Malibu Madness: A Broken Heart - Finale

[x-penance.livejournal.com]

The truth comes out.



"It is a pity we are leaving soon," Yvette said wistfully as she and Cam walked along the beach, knee-deep in the water. "It has been such the good time." Mostly because of him, she was too shy to add, but the implication was there. "Perhaps we can be visiting each other some time?"

"I'd love to come out to New York sometime," Cam smiled, looking down at the lapping waves hitting their knees. "Maybe you can show me around the town or something?" For several days the two had been thick as thieves, though he had yet to tell her about his girlfriend back home. Of course, now it was too late and he would appear to be a jackass, though he was constantly fighting an affirming feeling that he was one anyway.

"I think I can manage that, yes," she replied, teasingly. "There is much to see there and many things to be doing." She was about to say more when she caught sight of a girl making her way down the beach towards them. Tall, pretty, dressed in a bikini with a small wrap-around skirt and her face lighting up at the sight of Cam.

"Cam!" the girl explained, throwing her arms around the boy and kissing him soundly. "Surprise!"

Cameron was, to say the least, surprised. A world of possibilities spun around his head as he looked at Ginny and tried to keep his mouth from dipping into the salty-brine. "You're here?!" the question was asked in such a way that it didn't sound like a question at all.

"Yep!" Ginny beamed at him. "The family trip finished early so I begged Mom and Dad to let me join you guys and they totally did! I wanted to surprise you, so here I am! Isn't it fantastic?" She glanced at Yvette, doing a slight double-take at the obvious mutant. "Oh, hi."

Yvette opened her mouth to say something, anything, but nothing came out. Her mind was awhirl. This girl obviously knew Cam and knew him well, but why hadn't he mentioned her? Her confusion was obvious in the way her skin and hair was hardening, and she took a step away from the pair, just in case, all the old protective habits going up.

Cameron looked at Yvette's dimming eyes and knew that he'd hurt her deeply. "Oh, um...fuh..." was all he could get out as she began to pull away. "Um, Ginny, this is my good, good friend, Yvette." What else could he say, asking for time with his friend when his girlfriend just showed up would have been a dead giveaway that something was up, but the last thing he wanted was to hurt Yvette in anyway. She was a good person and he was...a dumb-ass.

Ginny looked Yvette over and gave her a bright, empty smile. "Hi! Pleased to meet you."

Yvette nodded, glad for once her powers meant her expression was hard to read for those who didn't know her so well. "It is good to be meeting you also," she murmured. "I hope you have the good vacation. If you could be excusing me, I should be going back to my friends. Cam, it was good to see you." It was rude, but all Yvette wanted to do was flee the scene. She couldn't stand seeing that girl draped over Cam, her perfect soft skin and long hair, everything that Yvette wasn't.

His eyes told the story that the rest of his face withheld...if only she would make contact with her own blue orbs. "Yvette, you don't have to-" but it was too late, she was out of the shallows and heading off into the bright, sunny day that did nothing to mirror the way this moment felt.



Yvette takes solace in those age-old comforts - a best friend and a bowl of ice cream.



Not being able to cry was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it stopped her from being a blubbering mess as she made her way back to the beach house, drawing unwelcome attention. On the other, there was no relief from the heavy ache in her heart, the constriction of her throat, the only outlet for her feelings being her powers, hair and skin sharpening to the point that even brushing past a bush lightly left shredded foliage in her wake. Reaching the sanctuary of the house, Yvette went up to the room she and Angel had claimed as 'theirs' and sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, breathing deeply and trying to calm herself as Ms. Frost had been teaching her. The problem was, her mind's eye was filled with images of Cam and that... girl, laughing behind her back at the silly little mutant and her crush.

A sob escaped, even though her eyes remained dry.

Angel had actually been heading back to the room, having been sunning herself, when she noticed a few scratches on the wall that hadn't been there before. She paused and held a hand out, judging the height of them with a practiced eye of someone who noticed things like that. "Yvette?" she called, breaking into a trot and leaving her towel and other things on the floor to be picked up later.

When she saw the state of her roommate, Angel immediately grew alarmed. "Yvette, what is it, what happened?" she asked, dropping to her knees before the other girl at as close a distance as she safely could get.

