Cecilia and Topaz || Early Friday Morning

[x-topaz.livejournal.com]

A wild Topaz appears, and Cecilia is the lucky insomniac who runs into her in the kitchen. It's a very one-sided conversation.



It was close to 3 a.m., and the text in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery was all starting to blur together.

Cecilia blinked a few times, hoping the words would clear up. Her eyes ran over the printed pages where trails of fluorescent yellow ink veered from well-spaced lines of type. Marks that started off straight suddenly careened down the page, leaving permanent proof of how often she kept accidentally nodding off.

She dropped the highlighter and the journal on the table, rubbing her eyes as she glanced at a large stack of periodicals yet to be defaced. Even now, hours after she'd started reading, it was an annoyingly big stack. She sighed as she pushed her chair back from the kitchen table and stood.

This situation was entirely of her own making, and she knew it. The mansion and its craziness had sucked her in, and between that and her own personal issues, Cecilia Reyes, M.D., F.A.C.S., had come dangerously close to letting her certifications lapse. Now she was trying to make up for lost time, cramming for CME tests and mainlining coffee so she could squeeze months of reading into a few days.

"Dumb, dumb, dumb," she muttered to herself as she grabbed the electric kettle and brought it to the sink. The faucet sputtered to life, almost echoing her cadence. She filled the vessel to the top, then set it on the base.

It was with great care that Topaz opened her door and peeked out, making sure no one was standing guard waiting for her to make an appearance. The hallway was blissfully empty, however, so she nudged Midnight aside to let herself out of her suite. She wouldn't have been making the journey, honestly, if not for the fact that she'd used up the last of her tea about an hour ago.

And every time she closed her eyes she still saw the weird angle Ebersol's neck had been twisted at after she'd blasted him.

So instead she made her way down to the kitchen, deliberately circling around and taking different routes to avoid any of the usual mansion insomniacs. She finally made it to the kitchen, and nearly groaned out loud when she saw she wasn't alone.

Brilliant. Well, it was just Dr. Reyes, she reasoned as she slid in quietly, heading for the cabinet of tea. She probably wouldn't bother her anyways.

The footsteps were hard to hear over the bubbling kettle, but the change in the shadows drew Cecilia's attention. She looked up, wondering for a second if her eyes were playing tricks on her before she saw Topaz. Topaz, at 3 a.m., quiet as usual, avoiding conversation as usual. Almost the same, but...

But. Well.

Cecilia had heard what happened. Even without being an X-person, she learned enough. Bits of conversation, lines in reports that she'd been shown as a precaution. Things written down that nobody ought to be reminded of. At least she'd been spared in that regard. Topaz hadn't.

She watched the younger woman move toward the cabinet. Her body language, the bent of her eyes, the way she moved seeming so familiar that it was almost as if she were having an out-of-body experience. Then Cecilia went back to the shelves above her head, pushing aside glasses in search of a second mug.

Good, Dr. Reyes was ignoring her. That was exactly what Topaz had been hopping for.

She was absolutely unashamed about crawling up onto the counter to get to the higher shelf in the cabinet and find the good tea that the Brits tried to hide from the rest of the mansion. She grabbed a box, making a mental note to replace it before someone got mad, and hopped down again to head back to her suite.

The kettle clicked, punctuating Topaz's landing. Cecilia raised an eyebrow, but she lowered it as she turned to face the source of the sound. "Hey," she finally said, her eyes drifting to the tea. "You mind if I have some of that? Can't stomach more coffee."

Words. Dr. Reyes was talking to her now. Okay, that was fine. She was just asking for tea. It was good tea. A British person's taste in tea should always be trusted. And anything was a good change from the copious amounts of Earl Grey the Professor poured down the throat of anyone who spent more than five minutes in his office.

So Topaz nodded silently, holding the box of tea out for the older woman.

"Thanks." Cecilia took the box and removed two tea bags. She dropped one in the empty mug in her hand and handed the box back to Topaz. Then she moved to the kettle, lifting it off the base and filling the cup. "Here." She lifted it gingerly, moving slowly to avoid spilling on her bare feet, and handed it to the girl.

For a moment Topaz just stared at the mug like she didn't know what to do with it. But Dr. Reyes was offering her a drink and she supposed the least she could do was take it and stay while she drank it. Courtesy. Unless of course Dr. Reyes ran off first.

So she took the mug, wrapping her fingers around it and nodding again, hoping that conveyed the "thank you" she couldn't quite make herself say. The mug should've felt warm around her fingers - she'd felt so cold since they'd gotten back, she could only assume that was Alaska settling into her skin - but she couldn't feel it at all.

