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[x-copycat.livejournal.com]

Garrison comes by the new office building after work for dinner.

Vanessa had been spending a lot of time tied up with X-Factor between finding an office, turning it into something actually resembling an office, moving out of Adrienne's penthouse and taking up their first investigations. It all meant she didn't get back to Xavier's as much as she used to for the casual pestering of the various and sundry folks she knew there. Luckily at least one of those friends had a job in the city so she'd called Garrison and tempted him with post-work beer and barbecue on the roof of her and X-Factor's building.

"You know, I'm still trying to figure out how a former mercenary with no legal documentation qualifies for a private investigators license in New York City. I mean, at the Bureau, we joke about those things being given away like baseball cards, but still..." Kane stepped out on to the roof, having followed Vanessa's directions and walking up the fire escape to reach the top of the building.

"I don't qualify," Vanessa replied as she turned toward the voice. "But a former NYPD homicide detective does and he's the one who holds the license, not me." She grinned at Garrison and there was the faint look about her of someone who had just won a small victory. "New York state law says I can work under a licensed private investigator and after three years of doing so I qualify for a license of my own. Until then I technically work for Bishop and I hold less power than him in terms of what I can do and get into legally, but how many people do you think really know the difference when I say I'm with X-Factor Investigations?"

"Working under Bishop, eh? Looks like Logan owes me ten bucks." Garrison joked, leaning against one of the brick exhaust points. "Seriously though, you officially open yet?"

Vanessa just barely suppressed the urge to stick her tongue out at him. "Only legally. But, aye, we're officially open. We had a few missing persons cases come in all about the same time after we opened our doors. Turned out to be a healer taking mutations away. I think the X-Men handed the chick over to SHIELD." Which was too bad since Vanessa still really wanted to punch that woman.

"So what was your bet with Logan exactly?" She checked on the fire in the grill and uncovered a plate with a couple of steaks on it. After carefully placing the cuts of meat onto the grill she pulled the cover back down and turned her attention back to Garrison.

"Much like the Fifth Amendment, I choose not to answer that question as I may incriminate myself. Or get kicked in the nose. I'm all about nose protection under the law." He considered the situation. Bishop made sense as the obvious front man, but there was going to be a point that Vanessa was going to have to come back out of the shadows if she wanted to make this work. Kane wondered if she'd realized that yet. "Is the Professor bankrolling this, or are there currently a lot of financial institutions in Switzerland orbiting between audit and meltdown over missing funds?"

He got an unconvinced little smirk for his fifth amendment comment. "You're Canadian, you shouldn't be spitting the fifth at me. It only makes you look more guilty anyway." All she could really infer about the bet, though, was that Garrison had come down on the side of Bishop being the one with the license and Logan possibly coming down on the side of her forging her way into one. "But, yeah, Xavier's bankrolling. Well, technically the Institute is which is a separate but not so separate entity, I guess. Mostly that means I have to give up my dreams of having a pack of immigrant workers to pay two dollars an hour to do all the surveillance and possibly some wet work." Vanessa frowned for show to go along with her sigh. "Above the board living is so much less fun."

"It does have it's advantages. You qualify for those reward programs on your credit cards, buying a cell phone doesn't require fake ID, and oh, very rarely does someone shoot out you as part of the interview process for a job. You have to admit, that's a boatload full of positives there."

Vanessa's face arranged itself in a thoroughly indignant and saddened expression. "Those were job interviews? I thought they were dates." She fell quiet for a few beats, expression slowly brightening. "I guess I've had better luck with dating than I thought, then." She broke into a grin and reached down to a cooler set down beside the grill. "Beer?"

"You know I don't drink." Kane said straightfaced as he accepted the cold bottle. "And if those are dates, lady, you're doing it wrong. A night out is only supposed to require you to consider your ammo load out if something goes wrong, as opposed to what you're expecting at the start of the evening."

"I had unconventional formative years for dating," she told him with a shrug. "Obviously I should go find one of those Dating For Dummies books or something. You know, really learn how to do it right. I'm better with the sex for obvious reasons." That was, sadly, not an entirely inaccurate statement. "Besides, I prefer knives on a first date. Is that wrong?"

"Unless your idea of a good time is dinner and landmines with Rambo, yes." He took a long pull off of the bottle and re-acquired his perch. "Now you're into a respectable business, these are the tricky little bits of social interaction you're going to have to learn. No shooting clients. No waving knives at annoying people. No planting bombs in the cars of municipal inspectors. The sex thing you can pretty much wing. Most guys will just chalk up weaponry to kinkiness if you wait until they're far enough along."

