xp_logs | Vanessa and Adrienne- early tuesday evening

x-adrienne.livejournal.com posting in

Backdated to Tuesday.

Vanessa and Adrienne have a visit, their first since Christmas morning. Their conversation about Garrison's departure gives way to much personal introspection but when they try to change topics and discuss their other activities, both try to outdo each other in the 'i have a secret' game, leading to much frustration.

In less than a week the man she'd been pining for since she met him over six months ago had returned, broken down on her shoulder and left again. She'd also somehow ended up in a sort of dating situation with perhaps the single sweetest guy she'd ever met and been offered a job which promised new and exciting training if she accepted it. Sure, Vanessa had gone hunting and killed a a few deer to get most of the emotional extremes out of her system, but at this point she just wanted to relax, which was what had her knocking on Adrienne's door at half past five in the evening.

"Human interaction, what a novel concept," Adrienne singsonged as she moved towards the door. "And here I thought people just used phones or the journals." Opening the door without checking who was on the other side, Adrienne's face went blank as she realized that the person on the other side was Morgan. "Oh. Hey," she muttered, a little shyly. She hadn't seen Morgan since Christmas, and so much had happened then, and since then, Adrienne found she didn't really know where to start.

"He came, he saw, he ditched out again," Vanessa announced without ceremony. "Which, you knew, didn't you? Because if he didn't tell you and just disappeared I will be happy to smack him around when he comes back for being a fucking idiot." Of course, according to Garrison he didn't know if he would be back, but according to Vanessa he would be back because that was who he was and in the end the core of who you are doesn't change so quickly, no matter what the trauma. "I need some fucking alcohol in my system. It's going to be my new post-killing shit coping mechanism. You wanna go to Harry's?" She was taking this all much better than she should have been and it would have been easy to assume it was Morgan in place except for the much more subtle Irish tones in her strongly Boston accent.

"He told me. He's not 'ditching out'," Adrienne responded with a wrinkle of her nose. "He's having some sort of an identity crisis after killing Apocalypse and he thought hanging out on a boat would be the best way to try and figure out who he is now. Or something like that. And he didn't 'ditch out' last time. He was kidnapped. I'll go," she conceded, raising an eyebrow at the change in Morgan's voice. "I haven't been to Harry's since before Garrison... No alcohol for me, though. You should really change your coping mechanism to retail therapy. Easier on the liver."

"Except that I count shopping among the nine levels of hell," she pointed out with a sarcastic look. "Yeah, actually, he is 'ditching out.' I didn't think he even liked his father and now he's running away so that he can reconcile who he is now with a man who has stark ideological differences with him? That doesn't even make sense. I get that there's probably too many people here and maybe he needed out of the mansion, but did he have to take off to destinations unknown? Seems to me he'd be better off with people who care and who are more likely than not to do whatever they can to help him. He got a lift home so he could pack his shit and go. He can't run away from himself, and that's what he's trying to do."

"But being around his father is going to convince him that no matter how much he thinks he's changed into someone like his dad, he hasn't," Adrienne pointed out, ushering Morgan out the door. "Being around his father is just going to confirm what he won't let us tell him right now- that he's still a good man despite what he did. He doesn't want to be around people who care, who are going to tell him that he's alright- seems to me he wants to figure that out for himself."

She let herself be ushered out, and headed down the hall with Adrienne. "Oh, that's such bullshit and you know it. He could just as easily hang out with Nate or I, or, hell, LeBeau over at Snow Valley and find out really fucking quickly he's not even on level with any of us, nevermind his father." Vanessa paused and made a face. "Actually, I take that back, I'm pretty sure LeBeau is worse than his father. Which is not the point. The point is that he has plenty of bad examples. I think he's just all freaked out that he won't deal if he is around people who refuse to let him not be who he was, which is valid, but they'll have to deal eventually and where he deals isn't going to make a difference. Not in the long run."

"LeBeau? Remy LeBeau? How do you know him?" Adrienne asked, freezing.

"Oh, we're dating, didn't you know?" Vanessa's reply was flat and followed quickly by a raised eyebrow. "Who do you think dragged me off after Christmas and then to that complex where we found Garrison and the others? Why do you know him?" She'd kept walking but Adrienne wasn't following and it was too uncomfortable to keep looking back at her so Vanessa finally stopped and turned. "And why are you reacting like that over it?"

