Maddie & Clint | Sunday Night (backdated)

[x-hawkeye.livejournal.com]

After meeting Tandy, Clint heads back to the suite to continue playing catch-up, only Billy's gone and Maddie's playing Goldie Locks in his bed.


Clint opened the door to his suite and stepped inside, closing it quietly behind him. It wasn't that it was horribly late or anything, he'd just gotten used to being quiet over the years. It looked like Billy was still working on something, though his roommate was nowhere to be seen just then, and Maddie's things were still on the table, but she'd disappeared as well.

Shrugging, Clint headed for his room - only to find Maddie on his bed. He blinked, tilted his head to the side, then tossed the bag of pretzels he'd grabbed from the kitchen onto the end of the bed. "Rise and shine."

"Mmpf." Maddie groaned and buried her head into the pillow. She had only just closed her eyes, but now they felt heavy with sleep; she must have been out longer than she thought. Her face scrunched up to protect her eyes from the light as she rolled onto her other side. "Go away," she said through a yawn.

"My bed," Clint pointed out, snorting softly. "I wasn't gone that long - English can't have killed you."

That actually made sense. Maddie remembered deciding to lay down on Clint's bed after the words on the page became fuzzy and she read the same sentence several times. Clint had been gone from the room, and she was just going to rest for a few minutes then go back to reading. With a groan, she sat up to pull her cellphone from her pocket; another large yawn escaped, and she noticed that more than an hour had past. "Fuck. Shit Clint, I'm sorry." And she was. For as much as she tended to invade peoples' physical bubbles, Maddie respected the sanctity of personal space. You didn't just go in someone's room and start messing with everything without their permission, especially when they themselves were still settling in. She stuffed phone back into her pocket and stood up from the bed, then reached down to smooth out the wrinkles caused by her sleeping form.

"I seriously only meant to lay down for a few minutes. My head was starting to hurt."

"Hey, no problem. Seriously, don't worry about it. I got distracted in the rec room - I think her name is Tandy. She's watching Night of the Living Dead. Have some pretzels. They might help with your headache," Clint said, sitting at the foot of his bed and opening the bag. He shook it at her and raised his eyebrows.

"Ah yes, Tandy." The bag of pretzels flew through the air, and the redhead reached her hand in as she settled, cross-legged at the head of the bed. "Queen of the horror flicks. Not my cup of tea." She popped a few of the pretzels into her mouth, a contemplative look on her face. "I'm more of a History fan." Another pretzel gave her time to pause and think while her brain struggled to wake up from her nap. "And Space. And Space History. I've seen The Right Stuff like a million times. No exaggeration."

Maddie held the bag of pretzels out to Clint. "So how was it? The zombies win in the end?"

"Nope, but everybody dies," Clint answered as he took a handful of pretzels. "The last guy standing gets killed by other survivors when they mistake him for a zombie in the morning. Kind of depressing."

Mouth otherwise occupied with masticating, Maddie brought her hands up and twisted them back and forth in the ASL version of clapping. "Woo hoo," she deadpanned, once she finally swallowed. "Sounds like a much better way to occupy your time compared to doing reading for History. And don't bother asking me where your roommate is, cause I have no idea."

"Nice," Clint said, shaking his head. "And I barely know him, so you'd be better equipped to answer that question anyway." Chomping on another pretzel, he flopped backward. "That telekinesis thing you do - that's pretty awesome. I don't get why you think your powers are lame or whatever."

Maddie shrugged again and pretended to be fascinated by the twists of the pretzel. "You know. I never understood how they could twist all these little pretzels." She was stalling, she wouldn't deny it. Ever since she had discovered her powers she had felt almost let down. Here she was, surrounded by people who could make objects with their mind, who had squirrel tails and wolf teeth, who could make zombies, and all she got was this combination of telepathy and telekinesis. Those were the two most stereotypical of superpowers out there, so old and so mundane that even non-mutants claim to possess them, and paranormal centers have been studying them forever.

"They're boring," she finally replied. "I mean. They're just so obvious when you think about mutant powers. You know?"

