Log: Julian and Maya

[xp-echo.livejournal.com]

Backdated to 20th May 2016

Maya comes across Julian in the kitchen, she's a bit of an arsehole



Ceramic shards tinkled to the kitchen floor and the metal caps covering Julian's wrists slammed onto the counter. He let out a primal cry of frustration and flung the cupboard open with his mind again.

Another mug, nee victim, floated from the shelves and hovered in the air with a greenish glow.

It was the middle of the night, and he was alone in the kitchen, with a broom and dust-pan on hand for when he finally gave up his one-man-crusade to ensure no one could drink coffee. Visibly concentrating, he tried to float it to the sink and fill it with water.

"You know, I'm pretty sure Professor Xavier is going to miss some of that, Don Quixote" Maya said, leaning against the door jam as she watched Julian from a safe distance.

She'd arrived a few moments before, but hadn't wanted to startle a man obviously in the middle of some very important powers work. Now that he'd completely flubbed it, she figured she couldn't do much more damage then he already had.

The mug shattered over the sink, and with a resigned sigh, Julian shut the water off. "What are you doing up, Maya?" he asked without looking at her, concentrating on handling the broom on the floor.

"Talking to you," Maya replied reasonably.

She watched him broom, making a silent bet with herself as to the possibility that he'd turn the broom into firewood, like the Magician's Apprentice, only with less buckets and flowing water.

"You should be in bed, you've got school in the morning...or..." he looked up at her past the dark circles under his eyes, and the start of a patchy beard. "It's not Saturday...is it?" Time had been lost since he'd shut himself away...since the accident.

"Do you feel like it's a Saturday?" Maya asked, curious now. "Because I'm pretty sure it is, somewhere."

It was not nice to play with the temporal reality of the recently traumatized, she knew that. Still, he was here and she was awake and not likely to get back to sleep for at least another hour after the somewhat terrifying Slenderman dream she'd just woken up from. Why shouldn't anyone else feel just as rotten as she did?

Julian gave her a puzzling look and nearly lost control of the broom in the process. Steadying himself, he returned to sweeping, "You okay?"

"Define okay," Maya said with a shrug, taking a step into the kitchen from the door and looking around. It was different at night, the light diffused but still bright enough to see by. She could almost imagine the ghosts of students past making their way between the chairs and the centre island and cupboards. "I'm awake, and I'm breathing."

"Seems okay to me," the dustpan disconnected from the broom and laid itself on the floor, debris sweeping into it. The delicate telekinetic ballet paused for a moment, "Though you are up in the middle of the night when everyone else is asleep, so..." he shrugged and went back to sweeping.

"I'm actually a superhero," Maya confided softly, as if it were the biggest secret in the world. "I was just about to hop into some lycra and go derring do my away across New York, you could call me Angry Girl."

An ___((insert period of time here)) ago, Julian would have scoffed and offered to make her hot chocolate, but this wasn't a ____ ago. "I wish you luck then, plucky-teenage-vigilante." He went back to sweeping in silence.

"That's it?" Maya asked, surprised and somewhat annoyed at being so readily dismissed. Most of the time people at least got angry with her, which just proved her point that they weren't worth caring about. "No 'Get back to bed, you young hooligan'?"

The sweeping didn't stop, "You're a big girl, Maya, do you really want me scolding you and sending you to bed." Julian turned his eyes on her, the broom bustling another pile of ceramic into the pan before lifting into the air and dumping into the waste-bin. "You make your own choices...just make them better than I did...okay?"

"Your girlfriend seemed to think you were very heroic," Maya replied, moving further into the room to take a seat. "So I shouldn't choose to be a hero?"

"It's hazardous to your health," Julian shook his head. "I've never wanted any of you to join up with the X-Men. I've known some people would never be able to be swayed, but...still, it's not as glamorous as I make it look." He finally did scoff, "And I was just helping out a friend."

Maya was about to answer that she didn't do lycra, but given her dance background that wasn't really true. She just...had no interest in being a super hero, not like the X-men were.

"I'm not the jumping in front of super villains in colander hats and bad attitudes type. And you maybe need to get better friends."

Julian smirked, and gave a wry scoff, "Good enough to get me patched up." He stopped the broom for a moment and leaned against the counter, "I'm glad you're not going to go out for the team, Maya. Not because I don't think you could do it...please, please don't take that as a dare." He sighed, "You've got a lot to offer the world, and from what I understand, you're crazy smart...you'll be one of the lucky ones that gets out of this place."

"David North is teaching me knife fighting," Maya offered, almost a challenge, but not quite, in her eyes. "But I don't care about your team, or any of that. I'm just here to learn to fix what's broken and then I get to go home, okay."

It was not a question, in that her tone of voice didn't rise at the end of her words but it was also a question in that she sounded hesitant anyway.

Her mentor's head dropped slightly, as he scoffed a bit, then met her eyes again before the broom began to once again sweep away the debris. "You're in good hands with Mister North, he knows his stuff."

"Did it sound like I was looking for an endorsement? Wade wouldn't be having him teach me if he wasn't good at the job," Maya snapped, back on the firmer ground of irritation and away from the quicksand that was vulnerability and hope. "Unless you know of anyone better?"

He didn't bother to respond, instead, letting out a small sigh, his shoulders rolled back in a shrug. Julian knew Maya could never allow herself to take a compliment, as her standard posture was one of constant defensiveness. The broom finished gathering the shards from the floor and the dust-pan floated up to deposit them in the waste-bin. A towel floated off a nearby counter-top and began sopping up the water.

"So, if you're not one of the old guys' recruiters, then why are you a mentor?" Maya asked, sensing he wasn't about to rise to the bait, which was a pity because she was pretty sure she'd have been absolutely scathing in response. "When you're not getting your hands cut off, anyway."

"Cut off...my hands weren't...oh, well, what do you know," he sighed, rolling his eyes as the towel wrang itself out over the sink. "I became a mentor for the exact opposite reason you'd think. I wanted to keep you idiots away from the team."

"You have no hands," Maya noted helpfully, as if this wasn't obvious. "Unless you just found out you've got the power to disconnect them and have them go walking about all Thinglike, then 'cut off' is a pretty good guess. And this idiot thinks you're doing a bang up job. A few more lost limbs and we can wheel you out on a gurney during career day."

"Well, one mind...not changed precisely, but still," Julian broke the faintest of smiles for a moment. "Well, enough training for one night, I'm going to head to bed. Don't stay up too late, I think Miss Jones has you running some sort of obstacle course in the morning." He started toward the kitchen door, the broom floating into its typical corner on the other end of the room.

"Just came down for some warm milk anyway," Maya replied, moving toward the fridge. "I could make you some, before you go?"

Julian paused at the doorway and turned his head back over his shoulder, "Would you prefer hot chocolate?"

"I can do hot chocolate. Real or the powered kind?" Maya said, pulling the milk out of the fridge and heading for the cupboard with the pans.

"The real thing, accept no substitutes," Julian smirked slightly, which was closer to a smile than he'd reached in over a week. Heading back into the kitchen, he braced himself for whatever Maya had in store.