"I'm not 'reacting like that'," Adrienne retorted stubbornly, forcing herself to start walking again. "I just didn't know how you knew him. I don't know him. Manuel didn't talk to you about him, say how they know each other, did he?" she asked, knowing it was a long shot. Bella, don't tell Remy, he'd said. She still didn't know what that meant. What hold did Remy have over Manuel? "I think you're right about him being freaked out about people not being able to let him be who he is now," Adrienne added, going back to where they'd been before she'd derailed their conversation. "But he has to go someplace where he thinks he can come to terms with the fact that people might admit he's changed. If that means a boat with only a beer and his bad-example father for company, then that's where he has to be."

"Manuel and I don't have the sort of relationship where we sit around chatting about who we know and how. Why?" She arched an eyebrow upward at Adrienne. Everyone in the mansion seemed to know everyone at Snow Valley for the most part so she wasn't sure it was all that interesting a tidbit of information that Manuel knew LeBeau.

Once they'd resumed their journey toward the garage Vanessa picked up the momentarily abandoned thread once more. "Is that really going to make it any easier when he comes back? He's still got all the same problems here, maybe even more of them if he comes back figured out only to have realized eighty things about himself have changed because of all this. Besides, what the fuck is his father going to do for him? He wasn't there for Garrison when the guy was a kid and suddenly he's going to help grant some magical insight into the new version of Kane? I have trouble believing that, but if he wants to ditch people who haven't let him down for one that has then that's his issue to work out."

Adrienne shrugged. She wasn't entirely sure she wanted to tell Morgan what had happened between herself and Manuel. Morgan would most likely have a lecture for her. "No reason. Just curious." She let Driver open the car door for her and slid across the seat. "I don't know if it'll make it easier, but you're right. It's his issue. He's doing what he thinks he needs to do. He doesn't see it as ditching. He just sees it as doing what he needs to do to survive himself. You can't stay with people, even if they mean something to you- especially if they mean something to you- if you can't live with yourself." she stated, rather rhetorically. "And maybe his father won't even be there? He just said it was his dad's boat. Dad's probably off beating up guys with paper bags over their heads. He's probably alone."

"So he's going to sulk all alone on a boat with beer," she asked as she slid onto the seat beside her friend. "Yeah, that's healthy. You don't survive alone, not really. You get this sort of shadow approximation of it, but all you end up doing is isolating yourself and hiding. I know he's doing what he thinks is right, what he thinks he needs, but I still think he's wrong. Garrison needs to be around people to help him realize that this one thing doesn't define him. It doesn't make or break him. The totality of everything over the past two months affects him and it may change things about him but it doesn't totally redefine him. That's not something he's going to remember off on his own. When he falls down out there who is going to catch him, cupcake? The water?"

"I tried to tell him that one choice and one action doesn't make a man. But he didn't listen to me," Adrienne murmured, staring out the car window. "He has to figure it out for himself. Some people have to be alone while they deal with how they've changed. You can think he's wrong all you want, but I don't think there's a wrong or right way to deal with feeling like you've lost yourself. Everyone's just trying to cope as best they can. Some people can't let anyone see them being weak, especially people who mean something to them. And when you don't know who you are anymore, you feel weak," she responded patiently. "Maybe you're right and people can't survive alone. Maybe you're supposed to let people who mean something to you catch you when you fall down. But some of us never learned how to do that. We didn't have anyone to teach us, we haven't had any storybook epiphany in our lives where we went 'I know, I'll start to lean on people now!' Some people don't know any different." She wasn't even sure she was defending Garrison anymore. "You can't think he's wrong for doing what he felt he needed to do, just because it's not what you would have done. We're not all as strong as you are."

"I don't think his problem is letting people know he's weak." The little salty stains on her shirt from Sunday were proof enough to her that Garrison Kane was fully capable of being weak once he was told he was allowed to be. Adrienne wasn't the only one who wasn't sure that she was still only defending Garrison. As a result an accusing finger was pointed at her, "If you ever pull something like this I hunt you down, I drag your ass back and I will beat the point into you until you get it." Her words weren't nearly as harsh sounding as they should have been given the choice of words, though they hinted at what Vanessa's real problem was. It was the same thing she kept repeating. You didn't just leave people you cared about. The only result was then that he didn't actually care, but that thought felt wrong as well.