Her nose wrinkled. "Rambo's just this side of too butch and too dumb for me." Vanessa sighed and deflated as she pulled out a bottle for herself and twisted off the cap. "This is going to be an adjustment. Do you think they've got support groups or something to help guide me through?" She checked on the steaks and flipped them over. "So can I wave knives at the clients and shoot the annoying people? Nothing gives someone incentive to stop being obnoxious like a bullet in the leg. I'll even try to miss major arteries just for you!"

"Nah, you shoot someone and you get arrested, regardless of the bits you don't hit. The assumption will be you're just not a very good shot, and knowing you, you'll have to prove you are and that's more charges... it's all very complicated." He killed the first beer, putting the bottle down on the concrete paving slab and helping himself to a second. "You could try flowers. Very hard to commit a felony with flowers."

"I think stuffing Oleander down someone's throat would put me further on the scary and psychopathic side than the guns and knives," she told him and added foil wrapped vegetables to the grill. "Oh, you meant for the dates, huh? I don't think guys appreciate being given flowers on a date." Vanessa looked over Garrison as she considered that and took a pull from her beer finally. "I mean, I imagine you'd give a woman a funny look if she brought you a bouquet of daisies."

"Not at all. I am, after all, a thoroughly modern and sensitive guy, who believes that women have the same rights to express affection and attraction as men do. It's one of those things we do to make up for the billions of years of the patriarchal oppression to preserve our chances of ever getting laid. There's a course. Online. I think I still have the link."

"Oh, can you email me that?" Vanessa's eyes lit up as she smiled with faux enthusiasm over the prospect of a course teaching her how to date. "I'll make a mental note that you're pro-daisy. You know, in case it ever comes up."

"I also like roses, poetry and weeping in romantic comedies. You know, since my penis is purely for ornamental purposes for the foreseeable future, might as well take the whole emasculating package on at once." Kane shrugged and took another sip.

"If you've relegated Little Kane to decorative only purposes that's your own fault. He could be all manly and go out to conquer if you really wanted him to." She understood why he might not, though. His girlfriend had disappeared overnight. Adrienne could come back any time. Or she could not. Who wanted to be the guy who got caught with his pants down right after his girlfriend splits and then comes back? Then again, she supposed it could have more to do with emotional attachment than she was considering. After all, Adrienne and Garrison had been friends for a while before they'd gotten together.

"You're on your own with the poetry and romantic comedies, though. I'm just not your girl for that one."

"Huh. I would have figured you and Lex as big Jennifer Aniston fans." The Canadian shook his head. "I think staying away from the crazy is just easier right now. Fact is, women are nuts and I'm not gay. Therefore, my options are limited. I think I'll get one of those monk robes or something."

"Sexy. Gonna go for the head shave, too? Maybe that whole shave the top but keep a ring of hair around the head look. It'd be hot. But women really are bat shit crazy. Not going to fault you for avoiding the headache there." Not to mention that Garrison seemed to end up with crappy break ups. Maybe everyone had those and she just hadn't been around enough people who dated to know that already.

"Lex and I are more Jennifer Lopez fans. Aniston doesn't have an ass." The fact that Vanessa even knew who the Jennifers were was slightly terrifying. A couple years ago she would have raised an eyebrow to the names but not really had much of a reference for who they were. Now pop culture was embedded in her brain. God, it was horrible the things leaving mercenary work could do to a person.

"Does she still make movies? I thought she dated professionally for tabloids or something now." He sipped from the bottle. "Anyways, what is is, eh. Who's on the paperwork for the building?"

"For X-Factor? Xavier since the Institute pays the rent. When we've got more steady business, though, I intend to change that over" She didn't mention that it would likely end up being her name and not Bishop's on the lease when it came down to it. She ended up doing stupid detail type things like that, not him. Bishop really was an employee. He came in, he did his job and he went home. Vanessa followed up on the paperwork, made sure the bills got paid, got appropriate signatures and all that. He was the PI and technically they were equals, but it really was her agency right now.

