Aoife/Vanessa & Lex | Monday evening
Dec. 14th, 2009 07:28 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsLex shows up at Morgan's apartment to cook her dinner but he finds Aoife instead and gets a surprisingly revealing conversation as a result.
Running a nervous hand through disheveled hair, Lex stood in front of her apartment door. He had everything he needed to make her an elegant dinner, but he was second guessing his decision to take the step. What if this isn't what she wants, he wondered, suddenly terrified that he was going to make a complete ass of himself. As he raised his free hand to knock, he breathed deeply. There were no words of confidence to ease his anxiety, so he thought about it in military terms: accept the plan and adapt as the situation dictates. The only thing he could affect at this point was how sincere his smile was.
With a slow exhale, to calm his heart, he knocked a repetitive four-beat measure. Hell, I don't even know if she's home.
She wasn't home, but it wasn't long after his knocking had ceased that the metamorph came up the stairs. She could hear him knocking but she'd assumed from the stairwell it was someone else's door that was being addressed. Aoife was a tiny thing, particularly compared to Vanessa's usual six foot frame. When she saw Lex at her door she stopped, green eyes going wide for a moment while they raked down the length of his body. She blinked and cleared her throat, the sound quiet and likely to not register with how far down the hall he was.
The thing with Vanessa and her various mimics was that they all had different personalities, manners of speaking and gestures. Aoife was quiet, bordering on shy and soft spoken. Her Irish brogue rolled off her tongue so easily it was almost more natural than her own accent, though Vanessa could easily put that down to the Irish influence in Morgan's accent. She padded down the hall on silent feet, a long skirt brushing against the floor as she moved. "You're all cleaned up," she commented once she was close enough to know Aoife's voice would carry far enough to be heard.
Pausing in knocking he turned to see the short woman, and he almost laughed. His first sight of Morgan had been in Aoife's body and that was one of the things he'd found most terrifying about her: she could absorb other people's forms through a touch. Though it threw him off for a moment he quickly realized that it made sense. His smile grew wide and he almost laughed at himself. "Well, that I am," and with that he decided to try and play it smooth, "If you see Morgan can you tell her I'm here to make her dinner?"
A delicate, red eyebrow raised in an arch. She knew that he'd seen Aoife before so Vanessa was under no impression he didn't know who he addressed. Did he address her as if she were a completely different person because he thought she kept all her various personas separate? To a degree she did, it was just a little odd in a way to be treated as if she were a separate personality altogether. Never had she quite felt so potentially full of dissociative identity disorder.
"What if I'm the only one in tonight?" There was no challenge in her voice as there would have been with Morgan. There was no playful teasing, just a quiet inquiry. She reached into the purse dangling from a wrist to fish out the keys she had tossed back in after unlocking the front door downstairs.
His eyes narrowed as he tried to figure out what that meant. He didn't really expect Morgan to be incapable of changing back to herself, and so he didn't know how to react her statement. After a few moments he just started talking, "Um, I guess, hmm... I'd just have to make you dinner. I don't know that I could handle walking it back to the jeep. Besides, I've got nowhere else to be."
Her head tilted a little to the side, the gesture expressing much the same as a shrug would have. Every motion Aoife made was delicate, though, and possessed a grace Morgan lacked. She had to look a fair bit up at Lex when she got to the door. The height difference was never fun even if Vanessa was used to it. "Do you like puzzles? Not the literal sort, mind, but more the intellectual kind?"
"Depends on the kind. I enjoy lateral thinking problems and the occasional hypothetical, but I'm not quite sure what you mean." He held the door open with his free hand as she passed inside. "If you mean people then I'm probably going to have go with no. I'm terrible at reading people, as you well know, and I find I make an ass of myself more often than not."
"You'll never survive," she told him with a soft, amused smile. She set her purse down on a table by the door and drifted off toward the kitchen. The shoes were going to have to go. As much as Morgan was fully dressed most of the time Aoife seemed at odds with shoes. Being barefoot fit her so much more. "Do you want anything to drink? Water? Milk? Orange juice? Beer?" She slipped her shoes off while she rummaged through her fridge.