"I'm serious. You can't just magically learn to lean on people but if you take off when you need them it takes you longer to get things straightened out in your head. You fall down and without someone to catch you it takes longer getting up. People don't need to be strong if they've got someone who's strong to be there for them. And don't talk to me about storybook epiphanies, I never had one of those." She had something very, very far from a storybook, actually.

"I don't think his problem is letting people know he's weak, either," she agreed. He had asked her to stay when she'd tried to give him the opportunity of dealing with his problems alone, after all. "Maybe I was projecting my own shit." She recoiled at the accusing finger, but the words that came after it stunned her even more. "I... you would?" Well, that was... well. Adrienne didn't really know what that was. "How well do you think that one would go over?" she asked with a smirk and a raised eyebrow after a brief silence during which she tried to fathom how to respond to this statement that Morgan actually cared enough to do something like that for her- deranged as it might have been. "I know you didn't have a storybook," she added quietly, knowing Vanessa's mother had kicked her out of the house as a teen, "but you must've had the epiphany anyway. So what you're saying is that instead of taking off, you can stay and use people to make yourself feel better? This sort of appeals to me..." she teased, pretending to think about it.

Vanessa rolled her eyes. "I think it'd go over about as well as it went over with me, but you'd get the fucking point, wouldn't you?" She waved a hand dismissively to stop Adrienne's protests before they started. "My non-storybook epiphany came with Aleister, who beat the point into me that you are only as strong as the people around you and even then only when you allow yourself to depend on them, lean on them. You've got a family, use them to build yourself. That's what he started with and I was damn fucking broken when he got me, trust me. Worse off than you are or than Garrison is right now."

The car stopped and Vanessa didn't wait for Driver-who-had-no-other-name to get the door. She opened the door herself and slid out, then held out a hand for Adrienne to take as if she were a princess getting out of her carriage at the ball. "Ma chère." The blue woman grinned at her friend, the expression a strange cross between flirtation and mischief.

Adrienne glared at the blue woman's offered hand and sat stubbornly in the car. "I am not broken," she protested darkly, unable to comprehend that she was lying to herself. "And that beating thing only works if you've got people who are worth depending on. Beating on people to get them to depend on you can be incredibly fucked up if you're the wrong sort of person." The sort of person who had broken her in the first place, for example.

Vanessa sighed and crouched down. "You're taking the word 'beating' way too literally here, chère. There's plenty of metaphoric ways to beat a point into someone. Would you prefer the word 'drill'?" Though, honestly, drilling something into someone always made Vanessa think of bad porn. "I didn't say you were broken, either. I said I was broken, therefore I was worse than you are right now Madam Doesn't-Know-How-To-Lean and worse than Garrison is right now." She had that patient tone in her voice, the sort you use on people who aren't listening to you.

"'Drill' sounds like a cheap porno," Adrienne pointed out. Satisfied that the blue woman wasn't trying to push her buttons, she took the offered hand and allowed herself to be led out of the car. "You realize how much this is not going to be fun for me, sitting around watching you get drunk, and with no baseball on even?"

"I could probably make 'thrust' work for you if that sounds like higher quality porn." Vanessa grinned. With an arm draped casually around Adrienne's shoulders she led the two of them to the door, which she then held for the other woman. "I've no plans to get drunk, cupcake. I just said I needed alcohol. I just need to relax and get the fuck out of that place after the past week. I can only hide out in Jean-Paul's suite for so long, after all." She waved to the bartender and headed for her favorite booth, which was blissfully empty.

"'Thrust' just sounds like a cheap drugstore novel word, not high quality porn," the psychometrist retorted with a shake of her head, allowing herself to be led into Harry's, giving the bartender a smile as she followed the blue woman under the Morgan mask to their booth. "You know, I think I do sort of understand about the 'hiding out and being alone with your problems is bad' thing," she mused, ordering a club soda from Briar. "I thought I could hide out in the office, but after a few hours it made me feel even worse. Before I came here," she grumbled, doing an 'on the other hand' motion, "I would have been fine to hide in the office." Did that mean the beatings were beginning to reshape her? That was a little bit scary. "Do you think I could read his phone and his computer and figure out where he went so you could drag his ass back for beatings?"

She snorted and ordered her usual Anchor Steam before Briar went toddling back toward the bar. "Wouldn't he have taken his phone with him, love?" Sure, he wanted alone time, but Vanessa had assumed he'd take the phone with him just in case. After all, trouble seemed to follow the mansion's residents like a lost little puppy. It would be more sensible for Garrison to have it on him just in case. Vanessa hoped he was still that sensible.

