xp_logs | Marie-Ange and North out for coffee (Reply)

Marie-Ange and David go out and discuss their powers and their pasts over a cup of coffee.

"No, so then Manuel drowns. Maybe he was already drowning, I am not certain. And I had to give him naked CPR, with the iguana watching." Marie-Ange's impish smile made the story sound entirely unbelievable, despite it being the complete and utter truth. She took a long drink of what was her third coffee of the afternoon. "So, I am not sure if you can top saving a unpopular empathic snob from death by electrocution and drowning with a giant lizard watching. But if you can, you must share."

David laughed as he stirred his latte. "Only if you count forgetting that certain parts of Belgium speak Flemish and not French. Which should not be a problem, except when you're getting a prescription for combat-grade amphetamines filled, and instead..."

He wiped a hand over his face, remembering the embarassment of THAT particular European mission with the Weapon X team. "Instead of being on an insertion team with Wraith and Logan, I wound up running mission control from a hotel bathroom in Bruges. You know how they say 'don't drink the water'? Don't ever trust a fucking Belgian pharmacist."

"Did you forget who I am dating? The language barrier is not usually a problem." Marie-Ange still wasn't sure why David kept calling Doug "monkey" but it amused her. "The water, on the other hand... Amanda fell into an underground river in... I forget what horrible desert in the middle east we were in, but I think she swallowed about half of it. She was sick for days. We have a report on that somewhere in the files. It was crazy cultists." As if that were anything new. They had an entire section of the files labeled "Crazy Cultists"

Drinking his coffee, David nodded. "It often is. Gott, you are... twenty-one, yes? Now I am the old man giving the 'when I was your age' story, but when I was your age... no, a year older. I was twenty-two when I defected. Two years with the State Police, three with the Stasi, and I thought I had seen everything. The arrogance of youth, you see."

He sighed and looked into the coffee mug introspectively."I look at you and the others; Mark, Illyana, even your monkey of a boyfriend. I was young once, and much, much more foolish. Then again, I did not have a Pete Wisdom, or a Remy LeBeau, or a Charles Xavier to guide me, either."

Marie-Ange nodded "Twenty-two in August. You were seventeen when you joined the.. the Stasi?" The word came out oddly, her accent adding a buzz to the s-sounds. "Did you have problems with your precognition then? Before.." She gestured at David's coffee mug. "Before that became necessary? It seems like no two of us are alike at all. Nathan's was so far in the future that he could have been making it all, for all we know. Adrianne's runs both ways, forward and backwards. Mine has such drawbacks, even with Tante Mattie's help."

North nodded. "I grew up in the lap of the secret police. My father was a section chief, and I was something of a wunderkind. When my precognition developed, it was like... hunches? Sometimes clear, sometimes days, or weeks, or in one case, years ahead."

Quietly, he set the mug down. "My longest flash was a little more than a year and a half ahead. Our bureau chief, he knew what I could do - many people in the Stasi suspected, but this was twenty years ago, we did not have as much knowledge about mutants, not outside government channels. They would bring me photographs, interviews with informants, suspected defectors... like you see on television, the police with the charlatan psychics. And one day I saw the Wall." The capitalization was obvious in his voice, and a child of East Germany could only mean one thing by the reference. "I saw it come down, a year early. My country collapsing, everything I knew falling apart. It was absolutely terrifying. I almost went mad, you know. If not for my father's connections, they would have put me in a mental ward."

He sipped the last of his coffee thoughtfully. "As it was, they sent me on a sabbatical to Bern for a month to clear my head. And there I met William Stryker."

"So not very different from mine. Just less ... symbolic? Perhaps that is because of my other power?" Marie-Ange mused, between careful bites of an apple danish. "I had ... still have, really, nightmares and odd dreams, and then, I think it is called automatic writing, but mine is drawings. I draw and sometimes am not aware of it. Sometimes they make sense right away, sometimes not for months later." She reached back and dug in her purse, producing a well-worn sketchpad. "I go through, maybe two or three a month? Doug scans them into a database that he made."

"Tante Mattie - she is, ah, I am still not sure of her relationship to Remy. He is terrified of her, and I do not blame him. She thinks that my power is more mystical than not, but I am still not sure about that. But she helped when it was broken and all I saw was everyone dying, so I not going to argue." Marie-Ange smiled wryly. "It is possible I would have had to be in a mental ward, as you say, if not for that."

"I, on the other hand, sleep like a content baby," David bragged with a smile, then held up a finger to correct himself. "Notwithstanding the semi-regular attempts by Jubilee to burgle my liquor cabinet at three in the morning. No, now my visions are more controlled. Clear and precise, but never more than ninety seconds, and only the immediate events around me. For as much of a bastard as Stryker was and those butchers he employed... if not for the Weapon X project, I would be in some asylum, ranting like a modern Nostradamus."

"She only steals our ice cream now." Because Marie-Ange and Doug had gotten amnesty for all food not ice cream when they gave Jubilee a free sofa. And leftovers were liberally laced with those absurd peppers often enough that they'd trained Jubilee to not eat anything that wasn't one hundred percent safe. "Even a very broken watch is right twice a day, yes? I suppose unless the watch is jumping around randomly but what kind of watch would do that? That would make no sense. But that is sort of how my power works. It jumps around randomly like a mad watch. Five minutes ahead here, five weeks there, a year, a month. You can never get past a minute and a half? Not even with different medications?"

"Forcing my precognition is an immediate express train to brain-bleeding migraines," David confessed. "It is a powerful tool, but like any tool, it is a situational one. I've been trained to rely on it no more than I would a knife, or a gun, or a teammate."

"Metaphorical brain bleeding, or literally your brain bleeds?" The assessing and slightly calculating expression that flashed over Marie-Ange's face was a dramatic shift from the slightly amused and unfocused one she'd had before. "If a tool can be fixed after breaking, then it is an option, but not a preferable one. And good to know about." Precognition they could rely on more than her own was far too valuable to worry about something as petty as painful headaches.

"Possibly both. Although that could have been the dexedrine," North said, then made a tsk-ing noise. "Either way, it's never failed me since the day Betsy jammed that purple spike of telepathic agony through my brain and 'unlocked' me again. Believe me, the moment something goes wrong..."

He stopped for a moment, staring into space, one hand scratching idly at the edge of his beard. "Strange. I do not quite recall when that happened. I... I would tell you. Trust is not something that has been in abundant supply for me, especially in our line of work. But there it is. I have a team I can trust, once more."

"Except where your alcohol and late-night snacks are concerned. I'm afraid there, Jubilee is quite untrustworthy." Marie-Ange said, with a grin. "But yes, I think... it is funny, we have fewer problems than one might expect. But I think so many of us have needed each other that we do not want to break those trusts."

"Honor among spies, yes?" North said with a smirk.