Laurie & Eamon | Monday early afternoon

[x-copycat.livejournal.com]

An unannounced visitor shows up at the mansion with the intention of visiting Vanessa. Instead Eamon finds Laurie.

Laurie had been just about to head out the front door, keys in hand when she heard the doorbell ring and frowned. They didn't often get visitors here who actually used the doorbell, and so she opened the door with a curious look.
"Um...hi?" she said uncertainly, looking up. Handsome man, that was about the extent that her brain worked before it was shut down by teenage hormones.

"Hey." Eamon had one of those disarming smiles. It wasn't the best smile ever, a little crooked with a hint of scoundrel if you looked closely, but it was the sort of smile you trusted. The sort of smile you usually found on guys who were going to rip you off. He wouldn't rip you off but it had taken him a thorough talk with himself to show up at the school completely unarmed. A hand went through his sandy brown hair as he looked at the girl in front of him. "I'm looking for Va--," he paused, trying to remember what name she had been using here. "Morgan. Morgan Lennox? She's not expecting me or anything, though." The accent he spoke with was a strange mixture. It had shades of Irish and Morgan's Boston mingled with something Eastern European and even a bit of a generic American. It made pinning down his origins difficult.

Laurie simply stared at him for a moment longer in silence, before she shook herself mentally. He was looking for Morgan, and had something of an Irish accent, which meant he must be one of her Mag Elga comrades. He had gotten through security at the front gate, so that meant he wasn't armed, and he'd rung the doorbell, which meant he was polite at the very least.

"She's not actually here at the moment." Laurie said finally, realising that her silence had stretched toward rude, just a little. "Um, did she tell you that she was moving to New York at all? New York proper that is. Also, who are you?"

At least she wasn't stuttering, that had been a bit of a struggle to begin with, but she had finally managed to conquer the slight nervous speech problem finally.

He was a little worried that maybe the girl didn't actually speak English. Eamon had assumed she would but then again there was no reason she had to. He was about to start cycling through the languages he knew when she finally spoke again. A realization hit his face when she asked who he was and Eamon winced as if he'd had a minor pain inflicted upon him. "Sorry! That was rude. I've got manners, really." He smiled at her again and held out his hand to shake, "The name's Eamon. Eamon Cooper. I'm an old friend of Morgan's. And you are?" There was only a slight hesitancy as he said the alias. Normally he had more time to adjust to the name before having to use it with others. Normally there was a different body to go with it.

"She told me she had a job in the city. She didn't tell me she was moving, though. Haven't really spoken to her since she came to see me about a month back. I had time, wanted to come see her out here. Figured I'd surprise her but," he shrugged helplessly. Obviously his surprise was no good since she wasn't there.

"Eamon?" Laurie asked, giving him the once over without really meaning to, and then started. "Oh! Eamon, you're Eamon? Wow. Ah..."

She looked down at the hand he was still holding out, and closed her own around it, smiling somewhat shyly at him. Morgan hadn't told her just how cute he was, even if it wasn't a magazine type cuteness. She preferred guys who were a little different anyway, and he wasn't in the least hard on the eyes.

Eamon's smile morphed into a grin the moment her hand was in his. He didn't let it go when he should have but rather held onto it and took a half step toward her. Why hadn't he realized how hot she was until now? "At least one of us knows who the other this. You still haven't told me your name." And how would he manage to ask her out if he didn't know her name? Sure, there was an age gap but Eamon was sure she was legal and who needed more than that?

Laurie gaped up at him for a moment, and then her eyes flicked to her hand in his and she blushed a deep red. "Laurie, my name's Laurie." she said, pulling her hand out of his and stepping back.

She hadn't realised...It was the work of moments to concentrate and pull her powers back into line, it would still take her having a complete wash to clear it completely from her skin but at least she wasn't adding to what was already there.

Eamon paused, the name ringing a vague bell. His empty hand hung in the air for a moment after she'd pulled hers out while he tried to remember why. When he remembered the hand fell back to his side and his smile was much more scoundrel than it had been before. "Laurie? The adopted little sister?" His eyebrows went up, an amused expression overtaking his face. "The one Ness says wants to take me out?" He held back a laugh and mentally brushed off the name slip because he remembered Vanessa telling him Laurie knew her name. The real one.

Laurie's blush deepened, but she decided to braisen it out. After all, this was one of Morgan's friends, and she didn't think he was about to get too familiar unless she wanted him to. Still, she kept her distance, not wanting to influence him in any untoward way.

"That would be me." she said, smile forming. "Did you want me to give Vanessa a call and let her know you're in town? I figure she'd probably kill me if I let you disappear now that you're here."

"Oh, Ness isn't getting rid of me before I see her." There was a note of protectiveness in his voice, making his role of older brother to the metamorph clear. "I've got her number, but if you've got her new address, well, I'd be grateful if you helped me drop in on her without giving her a head's up." Eamon paused for a moment before adding, "Maybe even show my gratitude by taking you out?" Sure, Vanessa might kill him for hitting on her little sister sort, but she was cute and it would be worth getting smacked over.

Laurie pulled her car keys out of her pocket and dangled them between the two of them. "I figure I can do one better and just take you to her." she said, a grin now firmly in place. It wasn't often that she got asked out by cute foreign men, and it would be safe enough. "We can talk about the possibility of you taking me out on the way there."