Shifting gears, Vanessa grinned at Adrienne. Unlike Morgan, when Vanessa really smiled the expression spread across her lips fully instead of only pulling one side of her mouth into the expression as it did with Morgan. "Aye, cupcake, I reckon it's begun to work on you. See, I'm very subtle with my beatings." She winked across the table at the other woman and it had the easy grace of a wink that was given often. One of her mimics she'd worn for a couple years liked to wink at people. It had become a very natural thing to Vanessa.

"Stop looking so damned pleased with yourself, Sassafrass" Adrienne smirked, rolling her eyes. She scrutinized the face in front of her, how it was subtly different from the Morgan mask. "Through this whole conversation you've looked like the girl I saw in the watch," she mused. Things she saw in readings never seemed to leave her as quickly as things she saw with her own eyes, and she could pull up images of the young Vanessa quite clearly. "I like her. Yeah, he probably did take his phone," she carried on as Briar returned with their drinks. "I can still read his keypad, get into the room, read whatever to figure out where he's gone. Wouldn't be hard. Hey, you promised me a souvenir from the bad guy. Where is it?"

"Wrong bad guy." She didn't comment on Adrienne's observations. She wasn't sure why she suddenly felt like it was time to be herself, even if it wasn't likely to last forever. Truth be told, Vanessa was just enjoying the lessened effort that not wearing a mask came with. Though she felt naked in all new ways. Maybe she had lied to Sam. Maybe she was an exhibitionist, what with her practically streaking at the moment. Maybe metaphor nudity didn't count. "Amanda and I were discussing what to bring you back if we hunted down whoever took Pete and Kane. She thought ear but I was thinking finger, balls or eye. Glad to know I was right." She grinned suddenly and sipped her beer so she didn't spill it.

"Oi, you know, as much as I'm glad he's alive and okayish, please tell me something else had happened to the two of us other than Garrison fucking Kane. Don't take this the wrong way, because I'd love to find him, drag his ass home and tie him to the bed until he realized that running away to a boat won't actually solve anything." She paused, thought for a moment, and then gave Adrienne a mischievous smile. "Or maybe I have ulterior motives for tying him to the bed. Either way, I think I need to stop obsessing and we both need to get our minds out of Kane mode since he's going to be gone for who knows how fucking long. Please tell me you've been doing something else interesting with your time."

Adrienne narrowed her eyes. "What do you mean, wrong bad guy? I don't care which bad guy. I was promised bad guy souvenir, I want bad guy souvenir!" she whined. An eyebrow quirked up at Vanessa's mention of tying Garrison to the bed, but she let the statement go. "You're the one who brought Kane up in the first place," Adrienne reminded her, quite happy to go back to pretending she didn't care about the Boy Scout. "I haven't been doing anything interesting." Just getting blackout drunk and using Manuel de la Rocha as a pillow... She wasn't about to open herself up to what could either be a Morgan-lecture or insane amounts of laughter and teasing about that, though. It was far too embarrassing. "You?"

Vanessa rolled her eyes. "Aye, Captain Cupcake." She even gave Adrienne a two-fingered salute. "Next bad guy I meet will be less one finger, which I will wrap with a bow and deliver to you in a jewelry box, aye?" She gave Adrienne a broad, cheeky grin and then took several gulps of her beer. "Lies! There's no way you've been more boring than me. I killed some blokes, shot some dogs, shot more people, got a few ferals squished by a shield for me, got a job offer and acquired a potential someone." She took another drink and quickly added, "I'm not supposed to be the interesting one here!"

Giving Vanessa a pasted-on smile, Adrienne sipped at her drink. "I've been incredibly boring, sorry to say." Maybe it was because she had the images of Vanessa as a child in her head, but Adrienne was responding to Vanessa in a bit of a patronizing way. "Tell me about the job offer, and the potential someone."

An eyebrow went up at the tone and Vanessa fixed her best annoyed child expression onto her face. "No, mummy, I'm not going to tell you. I don't need to tell you everything!" She even considered stomping a foot or something but Vanessa suspected people would think they had some sort of fucked up BDSM age play relationship going on and that was just too far into the gross and disturbing zone for her.

