Adrienne & Morgan | Sunday evening
Nov. 23rd, 2008 02:05 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsWhile in Boston Morgan seeks a distraction and Adrienne snaps, finally.
It got dark out so early these days. Daylight Savings Time should be obliterated because of that. Who needed the sun to rise at six in the morning if it was gone before six in the evening? Rush hour traffic and the streetlights were already on. In a way it would work to Morgan's advantage tonight. She walked into the living room where Adrienne was no doubt distracting herself with something mindless just for the sake of distraction. Morgan couldn't blame her, they both needed distracting. The potential death and the loss it carried for them both was painfully sharp between the two women, though they artfully ignored speaking on the subject more than absolutely necessary.
The normally six-foot-tall woman was noticeably shorter as she walked up to her friend. Her skin was paler as well, more a frosted blue than she normally was. Around her fingers was woven a long, thick lock of bright orange hair. "Hair's a funny thing," she said without preamble. "All that genetic material and no one ever really thinks about how they just throw it away. You get your hair cut and then it's left on a floor to be swept up and thrown out. It may be a dead piece of you but it's a piece of you and every cell in your body contains the complete set of chromosomes needed to create one of you. Makes it creepy to throw out all that hair and those nail clippings when you think about it that way, doesn't it?" As she spoke Morgan's hair was very, very slowly attaining a sort of warm glow to it while the blue in her skin continued to leech away just as slowly.
Adrienne jumped at hearing Morgan's voice. She'd been lost in her own thoughts, a world away. Morgan's presence in the house had momentarily startled her, as Boston was where she went to escape, to be alone, and the only time there were people in the house was when she was entertaining, and on those occasions there were so many people that you couldn't think at all. Having Morgan in the quiet house that was usually her own personal space had confused her.
But after she'd come back to the present with her thoughts, Adrienne was once again very grateful for Morgan's company. "I can't see you as the type to creep around salons picking up bits of dead hair," she pointed out with a smirk. "Unless you take a hunting knife and cut it right off of people on the street. Now that, I can see."
"I'm not too enthusiastic about scalping. Some people are, sodding twisted types, I tell you." Morgan made a clicking sound as she shook her head. "No, but I should get a job sweeping up hair in a salon some day just to acquire an arsenal of mimics, don't you think. It'd be horridly convenient." Morgan looked down at the lock of hair and her steadily paling skin. "It just takes so much longer to pick up a decent copy of someone from hair. I don't know if it's because it's small or because hair's never actually alive." She frowned a bit and then shrugged her shoulders. "This was a donation, though. Sweet girl."
"Hey!" Adrienne pointed a finger at Morgan. "Have you been bringing girls into my house? You can't bring people into my house unless I get to be involved. It's one of the house rules. No fucking people unless I get to be involved."
Red eyes were immediately wide, round and innocent as can be. "What? Me? Girl? No. Well, likely, sure, but I haven't." She held up her left hand and crossed her heart with her right. "I just chatted her up in a coffee shop. Bloody cute as hell. Seriously. You'll see soon. I just chatted with her and since I'm obviously a mutant she outed herself to me. She can sort of do what you do in a way, only less creepy and with books. If she puts her hands on books she sort of absorbs everything in them. Never forgets, too. Or so she says. I don't think I can get that with hair but it'd be interesting. She volunteered the genetic material so her body could have adventures she can't." Morgan had a grin on her face that would not be out of place on the face of a frat boy. "I plan to give her adventures later, but after I'm done borrowing her body for this bit of business."
"Not in my house unless I can play too," Adrienne reiterated teasingly. "And my power's no more creepy than yours, you know. And it's incredibly lame to volunteer your body to have adventures you can't, because she obviously won't know what the hell you're doing with her body. I mean, it's not like she's going to reabsorb the memories of what you did when you give her her hair back." She giggled at the stupidity of it. "I don't want this lame girl in my house." Realizing something, she frowned at Morgan. "Aren't you from Boston? Don't you have a place here you can take her to have 'adventures'?"
"A," Morgan ticked off a finger, "I'm not taking her here. B," another finger was ticked off, "I'm not taking her to a brothel. C," a third finger followed trend, "It's no more lame than living your life through movies or books or sod all else that most people live their lives through. At least when people come looking for her asking where she was on the eighteenth of March she'll know she was up to something. She's a head in the clouds sort. It's cute and sort of endearing." She blatantly ignored the part of Adri's question that related to Morgan having been from Boston aside from her mention of Madame's brothel.
"I never said anything about a brothel," the psychometrist muttered. Morgan's happiness over finding the girl was irritating her. She wished the prospect of sex with someone 'cute and sort of endearing' could make her happy and take her mind off of what had happened to Garrison and the others. But it couldn't. And the fact that it could for Morgan was irritating. "If the 'bit of business' you're borrowing Miss Head in The Clouds's body for is to go to a brothel why are you still hanging around here?"
Morgan shook her head. By now she was all of five-foor-four and her hair was a dull orange. Her eyes had lightened to a very pale red and had a greenish tinge to them. Freckles were cropping up all over her face and arms where they were visible. "You asked about being from Boston. Aye, I'm from a brothel in Boston. It's still here; I could introduce you to Madame if you'd like. You'd despise her." Morgan wasn't really going to sleep with the girl, but she would likely flirt with her and maybe make out with her because it would distract the woman from both the situation with Garrison and the fact that she was going to do the biannual check up on her mother's state of existence for herself for the first time. She hadn't seen the woman since she was sixteen, Morgan would need a distraction.
Morgan's flippancy was grating on Adrienne like sandpaper. "I don't want to go to a fucking brothel, Morgan!" she cried out, surprising herself with the volume of her own voice in the spartan, quiet house. "Garrison's probably dead and you're dressing up like Miss Head In The Clouds and going out to visit brothels?! Is that your way of dealing with what's going on? Just find people to fuck so you don't have to think about people getting their throats cut and their wings torn out of their spines and their fucking... fucking arm ripped off... and so much fucking blood everywhere, and why did they leave the parts behind?" One moment she had been joking about having Morgan bring women home to play with and the next she was sobbing uncontrollably. Maybe she should ask Amanda for the number of her psychologist...
Adrienne had been doing the snapping thing on and off since the day the FBI called her onto the crime scene. Morgan had already heard the details from her friend, but there hadn't been yelling until now. Mostly Adrienne had gotten really withdrawn and quiet and whispered about the events on Thursday. Every other time that Morgan knew of it was mostly quiet sobbing Morgan could hear because she was listening when Adrienne likely thought she wasn't. Walls weren't so thick as to keep out sound when someone was overly worried and paying attention. Okay, yes, Morgan had been spying on her but only to make sure she was okay enough to function and didn't need psychiatric attention or some such.
Without being fazed she grabbed a tissue and walked over to hold it out to Adrienne. The metamorph was rapidly losing any resemblance to herself as her body started to pick up the details of her new mimic. It was only a few more minutes until her hair would be the same flaming orange as the original girl's. The skin was nearly paled out and freckled completely. A few bone structure changes and the shift would be complete. "I don't plan on fucking anyone," she informed Adrienne quietly. Morgan's voice had grown softer, partly in reaction to Adrienne's yelling and in part due to the way her mimic's vocal chords worked. Her voice had taken on a musical, quiet tone that was obviously not native to how Morgan herself spoke. "In fact, I don't sleep with people I'm not involved with romantically as a rule. Rather, as a rule ever since I was given the choice. I was referring to the brothel where I made my home when I was kicked out of my own house as a kid. The one where I was an underage whore, cupcake. If I wanted a piece of ass that badly I'd go to a club and pick one up. I'm not on a mission for sex you daft twat." The Irish in her accent intensified as it usually did around Eamon and Thom. It seemed more at home in her borrowed voice than it did in Morgan's own.
Staring at the tissue being held out by the unfamiliar hand, Adrienne backed away and shook her head. "I can't listen to you when you're... this. I can't talk to this. You're not you. You're like a stranger. I don't want to talk to a stranger. Someone who didn't even know him."
Morgan's shoulder's slumped. "You're not such an idiot to not be able to think beyond what you can see." It was neither a question nor filled with even the slightest bit of doubt. "If you won't deal with someone who doesn't look how you're used to them looking then that's on you." The softness of her voice cushioned the harshness of her words. "I've business to attend to and I can't go 'round with blue skin and red eyes when I do it. The body's not being dropped until I'm done."
"I'm in fashion, you orange-haired freckled bitch; of course I don't think beyond what I can see!" Adrienne screeched, her frustration and grief making her see stars. " I saw them all torn apart! I saw things that told me they're all dead! I want to believe they're alive, that the search teams are going to find them, but what I saw won't let me think that!"
Morgan only shook her head. "Good thing you never had to deal with me in real life, then, innit?" That's all she could say. She'd been thinking about ripping an arm off, what sort of force you would need and what sort of pain that would inflict. She'd been thinking about bleeding to death and whether shock would set in quickly enough that Garrison wouldn't feel his life slipping away. She'd been thinking about shock not setting in and being acutely aware of your own blood leaking out of a hole in your body where part of you was once attached. Morgan had thought of a lot of that in scrutinizing detail. The difference was Adrienne was in the vapid business of fashion while Morgan's business involved killing strangers en masse. War wasn't like real life as other people knew it, and neither were the injuries.
