Vanessa & Jean-Paul | Early Saturday Morning

[x-quebecois.livejournal.com]

Vanessa emails Jean-Paul with a request for company and he obliges.


Jean-Paul had checked his email at roughly one in the morning, as he did most nights, purely out of boredom. He hadn't been sleeping well for most of the time he'd been abroad and he'd managed even less quality rest upon returning to the mansion. Given the circumstances of his return, though, that wasn't necessarily odd. Sleeping fell by the wayside when he worried.

As it turned out, this time his boredom somehow paid off. He had an email. From Vanessa. After reading it, he typed a quick reply, closed his laptop, and pulled on a t-shirt.

Moments later, the Québécois knocked softly on Vanessa's door.

The door opened following the click of the lock with a very tired looking Laura staring at him. It wasn't Laura, of course, and small cues in body language told the story without Vanessa having to. Without a word she stepped back and gestured for Jean-Paul to enter the guest suite she was holed up in. Infomercials comprised the totality of noise inside the place. "I almost bought a knife that can cut through concrete. A chef's knife. I knew I had hit rock bottom when I decided that it was a good idea. Really, who does that?" In usual Vanessa fashion, she picked up right where they had left off as if she hadn't been kidnapped, as if she hadn't been missing for months, as if he hadn't been out of the country the entire time. Ignoring was a fantastic coping mechanism, thank you very much.

Walking into the suite, Jean-Paul felt the back of his neck prickle as he took everything in in a glance. "Chefs," he answered without a pause. Then he shrugged and continued, "But I do not think this is rock bottom so much." He noted the way all the tables and breakable baubles were arranged along the exterior of the room - not even he would have been able to fly in without knocking something over. "After all, you did not actually buy the chef knife."

Looking over his shoulder, he quirked a brow at her, catching sight of the vase of flowers so conveniently located on the table near the back side of the door. If he wasn't completely off the mark, and he knew he wasn't, Vanessa could do more than a little damage with a simple kitchen knife - and would if he hit any of her new triggers. His expression gave none of his thoughts away, though, and his body remained relaxed, at ease.

Jean-Paul knew what it was like to come out of a horrific experience changed, raw on the inside from all the things doctors and telepaths couldn't fix with the wave of a hand and a thought. "If it is so tempting, though, you should change the channel. This is how I avoid giving all my money to the abandoned animals late at night. Do you have any carrots?"

Using his back being turned to her advantage, the knife in Laura's hand was slid quickly into the flower vase. The stems, baby's breath, water and whatever else it was that was in it helped mute any noise the tip made when it hit the bottom. It was concealed before the door had closed behind him. "I tried changing the channel. It's on more than one. Or I scan through them all too quickly and only think it's on more than one. Either way, the prominence keeps drawing me back in. Possibly I have an inordinate admiration for something that can cut through rock without a motor." She had been sticking behind Jean-Paul the whole time she spoke, watching his body language carefully. He wasn't tense but he was a little on edge, it seemed. He was looking. He was watching. Then she realized, he was treading carefully but leaving the eggshells out of it. For now she would trust him.

Vanessa peeled away and headed into the kitchenette area to scope out the refrigerator. She had been stealing things from the fridge down in the main kitchen and squirreling them away up here so she could avoid conversations she didn't want to have whenever left overs from take out ran out. Her eyes remained on Jean-Paul right up until she had to divert her eyes toward the contents of the fridge. "I have no carrots. I have celery, though I don't remember why. And grape tomatoes. So many grape tomatoes." She pulled one of those little baskets of tomatoes out for herself. "I have apples? They were crunchy last I checked. Or...hm...broccoli?"

"Celery, s'il te plait," Jean-Paul said, watching Vanessa rummage through the refrigerator. "Celery is crunchier, I think. And apples require more work. It is very late, I am not so interested in working for my food, I think." Facing her, the Quebecois held his arms up and made a fairly impressive set of grabby hands at the celery. "There is a marathon, I think, of shark programs on the Animal channel."

"Are you condoning my exposure to violence, monsieur?" She looked over at him with an arched eyebrow. A half beat later she tossed a bag of celery his way. "Crunchy with a side of stringy, all yours." Vanessa couldn't help thinking that encouraging her to watch shark attacks would only enable her violent tendencies and she already wanted to do a great deal of violence to a number of individuals from New Son. Warren likely wouldn't approve but then he wouldn't really try to tell her she needed to be zen right now, would he? With that thought Vanessa let the refrigerator door swing shut. A tomato got popped into her mouth and she nodded toward the tv. "So where are my sharks?"

