Laurie & Jean-Paul, Monday Night

[x-quebecois.livejournal.com]

Laurie's stargazing on the flier's platform and Jean-Paul drops by to say hello.


Jean-Paul had decided to go flying. This let him shoot through a relatively cloudless sky in the middle of the night. He hadn't been flying after dark very often since returning to the mansion, mostly because he'd been running himself ragged during the days early on, so he'd been too exhausted to even contemplate it, and now... now he had other things to occupy his time in the evenings.

Arching into a lazy back-flip, he slowed just at the peak, hanging half upside down, when he caught sight of someone on the flier's platform. Jean-Paul twisted out of the back-flip and drifted downward, toward the platform, pausing off to the side when he was able to make out the person standing there with a telescope. "Bonjour. Que faites-vous?" It occurred to him a moment later that whoever was down there probably didn't speak French, so he revised his question, saying, "Pardon - what are you doing?"

“Aucun problème, il suffit de régler jusqu'à tout,” Laurie replied, grinning at Jean-Paul. She’d been practicing her French fairly regularly, although Jean-Paul’s Quebec dialect was a bit different from the standard French she was learning.

"Stargazing?" Jean-Paul drifted closer once he recognised the voice. "I did not know you enjoyed looking at the stars, ami."

“I’ve been attempting to do something other then study and work lately,” Laurie admitted, adjusting her telescope to the right angle and then setting up her deck chair, and placing the thermos of hot tea beside it. “Well, something that doesn’t involve other people, or archery training anyhow. I’ve got more then enough other people activities and there’s only so much archery training you can do before you get bored.”

"I do not know," Jean-Paul said, lighting on the platform to Laurie's left. "I have only ever been used for target practise when it comes to things like shooting and archery." It was obvious from his tone that he didn't particularly mind that.

“Someone used you as target practice?” Laurie asked, nonplussed by the reply.
She sat down in her deck chair and waved at the area beside her in invitation, true she hadn’t thought to bring out a blanket for anyone else to sit on, but the flyers platform wasn’t too uncomfortable for sitting on, even so.

"Only with permission, of course. It is good for agility training for me," Jean-Paul explained. "And good practise for their aim, also. They do not often hit the mark, but it is fun." Vanessa hit the mark more than anyone else - and paint-balls left large bruises.

Seating himself beside Laurie's chair, he tipped his head back and looked up at the sky. "It is a good night for looking up."

“People don’t do it often enough,” Laurie noted, resting back with a happy sigh. “Did you know that’s one of the easiest ways to hide? Just because people don’t often think that there’ll be something above them outside.”

"Oui," Jean-Paul said, nodding. "And many times they do not look up when they are inside. Birds of prey use this tactic also - striking from above while the prey bird flies. Fliers do not expect the attacks to come from above them, either. They take it for granted that they are the highest thing in the sky, you see?"

“It’s not easy to train yourself out of,” Laurie noted, taking a look through the telescope and adjusting some settings before she pulled out a notepad and made the first notation of the night. “Did you enjoy your flight?”

"I did," Jean-Paul nodded. "It is... quiet. Especially at night." Looking over at the pad, he quirked an eyebrow. "What is it you are writing there?" He liked the sky for obvious reasons, particularly when he needed to be by himself to think properly, but he didn't really know anything about stargazing.

Laurie showed him her book, the script neat along the lined pages, "Coordinates mostly, so I know where I've looked each night, and sometimes notes if I see something I want to find again. Want me to show you something wonderful?"

"Oui," Jean-Paul said, nodding easy agreement. Then he tipped his head backward again to look at the sky for a moment and asked, “Your calculations, they take the seasons and the changing of the earth’s tilt into consideration also?” He didn’t do a lot of stargazing, but he certainly paid attention to things that impacted his ability to know which direction he was flying in.

“Yep, otherwise I’d come back to the co-ordinates and find out that I wasn’t looking at what I thought I was looking at,” Laurie noted, and pulled a pair of binoculars out of her bag and handed them to Jean-Paul. “Take a look at the stars through those.”

