xp_logs | Artie and Wanda (Reply)

Backdated to 23 Jan. Artie meets the new Wanda

The world had changed.

The world had changed and they couldn't talk about it and now, Artie was here, in the mansion. Everything was almost the same, but not - jarring differences. A wall a foot away from from where it should be. A vase that wasn't there and a picture that was. He leaned back against the wall for a moment at the top of the main stairs, closed his eyes, the exhaustion of the last few days still weighing down on him even if he felt physically fine.

He built a picture of it as it had been in his mind, perfect. Not unchanging but as it had been when he'd come by in late December for a visit, jetlagged and tired after Christmas in Budapest. Blink and it was gone before he could project it out over the utterly, utterly wrong reality in front of him. Blink again, and it was the ruins he'd pulled the injured new mutants out of. He shook his head to clear it, and turned angrily.

The X-Force grapevine had been busy. They knew where the offices were and ... who was there. He set off down the hall and knocked on a door.

Wanda looked up from the computer she'd been staring at for the last hour, wondering if what she needed were glasses or a new computer, and called out to the person to come in. She smiled when she say Artie and hit save on her document, though a part of her was still never certain it was actually going to work. The paranoia of an academic went pretty well with the paranoia of a spy sometimes.

"Artie! How are you? Come in, grab a seat and save me from this dreadful device."

Wanda-not-Wanda and the last time Artie had seen her was at the all-hands briefing before. Before everything. She looked the same.

He smiled broadly and gestured at the computer. "Computer trouble again?" he signed, fast and furious. That was a test.

Her eyes had followed along with his signing and the flicker of surprise at the speed disappeared quickly. "Again? Try always," she said after a moment. Her ASL had been nonexistent before Artie had joined the team but she'd considered it a detriment and had, with some difficulties, set about learning it. But it wasn't great by any stretch of the imagination, though she was trying. "I have not blown it up yet, yay me."

As tests went, that was surreal. She was more fluent than his Wanda. "I'm glad to hear that. Doug gets annoyed if we break his stuff." Poke, slowly, carefully and find out what the differences were. "Your flight in was good?" Artie asked, settling himself in the visitor's chair.

"Well, as good as could be expected." She rubbed her face. "I'm not sure if you heard but Lorna's cover as our mole was blown. Well, at the very least the Brotherhood found out they had a mole and, smart girl, she went running. It was only a matter of time. So I pulled some strings and waved some money around to get my layover changed so I could grab her."

Wanda grinned tightly. "We're one safe house down in San Francisco but it was worth it to get her out. So the flight itself was long and they did not lose my luggage - but it was stressful nonetheless."

Artie shook his head and grimaced. He'd gotten - most of that - but he wanted to make sure. This wasn't a language Wanda spoke fluently and, much as his Wanda had, she tended to use sign supported English, meaning that a lot of the key words were just... dropped when she didn't know the appropriate signs. The message was garbled and this, this he wanted to have clear. "Can you repeat that, in just one language?"

"Sorry." Wanda grimaced as well and dropped her hands down for a moment. There were simply things that didn't translate well - Brotherhood and Magneto were hard concepts for her to get across with her hands. She was fluent in a number of languages but, to date, ASL was the hardest she'd ever tried to teach herself. Luckily, speaking worked just as well even if it meant she was still trying to figure out the way to sign it. She repeated what she said in a way that wouldn't give him a headache.

The extra time while Wanda repeated herself gave Artie time to compose himself. Muir had been destroyed because of the Brotherhood and they were still here. New Orleans gave him the practice at keeping a calm, composed face and he switched to text. "I'm glad you got her out. Has she been debriefed?"

"I'm sure she will be." Pushing aside the keyboard, she leaned against the desk and sighed. "I had to recuse myself from that, of course. And with the teams in turmoil... It will get done. But there's also the fact that she's jumping at every shadow or at least she was. Giving Lorna some breathing room will make that debrief much easier."

You didn't speak ill of the dead-not-dead-resurrected-and-replaced people - oh god, how was this even his life? Unless they were dead-not-dead-resurrected or what the fuck ever this was and fuck, seriously or unless you just didn't give a fuck. "She will," Artie replied. "Lorna's a bit... fragile, what with the whole anorexia thing and all that and her vested interests in the Brotherhood." He'd switched back to sign, fast and furious and didn't much care if Wanda got the fingerspelling. "We need that first debriefing now, before she's had time to think about what she's going to censor out because, hello! vested interests there."