He definitely liked her. She was feisty, there was absolutely nothing about feisty to not want. "You're an angel," he told her, Eamon's accent shifting more Irish for a moment. "I'm willing to plead my case if I need to. It's not often I get to ask a beautiful girl out." And in his head the mental image of her was fantastic. Also, it was naked.

Laurie couldn't help it, she had to laugh. It wasn't so much that she'd never been called beautiful before, but that she wasn't entirely sure she believed all the flattery. Especially not when it was said in an Irish accent, by one of Morgan's adopted brothers. She'd been warned often growing up about accepting candy from strangers. There was really nothing else for it but to get to know the man so he was no longer a stranger.

"Come on then, you can tell me all about yourself on the drive there, and I can act all mysterious and non commenty while I learn everything about you, and you learn almost nothing about me." she said, tone obviously teasing.

Eamon sighed, sounding very put out. "Female prerogative." He said it as if it were prohibiting him from something. "I'll just have to sell you on me well enough that you dangle bits of information for me at least. Even little ones." He gestured for her to lead the way to wherever they kept cars in this giant place. Vanessa landed herself in a mansion and then moved out? She was crazy, obviously. "But I should warn you, there's going to be a lot of holes. People might kill me if I tell you some things. You might be worth the price but how am I supposed to know that while you're all mysterious?"

"Hmm, that is a dilemma. But you're a mercenary, are you really going to tell me things that could get you killed?" Laurie noted, clicking the button on her security device, and opening the door once the locks had clicked open. "Mind the chair, this is one of the more often used loaners and the little lever that moves it back and forth can get a bit stuck."

"Not likely, lovely. Maybe if I knew you were worth it," his voice held a note of leading teasing in it. "There's plenty of information that could get you and me killed. I wasn't always a mercenary." Eamon eyed the seat before he got in. The last person who sat there must have been very short because his legs were cramped up once he sat down. After some minor altercation with the lever he'd been warned about the seat finally moved, by suddenly sliding all the way backward. It was more than he needed but he just wasn't going to tempt fate again. "The whole thing isn't going to go and blow up, is it?"

"You weren't?" Laurie asked, interested all of a sudden in what this man might have done before he was one of Morgan's brothers in arms. "What did you do before?"

Checking that they both had their seatbelt on, she placed the key in the ignition and started up the car, it came to life with a soft purr and Laurie grinned. Between Forge, Scott and Callisto, it would've been a brave car indeed that showed any particular mechanical problem.

Eamon grinned. "No, I wasn't." He just let the silence take over and hang as his eyes swept from her hands on the wheel up her arms and then down the line of her body. Young and nubile were both words that popped into his mind. The word corruptible quickly followed. And then an image of Vanessa with a knife at Mike's nuts cropped up and Eamon diverted his eyes out the window quickly with a small flinch. "I was a SEAL. Joined up with Morgan and crew about the same time she did, actually."

Laurie's eyes widened and she flicked a quick look over at him before getting her eyes back on the road. How did a SEAL end up a mercenary? Laurie knew there were certain things in the world that she was rather naive about, but she'd figured military people didn't go in for selling their abilities to the highest bidder, at least...but then she couldn't say she'd thought on that much either.

"How do you go from being in the military to being a gun for hire?" she asked, she turned left as they pulled past the mansion gate, watching it close behind them in her rear-view mirror as they drove off.

"'Gun for hire' is simplifying it a bit." It was simplifying it a lot but he wasn't sure he wanted to get into that. He'd leave explaining exactly the breadth of what the crew had done up to Ness. "And it's complicated." Sort of like how it was complicated that he was a little too scared of his former teammate's reaction to him hitting on her adopted little sister to look at the girl again. "Let's just suffice to say there were some things I didn't agree with but you don't get to argue with commandant's orders. You shut the fuck up and do your job. People change. Perspective does, too. I wasn't the same person when I chose to not re-enlist as I was when I joined up at seventeen."

"I thought you had to be eighteen to join the military." Laurie noted, her eyes flicking from the road and traffic in front of her, to him and then back again as she drove. She was a confident driver, something that was sometimes at odds with her outward appearence. She'd been dropping a lot of the shyness that had been part of her personality for years lately, it was a painful process at times.

Eamon spared a glance in her direction and caught Laurie's gaze when she had looked at him for a moment. A confident smile bordering on cocky immediately appeared on his face. "Not if you have parental consent. My dad was career military and I'd wanted to join since I was a kid. He and my mother had no problem signing off on me joining when I turned seventeen. Even graduated high school a year early to enlist."

"Enthusiastic." Laurie murmured, flashing him a grin. She'd been something of the same when she'd joined up for the X-men, even if their fundamental principals were slightly different to a military unit. She wanted to ask him what had changed his mind, and if having a military Dad had given him an unrealistic view of what fighting was all about. But these were not questions you asked someone you just met, especially if you wanted them to ever talk to you again. Laurie thought she might just like Eamon to want to talk to her again, or take her out to dinner, more to the point.

His grin turned to a smirk. "Yeah, well, when feeling inspired it's easy to be." His voice had gone sly and the innuendo laced through his words that it wasn't the military he was referring to being enthusiastic about. He really had to get these mental images of her out of his head or Ness was going to take one look at him and smack the hell out him. That could hurt. It would also really defeat his manly reputation with Laurie.