Vanessa & Adrienne | Saturday night

[x-copycat.livejournal.com]

After a successful stake out with Vanessa Adrienne decides to finally poke at some sore spots in an effort to get her friend to stop bottling up so much. She succeeds to a point but in typical fashion with the two their conversation veers widely off topic.

After a countless number of Thumb Wars, games of Twenty Questions and I Spy and Would You Rather, there had finally been some movement at the athletic equipment warehouse, with the truck rolling up being unloaded light by the warehouse manager and the driver who, as X-Factor had thought when they took the case brought to them by one of the employees, were in on the scheme together. Vanessa had gotten the money shot easily. Adrienne held up a hand from her position in the driver's seat for a high five. She didn't normally go with Vanessa for stakeouts, but was still trying to learn proper procedure and technique and all that so she'd joined her friend on this operation. "Nice job, Veronica Mars," she grinned.

Vanessa shook her head. "Maybe I should go by Veronica while I'm pink and blonde. I could get a pit bull and name him Backup." She smirked a little. "I feel like Lucas would approve of having some Backup 'round the office and out in the field with me. Though I suspect he would train the dog to attack bad guys or summat and that could get a bit useless in the field when we are supposed to be photographing, not apprehending."

"The dog on the show only attacked when commanded," Adrienne mused, waiting for the truck to clear out so she could put the car into gear and head back to the office. "I'm sure it could be trained to just take photos though," she nodded sagely. "I don't know if I could see you with a dog, though. I think I see you as more of a plush goat-type person."

"Make sure Lucas is aware of this training caveat, aye?" Vanessa fished out a paper specifically so she could roll it up and hit Adrienne over the head with it. "I see myself more as a snake and frog kind of person. I could have a dog, though. Then I'd have someone to go running with. Aye, and a dog wouldn't freak people out half as much as if I wanted to walk around with a giant boa wrapped around my shoulders. Or maybe people are more accepting than I'm giving them credit for. What do you think?"

Adrienne threw a hand up against the paper assault, making a face at Vanessa. "I think a giant boa would be too sexy for words!" she bluffed, though it was quite possible Vanessa knew how afraid of snakes she really was. "Seriously, we get you a pair of thigh-high stiletto leather boots... white, I think, with a white leather bustier and a snakeskin-print miniskirt, tease your hair up a bit..." she trailed off, smirking to herself at the mental image. "Oh, sorry, I lost my train of thought. What were we talking about? Ah yes, you getting a guard dog. You should get one of those Japanese fighting dogs, a... Tosa something? They look so sweet and adorable. And if you had a guard dog maybe I wouldn't worry about you so much," she added pointedly.

And completely derailing from the topic of anyone worrying about her, Vanessa went for the obvious, easy deflection. "I think you're confusing me with your sister's Mistress of Pain look again. I can barely stand in stilettos, never mind walk." Vanessa reached down, pulled up a pant leg. From inside her boot she pulled a stiletto switchblade and opened it. "Unless you'd like to revise that to actual white-handled stilettos, anyway. Then we could consider it."

Adrienne noted the deflection and glanced over at the stiletto, giving Vanessa a smirk to show she appreciated the joke. "Sadly, the Mistress of Pain isn't exactly striking fear into the hearts of naughty men and women with that look these days," she commented ruefully. "The being-sixteen thing fucked her up big time, and she can't shake it. And I don't know why. It's killing me," she admitted pointedly, eyes on the road so she could avoid looking at Vanessa. "You want to help the people you care about, y'know? Be there for them. But if they don't accept that you're there to talk to so you can try to help them work through it, all you do is worry, and keep worrying the longer it goes on."

Vanessa shrugged, the point Adrienne was making only sort of half sinking in. "Sometimes you need to give people the space to freak out or deal on their own, though. Sometimes people trying to help only exacerbates the problem and makes it harder to deal with whatever it is. Sorry that she's having trouble coping, though. I know a number of the guys over at Snow Valley didn't have a great time of things after that whole thing went down." She didn't mention David and that he had looked worse than Vanessa when she had dropped by the office to feed him. Vanessa didn't think Adrienne knew him that well. Besides, insomniacs had to have each other's backs, right?