"But they're not obvious to everybody else, which is convenient. Concealed weaponry, if you will. And there are machines that twist the pretzels. I watched a show on The Discovery Channel about how stuff's made." Clint finished off his handful and then looked over at Maddie. "Wanna see something else with my eyes?"

"Is this gonna turn into 'Show me yours and I'll show you mine'?" Maddie quirked an eyebrow and gave a wry smile. "Cause I don't know what kind of girl you think I am, Mister Barton, but it's not that kind."

"Pssh," Clint waved a hand. "Not even close. I can do this, though." Looking over at her, he looked to the left with one eye and the right with the other. "Things don't even look all that weird."

Okay. That was pretty cool. But it really only served to prove her point. Even though Clint looked really weird with his eyes like that, it was still awesome. He had, like, bird of prey eyes. And that made Maddie give a quick snort of amusement. "Like I said: I have the grape Skittles of the mutant powers world. Everyone knows lime is the best flavor."

"Grape Skittles are awesome. But strawberry ones are the best, obviously," Clint said, grinning. "Do people ask you to read their minds a lot?"

With those three ridiculous statements in quick succession, the redhead was at a loss of words. Grape skittles awesome? Strawberry the best? This kid was either seriously deranged or lacking in the experience necessary to know how intrinsically wrong he was. Such nonsense was clearly impossible to respond to. But the look on Maddie's face (raised eyebrow, head tilted to the side) made it very clear that she thought Clint needed his head examined.

"What, nobody's asked you to do that? Ever? It could come in pretty handy if you ever want conversations to actually be private." Clint basically had no idea what he was talking about, a fact made obvious by the way his eyes began to crinkle at the corners as he attempted to suppress a smile. "You'd make one badass secret agent. Like James Bond, only better."

"Oh. You mean communicating, not mind-reading. There's a difference." Confident that her companion was merely lacking experience, Maddie felt her face relax into an expression of amusement; she was clearly going to have to show him the ways of the world, but at least he wasn't a lost cause yet. "Mind reading is more like reading someone's thoughts, like either on the surface or deeper stuff. But communicating is completely superficial. And people know when you're communicating, not so much with the mind reading. I mean, the last time we all played poker I read everyone's minds and swept up all the buttons.

"Life Lessons with Madelyne Jennifer Pryor 101: Always know who you're dealing with. AKA don't play poker with a telepath."

"Duly noted," Clint said, nodding agreeably. "I won't ever play poker with you. How do people know when you're communicating?"

~Because they hear my voice in their head?~ Maddie stared stoically at Clint, face blank, giving no hint as to the fact that she was doing anything, let alone mentally projecting her voice into his mind.

"Oh, I thought you meant other people would know you were doing that," Clint said, tipping his head to the side a bit. "Like you had a nervous tick or something you couldn't control when you were talking in somebody's head."

With a shrug, the redhead girl reached down over the side of the bed and scooped up the book she had been reading. ~What can I say?~ She began to idly thumb to the pages, not bothering to look up to catch his reaction. ~I'm very good at what I do.~

"And you say that's not cool," Clint said snorting softly. "But hey, the grass is always greener, isn't it?"

Reaching into her pocket for her phone, Maddie gave another half-hearted shrug as she pulled it out and looked at the time. Her nose wrinkled in disgust for a moment before she sighed and swung her legs over the edge of his bed. "It's getting late," she declared, sounding resigned, as she set to work picking up the rest of her books and binders. "I suppose you might want to get some rest before your first day of classes. Here," Maddie held out a notebook. "These are my History notes. Hand copy, machine copy, scan in to your computer, whatever. But I'd like to have them back before class tomorrow?"

"Sure," Clint said, brows drawing down a little. "You alright? I didn't stick my foot in my mouth or anything by asking about your powers, did I?" He took the notes and leafed through them, then set the aside.

"Oh G-d No!" Her hands flailed wildly in front of her to wipe that thought out of existence. "My roommate's mom is a serious psycho," she explained. "And whenever she calls or anything, my roommate gets majorly upset and there is nothing I can do. So it's gotten to a point where I'm basically like avoiding my room as much as possible is the only way to keep me sane. I just wanna defenestrate her... her mom, that is, not my roommate."

