Doug and Adrienne: Coffee (backdated)
Dec. 12th, 2011 01:35 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsBackdated to December 12th. Doug and Adrienne meet for coffee, and chatter about just about everything - Christmas presents, the Black Court, television...
Doug had staked out a table at CoffeeQuake, but hadn't ordered anything, preferring to wait for Adrienne to arrive. He hadn't actually seen her hardly at all since her return to the mansion, and so when the opportunity to catch up had arrived, he'd been happy that it had. He liked Emma's sister quite a lot, in fact she was one of the people he was probably closest to outside the "Trenchcoats". Sometimes it was nice to get away from the office and the cloak-and-dagger and at least pretend at something approaching normalcy.
Adrienne bustled into the coffee shop with her arms loaded down with bags, gratefully depositing them next to her in the booth as she sat down across from Doug. "Hey! Sorry I'm late," she apologized with a shake of her head. "I stopped off to grab some wool at the dollar store and on the way back the bus driver was trying to sort out some lost woman, it took aaaaaages." She saw that he had no coffee and apologized again. "Sorry, I didn't know you were waiting for me before you ordered! I hate to be the cause of anyone delaying a caffeine injection."
"It's more fun to order together," Doug waved away Adrienne's apology. The thought of paying for both his and Adri's coffee, given her financial straits since returning from Boston, may have crossed his mind and weighed into his reasoning. But he certainly wasn't going to articulate that aloud. "What'll you have?" he asked as he stood to go join the queue.
"I think I want to try an eggnog latte," Adrienne mused, standing next to him as she kept an eye on her bags in the booth. "Tis the season and all that, right?" she added with a smirk. "I think I may also need a holiday-themed pastry of some sort. What about you? Candy cane hot chocolate? Gingerbread latte? Pepperment Mocha?"
"Too many options," Doug observed. "This is my favorite time of year for drinks, but how am I supposed to pick?" By the time they reached the counter, he still hadn't managed to decide, so he went with the super scientific method of 'eenie meenie minie mo', even going so far as to make an out-loud production of it. The result was a gingerbread latte, and he managed to pay for both of them.
"Thanks," Adrienne said after the 'who's paying' fight had concluded. Of course it was all just a front- she didn't really want to pay, after all! "So do you have all of your shopping done yet?" Adrienne asked conversationally as they sat back down. "Oh wait, you're a guy. Do you know what day Christmas is on this year?" she smirked.
A casual middle finger rubbing the corner of his eye was Doug's reply as he took a sip of his coffee and the pair returned to their table. "I haven't gotten everything yet, but I've done most of my shopping," he admitted. "And it's on a Sunday, and you can bite me."
"You've done most of your shopping?" Adrienne asked incredulously as she sipped at her latte. "Wow, good for you! So when you say you haven't gotten anything yet, do you mean you still don't have ideas for some people, or just that you haven't picked the things you're thinking of up yet?" It was a very important distinction, of course.
"Yeah, Terry made me take her shopping, and I got most of it then." Doug stuck out his tongue at Adrienne's disbelieving tone. "And I mean that I haven't gotten ideas for some people. I got all the relatively easy gifts, I'm still trying to figure out the important ones." Which were also the most difficult. Like Jubilee. Or Emma. The eternal question, what does one get the woman who has everything? "For that matter, I have no idea what to get you, so I'm open to suggestions. Or bribes. Or whatever."
"Ooo, that means I'm one of the important ones?" The brunette grinned at him. "Well, I knitted sweaters for everyone on my list, if that helps you decide what to get me in return." She'd been knitting them since moving back to Boston, actually.
"Important and difficult," Doug noted with a raised finger. "A sweater, huh? Please tell me it's not one of those ridiculous 'wear it to appease the family even if it's hideous' type of sweaters. Please." Not that he wouldn't probably wear it at least once to appease Adrienne even if it was. Their friendship was important to him, especially when he still felt a bit...rocky when it came to his friendships around X-Force.
Adrienne's face fell. "Aww, I'm hurt." She paused for a beat then added, "hurt you assume I'd make you something like that. Me, the epitome of classiness and fashion sense? Seriously, Doug?"
Doug held both hands up in surrender. "I just wanted to make sure that your skills are equal to your sense, honest." He grinned to show he'd been teasing her in good fun to take some of the sting away.
She rubbed her arms as if she felt dirty. "I'm so insulted now. Doubting that my skills are equal to my sense. Ugh. So insulted. So why did Terry ask you to take her shopping, if you don't mind me being nosy? Does she not have a husband anymore?" Adrienne had assumed something was up when Terry had sent that message asking about alternate sleeping arrangements, but hadn't confirmed anything.
