Amanda & Cecilia | Friday afternoon (slightly backdated)

[x-barrier.livejournal.com]

Amanda and Cecilia catch up in the mansion. It's not as awkward as might be expected.

The first time Cecilia had looked at Wade's files, she hadn't realized what a mess they were. It was a cursory glance - a way to satisfy her curiosity and look for any holes in treatment. She hadn't been trying to come up with a comprehensive plan for a new patient - one with a genetic anomaly that seemed to make treating his disease impossible. Plus, she hadn't had to deal with hem/onc patients in years, and so on top of figuring out Wade's weird stasis, she also had to give herself a refresher course in advanced topics in cancer.

The sheer amount of research was making her head spin, so after a few hours in the medlab, she'd grabbed Wade's chart and a stack of papers from his other doctors, then started toward the library for a change of scenery. Still, the whole case was really as engrossing as it was overwhelming, and Cecilia couldn't keep herself from reading as she walked. Her familiarity with the mansion would guide her, she figured, and the worst thing that could happen was running into a wall. She'd been through worse.

For her part, Amanda was trying to multitask. Her teaching responsibilities had gotten in the way of some fairly important report reading, and since she didn't want to look like a tosser at the next Trenchcoats meeting, she was trying to catch up on a series of incidents in Johannesburg that could be either some kind of mystical meddling, or a mutant manifestation. Maybe both. She really hoped it wasn't the latter, since any new magically-inclined mutant seemed to automatically wind up as her student these days.

"Can't wait 'til you come back, Boss Lady," she muttered to herself, squinting at a poor-quality fax as she turned the corner.

"Oh—" Cecilia looked up just in time to slide against the wall. But, startled by the other woman's sudden appearance, she dropped her stack of the papers to the floor. "Well damn," she grumbled as she knelt down to pick them up, trying not to show how dismayed she was to see them out of order. "Sorry about that. Should have been looking where I was going." She wasn't entirely sure why she was apologizing.

"Oh bollocks, I'm sorry!" Amanda joined her on the floor, scrambling to pick up her own papers, which she'd dropped in her instinctive leap away from a potential threat. "I should really put a shield up if I'm going to read and walk..." She looked up at the other woman, blinking as she realised this wasn't one of the usual people wandering the halls. "Dr. Reyes?"

"Yes?" Cecilia looked up from the floor and raised an eyebrow. The voice was familiar, but this well-composed blonde could not actually be who she thought it was. For one thing, her face wasn't jangling. Still, the accent was uncannily eerie, so... "Amanda?"

"In the flesh," was the witch's reply, accompanied by a brief grin. "Um, here, I think this one's yours..." She held out a bundle of notes held together with a paperclip. "I saw something on the journals 'bout you being back, but I thought I was imagining things."

"Thanks." Cecilia took the papers, added them to her pile and stood. She wasn't sure if she should take offense to that comment, so she figured she'd give Amanda the benefit of the doubt. But it wasn't like she'd stormed out of Xavier's the first time. Well, not exactly anyway. "No, I'm real." She smiled. "This is all very, very real."

Amanda collected one last stray page and rose as well, tucking the pile into the bookbag hanging from her shoulder. "Sorry, that was probably a bit rude. Like I said, I was surprised, is all. And possibly a bit defensive, considering I'm probably the epitome of everything that made you leave last time. Magic, forces unknown, blah, blah." It was said with the kind of diffident humour Amanda had developed as a better public face than the bratty antagonism she'd had as a teen.

"I wouldn't say that." Cecilia lifted an eyebrow at Amanda's apology. Maybe people really did change. "Well, okay," she relented, "maybe I would have said that."

There might have been a tiny part of Amanda that was enjoying messing with Cecilia's perceptions. Just a tiny part. "Well, 's all water under the bridge now, I suppose, especially considering you're back." Amanda shrugged slightly. "So you're back in the medlab? Patching up X-Men and giving the kids their shots?"

"I am." Cecilia made a face. "My return was, uh, abrupt, and I didn't have time to line up a real job, so I'm here for now. It's a nice change of pace, I guess, and it never hurts to be rooted. But I think I'm a surgery junkie." She pushed a loose braid behind her ear. "You're still... you know." Her hands traced random patterns in the air, and she smirked. "Hocus pocus?"

