LOG | Warren and Adrienne

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Sunday night, Adrienne comes looking for Vanessa and finds Warren instead. He fills her in on everything she's missed. Or, well. Some things.

It had been a very eventful day for Adrienne, including meeting with her lawyers, emptying one of her safety deposit boxes so she'd have some cash on hand, breakfast with Amanda and Marie-Ange, meeting with Charles Xavier to get her job back, taking the train back to Boston to pack up some clothes and necessities like her phone charger, and returning to New York late that evening. She still had plenty of things to sort out, like shipping her bike from Boston, but there was only so much one could do on a Sunday, and Adrienne was still exhausted and edgy from the day before. She'd done enough work for now, she told herself- it was time for some fun.

She took the subway from the train station into District X, and wandered around the neighbourhood for a while with the handle of her rolling suitcase in the crook of her arm and a gift-wrapped box in both hands. So this was where Vanessa was living now, she thought to herself aimiably as she searched for the X-Factor Investigations building. While Wyngarde had forbidden her to have contact with anyone from her life, he'd never said she couldn't keep tabs on what they were doing, so she knew Vanessa had started the detective agency and was living in a suite below the office. Adrienne had been so proud of her friend when she'd heard, and she'd wanted to send her congratulations so badly it became a physical ache she'd carried around for a long time.

She was still carrying it around now, in the form of a case of Lagavulin scotch, but was hopeful she could get rid of the burden shortly.

Her phone had died sometime that morning and she had no idea how to use a pay phone, or if pay phones even existed anymore, so Adrienne could only hope that Vanessa was home when she found X-Factor Investigations and hit the button for the intercom.

"Hello?" Warren had been surprised by the buzz this late on a Sunday. Sometimes people did need emergency assistance from X-Factor, but it was pretty rare. Usually they called the office number rather than drop by.

Adrienne frowned at the intercom, confused by the man's voice, because it didn't sound like Lex. "Umm... hi. Is Vanessa home? It's, umm... it's Saffron. I have something for her?"

Warren frowned, not recognizing the name. Or the voice. But then Vanessa knew a whole lot of people, and the likelihood of him knowing or even having heard of all of them was pretty low.
"She's out at the moment," he said cautiously. "Come up, you can leave it in the office." There was no way Warren was about to let someone he didn't know into Vanessa's apartment, even if they were supposedly a friend of hers. Not while she was still missing.

Adrienne struggled with the box of scotch and her suitcase as she entered the building, glancing around in the darkness. She found a desk and gratefully put the heavy box down on it, turning towards the doorway when she heard footsteps approaching. "Is Vee out on a job or something?" she asked the figure that approached in the dark.

"Adrienne?" Warren appeared at the bottom of the stairs, surprised to see the woman. They hadn't heard anything from or about her in - months, he couldn't remember how long it had been. Of all the people he expected to see here, she hadn't even registered as a possibility. "God, how long as it been?" He moved over to her to take the suitcase, picking up the box of scotch as well. "Come upstairs. I'll fill you in." It hadn't really occured to him that he wasn't exactly a person Adrienne would expect to see staying in Vanessa's apartment.

"Warren?" the brunette exclaimed in surprise. "Wow." Definitely not Lex, she thought with a smirk. Although there may have been a perfectly innocent explanation as to why Warren had answered the intercom at Vanessa's apartment. Maybe he was a roommate. God, Adrienne hoped not. Her own love life was so nonexistent- and would likely remain so for a very long time if Amanda was to be believed- that if Warren was here as anything more than a roommate she was going to be delighted for her friend. "Are you Vee's roommate? Please say no," she grinned. "Unless it's a sharing-the-bed roommate. Yes, please... please fill me in." She had a feeling she'd missed a lot more than she anticipated.

Warren laughed a little at the line of questioning, though not as much as he might of in another situation, nor was it followed up with a flippant, slightly naughty comment about him and Vanessa. He put down the suitcase to let them both in, waving Adrienne through.

"I am her boyfriend, yes," he commented. "But technically I live at the mansion." Though honestly, even when Vanessa was around, he spent more time here than there.

"Well, good for Vanessa," she answered with a smirk, now that she could see Warren better in the light from the suite. "So where is she? Working late on a stakeout or something? I tried calling yesterday- before my phone died this morning- but I didn't get a hold of her."