"What other life is there, Miss Head In The Clouds?" the psychometrist snapped, sniffling now as anger battled with the grief and pain she'd been feeling. "Is this some fucking fantasy world, then? This isn't real? That would be wonderful! Tell me how to wake up from it and get back to real life, then. I want out. I want to wake up now."
"Real life is the one where I point a gun at you and you try to shoot me before the impact of my bullet takes half your fucking skull off but doesn't kill you. Real life involves your mates in battle dragged your hole-riddled body off after the fighting's done and they try to find enough of you to identify who you are. In real life you can't even pin the finger that pulled the trigger on me for long because I've moved on somewhere else and may have a new name and a new body to go with the new job. That's my real life. Go back to fashion, Adrienne. You don't belong meddling in bits of my world. Or in bits of Kane's." Maybe she shouldn't have said that last bit, but it was true. Her anger over her own uselessness and the piercing pain from thinking about her friend being taken out like he was made Morgan less tolerant to Adrienne's melodrama, even if the woman was fully in her rights to have it.
Adrienne contained a scream, though only barely. "If this is your world, then why aren't you doing anything to fucking help him? Of course I don't fucking belong in your world; it's fucking insanity! You think I want this? Do you think I don't want to be able to go back to fashion, blithely unaware of this wonderful new 'real world' that you're showing me? I wish I could! But I can't! I fucking can't go back, because I- I..." I care. "I can't go back now," she said quietly, almost calm. "He stood by me when everyone else was going to send me to jail. He gave me a stupid medal. And now I can't turn my back on him. If it had been someone else in that car, he would have asked me to do exactly what I did, and I would have said yes to him. And I hate it."
"Because I don't know anything about the people who took him, where they'd have taken him or where to start looking. Just because I was born in this country doesn't make it my territory in the least." Morgan's words were flat. "When this turns into war I'll be your girl, but until then I'm no more useful than the next person."
Frowning, Adrienne nearly pointed out that the situation turning into war was highly unlikely, but she kept her mouth shut. What the hell did she know anymore about this stuff? "So the woman in fashion is more useful than you?" Under any other circumstance she would have smirked to show she was teasing, but this time she was just going for petty and spiteful. "I guess your 'real world' isn't totally your domain anymore then, is it? Now it's just some fucked up mess we both have to live in because we're both too stubborn to walk away and turn our backs on him." She flopped onto the tan leather couch, suddenly exhausted.
Morgan shook her head, the expression on her borrowed features clearly said Adrienne was missing the point. "This isn't war. Mercenary, Adrienne. War, sometimes protecting and once in a while sneaking about as someone else. That's my realm. Sneaking up on noncombatants, ripping off limbs and taking the bodies isn't my world either. You don't listen too well sometimes." She turned away from Adrienne and headed in the direction that would take her to the door. "I don't think it's stubbornness that keeps us from walking away from him, cupcake. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go see my mother and take something I should have taken a long time ago."
"I am listening," Adrienne snorted, eyebrow raised in bemusement. "I'm hearing that you said I don't belong in your world, but that this isn't your world either, so we're both out of our realm here. I'm also hearing that I'm not yelling anymore," she pointed out, mildly impressed by Morgan's tactic. "Wait- you're going to see your Mother? Dressed up in someone else's body?"
The freckled girl threw a grin over her shoulder at the now calmer Adrienne. "Both points are valid: you don't belong in my world and this really isn't either of our worlds. It's his, we just get dragged into it from time to time because of proximity. Confusion, way to cut down on the break down, eh?" She tossed her red hair over her shoulder and nodded toward the door, inviting Adrienne along. "Of course I'm dressed up in someone else's body. She threw me out during my father's funeral because I manifested, you think I want her knowing who I am? I never check on her myself but like I said, there's something I plan to take that I should have back then." Pausing at the door, Morgan spun around. Wide, innocent green-grey eyes gave Adrienne's direction a questioning look. "You in, love?"
It was still strange to think of this pale, orange-haired person as Morgan. Maybe she still said things that Morgan would say, but she wasn't really Morgan- not Adrienne's Morgan. But still, she could understand changing your appearance so people didn't see who you really were. Vapid as fashion may have been, Adrienne had been in the business long enough to know that while it could let you show your individuality, it could also be mass-produced and marketed so that you wore what everyone else was wearing in order to blend in. So she could understand the principle behind what Morgan was doing. "'Wasn't a breakdown," she mumbled defensively, even though she knew that was a lie. With a sigh, she rubbed her hand over her face, standing up. "Whatever it was, it had been building for a while and I'm glad it happened here and not in public or in front of anyone whose opinion I value," she smirked, teasing. The smile faded and she turned serious, however. "I'm sorry I hit you with it. Everything." But now that that was said, she put the topic away for the moment and picked up the other one happily. "She threw you out during your father's funeral? Of course I'm in for this. Let's take everything in the goddamn house! Just let me fix myself up."
Morgan takes Adrienne hunting, so to speak, in her childhood home but not before they run into the woman who gave birth to Vanessa Carlysle and pose as a lesbian couple new to the neighborhood.
Adrienne was unfamiliar with South Boston. Frosts and the people of Southie didn't exactly mix. But the fact that it was unfamiliar made it all the more interesting, which made it more of a distraction, which was definitely what Adrienne needed right now. As Morgan drove a rented, nondescript car around the unfamiliar streets, she was free to admire the scenery and think about Morgan's mission. "So how do you check up on your mother in other bodies?" she asked the orange-haired girl sitting next to her. "Pretend you're a Jehovah's Witness and get yourself invited in for tea and cakes, or whatever it is Southies eat?"
Morgan glanced at Adrienne from the corner of her eye, the steely green looking far more sarcastic than they should have with the quiet, innocent face they were in. "Just Mickey D's for us lowlifes down here, cupcake." By now all of her Boston accent had fled her voice in favor of the western Irish accent she usually associated with Thom. "Aye, no, we don't talk to her. I just want to see whether or not she's still alive. If she isn't that's fine. If she is then we wait for her to leave. I've years of reports that the woman has never changed her routine. It's bingo night, of all bloody things. She'll go and we'll go collect what's mine."
"Sure you don't want to drop the mission and go play bingo instead?" Adrienne teased. She raised a curious eyebrow at Morgan. "What are we collecting, oh partner-in-crime?"
"Aye, bingo's the love of my life," she replied with a fake swoon. "Can't live without it, but I'll make the sacrifice this once." Morgan turned a corner and then put the car into park. She let the car idle so they could keep the heat on while her eyes fixed on a yellow house four down from where they were parked. The porch light was already on and only the light in the front room seemed to accompany it. It wasn't a particularly nice house, but the lawn was kept well enough and nothing seemed to be broken or in disrepair. The squished, two-floor home looked just like the others around it without any remarkable traits. "We're collecting evidence she hasn't a right to, if she kept it anyhow."
Adrienne followed Morgan's gaze to the yellow house and studied it for a second. "Evidence? What, like the old report cards and school pictures she used to put on the fridge? Girl Guide badges? Cherished family photo albums? Arts and crafts from summer camp?" She began giggling, not trying to be mean, hoping that Morgan would be amused rather than upset. The little she knew of Morgan's family- that her mother had thrown her out of the house the day of her father's funeral which had led Morgan to turning tricks in order to get by- was evidence enough that Morgan's home life was cut from a similar cloth to Adrienne's own, so while she would have been jealous of other people for having 'normal' relationships with their parents, she had nothing except a sort of feeling of kinship towards Morgan, and she hoped Morgan recognized that. "I could go knock on the door to make sure she's gone if you wanted," she suggested, though she knew that since Morgan was in another body the other woman could do the same thing just as easily.
The withering look of sarcasm that Morgan shot Adrienne failed in its wrath, her face too sweet for the expression to manifest properly. Morgan could even feel it in her facial muscles. If she decided to reuse this copy, maybe make her Aoife, then Morgan would have to work on constructing a persona that matched the facial construction and overall impression the body gave off. She'd worry about that later and for now settled for sticking her tongue out at Adrienne. "Do I strike you as the sort who was ever a Girl Scout?" Granted, who Morgan was now had nothing to do with who she'd been so maybe she did. "Photographs, mostly. Photos of Dorothy's beloved, deceased daughter who was killed by the demon who possessed and consumed her body. She hasn't a right to those."
"No, you don't; hence the giggling," Adrienne pointed out. She frowned as her brain shifted gears. "She thinks you're dead? And sorry, but why bother stealing pictures of yourself as a child? I mean, no offense, but I thought you were of the 'can't change the past so why dwell on it, take what you're dealt and make the best of yourself with no regrets so you can show the fuckers later how you turned out better than them' camp of thought?"
"I don't know if she actually thinks I'm dead, but I'm good as." Morgan shrugged. "I'm not trying to change the past here, love. I'm just taking what's mine: me. She lost all right to me when she kicked me out and meant it. If she can't deal with having a daughter who's blue then she sure as hell hasn't earned the right to keep the daughter who wasn't. You get the whole or you get nothing." Most of those pictures had her father in them. It was the only reason Morgan was sure that Dorothy Carlysle hadn't thrown them out.