Cecilia nodded back, then prepared her own tea. She held her hands over the cup, letting the steam warm her hands for a bit before she wrapped them around the porcelain. The silence hung over her; she could feel the quiet in the air, and it left her feeling itchy and uncomfortable. But she had the sense Topaz preferred things that way, so she simply turned and raised the mug in a kind of acknowledgment before taking a sip.

Silence was absolutely preferred. Amanda and The Elf had both tried to have a conversation with Topaz once they'd managed to get into her suite (easier for Amanda than it was for Jean Paul), and neither had gotten very far. She still hadn't even looked at her phone to see who had been texting her.

She just wanted to be alone for a bit.

And if Dr. Reyes was going to allow her to be quiet, then that was absolutely fine. She took a sip of tea, focusing more on the counter than anything.

"You can't talk about it, because there aren't words." The comment left Cecilia's mouth before she realized it, and she clamped her lips shut as if that would somehow manage to take them back. But it hardly mattered; she'd changed the dynamic of the room, and she thought she saw Topaz tense, and so she felt like she had to make the abrupt and unsolicited observation count. "Not yet anyway. It's — well. I think people here don't realize that. Or maybe they forget it."

Topaz's fingers tightened around the mug as Dr. Reyes broke the silence, and the air in the room seemed to shift. She could sense the woman's discomfort - she was pretty sure if she ran now Dr. Reyes wouldn't mind; maybe she would even be grateful for it.

But a mix of bone-numbing exhaustion and lack of energy kept Topaz routed firmly to the spot, staring at the counter she sipped her tea.

They stayed in silence for a while longer, Cecilia feeling both regret and relief at having said anything to begin with. "Sorry," she finally said quietly after another sip of tea. "I didn't — I wasn't trying to speak for you or make you speak or anything. That was presumptuous. I just..." She gave a half-shrug, her face showing clear signs of frustration at not being able to articulate her thoughts better. "I dunno. I kind of know what you're going through."

What she was going through? Well she was glad someone knew because she honestly didn't. She'd killed a bloke. Okay. There was that. But she'd been about to die. He would've choked her to death. It was an accident. It had been life or death.

She was just trying to justify it though. She nodded again.

Cecilia wasn't sure if she should take the nod as a sign to keep talking. She really didn't know this girl. Not well enough to talk like this, not well enough to trust her with... well. She brought her tea to her lips, her eyes fixed on Topaz. Topaz, holding on to her cup, saying nothing, which in a way said everything.

"I almost killed a man with my powers at the end of the year." A pit formed in her stomach as she saw Raul's grey face, the blood on his flesh. Goosebumps traveled across her skin. "And the only reason he lived, if he's still living, is because I've got a medical degree."

Topaz's eyes flicked up from her tea, finally fixing on Cecilia, looking at her for the first time since she'd walked into the kitchen. It was hardly a surprise - with how many people there were in this place that fought on a daily basis, it would've been more surprising if no one had ever killed anyone before.

It was more the fact that Cecilia had saved him that was surprising.

"I — it horrifies me.." Cecilia met Topaz's gaze, trying to search it for judgment or emotion or anything.. "I could have killed him. I almost did. And maybe I should have. The things he..." Her eyes lowered to the mug. "Well." She'd clenched her hands tightly around it, her knuckles starting to change color from her grip.

"You have your own burden," she said after a few seconds listening to the hum of the refrigerator, "and I wasn't — my problems aren't the point. I just wanted you to know that it — god, I don't know." Cecilia wasn't used to playing this kind of role for anyone, and she wasn't entirely sure how to get beyond the trite phrases people used in moments like this.

"I fought to live," she looked up at Topaz again. "And living was hard for a while. But it got easier." Not easy, of course, at least not for her — but Cecilia's situation was different than Topaz's. She'd struck back to survive, but she'd crossed a line, gone beyond a limit that she hadn't known existed. There was a feeling, a kind of high she'd gotten while her forcefield was tearing Raul's skin apart. It was what she felt during her most intense surgeries — but this had been a vivisection.

"Anyway," she lifted her mug toward her face. "I just thought you should know that."

It all made more sense than Cecilia might have believed. Topaz turned the words over in her head for a moment, thinking hard.

It would get easier.

She let out a long breath, taking a sip of her tea for a moment before saying two, extremely soft words. "Thank you." It was so quiet, Cecilia might have believed for a moment she'd imagined it.

And with one last nod to Cecilia, the young witch walked out of the kitchen, heading back for her suite with her tea clutched tightly in her hands.