Vanessa and Adrienne - On Lint, Pizza, and Shoes

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

Adrienne brings pizza to Vanessa's and they discuss lint diversity, greasy pizza, Adrienne continuing to work for XFI, her return to NA, and scrotum-devouring-shoes.

Juggling two pizza boxes, Adrienne hit the buzzer for the X-Factor building since it was after hours. "Housekeeping!" she said in a singsongy voice when it connected. "You want mints for pillows?" Damn, she needed to stop watching Chris Farley movies.

Vanessa's voice came over the speaker in reply, "Only if it's the good ones that have that melt in your mouth effect. I'm sick of these dollar store crap mints you people always leave for me. Where is the appreciation of my habitation here?"

"I actually found these ones at the bottom of a purse I got at the Goodwill," Adrienne deadpanned. "They may have been the good ones at some point though, judging by the array of different coloured lint that's stuck to them. You just can't get that kind of lint diversity on the dollar store crap mints."

"Lint diversity's important. I'm glad to see you've finally really opened up to be more inclusive. For so long you were strictly grey lint and I was worried about how closed your lint circle seemed to be. This is a real sign of growth," Vanessa returned over the speaker.

"You have helped me see the error of my ways. I would like a bumper sticker and to subscribe to your newsletter. Also, you realize the pizza's getting cold, right?" Adrienne inquired.

"I like cold pizza." A moment later the door's buzzer sounded as the lock released to let Adrienne in. Vanessa was at her desk dealing with paperwork, her least favorite part of the job.

"Cold pizza may be the greatest thing since sliced bread," Adrienne mused as she put the boxes on the edge of the desk. "There's just something about congealed grease that's delicious. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that when it's already congealed it's in the same state as it'll be in when it's clogging your arteries so the body is that much happier to ingest it because it's like 'hey I recognize you, yeah, come join your brothers and sisters!' Okay, I don't get any points for saying that sounded better in my head do I?" she laughed. "I got the spicy pepperoni and bacon and the spinach and feta from Fat Tony's."

Vanessa blinked. "Did you really, seriously just use congealed grease as an attempted selling point for pizza? That's disgusting. You would have been much better served by saying it harkened back to college days of eating left over pizza whilst drunk. It may not have been an experience I've had but it's far more palatable than congealed grease." She wrinkled her nose.

"Yeah, sometimes words should just not come out of my mouth," Adrienne smirked, propping a hip on Vanessa's desk. "I've never had that experience either, I was still on my rigourous diet of Splenda and lettuce in college," she joked, throwing one of the boxes open and taking a slice of the spinach and feta. "And Marlboro Lights," she added as an afterthought. "I'm gonna grab a water- you want a beer?"


"Do I ever not want a beer?" She looked down at the paperwork in front of her and pushed it across the desk. "Paperwork doesn't count as working or being on the clock if the office is closed." As if to further reinforce her point, Vanessa grabbed a slice of pepperoni and bacon pizza. Mm...meat.

Adrienne returned from the mini-fridge with a beer and a bottle of water and pulled the chair from Bishop's desk over to Vanessa's. "Not normally, no," she chuckled, pausing to chew happily. "Hey, so now that you're back on the gumshoe detail, do you and Bishop want me to retire from my glamourous life as a consultant-type-spy?" She made a pouty face. "Please say it ain't so. I've really enjoyed it. And I could use the extra work to keep myself busy these days." The more distractions she had, the better.

"As if either of us are properly equipped to deal with your pouty face." Vanessa popped the top off her beer and took a long pull from it. "And, truth be told, we could use the help. I already offered Callisto a job. She's considering it. I actually think she wants to but has a lot of other commitments. We'll see how that shakes out. Anyway, if nothing else your powers would be dead useful. How much training did you get when you first came on?"