Adrienne still thought she was dwelling on things that were unnecessary, but she kept that thought to herself. She had no desire to get into another debate with Morgan- not today. Not after what they'd already been through. They'd fought enough for one day, even if the fight had been orchestrated by Morgan for the purpose of intentionally trying to confuse and infuriate her to pull her back together after her breakdown. She owed Morgan her right to erase herself from her mother's life no matter how pointless Adrienne thought it was. To show her solidarity with the cause, she opened her door and stepped out of the car. "Alright, so let's go steal you back from your mother," she announced, heading off towards the house.
"Damn it, cupcake," Morgan cut the engine quickly and got out as well, jogging slightly to catch up to Adrienne. This whole state of being short wasn't her thing. "What are you going to do, knock on the door, pretend to be a Jehovah's Witness and get yourself invited in for tea or whatever it is us Southies drink?" She was shaking her head and sounding a bit annoyed but the amusement shone strongly in her eyes.
Halfway from the car to the house the door of the home a redhead named Vanessa had grown up in opened and out stepped a woman. The woman was in her late forties with auburn hair streaked faintly through with white. She was about five-foot-six, a clear indicator that it was from her father that Vanessa had inherited her height. If they had been closer Dorothy's bright blue eyes would have been more visible. Before her mutation manifested Vanessa's eyes had been the same shade. Morgan froze momentarily when her mother glanced at Adrienne and herself. Dorothy even smiled and gave them a polite smile, one Morgan couldn't bring herself to reciprocate.
"Hello!" Adrienne called out cheerfully, giving the woman a finger wave. It was irresistible. "We just moved in down the next block and we thought we'd go for a stroll around the new neighborhood. I'm Veronica, and this is my life partner, Gertrude. I love the color of your house!"
"I'm going to fucking kill you," Morgan muttered out of the corner of her mouth through the clenched teeth of the smile she'd painted on her face the moment Adrienne had spoken. Her partner? Well, then. Morgan slid her arm around Veronica's waist and leaned into her ever so slightly. The way her mother's neck and shoulders stiffened along with the slight furrowing of her eyebrows told Morgan that Dorothy clearly did not approve. Morgan wondered if it was because they were obviously lesbians or because of the age difference. After all, at the moment Morgan looked about twenty and Adrienne was clearly a woman, not a girl.
Dorothy, however, regained her composure as quickly as she could. She should have learned to be quicker because the set of her jaw betrayed her even as she spoke. "Oh, thank you." Her accent was pure Southie, leaving one to wonder if Morgan had picked up the Irish bit of her own accent from her father or from somewhere else entirely. "I just repainted it. Honeybee, it was called." She sounded like she was trying to be suburban, likely because Adrienne carried class with her without trying. If one knew how to read body language and facial expressions well enough it would be obvious that Dorothy was trying to impress these women she did not approve of. "Have you been in Boston long?" She was attempting to sound interested instead of fleeing. Fleeing wouldn't make her a very good Catholic, now would it? You loved the sinner and hated the sin, after all.
The impression of the woman that Adrienne had gotten from Morgan's faintly painted picture was spot on: close-minded, petty, holier-than-thou. Unless Adrienne's reading of Mrs. Carlysle's facial expressions and body language was terribly off. Adrienne hid a smirk as she snuggled in closer to her companion, praying the substance coating her hands wasn't due for reapplication or she would be stuck reading Morgan's shirt. "We just moved a week ago from California. Gerty had an offer of a really great job in a tattoo parlor so we packed up and came to Boston." She gave Morgan an affectionate kiss on the cheek. "I told my sweetie I could be a personal shopper anywhere; so I just started over at Barney's yesterday, actually. Sweetie, I love that Honeybee color," she simpered. "We have to do the baby's room that color!" With a wide smile at Mrs. Carlysle, Adrienne decided to end Morgan's torment. "Oh, you're obviously on your way somewhere darling, I'd feel just awful if we kept you."
Morgan could play a role better than most, but something about Adrienne practically cooing over the yellow of her childhood home and talking about the baby's room and being a personal shopper nearly made her facade crack. Morgan nuzzled into Adrienne's neck for just a moment to ground herself before looking up at Adrienne, who currently had three inches of height on the slight build of her borrowed frame. "Aye, the baby would love it. So bright and warm. He'd feel right bathed in light all the time." The softness of the accent made her sound just as bright and innocent as the color they were speaking of. Just to fuck with the woman they were directing the act toward she added, "Like the Lord's always there." Yeah, go figure that one, Catholic lesbian. If Morgan was right that idea would send Dorothy to church in a fit.
Dorothy actually cringed every time either of the women mentioned the word baby. It was the sort of look you associated with the idea of people on Jerry Springer having spawn. It was not a pleased look at all. When Gertie and Veronica looked back at her, though, she forced a smile back onto her face which was very obviously so. "Yes," she sputtered, "yes, I was. It was nice meeting the two of you. I hope you enjoy it here in Boston." She gave the pair what attempted to be a polite smile, then nodded and scuttled off away to a half rusty, red Impala that she wasted no time at all getting into.
Morgan propped her chin on Adrienne's shoulder and smiled up at her adoringly. "Aren't our new neighbors so lovely and accepting and warm here in the original state to allow gay marriage?" She fluttered her eyes and tried not to laugh as she heard the tires squeal to get away. "Bit of a hazard on the road, inn'she?"
"'Bit of a hazard to more than the road, if you ask me," Adrienne mumbled, rolling her eyes. "I can see why you chose the brothel instead of going back to that." She squeezed Morgan's shoulder, not entirely sure she was doing it to keep up the appearance that they were a couple. "I wonder what she would have said if I'd asked her where she was going and tried to wrangle myself an invitation to bingo?" With a chuckle she pulled herself away from Morgan. "So how exactly do we break in to the Honeybee house?"
Morgan snorted and shook her head, hair falling in her face in the process. "Maybe she'd try to introduce you to some lovely young men your own age?" Morgan raised an eyebrow at Adrienne and the borrowed face managed to capture Morgan's own playfulness in that action. Brushing hair out of her face more completely, the metamorph nodded toward the door. "It's not breaking in if you know where the hide-a-key is kept. You'd think she'd have moved it after kicking the demon out, but no. Left it in the same sodding place. Not too bright, that woman."
Up the stairs and onto the porch, Morgan went to a planter in the corner, picked up what had looked like a real rock from the dirt inside of it and slid open the little latch to remove the key hidden inside of it. "Tada," she held up the key to Adrienne. Without another word, Morgan unlocked the door and went in. The motion was familiar in that distant, echoing sort of way for her. She made no comment on the Carlysle name painted on a plaque above the number of the house beside the front door. Taking Adrienne here meant the woman would know exactly who Morgan was by the time they left and she would understand why Ness was the only name Morgan could give her that she could be tracked down with.
Adrienne followed Morgan inside with a giddy feeling of anticipation in her stomach. All it would take was a quick swipe of her fingers on one of the wetnaps she carried in her pockets and a tour of the house and she could learn so much about Morgan's childhood. She ruthlessly tried to quash the giddiness, however, telling herself that she owed Morgan her privacy. There was nothing to be gained for Adrienne in snooping through Morgan's past except the satisfaction of personal curiosity. And as questionable as Adrienne's morals were sometimes, snooping into the past of someone you'd come to respect and even like when there was nothing real in it for you was something she considered rude. "If you see me take my hands out of my pockets, smack me," she warned Morgan pointedly, stuffing her hands out of sight.
An eyebrow arched as Morgan glanced at Adrienne over her shoulder. "Huh? Alright. Why?" It was a bit of an odd request, wasn't it? Pushing the oddness of Adrienne's statement aside, Morgan walked through the front hall to the living room. Much of the house was the same as she remembered it. The walls were pastels of blue, green and yellow for the most part. The house didn't look lived in. Dorothy had always been a bit OCD about cleanliness. It was only Vanessa and her dad who had disrupted the perfection of the house's organization.
There was a large, wooden chest against the back wall next to the doorway which would lead to the dining room. Inside, Morgan was sure, was the same arrangement of blankets, sheets, curtains and tablecloths there had been eleven years ago. A white, lacy cloth covered the top of the wooden chest Burt Carlysle had built himself. Various family photographs graced the top of it. Morgan was expecting Vanessa to have been largely erased from the displayed photographs but the first one the woman set her eyes on was of Vanessa and a neighbor's kitten she'd been quite smitten with. Next to it was one of her and her father in the butcher shop he'd worked in, and died in. They both had on white aprons that were smeared with animal blood. The mimic began to fade away as she reached out to pick up the frame, though once it was in her hand her other curled around the lock of hair in her pocket and the pale blue that had returned to her skin retreated once more.
"Why?" Adrienne repeated, confused. "Okay, you're distracted, so I'll let the stupidity of that question slide and actually answer instead of hitting you with a withering look. Because I don't want to be tempted to read your stuff, idiot. I'm trying to be nice and let you keep your secret identity; show you you can trust me not to nose around in your past." Despite having said that, however, she followed Morgan over to the chest and inspected the pictures. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed Morgan turning back to blue for a moment and suddenly realized how hard this must be for the other woman. "Pretty little thing," she mused, hands deep in her pockets. "Every bit as pretty as the blue, though, I think. And if she won't deal with someone who doesn't look how she's used to them looking then that's on her," she added, repeating the words Morgan had used on her earlier.
