xp_logs | Manuel and Adrienne - Backdated to the 8th

One year after waking up in bed together, Manuel and Adrienne have a meal and champagne at the Plaza to celebrate this momentous anniversary and discuss how their lives have changed in the past year.

Two glasses of Champagne clinged together in a very familiar hotel room, all expenses put into this night as sort of a meaningful change to the two people sitting at the table. Manuel drew his glass to his lips, considering Adrienne's posture before he set the glass down. "Whatever did you do with those set of clothes? Dry clean or throw them out completely?" he asked, casually casting his gaze over to the bed where Valentia lay on her stomach, flipping the channels, trying to find something worth watching.

"I threw them out," Adrienne smirked, sipping her very excellent champagne. "I throw most of the clothes I've worn out anyway, but these were special. There was no way I wanted to relive that night again through an accidental reading with my powers. Not that most of the night wasn't pleasant," she corrected herself, "but the vomiting part is something I'd rather not relive."

"I will have you know--" Manuel stopped and leaned back, arching his back so he could see what his sister stopped on. "No," he gestured to her very sharply to whichshe sat up and pursed her lips together at him. Then she made an argumentative gesture which he halted with another abrupt No.

Turning back to Adrienne, he blew a breath out and began again once the channel was changed. "I will have you know. Ah, never mind. I lost my train of thought. No. wait, yes. I will have you know that it was the first and last time I will ever hold a woman's head while she is throwing up." Amanda didn't count.

"I'm going to call your bluff on that one," Adrienne announced, grinning. "I know you took care of Amanda while she was detoxing. You also nursemaided me when I had food poisoning. If I didn't know you better, I'd start to think you had some sort of vomit fetish or something."

"Brotherhood has made me soft," he reasoned. "However, if you are referring to my toxic taste, which everyone seems to love to address these days, then you are wrong."

Adrienne raised an eyebrow at her dinner companion. "What? Why would I be referring to Cammie in the context of you enjoying vomit?" That made no sense to her. "Methinks someone's feeling a little defensive? Do you want to talk about your feelings?" she questioned with a teasing tone, eyebrow still raised. "Not that I want to discuss Miss Black in great detail, lest I say some things you'll find offensive about her," she added with a dark look, still not over what she was feeling was Cammie's betrayal of her in Chicago.

That quirked a brow. "No, but perhaps you do," Manuel countered, watching her from across the table.

"She lied to me." Adrienne shrugged casually, as if she didn't care overly much. "I trusted her, she lied to me, she got herself into trouble, I tried to help, I ended up getting my nose broken. The fault is clearly mine for having trusted her in the first place when she clearly wasn't worth that trust due to her own fractured feelings of self-worth." Despite her flippancy in tone, Adrienne was trying to stamp down her rising emotion lest Manuel figure out how hurt she really was over what had happened between herself and Cammie, and how damaged her willingness to trust people as a result of that incident had now become.

There were no emotions in the world that could be hidden from Manuel unless he competed with another empath but here, he did his best to ignore it, drumming his fingers on the table until his index finger was left to do so, gaging his response. He felt it, more than he would have liked and for once, he didn't bother to hide the sigh that fell from his lips, exhausted by Cammie's constant front of disregarding those who helped her. "Have you tried to speak with her?"

"I have," Adrienne nodded, running a finger around the rim of her champagne glass, making it hum to see what Valentia thought of the trick. "She came by to say she was sorry for what happened to me. I told her about my disappointment in misplacing my trust. That I had believed she was worth my trust and my time, that I wanted to believe she was more than people at the mansion thought she was. But she just played the damn martyr, kept telling me how she knew I'd never trust her again and that she isn't worth my standing by her. What the hell was I supposed to say to that? Kane says you can't save people; they have to save themselves. I believe that, Manny. I wanted to help her but she doesn't want to be helped."

"I know," he finally said after a long moment of silence split between them. "Kane is right. Change is only what you make of it and she will not address change in the slightest. Dare I say, I should have had this conversation with her months ago, but that would step up my status with her to something else entirely." A boyfriend status, but that did not stop him from mentioning it now and then as someone concerned. "Breeching such a conversation with her is hard. Perhaps I will have to try harder."

"Only if you want to step up your status," Adrienne reminded him. "I had sort of the same thought. That I could keep trying, try harder, but if I did it would place me in some sort of parenting position, and I don't want that. I'm not her mother, and I think if I tried to be she would just respond even more abhorrently. All I could say to her in the end, when she seemed so sure that she was going to push us all away and then we wouldn't suffer with her, was that people at the mansion care about her, so we're going to suffer whether she pushes us away or not, since caring about people doesn't seem to be something one can control- at least, not when one becomes infected with whatever it is they put in the water at Xavier's that makes one care about people." Maybe it was due to the anniversary occasion that had brought them to the hotel, but Adrienne had been thinking back on the past year a lot. "When I look at how things have changed in our lives even in the space of a year, sometimes I don't believe any of it can be real."

He agreed with her but it was a silent agreement that he would keep to himself, locked and stored away for future reference. "I am not the person I was before my coma, that much, I will agree with. You have undergone more changes than I."

"I don't throw up on men I don't really know anymore," she teased. She wasn't really going to elaborate seriously on the changes he spoke of, but recognized that of all the people who knew her now, if there was anyone who would have understood the person she had been before coming to the mansion and the magnitude of the changes she'd made, it was Manuel. "But I don't know, Seňor, from what I've heard about you pre-coma, you've undergone more changes than I have. And I'm not just talking about brotherhood."

"It depends on who you talk to now," Manuel said, moving the conversation away from her, sensing that she didn't want to discuss it.
"Oh, come now, don't be so modest. I've heard the odd thing about how you and Doug used to get along as schoolboys, and now you two... well, you actually do seem to get along. I don't know of anyone at the mansion or Snow Valley who will say you haven't changed."

"Let us agree that there was hardly anyone I did not know then," least of all Doug, although he liked to pretend it was a bad judgement and perhaps, drugs involved (even though he knew there wasn't).

"Wait... what?" Adrienne leaned forward in her seat, interest piqued. "Is that tone... are you talking about sex?"

"What were you speaking of?" Manuel asked, countering her question with his own.
"I was speaking of you being friends with Doug now, whereas I'd heard that you two didn't get along in school. You just had to mention sex to get that image seared into my head though, didn't you?" she muttered, rolling her eyes.
"Yes, that has been my ploy all along," Manuel mused. Let her think what she wanted, most people did although he gave her more credit than he meant to concerning information about his previous life.

"Well, thank you for that," Adrienne answered. "Now, since I'm pretty sure Doug and Marie-Ange were together in high school and you were with Amanda, I'm going to have this image of a big ol' Doug, Manuel, Marie-Ange, Amanda orgy stuck in my head and that's just not fair at all."