Amanda snorted. "Yeah, still in the eye of newt business. And teaching the next generation of meddlers with the natural order - I take it you haven't met Billy, Topaz or Megan yet?"

"Can't say I have. Although I think I'm familiar with Billy's work, at least. Hard to miss whatever was going on with Clint Barton's hair back in April." Cecilia shook her head and smiled. "Guess it's nice to see nothing really changes too much around here, though." At least, she didn't think the little things changed too much.

The blonde rolled her eyes. "I swear, Billy's going to send me bonkers," she said. "I mean, Topaz and Megan I get, with the angst and the horrible demonic-type events and the potential for going bad, but Billy? He's nothing like I was."

Cecilia wasn't entirely sure how to respond to that. So she settled with snark. "Hm. Over-enthusiastic about stretching the boundaries of reality?" She smirked. "Can't imagine how he picked that up living around here."

After a second, something Amanda said occurred to her. "Wait, demonic-type events? When, dare I ask, was the last one of those?"

"Um." Amanda looked a bit sheepish. "Maybe around last Christmas? But the magical protection on this place has been bulked up a lot since then."

"Aha." Cecilia nodded and tried not to look skeptical. "Well, whatever." She shrugged after a second. "I guess we just take it as it comes, right? No point stressing."

"If it helps, the demon responsible is very, very dead." Amanda possibly took a little too much pleasure in saying that. "So that particular threat? Not so much a threat any more."

"Right." Cecilia said flatly. "Like nothing's ever come back from life here before." She rolled her eyes and glanced down at the stack she was carrying. "God, I bet you would have loved to be a fly on the wall when I finally met Jean Grey. Shan neglected to tell me she was, you know, alive." She shook her head. "I've never felt like a bigger idiot."

Despite herself, Amanda snorted a laugh. "Yeah, I can imagine. Hopefully you didn't call her a zombie, at least? Clarice got hell for doing that when she first showed up."

"I didn't say it, but I'm sure I thought it, which means she probably heard me. God, there's a thought."

Amanda snickered again. "Well, she seems to have a better sense of humour about the whole thing these days, which is probably why you didn't end up in the lake or something."

Cecilia laughed. "I'll watch my mindcasts, then, I guess." This conversation was surprisingly normal and was going better than expected given her and Amanda's one-time difference of opinion about, uh, most things. "I take it you're in the city with everyone else over the age of 25, then?"

"Working with the Snow Valley Research Centre? Yeah. Marie-Ange and I are still roomies, tho', so I guess the more things change..." Amanda chuckled. "How much do you know about what happens over there, by the way? So I don't freak you out with spoilers or whatever."

"Spoilers?" Cecilia tilted her head, trying not to stare at a spot where she thought Amanda once had a piercing that no longer existed. She could have sworn that whole wasn't supposed to close. "Marie-Ange casually dropped the whole spy thing when we were drunk at the Eurovision party, but I was too focused on bearded Austrians and whatever was going on with France to worry about that." She thought about it. "Oh, and Remy alluded to things being dice-y or shady, but he never expounded on anything because, you know. Remy."

"Remy LeBeau, forever cursed to be a cross between a fortune cookie and a cryptic crossword," Amanda agreed. "As for the Snow Valley folks... well, yeah, it's obvious to anyone who knows us, we're not just a research centre. We're... I guess you could call us pest control for fuckweasels. The threats the leather brigade can't go after for various reasons, we take care of."

"Pest control for fuckweasels," Cecilia repeated slowly, a smile on her face. She liked the no-nonsense way Amanda made that sound, especially compared to some of the high-minded rhetoric she'd come to expect from the mansion and its ex-residents. "Sounds fun, if that's your sort of thing." It wasn't hers. "And dangerous, but then I suppose that's never been a problem for you."

Amanda shrugged. "Seemed the best thing for me to do, after getting my arse tossed out of here. And since it needs doing, it's best if we do it - less connections with the school means we can get our hands dirty without it bouncing back. Well, most of the time." The witch paused, and looked at her watch. "Say, it's moving on to beer o'clock. You want to join me for a pint at Harry's before I head back to the city?" She grinned, looking much younger for a moments, echoes of the kid she'd been. "'M actually legal these days."

Cecilia had to snort at that. She glanced down at the stack of papers in her arms, then looked up at Amanda with a smile. "God. Yes. Drinks sound phenomenal right now. Let me drop this mess off somewhere, and then I'm good to go."