The reiteration of her own words wasn't lost on Morgan one bit. "Your husband's shot, you've just buried him and suddenly your little girl's got glowing red eyes. It's not exactly an easy thing to deal with." Her words were soft, almost forgiving. All that forgiveness evaporated with her next words. "Of course, when you don't even bother to go looking for your fourteen-year-old daughter it becomes a lot less understandable. Maybe she really did think I was dead and the blue changeling was responsible." She shrugged a little. "I miss my freckles, though." It was probably a bit of an odd statement to make considering the mimic she wore was so prolifically smattered in freckles that they even intruded upon her lips.
Morgan picked up the picture of her and the kitten and held it out to Adrienne, "Take everything you can find with me in it. It's not my life anymore, it's just where I came from. Those aren't the same thing. I want everything gone before she gets home and that gets done faster if you're helping. At this point I'm not sure how much you'd read about my life, anyway. You'd mostly get my mother's, I'd think."
Adrienne made a face at the 'changeling' comment but left the words about her mother's mindset alone. "Alright, I'm going to start on the upstairs while you deal with the trunk, then," she announced. "And don't tell me about how much I'll read and whose life I'll see- who's the psychometrist here?" A question nagged at her. "I thought you keep your mimics... stored in you or something, though, to use later?" she asked as she moved towards the stairs, genuinely curious about how the mimic thing worked. "So can't you take some of your baby hair or first tooth and keep a copy of your former, freckled self?"
"Yeah, technically, if I had something of mine pre-manifestation I should be able to copy it, but I'd copy my body from that age. I can't change it into twenty-five year old and freckled version of myself. It's a direct copy at the time of touching the person, from wherever they are at that point in their life." Morgan paused, then raised her shoulders a little. "At least, I assume so. I've never really tried with old hair or anything like that." It was an interesting concept, though. Morgan wondered where she could obtain old hair to experiment with.
After clearing the top of the chest of any framed photographs, which she then worked to take the photos out of so as to not end up stealing frames, Morgan moved on to the bookshelf. There were three photo albums on the same shelf they'd always been kept on. It would be easier and quicker to just nick all the albums, but Morgan was intent on only taking what was hers. Photos of her, or photos she remembered taking herself were what she was after.
"Well check your baby book or something," Adrienne called down the stairs. "Your mother seems like the type to have kept the first lock of your hair that got cut." She entered a room at the end of the hallway and flipped on the light to reveal what she could only describe as a shrine. There were pictures of the not-blue Morgan and the man Adrienne could only guess was her father everywhere, filling the walls and the tables and bookcases that lined the room, along with atrocious fake flowers and garish candles bearing Catholic iconic imagery. Artifacts were arranged about the room as if they were on display in a museum- cheap toys, crude sports equipment, books, clothing, and knick-knacks of every variety. Adrienne could only describe most of it as junk, but she supposed that to a grieving wife and mother, the everyday junk that symbolized the two lives which meant the most to her, lives that had been snuffed out within a matter of days of each other, it wasn't junk but memorabilia to be cherished.
A tarnished gold pocket watch drew her eye, and despite her intention to stay out of Morgan's past, Adrienne picked it up. She wasn't an expert on antiques but she had tried to give herself a little education on valuable things, so she could recognize this as a late nineteenth-century piece, definitely crafted for a man judging by the simple design on the cover. Intrigued, she wiped the coating substance off one hand and touched the watch.
She watched the succession of the watch being handed down from father to child during various eras, in two countries, and after satisfying herself that it was indeed Morgan's father's watch, Adrienne fast-forwarded the time line until she found not-blue Morgan, a young teenager, and her father in the butcher shop where he worked, Morgan watching at first and as she grew, being taught the family trade. Baseball games- family outings to Fenway as well as informal stickball games in the summer on the street, games at a park in the neighborhood, Morgan playing with other children while her father looked on proudly. The freckled girl fussing with the watch for some amusement while suffering through Mass. Father and daughter climbing trees. Apple picking. Morgan being carried on his shoulders. Building things- a tree house, the bookshelf that she'd seen in the living room on her way in. Morgan- no, Vanessa, her father called her- learning how to ride a bike...
With something akin to reluctance, Adrienne forced herself to take her hand away from the watch. She felt the ugly warmth of envy seeping into her, jealousy of the happy childhood she'd witnessed, but after one glance around the shrine, the feeling evaporated into sadness for the fact that the happy childhood was long dead, preserved only in the distant, embittered memories of mother and daughter rather than being retold with affection and laughter at family functions.
Still, even bitter memories were something Adrienne felt that Morgan would appreciate. Wasn't the purpose of this whole expedition to take back Morgan's memories of her past?
Without further hesitation Adrienne stuffed the watch into her pocket for lack of a better place to put it and started filling her arms with pictures. "What the hell am I supposed to do with all this shit once I collect it?" she shouted down the stairs. "Do we have a wheel man coming to get us or do we have to carry this all the way down the street like petty criminals?"
Baby book, right. That'd be logical, wouldn't it? Morgan tended to forget about things like baby books, though when she found her own she grabbed the entire thing. It wasn't like there was anything in the worn, pink volume that didn't have anything to do with her, was there? Entire pages were torn out of albums as Morgan lacked both the time and the care to pull back the clingy plastic covering of every single page to remove the photos. Every single image brought back memories and the woman wasn't sure if she wanted them or wanted to close her eyes to them. They were unavoidable, however, so she tried not to think about it too much.
The entire first floor had been cleared of displayed photos, frames standing empty and vacant where the metamorph had been. The baby book had been pulled as had a couple books which were intended as scrapbooks young Vanessa had always lost interest in before getting too terribly far into. She was still flipping through pages of album when she called back up to Adrienne. "It's just photos, how much could you possibly have gathered up there?" A dreaded thought rolled up on the heels of that question. What if her mother still had all her stuff? What if her room was the way she'd left it after shoving what she could have into a backpack? Cleaner, that was for certain, but would it be otherwise unchanged? Vanessa didn't ask, only yelled back, "I'll fetch some trash bags to shove it all in, alright?"
"You should come up here and see this," Adrienne shouted in response to Morgan's question about how much she could have gathered up there. "It's a fucking shrine. There's enough to fill the car." To make her point, she started throwing stuffed animals that filled one bookcase down the stairs, adding a diabolical laugh to her action.
Going over to the stairs to see what in the hell Adrienne was talking about, the metamorph was confronted with a shower of stuffed, fuzzy things from the second floor. "What the fu--" the word cut off when one of the cascading animals fell at her feet. Vanessa picked up the stuffed bear and examined him, twisting him this way and that. "Jesus. You still alive Waffles?" Her accent had bled from the western Irish one she'd used ever since being in her mother's presence to one that was all Southie without even a hint of Irish. The freckled, ginger young woman cuddled the bear to her chest and began to climb up the stairs.
"Where'd you find all--" The question was dead on her lips when she found the room Adrienne was in. She wasn't kidding when she'd called it a shrine. "What in the bloody--?" Morgan's eyes narrowed. "She calls me a changeling, proclaims me dead, says I'm a demon, kicks me out and then builds a bloody shrine to me and dad? What fucking right has she?" The Irish was back in her tone which was full of quiet fury. Her voice wasn't as loud as it was in her own body, but it was a fair bit louder than it'd been since using this pair of vocal chords.
Adrienne flinched at the fury in Morgan's voice and took an involuntary step back from the woman. "No right," she agreed quickly. If the circumstance had been different she might have tried arguing that everyone was entitled to grieve in their own way, but she wasn't about to challenge Morgan when she sounded like that. "Are we liberating the animals?" she asked with a plastered smile, trying to lighten Morgan's mood.
"Everything." Her voice was flat. "Everything that was mine comes with us." Without another word Morgan, and Waffles, spun and headed out the room and down the hall. She wanted confirmation for her earlier suspicion. Given the room she had just walked out of she wasn't going to be surprised if she was right.
"Well, you could help me, at least," Adrienne called out with a smirk. "Are you getting garbage bags?"
"Bloody hell." The words were whispered as Vanessa stared at a scarily vivid flashback, only the image wasn't fading. "We're going to need a lot of trash bags, cupcake," she called back. Her room was, as she had suspected, cleaner but the same. There was a baseball bat in the corner, Sox caps on a stand near the closet, posters of the Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana, Marilyn Manson, Korn and whoever else she'd thought was brilliant at the age of fourteen. Everything was shades of blue, she'd forgotten that. She was a little surprised her mother didn't change the colors, all things considered.
Hearing the curse, Adrienne followed Morgan into her old bedroom. "Nice cap," she grinned. "I'm going to get the trash bags. Maybe raid the kitchen while I'm at it." She didn't want to intrude on Morgan's memories.
"They're probably in the cupboard under the sink," Vanessa said over her shoulder. She stared in amazement at the room, not sure where the hell to start. She meant to erase herself from the house but how was she supposed to erase an entire bedroom in such a short period of time? This was bordering on more illegal than she would have liked. Under her breath Morgan muttered, "Fuck it." Then she got busy pulling things off the walls.
