Log: Clarice & Laurie

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Backdated to 22nd January 2008 Time: 4:00pm because I suck at actually e-mailing myself logs. Song: 'Welcome to Wherever you are' by Bon Jovi.

Clarice catches Laurie taking a breather outside Nathan's room and decides to help her out.



Laurie paused outside the door to Nate's room, taking a breather for a second. She'd just been in to help Amelia change his bandages, and while she was professional enough that it didn't embarrass her to do so, she still had a hard time containing her distress at seeing one of her teachers wounded as he was.

He'd been admittedly upbeat, trying to make it easier for her, no doubt. Another point to feel a little bad about, since no patient should need to make their nurse feel better. Still, the jokes were appreciated and she hoped she hadn't leaked too much, either mentally or physically.

"You okay, Squid?" Clarice asked, passing by with a clipboard to work on the supply inventory. It was a fairly tedious job, but one she had done quite often as an EMT and had developed a liking for. It was a very Pavlovian response actually; she had learned to like something she had previously hated, like lunges when she had first begun fencing. Sadly, this didn't extend into some of her classes at school.

"Walk with me," Clarice instructed, heading towards the back supply closet and shuffling the papers on the clipboard around so the ones she needed were in front. Initially she had planned on starting in the near closet, but something told her that Laurie needed some space away from others right now.

Settling in on the closet floor, Clarice continued, "It's okay to not be okay you know. To be affected."

"I feel like..." Laurie started, pausing for a moment to get it straight in her mind. "Like such a, a, I don't know, a non-handling it type person. Everyone seem so used to all this, and I'm afraid they'll tell me I'm not good enough. It's too important, you know? I don't want them saying I can't do it just because I'm not, well, not Kyle, or Jenny or Marius. They just, they just handle it, and I don't know how."

Opening a box of expired saline bags, Clarice played with it idly, just to give her hands something to do. At heart, she was almost always in motion, "You're not Kyle or Marius or Jenny, you're Laurie. So you deal with things your own way, that's first. This isn't a competition to see who can out macho each other, you'll only end up hurting yourself if you try. This is....survival. Working down here, it's hard. And it's so much more real than any training scenario," tossing the saline towards the younger girl, Clarice grinned wickedly, "Ever throw one of these from the roof?"

Laurie caught the bag neatly as she shook her head, grinning. "Nooo, I can't say I have. Is this one of those super sekrit med-staff initiation rights Marius has been warning me about?"

"Yes and no. It's more like one of the best stress relievers ever. Wanna try it?" throwing expired saline bags from the roof was awesome. They made the best noise when they hit, somewhere between a 'splat' and a 'boom.' "But really, Laurie, it's okay to be freaked out. Everyone is sometimes. It'd been even freakier if you weren't."

Laurie pondered the bag in her hands, squishing the solution from one side to the other with her fingers as she thought about what Clarice had said. "Sure, why not? Do you, um, get in trouble if it were to say, accidentally drop on someone?"

She wasn't sure she believed her about it being okay to be freaked out, but maybe she'd meant once everything was done, not freezing up when everything was going to hell around you. She had been so close to that, every time something dangerous, something uncontrollable had happened. She was so worried that one day she wouldn't snap herself out of it and get on with things that needed getting on with.

Making a face at Laurie, Clarice stuck her tongue out, "Don't hit people. Except Kyle. You can maybe hit Kyle," she pulled a couple more boxes of saline out from under the shelf. There were three expired boxes, two saline bags in each box. Perfect. "The other thing about being an X-Man, Squid, is that you gotta know when to have your breakdown. Isn't it sad, we have to schedule them? My next one is a few months away, but I haven't been on a mission since October, so I guess that's reasonable," her tone was joking, but she was partially serious, "Taking time for yourself to not cope is good, just try to do it after the emergency is over."

"And here I was planning on trying to get Mr Farouk, although it would be fairer trying to hit Kyle, he's got that whole feral spatial sense thing." Laurie mused, taking the bags of saline from Clarice and moving out of the med lab closet. "Do you think Mr Summers and Dr Grey-Summers had to schedule breakdowns back before the team was so big? Seems like they wouldn't have had much chance, with so few of them. It must have been hard, having to do it all alone without anyone to tell them what worked best."

"I'm not sure they had as many back then," Clarice mused thoughtfully, tapping her chin with one chipped fingernail, “I think we are both the cause of some and the relief from some. And things were a lot less....fucked....than they are now too. Or at least, there was less response to the fuckduity of it all," yes, she was making up her own words.

"I guess so." Laurie murmured, standing aside so that Clarice could exit the closet. "I suppose less people really knew about mutants back then. I wonder what it must have been like, discovering you could do something but not knowing what it was, or where it was coming from. Do you think Mr Xavier thought he was going mad, hearing voices that weren't his?"

"Feel like going insane, got a fire in my brain and I'm thinking of drinking gasoline..." Clarice sang, taking a couple boxes of expired saline and heading out. The inventory could wait a little longer, "I think I heard someone say that was how he went about finding other mutants. By checking psychiatric wards and the National Enquirer. On one hand, that is nuts, on the other, it kinda explains this place a LOT."

Laurie thought about that for a moment, following behind Clarice as she walked. She supposed it would explain a lot about the place, especially the sheer amount of drama that happened from time to time.

"So, that whole saying 'You don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps' is really an instruction?" Laurie asked with a grin.

Being around Clarice, she could feel herself relaxing and letting go of the tension she'd been holding in her shoulders for at least the last couple of days. She wondered if the other girl knew how easy she was to be around.

"I don't know if that's true or not, but it makes a of hell a lot of sense to me," generally, Clarice took the stairs, but she was pretending to take it easy on her ankle, at least in front of Laurie, and the fliers platform on the roof was pretty high up there, so elevator it was! "The nuts run the nuthouse here, but I'll let you in on a secret. I'm not a nut. I'm a legume."