Clarice & Cecilia | Backdated to Sunday

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Clarice and Cecilia eat breakfast the day after the Avalon tsunami and talk about guilt/feelings/normalcy.

Neither woman was dressed in anything fancier than weekend comfy clothes and that was possibly too fancy for Clarice, but clothes were required in public. At least they were loose and soft. That was important. Puttering around the little kitchen in her suite, Clarice began getting French toast ready for their breakfast as Marvin Gaye and the best of Motown played on the iPod speakers.

"Ooh, I love this song." Cecilia murmured, sipping from the cup of coffee she'd liberated from the medlab after her shower. She'd barely slept (too much adrenaline, then too much anxiety) and felt like a bleary-eyed, disheveled mess. But the coffee was helping. Barely. "What can I do? Put me to work." She needed to be busy.

Motown was always good times, perfect for days when they, well...felt like this. "Um..." hmm. The kitchen wasn't that big. "Can you handle the sausage?" it was Wade's sausage, but she'd replace it.

"Yes." Cecilia nodded, then stared at Clarice for a few seconds. "Sausage. Handled." She put her mug down and grabbed the package. "Can I ask you - and tell me if this is inappropriate or something - but..." She frowned as she fumbled with the plastic. "Is transcontinental teleportation always this disorienting?"

"Uh...no?" It wasn't inappropriate, but Clarice also had no idea what Cecilia was taking about either. "It's exhausting for me, teleporting that many people, but I've never foubd the distance to matter."

"Oh." Cecilia nodded. She closed her eyes for a second, then went back to dealing with the sausage. "I'm totally wiped. Somehow, like, exhausted and restless. I thought maybe it was a... glowy wormhole form of jetlag." She was making no sense. "I guess it's the residual Red X effect."

Well, it could be Cecilia, but Clarice hadn't experienced that. Maybe it was a part of her powers? "Maybe?" though she was doubtful, "We worked our asses off yesterday. We need to give ourselves a chance to recover."

"Yeah," Cecilia nodded. "Makes sense." She finally managed to get the sausage out of its package and smiled a little. "Carbs will help." She closed her eyes. "I love French toast. And pancake. And all breakfast breads."

"I just love food," Clarice agreed, "especially breakfast. There's no such thing as a bad breakfast," especially like this with fuzzy socks and her hair up in a pony tail. "I think I could eat it all the time."

"Right?" Cecilia threw some sausage in a pan. "When I lived in Philly, you couldn't get an egg sandwich after, like, 11 a.m., and I will never understand that. I once had a roommate who knew how to make waffles from scratch, and if she hadn't been a narcissistic sociopath, I would have probably never moved out." She paused. "And now I live here. With Logan."

"He doesn't make waffles," Clarice pointed out. That was an important distinction. "I had a college roommate who hated breakfast. She'd eat a hamburger in the morning, but she hated Ihop and all that. Pretty sure she's evil incarnate."

"Gross." Cecilia wrinkled her nose. She watched Clarice cook for a little while before turning sausage in a pan. "Living with Wade must be nice, though." She looked around. "I mean, he's never here, I'm sure, but he's a nice enough guy if you can get past the whole... morally ambiguous thing." She shrugged. "I guess I don't see the world that black and white these days myself."

'Morally ambiguous' was a polite way of putting it. "He's fun," Clarice agreed, "I like living with him. Last time I was here, I lived with Monet," she slid the French toast onto plates, "Oj with the coffee? Or something else?"

"Just coffee for me, thanks." Cecilia nodded, somewhat absently playing with the sausage and a spatula. "I didn't know you'd left," she said after a second, looking up at Clarice. "I mean, I never asked," she admitted. "Sorry about that. Guess I've been a little self-absorbed since I got back. Everything's just been so weird."

"Yeah, college," Clarice explained, "I needed time away from this insanity, you know? Went to the University of Maryland, lived in the dorms, did the normal thing. Well, normal and purple. Then grad school at Pace Manhattan. Then I got pulled back in." It had been good to have the time away, but this was home.

"Yeah, I get that." Cecilia snorted. "Pass me a plate." She placed some sausage next to French toast. College made sense - if she'd thought about it enough, she'd have figured it out. Though how someone who was purple functioned in the real world seemed beyond her. "So many times in the last few weeks, I've wondered what I'm doing back here, but like, where else would I even go?"

Normal was relative when you were purple. By this point, Clarice was immune to the stares and could ignore the whispers well enough. She had absolutely no fucks to give. "That's the thing," she took her plate and mug and went to sit at the little kitchen table, curling her legs Indian style, "Whether we like it or not...we've seen and done too much to really work as civilians."

"You think?" Cecilia joined Clarice at the table. "I mean, I did for a while," she pointed out. "Years. And the whole time I've been here, I've been trying to get a downtown doctor job and let things go back to normal." She ran her finger around the rim of her mug and looked down at her plate. "Then I run around a mutant island trying to save people after a tsunami tries to wipe them away, and I realize I'm not entirely sure what normal is."

There was that. "So maybe it's just me," Clarice replied with a shrug as she poured syrup on her French toast, "but you didn't exactly have a normal job when you were gone. You did Doctor's Without Borders. That's not a nice safe practice in a medical office building where the scariest thing you have to deal with is office gossip either," hat wasn't for them.