It got dark out so early these days. Daylight Savings Time should be obliterated because of that. Who needed the sun to rise at six in the morning if it was gone before six in the evening? Rush hour traffic and the streetlights were already on. In a way it would work to Morgan's advantage tonight. She walked into the living room where Adrienne was no doubt distracting herself with something mindless just for the sake of distraction. Morgan couldn't blame her, they both needed distracting. The potential death and the loss it carried for them both was painfully sharp between the two women, though they artfully ignored speaking on the subject more than absolutely necessary.
The normally six-foot-tall woman was noticeably shorter as she walked up to her friend. Her skin was paler as well, more a frosted blue than she normally was. Around her fingers was woven a long, thick lock of bright orange hair. "Hair's a funny thing," she said without preamble. "All that genetic material and no one ever really thinks about how they just throw it away. You get your hair cut and then it's left on a floor to be swept up and thrown out. It may be a dead piece of you but it's a piece of you and every cell in your body contains the complete set of chromosomes needed to create one of you. Makes it creepy to throw out all that hair and those nail clippings when you think about it that way, doesn't it?" As she spoke Morgan's hair was very, very slowly attaining a sort of warm glow to it while the blue in her skin continued to leech away just as slowly.
Adrienne jumped at hearing Morgan's voice. She'd been lost in her own thoughts, a world away. Morgan's presence in the house had momentarily startled her, as Boston was where she went to escape, to be alone, and the only time there were people in the house was when she was entertaining, and on those occasions there were so many people that you couldn't think at all. Having Morgan in the quiet house that was usually her own personal space had confused her.
But after she'd come back to the present with her thoughts, Adrienne was once again very grateful for Morgan's company. "I can't see you as the type to creep around salons picking up bits of dead hair," she pointed out with a smirk. "Unless you take a hunting knife and cut it right off of people on the street. Now that, I can see."
"I'm not too enthusiastic about scalping. Some people are, sodding twisted types, I tell you." Morgan made a clicking sound as she shook her head. "No, but I should get a job sweeping up hair in a salon some day just to acquire an arsenal of mimics, don't you think. It'd be horridly convenient." Morgan looked down at the lock of hair and her steadily paling skin. "It just takes so much longer to pick up a decent copy of someone from hair. I don't know if it's because it's small or because hair's never actually alive." She frowned a bit and then shrugged her shoulders. "This was a donation, though. Sweet girl."
"Hey!" Adrienne pointed a finger at Morgan. "Have you been bringing girls into my house? You can't bring people into my house unless I get to be involved. It's one of the house rules. No fucking people unless I get to be involved."
Red eyes were immediately wide, round and innocent as can be. "What? Me? Girl? No. Well, likely, sure, but I haven't." She held up her left hand and crossed her heart with her right. "I just chatted her up in a coffee shop. Bloody cute as hell. Seriously. You'll see soon. I just chatted with her and since I'm obviously a mutant she outed herself to me. She can sort of do what you do in a way, only less creepy and with books. If she puts her hands on books she sort of absorbs everything in them. Never forgets, too. Or so she says. I don't think I can get that with hair but it'd be interesting. She volunteered the genetic material so her body could have adventures she can't." Morgan had a grin on her face that would not be out of place on the face of a frat boy. "I plan to give her adventures later, but after I'm done borrowing her body for this bit of business."
"Not in my house unless I can play too," Adrienne reiterated teasingly. "And my power's no more creepy than yours, you know. And it's incredibly lame to volunteer your body to have adventures you can't, because she obviously won't know what the hell you're doing with her body. I mean, it's not like she's going to reabsorb the memories of what you did when you give her her hair back." She giggled at the stupidity of it. "I don't want this lame girl in my house." Realizing something, she frowned at Morgan. "Aren't you from Boston? Don't you have a place here you can take her to have 'adventures'?"
"A," Morgan ticked off a finger, "I'm not taking her here. B," another finger was ticked off, "I'm not taking her to a brothel. C," a third finger followed trend, "It's no more lame than living your life through movies or books or sod all else that most people live their lives through. At least when people come looking for her asking where she was on the eighteenth of March she'll know she was up to something. She's a head in the clouds sort. It's cute and sort of endearing." She blatantly ignored the part of Adri's question that related to Morgan having been from Boston aside from her mention of Madame's brothel.
"I never said anything about a brothel," the psychometrist muttered. Morgan's happiness over finding the girl was irritating her. She wished the prospect of sex with someone 'cute and sort of endearing' could make her happy and take her mind off of what had happened to Garrison and the others. But it couldn't. And the fact that it could for Morgan was irritating. "If the 'bit of business' you're borrowing Miss Head in The Clouds's body for is to go to a brothel why are you still hanging around here?"
Morgan shook her head. By now she was all of five-foor-four and her hair was a dull orange. Her eyes had lightened to a very pale red and had a greenish tinge to them. Freckles were cropping up all over her face and arms where they were visible. "You asked about being from Boston. Aye, I'm from a brothel in Boston. It's still here; I could introduce you to Madame if you'd like. You'd despise her." Morgan wasn't really going to sleep with the girl, but she would likely flirt with her and maybe make out with her because it would distract the woman from both the situation with Garrison and the fact that she was going to do the biannual check up on her mother's state of existence for herself for the first time. She hadn't seen the woman since she was sixteen, Morgan would need a distraction.
Morgan's flippancy was grating on Adrienne like sandpaper. "I don't want to go to a fucking brothel, Morgan!" she cried out, surprising herself with the volume of her own voice in the spartan, quiet house. "Garrison's probably dead and you're dressing up like Miss Head In The Clouds and going out to visit brothels?! Is that your way of dealing with what's going on? Just find people to fuck so you don't have to think about people getting their throats cut and their wings torn out of their spines and their fucking... fucking arm ripped off... and so much fucking blood everywhere, and why did they leave the parts behind?" One moment she had been joking about having Morgan bring women home to play with and the next she was sobbing uncontrollably. Maybe she should ask Amanda for the number of her psychologist...
Adrienne had been doing the snapping thing on and off since the day the FBI called her onto the crime scene. Morgan had already heard the details from her friend, but there hadn't been yelling until now. Mostly Adrienne had gotten really withdrawn and quiet and whispered about the events on Thursday. Every other time that Morgan knew of it was mostly quiet sobbing Morgan could hear because she was listening when Adrienne likely thought she wasn't. Walls weren't so thick as to keep out sound when someone was overly worried and paying attention. Okay, yes, Morgan had been spying on her but only to make sure she was okay enough to function and didn't need psychiatric attention or some such.
Without being fazed she grabbed a tissue and walked over to hold it out to Adrienne. The metamorph was rapidly losing any resemblance to herself as her body started to pick up the details of her new mimic. It was only a few more minutes until her hair would be the same flaming orange as the original girl's. The skin was nearly paled out and freckled completely. A few bone structure changes and the shift would be complete. "I don't plan on fucking anyone," she informed Adrienne quietly. Morgan's voice had grown softer, partly in reaction to Adrienne's yelling and in part due to the way her mimic's vocal chords worked. Her voice had taken on a musical, quiet tone that was obviously not native to how Morgan herself spoke. "In fact, I don't sleep with people I'm not involved with romantically as a rule. Rather, as a rule ever since I was given the choice. I was referring to the brothel where I made my home when I was kicked out of my own house as a kid. The one where I was an underage whore, cupcake. If I wanted a piece of ass that badly I'd go to a club and pick one up. I'm not on a mission for sex you daft twat." The Irish in her accent intensified as it usually did around Eamon and Thom. It seemed more at home in her borrowed voice than it did in Morgan's own.
Staring at the tissue being held out by the unfamiliar hand, Adrienne backed away and shook her head. "I can't listen to you when you're... this. I can't talk to this. You're not you. You're like a stranger. I don't want to talk to a stranger. Someone who didn't even know him."
Morgan's shoulder's slumped. "You're not such an idiot to not be able to think beyond what you can see." It was neither a question nor filled with even the slightest bit of doubt. "If you won't deal with someone who doesn't look how you're used to them looking then that's on you." The softness of her voice cushioned the harshness of her words. "I've business to attend to and I can't go 'round with blue skin and red eyes when I do it. The body's not being dropped until I'm done."
"I'm in fashion, you orange-haired freckled bitch; of course I don't think beyond what I can see!" Adrienne screeched, her frustration and grief making her see stars. " I saw them all torn apart! I saw things that told me they're all dead! I want to believe they're alive, that the search teams are going to find them, but what I saw won't let me think that!"
Morgan only shook her head. "Good thing you never had to deal with me in real life, then, innit?" That's all she could say. She'd been thinking about ripping an arm off, what sort of force you would need and what sort of pain that would inflict. She'd been thinking about bleeding to death and whether shock would set in quickly enough that Garrison wouldn't feel his life slipping away. She'd been thinking about shock not setting in and being acutely aware of your own blood leaking out of a hole in your body where part of you was once attached. Morgan had thought of a lot of that in scrutinizing detail. The difference was Adrienne was in the vapid business of fashion while Morgan's business involved killing strangers en masse. War wasn't like real life as other people knew it, and neither were the injuries.