Yvette tried to speak but it got stuck around the lump in her throat. She took a deep, harsh breath, swallowed, and tried again, her voice small and strangled-sounding. "Cam. He has the girlfriend."

It was really, really hard to pull back in the sudden rage that someone could even think of pulling something like that on Yvette. But that really wasn't what her friend needed and Angel squashed the shriek of outrage as much as she could. "Did he tell you or ... did you see him?" she asked, unfolding herself so she could pull herself up on the bed next to Yvette.

"She came to the beach, to make the surprise for him. I do not think she was supposed to be coming here at all." Yvette looked down at the floor and her long-toed feet. "I do not think he would have been telling me, if she had not come."

"I'm not sure what's worse, honestly." If she hadn't come and Cam hadn't said, than Yvette wouldn't be upset. But it would have been ... false even if Yvette hadn't known. "I'm sorry, I know how much this kind of thing hurts. It sucks and I'm sorry you found out like that."

"She is very pretty. Tall and with the long hair." Yvette bit her lip, eliciting a small scraping sound, like a knife on china. "The perfect girl for Cam." She sighed. "He is probably making the jokes about the red hedgehog girl and her crush."

At that, Angel turned so she was sitting cross legged on the bed, looking at Yvette instead of nearly shoulder to shoulder. "If he is, than he's an ass," she said, maybe even more bluntly than normal and harsher than even she'd intended. "And if he is, the problem is with him and not you, Yvette."

"What if I am being silly, Angel? What if he was just being the good friend and I was aking it more in my head?" It was the doubt that had assailed her all the way back from the beach - Cam was a good person, she knew him well enough to know that he wouldn't deliberately hurt her, so perhaps she had been building things up?

"I'm not going to lie, there's a chance that was it," Angel responded slowly. "But it sounds more likely that maybe he wasn't been a bad guy, really, but didn't want to hurt you?" She shook her head. "Okay, you know, we need ice cream for this. You up for some heavy duty girl talk over the largest bowls of ice cream we can make?"

Yvette gave her friend a tiny, grateful smile and nodded. "That would be very good, yes," she agreed. Anything to help calm herself down, before something got damaged.

Someone had left the television on in the kitchen - the two girls ignored it, heading straight for the freezer and the copious supply of frozen goodness. Bowl of ice cream in her lap, Yvette perched on a stool, considering her friend. Angel had been through this, so she had to have some way of making it feel better. Well, aside from the ice cream idea, which was already helping.

"Why is it that the boys are making us feel so..." She waved her spoon, lost for the word, and settled on: "Dumb?"

"It's in their genetic makeup," Angel responded as she poured chocolate syrup all over her ice cream. She held her hand over the bowl and concentrated to send out a gentle wave of warmth so just the hot chocolate heated up. No need to use the microwave when she didn't have to get up. "Seriously, though, it's rough. They can make our knees weak, make us moon after them and then break our hearts by being dumbasses. To be fair, I think we send them all a-twitter, so..."

"Well, you are making them a-twitter," Yvette pointed out. "I am making them think I am the little sister." There might have been a hint of a pout around her mouth. "Or the video game character."

Angel pointed her spoon at Yvette. "That's because they're boys which means not very bright sometimes. I mean, you saw how Julian was acting for a while." A wry note crept in. "I'm not saying I was the smartest cookie in the world but still. They get used to the status quo and don't think."

She grew quiet. "It'll happen, Yvette. Maybe not right now this very minute but I guess this is what being a teenager is all about. Getting our hearts broken, crying on the shoulder of a friend and then gorging ourselves on ice cream. It's what 'Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants' and the sequel taught us, anyway, and if a movie like that is wrong, then I don't want to know what's right." She thought, anyway. She sort of slept during that movie.

"Perhaps that is the problem," Yvette replied slowly. "I am wanting it so very badly... sometimes I am not using the brain, yes? All I can think about is having the boyfriend and perhaps that is making me do and say some things which are not right. Like with Cam - perhaps he was just being the good friend, but I am wanting the boyfriend so much, I was not paying attention." She spooned a mouthful of ice-cream and ate it, then continued. "Like when Monet is telling me to... be with Fred, just because he cannot be hurt by my powers. Cam was the boy who is my friend and who can be touching me, so of course he must be the one, yes?"

