Arthur and Adrienne - Meeting (Backdated to January 5 - Phase 1)

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

Adrienne helps Arthur with a powers exercise and ends up discovering something new about her own powers, which she uses to offer to help him piece together his lost memories and culminates in her offering him a job.

Arthur had on a blindfold.

This was wholly unnecessary, but just felt right. The blindfold was technically a scarf procured on a previous shopping adventure. The game was cards. The ex-television star, as that fact was starting to slowly sink in as the details surfaced on how thoroughly Majordomo had been controlling Arthur's life, wore a very serious expression of concentration underneath the fabric that was all his own.

"Uh. Nine of Spades?"

"Go Fish," Adrienne responded. She was wearing a completely useless blindfold as well, Reading the cards as she picked them up to tell her what they were and treating the whole thing as an exercise in deleting superfluous Readings from her mental repository.

He pouted a little. "Isn't the point of being lucky that you're supposed to be reliably lucky?"

"Welcome to the wonderful world of Xavier's," Adrienne muttered, making a face. "We're like a Humane Society for people with powers malfunctions. Or people who don't know what their powers do. Seven of Hearts?" she asked. In addition to her exercises on the astral plane, she was also trying to use her precognition, but she was having about as much luck with it as Arthur was in getting her cards from her. "You don't have any Bowens in your family, by any chance, do you?"

Arthur handed over the seven after a quick peek to see his actual cards, but was pleased to discover that his draw had revealed another pair. "Well, they tried to explain my powers to me, but honestly I think I need to ask for a cliff notes version. I was also high out of my mind on pain killers. Something something reality, something luck."

Adrienne touched her cards to determine which one was the Jack of Diamonds and handed it over. "Ah, probably not related then. There was a rumour going around after your bookstore thing, when your eye glowed, that you might be related to my ward. She does the glowing thing, too. Also, who tried to explain your powers to you?" she asked, curious. "I mean, I didn't know that Powers Recognition was something we could do here. Is there like, an Xavier's Sorting Hat that you put on when you got here to tell you what your powers are?" Why did Arthur always make her think about Harry Potter? She touched the table to try, once again, to determine if its future included her putting down another pair in the next couple minutes. "Four of Clubs?"

The table was rather fickle about its future, but deadwood generally liked to stay rooted in the past than reveal oncoming changes.

"Go Fish."

Arthur slumped back a little in his chair. The game was drawing on, and he fiddled underneath the table with his utility blade -- one of the only items to make it with him from home to the mansion -- to keep his attention occupied. Switch, flip. Switch, flip. The soothing repetition was known and relaxing. "A curly haired lady and another brunette sat me down for a serious talk about reality-warping, but I was never good at high-minded subjects. Wanda? Maybe? Penny? I apparently bent some major rules out... out in..."

He didn't finish, voice catching as he bit his lip and looked away. "You'd be doing me a favor if you had a Two of Hearts."

"Unfortunately, reality is not warping in your favour right now," Adrienne answered, trying to precog what card he'd pick up from the deck by touching the table again. "I don't think there's a Penny," she told him with a smirk. "There's a Jennie?" She took her blindfold off to look under the table and determine the noise she was hearing. "Are you going to test your luck by trying to kill me and seeing if I die quickly or slowly?"

"What?" Yet as soon as he stopped to do a double take, the weight of the blade in his hands registered. His grip tightened out of reflex."Oh, I'm so sorry. Nervous habit."

Arthur held the blade up, all bits sheathed, in a sign of good faith. "This is Chelsea. She's been with me a long time."

"As in, 'Chelsea Dagger'?" Adrienne asked, studying the blade with the eye of one who'd studied a little with Wade Wilson.

"Multitool," said with the clear inflection that this came up a lot, "And I got her before that song happened."

He petted the shiny metal grip lovingly. "She's got blades, sure, but sometimes you need a can opener too."

"You need to meet Wade Wilson," Adrienne smirked. "Two people who both pet their wea... tools," she corrected, not wanting to... insult Chelsea, "should clearly be friends. Actually, have you met him? You would have seen each other at the charity auction," she mused thoughtfully.

