Garrison and Yvette - Thursday evening

[x-penance.livejournal.com]

Garrison fetches a sulky Yvette for dinner, but takes the time to ask her explanation of things.



Yvette, always quiet, was keeping even quieter in the days following her return from Kosovo. It was a sullen silence, one part guilt-stricken for what she'd done, one part resentful at the reaction she'd gotten when other people - no, not people, X-Men - had done far worse, in her mind and gotten off with sympathy and hugs. Laurie wasn't speaking to her, most of the Elpis people were furious at her, and she wasn't inclined to seek out company, not knowing who would react how. Luckily, school gave her something to concentrate on, and she was sitting under the treehouse tree, making the most of the remaining good weather, avoiding people and doing her English homework in an effort to avoid thinking about the mess she'd made and how long she was going to be grounded. She'd never been grounded before.

"I swear, I'm not an X-Man. I'm a damn babysitter." Garrison muttered as he trudged up the path and into the clearing where the treehouse sat. He always wondered about why the school was so happy with helping the kids build a treehouse. It was like endorsing a place to have teenaged sex away from adult supervision. "Hey Yvette! It's time for dinner." He called out.

Yvette glanced up, sighed and looked back to her book. "I am not being hungry," she replied, stiffly. Mr. Kane hadn't yelled at her, but he was a police man, and probably was taking their side.


"Yeah, I'm sure about that, but you have to eat. I got them to set a place in the kitchen, so you don't have to eat in the dining room with everyone else if you don't want to." Kane said, beckoning with his hand. "Come on. My food is getting cold."

Yvette stared at her book a while longer, then sighed again and closed it, climbing to her feet. It was one thing to not eat herself, completely another to ruin someone else's meal. "You did not have to do anything special for me, Mr. Kane," she said, coming to his side. "I am being all right on my own."

"Yeah, yeah. You're a teenager, an independent person with your own thoughts and feelings and responsibilities that I don't really care about. However, you're also a student and boarder here, so when we say you eat, you eat. You can hide from everyone between meals if that's what you really want to do." Kane had seen Yvette's withdrawls enough to tell the difference between sad and defiently angry, and this was certainly the latter. He figured Angelo had Bad Cop'ed both of them enough that Good Cop wasn't going to fly either, so he decided on Dismissive Cop to see if he could provoke a reaction that wasn't sullen or defensive.

"It is not like you have ever asked me about my thoughts or feelings," she muttered, mostly to herself as she scurried slightly to keep up with the long strides of the Canadian. "It is always being 'for my own good', without asking me what I am wanting and using the powers to make sure I am doing it, like Laurie."

"Ooh, someone has an issue. Is this one of those problems with the more advanced student talking or some kind of deep issue with the whole idea of the X-Men, because if that's the case, I really should have packed a picnic dinner or something. Maybe some cheese and a bottle of wine. Well, for me. You know, because you're underaged or something, and wine makes you vote Democrat." Garrison paused. "You're not a Libertarian, are you?"

He was met by a blank blue stare. "I do not understand what you are meaning," she said, sounding a little annoyed. Bad enough she had issues with English, without people being deliberately confusing. "I did not say I was the more advanced person. I am being tired of people treating me like the small child, just because I am not speaking English so well and I am being small. That is all," she concluded with the great dignity of the teenager with affronted pride.

"Well, you know, you did screw up a major police investigation by running out to stab the bad guys in the face. That's kind of childish, Yvette."

Her eyes blazed briefly and her hair stiffened into further spikes, perhaps a more eloquent response than any words she could have found. "I am sorry, that I was making things to go wrong," she said at last, choosing her words carefully. "And that I was hurting Laurie. But it was the personal matter."

"I understand that. But personal isn't the same as important." Kane pointed to one of the benches that flanked the path. "Sit. I doubt anyone else has spent the time to listen to your side. If you've got a point to be made, this is the time to do it."

She opened her mouth to argue, to remind him that his food was getting cold, but the lure of having someone actually listen instead of lecturing her and demanding answers was too much. Perching on the edge of the bench, she looked down at her long toes, back in their socks, curling over the wood. "The man I followed, he was the one who was taking me from the orphanage," she said, the words coming out in a gush. "The man who gave me to the people who were selling me to Marius in France. It is his fault that I am like this, that I cannot be controlling my power. When I am hearing the police are finding him, that the police were not doing anything, I... It was like it was to be happening all over again. That I was not having the control."

"So why didn't you talk to the rest of the group there about it?"