Taking his shoes off, in the understanding that it was probably a best bet to follow his host's example, he brought his materials into the kitchen. "Hmm, I think I'll have a beer. It'll give me an extra ingredient to flavor dinner with." He was still trying to figure out if he was going to be cooking for Morgan or Aoife, but at the moment he was too confused to care. He would just have to play it moment by moment.
"There's Anchor Steam or Stella or Blue Moon," she listed off while she pulled out a bottle of water. Aoife just didn't have the sort of body mass to drink much. She noted him losing his shoes and smiled to herself. Soldier boy took direction well. She wasn't sure how well he adapted. "You know, a bloke showing up to cook a woman dinner tends to have a certain sort of connotation. But you've no idea what you might be getting yourself into here, do you?"
"I'll have an Anchor Steam. And no, I don't know what I'm getting into, but the more I've thought about it the more I've realized I want to find out. So, here I am." He'd just put it as bluntly as he could, because the confusion within him was making it very hard to figure out just how to proceed. He couldn't really tell Aoife how he felt, could he? Would it make any sense? Everything within him told him to just let it play out without pushing.
She passed him a bottle of Anchor Steam and then hopped up on the counter where she would hopefully be out of the way. She twisted the cap off her bottled water with a little difficulty. Small hands and they weren't as strong as Vanessa's own. "Everything's a part of the whole," she explained to Lex after a sip of water. "All the pieces are indicative of the whole but none are fully representative of it. It's one of those 'If A equals B and B equals C then does C equal A' sort of things. Aoife is part of the whole but only a part and not all of Aoife is part of that. The same for Daniel and every other body and persona that flows through. Make any sense?"
"You're talking... what's it called, transitive property, right?" It'd been over ten years since Lex had taken a math course, but for some reason it had never faded away. Probably because his power worked in a very similar way, if you could make one electrical system look and act like another you could manipulate it to do just about anything. "Are all of your personae created by you, or do they come from the actual host's mixing with you?" It was an odd question, but one he realized he was extremely curious about.
"They're all me. But none of them are all me." Her face held a contemplative expression. "Of course, if each facet of a jewel is only one face of it but no facet is the jewel then comes the question of how you know when you're looking at the diamond or just a face of it? And can you be okay with not knowing potentially? Because I am just as much Aoife as I am Daniel, for example." Some of the Irish was slipping out of her voice, though she never lost that delicate grace as her hands gesticulated and her head moved.
"To be honest, I can't know that right now. I mean, I understand the concept, but I won't be able to figure out if I'm alright with it until it hits me." He sighed as he spoke, pulling out the fresh herbs and chicken breasts, looking around for a cutting board. "I am still here though, just as willing to make you dinner as Morgan, so I guess that says something. Even if one gesture isn't equivalent with the other in my mind."
She frowned a little to herself. On Aoife's face the expression was more thoughtful than disappointed. "Why isn't one equivalent to the other for you?" It was inquiry, nothing more. No judgement or expectation laced through her voice when she asked the question. She needed to know why he separated Aoife from Morgan even though he knew they were the same person because if he kept that separation it was going to be a problem for her.
"Because I'm not clear on the distinct nature of your personalities. Morgan is the one I am most comfortable with, and so seeing you as her brings about different emotions than seeing you as Aoife. It's not that I'm displeased with talking to you like this--actually it's quite intriguing--but I'm not sure how I'm supposed to feel about you in this form. I mean, do you want expect me to be attracted to you in all forms, equally, or am I supposed to be attracted to you just as Morgan?" He was rambling, unable to contain the thoughts in his mind, and though his face expressed the sincerity of them he didn't know how she'd react. The conversation certainly wasn't what he envisioned when he planned everything out earlier in the day.
"It makes sense that you're most attached, for lack of a better word, to the version you've the most experience with. But I'm not always in that body. Bodies are like clothes. I speak differently, I may act differently, but it's all window dressing." Vanessa smiled a little. "I suppose the trouble with me is that I'm truly a test of whether or not looks matter. General physical attraction preferences aside, the person who is the heart of all the facets lies beneath all of them. I guess the point is to find out if that's the person you want. Or if Morgan is." It was the first time she'd really differentiated herself from Morgan as separate personalities, though Vanessa wasn't sure if Lex would pick up on it or if he would misinterpret it. Perhaps he'd glance over it entirely.