"Well..." Doug drew out the L sound as he thought. "First, sorry for stepping on a nerve. I was only teasing, promise." Now what to say about the rest. "As for Terry, we were out having breakfast, catching up..." Okay, maybe he skated a bit fast over that thin ice to get to the next part. "...and she decided I owed her or something." He shrugged. "It's Terry." Oddly, as much as he enjoyed being 'in the know' about gossip, he was a bit more reticent to share others' secrets himself.
"You owed her? You mean like... you made her pay for breakfast so you owed her a shopping trip or something?" Adrienne asked, playing the naive card since she had absolutely no idea what Doug meant.
"No, we each paid for ourselves," Doug said. The naive card might have worked a bit better if Doug wasn't able to see the curiosity in Adrienne's body language. "And I'm not sure, really. Terry logic isn't always earth logic. She said it was penance or something." He probably shouldn't have said that last, because it was likely to lead into an explanation of the whole 'confession' conversation he and Terry had had...
"Penance?" Adrienne frowned at the connotations of the term, though she kept her tone amused. "What the hell did you do?"
"Confession." Doug made airquotes with his hands. "Like I said, catching up on the past couple of years, and all the trouble we'd gotten up to in all that time." Of course Adrienne would grab onto that word and want to know what it meant.
"Okay, 'confession', 'penance'... this is getting really awkward to me for some reason," Adrienne commented as she sipped at her latte. She really needed to get her brain out of the gutter. "So how's your girlfriend these days?" she asked pointedly. Yeah, maybe the whole thing between Terry and Doug was completely innocent and Adrienne's mind just lived in the gutter and saw innuendo where there was none, but really, what innocent conversation talked about confession and penance?
Doug had no reason to feel defensive at Adrienne's question about his girlfriend. Nothing had happened between him and Terry. Except he did feel guilty and defensive despite all that logic. "She's fine," he said neutrally. "We're going to go skating at Rockefeller Center this week."
"Wow, sound a little less enthused there, pal," Adrienne snorted, picking up on the neutral tone. "Don't you like skating? I mean, you know how to skate, right?"
Doug rolled his eyes. "I played kiddie league hockey growing up. And I still own hockey skates." And apparently 'Joseph Crockett Jr.' was a hockey letterman. From New Mexico. However that worked out. Wacky reality warping, for sure. He pursed his lips and his eyes flicked off to stare into the distance. "It's about Christmas. And...my family." And the fact that his break with them was weighing down on him more and more as the holiday approached.
"Ah, and it's about how the Black Court took them away from you, am I right?" Adrienne inquired in a sympathetic tone, remembering all too well how lonely she'd been last year in Boston. "Maybe by next year the White Court will have completely defeated the Black and we can all have back what we had to sacrifice," she mused hopefully, smirking only slightly.
"Dear Santa - I've been an awfully good super-spy this year, can I please have my family for Christmas? Love, Doug." Doug's smirk was a bit more self-mocking as he composed the faux letter. "I'll drink to that." Too bad his coffee didn't have alcohol in it.
Adrienne gave him a rueful smile and knocked her paper cup against his. "I'm not drinking in public places right now but a coffee toast works just as well, right? Listen, we're gonna fix those assholes one day, good and proper. I know it. And we will drink to their destruction together, you, me, Emma, Manuel, Amanda... everyone they've fucked with."
Doug tipped back his latte after the toast. "And the last word they'll breathe before the end will be my name," he quoted. At Adrienne's curious cocking of her head, he elaborated. "I've been watching the La Femme Nikita remake with Maggie Q in it." Not that he identified with any of the characters in the show at all, with their being torn by competing allegiances and shades of gray. Not at all.
"I have no idea what that is, but okay!" Adrienne laughed. "That's funny... with all the television I've watched over the past year and a half since I had to stop working at my company and have been bored out of my mind, I thought I'd seen everything. Nice to know I haven't watched everything ever made." Because sometimes she got so bored it felt like she'd watched so much television she must have seen everything.
"Super spies are apparently the in thing with Hollywood right now. I've been eating a lot of yogurt for breakfast because I want to be more like Michael Westen," Doug observed with a sage nod. He hadn't gotten a few ideas for ways to improvise things from watching Burn Notice. Not at all.
"Clearly the solution is to watch even more television," he instructed Adrienne with a grin.
"That show is gonna get sued all to hell one day," Adrienne muttered with a roll of her eyes. That one, she did know. "You just know some idiot is going to think he can build something he saw on that show, explode his own ass off, and blame Burn Notice. And hell, if the solution is really to watch even more television, I might be the one who ends up exploding their own ass off, just to put myself out of my own misery." Not that she was miserable, persay, but if there really was nothing more to life than teaching for 40 hours a week, doing odd jobs for X-Factor, and watching television, it was a sad state of affairs. Especially when one was used to working between 70-80 hours a week on top of socializing, like she had been before the Black Court had shaken everything up.