"I know," Adrienne acquiesced goodnaturedly, turning onto the freeway and pointing them back towards District X. "And I get that. I do. It's just... that doesn't make it easy, y'know? That's all I'm saying. That I can understand it, and accept it even, but that doesn't mean I don't still worry my face off. It's like with you and I," she shrugged, eyes on the road, figuring it was better to just say what she was thinking rather than continuing to beat around the bush. "I know I need to give you your space, and believe me, the last thing I want to do is push you and make things harder for you, or meddle and end up messing up what we have. I would never want to mess up our friendship. So I don't push. But that doesn't mean it doesn't still kill me when I know you're hurting because you're avoiding dealing with what you've been through. Yet all I can do is wait for you to be ready to talk to me, so... that's what I do." She kept her tone light, non-judgmental, and detached, like she wasn't talking about the woman sitting next to her.

So Adrienne had finally begun to run out of patience, it seemed. Vanessa knew her friend would eventually get sick of letting her dodge the topic. Actually, she'd been surprised she had gotten away with it for so long. After all, once upon a time Vanessa had been the one to give Adrienne the lecture about how it was okay to need people. Fuck. "There's nothing to say about it. It happened, it's done. That's all there is to it." Perhaps slightly avoidant but it's how she felt. There was no use in combing over the details of her incarceration, as she'd come to view it. It wouldn't change anything.

"Uh... huhh," Adrienne mumbled, giving a Look even though she still had her eyes focused on the road since crashing and killing them wasn't going to do anyone any good. "Okay, so just refresh my memory again?" she asked lightly. "If that's all there is to it, what's the other thing that's causing you to be all sleep-deprived and jumpy and uber-paranoid? Cuz I think I missed the part where you actually moved on from July-to-October-Twenty-Eleven and then something else happened."

If looks could kill Vanessa's would be pulling an admirable attempt right now. As much as she loved Adrienne, the brunette's pointed observations could be...inconvenient. "I never said it was life as usual after...everything," the blonde eventually returned in a short, clipped tone. "What, you think detailing the gruesome details will help? Maybe you can find whatever I was wearing when they found me. Charles may still have it around for some reason or another. You can read it and then shiny, happy memories follow you everywhere as well."

"Would it be easier for you to deal with what you're going through if I did that?" Adrienne asked with another shrug, tone sincere. "Because I'll do that for you. You're my best friend, if that's what you need I'll do it."

The frustrated growl stood no chance of being contained. "No, it's not going to make anything easier. It'll just make you have that annoying concerned face people like breaking out around me. Mostly it'll piss me off."

"I hate that face. And the last thing I want to do is piss you off. So I don't think I'll be doing that then," Adrienne murmured, risking a half-smirk in Vanessa's direction as she navigated them through the outer burroughs. "So you admit things are hard, then? When you said 'it's not going to make anything easier'? Things, therefore, are hard?"

Crossing her arms over her chest, it was possible that Vanessa was looking remarkably like she was sulking. Which she was. "They aren't easy," she grudgingly admitted. It was like rock salt on her tongue letting those words out. "Some people might classify that as hard, but it is what it is. And if you tell me to see a shrink I am jumping fucking ship at the next light and walking home, hopping a cab or taking the subway."

Adrienne shuddered visibly. "Oh, Christ no! I'm not telling you to see a shrink. Just... talk to me. You talked me through the worst of my nightmares, so just know... I'm here for you. You know, when you're ready. Which I think should be now, but, y'know, it's up to you," she laughed. "Don't go jumping out of the car."

Frowning, Vanessa fidgeted visibly. Her thumbs twirled around one another despite her clasped hands. "I wouldn't know what to say, honestly. Garrison's the only one I know who's been through anything like it and...it's still not the same. And I don't want that horrified, pitying look on your face where you look at me and think I'm fucking shattered China on the floor after some housewife's tantrum, you know?"

