Garrison and Adrienne - Backdated

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

Garrison and Adrienne watch a movie when he gets back from India.

Backdated to thursday night because Mon fails at life as usual.

"You know, my natural hair colour is red," Adrienne mused lethargically, frowning at the television screen. "I could totally be Tracy Lord. We're both rich, beautiful, feisty, like to drink, both from the East, both hate people..." She lapsed into silence for a moment, curled up with her head on the arm of the couch as she focused on what Katherine Hepburn was saying to Jimmy Stewart in the scene of the movie. "Intellectual snob," she echoed, "hey, you know, you're a little like Mike in this movie," she told the man on the other end of the couch.

"Which one is Mike again?" Kane said, slumped back against the cushions as he watched the movie, mind not entirely focused on it. After the events in India, his mind wouldn't stop ticking over the potential implications, and the idea of a country that possessed both nuclear weapons and a powerful mutant strike force in the hands of a man with no remaining limits on his power worried him.

Adrienne cocked an eyebrow at Garrison, but didn't remark on his lack of attention to the movie. It was supposed to be a distraction after she'd heard he'd been to India, but mostly the movie itself had been irrelevant, and the real point of the evening just to give them both a night to relax, veg, and talk in a venue that didn't involve groups of people cheering for baseball teams they both disliked, public restaurants, or horses. "Jimmy Stewart," she answered. "The one Katherine Hepburn is calling 'Professor', because of his intellectual snobbery. The one she's fighting about upper and lower class people with, because she believes that you can't fit people into classes and expect things to work out romantically with people from the same class, because she divorced the upper-class Dex and is engaged to the lower-class... uh..." she couldn't remember the third male character's name.

"Ed. From now on, his name is Ed. Makes things easier." He shifted Adrienne's feet on his lap, folding his hands over top of them. Kane was well aware that the relaxing, quirky romantic Adrienne was trying to make was wilting under his own concerns, but he felt unable to reverse the issue. What part of him wanted to do was sit down on a conference call with very intelligent people who would give him a hundred reasons why India wasn't going to start flipping nukes at people, and that wasn't possible. Talk about being a lousy date, he considered glumly.

"Kitteridge," Adrienne said with a laugh, shimmying slightly more towards the middle of the couch so she'd be more comfortable as Garrison took her feet, "they just said, his name is Kitteridge. You know, we don't have to do this now, if you've got somewhere else you need to be," she informed him gently, passing a bowl of popcorn over to him. "I know you probably have a lot of loose ends that you'll want to tie up regarding India, and those are more important than this."

"The problem is that I don't have any loose ends that I can do anything about, Adrienne. I can't go and arrest the Prime Minister of India for being a lying shitbag who happened to try and get his political rival killed. I don't have any high level, well, anything I can use to get the information out. I'm just-" Garrison tossed up his hands. "Right now, useless."

Adrienne opened her mouth to remark that he would be quite useful if he gave her a foot massage, but she bit the comment off. That seemed like an activity for people in a relationship, and she didn't know what she was in with Garrison. "You're not useless," she said instead, adding a smirk to the comment, "you're very useful to have around when I need to make fun of the Blue Jays." She turned back to the television with a frown, realizing how lousy she was at offering comfort.
"Thanks." Kane said wryly, eyes flicking from the screen to her face. "I'm glad to see that it's my baseball knowledge that validates my existance. Thank god for little league, eh?"

"Indeed," Adrienne answered with a teasing smile. "Do you need me to point out other winning factors you possess that validate your existence? Because if you're feeling insecure about your uses, I'm sure I can think of some. I don't like to see you so distracted over something you can't control, or to hear you say you feel useless," she admitted, almost nervously, "but I don't know what to do to make you feel better." How embarrassing was the fact that she had no idea how to comfort someone?
"It's alright, Adrienne. I don't expect you to make it better. In fact, I don't think any one can make me feel better other than me. It's just frustrating. Knowing what's going on, but being completely blocked from doing anything about it. Kind of like being a Baltimore fan; you know it's all going to hell, and yet, you feel like you need to try and make it better somehow." He rubbed the top of her bare foot, his thumbs traveling along the side of her big toe, more of a meditative twitch than an actual caress. "Unlike Jimmy Stewart, just having good intentions isn't enough sometimes."

"Sort of like being a Jays fan," she added, though the smile this brought on faded quickly. "It is<.i> frustrating," she agreed, "because now you've got me feeling useless, too. This whole caring about people thing just gets worse and worse, because not only do I care that you're feeling down, but now I care that I can't fix it when I want to fix it.

"But," she sighed, "I think you're right. I mean, no one could make Katherine Hepburn better in the movie except Katherine Hepburn. She had to realize that she's a human being and not a goddess on her own. No one could make her start showing respect for human frailty, even though her dad flat-out told her that's what she needed to do." The smile returned, slightly. "So I guess we're in some role reversal now where I'm Jimmy Stewart and you're Katherine Hepburn, and all I can do is get drunk and make sure you're drunk and take you for a swim?"

"Didn't that get you tossed in the pool last time? Oh right, that was me..."

"Exactly, but in this role reversal where you're Katherine Hepburn, you get to go for the swim." She focused on the screen for a moment. "Except I'm not carrying you around. I may croon if you want me to, but I draw the line at carrying you around."


"I already told you. The piggyback ride? That was for science."

There was no retort she could think of except to throw a handful of popcorn at him.


"Nomnom."