"Now who's impugning whose skills?" Doug asked archly with a faux-hurt expression. "Like I'd ever explode my own ass off. If my ass ever gets exploded off, it's going to be by someone else."
Doug had staked out a table at CoffeeQuake, but hadn't ordered anything, preferring to wait for Adrienne to arrive. He hadn't actually seen her hardly at all since her return to the mansion, and so when the opportunity to catch up had arrived, he'd been happy that it had. He liked Emma's sister quite a lot, in fact she was one of the people he was probably closest to outside the "Trenchcoats". Sometimes it was nice to get away from the office and the cloak-and-dagger and at least pretend at something approaching normalcy.
Adrienne bustled into the coffee shop with her arms loaded down with bags, gratefully depositing them next to her in the booth as she sat down across from Doug. "Hey! Sorry I'm late," she apologized with a shake of her head. "I stopped off to grab some wool at the dollar store and on the way back the bus driver was trying to sort out some lost woman, it took aaaaaages." She saw that he had no coffee and apologized again. "Sorry, I didn't know you were waiting for me before you ordered! I hate to be the cause of anyone delaying a caffeine injection."
"It's more fun to order together," Doug waved away Adrienne's apology. The thought of paying for both his and Adri's coffee, given her financial straits since returning from Boston, may have crossed his mind and weighed into his reasoning. But he certainly wasn't going to articulate that aloud. "What'll you have?" he asked as he stood to go join the queue.
"I think I want to try an eggnog latte," Adrienne mused, standing next to him as she kept an eye on her bags in the booth. "Tis the season and all that, right?" she added with a smirk. "I think I may also need a holiday-themed pastry of some sort. What about you? Candy cane hot chocolate? Gingerbread latte? Pepperment Mocha?"
"Too many options," Doug observed. "This is my favorite time of year for drinks, but how am I supposed to pick?" By the time they reached the counter, he still hadn't managed to decide, so he went with the super scientific method of 'eenie meenie minie mo', even going so far as to make an out-loud production of it. The result was a gingerbread latte, and he managed to pay for both of them.
"Thanks," Adrienne said after the 'who's paying' fight had concluded. Of course it was all just a front- she didn't really want to pay, after all! "So do you have all of your shopping done yet?" Adrienne asked conversationally as they sat back down. "Oh wait, you're a guy. Do you know what day Christmas is on this year?" she smirked.
A casual middle finger rubbing the corner of his eye was Doug's reply as he took a sip of his coffee and the pair returned to their table. "I haven't gotten everything yet, but I've done most of my shopping," he admitted. "And it's on a Sunday, and you can bite me."
"You've done most of your shopping?" Adrienne asked incredulously as she sipped at her latte. "Wow, good for you! So when you say you haven't gotten anything yet, do you mean you still don't have ideas for some people, or just that you haven't picked the things you're thinking of up yet?" It was a very important distinction, of course.
"Yeah, Terry made me take her shopping, and I got most of it then." Doug stuck out his tongue at Adrienne's disbelieving tone. "And I mean that I haven't gotten ideas for some people. I got all the relatively easy gifts, I'm still trying to figure out the important ones." Which were also the most difficult. Like Jubilee. Or Emma. The eternal question, what does one get the woman who has everything? "For that matter, I have no idea what to get you, so I'm open to suggestions. Or bribes. Or whatever."
"Ooo, that means I'm one of the important ones?" The brunette grinned at him. "Well, I knitted sweaters for everyone on my list, if that helps you decide what to get me in return." She'd been knitting them since moving back to Boston, actually.
"Important and difficult," Doug noted with a raised finger. "A sweater, huh? Please tell me it's not one of those ridiculous 'wear it to appease the family even if it's hideous' type of sweaters. Please." Not that he wouldn't probably wear it at least once to appease Adrienne even if it was. Their friendship was important to him, especially when he still felt a bit...rocky when it came to his friendships around X-Force.
Adrienne's face fell. "Aww, I'm hurt." She paused for a beat then added, "hurt you assume I'd make you something like that. Me, the epitome of classiness and fashion sense? Seriously, Doug?"
Doug held both hands up in surrender. "I just wanted to make sure that your skills are equal to your sense, honest." He grinned to show he'd been teasing her in good fun to take some of the sting away.
She rubbed her arms as if she felt dirty. "I'm so insulted now. Doubting that my skills are equal to my sense. Ugh. So insulted. So why did Terry ask you to take her shopping, if you don't mind me being nosy? Does she not have a husband anymore?" Adrienne had assumed something was up when Terry had sent that message asking about alternate sleeping arrangements, but hadn't confirmed anything.
"Well..." Doug drew out the L sound as he thought. "First, sorry for stepping on a nerve. I was only teasing, promise." Now what to say about the rest. "As for Terry, we were out having breakfast, catching up..." Okay, maybe he skated a bit fast over that thin ice to get to the next part. "...and she decided I owed her or something." He shrugged. "It's Terry." Oddly, as much as he enjoyed being 'in the know' about gossip, he was a bit more reticent to share others' secrets himself.