Grinning at the pouty face comment, Adrienne cracked open her water to wash down the pizza, narrowing her eyes at the bottle as if it were responsible for the fact that it wasn't beer and that eating pizza really wasn't the same without beer. "I think Bishop showed me where the coffee was?" she answered, not exactly smirking when she said it. She hadn't gotten much training, what with the circumstances of her offering to help. "Mostly I've just been going on my knowledge of Charlie's Angels and that show about the teen detective." That part was said with a smirk before she took a second slice of pizza. "I rode along with Laura a couple times, and Laurie showed me how to write up reports, and Bishop and I talked about some stuff in the car on the way to and from Boston..." she trailed off awkwardly, not sure if Vanessa wanted her stirring up their reasons for going to Boston. "Riley and Laura and I got pretty good at doing the Charlie's Angels pose, though. I'm fully trained in doing that."

Vanessa drank down more of her beer rather than answer immediately. She was going to need more beer for this, definitely. "As handy as the pose is, you'll need real training before I let you come on any other cases." She took another bite of pizza while she considered her options. "We have two ways of going about things, really. First, we train you properly and you have the option of working as a part time investigator during breaks in the school year. Our hours are too erratic for me to be comfortable giving you cases while you're teaching generally, but there can be case by case consideration there or you could act as back up when someone else needs it on their case which means you'd be playing tagalong with Bishop, Jean-Paul or myself. The other option is to treat you strictly as a consultant. You come in, you read stuff, you type up reports on your readings and you never go into the field or interact with clients. If you decide you want to play Nancy Drew later on them you would need to be trained at that time. It's up to you which you want to pursue." She punctuated her statement with her last bit of her slice being swallowed.

"I would like door number one, Richard," Adrienne answered without much pause. "Don't get me wrong, I like being a teacher, but it's... maybe it's because I've always had my company, but teaching just... isn't the be-all and end-all for me, y'know? I need more. I want more. I'm used to being busy." Hell, maybe that had been part of the reason she'd bought the cocaine- boredom. Adrienne wasn't going to overanalyze what she'd done, but on the other hand it helped to understand her own psyche to make sure she didn't do it again.

She took a sip of her water. "If I can best help you by staying in the office and never interacting with clients, that's your call, but I think being trained properly is important, no matter how I'm involved," she told Vanessa with a flash of her old businesswoman voice, which she didn't use very much anymore. "And now that I don't have my company, all my evenings are free for training or playing tagalong or writing reports. Except thursdays," she suddenly realized. "I have Narcotics Anonymous meetings on thursdays."

All other points of discussion promptly went onto the back burner and Vanessa froze with her arm outstretched in the course of grabbing another slice of pizza. "Come again?"

Adrienne put down her water and nodded, swallowing. "Narcotics Anonymous. I'm going to the meetings." She focused on the pizza box, combatting nerves that suddenly sprung up, an irrational fear that Vanessa would judge her. "I dangled a foot off the wagon the other night when I was three sheets to the wind and bought an eight-ball in the Zeitgeist washroom. I didn't use any, and flushed it when I sobered up, but the fact that some part of me thought buying it would be a good idea has me seeking help to make sure that doesn't happen again."

Vanessa said nothing for a long while. She was doing her best to not judge but part of her couldn't help it. What the fuck had Adrienne been thinking? What could possibly have pushed her into thinking that was a good idea?

Eventually she finished reaching for her next slice and tore a bit of it off. She was three bites in before she spoke. "I'm glad you realized what a bad idea that was and went looking for help to ensure it doesn't happen again. Is that why you're drinking water?"

"Yup." Adrienne rotated the water bottle on the desk, staring thoughtfully at it. "No alcohol for the next little while. No cigarettes. No painkillers. Nothing mood-altering. Just a whole lot of knitting. And gum. Until I feel a bit more steady," she shrugged. "Alcohol's never been a gateway addiction for me, but getting that drunk, letting my guard down like that, it really rattled my cage. So I want to do this. I think going through the program again is going to help, and they recommend that you go completely clean and sober from the start, so that's what I'm going to do. So hey, guess who's going to be the designated driver for all her friends and neighbours for the next little while?" She gave Vanessa a wan smile and jerked her thumbs towards herself. "This guy!" Self-deprecating seemed to be her natural state of mind when she was around Vanessa, she was able to let her natural mask of false bravado she usually wore with other people slip away.