"We've met. He's very enthusiastic." Arthur let his smile try to fill in for any of the other words he might use to describe his interactions with Wade.

He set Chelsea on the table.

"That's one word for him," the brunette responded with a goodnatured grin, setting her hands back on the table to resume the card game. She flipped her mental switch to turn her powers back on, but the images she got were not from the table.

There was the wreckage of a plane. Snow. Something... in the snow. Animals? Then a warehouse filled with armed men. Then a dragon was breathing fire. Then a cave. Then nothing but water. Then...

Arthur frowned politely. "You have the most peculiar look on your face."

Adrienne tore her hands from the table and held them up around her shoulders, not wanting to put them down again. "What the fuck?! Why did I Read your dagger?" she asked him, fidgeting uncomfortably in her chair. Her face was filled with worry. "How did I Read your dagger? That doesn't happen. That can't happen. And why the fuck was there a dragon?" she added, suddenly distracted from her panic about her powers by the fact that she'd seen a dragon.

The man looked at Adrienne blankly, then at Chelsea, then back at Adrienne, and then took another long look at the knife. He pointed helpfully. "Do you mean my multitool?"

"Yes!" Adrienne snapped, fear making her short and snappish. "I Read your multitool. I'm not supposed to be able to do that. Why did I do that? And what the fuck did I see with it?"

"Well," but it wasn't really a segue more as a pooling of reserves, "My blade there likely remembers more of my life than I did. The papers say I went up against a terrorist who turned into a dragon last month." He shrugged, exercising extreme optimism. "That sounds cool, right? Would have made a hell of a ratings boost."

"From what I saw in the dag... multitool," Adrienne corrected with an apologetic hand gesture, "you had a lot of boost-worthy exploits. So... you really don't remember much about your life?"

"I remember the important things? Family. Growing up. My successes. Lows. It is just the wilder parts of the last five years that are giant, gaping holes when I was some media mogul's ratings puppet."

Adrienne nodded, rubbing her hands together distractedly. "Well, the important things are... the important things," she said in her most comforting tone, though she realized after she'd said it how odd it sounded. "If I were you, I don't know if I'd want to remember my time spent as a puppet. Even if there were cool adventures with dragons and shit involved. But I can fill in the blanks for you if you want," she offered.

The man bit his lip speculatively. "Haller gave me a speech where the moral that was likely the opposite of what you're offering. A lot of big words about emotional health through self-discovery. Still..."

He fiddled with the knife, picking it up and putting it down on the table again. "Storytime sounds better than ripping a bandaid off over and over. I also have a bad habit of not paying attention when I don't completely understand things."

"I won't narc if you won't," Adrienne joked, picking up the multitool and switching her powers on.

The dragon again. Or, at least, a sulking woman in handcuffs that wore a dragon's fang, an ankh, and a confused expression. A cheering crowd. A white gloved hand, too many hands, touching playfully as a voice cooed "Brave Arthur slays the foul beast."

Fire. Drowning. A rush of combat scenes, all fuzzy around the edges. Cutting wire, blinking lights. A campsite. A young boy. A father. "Art, this is a tool Like any tool, you must learn to us it correctly." A smile.

Forehead wrinkled in a frown, Adrienne passed the tool back to Arthur. "It's nice that your father gave it to you," she said to buy time as she struggled to make sense of what she'd seen of the woman with the dragon fang and the handsy woman, the same one she'd seen Arthur with at the Red X charity event. "Did you ever bang the handsy woman? She's pretty hot and all those hands... that's definitely not a turn-off."

"One the one hand," and Arthur held up an open palm, "Yes, Spiral is hot and we probably rolled around a few times. On the other..." He shifted uncomfortably. The edges of his smile twitched. "It depends if mind-wipe kink is your thing. She wasn't shy about sharing what she liked about the relationship in Nevada."

"Touché," Adrienne acquiesced, shrugging good-naturedly. "Although, speaking as someone who attempted a lot of her own mind-wiping due to past relationships, I guess it's better if you're the one losing your memories of the sex than your partner erasing their own memory because of how bad you are in the sack or something. I don't think my ego could take that." She took out her notepad and pencil and scribbled down the other scenes she'd seen in the Reading so that Arthur could read up on his own past later. "So it looked like the dragon was a woman with a necklace. And it looks like she was some kind of captive. I wonder what happened to her," she mused as she scrawled her jot notes.