"You want to... what her? Is there a vocabulary component to English that nobody mentioned before? And how psycho are we talking?" Clint had seen some crazy stuff and heard about even more, but somehow he wasn't certain any of his ideas would be accurate.

"Defenestrate? To throw something out a window? Duh." She was a bit more ditzy sounding than normal, a conscious decision made to emphasize just how obvious Maddie thought the word was. It wasn't as if she was exactly the smartest girl in the mansion considering how many complete nerds there were (Nerds! All of them!), and the redhead accepted it, so she took advantage of knowing something Clint did not. He'd just have to say something mathy or sciencey and equilibrium would be restored.

"And her mom is seriously awful." With a groan of frustration, Maddie flopped back across Clint's bed and turned her head to look up at him. "Like she sent her a book on how to dress to catch a man! And I wasn't even surprised. Well I was surprised that such a book existed given that we're in the 21st century. And I'm not even talking about 'The Rules' which are hilarious, but an entire book about dressing to catch a man. This woman's trapped in a super oppressive 1950s recreation and is passing it on to her daughter unjustly. It was not bad for awhile in the summer, I guess, and Hope and I got along fine and she was cool, if a little prim and proper. But now it's like she believes her mother's sentiments about how being a mutant is 'major deficiency' and that she needs to make it up that she's turned into a complete Stepford. Like all the personality has been sucked out of her and now she's just completely bland and boring and is actually trying to 'make up' for being a mutant by improving other skills."

It was an impassioned speech, Maddie's hands flying through the air as she vented her frustration by miming wrapping her hands around an invisible neck. She let out a small scream of frustration and rolled onto her side, her head propped up by one hand. "So I basically try to avoid my room as much as possible, especially around the time her mom calls because I cannot take it. Right now it's a crapshoot: she might have finished speaking with her mom, or her mom might have a long lecture taken straight out of the 1700s on how to be a virtuous woman." Eyeroll. "So most nights I sleep in the common area of our suite in my running gear, well except the shoes and my iPod obviously, but they're close by, so by the time I return to the room it's time to dress and get to class. Avoidance is like totally not my style, but there is nothing else I can do really. They can't keep Hope from talking to her mom. But whatever."

Clint's eyebrows rose as Maddie spoke and by the time she stopped, his eyes had widened, too. "Dude." He didn't say anything else for a long moment, but when he spoke, he asked, "So what's the book say a girl should wear? Like an itty-bitty, teeny-weeny, yellow polka dot bikini? Cause I'm not sure it'd be the clothes catching people's attention then." He'd never really met anyone who thought the way Maddie said Hope's mom - and apparently Hope - thought, so the least he could do was try to make Maddie a little less unhappy about the situation.

It started as a snort, but quickly exploded into a torrent of laughter that found Maddie on her back once more and gasping for air. She wasn't so sure why exactly Clint's comment was so funny, but it was. Sure it contained a quote from some song she couldn't remember the name of, but that wasn't it. Perhaps that rant had been helpfully cathartic and now her emotions were swinging in the opposite direction from pissed off, or maybe she was just finally going insane.

Still in a fit of giggles, Maddie reached over and brought the pillow (still indented a bit from her head) up so that it made contact with the head of its proper owner. "You're such a dweeb."

Catching the pillow before it could smack him in the face, Clint smiled. "Maybe, but apparently you don't mind." His expression sobered a little as he continued, "You can hang out here as long as you like whenever you need to. I'm pretty good at letting people know when I need my space, so don't worry about overstaying or whatever. Having a roommate situation like that's gotta be stressful."

The redhead pursed her lips in concentration as she weighed the two options in her mind, but really, given her level of annoyance at Hope's mom, there really was no contest. "Okay," she sat up and proclaimed after several seconds. She was smiling now. Yeah. It had definitely been cathartic to lay all of her roommate frustrations out there. "Deal.

"So. Tell me Clint. What's it like to have two dads?"