Jean-Paul settled in his usual place at the end of the couch, then reached for the remote control and flipped through the channels until he got to Animal Planet. "I am not so sure there will be attacking sharks in this show," he said, tipping his head to the side as he watched the host stand in the water and talk about baby hammerheads. Opening his bag of celery, he took out a piece and bit into it, crunching as he chewed and watched some sort of experiment with electric signals and the baby hammerheads. "Maybe there will be attacking later."

For her part, Vanessa looked awfully concerned with fishing out tomatoes until Jean-Paul had settled in. She considered whether the chair or the other end of the couch would be better. The couch was more in line with what she would normally do, but then if someone was fucking with her Jean-Paul was exactly the person she would send to lull her into a false sense of security before going in for the strike. After all, you give her the one person she trusts unconditionally in this country and guards could come down accidentally and fairly quickly. She opted for the opposite end of the couch regardless. Vanessa was mostly sure this wasn't all an illusion or telepathic trick. She'd found small pieces of proof here and there since waking, she reminded herself. The ability to shake the feeling entirely was something of an effort, though. "Oh, so you're teasing me with the possibility of shark attacks? That's wrong. When'd you get to be a tease?" She glanced over her shoulder at the windows and the breakables arranged on the edges of the windowsills.

"Pfft," Jean-Paul waved a hand in Vanessa's general direction. It was a little odd, how her hair was dark and her skin was normal-color and she was short, but he knew Laura well, too, and so it didn't throw him as much as it could have. "Teasing - I am not teasing. The Animal channel has tricked me. They advertise sharks with fish and leaping from the water, but they give me babies and electricity. False advertising, I think. I will write a letter." He crunched into another piece of celery for good measure, then quirked a brow and looked back toward Vanessa. "There is also the Discovery Channel, though, with the Mayan prophecies telling us we will all succumb to something next year and the world will be born anew. I do not understand it, truly, but people are strange with their religious beliefs."

In true Vanessa fashion, she perked up. "We should watch that. We've got about 13 months until the world ends. I bet you they just got sick of planning out the calendar and decided 'hey, we can play catch up in a few centuries' only then they got wiped out and since the conquistadors were complete idiots they assumed it meant something huge and cryptic. Really, their hands just got tired from all the writing." She popped another tomato into her mouth. "Would you be worried that you had only gone eleven hundred years in the future for your calendar?"

"Their hands were tired from all the chiseling, I think," Jean-Paul said, holding up a length of celery and feigning hammering it into an invisible wall. "I would be tired of chiseling 1100 years' worth of prophecy, too. Only I think I would end it more with, 'Forgive me, my fingers ache. I will return later. Merci.' Let the later generations make of that what they will." He grinned despite himself, changing the channel with one hand while he offered the bag of celery to Vanessa. "Come, crunch vindictively avec moi, mon ami."

"And give up my lovely 'bite-go-splat' effect?" She gasped at him, feigning horror, and clutched a hand to her chest. Somehow she had stumbled into a rare moment of relaxing a little. She found it nigh impossible to do that around here much. Hank checked up on her daily and the idea of Charles monitoring her every thought was as pervasive as her awareness that something was not right with her. It didn't help that she assumed everyone who saw her would have to figure out if she was the fragile one or the real Laura. As such, Vanessa had chosen the life of a shut in for the most part. Laura had been a nice moment of normalcy and, oddly enough, Sam had been as well. She hadn't expected that one. Jean-Paul, however, she had known could be relied on to be a respite from the awkward attempts at offering comfort and the tip toeing conversations she anticipated getting so much of if she interacted with others. Him she could relay on to only be as odd as he always was.

Some of her tension released when she reached over to take a stalk of celery. Vanessa was still on alert, eyes flicking to every noise Laura's sensitive hearing picked up, but she seemed not quite like she would spring at any moment. "If I eat this what will I use to chisel my calendar into a wall?"

"Hm..." Jean-Paul seemed to consider that for a long moment, crunching contemplatively at his own stalk of celery. Then he raised one finger as though having discovered a very important answer. "It is an invisible wall. I believe, therefore, that anything could chisel into it, oui? So you could use a piece of pasta or even one of your splatting tomatoes, though I think you should eat those, also, instead of chisel with them." Eyebrows rising a little, he crooked his finger at the basket of tomatoes. "May I?"

