Shiro & Amanda, Tuesday lunchtime

[x-sanfuaiyaa.livejournal.com]

Amanda shows up outside Shiro's class, and finally gets through to him to seek real help.


Shiro idly wondered if he'd get credit for his digital coloring course by firebombing the Adobe Systems headquarters. What should have been an enjoyable class was nothing more than another try at his fraying patience and health. It was an effort just to close up his laptop and drag himself out of class. "Oh, please just kill me," he said not quietly at all when he spotted a familiar blonde head as he left the building.

"Only if you ask me nicely," Amanda replied with a grin, stubbing out her cigarette and standing up from her seat on the edge of a concrete planter to meet him. "Just happened to be in the neighbourhood," with a copy of Shiro's class schedule, obtained online, "and I thought I'd see if you were up for lunch or something," she continued, deliberately casually.

Shiro raised an eyebrow at that. "Is the Mandarin back again?" he hazarded. It was the only thing he could think of that would have Amanda of all people here. At his school. His one refuge from the neuroses and psychoses of the mansion. "Because this time I think I will kill him. I have very little patience left with anything now."

"No Mandarin. Or any other villain of the day." Amanda folded her hands into her jacket pockets. "Look, I know you don't like me very much, but considering what's flying around gossip-wise at the moment, I figured maybe you could do with company." She took in his appearance, the small hints and signs of someone doing things cold turkey. "Or a distraction. Railing at me for being a busy-body could take your mind off the withdrawals for, oh, a good half-hour if you wanted."

"What do you know?" Shiro spat, before realizing that of everyone he'd ever met, Amanda was the only one who could possibly know anything. He looked suitably chastened at that realization. For him, at least. "Sorry. Instinctive reaction."

The retort had been expected. The apology wasn't, and she nodded. "'S all right. Seems like sometimes when people find out about this sort of thing, they automatically have the right to have an opinion about it. Most of which isn't really that helpful." She gave him an appraising look. "I meant it, tho', about lunch. We don't have to talk about where you are right now with things, but I think it might do you good to get out of your own head a bit. Especially considering the sort of reception you've been getting lately back at the school."

"My next class is not until 1," he replied, and led Amanda down the street to a sub shop crowded with fellow students. They stood pointedly out of place among the mostly white artsy types discussing the deconstruction of postmodern cubist identity. Or something. Shiro didn't have very many friends in college. "Really, why are you here? People do not just go check up on others they do not care for."

"Maybe I'm being proactive," Amanda replied airily, looking around the students with amusement. Ah, arty wankers, so much fun. "After all, the last time the mansion folks dealt with someone falling off the wagon, they wound up fighting the Hellfire Club. Not to mention the life sucking. And from what I'm hearing, they haven't really improved their approach much." There was a certain degree of cautious sympathy there, however - she didn't want Shiro to think she pitied him, but she did want him to know there was one person who would understand where he was.

"I've not seen any outright condemnations of me for Kick. Lately," he amended. Suspicious looks and avoidance in the hallways, but he'd always sensed that reluctance to be anywhere near him since he first came to the school, and he'd come to grips with it. "Most of the gossip is just about my recent public confrontations. Which, I suppose, do stem from willful misunderstandings."

"Yeah, certain people are good at those. Did I ever mention the time I got yanked around by the piercings because someone didn't understand the sort of stupid shite you do when you're out of your head with cravings? Fun times." Amanda had no issues with disliking Lorna - or letting other people know how she felt. "Must be hell on the stress, which doesn't help. You seeing anyone about it?"

Comrades-in-arms, if not experiences, it seemed. Shiro quickly ordered his sandwich and moved down the line to wait for it to be prepared. "We have to speak with Professor Xavier regularly." Even though Xavier had been suggesting for months that Shiro find someone else better suited for him, and Scott had more or less threatened violence if he didn't go soon.

Neither had Amanda, until they'd pretty much forced her to go see Samson. She ordered her own sandwich, and glanced at Shiro. "And does it help?" she asked, arching an eyebrow challengingly. "You getting any better?"

"Define better." He thought he had been, until three and a half weeks ago. "I was permitted to stay on the team. I felt that was an accurate measure of my health." Eight missions he could count off the top of his head, not including his and Marie's joint venture with Remy, Amanda, and Betsy to San Francisco. Also not counting retrieving the three trainees from Ahab, where he'd flashed back and nearly killed one of the mercenaries, confusing him for a Kick peddler. He frowned and looked away as the memory refused to leave.

"Better as in 'not needing something to get you through'," Amanda replied, although quietly. "Better as in managing the cravings, understanding what sets you off." She needed him to be honest with himself, if not her. Mainly because she could see for herself Shiro wasn't managing anything right now. He looked horrible.

"The last one is easy. Everything. You should know what it is like." Grabbing his finished sandwich, he passed a few bills for the cashier and absently dropped the change into the tip jar, then roughly pushed through the throng of people to find seats for the two of them. "My powers do not turn off so I am constantly absorbing energy. Now I . . . cannot get enough."

Following shortly after, Amanda gave apologetic looks to several jostled people, but sat down without complaint. "I do know. But these days for me it's more of a matter of knowing what makes the temptation to use something worse than the background levels. What about the rest? You haven't been substituting, have you?" She looked a little abashed. "Like the half a big bottle of vodka and a lot of beers I wiped myself out with the other night."