"Your guess is as good as mine," Warren replied, setting down Adrienne's stuff in the living room and waving for her to sit down. "She went AWOL in late July while working on a case, and we haven't been able to contact her or find her. Her cell phones were ditched, Charles can't find her on Cerebro. Bishop's been trying to hunt her down, but he hasn't had any luck."

Adrienne's eyebrow quirked upwards at Warren's terminology. "Went AWOL? Did someone piss her off or something? Make her want to get away for a bit? Is the Black Court of the Hellfire Club holding her hostage, telling her she can't get in touch with anyone she knows or they'll kill her friends?"

"We have no idea what happened to her," he replied, a little heatedly. "She dropped out of contact in the middle of a case while one of her closest friends was in a coma. We had plans for a vacation once she was back. Her phones were found dumped in the middle of nowhere. Unless she underwent a radical personality shift in a day or so, I assume something bad has happened to her. And I very much doubt the Hellfire Club has anything to do with it."

"Wait... what?" Adrienne's face blanched. "But that... that's not AWOL," was all she could think of to say. Didn't AWOL imply that you'd taken off of your own accord? Didn't Warren mean MIA? "That's... missing. She's missing? But... Vanessa can't be missing. Wait, are you sure the Hellfire Club had nothing to do with it? But wait, you said late July, and I wasn't in touch with anyone then... unless Wyngarde took her preemptively to get me to do something he hasn't asked me to do yet? But wait, Emma fixed things with him, everyone's safe now, and if he had her he would have let her go by now, so you would have heard from her... so it wasn't the Hellfire Club... something bad happened to her...she wouldn't leave in the middle of a case when one of her closest friends was in a coma... wait who's in a coma?"

Warren's words were just fully beginning to sink in and Adrienne realized she'd been thinking out loud. "But Vanessa can't be missing. I just came back. And she can't be missing because she's the one who gets me through other people being missing. She deals with me when other people are missing!" She'd gone from joking to hysterical in a very short amount of time, and this was the point where she would have expected Vanessa to hug her, or touch her hand, or her hair, or shout at her, do something to stop her being hysterical, except she was now the cause instead of the remedy.

"Adrienne," Warren said firmly, looking at her directly, holding her gaze. "Take a seat. Take a deep breath. I'll get you a drink." Her getting hysterical wasn't going to help anything. Once she was calm, they could talk about it. Especially if she thought Hellfire might be involved. He doubted it, but none of their other ideas had panned out.

"I-I-I... okay." She sat down, rubbing her hands together, glancing about the room. Then her eyes went wide and she threw a hand into her purse for a wet-nap, then thrust the hand onto the couch, shoving into a future reading (she respected Vanessa too much to mess around the couch's past events.) "Warren!" she cried out happily, "Warren, she's gonna come back! I saw her! She's gonna come back to the couch!" Adrienne was laughing and crying, truly a mess. As was her habit, she touched the couch again, knowing that future readings were incredibly volatile and the only way she could put stock in one was if she took multiple readings. But this time the reading took her much longer, and she pulled out of it with sad tears instead of happy ones. This time she couldn't see Vanessa returning. "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!" She read it a third time, and a fourth. "No, no, no, this isn't right, I saw her the first time, she's coming back! She's gonna be found, she's gonna come back!"


"Of course she is," Warren replied calmly, hiding his relief. He'd been worried she may have been dead. He offered Adrienne the glass of scotch he'd poured for her, which had quite a generous amount of amber liquid in it. He sat down next to her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. "Of course she is."

Adrienne sipped at the scotch, sniffling and huffing out ragged breaths, leaning against Warren, his warmth and the warmth of the scotch bringing her back to her senses. "I brought her scotch," she told Warren as she drank the glass he'd poured her, voice strained and suddenly tired. "I brought her a case of scotch to celebrate her starting the detective agency. I wanted to congratulate her every day since she started it. Every day when I was gone, I wanted to talk to her. My best friend." She tipped the scotch glass back to finish off the rest of it. "She's gotta be found. What can I do to help?"

