Vanessa & Haller | Wednesday afternoon

[x-copycat.livejournal.com]

Vanessa meets up with Haller for lunch and he uses his other reason for being in the city to evaluate Vanessa's current level of crazy.

The interior of the Indian restaurant was every bit as unassuming as its storefront had lead Jim to believe it would be. Not bad, per se, and clean enough, but the furniture was older, and the walls were a bit on the bare side. Someone had made an attempt with Christmas lights on the front window, though he wasn't sure that improved the situation. Nonetheless, the smells were appetizing, and when the door to the kitchen opened he caught a glimpse of an actual tandoor in the kitchen. The staff, too, appeared to be from the actual geographical region of the food they served, which was always a positive sign.

It took him a few moments to locate his lunch companion. She was sitting at a corner table in the back, as far away from the restrooms and kitchen as she could manage. A seat from which she could watch the door, front window, and the majority of the dining area with relative ease. He concealed a small frown. A server approached to seat him, but Jim pointed to the woman and politely excused himself to join her.

"Vanessa?" the telepath said once he'd reached the table. He blinked at her, taking her in now at close range. ". . . you are pink."

She had noticed him the moment he had entered. Haller's height alone made him easy to spot, but so did the half-empty restaurant and watching the door intently every time it opened. Vanessa had, of course, diverted her gaze once she realized who it was, not wanting him to pick up on how twitchy being in unsecured surroundings made her. At least it was more secure than the sidewalk. Vanessa had been tempted to lay a guy out just for brushing past her on the sidewalk earlier in the day. That had been a good barometer for her. Vanessa had hard days and really hard days. Today was a nigh impossible day, but she was doing her best to fake her way through it. Especially since she'd made plans days ago to meet up with Haller.

The word pink drew a twisted sort of smile to her lips. "I feel that description does a great disservice to those who are actually pink. Have you met Lucas' girlfriend? Nice girl, also the shade of cotton candy. But, yes, compared to my typical hue with this bone structure I am rather pink." The whole time she spoke to him her eyes drifted. They were on Haller, then over his left shoulder watching movement out the front window, back on her companion and then over his right shoulder tracking a customer as they paid and readied to leave. They always came back to the tall brunette in front of her and his mismatched eyes, but the slightest notice of movement would draw her gaze away. It was back on him now, though, as she reached a foot out and pushed out the chair across from her. "Have a seat, you'll adjust to the pink eventually. Perhaps not before lunch is through but at some point, I'm sure."

"It's not bad, just a little strange. It's like looking at a photo-negative." Jim draped his jacket across the back of the chair and took a seat. It was odd to be able to see Vanessa's eyes rove in her own face; he wondered if she realized how much their natural red had concealed. "Thanks for meeting me, by the way. Sometimes I give my number to people we meet on missions if they seem like they could use someone to talk to, and there's this woman I met years ago who got snatched off the street . . . she's agoraphobic anyway, and this time of year is bad for her. The human contact helps."

"Is that why you're in the city? Visiting her?" It was sweet, actually, that he would give strangers he met in the course of playing hero his number just on the off chance they needed to talk to someone. Vanessa kept tabs on some former clients, particularly the ones from the neighborhood, and checked in with a number of business owners every morning but it wasn't the same. Even as strangers those people weren't strangers.

Her eyes moved off over Haller's shoulder for a split second before she identified the guy walking into the kitchen as staff, then they were back. The problem was that Vanessa still thought of herself as having red eyes. She knew intellectually they they were blue but she rarely remembered unless someone drew her attention to the fact. She had no idea how much she gave away as her eyes drifted and darted at the smallest noise or hint of movement.

Jim nodded. "She has a regular therapist, but she's . . . well, she was assaulted and . . . maimed, I guess. A mutant named Masque was taking humans and passing mutants and disfiguring them. She's fine now, but I saw her and the others like they were before the damage was reversed, and how they were living. I know what she came from." He gave the other woman a lopsided smile. "I was still a trainee. It made an impression."