Eyes narrowing, she looked shiftily between the Quebecois and the basket of tomatoes. Vanessa seemed to consider it for a moment, then extended the basket toward him. "If you violate my tomatoes we may have to have words. I may not be able to shoot you normally but Laura's reflexes stand a chance," she warned. Okay, so she really didn't care if he "violated" the tomatoes but she enjoyed pretending to be protective of them. After all, that whole splat thing was fairly satisfying. "I think I can steal some fettuccine for chiseling. It seems like a chisel sort of food. When raw, anyhow."

"And it is delicious when cooked," Jean-Paul said, nodding as he took a few tomatoes from the basket. "I feel this is a good plan - we cannot lose. Either the invisible wall is properly chiseled or we have pasta." Humming a few bars of 'It's The End Of The World As We Know It,' he bobbed his head a little, then frowned. "These people, they talk a great deal, but they are not telling so much of the history." He wished he had something he could actually chuck at the screen, but that would have been fairly silly, all things considered, so he settled for eating a tomato - vindictively.

"Yes, yes this is a good plan. And I can actually make pasta without burning it or making it a soggy gross thing." This was a bit of a point of pride for Vanessa who had managed to burn numerous attempts at cooking meat recently. As she told Sam, she was pretty sure charcoal was good for digestion. That was her story and she was sticking to it. "Maybe they don't know the history," she suggested regarding the tv program. Vanessa finally bit into the celery with a satisfying crunch. "How much of people talking on television is useful and how much of it is them making it up to fill time anyway?"

“Not very much, I think,” Jean-Paul opined, shrugging a little. “But sometimes, they give useful information. The Egyptian man who is in every show about the pyramids - he is informative sometimes.” Though mostly he just ranted about how Egyptian artifacts should be returned to Egypt and how World War II had done more to damage Egyptian cultural identity than pretty much anything else. “If you ask me, I think the grave robbers have done as much damage as the Nazis,” he said, tipping his head to the side as the person talking on the show yammered on and on about the Mayan calendar and what it might mean.

"Aren't they something of a similarly qualified thief anyhow? Grave robbers are despicable because disturbing the dead is taboo. You don't dig someone up just to steal from them. The Nazis are horrendous because they locked people up and then looted their homes. In a way that's worse. They wanted to wipe entire cultures off of the face of humanity. So they locked them up and they took their stuff. They invaded countries and did more of the same to the people there. I think I'd rather be acquainted with grave robbers." Vanessa paused to chomp into her celery stalk again. She pulled the stringy bits off before chewing so she could be done with the stringy part. "Actually, it's possible I know some grave robbers." She shrugged. "They're lowlifes but the people are dead and their shit is in the ground. It's not exactly moral but technically they aren't hurting anyone unless you count the shit they've stolen from the pharaohs. Nazis are just bastards." Vanessa tilted her head and looked at Jean-Paul. "Why are we talking about Nazis again?"

"Mm... because they are more interesting than the doctors and professors talking on the television?" Jean-Paul quirked an eyebrow at Vanessa, amusement in the upturned corners of his lips. "Also, I think it is more that the Nazis, they shot off the Sphinx's nose, oui? But the grave robbers, they have robbed and sold many many ancient artifacts and relics and things. Though I believe it was grave robbers, also, who found the Dead Sea Scrolls, so perhaps they have made up for selling away Egyptian history by finding Christian history..." He paused to mull that over for a moment, frowning a little, then shook his head. "But I am not so sure this is a fair trade."

"Nazis shot off the sphinxes nose? Really?" She eyed him skeptically and bit into her celery again. A tomato followed so she could get a nice splat-crunch combo effect. It was squishy be thoroughly satisfying. Though it sort of made her want a bloody mary. Sadly, getting drunk while wearing Laura was far too much effort. Which was too bad, getting drunk could have been a nice way to get some sleep. Even drunk sleep was better than what she'd been getting lately. "You could argue that the grave robbers were spreading cultural awareness by selling off the Egyptian artifacts they stole. Yes, if they had left the tombs alone eventually archaeologists would have found them and had this amazing, in tact picture of the tomb to look through. On the other hand, if they hadn't stolen from the tombs would we have found them when we wondered where these artifacts had come from?"

Jean-Paul frowned for a moment, trying to remember the specifics. "It was the Nazis or Napoleon." He continued to frown, then shrugged. "One of them shot off the Sphinxes' nose - they were using it for target practice, oui? So I think it was the Nazis. They were searching for something, though I cannot remember what, and they got bored. However, I would say that they did not spread Egyptian culture so much as make a spectacle of it, oui? It was something to be gawked at, made fun of - these people went to such great lengths to preserve their history - the ruling classes particularly... and then it was scattered around the world. Sometimes, it is that you cannot have a clear picture of the whole thing because the puzzle pieces, they are in America and England and many other places. It is the same thing with the Greek and Roman architecture and things. Statuary." It was also possible that, when not baking, Jean-Paul had been watching a lot of documentaries on Netflix, but he would never admit it. Especially not the ones involving the cake makers and their bakery.

