Laurie and Yvette: A path in the woods

[x-wallflower-.livejournal.com]

Laurie and Yvette finally meet up to talk. Things go better then Laurie was expecting.



It was peaceful this deep into the woods that bordered one side of Xavier's, and Laurie might have taken time just to enjoy the sounds that came both from animal, and from herself as she walked through leaf-fall and bracken that coated the ground. She didn't often leave the designated paths these days, having only enough time for her normal morning run before she buried herself in books and the other work that took up much of her days.

It was nice simply to wander now, even if it was with a purpose of finding her sometimes friend and former roommate. A sometimes friend that she hoped might be a current friend again if they could find a way to mend the differences that had put distance between them this last little while.

"Hije?" Laurie called out, using her sometimes nickname for Yvette. It wasn't one she'd used in a while, and she couldn't say why she hadn't, except perhaps that nicknames were a form of closeness, and she hadn't felt close to anyone here in a long time.

"I am up here," came the reply, from a large oak tree. Yvette was perched on one of the broad branches above Laurie's head, staring back down at her with impenetrable glowing eyes. "I am glad you are coming."

Laurie's face had turned upward when she heard Yvette's voice and she locked gazes with her for a moment before stepping back and lowering her eyes. There was so much...too much, and she felt like if she held gaze with anyone for any length of time right now she might see things she had no wish to see.

"Should I come up, or will you come down?" she asked, resting her hand on the trunk of the tree.

"I will come down," Yvette replied, and leapt off the branch to land crouched in a pile of leaves a couple of feet away from Laurie. When she straightened, it was with a certain wary wachfulness, her eyes never leaving Laurie's face, taking in the purple skin and hair. "It is good, that you want to be talking. Talking is how the people make things right, yes?" There was a slight stress on the word 'people', a challenge to Laurie's comment about feral nature.

"Some people, yes." Laurie agreed, turning and sitting at the base of the tree, resting her back against the trunk as she watched Yvette. "Some like to yell, and some hit, but I find talking is better. Things seem to go a lot better when there's no yelling and hitting."

She was babbling slightly, and she allowed her words to trail off as she realised it. She felt nervous, and frightened, more at the situation she'd gotten herself into then Yvette herself. She had left herself almost without options, and now she wasn't sure where to tread, or what to say.

"Then perhaps you should be talking first? I said the things I wanted in the first email I was sending, after what happened in my home country, and you were wanting the time to think. I am ready to be listening, I think." It was said with a certain dignity that was almost comical from the tiny spiky red girl. She perched on a nearby stump, purposefully accentuating the almost-animalistic crouch and her elongated hands and feet. The gloves and socks were off, and her toes curled deeply into the wood.

Laurie allowed her hands to drop from her thighs, fingers digging absently into the earth and taking comfort from it as she did so. "I never thought you'd hurt me, and it didn't matter that you had by accident because I knew you hadn't meant it. But, when you attacked me, I wondered if I was wrong, if I'd made a mistake in trusting you so much. I know it was another mistake now, you were so angry that you couldn't see who I was, just that I was in your way. I get that now."

"I did not want to hurt you," Yvette agreed. "And yes, I was so angry, all I was wanting was to be lashing out. I did not even mean to be attacking you - I was forgetting, in my anger, that I should not be touching. It was as if I had forgotten who and what I am being, in the moment." Her toes flexed deeper into the wood as she paused to think of what she was going to say next. "And then I am seeing what you are saying to Kyle, about the feral nature. Kyle has not hurt the people who are his friends and you are calling him the animal, the one who cannot be controlling his anger. I did hurt my friend, so what is that to be making me?"

It wasn't the most comfortable of questions to answer, especially since after the fight with War she felt even more like a huge bitch then she had after she'd realised just how far she'd gone in her desire to 'win' that argument. She was silent for a long time, fingers playing in the earth at her feet as she gathered her thoughts inwards, trying to come up with something she was happy to be saying.

"You ever said something you wish you could take back? Even if at the time you completely meant it?" she asked eventually.

There was a pause, and then a slight, wry smile crossed Yvette's face, vanishing again just as quickly as it had appeared. "You are talking to the person who is hurting you in the heat of the moment," she pointed out. "I wish every day I could be taking that back." She regarded Laurie longer. "Why did you say such a thing? You are Kyle's friend, yes? You are knowing that he is being afraid of himself sometimes? Like I am?"

"I don't think it was any one thing, and mostly I think Kyle was just a convenient target." Laurie admitted, pulling her knees up to her chest and resting her chin on them. "I don't like failing at things very much, or not understanding them. I feel like my whole life has just been one big case of stupid since I came here. Nothing I do seems well thought out or right. I just, get angry all the time now, and the stuff that comes out of my mouth. I am...was Kyle's friend. I knew exactly what to say to really hurt him. So I did."

