Cammie & Jean-Paul, Saturday Afternoon

[x-quebecois.livejournal.com]

Cammie finds out Jean-Paul is back and goes hunting for him. Things don't go precisely as planned.


Cammie was on the hunt. Which wasn't very stealthy right now, given she was sporting a heavy cast and two crutches. But rumor motivated her, and even sporting the injury she had something of fleet feet. It was amazing how fast you could crutch through the halls. Jean-Paul was apparently back.

And Cammie was going to find him.

Jean-Paul was working at avoiding people. He hadn't been very successful, which was inconvenient and slightly annoying. Or more than slightly annoying. He'd just escaped a conversation with a student he didn't remember teaching and was keeping his head down as he walked through the halls, hoping the changes in his appearance would keep others from noticing and stopping him.

If he was lucky, none of them would have found out which suite he was in and he'd be able to get there, then out the window. Escape seemed to be his word of the week.

Escape wasn't exactly in the cards. Not because of any divine plan. Or not even because Cammie had spotted him and was trying to run him down. But because she had to pause in the middle of the hall to catch her 'footing' with the walking sticks of doom and getting started again without looking up was apparently a bad idea, given she and her target were a ball of crutches, cast and people.

"...the fuck...?"

There was something pointy, hard, and painful digging into Jean-Paul's side. He wasn't sure what it was, but he was also fairly certain he probably didn't want to know. Still, he should have been taking more care with where he went and how quickly. It was second nature to accelerate his movements, though, and since it would have, theoretically, gotten him out of the hallway more quickly, he hadn't considered... this.

'This' being that he'd apparently crashed into a person. A vaguely familiar person. Pushing himself up, off, and to the right so he could avoid gouging a hole out of his side, he looked down at the girl he'd run into and frowned. "I am sorry." He reached down to help her up. "I should have been watching where I was going better." Of course, he'd not expected to run into someone after turning that corner.

"Holy crap it is you," Cammie started, "Shit you look different. You chopped off all of your hair!" Cammie for the most part hadn't changed at all, if you didn't count the cast on her left leg. It took a minute of shaking off the haircut difference before reaching up with her right - and non toxic - hand to get up. Which was a trick and a half with the cast.

"Yes," he said, helping her up as best he could. "And you have broken yourself. I think my change less bothersome." That was when he noticed the crutches she'd been using - and how one of those was definitely broken, too.

Cammie noticed it too, "Fuuuuck," that was really going to suck, "Yeah. Broken bones are oodles of fun, it makes me wonder why I didn't get any early." She was sure Logan would've gladly given her a couple during various training sessions. "On the upside I look a lot better than I did a few weeks ago. On the down side I've been starving to death."

"They are not feeding you because you have broken your bones?" Jean-Paul considered his options. He could turn around and leave. But propping Carmilla up against something and running away would probably do more harm than good in the long run, for both her and himself. "Where were you going?"

"I was looking for you. And there's food around, but not many people really like to cook for me. Something about it being disgusting," Cammie said nonchalantly, trying to shift her weight so it wasn't on her cast, which hurt. Intensely.

Jean-Paul had a sudden memory of moldy cheese and meat that had gone off. A ribbon of thought that involved sour milk followed, but nothing else. "And you cannot cook for yourself?" Reaching over, he offered the young woman his forearm so she could steady herself. "This is not a good arrangement for you."

"Owowowow. I can kind of cook for myself," Cammie returned, "It just makes everyone else extremely sick. And I'm bad at it. You were teaching me, remember?"

Actually, Jean-Paul didn't remember that, but he didn't want to let that show. "Oui," he said, eyes sliding to the side. If he could find something like a table along the hallway where others would be walking, he might actually be able to get away without feeling like a complete asshole. Also, it wasn't like she'd be able to track him down easily, what with her cast and only one crutch.

Even if she has been focused on his face, the pain in her leg was doing a good job at obscuring an awful lot from her right now. The leg was still a lot of pain, simply because of how it had broken and how she couldn't take anything for it. "But hey, we'll never run out of garbage here."

Leaning down for just a moment, Jean-Paul picked up the broken crutch and held it in his free hand, then considered this entire situation and wished he'd never left his suite. His empty, rather pathetic looking suite. But still. It did offer some measure of privacy. He really wanted to find a window. Any window at all would do.

He grimaced, then handed her the broken crutch and bent to put his shoulder at her middle. Hooking one arm around the backs of her knees, he picked her up. "Do not kick me. Or hit me with the good stick. I am taking you to the MedLab. You need a new crutch." And he could leave her there without feeling guilty.

"Yeah, you think?" she returned to the new crutch part. At least with her feet off the floor, there wasn't anything putting undue pressure on her leg anymore, but the lingering pain still shot up and down the leg in question, "Aww fuck that hurts."

"You should try harder to not break yourself," Jean-Paul muttered, glaring at the wall for a moment before turning and trying to remember which way he needed to go to get to the MedLab. "Left or right?"

"I didn't break myself," Cammie snapped, "It was done for me, thank you very fucking much. And right."

"Your right or my right?" Jean-Paul asked, jaw flexing a bit. He reached around with his free hand and took the undamaged crutch from her so she couldn't beat him with it if she took it into her head to try. He remembered being ill after she hit him, but he couldn't recall what he'd done to spark the display of temper. He would very much like to avoid being sick, at least for the foreseeable future.

"I don't know. Right, right," Cammie said, looking around, "That right," she sort of pointed.

Jean-Paul suppressed a sigh and turned to his left. The edge of Carmilla's cast was digging into his forearm, but he walked on with purpose, trying not to pay any attention to it. "Who broke you?"

"Some people who killed my friend," Cammie said, "It was the best vacation ever."

There were things here, pitfalls, that Jean-Paul did not want to step in. "I am sorry for your friend. And your leg." He was scowling, though, as he said it because he'd somehow managed to let himself get roped into carrying on a conversation with this girl that he knew he should remember and that he couldn't and she, like everyone else, was going to realise that there was something seriously wrong with him. Still, he couldn't stop himself from asking, "Did the people who broke your leg come to harm as well?"

"Not as much as I wanted them to," Cammie returned, "Which sucks total ass."

Jean-Paul wasn't sure about that, but he wasn't going to directly contradict the girl, considering he was currently toting her around on his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Actually, he didn't carry potatoes like this. "That is... a shame." What else was he supposed to say to that?

A few turns later and he found himself at the MedLab. "We are here," he muttered, moving to put Carmilla down before giving her the good crutch back. "And now I must go."

Cammie took it, "Hey, I'll see you later, right? Because you better not have come back just to hide from me the whole time. I'm like a bad cold, you're never free of me." See, she had even pulled him back. With the power of... POISON. And no, not the rock band.

Jean-Paul wasn't entirely sure what to do with that, so he just nodded, then turned and fled. That seemed to have become his modus operandi over the past several days.