Traffic was minimal at that time of night so they were already nearing District X and the XFI building when Adrienne scoffed. "Me? I don't even know how to make a pitying look! I couldn't make one if my life depended on it." Horrified, sure, and Vanessa had already seen that one on her before, but pitying, not so much. Not something she showed outwardly, at least. "There's also nothing you could ever say to me to make me think you're shattered china, Vee. I know you too well to ever think that." She parked the car in the lot next to the building and cut the engine, finally looking over at the other woman. "Even if you feel like you're cracking, you're not shattered." She and Emma were alike in that regard, she thought to herself. They were both so strong, even when they were hurting.

"I don't think the others agree with you." Her tone was low, almost resigned, and the smile had a touch of bittersweetness to it. Vanessa got out of the car rather than saying anything else. She doubted Adrienne was as impervious to wearing the pitying expression as the other woman thought she was. After all, what you thought you were showing outwardly didn't necessarily mean the same look was on your face. Faces betrayed people every day.

Following her out of the car, Adrienne closed her door with a little more force than was absolutely necessary. "So? Who fucking cares what 'the others' think?" she muttered snarkily. "I'm not 'the others'. We're not talking about how other people might perceive you here, cuz I don't give a shit about that, we're talking about how you are because it's pretty obvious to me that something is eating at you and you're avoiding dealing with that in any way, shape, or form. I'm not saying I know how you should deal with it, I just think you can't have an idea of how until you actually say something other than 'it happened, it's done.'"

"I have nightmares, is that what you want me to say?" Vanessa's pace had picked up, not because she could lock Adrienne out of the building, but it was a tempting thought nonetheless. "There's no way to stop those. Talking to people or getting my head shrunk or doing a magical pagan dance naked under the moon...none of them will get rid of the nightmares. Not when most of them are fucking memories anyway, okay? You don't get okay with having your skin sliced through or cut off just because you talk about it. That shit doesn't help. You just have to wait until you've got more distance from them and until the memories get fuzzier. And maybe that takes years. But talking about it does nothing but make the memories sharper. So, what, I should reset the fuzzing process because everyone else wants me to talk about it?"After some angry fumbling with the building's front door, Vanessa got it unlocked and practically shoved it open. She didn't exactly stomp up the stairs but her steps were measured and precise, making a sharp thud every time her foot connected with a stair.

"Okay, good start!" Adrienne chirped in her best shrink voice, the line dripping faux optimism as she followed Vanessa up the stairs. "Look, again," she carried on in her normal tone, "I'm not saying I want you to talk about the details of what happened. It just... seems like there's something more. I don't know what, but something, beyond the atrocities of what was done to you, to be making you Not Okay. I know there isn't a set way to deal with this sort of thing, but Vee, from everything I know about you and how you deal with trauma, and the way you've been dealing since November, something else is just... off. Why did you break up with Warren?" she asked suddenly, curious.

The faux shrink tone was overwhelmingly unappreciated. Maybe Vanessa would have said as much if Warren's name had not come up. When it did she stopped dead on her step before continuing on to the third floor so they could get the photographs into the agency database right away. "There were a lot of reasons why I broke up with Warren. Not the least of which was that I wasn't exactly up to being anyone's girlfriend when I woke up. I'm still not, really."

Adrienne stared at Vanessa's door longingly, starving and hoping they could at least grab a bite to eat before doing the offical work stuff but she followed the other woman up to the office without protest. "Fair enough. So what were the other reasons?" she inquired, still rather confused about the whole thing.