"What other life is there, Miss Head In The Clouds?" the psychometrist snapped, sniffling now as anger battled with the grief and pain she'd been feeling. "Is this some fucking fantasy world, then? This isn't real? That would be wonderful! Tell me how to wake up from it and get back to real life, then. I want out. I want to wake up now."
"Real life is the one where I point a gun at you and you try to shoot me before the impact of my bullet takes half your fucking skull off but doesn't kill you. Real life involves your mates in battle dragged your hole-riddled body off after the fighting's done and they try to find enough of you to identify who you are. In real life you can't even pin the finger that pulled the trigger on me for long because I've moved on somewhere else and may have a new name and a new body to go with the new job. That's my real life. Go back to fashion, Adrienne. You don't belong meddling in bits of my world. Or in bits of Kane's." Maybe she shouldn't have said that last bit, but it was true. Her anger over her own uselessness and the piercing pain from thinking about her friend being taken out like he was made Morgan less tolerant to Adrienne's melodrama, even if the woman was fully in her rights to have it.
Adrienne contained a scream, though only barely. "If this is your world, then why aren't you doing anything to fucking help him? Of course I don't fucking belong in your world; it's fucking insanity! You think I want this? Do you think I don't want to be able to go back to fashion, blithely unaware of this wonderful new 'real world' that you're showing me? I wish I could! But I can't! I fucking can't go back, because I- I..." I care. "I can't go back now," she said quietly, almost calm. "He stood by me when everyone else was going to send me to jail. He gave me a stupid medal. And now I can't turn my back on him. If it had been someone else in that car, he would have asked me to do exactly what I did, and I would have said yes to him. And I hate it."
"Because I don't know anything about the people who took him, where they'd have taken him or where to start looking. Just because I was born in this country doesn't make it my territory in the least." Morgan's words were flat. "When this turns into war I'll be your girl, but until then I'm no more useful than the next person."
Frowning, Adrienne nearly pointed out that the situation turning into war was highly unlikely, but she kept her mouth shut. What the hell did she know anymore about this stuff? "So the woman in fashion is more useful than you?" Under any other circumstance she would have smirked to show she was teasing, but this time she was just going for petty and spiteful. "I guess your 'real world' isn't totally your domain anymore then, is it? Now it's just some fucked up mess we both have to live in because we're both too stubborn to walk away and turn our backs on him." She flopped onto the tan leather couch, suddenly exhausted.
Morgan shook her head, the expression on her borrowed features clearly said Adrienne was missing the point. "This isn't war. Mercenary, Adrienne. War, sometimes protecting and once in a while sneaking about as someone else. That's my realm. Sneaking up on noncombatants, ripping off limbs and taking the bodies isn't my world either. You don't listen too well sometimes." She turned away from Adrienne and headed in the direction that would take her to the door. "I don't think it's stubbornness that keeps us from walking away from him, cupcake. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go see my mother and take something I should have taken a long time ago."
"I am listening," Adrienne snorted, eyebrow raised in bemusement. "I'm hearing that you said I don't belong in your world, but that this isn't your world either, so we're both out of our realm here. I'm also hearing that I'm not yelling anymore," she pointed out, mildly impressed by Morgan's tactic. "Wait- you're going to see your Mother? Dressed up in someone else's body?"
The freckled girl threw a grin over her shoulder at the now calmer Adrienne. "Both points are valid: you don't belong in my world and this really isn't either of our worlds. It's his, we just get dragged into it from time to time because of proximity. Confusion, way to cut down on the break down, eh?" She tossed her red hair over her shoulder and nodded toward the door, inviting Adrienne along. "Of course I'm dressed up in someone else's body. She threw me out during my father's funeral because I manifested, you think I want her knowing who I am? I never check on her myself but like I said, there's something I plan to take that I should have back then." Pausing at the door, Morgan spun around. Wide, innocent green-grey eyes gave Adrienne's direction a questioning look. "You in, love?"
It was still strange to think of this pale, orange-haired person as Morgan. Maybe she still said things that Morgan would say, but she wasn't really Morgan- not Adrienne's Morgan. But still, she could understand changing your appearance so people didn't see who you really were. Vapid as fashion may have been, Adrienne had been in the business long enough to know that while it could let you show your individuality, it could also be mass-produced and marketed so that you wore what everyone else was wearing in order to blend in. So she could understand the principle behind what Morgan was doing. "'Wasn't a breakdown," she mumbled defensively, even though she knew that was a lie. With a sigh, she rubbed her hand over her face, standing up. "Whatever it was, it had been building for a while and I'm glad it happened here and not in public or in front of anyone whose opinion I value," she smirked, teasing. The smile faded and she turned serious, however. "I'm sorry I hit you with it. Everything." But now that that was said, she put the topic away for the moment and picked up the other one happily. "She threw you out during your father's funeral? Of course I'm in for this. Let's take everything in the goddamn house! Just let me fix myself up."
Morgan takes Adrienne hunting, so to speak, in her childhood home but not before they run into the woman who gave birth to Vanessa Carlysle and pose as a lesbian couple new to the neighborhood.
Adrienne was unfamiliar with South Boston. Frosts and the people of Southie didn't exactly mix. But the fact that it was unfamiliar made it all the more interesting, which made it more of a distraction, which was definitely what Adrienne needed right now. As Morgan drove a rented, nondescript car around the unfamiliar streets, she was free to admire the scenery and think about Morgan's mission. "So how do you check up on your mother in other bodies?" she asked the orange-haired girl sitting next to her. "Pretend you're a Jehovah's Witness and get yourself invited in for tea and cakes, or whatever it is Southies eat?"
Morgan glanced at Adrienne from the corner of her eye, the steely green looking far more sarcastic than they should have with the quiet, innocent face they were in. "Just Mickey D's for us lowlifes down here, cupcake." By now all of her Boston accent had fled her voice in favor of the western Irish accent she usually associated with Thom. "Aye, no, we don't talk to her. I just want to see whether or not she's still alive. If she isn't that's fine. If she is then we wait for her to leave. I've years of reports that the woman has never changed her routine. It's bingo night, of all bloody things. She'll go and we'll go collect what's mine."
"Sure you don't want to drop the mission and go play bingo instead?" Adrienne teased. She raised a curious eyebrow at Morgan. "What are we collecting, oh partner-in-crime?"
"Aye, bingo's the love of my life," she replied with a fake swoon. "Can't live without it, but I'll make the sacrifice this once." Morgan turned a corner and then put the car into park. She let the car idle so they could keep the heat on while her eyes fixed on a yellow house four down from where they were parked. The porch light was already on and only the light in the front room seemed to accompany it. It wasn't a particularly nice house, but the lawn was kept well enough and nothing seemed to be broken or in disrepair. The squished, two-floor home looked just like the others around it without any remarkable traits. "We're collecting evidence she hasn't a right to, if she kept it anyhow."
Adrienne followed Morgan's gaze to the yellow house and studied it for a second. "Evidence? What, like the old report cards and school pictures she used to put on the fridge? Girl Guide badges? Cherished family photo albums? Arts and crafts from summer camp?" She began giggling, not trying to be mean, hoping that Morgan would be amused rather than upset. The little she knew of Morgan's family- that her mother had thrown her out of the house the day of her father's funeral which had led Morgan to turning tricks in order to get by- was evidence enough that Morgan's home life was cut from a similar cloth to Adrienne's own, so while she would have been jealous of other people for having 'normal' relationships with their parents, she had nothing except a sort of feeling of kinship towards Morgan, and she hoped Morgan recognized that. "I could go knock on the door to make sure she's gone if you wanted," she suggested, though she knew that since Morgan was in another body the other woman could do the same thing just as easily.
The withering look of sarcasm that Morgan shot Adrienne failed in its wrath, her face too sweet for the expression to manifest properly. Morgan could even feel it in her facial muscles. If she decided to reuse this copy, maybe make her Aoife, then Morgan would have to work on constructing a persona that matched the facial construction and overall impression the body gave off. She'd worry about that later and for now settled for sticking her tongue out at Adrienne. "Do I strike you as the sort who was ever a Girl Scout?" Granted, who Morgan was now had nothing to do with who she'd been so maybe she did. "Photographs, mostly. Photos of Dorothy's beloved, deceased daughter who was killed by the demon who possessed and consumed her body. She hasn't a right to those."
"No, you don't; hence the giggling," Adrienne pointed out. She frowned as her brain shifted gears. "She thinks you're dead? And sorry, but why bother stealing pictures of yourself as a child? I mean, no offense, but I thought you were of the 'can't change the past so why dwell on it, take what you're dealt and make the best of yourself with no regrets so you can show the fuckers later how you turned out better than them' camp of thought?"
"I don't know if she actually thinks I'm dead, but I'm good as." Morgan shrugged. "I'm not trying to change the past here, love. I'm just taking what's mine: me. She lost all right to me when she kicked me out and meant it. If she can't deal with having a daughter who's blue then she sure as hell hasn't earned the right to keep the daughter who wasn't. You get the whole or you get nothing." Most of those pictures had her father in them. It was the only reason Morgan was sure that Dorothy Carlysle hadn't thrown them out.