There was a subtle shift in her inflection as she spoke, something Lex had noticed before at his suite, and it made her last statement all the more potent. He didn't know how to respond, he'd always assumed Morgan was the base, but with the realization that she wasn't he wondered if his attraction was even fair to the woman on the counter. He stopped cutting for a moment and turned to face her directly. "I know that I'm most attracted to Morgan right now, but in telling me what you just did, you've peaked my interest more than I can say. The only answer I've got for you is that I would like to know you as you want to be known. If that is as your personae then so be it, if you choose to show me what's beneath then know that I am not going to shy away from you for it." It made sense in his mind, but he didn't know if it actually made sense when spoken aloud.
Bare feet kicked back and forth, heels rapping lightly on cabinet doors. Her skirt was long enough that only her socked toes were visible in all her movement. "It's no different from any other person, really." By now the Irish tones were gone from her voice. Vanessa hovered between a neutral American accent and a light South Boston accent. Her voice kept shifting the longer she spoke. "Everyone has pieces of themselves. Everyone has a face they show their family that is different than the face they show their friends which is different still from the face their significant other sees. The difference is that you never have to guess which face I'm wearing because you can see it. They've different voices, different accents, sometimes different languages, but parts of me go into the base of each of them."
Vanessa let the mimic of Aoife seep away. Fluidly her body lengthened, skin shifting from pale peach to blue, eyes going from green to red and hair draining of all color. The shirt Aoife had been wearing was long enough that Vanessa wasn't flashing any midriff in her own body, but the skirt would need to be pulled down to her hips in order to reach about her ankles. "Learning faces won't tell you what lies behind them," Vanessa told Lex, her voice finally taking on her native Southie accent in full. "No more than I know what's behind what I've seen you. I have to peel back the layers of you same as you'll need to peel away mine. And inevitably you'll need to decide if you can handle all my layers. If you can want them all even if you're not physically attracted to them all. Just like I'll have to with you. Mine are just color coded."
"That might actually work to my advantage," he replied in his most nonchalant tone, "I mean, you were the one to point out that thinking's not my strong suit, and so this way I'll... I won't have to worry about figuring out who I'm talking to." He liked the idea that he'd be able to tell when she was acting differently, up until he realized that each of her personae were probably as complicated as any ordinary individual. He turned back to his work as he tried to figure out what to do next. He didn't know if he could like four different people at once, three faces and the underlying foundation, but he knew he was still willing to try it out. There was no harm in that, at the very least.
"You might have to figure a little." Vanessa took another sip of water. She didn't bother to point out that she'd told him there was a personality beyond Morgan, but this was her true face which meant he'd have to figure out which one was Vanessa and which one was Morgan on his own. Adrienne and Laurie both had, though Laurie defaulted to calling the metamorph by her birth name for the most part.
The woman slipped off the counter and pulled the skirt down far enough that it didn't look out of place on her frame. Padding over to Lex, her arms slipped around his waist slowly enough to not startle him. You did not surprise a man with a knife whether or not he knew you were around. Once she was sure he wasn't going to jump and stab one of them accidentally her chin perched on his shoulder. "Anything you want me to do to help with dinner?" Both her voice and the way she wrapped around him were more affectionate than anything he would have seen from Morgan. Vanessa even spoke in a soft, purring sort of tone. She was comfortable, it was a rare thing for her to be comfortable in her own body without the defense mechanism that Morgan was. "Or am I relegated to 'sit and be pretty and wait'?"
Lex couldn't tell if he was talking to Morgan or the woman beneath her, but it seemed the latter. Even when he was intimately close to Morgan there seemed to be a restricted nature about her, as though she could turn off and kill him at a moments notice. This was much more comfortable. "If you'd like to take over here, I can start mixing what I need for the glaze."
Vanessa nodded and held her hand out palm up. "Aye, sir." There was a very quietly playful note to her voice that was followed by a brief brush of lips across the side of his neck. It wasn't quite a kiss. She made a mental note to somehow get him to come make dinner again at some point. Without the deep, exploratory discussion. Once the knife's handle was in her hand Vanessa let her other arm drop away from his waist and smiled to herself. Maybe Morgan wasn't so necessary as she'd once thought.