Warren hugged her close, trying not to be too giddy about the hope Adrienne had given him. "Save the scotch. You can give it to her when we find her. In the morning we can talk to Bishop, he's been leading the investigation. He'll work out how you can help."
"Bishop?" Adrienne's eyes lit up. She'd always liked Bishop. "Yes. Bishop will find her. I'll help." She found her tension being released with Warren's hug. Maybe it wasn't a Vanessa hug, but it was a pretty great hug, and Adrienne was just realizing how much she'd missed hugs. Christ, what had she turned into? It was still a terrifying thought that Vanessa was missing, but knowing Garrison had been found gave her faith that Vanessa would also be found. Faith was something Adrienne had never really had before, but the people in her life now, the ones she knew would keep searching for Vanessa no matter what, had never let her down, so she had no reason not to have faith in them now.

"So how long have you and Vanessa been together?" she asked, sounding much more like her usual self.

Warren grinned at the question. Partly because he was still pretty pleased about the whole thing, but partly because it meant Adrienne wasn't having hysterics anymore.
"A couple of months, officially," he replied, taking a sip from his drink. "But we were sleeping together for awhile before that." He'd honestly never expected any of it - sleeping with Vanessa in the first place, let alone things continuing. But he rather liked the fact that it had.
"What about you? What have you been up to? Or does that story require more alcohol?"

"Good for you guys," Adrienne grinned, toasting Warren with her empty scotch glass. She didn't know much about Warren other than the fact that he was a businessman, but he'd handled her freakout so well that she already knew she liked him a lot. Still grinning, she shook her head. "Nah, I should probably get used to telling it without alcohol. The Black Court of the Hellfire Club was forcing me to use my powers for all sorts of crap, promising me they'd kill my friends and/or my students if I told anyone what they were doing to me. I couldn't let anything happen to anyone so I left. My own little form of torture. Which is why it's pretty unbelievable that I finally make it back and Vee's gone," she added ruefully. "But I'll see her again soon, I'm sure," she smiled, refusing to trail back into the place of panic and fear and negativity she'd been in earlier. "So do you work here at X-Factor with Vee, or did you guys meet through Xavier's?"

Warren's hand squeezed Adrienne's shoulder as she told her story about Hellfire, frowning a little. He didn't know a lot about the group, except what he'd heard from X-Men reports and what filtered through from Snow Valley. And everything he heard about it made him glad he wasn't a part of it.

"Through Xavier's," he said, happy to run with the change of subject. "We threatened a high school secretary together." He grinned at the memory. "Though it wasn't until later than anything happened. We went out for drinks - I can't even remember why now. But then one thing led to another..." He shrugged. He'd been surprised by it at the time. Vanessa had been the first woman he'd been with in a very long time.

"Threatening a secretary," Adrienne mused, "yeah, that sounds like Vee. Although maybe now that she's not dating a soldier anymore she won't be as violent. See, I think Sam was so vanilla that he made Vee more inclined towards violence cuz that amount of goodness and boring...ness is just so frustrating that it makes you want to go ape-shit on something. And then Lex was a soldier, so it was a case of like minds. But you, you're a businessman. You're not boring or vanilla, and yet as far as I know you haven't ever made your living through violence or the attempt to stop same. So you'll probably be a good influence on her. Of course, if you were helping her threaten the high school secretary, maybe I'm way off base," she grinned.

"Well, I'm also a lawyer. And an X-Man." Warren shrugged. "We don't really agree when it comes to violence, but I think we... agree to disagree. And since she visited Thom in Wales and fell in love with the goats, she's been different. Trying out non-violent forms of relaxation." He grinned. "She has a rooftop garden now. And she hasn't killed anything as yet." The grin faded. "We were going to go to my family's country estate after my bar exam, so she could learn to ride a horse properly."

Adrienne shuddered at the comment about horses. "Whoa, I just went to a really bad place there when you mentioned horses. I don't think I've ever been so afraid of anything in my life. I didn't know you were a lawyer." She chuckled to herself. "I bet that makes things interesting." And then it sunk in. "Wait... what? Goats? Rooftop garden? Goats? She fell in love with goats? Christ, that's so very... Vee." Now she was full-out laughing. "I can't wait til she's back. I hear there's a moose at the mansion now; I'm totally going to get her a goat to add to the menagerie!" Her face fell suddenly. "Aww, but I'm broke now. Damn Black Court concocted some shit about my business accounts and I'm under federal investigation now. Everything's frozen. No goat money. Damn."