"I love how you seem to think you'll manage not to kill us all with you quitting smoking cold turkey. Jesus, you'll be a right bitch on permanent PMS for ages. Actually, how do you expect me to not kill you?" Vanessa quirked a lopsided smirk in her friend's direction, seemingly recovered from her initial surprise. "I may need to tie you up and throw you in a closet for everyone's benefit Wednesday through Monday."

"I'm sort of banking on that, actually," Adrienne said as she returned the smile. "You locking me up or killing me if I try to kill anyone. Isn't that the job of a girl's oldest friend? Keep her from committing felonies?" She sipped at her water and contemplated another slice of pizza. "I'm just hoping you slide some new issues of Vogue and Vanity Fair under the door and let me play with the clothes and shoes in the closet."


"Sure, I'll just stash you in my mimic closet. If anyone asks where you are I'll just pretend I don't know and if anyone finds you by accident I'll claim I was saving you for later and it was part of our kinky sex games we like to get up. I doubt many people will question the validity of that statement. It is us, after all." Vanessa's offhand comments covered the slightly jarring reminder that she was, in fact, Adrienne's oldest friend. She'd already known this, of course, but they didn't exactly talk about their friendship often or the fact that Adrienne had been friendship challenged before Morgan had beat her out of that habit. It instilled both warm, fuzzy feelings and a little bit of panic being reminded she held that place in someone else's life. With Eamon and Thom she was always the little sister or daughter role, the one depending on them more than being depended upon. I'm going to fuck this up one eventually, the metamorph thought darkly and tore off another bite of pizza.

"Hmm, you seem to have that all planned out pretty fast there, Hollyhock," Adrienne pondered with a smirk, "almost as if you'd put some thought into the scenario of locking me in your closet before! Wait, your mimic closet gets HBO, right? And ESPN? Or at least a wi-fi signal?"

"Aye, well, I needed to set up contingencies for you being problematic long ago," Vanessa answered with a look of utter seriousness and an expression that seemed to imply this was the picture of normalcy. "And there were, of course, more intriguing reasons for such contingencies. No need to dwell on that, though. The important thing is the closet gets wi-fi but you'll need to provide your own device for leeching off it and be good enough to earn the code to use it. I can't just give these sorts of things away for free, you understand."

"'It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again'?" Adrienne quoted with a raised eyebrow, "is that how it's gonna be? I'll be good. Although if I'm not good, I'm sure my skin would make a very lovely coat." She petted her forearm with a finger reverently. "Of course you could just mimic me and have access to my skin whenever you wanted, so would that defeat the purpose of needing to make a coat out of me? Or would a coat still be useful because then you could wear it while you were still in your own skin?" She took another piece of pizza and chewed thoughtfully, as if seriously contemplating this question.

"You're a few sizes too small to be a coat whilst in my own form," Vanessa pointed out. "Though you could be a rather fetching pair of boots, perhaps. Possibly a skirt, but then when would I wear you? Hm..." Vanessa pretended to think this over, only she really was. Vanessa wasn't usually a skirt in a club sort of girl but she could perhaps make an exception if Adrienne was the skirt.

Adrienne raised an eyebrow thoughtfully, grabbing a piece of scrap paper and a pen and making a quick sketch. "You could probably get a skirt and a pair of boots out of me, as long as they were a pair of ankle boots. We could put a nice heel on them for when you ride your bike?" She finished her piece of pizza and as she sketched with her right hand she unwrapped a half dozen pieces of gum she pulled out of her purse with her left and popped them into her mouth. "Yeah, doing the math on the amount of skin I've got, I think there'd be just enough as long as the skirt was short enough," she smirked around a mouthful of gum. "The only question is whether you want the boots to be steel-toed or a wing-tip. Hmm. Which ones would kick more ass?"

Vanessa gave her a bit of a flat look, but it was an effort not to smile. "Wingtips would not offer me appropriate protection from kicking in things like shins. It's also entirely possible whatever bad ass qualities a wingtip may possess are immediately negated by the fact it is called a wingtip." Realizing her piece of pizza was gone, Vanessa grabbed another and bit into it happily. "Also, I'm fairly certain you're not supposed to chew that many bits of gum at once. You'll fuse your jaw shut."