"I think you are needing the outlet for your anger, like I am," Yvette replied quietly, looking down briefly at her feet digging into the stump. "You may not be able to be hurting someone in the body, but the words... sometimes they are very much worse. And you did not seem so angry on the journals. It was looking like you were wanting to hurt Kyle. That is why I could not be talking to you for the time."

"I did want to hurt him." Laurie said quietly, not proud of that, but not wanting to shade the truth either. "We've been at each other for awhile now, and he scared me badly that day. I know different now, but then, it didn't seem like such a hard thing to imagine him killing that man. I'm not a nice person at times, Yvette. I'm judgmental, and stubborn and kind of an ass. I'm hoping to change that though."

"Why?" came the almost challenging answer. "It is the hard thing, to change what you are. Why do you want to do this if before you were thinking you were right?" Not just with Kyle, but in every other conversation Laurie seemed to have with people.

"Because my father almost died." Laurie said, eyes focussed on her hands. "It was my decision to leave him, to go off on my own because of a principle. He saved my life, you know, even after I left him by himself."

"But do you want to be changing because you want to be the better person, or because you do not want people to be thinking you are the bad person?" Yvette persisted, remembering Samson's talks about motivation being just as important as the decision to change.

"I don't like being thought of as a bad person." Laurie admitted, having gone quiet for some time as she thought about her answer. "And I think there's some of that in me wanting to make things different. But I think I need to change as well, because this isn't who I used to be, and it's not who I want to be now. I didn't mean to get so cold, I want to be more like I was...only, you know, a little less of a coward."

"You were never the coward, Laurie," Yvette said, a little sadly. "You were afraid, yes, but you were still doing what needed to be done. To be brave does not mean you do not feel." Strange, Yvette reflected, how things had turned around.

Funny, Laurie had come here expecting a possible fight, or at the very least a level of coldness from Yvette. She was glad that things had turned out differently from what she'd feared, it just went to show how little she trusted in anything these days, she supposed.

"Can we start again?" Laurie asked after the silence had stretched on a little longer then was probably comfortable. "I mean, like we'd only just met, but, you know, not. I think maybe it would be good to get to know each other again."

Given Yvette had forgiven Tommy for doing far, far worse to Jay, she wasn't about to eat her own words to Jay and draw this out. Especially when she'd wronged Laurie so much herself. "I would like to try," she said, after considering what Laurie had said, what she had done. "It will be hard, for you to be trusting me, for me to be trusting you, but you were the good friend to me." She paused, and offered a brief, stiff smile. "When you were listening to me."

"One of the things I think Scott is going to get me to work on, I think." Laurie admitted with a soft smile. "I almost quit, you know? I'm glad he didn't take me on my word now."

Yvette blinked. "You were wanting to be quitting the X-Men? But that has been the only important thing to you since you are joining."

"I..."

Laurie paused, trying to get her thoughts in order. The idea of talking to someone, actually talking and not analysing just how her words would be taken...

"I felt like I'd burnt all my bridges there. I've been just a little obnoxious lately, you might have noticed?" she finally said, resting her chin against her knees as she folded her arms around them.

"Just a little." Yvette picked at the stump, long fingers shredding the wood. "But is it not for the X-Men to be telling you that there are no more chances? There have been people who have done far worse." Yvette thought of that final battle with Apocalypse and shivered a little - she had shared Jay's concern for his friends, although not his demand for answers.

"You and Scott must be sharing a brain." Laurie said, but there was humor in her gaze. "He told me something about X-men not being born, and that I shouldn't worry about what other people thought, and only about what I wanted. So, I guess this is what I want. To be an X-man, but be a person as well. Not just one or the other, and nothing in between. I think I'm going to need to talk to some people though, and well, keep talking till they're ready to talk back. Then, listen a bit, after that."

"Listen first," Yvette advised. "You cannot know what someone is thinking unless you are listening to what they are saying. No matter how clever you are thinking you are."

"Smart person disease." Laurie acknowledged with a wry grin. "We always think we know it all. Most of the time that 'all' is pretty focussed though. Anyway, you ready to go back inside, or were you wanting to hang out out here some more? I hear tell that there's some form of cooking going on at the moment. I figure we could go make nuisances of ourselves and get some cookies right out of the oven?"

"I think I will go for the run - it is too crowded in the mansion for me at the moment," was Yvette's reply. She repressed the urge to snort at Laurie's "smart person" descriptor. She might be clever in some things, but with people she was not.

Once upon a time, Laurie might have told Yvette to be careful, or to make sure she didn't stay out too long. But that had been awhile ago now, and Yvette was a different girl to the one who'd entered the mansion. So instead, she simply got to her feet, nodded her head in acknowledgement of what she'd said, and then walked away back through the woods toward the mansion.