Running a nervous hand through disheveled hair, Lex stood in front of her apartment door. He had everything he needed to make her an elegant dinner, but he was second guessing his decision to take the step. What if this isn't what she wants, he wondered, suddenly terrified that he was going to make a complete ass of himself. As he raised his free hand to knock, he breathed deeply. There were no words of confidence to ease his anxiety, so he thought about it in military terms: accept the plan and adapt as the situation dictates. The only thing he could affect at this point was how sincere his smile was.
With a slow exhale, to calm his heart, he knocked a repetitive four-beat measure. Hell, I don't even know if she's home.
She wasn't home, but it wasn't long after his knocking had ceased that the metamorph came up the stairs. She could hear him knocking but she'd assumed from the stairwell it was someone else's door that was being addressed. Aoife was a tiny thing, particularly compared to Vanessa's usual six foot frame. When she saw Lex at her door she stopped, green eyes going wide for a moment while they raked down the length of his body. She blinked and cleared her throat, the sound quiet and likely to not register with how far down the hall he was.
The thing with Vanessa and her various mimics was that they all had different personalities, manners of speaking and gestures. Aoife was quiet, bordering on shy and soft spoken. Her Irish brogue rolled off her tongue so easily it was almost more natural than her own accent, though Vanessa could easily put that down to the Irish influence in Morgan's accent. She padded down the hall on silent feet, a long skirt brushing against the floor as she moved. "You're all cleaned up," she commented once she was close enough to know Aoife's voice would carry far enough to be heard.
Pausing in knocking he turned to see the short woman, and he almost laughed. His first sight of Morgan had been in Aoife's body and that was one of the things he'd found most terrifying about her: she could absorb other people's forms through a touch. Though it threw him off for a moment he quickly realized that it made sense. His smile grew wide and he almost laughed at himself. "Well, that I am," and with that he decided to try and play it smooth, "If you see Morgan can you tell her I'm here to make her dinner?"
A delicate, red eyebrow raised in an arch. She knew that he'd seen Aoife before so Vanessa was under no impression he didn't know who he addressed. Did he address her as if she were a completely different person because he thought she kept all her various personas separate? To a degree she did, it was just a little odd in a way to be treated as if she were a separate personality altogether. Never had she quite felt so potentially full of dissociative identity disorder.
"What if I'm the only one in tonight?" There was no challenge in her voice as there would have been with Morgan. There was no playful teasing, just a quiet inquiry. She reached into the purse dangling from a wrist to fish out the keys she had tossed back in after unlocking the front door downstairs.
His eyes narrowed as he tried to figure out what that meant. He didn't really expect Morgan to be incapable of changing back to herself, and so he didn't know how to react her statement. After a few moments he just started talking, "Um, I guess, hmm... I'd just have to make you dinner. I don't know that I could handle walking it back to the jeep. Besides, I've got nowhere else to be."
Her head tilted a little to the side, the gesture expressing much the same as a shrug would have. Every motion Aoife made was delicate, though, and possessed a grace Morgan lacked. She had to look a fair bit up at Lex when she got to the door. The height difference was never fun even if Vanessa was used to it. "Do you like puzzles? Not the literal sort, mind, but more the intellectual kind?"
"Depends on the kind. I enjoy lateral thinking problems and the occasional hypothetical, but I'm not quite sure what you mean." He held the door open with his free hand as she passed inside. "If you mean people then I'm probably going to have go with no. I'm terrible at reading people, as you well know, and I find I make an ass of myself more often than not."
"You'll never survive," she told him with a soft, amused smile. She set her purse down on a table by the door and drifted off toward the kitchen. The shoes were going to have to go. As much as Morgan was fully dressed most of the time Aoife seemed at odds with shoes. Being barefoot fit her so much more. "Do you want anything to drink? Water? Milk? Orange juice? Beer?" She slipped her shoes off while she rummaged through her fridge.
Taking his shoes off, in the understanding that it was probably a best bet to follow his host's example, he brought his materials into the kitchen. "Hmm, I think I'll have a beer. It'll give me an extra ingredient to flavor dinner with." He was still trying to figure out if he was going to be cooking for Morgan or Aoife, but at the moment he was too confused to care. He would just have to play it moment by moment.