Maimed. That made Vanessa frown. She couldn't help but let her mind, oddly enough, drift to Garrison. Namely, it went to his arm, the one they had found at the crash site. It was years ago so the memory was diluted by time, the emotional impact of it equally muted. Yet there her mind lingered, perhaps as a way of keeping her from thinking of herself bound in bandages after having her own skin peeled off. "I can imagine it would. 'Maim' tends to be fairly horrific for the word to be accurate and that sort of thing leaves an impression with just about anyone, I would think. Unless they are a psychopath."

"Yes. And I think for them, it was . . . worse, almost, than being butchered. Masque didn't really take anything. He just changed them. It was still their body, but not how it was supposed to be." The telepath's mouth thinned for a moment. "He's in the Vault. He deserved worse."

"How do you change someone's body but keep it theirs? Are we talking amputating an arm and affixing it elsewhere or mucking about with their insides only?" Vanessa could relate all too well with having a body that was hers but just not right. Recognizing herself in the mirror was something of an effort most days. Once in a while she just had to do a double take, but this morning she had stared in the mirror for close to a half hour trying to find herself in the new reflection. It was strange how hard it was for her to look past the pigment to the bone structure and features of her own face.

"He's a flesh-sculptor, basically. We only realized he existed after he attacked some of the students. He did things to Kyle, made him look like a dog, turned Jay into a gargoyle . . . extended Forge's flesh over his prosthetics. All functional. It turned out he'd been doing it for months." Jim made a disgusted sound. "He lived in the sewers. Most of his victims stayed with him, hoping he'd turn them back."

Vanessa could not help the way her eyes immediately moved down to stare at her left forearm. In her mind she peeled back the long sleeve and found nothing but bloody meat beneath it. It was the thing that seemed to haunt her the most, the thing she had been able to stare at long enough to sear it into her mind. The incisions all got stitched or stapled and usually bandaged but not that. Her other hand crossed her stomach to lay on her side, which she was oddly surprised to find solid and dry beneath her touch rather than warm and damp the way it had been the one time she had woken and touched it to find that it, too, had no skin.

"He's lucky all he got was the Vault," she returned more quietly than she'd been a moment ago.

The waiter arrived to take their orders. It had already been long enough for Jim to make an assessment. He recognized the removed look behind Vanessa's eyes, the heightened sense of alertness. The conversation was triggering her, and Jim knew what dissociation looked like. His brain was waving flags stamped with Post-Traumatic Stress.

Jean had been right to be worried. The first time he'd tried speaking to Vanessa the woman had been cordial enough, but made it very clear topical answers were all he was going to get. He felt guilty for using a meeting with a legitimately traumatized woman as an excuse and assessment tool, but he'd had to know. And with Vanessa he suspected an oblique approach was the only sort that wouldn't be immediately rebuffed.

"Anyway," Jim said after the waiter had left, "sorry about that. It's not really great lunch conversation. Um, what about the whole" he opened his hand and moved it in front of his face "pink situation? I thought blonde wasn't even your baseline coloration."

Thankfully, the waiter had drawn her attention and held it long enough that when he had gone she focused on Haller, not her arm. She still kept waiting to swipe at it, though. Somewhere in the back of her mind she just knew she had to wipe the blood away even though Vanessa knew there wasn't any blood to be found.

"It's not," Vanessa answered in the midst of shoving thoughts of skinless, bloodied arms further back in her mind. "The blue eyes are." She paused, realizing her gaze had drifted over Haller's shoulder again and he could see it. Because her eyes had been been blue, not red, and they were blue again now. Vanessa immediately fixed her gaze back on Haller's mismatched pair of eyes. "I was a redhead originally. I've no idea why I've got the blue eyes but not the orange-red hair."

"Well, both colors are pretty light in terms of melanin requirement," he hazarded. She was still a little glassy; Jim wasn't sure he was going to be able to get her back, but at least this topic was less graphic. "And you were never able to go normal-colored before? With your own face, I mean."

