Garrison and Adrienne (Backdated)

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

The stray cat makes a nuisance of itself in Garrison's suite as Garrison and Adrienne discuss traditional domestic things such as money, sweaters, plotting Adrienne's death, the aftereffects of Garrison's death-by-a-god, the cat being a mutant, the Frost women being elves, etc.

"I know what you're thinking, and you can forget about it," Adrienne muttered, glaring up at the moose head on Garrison's wall and gathering the ball of yarn that had rolled off the couch closer around her feet. Tandy was holed up in her room, where she'd been a lot lately, what with the anniversary of her parents' death coming up. Her unwillingness to talk about it was causing some discomfort for Adrienne, so she'd set up camp with her knitting in the suite vacated by the late-working Mountie. "You touch this yarn and I make violin strings out of you," she warned the ginger cat over the swells of an aria from Rigoletto playing on the sound system.

The ginger cat continued to stare at the blue ball of yarn intently from its perch on top of the moose head, making Adrienne increasingly nervous. She looked around for something handy and sharp to throw at it if it made a move, but nothing fit her needs. There was a recently-completed sweater draped over the back of the couch and several slippers gathered in a neat pile next to her, but nothing that she could use to bludgeon the animal. Setting her newest project aside, she settled on a slipper, picking it up and waving it at the cat. "You see this? It's got your name on it if you go for that ball of yarn."

"I see the cat is back and you're losing yet another argument to it." Kane said, rubbing his eyes as he came in from the washroom. His mutant endurance had been out of whack lately; a side effect to the damage over the last year, leaving him feeling achy and tired. The doctors had assured him it was only temporary. "You found anyone to give Houdini there to? I struck out at the office. Turns out that FBI agents are dog people like me."

Adrienne jumped, not having heard him come in. "Oh, don't name it!" she muttered to him, sounding exasperated. "Naming it is giving up! And no, no takers, surprisingly. I'm shocked no one wants the stupid thing. You'd think a large, orange, creepy, lock-defying animal would have them lining up around the block." She moved the pile of slippers onto the floor to clear a space on the couch for Garrison and glared at him. "Please tell me you don't have plans to get a dog."

"I didn't have plans to get a cat. At this rate, I'm going to have Daisy living in here." He flopped down on the couch and turned on to his back, dropping his head in the midst of her knitting.

"Oh no. No, no, no. I may have gotten over my fear of horses, but if I ever find a moose in here- a whole moose, anyway-" she added, glancing up at the stuffed head on the wall, "I'll probably have a heart attack and die of fright. And then you'd have to clean it up. Unless that's your end game all along," she mused, poking him in the arm. "To kill me for my money. It's just too bad the joke's on you and it's all going into my new business venture."

"I think if I was going to kill someone for their money, I'd have done it before you lost most of it. I actually think my savings, once you add in my pension, would make me the main moneymaker in this relationship." Kane grinned at her. "So obviously this new business needs to take off soon so I can plot your death for your fortune again. Restoring balance, eh?"

Adrienne moved her current knitting on top of Garrison's head and carried on knitting it, grinning back at him. "You keep telling yourself you're the moneymaker if that makes you feel more masculine," she shrugged, watching with amusement as the cat, still atop the moose head, eyed Garrison like he was a porterhouse steak. Or a really comfy potential bed. Adrienne couldn't really understand cat facial expressions or body language to tell what it was planning. "Oh, it'll take off. Don't you worry. I'm far too amazing a businesswoman for it to not be successful. Except how are you going to work around the issue of my powers in plotting my death?" she inquired with a smirk, eyebrow raised.

"Overload. I figure that the more often I'm keeping your hands occupied, the less likely you'll be able to scan my things for secrets." He started to say something else when the cat landed directly on his stomach, jackknifing him. "Ufh!"

Cackling at the cat's attempt at trampolining, Adrienne moved her knitting off of Garrison's head around to her other side to keep it out of the cat's reach. "I taught it how to do that," she joked. "You know, the overload tactic might just work for you. That must have been where Steven screwed up." She took her eyes off the cat and put her focus back on her knitting. "Except, if you kill me, you realize you'd have to look after Tandy, right? And have fun with that, considering the mood she's been in lately. And, I mean, I get it. It's almost the anniversary of her parents' deaths and all the shit that went down around it. But she won't talk about it; she's hiding in her damned room all the damned time. Unless, of course, you have a plan worked out for her, too?" She screeched as the cat leaped from Garrison's stomach onto her shoulders and took a playful swipe at the knitting.

"I was thinking of a mass fire. Or-" He winced as the paw swiped an inch from his nose. "Maybe military school for her..."