"Because..." She paused, really thinking about it for the first time. "I am not sure. Perhaps I was wanting to stop being the person who is always needing to be saved. I was very angry... I did not stop to think that there would be the danger. I was thinking that since he was not the mutant, that my powers were to be keeping me safe." Yvette sighed, hunching a little more and resting her pointed chin on her knees, not noticing that she was digging a hole in her pants. "I do not know, Mr. Kane. It seemed that they would not help, that it was not personal to them, so that it was not the important thing."

"You know, Yvette, there's a reason people are mad at you. It's not necessarily what you did." Kane sighed. All of the kids had this kind of hairtrigger for different reasons, and like the rest of them, he was surprised that Yvette was the first one to lash out. "These were bad people. People who needed to be brought to justice. You don't think Angelo understands that? Sometimes, you have to trust other people to do something personal, and you told them with your actions that you don't trust them. Is that the case?"

"I... don't know." When she first came to the school, she would have said "no" in a heartbeat. But now... "Many times, it is seeming that we are not so important as the X-Men. When Miss Lorna was getting upset and hurting Mr. Shiro in the hallway with her powers, she was not to be punished. Miss Marie even said it was to be all right, because she was upset." She glanced up at him. "It seems that if you are the X-Men, the rules do not matter."

"That's not untrue." Kane said with a huff. The stupidity of having a powers fight in the foyer still amazed him. "But that's not really the case, even if it seems that way. Yvette, one of the very unfair things about being your age is that a lot of people tell you that you have to trust them, and unfortunately, you don't get a lot of reasons to do so. But that doesn't make it wrong. There's a lot of things that will be done that makes you wonder whether or not the people in charge have a grip, but one of things we need is you to understand that for most things, there is a reason, and more so, a reason why it isn't necessarily shared with you."

"Because I am too young?" she asked, with a huff of her own. "Or because I am not being the X-Men trainee? Laurie is not being so much older or more mature than me and she is one of the people I have to be trusting, yes?"

"Yeah, sometimes, it sucks. I'm not going to pretend about that. You know what though, you ever run into a rookie cop? That doesn't make him any less a police officer." Garrison sighed, holding up his hands in mock surrender. "Yvette, you've got every reason to be angry. In fact, no one is really surprised at what you did."

The last was a bald faced lie, but Angelo's indignation had seemed pretty specious by Garrison off the bat. This was a man who had broken into a woman's house with no backup and trashed the place with a sword of all things. He figured that he could ignore this issue about Yvette's behaviour. "People will make mistakes, Yvette. Sometimes stupid ones. You did that. Should people stop trusting you the way you stopped trusting them?"

"Perhaps." Her eyes dulled. "It is hard, Mr. Kane. To always be calm. To try to stop my powers from being too out of control. To always be thinking about not making the mistake, because I might be hurting someone." She remembered the blood on Laurie's arms and shuddered a little. "It... did not feel like the bad thing, to be so angry," she confessed. "To not have to be trying so hard."

"That's the danger, Yvette." Kane sighed. "Look, it seems easier to be able to so what you think is right. You're all but invulnerable. Oddly enough, my dad was the same way. He made the decisions about what was right and wrong and followed those through. It's very freeing to be able to do that."

Garrison shifted in his seat on the bench, for the first time bringing Yvette's blue luminous eyes into focus with his. "It's hard to tell someone that you just have to trust us, when you've got a lot of reasons to say we can't be trusted. I've been struggling with the same thing myself. But you know that Professor Xavier wants what's best for you. You know the X-Men want to stop the same activities that got you sold. What I'm asking you to do is have some faith in us. Maybe we don't deserve it, but if things are going to get better, it's better to have you with us."

She held his gaze for a moment, then looked away. "I..." Her voice broke, even though there was no sign of emotion on her mask-like face. "I am sorry, Mr. Kane. For not trusting." Her voice caught again, a small little hiccup, as her eyes remained dry. "Do you think that the people will be forgiving me, if I am saying so?"

"I don't think you should say so." Kane smiled. "Go talk to Angelo and Elpis. You screwed up, because you were their responsibility, and they were terrified that you would get yourself hurt. You owe them a big apology. Angel too, because you dragged her in. But Yvette, you've witnessed two genocides in your life. More than anyone ever should. You wanted to change things. That's the idea behind the X-Men. You didn't get the how right, but you understand the why. Tell them that."

Yvette nodded, taking a breath in an effort to control herself. "I will do that," she managed at last, giving him a tiny smile. "Thank you, for listening to me?"

"It's the only way I'm going to get a hot meal." Kane said. "Yvette, it's a weird world. We're not always right, but if you talk to us, you at least have a lot more people to blame when we're wrong, eh?"