Laurie & Vanessa | the ungodly hours of Saturday

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Vanessa gets woken up by Laurie, who is very clearly not okay.

Laurie listened to the dial tone for the fifth time, feeling her heart speeding in her chest as she crouched in the corner of her room, trying not to let the whimpers of sound past her lips, trying not to alert her roommate to just how much she wasn't coping alone. She couldn't understand it, she really couldn't. She'd never had a problem being alone before, and now every time she so much as put a door between herself and the rest of the world it felt like she was drowning.

Yesterday, she'd found herself staring at the main hallway stairs, wondering why she couldn't just trip on her way down, why God wouldn't just let this all stop and then she wouldn't have to deal with the fear anymore, the panic of aloneness that seemed to paralyze her at night. It was so stupid, so very, very stupid and why wasn't Eamon answering his phone? Didn't he know she needed him? Why couldn't he just answer his phone and then she could hear his voice and it would all be alright. There'd be someone there, and it wouldn't even need explaining, because why shouldn't she want to hear her boyfriends voice? Only he wasn't answering and she...she was so afraid.

"Aye, it's Ea," came the voice when the ringing finally gave up. "I'm on a job and signal's shit. Leave a message and I'll ring back when I can. If it's dire and I've not returned the call then you should know who to call." The man's voice cut out only to be followed by a female voice instructing the caller that the mailbox was full and to please try again later. Then the line when dead.

"Fuck," Laurie swore, wincing at the sound and imagining the look on Kyle's face.

She never swore if she could help it, she'd always considered it crass and while she wasn't as judgmental about it now as she'd been in her youth, she still found the whole idea of using vulgarities to be distasteful at the least.

"Fucking fuck," she said again for emphasis. Not the least because she'd filled up Eamon's mailbox with what would sound like a series of probably pathetic gibberish as she'd sort to sound completely fine while also panicking just a little bit...or a lot. She needed to call someone before he freaked out and thought she'd been shot or something worse and there was really only one person she knew who would still be awake at this time of night.

She clicked through the contacts on her phone and hit the dial button when she reached Vanessa's name, hoping that she wasn't out, or with someone or any other number of possibilities, like being asleep like a completely sane person and then Laurie would have woken her up and oh God, why was she being so damn pathetic about all this?

Vanessa had definitely been playing catch up on her sleep since returning from the land of bigots. Of course, her phone didn't just wake her up. It also woke Callisto up. Even if Vanessa hadn't been in the brunette's bed very little got past her hearing. So Vanessa rolled out of bed, once again wearing her sleeping companion's body, and made a barely awake dash for her mobile. It all would have been much more easily accomplished had she actually remembered where she had left the fucking thing. Callisto's speed was very likely the only reason Vanessa hit the answer button before it turned over to her own voicemail.

"Peaches?" Callisto's voice was thick with sleep and Vanessa wondered if she would be able to drop the mimic on her own. After a few moments of trying to concentrate she was pleasantly surprised to find that yes, in fact, she could drop Cal's body and slip back into her own. Maybe that was only possible when she was half asleep. Damnit. The metamorph cleared her voice and tried again. "Peaches? You alright? It's half two in the morning, you know."

"Um...hi," Laurie replied, trying not to sob it down the phone, she'd been all set to use some sort of 'Oh, sorry, wrong number' when she'd heard Callisto's voice, and then it had been Vanessa's voice and now she didn't know what she should do because, ack, you shouldn't interrupt people's nights if they had people over and oh God, why couldn't her mind just stop? Stopping would be great right now...just stop...please?

Her breathing had picked up through the haze of thoughts that wouldn't slow down, or shut up or just GO AWAY! and she banged her head against her knees for a moment as if that might somehow help, even though as a person who had studied human and mutant biology quite extensively to this point, she knew percussive force was more likely to simply give her a headache rather then circumvent any erroneous thought patterns on her part.

"I'm sorry," she finished lamely after Vanessa's statement about half-two in the morning broke through her otherwise completely self-focused panicked babble. "I just, it's just, it's, I mean, Eamon didn't answer his phone, and I, I, I'm sorry, I'll just, I'll call later, okay?"

