xp_logs | LOG: Terry & Doug, Backdated to Saturday

And Terry goes to bully one of those foible-prone men.

"So I hear you are thinking I abandoned you." That was a lovely way to initiate a conversation after more than a month's absence. Forget 'I'm back' or even 'hello!' Terry leaned a shoulder against the doorway, arms folded in front of her. She leaned carefully because her arms were bared by a tank top and obviously sunburned. Her face (also sunburned) was screwed up into scowly contemplation. HI DOUG.

Doug looked up from his computer, instantly on the defensive. All the therapy in the world wouldn't have prepared him for the scowl on Terry's face, or even just the confusion of seeing her walk into his office, and the jumble of emotion it kicked up. He felt short of breath all over again, and one hand unconsciously went up to hair that was just starting to reach a normal-looking length. His shoulders hunched forward and he swallowed several times before speaking. "You have?" he asked, stalling for time to figure out what to say.

"I just said it, didn't I?" she tossed back, pushing away from the frame to wander further into his office, moving in an agitated and uneven circuit of the available area. Her fingers left little white divots on her arms where they pressed. "And I thought t' myself, why on earth would the man be thinking such a thing? Did I do anything to give him the impression I am in the habit of abandoning people? I must have because surely he would not be so big a fool as to think I would ever not be there for him? After all, I was thinking I was the one with the abandonment issues."

"Because everyone leaves me," Doug said dully. The subtle undermining of the Genoshan interrogator asking him when his family had abandoned him to Xavier had brought his whole perspective crumbling down, and made him question every interaction since then. But most especially Terry's departure for California. "So it must be something about me."

"Well, aren't you the bloody center o' the universe?" Terry said snarkily before she stopped in the middle of the room to look over at him, finally seeing the dejection and trauma written into every line of his posture and face. She made a truly Irish noise of disgust deep in the back of her throat and flung herself into a chair, wincing when the frame hit her skin.

"No...I just...I..." Doug's face crumpled and he sagged back in his chair. Clearly therapy had a ways to go with certain aspects of Doug's worldview. "It's...good to see you," he said quietly. And it was, even if he was hellaciously confused, and couldn't bring himself to ask about the elephant in the room. The entire herd of them, really.

"Oooh, it is, is it?" Terry drawled, her accent laying thick on the words. "And is that good just because you are glad to see me, or glad that I came back? Since I am such an unreliable sort, that it."

"It's not you. You're not unreliable. It's me." Doug winced at how cliche the sentiment was, even if it was sort of turned on its head the way he meant. "I mean, what is it they say?" He stared off at the window. "If the same thing happens with a bunch of people, what's the common element?" He lifted a finger off the arm of the chair, indicating that it was him.

"The common element is you are a egoistical sap with delusions of controlling the world. I went back to try and repair my marriage, Douglas Ramsey," Terry snapped, sitting up in her chair. "To see if there is anything left of who I used to be worth holding onto. Do you really want to be getting into an everybody leaves me competition with me?"

"Shit." Doug scrubbed at his face with his hands. Wasn't she listening? That was what he meant! She'd gone to California, to Bobby, because he wasn't...

Stop. He could practically hear Dr. Grim saying the word sternly in his mind. His mind still raced, so he had to repeat it several more times before his heart began to slow its pounding.

"I thought you had gone back to him," he said quietly, without recrimination or defensiveness this time. "I thought...I blamed myself. For what happened to us. And I thought that was why you left." He sighed. "My therapist has been on me about that tendency to take too much blame. I just...I'm sorry." He bit his lip on the impulse to keep apologizing over and over.

"I did go back to him. I went back because he is--was m' husband and I took vows. Jayzus, Doug." Terry was not listening, but neither was he. She scrunched her face up, managed to avoid scrubbing it as she sighed, then slid from the chair and crossed to his, squatting in front of it to bring herself down (and below) his eye level. Her own were haunted, but bright set against the burnt tinge. "What do you mean, what happened t' us? Is it about Genosha?"

Doug wanted to reach out to her, but he was still scared to, even if he'd managed to break the worst of his self-loathing spiral. "It's everything," he told her in a hoarse whisper. "It's how Remy always tells everyone that this job will break them - well, it did break me." Or it had. It remained to be seen if the pieces could be put back together now. "I...had a meltdown on Amanda. And...then I had to go on a therapy retreat." He'd been intentionally vague about why he had gone out of town publicly, even if he'd had to bare all to his teammates. And even then he hadn't precisely bared all. He certainly didn't want some of them knowing the particulars of what the Genoshans had done to him. "I blamed myself for not being...enough." Good enough, strong enough, just plain enough.

"Everyone breaks, Doug," Terry sighed, bending her head forward to rest her forehead against the chair arm while holding onto it with a hand. "Breaking does not mean damaged beyond repair. Just means y' have to work a wee bit harder to hold yourself together." She went quiet for a moment, then added softly, bitterly, "There are none of us enough."

