xp_logs | [Shiro and Jennie]

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Jennie and Shiro gets shared comms duty, and Jennie points out some uncomfortable truths. With the subtley of a brick.

One of the many running in-jokes of the X-Men is the shared hatred of comms duty. To many it was a dull responsibility and a time to keep up with other work. To others it was a punishment for screwing up. To Shiro, it was often the former, and he'd gotten through plenty of college work those nights. But today was certainly the latter. Unable to concentrate, much less sit still, it was almost physically painful to sit and wait. He almost hoped that Magneto would take control of some abandoned missile silo.

"Hey there, Twitchty McTwitchypants, settle down before I go and find a roll of duct tape," said his companion irritably. Jennie sometimes enjoyed shared comms duty, as it made the time go faster especially when there was loads of snark from your partner to keep you company. But tonight Shiro had spent the majority of the last half hour to trying to crawl out of his own skin, and it was starting to annoy her. Painting one's fingernails took effort if one was not left-handed.

"Sorry," Shiro muttered petulantly. That didn't stop him from shaking his legs or drumming his fingers on the console, though. The water he'd brought down with him was starting to bubble, but he didn't even notice it.

"I'm not going to have to bust out one of the hazmat suits, am I?" Jennie responded dryly. "I know your boyfriend took off, but the literal withdrawals are a bit much." The girl capped the polish and blew on her fingernails, while raising a dark eyebrow at the man sitting next to her.

Shiro turned so quickly that his neck cracked. "What?" he demanded hoarsely, gingerly rubbing the back of his neck. "What are you talking about?" As if the sudden denial weren't proof enough to verify what she'd just said.

Jennie blinked in confusion. "Okay, I was actually teasing. But that rings an alarm bell. Shiro whatever-the-hell-your-middle-name-is Yoshida, don't tell me you actually..." she trailed off. There had been something in the files about Alex. Several somethings. He wasn't boy hostage boy for nothing, she'd discovered. "...Oh my," Jennie finished.

Shiro had been pale enough to begin with, but now he looked like a ghost. He turned away, unable to so much as look at Jennie. "I do not actually have a middle name," he muttered. It was the only thing he could bring himself to say.

He didn't need to say it, it was written all over his face. Suddenly Alex's departure made a lot more sense than the usual 'I just had a fight with my boyfriend'. She was appalled. "Dude, seriously?" Jennie sat back in her chair. "With your guys's history? I mean, did you even stop to think about it?"

"We are not the first friends to become . . . something else," Shiro protested weakly, struggling over that "something else." Alex had always been the more expressive and intimate one, so he hardly knew how to qualify them, especially given the recent revelations. "It just happened."

Jennie was never very good at being subtle. Blunt as a brick to the face was a more apt descriptor. "Sweetie pie, I know you and Alex have been having intimate relations for the past several months. Anyone with two eyes and more than a handful of braincells knows. Now, please tell me I'm not getting a wire crossed and you are not having actual withdrawals here? Because I lived with a drug addict for a good majority of my formative years, and I know a withdrawal when I see one. And had you not the history that you have, I would chalk it up to something else," Jennie crossed her arms over her chest and stared at Shiro coldly. There were very few things that were totally unforgivable to Jennie, and not surprisingly, falling off the wagon was one of them.

"What, you think that I'm addicted to him?" Shiro let out a derisive snort, but it was half-hearted. "That is dumb. You cannot actually get addicted to a person." Though no matter how much he told that to himself, he didn't believe it any more. "What do you know?"

"I know plenty," Jennie said coolly. "Sometimes what we think is normal, or should not happen, does, simply because of who we are and what we can do. Friends can betray friends without even meaning to, simply because they have the power to do so," she looked down at her hands, face expressionless.

"Even with the best of intentions, things can happen," she said quietly before she looked up at Shiro. "People get addicted to others, Shiro, for whatever reason. Sometimes it's simply how that other person makes us feel. But then it's a short dangerous walk to getting addicted by other means."

"Samson is upstairs for the rest of your psychobabble." Shiro sighed and sat back, leaning his head over the back of his chair. "It felt so good," he finally admitted. "I did not think . . . We thought that it was the right thing to do, and it was working well. No one could have known."

"Well, no," Jennie conceded. "But people like you need to be careful about things that 'feel good'. Once an addict, always an addict."

"People like me?" Shiro finally worked up the nerve to look Jennie in the face. "Fuck you. It is not your place to judge me."

"Let me tell you something Shiro," Jennie turned in her seat and stared down Shiro with a cold blue gaze. "You don't see who you're hurting when you do what you do, but you need to think of those that depend on you." She stood and lifted her shirt, showing Shiro a small circular scar on her hip. "My mother's boyfriend put his cigarette out on me when I was five, while she was passed out on the couch. Too drunk to stop him." Jennie sat back in her chair, staring at the monitors in front of her.

"When I let someone lay a finger on my sister because I am high, then you can lecture me." But the heat was gone from Shiro's voice. Deny it though he might, he couldn't avoid the truth in her words. He hated that.

"When?" said Jennie, turning to Shiro and raising an eyebrow. "How about 'never?'"

"It was a rhetorical when." And something that Shiro had never even imagined before. "So is there a point to this? Because you are not saying much that I have not heard already."

"Yeah, I do," Jennie began putting things in her bag. She swung to face him. "The others may forgive you, give you another chance, continue to trust you. But I've had too much experience with 'I screwed up, I'll never do it again.' I didn't really trust you before, and now I definitely don't trust you as far as I can throw you Shiro Yoshida, and that's much farther than you think."

"I literally could not care less about what you think or how you respect me," Shiro retorted, eyes blazing. "With this attitude, you will make a great X-Man some day. Just remember not to be a raging bitch on the field. That stays at home."

"At least I'm not some fucking junkie who puts his teammates at risk with his own ignorance," Jennie said, standing and swinging her bag over her shoulder. "Have fun watching comms by yourself flyboy, my shift is over." And with that, she was gone.

"Good riddance," Shiro spat. Literally. He slumped in his seat, his fists aflame and the air around him suddenly ten degrees warmer. The console buzzed and the screens went fuzzy until Shiro reined himself in, leaving him panting and exhausted. He angrily wiped at his eyes and shouted a curse. The worst part of all this was that everything she'd said was exactly right