Giggling, Adrienne rolled her eyes. "But you do need to tell me things that you bring up in the first place. You can't just dangle things like that over my head and then clam up. It's one thing to pretend you did nothing and be all cryptic like I'm doing, but it's quite another to dangle tidbits and then try and be cryptic. I can always just break into your room and read your shit too, you know. But I won't have to if you just tell me what I want to know," she added in her best 'evil villain' tone.

Now Vanessa was giggling, mostly because Adrienne's evil villain voice was really kind of cute and made her want to pinch the older woman's cheeks, pat her on the head and do other patronizing things. When the giggling subsided, though, an eyebrow was arched and Vanessa gave her friend the best "oh really?" expression she had. "Oh, so what are you pretending didn't happen that did happen then?"

"Nothing at all, Sassafrass," Adrienne said with a shake of her head, still laughing. "Nothing at all. Stop changing the subject and tell me about the job offer and the potential someone."

Vanessa leaned across the table and stared at Adrienne's eyes. "Lies." The word was pronounced with finality and the woman sat back down properly. "You're lying. C'mon, what's up, what trouble have you been getting into my dear frosting-covered confection?"

"Nothing," Adrienne protested. "I keep telling, you, it was nothing. I haven't been getting into trouble." She downed the rest of her club soda. "If you don't tell me about the job and the potential someone, I'm going to read your dad's watch and there's nothing you can do to stop me," she threatened.

Vanessa narrowed her eyes at Adrienne, unclipped the pocket watch and held it up so it dangled in front of her friend. "Was nothing, which doesn't mean it didn't happen, it just means you're pretending it wasn't significant. Slight difference there. A bloke offered me a job being a shady badass and a boy thinks I'm pretty," she informed Adrienne and then grinned. "Your turn."

The brunette signaled for a refill. "Who offered you the job and who said you were pretty?"

"A bloke and a different bloke," she responded automatically. "So what is with you going all alcohol free anyway? It's very...not you." Her eyes were narrowed suspiciously and Vanessa was watching Adrienne very closely for visual cues as to what may be up.

Annoyed with this game, Adrienne leaned across the booth and closer to Vanessa. She wasn't so embarrassed about throwing up that she didn't want to know what was going on with Morgan. "If I tell you, you have to tell me names of the blokes. Both of them. Deal?"

Without a word Vanessa propped her elbow up on the table and held a pinky out to Adrienne as a sign that she would pinky swear, truly a solemn oath. At least it would have been if she were seven but the look on her face promised as well.

"I threw up," Adrienne admitted, wrinkling her nose. "After dinner with Manny. There was a lot of drinking." Also nakedness. But she left that part out. "Now you."

Vanessa rolled her eyes. "LeBeau." It was an answer. She didn't qualify which answer it was, but it was an answer. Though, if Adrienne assumed he was the potential someone Vanessa may have ended up laughing so hard she fell out of the booth. "So what, precisely, are you not telling me?"

"I don't really want to talk about what happened precisely," Adrienne said with a shake of her head. "LeBeau as potential employer or boy who said you were pretty?" she prompted.

"You know," she drawled sarcastically, "I refer to all persons who I may potentially consider dating by their last names. I think it sets me apart from other women. And it's much better than pet names."

Adrienne's eyebrow quirked up. "So you already said that LeBeau was the reason you went off after Christmas... which was for a job. And you're also dating him now? Is this a different sort of job than I'm thinking of? You do know what the oldest profession in the book is, right?" she teased. "Though I think in that profession you're not supposed to date the person after you do the job..."

"You're forgetting, I've already years of experience in that profession," she told her flatly. Something was up that Adrienne wasn't telling her and it was starting to bug her. Vanessa had been playing with her brief little overview that skipped all detail, but Adrienne had avoided the topic, then brought up that she was avoiding it and had then only given what was either a partial truth or a lie. It was a bit irritating, to say the least. Generally if people were truly opposed to talking about something shouldn't they just not bring attention to it at all in the first place?

"I didn't forget, I was just trying to make a joke," Adrienne replied. Her mood had really soured from this secretive thing they were both doing, and she rose from the booth. "I've gotta get back to the mansion. I'll have Driver take me back and then send him back here to take you back whenever you're finished if you want."

"I can walk," she told Adrienne before the other walked away from her. Well, that went well. The real question for Vanessa was why their outing had ended the way it had. She suspected it had something to do with whatever Adrienne wasn't telling her about what happened between her and Manuel.