The sitcom playing was abruptly disrupted by the sound of breaking news. A logo flashed on screen before an older gentleman in a gray suit came up on screen. "We interrupt your regularly scheduled broadcast with breaking news. We take you now live to the LA County Court House where Lisa Chang is standing by."

The screen quickly flashed to a female reporter in mid-sentence. "-just moments ago. Stating that there was insufficient evidence, the alleged drug lord Gordon McPhearson has been released after the judge deemed the case to have insufficient evidence to procede. McPhearson declined statement as he exited the court house, but his lawyer called this a victory for justice." The screen flashed to a young man as he smiled, waved and got into a limosine. "For Channel six news, I'm Lisa Chang."

The older man was back, "Thank you, Lisa. We'll have more on this story at ten." The program flipped back and the news was over before it began.

Angel blinked at the T.V. and then looked back at Yvette. "I totally get that logic - it's a different sort of thinking but we all do it. He looked at me that way, he's the one, etc, right? It's not a very awesome club but we do have a club. And Yvette, you'll totally be able to control your powers one day. So then you can have a wiiiide range of boys to pick from. I know that doesn't help now and we'll eat ice cream until the pain goes away or at least until you're so stuffed from overeating that you can look back on it a little."

The overly elaborate doorbell the Keller's had installed chimed out.

Yvette had giggled at Angel's comment before the doorbell rang. "I will get it," she said, sliding off her stool. Bowl still in hand, she went to the front door, pulling it open. Her initial instinct when she saw who was standing there was to slam it shut again, but she knew that would be childish. Instead, she gave the boy standing there a stiff nod, her now-spiky hair rattling slightly. "Cam."

He froze for a moment when he noticed how harsh Yvette's features had become- transforming before his eyes. "Yvette...please, I'm so sorry," the three red roses in his left hand had been all he could afford given his limited budget and the expensive dinner he'd just had with Virgina on the boardwalk. Now, she was back at the timeshare with his friends while Cam tried to get back into his friend's good graces. "I should have told you sooner."

"Yes, you should have," she replied simply. She looked at the roses in his hand. "Perhaps you should be giving those to your girlfriend." She stressed the word a little, voice loaded with as much dignity as she could muster.

"I didn't mean to hurt you," he said, looking down at the stones that made up the porch. The irony of the statement wasn't lost on him- the fact of the matter was it apparently took a landmine to harm Yvette in the slightest. He was also, more or less, invulnerable from the outside, but right now, his heart was breaking. "I wanted to tell you so many times, but the moment just never seemed right."

"Why could you not tell me?" she asked, the hurt showing now. "Was it the joke, having the silly little girl following you like the puppy? If I was knowing you had the girlfriend, I would never..." Her voice cracked and she couldn't finish.

"It wasn't a joke, I really enjoyed spending time with you!" This was not how he'd pictured this going. "Virgina just didn't come up and by the time that I realized that I should probably say something, it was too late- you would have hated me for leading you on and...well, I guess you do now anyway, but...I never meant for you to find out!" Warning bells started going off in his head, "That came out wrong, I-"

Her eyes flashed, literally and when she spoke again, that cool dignity was back. "It is, perhaps, the good thing that Virginia was coming here. I do not hate you, Cam, but I am disappointed in you. I thought you were the better person than that. Go back to Virginia - she is probably wondering where you are."

Cameron didn't know what to say, he'd just crashed and burned. He started to turn away, but stopped and looked back, holding out the flowers, "Can I still write you?"

She paused. She could reject the offering, tell him she never wanted to hear from him again... but it wouldn't fix anything. And she didn't have it in her to be cruel. She reached out, took the roses. "To be giving me some time, yes?" she replied. "I need to be thinking."

"I owe you that at least," he smiled weakly. "It really was good to see you again, Yvette," Cam said sincerely, before turning away and heading back toward his timeshare.
Once the door closed, Angel's voice trailed down from the hallway. "Yvette? You okay? I didn't mean to listen in but when you didn't come back right now, I got curious and came to see what was up."

Yvette looked down at the roses in her hand, and at the boy walking away, and took a deep, shuddering breath. "I will be okay," she replied, looking up at her friend. "Come, the ice cream is melting, yes?"