"Never. Jake could with the way his shapeshifting works. I've played with his mimic before, I know how his pigmentation shifting works. It's a pain in the ass but it doesn't work for my mutation." She was still struggling to forget the images and memories associated with her skinning. Vanessa was attempting to focus and concentrate and as such her gaze was intensely and unwaveringly glued to Haller. It was probably a bit disconcerting considering her wandering focus of only a few minutes ago but it was what she needed to do to stop herself from inspecting her arm and looking for where the skin would come apart and peel away. She was sure that she could find a seam and if she got the edge of it up the whole thing would peel off like cling wrap and unveil her arm. It probably wasn't even real skin.

"I always had to pick up a complete mimic of a person and I could only ever do it via touch for some period of time or another depending on how thorough I needed the mimic to be. I've never been capable of just shifting pigment or making changes that are contrary to the encoded DNA."

Jim furrowed an eyebrow. "I thought you could also mimic tattoos and scars. And doesn't hair-length and cut change, too? If so, genetics can't be the only thing your mutation depends on, because those aren't hard-wired."

"I - uh..." Vanessa paused in the middle of trying to find something to say. "I've gotten caught for not having scars people have before," she pointed out. That had nearly gotten her killed, actually. Now she was racking her memories for examples where she did or did not pick up scars or tattoos. "But...I have Aoife's tattoos." She frowned. "I just don't think about it, really. It...well, I can't remember if it's always been like that. I don't think it has. But I spent so much time in one form that I got used to them so I started thinking about the form as being complete whether or not it was, I think." Vanessa was speaking slowly, thinking things through as she went.

"Huh." The waiter returned to set a basket of naan in front of them. Jim felt himself slipping into professional mode despite himself. It was hard not to when it came to mutations. On the other hand, at least it seemed to be distracting Vanessa. "The times you didn't have scars, was it because you couldn't see them when you were copying the person, or you hadn't been touching them for long?"

"Um..." She reached out and ripped a bit of naan off from the larger piece. As she tried to sort through memories she occupied her mouth with chewing. Vanessa tried to shift from her most recent mimics backward. Laura, Andrew, the woman in Romania, the girl who was Aoife's basis, Daniel's mimic, the man in India last year...and back she went through mimics she had picked up on operations during her time at Snow Valley, the mimics she used for infiltration as a mercenary... And then back further to dozens if not hundreds of mimics she used during him time as a whore. Half a naan was gone before she spoke again.

"It's more recent than not that scars and tattoos show up. The last few years or so. maybe the past five years? Hair was a problem when I first manifested. I picked up my john's mimic but I still had long hair the first time I ever shifted. But it wasn't a problem the next time I picked up a guy's mimic a couple years later. I remember it being hard with female mimics at the beginning because my hair was sort of short and some of the women had long hair. I don't remember when it stopped being an issue, it just eventually wasn't. But I guess with scars...sometimes I know about them but I haven't seen them and I get them but they aren't always accurate? If I don't know about them I think I don't get them at all? But I'm not sure.

"It's hard to remember them all. Or know if I had scars and stuff or was missing them since most of the time I was wearing clothes around people who would know or I wasn't around anyone who knew the original, which is the most common situation I get into with mimics. So, yeah, I can't really say if it's a time thing or a not seeing it thing. It could be either." Vanessa bit into another piece of naan and considered things.

"Either way, it means your shifting's never been strictly bound to physical contact. There's some versatility there." He took a calm bite of the naan and inwardly thanked Cyndi for handling the choke of laughter Vanessa's offhand mention of mimicking a john had nearly elicited. However casually the subject was mentioned, it was never appropriate to start laughing at a history of prostitution.

"It's a little strange that it's started working for your base shape," he admitted, "but it sounds like your mutation's been making subtle adjustments for years. You've definitely got enough coloration in your internal rolodex now that your body's got a lot of reference material."