Vanessa unlocked the door to X-Factor Investigations, hit the lights and made sure the alarm wasn't on before heading over to her desk. "I don't know." She fished out the cable and hooked it up to her tower and to the camera and sighed. "No, I do know. It's just a bit fucked up really. The whole thing was fucked up. I wasn't in a relationship with him because I was crazy for him or smitten or girlishly over the moon about him. I was with him because it was sort of the logical conclusion. We'd been fucking for months. We started hanging out. We weren't really just friends with benefits. There was...affection. And really it was my fault it turned into a relationship anyway. It was all sort of accidental. We fell into bed together less than a week after I'd broken up with Lex, who you know I'd been mad for once. And then we just sort of...kept falling into bed together. It became...habit. Routine. Comfortable, I suppose. There was the potential there for something with someone else and when that was put to a halt for entirely separate reasons, well... Warren became the rebound."

She stopped fishing through the folder of photos she'd pulled up on her monitor to look over at Adrienne, expression a little sad. "I didn't feel for Warren what someone ought to feel for someone they're in a relationship with. And after everything...I couldn't keep up what I thought of as something of a sham on top of trying to keep people from telekinetically restraining me or locking me in hospital rooms. He was lowest priority. And he was easy to put there because I wasn't in love with him. I didn't care about him the way I'd cared about Lex or Sam or even," Garrison. Vanessa cut herself off and waved a hand through the air, dismissing the abruptly halted sentence. "And in the end, after it all, I didn't know why the fuck staying with him was important. And even now there's this part of me that feels some sort of hope that if I sort my shit out we'll get back together. But I don't know why. I don't want to be the person who winds up with someone she fell into bed with to get over not one but two other men."

Adrienne didn't say anything until she'd used the facilities and grabbed a bottle of water out of the mini-fridge, settling into a chair across from Vanessa's desk. "Well," she said hesitantly, "you're not that person. Because you ended it. You know that staying with someone just because they're comfortable, when you know you're not in love with him, isn't going to make either of you happy in the long run, even if there's affection there. What else could you have done?" She sipped at her water and offered the bottle to Vanessa. "Back up for me a bit more, though? Why did you break up with Lex?"

Another shrug. She was starting to think Callisto was rubbing off on her too much. "Straw that broke the camel's back? He put his foot in his mouth about something that really offended me and I can't even remember what it was now. And then he tried to fix it and it just got sort of more fucked up. I had issues with the relationship before that. His weird mothering tendency that had him wanting to feed me after stitching me up before I went off to actually, literally hunt down and kill people. He'd been sort of absent for months and during that time I had sort of mentally gone through and gotten over him and the relationship. Things seemed to be over and I adjusted accordingly, I suppose. And then when he was about again..." Yet another shrug. "It wasn't the same. There was attraction, of course. Even something of an intense one. But we weren't a couple anymore. Not really. Just two people who liked each other and had really good sex together."

If Callisto was starting to rub off on Vanessa, Vanessa was starting to rub off on Adrienne as she shrugged as well. "Well, at least you've been having a lot of sex?" she suggested hopefully, smirking and sounding much more like her usual self. "I'm sorry I missed all of this. I don't know what I could have done," she added as an afterthought, "but I'm sorry I wasn't here with you through it at least."

"I dunno, you might have convinced me to not get into the relationship in the first place?" There was something of an optimistic, hopeful note in Vanessa's voice as she said that. If anyone could have stopped her from fucking her way into a relationship it would have been Adrienne. Jean-Paul was simply too...supportive. And he didn't nearly have Adrienne's skill at extracting information when Vanessa was in non-disclosure mode.

"Yeah, possibly," Adrienne frowned. "Fucking Black Court. I'm going to make them pay somehow," she muttered grouchily. "I have no idea how to do that yet, but I'm going to think of something. Something that doesn't involve running away without telling anyone what I'm doing this time." She made a face and sipped at her water, knowing there was no use in complaining about it now. "But maybe," the brunette added, waggling her eyebrows at Vanessa and giving her a smirk, "I would have supported your getting into the relationship with Warren, just so I could hear how the sex was."

