Log: Doug and Laurie

[x-wallflower-.livejournal.com]

Backdated to 23rd January 2015

Laurie and Doug spend a little time talking after she comes to bed late



Laurie pulled the covers back and slipped into the bed she now shared with her boyfriend, snuggling up against him in a spoon configuration as she gently kissed his forehead. She'd finally been kicked out of the little side lab in the Medlab facility that she'd taken over in her search for a prosthetic limb. Considering she was on medical leave from the X-men until she found a solution, she had made it somewhat of a mission to find something soon. If she'd known Forge in this universe then the answer would have been simple, but she didn't, and she had a lot of catching up to do on technology.

"Sorry," she said softly as she met Doug's sleepy gaze and realized she'd woken him. "CeCe told me to go to bed."

"Whutimzit?" Doug said blearily as he raised his head up off the pillow. He rolled onto his back, coming a bit more awake. "Not surprised she threw you out." Laurie's tendencies toward single-mindedness were well known by all at this point. For that matter, so was Cecelia's no-holds-barred approach to 'people skills'.

Laurie grinned and settled herself down beside him with what was left of her right arm curled against her side.

"I may be pushing myself a little hard, but no gain without a little pain, right?"

"There's a little pain, and then there's what you've been through." Doug was still processing the incandescent rage that he'd felt upon finding out that Laurie's hand had been cut off. He rolled over to face her, stroking the upper part of her right arm with his hand. "You don't have to push yourself so hard," he told her. "Yes, I know, pot and kettle," he continued before she could even snort in amusement. "But still."

"You're still here, and I'm still here." Laurie replied, turning her face upward to grab a quick kiss. "What's half an arm when the other possibility was that I wouldn't know you at all. Or if I did, we might be completely different people."

Or that she might have not been part of this world. Doug did his best to pry himself away from that morbid line of thought. "It's just an awful lot to take in and deal with," he said quietly, curling into Laurie. Here, by themselves in the dark, he could let himself worry.

Laurie allowed herself the comfort, and tilted her head back, meeting his eyes with her own, allowing him to see the pain she had hid from the outside world, and the worry that she might not find a way to go forward, or fix what had been taken.

"It is, but you've got Wade and Marie-Ange here still, and we've got each other. We just have to let people help us, rather then trying to pretend we can handle it all ourselves."

"We lost so many people," Doug said quietly after a longish pause. He was still coming to grips with the giant holes left behind by the ones who hadn't been shifted to this new patchwork reality, and the seeming arbitrariness of it all. Doug was the sort of person who needed things to make sense, for there to be a deeper reason for why there were so many missing pieces.

"Are you blaming yourself for surviving when they didn't?"

Laurie used her good hand to run her fingers over the line of worry on her forehead. She knew he worried constantly, and that he held himself to an almost impossible standard, she did much the same herself.

"No? ...yes? I don't know." And Doug absolutely hated not knowing. He hated things not making sense. This new patchwork reality had him on edge more often than not, trying to figure out what familiar face would be missing, or in some unfamiliar new form. "It's exhausting."

"It doesn't all have to make sense all at once." Laurie explained, continuing to stroke her fingers down the side of his face to rest in the short tangle of his hair against his neck, kneading softly. "You're allowed to be confused, or afraid, or worried. The way you are, the way your power works, it can't be easy to get it all together so soon after everything has fallen apart. So you lean on the ones that care about you, you lean on me until it makes a little more sense."

Doug curled farther into Laurie, pulling the covers up to make a cocoon around them. "I hate that we're not supposed to talk about it too much, or go looking for particular people, or any of that crap Xorn said could break the universe."

"I don't think he did it to be cruel." Laurie said as she allowed herself to be covered, enjoying the feel of being encompassed by him. "I think if he could have, he would have made it easier. Mutant powers, they don't always work the way we want them too."

"There's so many people." The friendships he'd made over ten years at the mansion, and the loss of so many, hurt Doug very deeply. Hell, even for as much as Jamie had crapped on their friendship, Doug still felt a need to find him in this universe.

"And we'll remember them, as best we can and in little ways every day," Laurie responded, stroking his arm lightly with her good hand as she closed her eyes. "My father wouldn't have wanted me to grieve for him, not forever. He would have probably said I should go out and do something completely illegal but mostly I think he'd have wanted me to live."

"I'm trying mostly not to think about what changes to my family might be waiting unexpected for me this time around," Doug said, sticking his tongue out at the ceiling, as if he could somehow make Xorn see it.

"God, I haven't even called my Mom yet, or my Dad," Laurie replied, the realisation that her family might be different in this world a splash of cold water over her tired mind. "I guess it's too late at night to give Mom a call, she'll wonder what's wrong and then I've never been able to lie to her."

Laurie sighed and curled in tighter to Doug, not wanting to deal with the idea that her family, not just the mother she'd had since birth, but the father she'd only just found might be different, or gone. What if in this universe she'd never gone looking for her Dad? Would her mother still have the cancer time bomb ticking inside her? Please, Xorn, please don't have done that to her family.