"Hm...maybe. But I don't know if I exactly store stuff, so to speak, in a way that really gives me a 'rolodex' to pull from. You would think familiarity would make it easier to adjust without picking up a person's mimic, but insofar as I am aware once I drop a mimic that's it. It's purged and there's a clean slate without any memory of previous mimics." She frowned and tried to think about that.

The waiter appeared again, this time placing their orders down on the table in front of them. Vanessa dipped the naan in her hand into the tikka masala sauce and continued to think what Haller said through. "Do you think maybe it does sort of store mimic profiles or somehow learned over time? As I used it more and more perhaps my mutation learned to adapt to the elements I needed that were not genetic? Yet, if I pick up Jake's mimic I still have two arms. I assume if I did the same with Scott I would have two eyes."

Jim scooped a glob of lamb curry onto a piece of naan. "If it learned to adapt hair-length and attempt to recreate scars you know about but can't see, I assume it has at least something to do with your perceptions and expectations. And, well . . . Scott at least looks like he has two eyes, and I can't imagine your body would have an easy time absorbing an entire extremity unless you picked up a power that let you do it. It might also have something to do with your sense of physical integrity. Even amputees can suffer from sensations of phantom limbs. Maybe your brain works the same way. As long as it's not a genetic shortening or absence of the limb, your mutation may just default to whole because that's what you're used to having." He took a bite of the naan. "That's what I'd guess as a telepath, anyway. How you see and think of yourself can affect more than you realize."

"Hrm, maybe. I've never picked up the mimic of someone who had a genetic deformity like a cleft lip or a lack of a leg or something like that. I believe Jake is the only one who has ever lost a limb that I've ever mimicked. He walks around with two arms thanks to the way his mutation can work." Not that he kept both arms if he stopped concentrating on it, such as mid-orgasm. She wasn't going to bring up Adrienne's trauma though. "So, yeah, maybe it's part what I think of him having and part that I think of people having two arms. I always wanted to try to play around with his mutation and do really strange things, like have eyeballs at the tips of my fingers like in that del Toro movie."

Jim grinned. "You mean multiply one of the most sensitive parts of your body by five on the digits you use to do almost everything? I'm sure nothing could go wrong there." He took a drink of water and cleared his throat. "Anyway, back to the pigmentation issue . . . could this actually be your new baseline coloration? I mean, can you go back to blue at all?"

The smile from his reaction to having eyeballs at the tips of her fingers was still in place when Vanessa answered, "Yes, just not by choice." A bite of chicken tikka masala with some naan stalled for time before she explained further. "Once since being...recovered. I fall asleep on the couch with someone while having a bit of a marathon of a TV show. I woke up blue in the middle of that. It's the only time I've been blue since waking up and I've been like this," she gestured to herself from her hair downward, "ever since I tried to leave my apartment afterward."

"Hm." Jim frowned slightly and spooned curry onto a heap of basmati rice. "Do mimics work when you're pink? I mean -- okay, I thought how it works was that to shift you have to start from blue. Is that right?"

Vanessa tapped the end of her nose with the tip of a finger. "Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. I've got to start from zero, which in my case is blue." She took another bite of sauce-slathered chicken. "Admittedly, I haven't tried to pick up another mimic since I turned pink." Her nose wrinkled up at mention of the color.

After wiping her hand off on her napkin, Vanessa held it out, palm up. "But I can try if you want me to."

For an instant Jim hesitated. Contact, especially skin-to-skin, was normally only used to sharpen his telepathy or offer comfort. It wasn't often he was the giver rather than the receiver, even if all he was donating was his genetic code. Then again, he was starting to have some suspicions about Vanessa's current coloration, and the exercise might help clarify it.

"All right," Jim said, laying his left hand over hers and lifting his drink with his right, "just stop short of the powers. Psi can be a little unpredictable, and anyway I think they'll want the table back before then."