Doug's fingers crept forward, inches that felt like miles, to hesitantly lay across Terry's. He wasn't sure what to say, but at least he could try to provide comfort, and perhaps get it in return. "I wasn't. Holding together, I mean," he told her. Blindly panicking at getting one's face wet certainly wasn't a way to get through life.

Terry turned her hand up at his touch, accepting and holding onto his hand in return. She turned her head to peek up at him from the corner of one eye. "I'm sorry. I should have known..." She really should have, having watched them do the breaking. It had been easier to not think, to get away, to find someone else to be mad at.

Doug clung to Terry's hand, wrapping his around hers. "I...tried to hide it from people," he admitted. "I was trying to just keep going. So..." He sighed. "And you were struggling too."

"You know I was not leaving you, do you not? Was not about you." Terry stopped and lifted her head, tugging his hand closer and holding it under her chin. "At least not beyond that I was needing to get things settled with Himself, once and for all..." She trailed off inarticulately and looked away as she exhaled.

"...no. I didn't know," Doug admitted. "I thought you were leaving for good. And that's what I blamed myself for." He had been so confused when it sounded like she was coming back. "And are they? Settled?" he asked very quietly, not knowing how to feel, even more confused than before. What would her answer mean for them? Would they finally have to define what had been going on between them for so long?

Terry stiffened in place and released his hand very slowly, peeling each finger away individually before settling onto her knees at his side. "They are settled. Not finalized, but-- There will be no more trips." Her hands floated down to settle in her lap, her eyes dropping to land on top of them.

"I'm sorry." Doug couldn't say that the news didn't bring up a huge jumble of confusion and hope and wondering in him, but it was never easy to come to an ending with someone you'd once loved. Doug knew that too well. On the one hand, at least this was Terry's decision, but on the other, he couldn't imagine how much harder it would be for her, given that she and Bobby had actually been married.

"For what?" she asked, still quiet. Dangerously quiet, it seemed. "For believing I let you drive me away? Or that I was so shallow as to be disgusted by your weakness?"

"For all of that, yes. But also I'm sorry things ended this way with you and Bobby." Doug took the dangerous quiet in stride, not flinching from it. He'd earned whatever anger or frustration she was feeling with the way he'd behaved. The trick was not to wallow in it. Not easy, but he was working on it. "It can't be easy, and I didn't necessarily help things. But if I can help in some way now..." he offered.

Terry twisted her hands together in her lap with jerky motions and did not reply immediately. "And now?" she said a moment later, looking up after she had knitted her fingers together too tightly to release easily. "Are y' getting help? Getting yourself glued back t'gether?"

"Yes." Doug had to admit that even when he had rough patches, or was totally exhausted after a session, that it felt much better to be able to say that, and mean it unequivocally. "Remains to be seen how well the pieces go back, but yes."

"Brilliant," Terry said emphatically and tore her hands apart to plant them on the floor. She pushed herself up to her feet and straightened with her hands settling again on her hips. "Because if I ever hear anything more about you thinking you drive everyone away, I will belt y' but good." How serious she was was difficult to tell.

"And you?" Doug's quiet wasn't the dangerous sort Terry's had been, but rather the hesitance of someone asking a question he wasn't sure it was his place to ask. He looked up at her, standing above him, and bit his lip.

"And me what?" Her evasion was quick and easy, betrayed by the shift of her eyes and a slight turn away. Her own issues over the course of the past month might have been louder, but they had been made just as discreet by the distance. She hoped.

"Are you getting help?" Still hesitant, but laid under with concern. If there was something Doug had learned, it was that you shouldn't use others' problems as an excuse to not address your own. And he knew, from the shift in Terry's body language that she knew, but she was probably trying to avoid just as much as he had before he'd lost all pretense of togetherness.

"I..." Terry exhaled and let her head bend forward, eyes closed. Her shield slipped just a little with her sigh. "I am coping," she finally settled on a reply. And it was true. Leaving lights and music on all night to avoid those dark, quiet hours in the early morning hours. Doing everything she could to antagonize her bosses to avoid their questions. Pinning a husband down on the state of their marriage in a masochistic fit of temper to avoid his. Chasing friends down to yell at them for their irrationalities. They were all coping strategies. If they were sufficient remained to be seen.

Doug wasn't sure how she would react if he pushed the issue, but a hung head and sigh with closed eyes didn't speak very much to whether the coping mechanisms were healthy. Or helping all that much. Instead, he stood from his chair, as he felt ridiculous sitting down while she stood over him, and placed a very tentative hand on Terry's shoulder, so light it almost wasn't even touching.

Terry glanced at the hand and let the corner of her mouth twitch in a half-formed, self-depricating smile before lifting her eyes to his. "Well, aren't we an arseways lot?" she murmured with a snort.

Doug let his hand rest a little more firmly when Terry smiled, and quirked an answering dry smile and quiet chuckle. "Perhaps," he answered. "But at least we're both arseways together, and things are never quite so bad when you've got someone to help you sort it all."

Terry shifted, twisting in place to wrap an arm around Doug in return and slid into a hug. "Don't you be forgetting that," she whispered fiercely against him and squeezed.

"You either," Doug said, suddenly choked up as he squeezed back just as hard.