and helping him sit upright so he could breathe a bit better. "Fuck, love," she said when the fit had subsided. "What happened? You sound horrible."
"Uh", he rasped out sheepishly, "there might've been a few seconds in vacuum involved there. Wasn't my fault, an' Clarice sent one of her discs after me..."
Her hand paused in the action of rubbing his back soothingly. "Vacuum," she said distantly. "You ended up in a vacuum." Then she took a deep shuddering breath, making a mental note to thank Clarice in whatever fashion the pixie wanted. "So," she continued, her voice a little more normal, just a tightness in her expression. "How long with the coughing? There's no permanent damage, is there? And what needs doing to help?" Her fingers itched to just Heal him and be done with it, but she knew better than that.
"Nothin' permanent, the doctors said", he assured her. "Should pass in a few days. Until then... just wait it out. Maybe treat it like a normal cough."
"Normal." It came out a little flatly, but the moment passed as she gave his back a little pat. "You want some tea or something? Water? Painkillers for the head?"
"Water'd be good. Headache comes an' goes." He leaned into her hand. "... don't be like that."
"'M sorry, just a bit freaked out. You just told me you got sucked into space - 's gunna take a bit to get used to." She pressed a kiss to his shoulder and got up, moving to the kitchenette. After a longer moment than it really should have taken, she returned with a glass of water, looking a bit more composed. "Here, love. So... Space, huh? No air, freezing cold, things imploding or exploding or whatever it is they do, I can't remember..." Her voice trembled a little.
He looked round at her, knowing she wasn't okay but not sure what to do about it, and reached carefully for the glass in her hand. "Nothin' imploded or exploded. Come here."
She sat carefully on the couch next to him, as if afraid to jostle him. Or that he'd suddenly not be okay. Her hands she kept firmly in her lap, trying not to twist the hem of her shirt like she was prone to do when anxious. "It just... it didn't seem real, y'know?" she said at last. "The space thing. Too big, too bloody mad. If I thought of it just like a normal fight, I could handle it better, since then you were safer, in a way? But this..." She pressed her lips together to stop the tremble. "'M sorry, love, you're sick and you don't need me freaking out on you. I'll be all right, just give me a sec to pull it back together."
"Not gonna get any worse if you freak out", he said gently. "Or if you touch me."
At that she slid closer, so their shoulders touched. "You won't explode? Or implode?" she asked, only mostly joking. "You'll be okay after all that?"
His arm went around her easily now - there was nothing worse than bruises there, after all. "I'm not gonna break", he promised her. "They said the cough should be gone by the end of the week, an' then there's just the ankle."
She made a soft noise and leaned into him, resting her own hand on his knee and her head against his shoulder. "'S good to have you back," she said quietly, the warmth of his arm around her doing more to reassure her than anything else that he was really there and really would be okay. "All of you." She'd go down to the medlab later, check on Marie and Clarice and anyone else who was still there. But later. Much later.
"Good to be back with everyone in one piece", he said, just as quiet. "Fuckin' miracle that we managed it."
"Well, seems like the year for those." Her hand tightened a little on his knee. "What you lot did... it was pretty fucking incredible, really. Going into space, stopping Magneto and the Brotherhood... You can't say you miss the good stuff any more now, you realise?" The last was said almost teasingly.
"We didn't get them, though. Most of them're still out there, we only stopped them for now. But yeah, it was... really somethin', gettin' to go up there."
"Moscow and Washington aren't smoking holes in the ground, so I'd say it's a win." She refrained from poking him. X-Men and their need to beat themselves over the heads with their 'failures'. "Unless you lot went up there looking to take them down permanent, you were always going to run the risk of not taking them all in - there was too much at risk otherwise. And X-Men don't kill." She smiled a little at the last part. "I almost wish I'd been up there with you. Almost - 'm not really that good with the dark."
"I'll take you to the Planetarium when I can walk again", he said almost lightly. "Not quite as good, but it'll do."
There was a giggle, and then Amanda lifted her chin to kiss him on the jaw. There hadn't been a lot of time for shaving, to judge from the stubble. "You're balmy, you know that, right? And I love you for it." She paused, and kissed him again, this time just below the ear. "Among other things. And if it'll help keep you in one place, I'll break out a little nurse's uniform, just for you. It'll be the funny kind of stroke for Forge."
His head tilted, almost unconsciously, into the contact. "Hey, who says Forge ever gets to know about it?"
"You think you're getting off this couch any time soon after the effort it took to get you here?" She did poke him this time, very gently. "'M surprised they let you out of medlab after that whole journal effort."
"I didn't have to get out of bed or anythin' against orders", he said with a crooked grin, twitching automatically away from the poke. "Not for the journals, anyway. Just... borrowed Kurt's Blackberry when he wasn't lookin'. He was right by the bed. As for the water thing, I didn't want to bother them just for that."
"Plonker," she told him affectionately. "Well, now you've got me to spoil you rotten. And that doesn't happen so often, so you'd better make the most of it."
"An' how long do I have you for before Snow Valley drags you back?" he asked, deliberately lightly. "Until the next time someone tries to end the world?" she suggested, equally lightly. "I might have to borrow a toothbrush and some clothes, tho'. I kind of took off without packing when I saw you were back."
"'m sure someone can lend you a toothbrush, or there might be a spare one around here somewhere. An' my clothes are yours if you don't want girls' ones."
"I probably left some stuff here last time I came, too." Amanda snuggled close with a contented noise, careful not to jostle him too much. "'S good to see you, love."
He leaned carefully into the contact, smiling slightly. "Good to see you too."