"If we are sitting here holding hands still in an hour and a half it won't be powers-related," Vanessa joked and winked at Haller. The joke, oddly enough, saw her more relaxed than she'd been the entire time. With his hand in hers, she settled in place and dipped a piece of naan in her chicken's sauce. "It only takes a few minutes. Gimme five minutes tops. If I can't copy you at that point then it's just a no go and more time would be useless. I haven't needed more than five minutes to pick up a basic, physical mimic since I manifested unless you count being unconscious on a plane and picking up Laura."

Vanessa was remarkably conversational as she explained things. Having something to focus on that wasn't explicitly about her trauma was helping. Granted, their little experiment was about whether or not her base pigmentation had changed irreparably or not, but it wasn't necessarily about being a science experiment for months. At least not to Vanessa's mind. She had returned to checking every movement she caught out of the corner of her eye but the effort was lazier now than it had been before she had tried so hard to focus on Haller so he wouldn't realize how jumpy she was.

"So it also works when you're unconscious?" Jim asked, spearing a piece of lamb. Vanessa appeared to be calmer, but the awkwardness he felt at holding a woman's hand was evening it out. He also suspected his sleeve was in a patch of spilled sauce, but since it was already done there was really no point in moving it.

"Technically it can. It was a passive thing when I first manifested but I figured out my off switch, so to speak, as quickly as I could so I didn't have to just avoid touching anyone at any time. Aside from when I was unconscious on the plane back from Prague I haven't shifted passively in ages." It was funny, but the tension in Haller's wrist and arm didn't faze Vanessa. She had been iffy on physical contact in the past couple months, but under these circumstances she just went back to that patient mindset she always went to when she was waiting to pick up a mimic.

"Hm. Okay." That was another potentially important detail. Jim took another drink of water and studied Vanessa's roots. They didn't appear to be getting any darker, but he doubted as much time had passed as he felt it had. He exhaled slowly and shed a little of his tension. "When it's happening, can you tell?"

Vanessa's hand shifted in his, careful to never break contact but also finding a more comfortable interlocking of their grasp on one another. "Hm, how do I explain this? Is there anything that you do so often that you do it without thinking about it? Like a routine almost? Get up, go to the bathroom, turn on coffee maker, stumble into shower...that sort of thing? Well, I sort of have that with my shifting. I tend to hold back until I'm reasonably sure I've got enough to shift, because the slow version isn't that pretty to watch, honestly. Usually I can feel a sort of build of pressure but I'm so used to it that I don't really notice it all that much. I'm not getting it at the moment but like I said, I could just be too used to it to pick it out." Especially with all the other stress she was trying to ignore or that was practically staring her in the face.

"So . . ." Jim began, then remembered to wipe his mouth with his napkin rather than his sleeve just in time, "basically what you're saying is that we'll know for sure in five minutes, but until then we just stare awkwardly at each other and wonder if it's taking."

"Pretty much." She gave him a lopsided grin and squeezed his hand a little. "You can think of it as a reminder why first dates are dreaded so much, the awkward staring." She had to make light of it because, really, with someone as clearly uncomfortable with casual contact as Haller it was the only real option. It was either try to keep things light or compound the awkwardness of the situation. Really, there was nothing not awkward about hanging around holding someone's hand so you could turn into them.

"I guess." Jim took a drink of water and hoped his face wasn't actually flushing. His first actual date had been awkward, but that had been more due to the knowledge people traditionally had it before sex.

"These are the things television has taught me," Vanessa informed him with an air of certainty. "Ergo, they must be true." She managed to fill most of the remaining time of the five minutes with dipping naan into sauce, eating, and making very idle conversation to try to distract Haller enough that he didn't start twitching or shifting around restlessly or some such.

When five minutes had come and gone Vanessa went reaching inward to find the build up Haller's mimic inside her. It was usually pretty easy, almost like she just had to find a box straining to burst from how full it was. Then all she had to do was pop the lid and the shift would happen. Only there was no box. There was no pressure of a mimic trying to erupt and take over her form. There was just...nothing. Vanessa frowned a little and slid her hand out from under Haller's. "Nope, still have to be blue to shift."