"Ick." Cecilia grimaced. There was a weird thought. Cecilia Reyes, danger junkie. "I guess I have been leading a fairly high-adrenaline life since I left. That never occurred to me before." She cut off a piece of her French toast with her fork. "I don't know if I'm cut out for it though."

"Says the woman with the built-in force field," Clarice snorted and rolled her eyes, "You just hate admitting the glaringly obvious because it doesn't involve a white picket fence," maybe Cecilia didn't want a white picket fence, but the point was the same. For all Cecilia bitched about wanting a 'normal life,' she seemed to do everything in her power to not have one.

"Well, I didn't mean—" Cecilia sighed and stabbed at her food. This is why she never opened up. "Picket fence?" She cocked an eyebrow. "Who wants a picket fence? Who said anything about a picket fence? Deluxe apartment in the sky, maybe."

That sounded a lot better than a picket fence! Clarice chuckled, "That sounds more do-able and realistic," she agreed, "I can't see you as the picket fence type. You're more...reluctant hero, I suppose. You're doing it because it's the right thing to do and safe might be safe, but it's also boring."

"Well, I don't like boring," Cecilia agreed after swallowing a bite of her food. "But there's a difference between, like, fixing gunshot wounds or whatever, and helping to restore order after a demon from another dimension wreaks havoc on your city." She took a sip of her coffee and tried to ignore Clarice's look. "Okay, maybe there's not. But something was different about Avalon. I was..." Unsure of exactly what she meant, she just shrugged.

"Gang warfare is normal, demons are supposed to be creatures only in fantasy movies?" Clarice asked, making sure she understood. Alas, nothing was that simple anymore. Not for them anyways.

"Something like that, I guess." Cecilia leaned back in her chair. "Although I guess none of it's normal, really," which she thought was Clarice's point. "Just more familiar."

"You know you've been at Xavier's to long when," Clarice agreed wryly, sipping her coffee, "That was the hardest thing about being away actually. It was really hard to relate to my classmates when I'm used to demon invasions and they think demons aren't real," maybe that was why everyone seemed to return.

Cecilia snorted and shook her head. "At least you tried. I kept to myself in college. And much of med school. Wasn't until I came here that I felt like I could start to, you know, let my hair down. Residency was nice, though. It's kind of a great equalizer - everyone's miserable and you're in the trenches together, so you bond instantly." She looked up from her plate. "A lot like being here, I guess, if you stick around long enough."

Getting up with a groan, Clarice went to give Cecilia a hug, "This place is awesome and you know it! Kinda like you. Like attracts like."

"No, I know, I know!" Cecilia shook her head as Clarice went in for the embrace. "I didn't mean it like that. Just in the sense of like, you know. Shared trauma," she waved her hand in a vague gesture, "and shared war stories and all that. Like, years from now, we'll be talking about the time we got walloped by a tsunami." And saved a 17-year-old from a death that probably could have been prevented.

That was true. Shared trauma linked them all, just like soldiers or those who grew up in violent places. "Years from now we're not even going to remember the tsunami because of all the other stuff," Clarice countered. "Don't beat yourself up, Cece. Seriously. We all did our best."

"No, I know. I'm not," Cecilia protested somewhat half-heartedly. "It's just hard when you — when it's something preventable. I mean, it can all be prevented, but, like..." She shrugged. "I keep thinking, what if I could have built a bigger shield. I mean, I know I can't protect a whole island, but there was — there were people around me when the thing hit. Couldn't help them."

Sighing deeply, Clarice sat for a moment thinking. This was something everyone dealt with at some point in their own way. "We're people, Cecilia," she said finally, "We have mutant powers and training for terrible situations to make them less terrible, but we're human. We can't save everyone no matter how much we want to. Not with our powers, not as doctors. And we can't feel guilty for that, it will eat us alive," Clarice ran a hand through her hair, pushing it back off her face, "If you think more powers training would help, then you're in a great place to try and learn. But don't feel badly for doing what you could, even if it wasn't enough. You did your best."

"Yeah," Cecilia nodded, "I know that. But I still feel like I failed." She looked down at her remaining French toast. "How did I not think about something like this? Not a freak tsunami, but that I could have used my powers to..." She shrugged. "Just seems like something I should have thought about when I blew off powers training and then moved across the country."

"That's the point," Clarice pointed out around a bite of food, "you're not as well trained in your powers as you could be, they're not your first thought for solving a problem or whatever. And that's okay. It's better not to be a one-trick pony, which can happen if you only focus on one thing. You're a great doctor and you're here now, you can focus on your powers some more. It's okay," diversity was important.

"Yeah, okay." Cecilia understood what Clarice was saying, even if it didn't entirely ease the guilt she was feeling. She sipped her coffee, considering for a moment. "Thank God, Hope's okay," she finally said.

Nothing Clarice could say would truly ease the guilt, but lessening it was a good start, "Hope's okay," she agreed, repeating the words. "Now. Do we want an exfoliating body wrap or a seaweed one or what?" The important questions.

"Ugh, no seaweed!" Cecilia grinned before taking a bite full of French toast. "No more seaweed again, ever."