Wanda cupped her chin in her palm and stared at Artie for a few moments, quietly watching. When she spoke, she was laughing a little at herself. "Mr. Maddicks, someone has taught you well. No, you're right. It is, I suppose, simply a matter of finding someone to do it. Too much chaos in these halls these days. I'll talk to Lorna and have her talk to someone - she told me much on the drive from the airport but, again, I have too much invested to be a good judge."

Artie replied in images, Lorna in a car Wanda was driving, holding the seat, alternately telling everything she knew and begging Wanda to stop, powers fending off traffic as Wanda veered over the centre line and into the path of an oncoming school bus. "Bring a recorder next time. It's a novel way to debrief," he added, in text.

It had been days since Wanda had laughed like that, head thrown back and a hand covering her eyes as she tried to unsee the images if only because it was a little too close to the real thing. "I will make certain," she replied, breaking into a fit of giggles, "to try that next time. But cleaning out the car after an episode or two like that might prove to be too much for even myself to handle."

"Who says you use your own car?" It was easier to keep it to this, to the lighthearted banter. He'd had to sit across a table from Wanda a few weeks ago, working over a list of contacts and this felt disturbingly like that. Like her. Like she was real.

"Mmm, good point. I could always use a rental or even borrow a car from someone that's been annoying me."

"Better." Artie shook his head and then gestured - we're moving past that. "Have you got anything that I need to know? I'm on a 7:30 flight to New Orleans tonight and want to make sure that I'm up to date here before I leave."

"Perhaps. Hold on a moment..." It took only a small amount of cursing and threatening to throw the computer out the window before Wanda was able to get on and work her way through the folders. "How long will you be there? There are at least two names that I know of that I would appreciate you checking on." The printer next to her whirred to life. "One is one of our magical contacts. A fairly small fish in the grand scheme of things, Emily James, but she was always keen to help us, always very clever. And the other..."

She sat back and looked thoughtfully at the computer before glancing back at Artie. "A personal favor, if you would be so kind. One of my old professors settled in New Orleans when he retired and I have not been able to get in touch with him for weeks. If you have time, would you check in on him...?"

Artie nodded. "I'll be there for two-three days and working nights. I've got time to check in on him. I'll do it first thing in the morning, since ... old people, y'know? they don't want to be harassed at night." New Orleans didn't have the resonance for him that it had for Amanda, for Marie-Ange, for Remy. Fuck Remy. Artie had learned more about his powers and how to use them effectively there in his six months with the forgers than he had in all the years before that.

Here was terrible, the walls, the details, everything, just so slightly off. Nothing was the same and the urge to make it that way, for a minute, two minutes - the hallways at 9am, right before classes started, the kitchen in the evening, when the insomniac coffee run started and he could. He could rewrite reality for just an instant. Replace these people, more of them every day, with the ones they should have had. Make the walls, the scuffs in the paint, the decoration on the runner on the second floor front hall look the way it ought to. For a minute. He couldn't.

He hadn't gone back to the tunnels. Like, sure, whatever, there were words for people who made connections, saw the world break and didn't go back to see if their mates were still there. And as terrible as here was right now, as skin-crawingly wrong as everything felt, he couldn't face the tunnels. At least New Orleans was only business. Or so he told himself.

Across the desk, Wanda sat and quietly watched him for a moment as Artie seemed to visit another place for a few brief seconds. It wasn't uncommon these days. Too many people - most people - had stumbled away from New Years Eve not with a hangover but, instead, with grief of differing sorts hanging over them.

"Thank you, I really do appreciate it," she said suddenly, breaking the moment of silence. Reaching out, she punched a few keys to save the documents she'd been unsuccessfully working on earlier. When that was done, she stood and pulled her jacket off the back of her chair. "Care to take a walk?" she asked as she pulled it around her. "I could do with some fresh air. And perhaps a hot dog. Or coffee, I could always use more coffee."

Artie nodded, projected image of him grabbing his coat on the way out floating between them. Food was good plan.