Jim frowned pensively, setting his fork down with a click. "Huh. So not only is this not your baseline, it means your power is already active." He regarded her thoughtfully. "Your mutation must have figured out how to pull pigmentation only."

Dominate hand free again, Vanessa took up her fork and speared a piece of chicken. "Unfortunately, it jumped the gun. Obviously it was so happy to have a new trick that it didn't stop to make sure it could undo it as well." She bit the chicken off her fork as if it punctuated her point.

"But you've changed back once," he pointed out, "so you're not physically stuck. You just don't know the conscious trigger."

Vanessa nodded. "Aye, something like that. Though I also shifted back to my natural form while asleep, something I have never been able to do before. Clearly it's not just my trigger for dropping my mimic that's changed."

The telepath nodded. "I have to say, my impression is that it's mental. I mean . . . speaking personally, there's no reason I can't use telekinesis. It's mine. But something back there . . ." He rubbed his forehead. "Part of me just decided it didn't want it. The decision wasn't conscious, but the effect is real."

What made her frown more than anything was the comparison to Haller's own segmentation with his powers. He thought it was essentially all in her head, something she had assumed but for more biological than psychological reasons. More than that, though, was that he thought it was the same sort of thing he had where one part of her brain decided something and the rest went along with it without allowing her to weigh in on the decision. Vanessa did not like that answer, to say the least. "So you think my unconscious has sort of...detached control of my mutation from my consciousness and is calling the shots whether or not I like it?" Her voice was calm, much calmer than she felt. She could feel muscles along her shoulders and down her neck tighten as she fought off the implication that it was all her own damned fault.

"You've never gained conscious control of your telekinesis..." Vanessa faltered, trying to find a vague way to reference his dissociative identity in public without stating it plainly, "like this. Other elements are in control of your telekinesis. I know my circumstances differ greatly from your own...but if you're right - just hypothetically - what are the odds that I wind up with the same net effect? If your guess is correct what are the odds I regain control of my shifting and the ability to de-pink at will?" Because the scary thing, the really scary thing, was that this was all her own damn fault and she would never be able to undo what she had done. She would be at the whim of her mutation. Blue when it wanted her to be blue, pink when it wanted it...and what if she woke up and her mutation wanted her to be Manuel? Or Monet? Or military or political personnel she had impersonated on jobs in the past? It would be the worst sort of nightmare.

"Vanessa, hang on. Don't get ahead of me here." He was starting to lose her again -- her eyes were going unfocused, and her breathing had picked up. He'd been afraid this was going to happen. Jim raised his hands -- slowly -- and said in a tone of complete calm, "I was just giving you an example. This is an entirely different situation. It's not uncommon for mutations to go a little strange after extreme stress" which was probably the biggest downplay of her abduction anyone had ever used "almost like a form of somatization. Instead of pain, you get unpredictability. It can happen when you're displacing strong emotions." He looked her directly in the eye and said, in that same, calm tone, "And it is not permanent."

Displacing strong emotions. The wording echoed through her head on repeat. Displacing. Displacing, as in not dealing. As in shoving things into a box in her head and shutting it up in the attic. Displacing, as in not dealing. That all came together with what Garrison had said over dinner not long ago. Vanessa's eyes finally pulled focus on Haller again. "You think I should see a shrink."

Jim gave her a lopsided smile. "I think talking will help. It could be with a shrink, but it doesn't have to be." And if his sense of her was right, it probably wouldn't. He understood her hesitation. There had been days one or the other of him had sat in a therapist's office in silence. Or, if the day had been bad, in the middle of broken furniture.