Jean-Paul did as she told him, though he wasn't sure what, exactly, he was looking at. They were stars. Beautiful, but distant and rather cold. "It makes sense, in a way. But I will admit, I like to fly to be closer to them." Though that wasn't entirely correct. He loved flying in general and the stars never felt any closer, really, when he was flying than they did now. It was all a trick of the mind, an optical illusion of some kind, maybe. He didn't know - that wasn't really his area of expertise.

“Each to his or her own,” Laurie noted, settling back against her seat. “I can’t fly, so this is really as close to them as I can get unless I became an astronaut or something.”

Tipping his head back so he could look through the binoculars, Jean-Paul quirked a smile. "Now I am thinking of you wearing one of those very large, white suits." He held the binoculars away from him for a moment to focus them a bit better, then looked through them again to see if the view had improved. "Also, being closer technically does not make them seem so much closer."

“I suppose you’re right,” Laurie said, pushing away her telescope and turning toward him more fully. “And how have you been getting along, lately? Vanessa tell you I’ve decided to haunt her till she lets me organise her new job? I think it would work better if I had more free time in which to haunt, but I’m giving it a good go.”

"Non, Vanessa did not mention to me that you were working with her, but this is not so surprising," Jean-Paul said, resting the binoculars on his knees and looking over at Laurie. "You are very busy, mon ami. Where do you find all of the time?"

“It’s this amazing thing called caffeine; sometimes if I have enough of it I can even contrails. Mostly though it’s a lot of time juggling and having to have almost no social life at all,” Laurie noted, pulling her legs up so she could rest her chin on her knees. “And I’m not working for her yet, more sort of just hanging around and trying to be useful. I figure if I ease her into it, she’ll suddenly find herself asking me what’s on the calendar for this week and realise I’ve managed to become her personal assistant all sneaky like.”

Chuckling, Jean-Paul shook his head. "She will never know what you have done until it is finished. I will not tell her. It is good that she will have someone she can depend on, oui?" He liked the idea of Vanessa having people she could count on around her. Since he'd done nothing more than help pick out the building, he assumed he wouldn't be one of those people - and it was probably for the best, after all. Vanessa understood that he didn't do well working with teams.

“I have a feeling she’s just waiting to see how serious I am about it all, I think she’ll come around once she realises I’m not going to stop bugging her about it,” Laurie noted, looking down at him with a thoughtful expression. “You ever taken someone flying?”

"Only when they were in a great deal of danger," Jean-Paul said, which was technically true. He'd had Yvette on his back once, during that awful superhero escapade, and he'd hauled John down the tracks in India. "Porquoi?"

“Pensez-vous si j'ai demandé gentiment, vous voleriez avec moi?” Laurie asked, trying to keep the hopeful look from her face.

She’d never had a good enough friend who could fly to ever ask, but since he was here it seemed like the time to take a chance. The worst that could happen was that he would say no, or possibly freak out and run away. But the best was that he would say yes, and then she’d get to fly.

Jean-Paul's head tipped almost quizzically to the side as he considered her question. Would he fly with her? "I can," he finally answered. "But it will not be... pretty?" There were all sorts of movies that showed it being simple and easy to lift someone off the ground and fly them around, but the reality of it was that Jean-Paul's arms would get tired eventually and that could be more than a bit inconvenient, depending on how high up they were at the time. Which would not be very high at all, so far as he was concerned. "Elegant, I mean." She could always hold onto his back like a koala. That thought made him smile a little. "Do you have motion sickness?"

“No, not ever actually, something I was eternally grateful for considering how much I fly these days, in the conventional sense, anyhow,” Laurie replied with a smile. “And I promise I have no illusions as to how pretty flying is. I’ve seen Angel in Danger room runs with some of the older X-men. But usually that’s when they’re being rescued and he’s having to hold them under the armpits. I never understood why somebody just didn’t create a sling or something he could whip out in an emergency.”

Standing up, Jean-Paul gestured for Laurie to stand as well. "Come, we will see how we do tonight."