"Military school doesn't take care of the damned cat," Adrienne muttered, trying really hard not to stab the cat with the knitting needles as she tried to work out a way to dislodge it from her shoulders without dumping it back on Garrison. "I like the fire idea better. Although, it would be a shame if all this fine knitting were to go up in smoke. 'Course, I'll be dead, so, really, don't let my opinion sway you."

"I'm not much of a knitter. Perhaps I'll need to keep you around after all."

"That's right. If you got rid of me, who would make you things like that?" she asked, motioning with a nod of her head towards the sweater on the back of the couch. It was ribbed crew-neck fisherman's sweater in deep red with two broad horizontal white stripes.

"The Hudson's Bay Company? I mean, I doubt it would let me do the things to it in bed that you do, but it does have the sweater part down..." He teased.

Adrienne knew what the Hudson's Bay Company was from her business dealings over the years, and frowned at the comment. She calmly set her knitting aside, grabbed the cat off her shoulders, stood up so she'd be out of the crossfire, and held the cat above Garrison's face. "You're going to regret that comment," she muttered, shaking the cat a little as it dangled above him. "My sweaters are a million times better than any overpriced Canadian fur-trading retailer's. Say it. Say it."

"No threatening with animals. That was the deal." Kane shielded his face, even as the cat whined in her hands. "Fine, your sweaters are better!"

"I made no such deal," Adrienne responded, but she put the cat down on the floor with a triumphant grin when he acquiesced. "Unless I did, and I accidentally deleted it from my memory when I was doing a clean-up session in my mental repository. Wait... who are you? And what are you doing in my suite? And why are there a moose head and a cat in my suite? And a Blue Jays poster? Do I like the Blue Jays?" It was easy to joke about it, but with the frequency in which she utilized a similar theme of forgetting something during her clean-ups as jokes, Garrison could no doubt realize it was something she was actually worried about.

"You like the Blue Jays so much that you got a tattoo of them on your pelvis." He was still flopped on the couch, watching her from on his back. "Also, if you keep playing with the cat, we're never going to get rid of him. You know that, right?" The cat meeped as it jumped up on to the moose head again and settled down to wash himself.

"Really? I thought cats hated to be played with. Isn't playing a dog thing?" Adrienne inquired. She put the sweater she'd made over him like a blanket, wondering if he was feeling alright. He'd been much more... floppy lately. It wasn't like him. Of course, as always, she felt there was no point to wondering and just came out and asked him. "Tired?"

"Worn out. I've pushed my limit to the maximum too many times lately. So I'm just exhausted, which is a weird feeling when your mutant powers specifically keep you from getting exhausted."

The psychometrist frowned at him, worried. "So what's wrong with your powers that they aren't specifically keeping you from getting exhausted anymore?"

"Too much physical trauma over the last year. Powers occasionally get tapped out. According to the Docs, it's a temporary thing. Like catching the flu."

Adrienne inched away from him. "It's not contagious, is it?"

"Only if you've been somewhat recently punched to death by a God."

Nudging him to lift his head and shoulders, Adrienne returned to the couch and sat with Garrison's head in her lap. "I think if I'd been punched to death by a god, I'd have a lot more to worry about than the Powers Flu. What with the whole 'not having a healing factor' thing, I mean. Because I'd be really, really dead. And then you really would have a Tandy problem to deal with. In addition to your cat problem," she added as the cat jumped up on the arm of the couch and stared at Garrison's stomach as if contemplating how squishy a bed it would make. "Do you think it's a witch that got stuck? Or a shapeshifter that got stuck?"

"I think it's an opportunistic stray that has some kind of weird ability to move through walls." Garrison let his head loll back. "Mmm... this is nice."

"The cat's doing that," Adrienne deadpanned. "But if it can move through walls, it's definitely a mutant, right? Are there mutant cats?" she pondered, still running a hand absentmindedly through Garrison's hair. "I mean, that purple-haired chick thought she was a cat that turned into a human, but she's not, right? She's human. So are humans the only ones who can have mutant powers like phasing through walls?" She watched the cat walk over Garrison's head and settle in a ball on his stomach. "Hey... wasn't there a woman at the school named Kitty at the mansion that could move through walls?" she asked, digging up knowledge from reading through old X-Men missions. "Coincidence?"

"I think you're stretching things a bit, babe. Next thing you know, you and your sister will actually be elves because of your very expensive lack of aging."

Adrienne was silent for a while. "Well, we have been going out for almost a year, so maybe it's time I finally told you; I think you're ready," she nodded. "I am an elf. I've just been pretending to be a beginner with the bow and arrow. I had cosmetic ear-rounding surgery when I was a teenager. A teenager in elf years, I mean," she added thoughtfully. "Ahh, to be four hundred again."

Kane arched an eyebrow at her for a moment and then settled back down. "Is there a Facebook status for 'I'm fucking a mythical creature', because I think there should be."