"I don't want to push you into anything you don't want to do," he continued, "but if you're worried about your shifting . . . this is the first thing I'd recommend to anyone. There's a lot that goes on between our mind and our powers. It's one of the things I study." Jim paused for a moment, studying the pale woman, and nodded. "Ignoring everything else, could you just tell me one thing? The one time you woke up blue -- how did you feel? Not physically, but emotionally."

Everyone wanted her to see a shrink. Her nose wrinkled but she tried to focus on Haller's question, not the fact that he and Garrison were in agreement about her talking to someone. She concentrated on pulling up her memory of the night Garrison was over watching Kung Fu. Her first thought was that her clothes didn't fit, they cut into her side and stomach and her ankles were cold. But Haller said not how she felt physically. So what did that feel? "I don't know, the way you feel when you're alseep. Really asleep. Peaceful, I guess. Like everything in my head finally went quiet so it was just me in there and not ... all my other stuff. Why?"

Jim nodded. "Because I wanted to ask . . . since that time, have you felt like that again?"

"No." That answer didn't take any time to think about. "But I haven't slept much so why would I?"

"I'm . . . inclined to say that's it's own problem," Jim said, a touch of wryness in his voice. "But here's the thing. You said you were with someone when you fell asleep, right? So when you woke up . . . did you feel safe?"

Vanessa shrugged. "I don't know. I guess it's possible. You know Garrison, he's a big damn hero and all." She smiled a little because she found herself amusing even if Haller didn't. "I wasn't exactly cuddled up in his arms, though. Safety isn't something I associate with being asleep on someone."

The telepath returned the smile, though for a different reason. "You said you felt peaceful. In my experience, that doesn't happen if you don't feel at least a little safe." He spread his hands on the tablecloth, the meal now completely forgotten. "But here's my point. Based on what you've told me, I think you were able to shift then because you felt something with Garrison you haven't felt otherwise. Because of that, whatever was keeping you out of your baseline relaxed. That's why I think that it might be psychological -- and why I don't think it's permanent."

What she may have felt with Garrison that she hadn't or didn't feel the rest of the time was being pointedly ignored. Garrison was a bit of a tricky topic for Vanessa, even when she was only talking to herself about him. She would rather not have to acknowledge what he meant or what effect he had on her. "So it's all in my head and I should talk to someone who may or may not be a shrink so I can fix my head and be blue at will again?" Well, that was probably a bit of an oversimplification but it skipped the bits she didn't want to mention aloud.

"Essentially," Jim agreed. He picked up his fork again and studied it for a moment, then returned his mismatched gaze to Vanessa. "Though there is something you could do on your own. Just something to think about, I mean."

An arched eyebrow answered him. "If you ask me to ponder the deeper meaning of life and its undercurrents you may find my homework somewhat delayed."

"Uh, no. That's more of a professor question. I'm the guy who can barely ponder the deeper meaning of Snoopy Come Home." Jim tapped his fork lightly on the side of his dish and gave her a faint smile. "Just think about what might make you not want to change back right now. Not why you couldn't, but why, maybe, you wouldn't. Just hypothetically."

"All I've been trying to do is figure out how to be blue again," she argued a bit more defensively than she meant to. Vanessa clenched her fist, held it for a moment and then forced her hand, and the rest of her, to relax. "Fine, okay, I will think about it. I promise. I don't think I'll come up with anything, but I will do the serious pondering just for you." At least she managed to end on a rather charming tone to help counter her defensiveness from a moment before.

"Thank you. And hey, pondering how to get blue again hasn't worked so far. I doubt trying an alternate route won't hurt." He reached across the table, slowly and very obviously so she knew it was coming, and rested his hand briefly on hers. Jim smiled again, wider this time. "In exchange for your tolerance, I'll get the bill."

The returning smile had more to do with the hand on hers coming from the guy who had been utterly uncomfortable with similar contact before. "Love, you always get my tolerance for free. But lunch can buy me doing your homework."

"Fair enough." Jim knew she still couldn't be happy at the implications, but the good thing about irritation was that it meant the other person was emotionally present enough to feel it. Today, he was calling it a win.