Shiro raised an eyebrow at Amanda. "Is self-awareness step one?" he sneered. "This weekend was terrible. The sky was cloudy and the weather was cold, so I felt like I had used up everything by midday. Saturday I just went to bed at 6, but Sunday locked myself down in the beach. I hate the winter."

"It is, actually. You can't get things under control until you realise you've got a problem, and what needs to be done to stop it. I had a shitty week last week, wanted to forget about it and went for the bottle. Luckily, I have people around who know to pull me up when I look like I'm doing something stupid, 'cause I'm straight with them." Amanda shrugged. "The X geezer is a smart man, but he's not a drug counsellor. Unless he's turning that part of your brain off, you're setting yourself up for a fall, big-time. And it might not be you that gets hurt."

Everyone just says the same thing. Did no one get it? "Am I supposed to talk to some gai-jin I have never met before and tell him that I got addicted to mutant crack so I could stop a fucking tsunami then tried to kill my dealer and turned on the people who tried to stop me, then started having sex with my best friend and got addicted to his powers and nearly raped him when he refused me?" It all came out at once, before Shiro even knew what he was saying, and he literally combusted from his agitation, and dropped his burning sandwich onto the tray. "Fuck!"

Bloody hell, that explains a hell of a lot. Amanda took a breath and reached into her bag, pulling out the newspaper she'd been reading earlier. The fire was a small one, and she was able to smother it with the paper, although the sandwich was rather the worse for wear. "Breathe," she told him quietly and calmly. "Nice and regular. Calm down, or we'll have one of those bloody 'mutant incidents' on our hands and I'd rather avoid the publicity."

He wasn't hungry anymore anyway. People around them were giving them strange looks, and he just stared at each of them, silently daring them to speak up. They all turned back to their food, but he could still feel their eyes on him. "Sorry."

"It happens." She wouldn't insult him by saying it was okay - there was nothing okay about Shiro's current situation - but there was no blame in her voice or face, only a certain intensity. She might have reached out to touch his arm, but after what he'd told her, she knew the gesture would do more harm than good. "Shiro, back when I was still at the school, and I broke my amulet, my power source, I wound up draining power out of Meggan. She'd synched onto the magical stuff in my study getting me one of my old teas, and I just yanked it out of her. A little kid, one who trusted me like I was her mum. Nothing but a fix. I was so fucked up after that, I wound up cutting a deal with Selene. She promised to cure me, and all I had to do was be her Knight for a year. I fucked Manuel up ripping out the empathic link, nearly got Alison killed, did kill Askani, because of that mess. And I got off lucky." She lowered her head a little, to meet his eyes. "Up until the thing with Meg, I thought I was handling it. Thought I was fine. I wasn't. Neither are you. And you might not want to go talk to some stranger about all this stuff, but if you don't, then you really are some kind of selfish junkie loser. Pride might be what's got you this far, but if you don't swallow it and get some proper fucking help, you're not even going to have that. You'll wind up topping yourself, or chewing through your remaining friends and teammates like they were Pocky sticks until someone takes you out."

"Without Alex, I have no friends, so that is half the problem gone." He didn't say it self-deprecatingly, just a statement of fact, like the sky is blue. "Whom can I even speak with? Who could possibly understand? Whom can I trust?" There was a particular emphasis on that final word. The existence and actions of the X-Men would surely be brought up, but to Shiro, that was a lesser matter compared to his pride and self-worth.
"You still have a sister. Who might manifest one day." Another statement of fact. Amanda leaned back a little. "There are people the X geezer and Samson can put you onto, that they trust. Fuck, if you want, I can put you onto the people I use - they're Emma's, and they're cleared for Trenchcoat stuff." She met and held his eyes again. "Are you sorry for what you did to Alex?"

"Of course." There was no question there. "He might even believe me some day. Did Meggan ever forgive you?"
Amanda gave a small, sad smile. "For the draining? Pretty much straight away. For leaving her, and then shuffling her off to Margali once the dust had settled because I couldn't be what she needed? That took longer." She looked down at her untouched sandwich. "The thing is, Shiro, when you're a junkie, saying the words isn't enough, because junkies lie." When she looked up again, there was a certain remorselessness there. "What are you going to do? To prove you're more than just a junkie? What are you going to do to show Alex you are sorry?"

"I keep being bombarded with rhetorical questions." Shiro poked at the charred bread. "The correct answer is to get healthy, ne? Show him that I can change. I know that." Intellectually, at least. Obviously not something yet taken to heart.

"Actually, you don't, because you haven't done it yet. Didn't do it the day you almost raped someone you say you care about, just for a fix." Now there was no hinting at remorselessness - it was out there. "You won't get many more chances, Shiro. If you really care about Alex and Leyu, if you want to be anything else but a junkie, you'll get yourself some proper, professional drug counselling, fuck whatever excuses you have ready to give everyone." Amanda nodded at the sandwich. "Or that's the rest of your life, right there. Burned out shite."

A vicious poke, and the bread crumbled. Shiro looked up. "Do you have their numbers?"