"There's Anchor Steam or Stella or Blue Moon," she listed off while she pulled out a bottle of water. Aoife just didn't have the sort of body mass to drink much. She noted him losing his shoes and smiled to herself. Soldier boy took direction well. She wasn't sure how well he adapted. "You know, a bloke showing up to cook a woman dinner tends to have a certain sort of connotation. But you've no idea what you might be getting yourself into here, do you?"
"I'll have an Anchor Steam. And no, I don't know what I'm getting into, but the more I've thought about it the more I've realized I want to find out. So, here I am." He'd just put it as bluntly as he could, because the confusion within him was making it very hard to figure out just how to proceed. He couldn't really tell Aoife how he felt, could he? Would it make any sense? Everything within him told him to just let it play out without pushing.
She passed him a bottle of Anchor Steam and then hopped up on the counter where she would hopefully be out of the way. She twisted the cap off her bottled water with a little difficulty. Small hands and they weren't as strong as Vanessa's own. "Everything's a part of the whole," she explained to Lex after a sip of water. "All the pieces are indicative of the whole but none are fully representative of it. It's one of those 'If A equals B and B equals C then does C equal A' sort of things. Aoife is part of the whole but only a part and not all of Aoife is part of that. The same for Daniel and every other body and persona that flows through. Make any sense?"
"You're talking... what's it called, transitive property, right?" It'd been over ten years since Lex had taken a math course, but for some reason it had never faded away. Probably because his power worked in a very similar way, if you could make one electrical system look and act like another you could manipulate it to do just about anything. "Are all of your personae created by you, or do they come from the actual host's mixing with you?" It was an odd question, but one he realized he was extremely curious about.
"They're all me. But none of them are all me." Her face held a contemplative expression. "Of course, if each facet of a jewel is only one face of it but no facet is the jewel then comes the question of how you know when you're looking at the diamond or just a face of it? And can you be okay with not knowing potentially? Because I am just as much Aoife as I am Daniel, for example." Some of the Irish was slipping out of her voice, though she never lost that delicate grace as her hands gesticulated and her head moved.
"To be honest, I can't know that right now. I mean, I understand the concept, but I won't be able to figure out if I'm alright with it until it hits me." He sighed as he spoke, pulling out the fresh herbs and chicken breasts, looking around for a cutting board. "I am still here though, just as willing to make you dinner as Morgan, so I guess that says something. Even if one gesture isn't equivalent with the other in my mind."
She frowned a little to herself. On Aoife's face the expression was more thoughtful than disappointed. "Why isn't one equivalent to the other for you?" It was inquiry, nothing more. No judgement or expectation laced through her voice when she asked the question. She needed to know why he separated Aoife from Morgan even though he knew they were the same person because if he kept that separation it was going to be a problem for her.
"Because I'm not clear on the distinct nature of your personalities. Morgan is the one I am most comfortable with, and so seeing you as her brings about different emotions than seeing you as Aoife. It's not that I'm displeased with talking to you like this--actually it's quite intriguing--but I'm not sure how I'm supposed to feel about you in this form. I mean, do you want expect me to be attracted to you in all forms, equally, or am I supposed to be attracted to you just as Morgan?" He was rambling, unable to contain the thoughts in his mind, and though his face expressed the sincerity of them he didn't know how she'd react. The conversation certainly wasn't what he envisioned when he planned everything out earlier in the day.
"It makes sense that you're most attached, for lack of a better word, to the version you've the most experience with. But I'm not always in that body. Bodies are like clothes. I speak differently, I may act differently, but it's all window dressing." Vanessa smiled a little. "I suppose the trouble with me is that I'm truly a test of whether or not looks matter. General physical attraction preferences aside, the person who is the heart of all the facets lies beneath all of them. I guess the point is to find out if that's the person you want. Or if Morgan is." It was the first time she'd really differentiated herself from Morgan as separate personalities, though Vanessa wasn't sure if Lex would pick up on it or if he would misinterpret it. Perhaps he'd glance over it entirely.