"You owed her? You mean like... you made her pay for breakfast so you owed her a shopping trip or something?" Adrienne asked, playing the naive card since she had absolutely no idea what Doug meant.
"No, we each paid for ourselves," Doug said. The naive card might have worked a bit better if Doug wasn't able to see the curiosity in Adrienne's body language. "And I'm not sure, really. Terry logic isn't always earth logic. She said it was penance or something." He probably shouldn't have said that last, because it was likely to lead into an explanation of the whole 'confession' conversation he and Terry had had...
"Penance?" Adrienne frowned at the connotations of the term, though she kept her tone amused. "What the hell did you do?"
"Confession." Doug made airquotes with his hands. "Like I said, catching up on the past couple of years, and all the trouble we'd gotten up to in all that time." Of course Adrienne would grab onto that word and want to know what it meant.
"Okay, 'confession', 'penance'... this is getting really awkward to me for some reason," Adrienne commented as she sipped at her latte. She really needed to get her brain out of the gutter. "So how's your girlfriend these days?" she asked pointedly. Yeah, maybe the whole thing between Terry and Doug was completely innocent and Adrienne's mind just lived in the gutter and saw innuendo where there was none, but really, what innocent conversation talked about confession and penance?
Doug had no reason to feel defensive at Adrienne's question about his girlfriend. Nothing had happened between him and Terry. Except he did feel guilty and defensive despite all that logic. "She's fine," he said neutrally. "We're going to go skating at Rockefeller Center this week."
"Wow, sound a little less enthused there, pal," Adrienne snorted, picking up on the neutral tone. "Don't you like skating? I mean, you know how to skate, right?"
Doug rolled his eyes. "I played kiddie league hockey growing up. And I still own hockey skates." And apparently 'Joseph Crockett Jr.' was a hockey letterman. From New Mexico. However that worked out. Wacky reality warping, for sure. He pursed his lips and his eyes flicked off to stare into the distance. "It's about Christmas. And...my family." And the fact that his break with them was weighing down on him more and more as the holiday approached.
"Ah, and it's about how the Black Court took them away from you, am I right?" Adrienne inquired in a sympathetic tone, remembering all too well how lonely she'd been last year in Boston. "Maybe by next year the White Court will have completely defeated the Black and we can all have back what we had to sacrifice," she mused hopefully, smirking only slightly.
"Dear Santa - I've been an awfully good super-spy this year, can I please have my family for Christmas? Love, Doug." Doug's smirk was a bit more self-mocking as he composed the faux letter. "I'll drink to that." Too bad his coffee didn't have alcohol in it.
Adrienne gave him a rueful smile and knocked her paper cup against his. "I'm not drinking in public places right now but a coffee toast works just as well, right? Listen, we're gonna fix those assholes one day, good and proper. I know it. And we will drink to their destruction together, you, me, Emma, Manuel, Amanda... everyone they've fucked with."
Doug tipped back his latte after the toast. "And the last word they'll breathe before the end will be my name," he quoted. At Adrienne's curious cocking of her head, he elaborated. "I've been watching the La Femme Nikita remake with Maggie Q in it." Not that he identified with any of the characters in the show at all, with their being torn by competing allegiances and shades of gray. Not at all.
"I have no idea what that is, but okay!" Adrienne laughed. "That's funny... with all the television I've watched over the past year and a half since I had to stop working at my company and have been bored out of my mind, I thought I'd seen everything. Nice to know I haven't watched everything ever made." Because sometimes she got so bored it felt like she'd watched so much television she must have seen everything.
"Super spies are apparently the in thing with Hollywood right now. I've been eating a lot of yogurt for breakfast because I want to be more like Michael Westen," Doug observed with a sage nod. He hadn't gotten a few ideas for ways to improvise things from watching Burn Notice. Not at all.
"Clearly the solution is to watch even more television," he instructed Adrienne with a grin.
"That show is gonna get sued all to hell one day," Adrienne muttered with a roll of her eyes. That one, she did know. "You just know some idiot is going to think he can build something he saw on that show, explode his own ass off, and blame Burn Notice. And hell, if the solution is really to watch even more television, I might be the one who ends up exploding their own ass off, just to put myself out of my own misery." Not that she was miserable, persay, but if there really was nothing more to life than teaching for 40 hours a week, doing odd jobs for X-Factor, and watching television, it was a sad state of affairs. Especially when one was used to working between 70-80 hours a week on top of socializing, like she had been before the Black Court had shaken everything up.
"Now who's impugning whose skills?" Doug asked archly with a faux-hurt expression. "Like I'd ever explode my own ass off. If my ass ever gets exploded off, it's going to be by someone else."
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