"Ea's on a job in the middle of nowhere, sweets." Vanessa rubbed at her eyes, yawned and started to bounce in place in an effort to wake herself up more. "It's fine. I was just sleeping because I didn't do much of that while on my fantastic island getaway. What's wrong? You sound a bit manic."

"I'm not sure," Laurie admitted softly, swallowing past the sudden reluctance to really talk about why she sounded like she did, or even admitting anything really, it wasn't like she could _remember_ anything that had been done to her, or that she'd done, so she should be perfectly fine. How to explain that the sheer blankness was terrifying, what if it was just the start? What if it spread, or if it didn't but just never got easier to deal with and she kept reaching out but never touching and it wasn't fair. She just wanted everything to be fair again, why wasn't it?

"I'm scared," she said lamely, knowing she'd been breathing into the phone again rather then talking like a normal, not crazy, person.

"Alright," came the very calm, patient sounding reply. "Why're you scared? You scared 'bout Ea or 'bout something else?" Vanessa eyed her keys. There were people at the mansion. Many people. Closer people. The thing was Laurie sounded fairly unhinged and she was family. After a cup of coffee and a five minute shower Vanessa could probably drive just fine if she needed to.

"I don't know," Laurie replied, and she did sob now, an ugly sound in the quiet nighttime silence of her room. She huddled closer into herself, trying to get her breathing under control, even as she tried to speak around the tears choking her. "I don't, I'm just s-s-scared."

Her words cut off into wracking sobs, finally unable to control herself any longer.

"Peaches, is anyone with you?" One would have thought eyes were being kept on all the younger sorts. The students, sure, but anyone who wasn't some sort of hardened, tough skinned sort really probably should have been looked after. Then again, it was half two in the morning.

"I think, I mean, Jean-Phillipe is sleeping in his room," Laurie said, finally getting her tears under control, although now her breathing was coming in gasps between the words, which didn't seem to help much at all really.

"I can come over." The offer, while presented as such, wasn't really a suggestion. Vanessa was already heading for her closet to grab a pair of jeans. She could skip the shower to wake her up and just throw cold water on her face. Coffee, on the other hand, wasn't as negotiable. It would hold her up but at this hour the last call bar crowd was pretty much gone and there wouldn't be much traffic on the roads to Xavier's.

"Don't," Laurie gasped, but then looking around the darkness of her room, the walls seemed to close in on her, making the spaces in her memory seem like vast gaps that might swallow her whole if she let it. "That is, maybe just this once?"

It wasn't as if she hadn't already shown Vanessa that she wasn't coping, her seeing Laurie like she currently was wouldn't be much of a shock after that really.

Vanessa would re-evaluate the 'just this once' stipulation after Laurie had actually gotten some sleep. Granted, Vanessa wouldn't get any sleep because it was the mansion and she had some notably unresolved issues that generally saw her giving the place a pretty wide berth. But it was Laurie and another half night of sleeplessness wouldn't really do any harm to someone who had been chronically deprived of sleep for months not too long ago. "I'll be there in about an hour. Probably less. You gonna be alright until then? I've got a hands free thing, I can stay on the line all the way there if you want."

"That might help?" Laurie admitted somewhat reluctantly, not wanting to appear so needy but unable to bear being left alone, without even the voice of someone she knew there, even if Jean-Phillipe was just a room away. He needed his sleep, and Vanessa was already awake, and this way there wouldn't be questions, or awkwardness about having a roommate that was completely crazy.

Vanessa swerved in her path to dig that hands free thing out of the drawer she was pretty sure it had been buried in. "Alright then, you wanna hear about how my off button is totally broken? It hasn't been like that since I was a kid." She considered asking Laurie to tell her about her day, but there was the possibility that it would just bring up whatever was making her so panicked and crazy. This way, Laurie could focus on something totally benign and outside of herself.

"You have an off button?" Laurie joked, the smile somewhat a shadow of its normal sunny self but her breathing was slowing now, her heart beginning to beat at a more normal pace in turn.