There was a subtle shift in her inflection as she spoke, something Lex had noticed before at his suite, and it made her last statement all the more potent. He didn't know how to respond, he'd always assumed Morgan was the base, but with the realization that she wasn't he wondered if his attraction was even fair to the woman on the counter. He stopped cutting for a moment and turned to face her directly. "I know that I'm most attracted to Morgan right now, but in telling me what you just did, you've peaked my interest more than I can say. The only answer I've got for you is that I would like to know you as you want to be known. If that is as your personae then so be it, if you choose to show me what's beneath then know that I am not going to shy away from you for it." It made sense in his mind, but he didn't know if it actually made sense when spoken aloud.
Bare feet kicked back and forth, heels rapping lightly on cabinet doors. Her skirt was long enough that only her socked toes were visible in all her movement. "It's no different from any other person, really." By now the Irish tones were gone from her voice. Vanessa hovered between a neutral American accent and a light South Boston accent. Her voice kept shifting the longer she spoke. "Everyone has pieces of themselves. Everyone has a face they show their family that is different than the face they show their friends which is different still from the face their significant other sees. The difference is that you never have to guess which face I'm wearing because you can see it. They've different voices, different accents, sometimes different languages, but parts of me go into the base of each of them."
Vanessa let the mimic of Aoife seep away. Fluidly her body lengthened, skin shifting from pale peach to blue, eyes going from green to red and hair draining of all color. The shirt Aoife had been wearing was long enough that Vanessa wasn't flashing any midriff in her own body, but the skirt would need to be pulled down to her hips in order to reach about her ankles. "Learning faces won't tell you what lies behind them," Vanessa told Lex, her voice finally taking on her native Southie accent in full. "No more than I know what's behind what I've seen you. I have to peel back the layers of you same as you'll need to peel away mine. And inevitably you'll need to decide if you can handle all my layers. If you can want them all even if you're not physically attracted to them all. Just like I'll have to with you. Mine are just color coded."
"That might actually work to my advantage," he replied in his most nonchalant tone, "I mean, you were the one to point out that thinking's not my strong suit, and so this way I'll... I won't have to worry about figuring out who I'm talking to." He liked the idea that he'd be able to tell when she was acting differently, up until he realized that each of her personae were probably as complicated as any ordinary individual. He turned back to his work as he tried to figure out what to do next. He didn't know if he could like four different people at once, three faces and the underlying foundation, but he knew he was still willing to try it out. There was no harm in that, at the very least.
"You might have to figure a little." Vanessa took another sip of water. She didn't bother to point out that she'd told him there was a personality beyond Morgan, but this was her true face which meant he'd have to figure out which one was Vanessa and which one was Morgan on his own. Adrienne and Laurie both had, though Laurie defaulted to calling the metamorph by her birth name for the most part.
The woman slipped off the counter and pulled the skirt down far enough that it didn't look out of place on her frame. Padding over to Lex, her arms slipped around his waist slowly enough to not startle him. You did not surprise a man with a knife whether or not he knew you were around. Once she was sure he wasn't going to jump and stab one of them accidentally her chin perched on his shoulder. "Anything you want me to do to help with dinner?" Both her voice and the way she wrapped around him were more affectionate than anything he would have seen from Morgan. Vanessa even spoke in a soft, purring sort of tone. She was comfortable, it was a rare thing for her to be comfortable in her own body without the defense mechanism that Morgan was. "Or am I relegated to 'sit and be pretty and wait'?"
Lex couldn't tell if he was talking to Morgan or the woman beneath her, but it seemed the latter. Even when he was intimately close to Morgan there seemed to be a restricted nature about her, as though she could turn off and kill him at a moments notice. This was much more comfortable. "If you'd like to take over here, I can start mixing what I need for the glaze."
Vanessa nodded and held her hand out palm up. "Aye, sir." There was a very quietly playful note to her voice that was followed by a brief brush of lips across the side of his neck. It wasn't quite a kiss. She made a mental note to somehow get him to come make dinner again at some point. Without the deep, exploratory discussion. Once the knife's handle was in her hand Vanessa let her other arm drop away from his waist and smiled to herself. Maybe Morgan wasn't so necessary as she'd once thought.
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