Arthur shrugged, expression growing worried. "She was taken into custody according to what I googled. I hate to think that she was manipulated like I was. Was she unlucky because of something I choose to do? I cannot help but think that a lot lately."

"Seems to me like that kind of thinking is just going to drive you insane," Adrienne answered sympathetically, finishing up her notes and ripping the page out so she could pass it across the table to Arthur. "Especially if that's just how your powers work. I mean, if so, it's just going to keep happening, right? Gotta make your peace with that, or whatever other therapist-spewy line you want to go with. Move on with your life and try to put what you can do to good use," she shrugged, not sounding entirely convinced by her own words. "Do you have any plans for what you're gonna do now?"

"People keep telling me I should be curled in a corner somewhere muttering incoherently. Maybe I passed insane and have graduated onto something else." He took the paper and gave them a cursory once over like how someone might scan a newspaper they had no intention of reading immediately. "People also keep telling me to move on and that's there's everything and anything out there. The thing they never mention, though? Anything is scary as hell."

"I can only imagine," Adrienne retorted. It was a statement open to interpretation, in that it could be taken sympathetically, or as it was intended, which was literally. Adrienne had never really experienced fear at the prospect of being able to do anything that was out there. A blank slate only excited her. "Well, if you intend to stick around New York, I work at a private investigator's office. In District X, catering to the mutant community," she explained casually. "I'm sure having someone lucky around, someone with what I'm imagining would be an impressive list of contacts and favours to be owed, would be very advantageous."

He looked at her skeptically. "So you're basically a detective. For mutants. I mean, I know people in Hollywood and across charity boards, but I imagine my Screen Actor's Guild membership won't be ruined this year. Mojo and his people have done a good job tarnishing my good reputation ever since I wasn't his ratings-puppet."

The man sighed, taking a moment to consider the opportunity, "I'm not exactly Sherlock either."

"I think the sole reason people become private dicks is because they've had their reputations tarnished," Adrienne mused to him with a smirk. "And who needs to be Sherlock when they have luck powers? I'd bet that between my psychometry, your luck, and the fact that Jessica Jones has actually trained with PIs, we'd be a pretty damned good crew," she shrugged, still sounding casual about it.

Arthur tried unsuccessfully to hide the sour look the played across his face at that. "Everyone seems to assume that my luck is all I am these days."

He took a cleansing breathe, and held up a hand to waylay any snark. "That said, yes. That might be handy. But what's so great about being a private investigator? Where's the action? Who do you work for?"

"The Professor here bankrolled the agency to start," Adrienne explained, "but it's mostly self-sufficient now." She mused on what was great about it, tossing the playing cards they didn't seem to be playing with anymore towards a trash can, trying to get them to fly in. "I guess there's not much that's great about it, to be honest with you," she admitted. "Strange hours, a lot of hurry-up-and-wait, a lot of staying in the shadows so you can watch people do bad things. But, I guess there's something satisfying in catching assholes doing shitty things. At least, that's what I get out of it," she smirked. "I love trying to figure out how I'd do whatever it is they're doing but not get caught, y'know? I could also say 'doing what's morally right, stopping bad people and getting justice for the little guy', shit like that," she added as an afterthought, "if that floats your boat."

"I'm an actor, Adrienne. An entertainer. I'm goofy and my attention span could fit on a 3x3 cue card." But, surprisingly even after this, he continued, "Although that sounds better than sitting around this place having folks prod at me all day. I will consider your offer."

"Good," Adrienne nodded, tossing more playing cards. Her aim was normally pretty fair, thanks to years of firearms and archery training, but the shape of the cards was throwing off her mental calculations about angles versus force. "Because, you're right. I'm selling you short. You're more than luck. And I think an entertainer and goof would be a good asset to the team," she told him with a hint of fondness in her voice. "With Vanessa away all the time, someone has to fill the crazy-slash-fun quotient at the office, and I can't do it all on my own."

"Well," he shrugged and slumped back a little into his chair, "Then we are agreed to see how it goes. Excellent."