Adrienne still thought she was dwelling on things that were unnecessary, but she kept that thought to herself. She had no desire to get into another debate with Morgan- not today. Not after what they'd already been through. They'd fought enough for one day, even if the fight had been orchestrated by Morgan for the purpose of intentionally trying to confuse and infuriate her to pull her back together after her breakdown. She owed Morgan her right to erase herself from her mother's life no matter how pointless Adrienne thought it was. To show her solidarity with the cause, she opened her door and stepped out of the car. "Alright, so let's go steal you back from your mother," she announced, heading off towards the house.
"Damn it, cupcake," Morgan cut the engine quickly and got out as well, jogging slightly to catch up to Adrienne. This whole state of being short wasn't her thing. "What are you going to do, knock on the door, pretend to be a Jehovah's Witness and get yourself invited in for tea or whatever it is us Southies drink?" She was shaking her head and sounding a bit annoyed but the amusement shone strongly in her eyes.
Halfway from the car to the house the door of the home a redhead named Vanessa had grown up in opened and out stepped a woman. The woman was in her late forties with auburn hair streaked faintly through with white. She was about five-foot-six, a clear indicator that it was from her father that Vanessa had inherited her height. If they had been closer Dorothy's bright blue eyes would have been more visible. Before her mutation manifested Vanessa's eyes had been the same shade. Morgan froze momentarily when her mother glanced at Adrienne and herself. Dorothy even smiled and gave them a polite smile, one Morgan couldn't bring herself to reciprocate.
"Hello!" Adrienne called out cheerfully, giving the woman a finger wave. It was irresistible. "We just moved in down the next block and we thought we'd go for a stroll around the new neighborhood. I'm Veronica, and this is my life partner, Gertrude. I love the color of your house!"
"I'm going to fucking kill you," Morgan muttered out of the corner of her mouth through the clenched teeth of the smile she'd painted on her face the moment Adrienne had spoken. Her partner? Well, then. Morgan slid her arm around Veronica's waist and leaned into her ever so slightly. The way her mother's neck and shoulders stiffened along with the slight furrowing of her eyebrows told Morgan that Dorothy clearly did not approve. Morgan wondered if it was because they were obviously lesbians or because of the age difference. After all, at the moment Morgan looked about twenty and Adrienne was clearly a woman, not a girl.
Dorothy, however, regained her composure as quickly as she could. She should have learned to be quicker because the set of her jaw betrayed her even as she spoke. "Oh, thank you." Her accent was pure Southie, leaving one to wonder if Morgan had picked up the Irish bit of her own accent from her father or from somewhere else entirely. "I just repainted it. Honeybee, it was called." She sounded like she was trying to be suburban, likely because Adrienne carried class with her without trying. If one knew how to read body language and facial expressions well enough it would be obvious that Dorothy was trying to impress these women she did not approve of. "Have you been in Boston long?" She was attempting to sound interested instead of fleeing. Fleeing wouldn't make her a very good Catholic, now would it? You loved the sinner and hated the sin, after all.
The impression of the woman that Adrienne had gotten from Morgan's faintly painted picture was spot on: close-minded, petty, holier-than-thou. Unless Adrienne's reading of Mrs. Carlysle's facial expressions and body language was terribly off. Adrienne hid a smirk as she snuggled in closer to her companion, praying the substance coating her hands wasn't due for reapplication or she would be stuck reading Morgan's shirt. "We just moved a week ago from California. Gerty had an offer of a really great job in a tattoo parlor so we packed up and came to Boston." She gave Morgan an affectionate kiss on the cheek. "I told my sweetie I could be a personal shopper anywhere; so I just started over at Barney's yesterday, actually. Sweetie, I love that Honeybee color," she simpered. "We have to do the baby's room that color!" With a wide smile at Mrs. Carlysle, Adrienne decided to end Morgan's torment. "Oh, you're obviously on your way somewhere darling, I'd feel just awful if we kept you."
Morgan could play a role better than most, but something about Adrienne practically cooing over the yellow of her childhood home and talking about the baby's room and being a personal shopper nearly made her facade crack. Morgan nuzzled into Adrienne's neck for just a moment to ground herself before looking up at Adrienne, who currently had three inches of height on the slight build of her borrowed frame. "Aye, the baby would love it. So bright and warm. He'd feel right bathed in light all the time." The softness of the accent made her sound just as bright and innocent as the color they were speaking of. Just to fuck with the woman they were directing the act toward she added, "Like the Lord's always there." Yeah, go figure that one, Catholic lesbian. If Morgan was right that idea would send Dorothy to church in a fit.
Dorothy actually cringed every time either of the women mentioned the word baby. It was the sort of look you associated with the idea of people on Jerry Springer having spawn. It was not a pleased look at all. When Gertie and Veronica looked back at her, though, she forced a smile back onto her face which was very obviously so. "Yes," she sputtered, "yes, I was. It was nice meeting the two of you. I hope you enjoy it here in Boston." She gave the pair what attempted to be a polite smile, then nodded and scuttled off away to a half rusty, red Impala that she wasted no time at all getting into.
Morgan propped her chin on Adrienne's shoulder and smiled up at her adoringly. "Aren't our new neighbors so lovely and accepting and warm here in the original state to allow gay marriage?" She fluttered her eyes and tried not to laugh as she heard the tires squeal to get away. "Bit of a hazard on the road, inn'she?"
"'Bit of a hazard to more than the road, if you ask me," Adrienne mumbled, rolling her eyes. "I can see why you chose the brothel instead of going back to that." She squeezed Morgan's shoulder, not entirely sure she was doing it to keep up the appearance that they were a couple. "I wonder what she would have said if I'd asked her where she was going and tried to wrangle myself an invitation to bingo?" With a chuckle she pulled herself away from Morgan. "So how exactly do we break in to the Honeybee house?"
Morgan snorted and shook her head, hair falling in her face in the process. "Maybe she'd try to introduce you to some lovely young men your own age?" Morgan raised an eyebrow at Adrienne and the borrowed face managed to capture Morgan's own playfulness in that action. Brushing hair out of her face more completely, the metamorph nodded toward the door. "It's not breaking in if you know where the hide-a-key is kept. You'd think she'd have moved it after kicking the demon out, but no. Left it in the same sodding place. Not too bright, that woman."
Up the stairs and onto the porch, Morgan went to a planter in the corner, picked up what had looked like a real rock from the dirt inside of it and slid open the little latch to remove the key hidden inside of it. "Tada," she held up the key to Adrienne. Without another word, Morgan unlocked the door and went in. The motion was familiar in that distant, echoing sort of way for her. She made no comment on the Carlysle name painted on a plaque above the number of the house beside the front door. Taking Adrienne here meant the woman would know exactly who Morgan was by the time they left and she would understand why Ness was the only name Morgan could give her that she could be tracked down with.
Adrienne followed Morgan inside with a giddy feeling of anticipation in her stomach. All it would take was a quick swipe of her fingers on one of the wetnaps she carried in her pockets and a tour of the house and she could learn so much about Morgan's childhood. She ruthlessly tried to quash the giddiness, however, telling herself that she owed Morgan her privacy. There was nothing to be gained for Adrienne in snooping through Morgan's past except the satisfaction of personal curiosity. And as questionable as Adrienne's morals were sometimes, snooping into the past of someone you'd come to respect and even like when there was nothing real in it for you was something she considered rude. "If you see me take my hands out of my pockets, smack me," she warned Morgan pointedly, stuffing her hands out of sight.
An eyebrow arched as Morgan glanced at Adrienne over her shoulder. "Huh? Alright. Why?" It was a bit of an odd request, wasn't it? Pushing the oddness of Adrienne's statement aside, Morgan walked through the front hall to the living room. Much of the house was the same as she remembered it. The walls were pastels of blue, green and yellow for the most part. The house didn't look lived in. Dorothy had always been a bit OCD about cleanliness. It was only Vanessa and her dad who had disrupted the perfection of the house's organization.
There was a large, wooden chest against the back wall next to the doorway which would lead to the dining room. Inside, Morgan was sure, was the same arrangement of blankets, sheets, curtains and tablecloths there had been eleven years ago. A white, lacy cloth covered the top of the wooden chest Burt Carlysle had built himself. Various family photographs graced the top of it. Morgan was expecting Vanessa to have been largely erased from the displayed photographs but the first one the woman set her eyes on was of Vanessa and a neighbor's kitten she'd been quite smitten with. Next to it was one of her and her father in the butcher shop he'd worked in, and died in. They both had on white aprons that were smeared with animal blood. The mimic began to fade away as she reached out to pick up the frame, though once it was in her hand her other curled around the lock of hair in her pocket and the pale blue that had returned to her skin retreated once more.
"Why?" Adrienne repeated, confused. "Okay, you're distracted, so I'll let the stupidity of that question slide and actually answer instead of hitting you with a withering look. Because I don't want to be tempted to read your stuff, idiot. I'm trying to be nice and let you keep your secret identity; show you you can trust me not to nose around in your past." Despite having said that, however, she followed Morgan over to the chest and inspected the pictures. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed Morgan turning back to blue for a moment and suddenly realized how hard this must be for the other woman. "Pretty little thing," she mused, hands deep in her pockets. "Every bit as pretty as the blue, though, I think. And if she won't deal with someone who doesn't look how she's used to them looking then that's on her," she added, repeating the words Morgan had used on her earlier.