"No," Warren said firmly. "No goats. They eat everything. She doesn't get goats until she's retired and living in the country." And it was just cruel to inflict a goat on the mansion. Especially when Vanessa was kept so busy with work in District X.

"Presumably you have your own lawyers, or Emma does, but if you do need any help untangling the mess, let me know. I know a few decent ones around here that could help you out. Are you okay for somewhere to stay? Because Vanessa has a spare room you could crash in if you need it."

"Fine, no goats," Adrienne pouted. "I was only joking anyway. I'll get her a plush one or something." She poked Warren in the side. "Spoilsport."

She flopped back against the couch and studied the glint of the scotch glass in her hand. "I do have my own lawyers, yes, but thanks for the offer. You're sweet. But I think my problem is less that I need lawyers and more that the man who set up the bogus account activity is basically untouchable legally. So much power, so many connections. I'm scrrrrrrrrewed. I think I'm going to have to rely more on Emma's White Court to fix my problems and less on the law." She went quiet for a moment, pondering the other half of Warren's offer. "That... that would be nice. Thanks. I... Xavier gave me my job back, as a teacher. So there's a place at the mansion. But... what with it being summer... and me having gotten a restraining order against Garrison Kane that I now have to explain to him... and being responsible for him nearly being killed in a chemical fire... it would be nice to have somewhere else to go, especially now that I can't work at my own damn company."

"I'm just thinking of the upholstery," Warren said mildly, a grin on his face. "But you're welcome here any time while you sort everything out." He gave her something of a speculative look. He didn't really know her well enough to comment on her involvement with Hellfire, but he'd honestly never understood why anyone would get involved with it.

"More scotch?" He asked instead, glancing at the levels in her glass. "You can worry about Hellfire and Garrison some other day."

"That sounds fantastic," Adrienne grinned. "And not just the scotch. Thanks a lot, Warren. Boy, when we find Vanessa, she and I will have a lot to gossip about where you're concerned. You're a peach."

Warren laughed a little at that. "Hopefully she'll only say good things. And won't complain about my wings taking over the bed or her finding down around the place. Or my law books being everywhere." He wasn't actually too worried. Things had been pretty good between him and Vanessa before she'd disappeared.

"Oh Warren," Adrienne laughed, "of course she'll only say good things! It's Vanessa! Have you ever known that sweet, gentle woman to say a mean thing about anyone or anything?" she snickered, wicked grin on her face. "So you live at the mansion, huh? Do you teach as well as being a lawyer?"

Warren looked at her in mock surprise. "Are you sure we're talking about the same woman? White hair, blue skin, legs for days? Perhaps I should reconsider my offer to let you stay in her guest room." He grinned a little. "At the moment all I'm doing is helping out XFI - I can't practice in New York until I pass the bar exam. Which I sat a few weeks back, it just takes them months to process it all."

"So what are you going to do when you pass? What kind of law do you want to practice?" she inquired. "Are you going to start up your own firm or go work for someone?"

"Mostly civil. When I was working in California, I mostly worked on anti-discrimination cases. Primarily mutant ones, but occasionally sexuality." He shifted a little, turning to face her a little better. "I'm hoping to set up my own firm. Since I quit working for my dad, I don't think any of the firms would touch me. And I'd rather be able to pick and choose my own cases."

"They won't touch you? What, did you set your dad's office on fire before you quit or something?" Adrienne laughed.

"I may have quit in a huff. And while he hasn't officially disinherited me after coming out of the mutant closet, it's definitely well known we're not on speaking terms. I could work on getting people on my side, so to speak, but..." He shrugged. "I'm happier here. I never had much time for those sorts of games."

"Playing games with your parents will never end in a happy time, I'm pretty sure this is some sort of rule," Adrienne muttered, snuggling against him sympathetically.

"Exactly. And now I get to be my own boss, which is pretty much ideal." He grinned, hugging her in close. "Or I have the time to help out around here, which is keeping me busy." Warren went silent, the reminder of his girlfriend being missing dampening the mood just a little bit. He rested his against Adrienne's, taking the moment to just try and relax. Damn, he missed Vanessa.