"Just make sure you're careful. If you start making enemies, and let's face it, you will, the biggest vulnerability you're going to have is on the legal side. I know there's some rough spots in your past, so if you officially go legit, you'll want to clear up or bury as much as you can still floating around out there." The advice wasn't entirely honest concern. Kane knew that the Bureau wasn't the only federal agency that kept a close eye on District X, for fear that it could suddenly turn dangerous in a heartbeat. Something like Vanessa's X-Factor could be either caught up and destroyed in events it had nothing to do with over a simple mistake, or worse, could be used in order to create an event by someone looking to cause trouble.

"The rough spots in my past involve getting kicked out of my house as a teenager and then disappearing for a little over ten years or so. All the X-Factor stuff involves my real name," she explained. "It's the same name used on the books as a teacher at Xavier's and as staff for Snow Valley. Vanessa Carlysle is clean, she just has a giant gaping hole. But at least LeBeau helped me get taken off the list of presumed dead in Boston when I started working at Snow Valley."

"I'll give you a little tip from the land of law enforcement; giant gaping hole is the thing that makes investigators pay a lot of attention. All I'm saying is that once you start pissing people off, be ready for the kinds of things that they can use against you when you're out in the open, eh?" Kane knew that Vanessa's life had a long time spent in the same kinds of shadows and cracks as people like Nate and Pete. He just didn't want her hurt because she didn't think to consider the total legal ways that people could use to fuck with you.

Vanessa nodded. "Noted. I'm not really sure what all I can do about that, though. I could talk to Doug about filling in the gaps for me in his snazzy hacker way, I guess. Shady ways of staying on the right side of the law are better than giving people ammo, right?" She didn't expect Garrison to agree with her, but those really did seem like the options. Either she let people potentially use her gap of nothing but a GED against her, or she filled in the blanks illegally. Technically being a mercenary was legal in the US so she could, theoretically, throw some truth into that gap. Somehow she thought that would bite her on the ass harder if she did.

"I don't know what the best method would be, but just don't let it catch you offguard. Nothing like finding out that the guy you're after just fucked you by reporting you to the IRS or something." He gave her a lopsided grin at the possible absurdity of it.

Of all the things to get nabbed for, not paying your taxes. And Vanessa hadn't, of course, paid any taxes on the money she had earned as a prostitute or as a mercenary. "I love you," she told Garrison with a smile. "I wouldn't have thought of that. Maybe I can convince Thom to claim he was my sugar daddy. I mean, he's not a US citizen so it's not like the IRS is going to get him for tax evasion."

"Inventing a salacious relationship between a youthful Boston girl and a disreputable Irish thug? I think I saw that film in the 80s." He wondered over and looked over her shoulder at the meat. "So when did you start cooking, eh? You going soft there, Vanessa?"

She gave him a very light elbow to the ribs. "How is cooking with fire going soft? And I can cook. My boyfriend can cook better than me but I've never burnt down a kitchen or exploded anything. And, okay, most of the stuff I make comes out of boxes but if it's not fancy I can make it. When I start telling you about my feelings you can ask if I'm going soft." She emphasized her point by reaching behind her and poking him in the side.

"I have super strength, which means you're not going to win an argument by trying to hit the tickle spot. Actually," In a smooth motion, he lifted her up above his head and away from the grill, leaving her dangling by one arm as he bent over and theatrically examined the steaks. "-I stand corrected. You have learned how to burn meat it seems." Kane said, before depositing her on the ground back in the same position she had been.

Vanessa had dangled there unhappily and then wiggled a bit until she was set back down on the ground. "Oi, you," she poked him again in principle, "don't get all with the caveman foreplay when no one's making good on it. And it's not burnt. You just like to complain." She even took a knife to one of the steaks and cut a slit through the thickest part. It was edging toward well done from medium well. Vanessa refrained from another poke. "Wait, are you saying you've actually got a tickle spot?"

"Yes. Everyone does." Kane shrugged and collected the plates from the bag by the barbecue.

Eyebrow raised, Vanessa watched him from the corner of her eye with a look on her face which suggested she was up to no good at all. "Everyone might...but you shouldn't go broadcasting it. That's asking for trouble." She checked on the foil wrapped vegetables for a moment before pulling the cuts of meat off the grill and laying each on one of the plates Garrison held. Vegetables followed.

"I think we have different definitions of broadcasting, but since you're providing dinner, I won't challenge it." He picked up his utensils and dug into the meal. The other side effect of his mutation was that he needed a lot of calories a day to keep his body going.

"That'll last for maybe thirty minutes," she muttered to herself while she put out the fire in the grill. Silence fell between the pair as they ate, Vanessa much more a fan of eating than letting food get cold just to banter.