The reiteration of her own words wasn't lost on Morgan one bit. "Your husband's shot, you've just buried him and suddenly your little girl's got glowing red eyes. It's not exactly an easy thing to deal with." Her words were soft, almost forgiving. All that forgiveness evaporated with her next words. "Of course, when you don't even bother to go looking for your fourteen-year-old daughter it becomes a lot less understandable. Maybe she really did think I was dead and the blue changeling was responsible." She shrugged a little. "I miss my freckles, though." It was probably a bit of an odd statement to make considering the mimic she wore was so prolifically smattered in freckles that they even intruded upon her lips.
Morgan picked up the picture of her and the kitten and held it out to Adrienne, "Take everything you can find with me in it. It's not my life anymore, it's just where I came from. Those aren't the same thing. I want everything gone before she gets home and that gets done faster if you're helping. At this point I'm not sure how much you'd read about my life, anyway. You'd mostly get my mother's, I'd think."
Adrienne made a face at the 'changeling' comment but left the words about her mother's mindset alone. "Alright, I'm going to start on the upstairs while you deal with the trunk, then," she announced. "And don't tell me about how much I'll read and whose life I'll see- who's the psychometrist here?" A question nagged at her. "I thought you keep your mimics... stored in you or something, though, to use later?" she asked as she moved towards the stairs, genuinely curious about how the mimic thing worked. "So can't you take some of your baby hair or first tooth and keep a copy of your former, freckled self?"
"Yeah, technically, if I had something of mine pre-manifestation I should be able to copy it, but I'd copy my body from that age. I can't change it into twenty-five year old and freckled version of myself. It's a direct copy at the time of touching the person, from wherever they are at that point in their life." Morgan paused, then raised her shoulders a little. "At least, I assume so. I've never really tried with old hair or anything like that." It was an interesting concept, though. Morgan wondered where she could obtain old hair to experiment with.
After clearing the top of the chest of any framed photographs, which she then worked to take the photos out of so as to not end up stealing frames, Morgan moved on to the bookshelf. There were three photo albums on the same shelf they'd always been kept on. It would be easier and quicker to just nick all the albums, but Morgan was intent on only taking what was hers. Photos of her, or photos she remembered taking herself were what she was after.
"Well check your baby book or something," Adrienne called down the stairs. "Your mother seems like the type to have kept the first lock of your hair that got cut." She entered a room at the end of the hallway and flipped on the light to reveal what she could only describe as a shrine. There were pictures of the not-blue Morgan and the man Adrienne could only guess was her father everywhere, filling the walls and the tables and bookcases that lined the room, along with atrocious fake flowers and garish candles bearing Catholic iconic imagery. Artifacts were arranged about the room as if they were on display in a museum- cheap toys, crude sports equipment, books, clothing, and knick-knacks of every variety. Adrienne could only describe most of it as junk, but she supposed that to a grieving wife and mother, the everyday junk that symbolized the two lives which meant the most to her, lives that had been snuffed out within a matter of days of each other, it wasn't junk but memorabilia to be cherished.
A tarnished gold pocket watch drew her eye, and despite her intention to stay out of Morgan's past, Adrienne picked it up. She wasn't an expert on antiques but she had tried to give herself a little education on valuable things, so she could recognize this as a late nineteenth-century piece, definitely crafted for a man judging by the simple design on the cover. Intrigued, she wiped the coating substance off one hand and touched the watch.
She watched the succession of the watch being handed down from father to child during various eras, in two countries, and after satisfying herself that it was indeed Morgan's father's watch, Adrienne fast-forwarded the time line until she found not-blue Morgan, a young teenager, and her father in the butcher shop where he worked, Morgan watching at first and as she grew, being taught the family trade. Baseball games- family outings to Fenway as well as informal stickball games in the summer on the street, games at a park in the neighborhood, Morgan playing with other children while her father looked on proudly. The freckled girl fussing with the watch for some amusement while suffering through Mass. Father and daughter climbing trees. Apple picking. Morgan being carried on his shoulders. Building things- a tree house, the bookshelf that she'd seen in the living room on her way in. Morgan- no, Vanessa, her father called her- learning how to ride a bike...
With something akin to reluctance, Adrienne forced herself to take her hand away from the watch. She felt the ugly warmth of envy seeping into her, jealousy of the happy childhood she'd witnessed, but after one glance around the shrine, the feeling evaporated into sadness for the fact that the happy childhood was long dead, preserved only in the distant, embittered memories of mother and daughter rather than being retold with affection and laughter at family functions.
Still, even bitter memories were something Adrienne felt that Morgan would appreciate. Wasn't the purpose of this whole expedition to take back Morgan's memories of her past?
Without further hesitation Adrienne stuffed the watch into her pocket for lack of a better place to put it and started filling her arms with pictures. "What the hell am I supposed to do with all this shit once I collect it?" she shouted down the stairs. "Do we have a wheel man coming to get us or do we have to carry this all the way down the street like petty criminals?"
Baby book, right. That'd be logical, wouldn't it? Morgan tended to forget about things like baby books, though when she found her own she grabbed the entire thing. It wasn't like there was anything in the worn, pink volume that didn't have anything to do with her, was there? Entire pages were torn out of albums as Morgan lacked both the time and the care to pull back the clingy plastic covering of every single page to remove the photos. Every single image brought back memories and the woman wasn't sure if she wanted them or wanted to close her eyes to them. They were unavoidable, however, so she tried not to think about it too much.
The entire first floor had been cleared of displayed photos, frames standing empty and vacant where the metamorph had been. The baby book had been pulled as had a couple books which were intended as scrapbooks young Vanessa had always lost interest in before getting too terribly far into. She was still flipping through pages of album when she called back up to Adrienne. "It's just photos, how much could you possibly have gathered up there?" A dreaded thought rolled up on the heels of that question. What if her mother still had all her stuff? What if her room was the way she'd left it after shoving what she could have into a backpack? Cleaner, that was for certain, but would it be otherwise unchanged? Vanessa didn't ask, only yelled back, "I'll fetch some trash bags to shove it all in, alright?"
"You should come up here and see this," Adrienne shouted in response to Morgan's question about how much she could have gathered up there. "It's a fucking shrine. There's enough to fill the car." To make her point, she started throwing stuffed animals that filled one bookcase down the stairs, adding a diabolical laugh to her action.
Going over to the stairs to see what in the hell Adrienne was talking about, the metamorph was confronted with a shower of stuffed, fuzzy things from the second floor. "What the fu--" the word cut off when one of the cascading animals fell at her feet. Vanessa picked up the stuffed bear and examined him, twisting him this way and that. "Jesus. You still alive Waffles?" Her accent had bled from the western Irish one she'd used ever since being in her mother's presence to one that was all Southie without even a hint of Irish. The freckled, ginger young woman cuddled the bear to her chest and began to climb up the stairs.
"Where'd you find all--" The question was dead on her lips when she found the room Adrienne was in. She wasn't kidding when she'd called it a shrine. "What in the bloody--?" Morgan's eyes narrowed. "She calls me a changeling, proclaims me dead, says I'm a demon, kicks me out and then builds a bloody shrine to me and dad? What fucking right has she?" The Irish was back in her tone which was full of quiet fury. Her voice wasn't as loud as it was in her own body, but it was a fair bit louder than it'd been since using this pair of vocal chords.
Adrienne flinched at the fury in Morgan's voice and took an involuntary step back from the woman. "No right," she agreed quickly. If the circumstance had been different she might have tried arguing that everyone was entitled to grieve in their own way, but she wasn't about to challenge Morgan when she sounded like that. "Are we liberating the animals?" she asked with a plastered smile, trying to lighten Morgan's mood.
"Everything." Her voice was flat. "Everything that was mine comes with us." Without another word Morgan, and Waffles, spun and headed out the room and down the hall. She wanted confirmation for her earlier suspicion. Given the room she had just walked out of she wasn't going to be surprised if she was right.
"Well, you could help me, at least," Adrienne called out with a smirk. "Are you getting garbage bags?"
"Bloody hell." The words were whispered as Vanessa stared at a scarily vivid flashback, only the image wasn't fading. "We're going to need a lot of trash bags, cupcake," she called back. Her room was, as she had suspected, cleaner but the same. There was a baseball bat in the corner, Sox caps on a stand near the closet, posters of the Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana, Marilyn Manson, Korn and whoever else she'd thought was brilliant at the age of fourteen. Everything was shades of blue, she'd forgotten that. She was a little surprised her mother didn't change the colors, all things considered.
Hearing the curse, Adrienne followed Morgan into her old bedroom. "Nice cap," she grinned. "I'm going to get the trash bags. Maybe raid the kitchen while I'm at it." She didn't want to intrude on Morgan's memories.
"They're probably in the cupboard under the sink," Vanessa said over her shoulder. She stared in amazement at the room, not sure where the hell to start. She meant to erase herself from the house but how was she supposed to erase an entire bedroom in such a short period of time? This was bordering on more illegal than she would have liked. Under her breath Morgan muttered, "Fuck it." Then she got busy pulling things off the walls.
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