Giggling over the commentary about wingtips, Adrienne scratched out one of the designs and started over. "I just like them because they're pointy," she mused. "I wonder if I could steel-reinforce a wingtip and then call it something more badass... but I guess at that point it's more like a bayonet or a knife in your boot. Ooo, I should make them steel-toed with a little blade that can pop out of the front of the sole if you stomp your heel! Of course then you might accidentally shiv someone at like, a hoe-down or something." After a moment of more scratching and sketching, she looked up at Vanessa with a confused look. "Gum? Oh! Yeah. Instead of smoking. I'm gonna say that a fused jaw is a good thing because then I won't be able to fit a cigarette in my gaping maw," she grinned.

"At least you'll finally smell better," Vanessa deadpanned and bit into her pizza again. Without missing a beat she veered back onto the topic of weaponized footwear. "Laura is a walking toe shiv experience. They come out the back, but they are highly inconvenient when they pop out accidentally. On the other hand, they could be very handy for stabbing some idiot in the balls who grabs you from behind. Who needs to elbow a bloke when you can get a bone claw lodged in his scrotum?"

Adrienne nodded thoughtfully in acquiescence of the bit about smelling better as she kept sketching. "We could do the back. I like the idea of stabbing grabbers in the balls. This could be the self-defense shoe line, or something," she chuckled. Damn, wouldn't that actually be a good idea? Other than being totally illegal, which sucked. "We'd just need Congress to make it legal before marketing it, but hey, I think you've got something here!" she joked. "Of course, not so much with the bone claws, unless you can get them out of Laura, more like steel for our purposes." Adrienne knew more about math than she did mechanics, but sketched out something with a lot of arrows and measurements and pointy bits and showed the sketches to Vanessa. "One Frost-skin ankle boot with toe shiv, the other with heel shiv. Too bad we couldn't get both in the same boot, but I think you'd lose the place for your foot. Or, y'know, you'd lose your foot with all the pointy parts. Probably a drawback to have a shoe where you risk cutting off your own foot with too many blades..."

As Vanessa looked over the designs with supposed interest she commented idly, "Sarah can grow bones and pull them out. You could always try to convince her to be a supplier of a limited run collection, then you just file down the bones to the proper shape and size and sharpen them as you like. Technically it's perfectly feasible."

"Hmm... I wonder how much of a cut I'd have to give her," Adrienne mused, pretending she was thinking about this idea seriously, even though of course she wasn't because it was crazy and would never work. "Of course, it's probably a hell of a lot cheaper to get them from someone who can grow them than to have something artificial made. I'm not really sure how the market for home-grown bone weapons is these days," she smirked, "but I can't rebuild my fortune if I'm giving all my profits to my supplier."

"Maybe she has an excess problem during certain times of the year and you could acquire the bulk supply at lower cost as you'd be doing her a favor by taking all that bone off her hands, perhaps literally.". Vanessa was actually pretty sure it didn't work that way for Sarah but they also weren't serious here. Or so she hoped.

Adrienne chuckled at the 'literally' part as she sipped at her water. "You want to be my procurement engineer?" she joked. "I can't pay you anything to start, but I have a feeling these babies will sell like hotcakes. Better than hotcakes, even. Possibly not because I don't really know what hotcakes are," she amended after a moment, "but our Self-Defence-Scrotum-Devouring-Shoes will definitely sell at least as well as hotcakes, I bet. And then we will be rich! Although," she added thoughtfully, "now that I'm not smoking or drinking, I have a nice little excess of cash for my budget."

"I'm sorry, I can't demean myself to the extent of working for free. I had been hoping we could arrange a situation in which you get my procurement services and I get sex," Vanessa explained in an utterly flat, serious, professional tone.

"Sex with me, or am I acting as a pimp and finding someone else for you to have sex with?" Adrienne questioned. "I'm not saying that's a dealbreaker, I just want to understand the terms of the situation."

Vanessa reached over and patted Adrienne on the head. "That's cute. I hardly require the services of a pimp."