"He had decent stamina and endurance but the wings got in the way some of the time," Vanessa reported almost clinically. "Don't get me wrong, I'd fuck him again but I like fewer constraints on my sex than his wings necessitate." She grinned, looking something of a Cheshire Cat. "Though he did really want to see if he could pull off sex whilst in the air. Should you ever feel particularly adventurous in that regard I would recommend him."

Adrienne dissolved into giggles. It never failed, Vanessa always cheered her up. "Sex in the air? Okay, even with my prodigious experience and imagination I can't see how that would be all that enjoyable. Just... how would you get any leverage?" she mused, frowning thoughtfully. "And he'd have to be beating his wings the whole time, wouldn't that be a bit... distracting? I just can't... did you guys ever actually do it?"

"Well," Vanessa began, re-thinking this through for the first time in well over six months, "you'd need your legs around his waist, arms around his shoulders and a log of leg strength for proper leverage. Yes, he would need to be beating his wings but he was sure he could manage that without being adversely distracted. There was definitely a recommendation on my end to try it at a lower altitude over something very soft at first and work up to the higher altitudes just in case. We never got around to it, though, no. We were gonna try it out because I'll try almost anything at least once and that is definitely not in my repertoire. Only..." Vanessa's face fell from its smiling joking expression to something more serious and almost sad, "only a week or two before we were gonna get away together I...disappeared."

"You didn't disappear, Vee," Adrienne pointed out, sounding bitter. "You were fucking kidnapped. Those fucking assholes took you away from us and did unspeakable fucking things to you. Sorry," she muttered, knowing Vanessa really didn't want to talk about her 'disappearance', "I just get so fucking pissed about it, and the fact I couldn't go with the team and kick the fucking asses during your rescue means I never really got an outlet for, y'know..." she boxed the air a little, "my rage. Something very soft," she chuckled suddenly, "ohmigawd, you know what I would do? Trampoline. Sex over a trampoline."

"Over or on?" Vanessa asked with what came very close to being a leer. Her eyes traveled down and then back up the brunette. Slowly. And lingered in all the appropriate areas. "I can't help you with the former but should you be interested in the latter...I'm sure I could locate a trampoline in a room with a high ceiling outside of Xavier's mansion for us."

"Uhh, both," Adrienne laughed. She took in the leering with a smirk and struck a pose in her chair. "I'm most certainly interested. When would I ever not be interested in being propositioned by you?" she chuckled.

"I think I've got next Saturday afternoon cleared. If I can find a place for us by then you think you can be free?" Vanessa grinned. "I'd say also be horny, but we both know I can remedy that should you be feeling...out of sorts for the occasion." While they both knew Vanessa was joking the all too cocky smirk she wore strongly suggested otherwise.

"Like I'm ever gonna feel out of sorts where you're around," Adrienne snorted. "I'm gonna be looking for a place too so we double our chances of finding a place by then and yes, I will most definitely be free," she added, smirking back at Vanessa.

Vanessa grinned as she went back to the computer, found the pictures she needed and set them to transfer to the agency hard drive. "Fantastic. I vote we go downstairs and...prep. You know, to be sure you're limber." Only her eyes moved over to Adrienne as a corner of her mouth quirked into a smirk.

Raising an eyebrow, Adrienne grinned back. "I haven't had sex in over a year, so yeah we'd definitely have to be sure I'm limber before moving to a trampoline. And you know, if you're just messing with me right now, you're a very cruel woman."

"Would I do that to you?" Of course she would; that was practically her MO. Whether or not Vanessa was just messing with her now...well, she'd made the offer to a number of people and no one had even hinted at taking her up on it thus far. Whether or not she would make good on her teasing remained to be seen.

Adrienne snorted again. "For shits and giggles, yeah." She rose from her chair and put the water back in the fridge. "Well, if you're not messing with me, I vote we go downstairs. If you are messing with me, I vote we go downstairs too, but for Chinese food and a game of swordfighting." It was Vanessa's choice.

Camera disconnected and monitor turned off, Vanessa stashed the camera in a drawer and stood up. She simply held out an arm, grinned and said, "I don't think Chinese is still delivering this late."