Vanessa shrugged and popped another tomato into her mouth. "So long as there are people there will be lowlife scumbags out to pillage and exploit. I mean, really? There are always opportunists. You can bemoan their existence all you'd like but get rid of the grave robbers and you will simply have someone find a way to steal from the dead before they are buried. You have conquering nations that come in, obliterate as much of the existent culture and scatter their artifacts as well. At least grave robbers wait until the people are dead, until that chapter of the culture is closed. I don't condone it. I think it's a right shitty thing to do either way. But personally? I'd rather you kill me before taking my shit. Imagine being conquered, enslaved and assimilated and watching them walk off with everything that had ever meant anything to you. At least if I'm dead I probably don't know or care. It's up to my descendants, should I have any, to take care of that. Really, the people left behind failed to provide security. I wonder if part of why people hate grave robbers, aside from them disturbing the dead, doesn't have something to do with their own self-blame that they didn't safeguard these important things better, that they didn't make it harder for someone to come in and rip their hearts out."

Jean-Paul ate another tomato, but he ate it slowly, mulling over what Vanessa had said. In an odd way, it drew a painful parallel between their situation now and her theory of why people hated grave robbers. Did he hate the people who'd taken her? Of course. Did he hate what he'd done to her? Absolutely. And was that hatred intensified by the fact that he hadn't been there to protect her? It might not have made a difference, he knew that, but then again... it might have. Perhaps he could have gotten her away from them. Perhaps, had they been working together, the people wouldn't have attempted to take her at all. There were so many possibilities, so many things that might have happened had he done even the smallest thing differently.

Swallowing the tomato, he let the silence between them grow heavy as the documentary on the Mayan calendar and its prediction of the end of the world next year went to commercial. The lights flickered over Jean-Paul's features, highlighting the shadows under his eyes, the gauntness in his cheeks, the fact that his hair was longer now than when he'd seen her last. Turning to look at her directly, he sat his vegetables on the coffee table and pulled one leg slowly up to his chest so he could loosely wrap his arms around it, resting his chin on his knee. "Je suis désolé, mon ami. I am sorry that I was not here."

Tilting her head, Vanessa looked at him questioningly. "What were you supposed to be here for, precisely, that you failed to show up for?" She could assume, of course. She could infer. He hadn't been here when she was missing. She understood that much from reading some of the journals. He obviously had not been here when she had been abducted, but then being here would have done no good anyway. Jean-Paul was fast but not fast enough to suddenly materialize in Boston when there was no reason to suspect anything was wrong. His presence or lack there of would have changed nothing.

"I should have been here," he said simply, shrugging. "I should have been here and I was not. For you so that you would not be alone on your case, maybe. To help to find you. To do many things that I did not do because I was not here."

In an effort to brush off the seriousness of the whole situation she shrugged and popped another tomato into her mouth. "I may not have taken you with me anyway. I don't know how they found me so I can't speak to that. Maybe you being here would have made a difference, maybe it wouldn't have. I wasn't there when you got your mind shredded telepathically. Consider us even now. You're here for the fall out. That's what matters, probably."

I wonder if part of why people hate grave robbers, aside from them disturbing the dead, doesn't have something to do with their own self-blame that they didn't safeguard these important things better, that they didn't make it harder for someone to come in and rip their hearts out.

Those words rang through Jean-Paul's mind, ricocheting off the torn and frayed edges of his telepathically shredded mind and he ate another tomato instead of replying immediately. "Oui," he said finally. "I am here for the fallout. If you need me, I am here."

She was watching him carefully. Jean-Paul looked more tired than she was used to. He looked less nourished, but maybe that was the exhaustion bleeding through. He looked generally more run through the ringer. Vanessa gave him a flash of a smile, though only one corner of her mouth pulled up into it. "I know that. You've already proven that. You showed up, after all."

The smile was different. It took him a moment to place it, but that was a Morgan smile, not a Vanessa smile. A Morgan smile on Laura's face. He wondered who he would wind up dealing with in the end - found he didn't particularly care, as long as his friend was still in there somewhere. He returned that smile with a tired one of his own. "Mon ami," he said quietly, "I will always show up, as you say, when you ask me to. Never doubt this."

"I never have," she answered just as quietly.