xp_logs | Artie and Gabriel, Wednesday afternoon

xp_artie posting in

So, well, actually, Artie hasn't been doing so great for a while.

Artie was sitting at his desk, tabbing through a series of photos on his computer almost inhumanly fast, screens from security cameras, looking for faces on the regular watch list.

He got to the end of the list and sighed, rubbing his eyes before standing a little too hard and sending his chair cracking back against the back of his cubicle. Whatever.

"Jeez." Gabriel appeared in a whoosh, as if from nowhere, as he so often did. This time, when he apparated, he at least had the decency to have a cup of coffee in his hand. "I mean, it's not like it's a library in here or anything, but that noise is hardly conducive to a productive work environment." He smiled as he extended the hand with the cup to Artie. "Here. I'm assuming you need this more than I do."

Artie rolled his eyes slightly but took the cup with a thumbs up. "ur right. i needed that." The text floated over the cup. "thx"

"Yeah," Gabriel said, "no problem." He crossed his arms as he glanced at Artie's screen, unable to help the peek. Working at a spy agency had made him more curious than ever. And he was especially curious about the man in front of him, who he rarely saw these days, if ever. And when Gabriel did see Artie, it wasn't entirely reassuring.

"So," Gabriel turned his attention back to Artie. "How are things?" It was a polite question, a careful venture into potentially thorny conversational territory.

Artie replied with two thumbs up, one on the hand still holding the mug and a mad grin. He was only here - on site at Snow Valley - for a 48 hour stopover while he ran contacts before he got on a plane back to ... to shit. He was blanking on the location for a moment. "im here for two days to run contacts for doug and then i'm going back go chicago to work w the mutant underground there and then uh... vegas, la and berlin amsterdam and back."

"Vegas? Where the plan is... what, exactly?" Gabriel raised an eyebrow. "Rolling on molly at Omnia or Hakkasan, then drying out in California before heading across the Atlantic?"

Artie shook his head. "I don't touch casinos any more. Learned that lesson back when I was 18. No, they're hot spots for agents coming in and making trouble that could come and make issues for us. Plus, lot of active mutant underground types in those areas and some of them are..." He shrugged, barely noticing the switch to more punctuation as he spoke. "They can make problems for us, so I'm keeping tabs on them."

Gabriel responded with a vague noise of assent. "Well, that's smart," he said, not really sounding like he cared one way or the other. "Just a brief stop home, then?" He shrugged. "Feels like we don't really see much of you around these parts anymore."

Artie gave him a bitter smile. "Back when I was a kid, Nathan had this... psionic link with the future. Like, way in the future, and the mansion was full of ghosts for a while. Future ghosts. It was a complicated time. Illyana - the old Illyana - freaked out about it. So did Alison. You'd have liked her." It wasn't really an answer. "We can't talk about - any of that any more." It still wasn't an answer and he wasn't making sense. "Every day I wake up in the mansion and there are people walking around wearing the faces of people I used to know. So yeah, I'm not around any more because this isn't my Alison," who had died in every sense of the word when Apocalypse came, and Artie waved away the image of her he'd thrown up briefly. "Or the Illyana I went to school with."

Gabriel stayed uncharacteristically silent as Artie explained. He didn't fidget, he didn't interrupt. "Yeah," he finally said after the other man was done. "Ghosts." He opened his mouth but paused, his hesitation clear as he weighed what to say next. "Well, not for nothing, but you know, I of all people get the ghosts." That was the wrong choice, and not the one he'd intended. "I mean, it's not the same," he added hurriedly, "I know it's not the same, I just..."

He had lost the thread, and so Gabriel just shrugged, trying to stop his brain from racing ahead of his mouth. "Well.." He looked at his feet for a second. "It makes sense," he said, looking back up. "Not just the avoidance," he said, "but you know. I mean, when you're home, too, you're not really..." He scratched the back of his neck, unsure exactly how to say what he meant without sounding offensive. "Yourself."

How could he be, though? Everywhere he looked, people who were still strangers three years on were wearing dead people's faces. It wasn't just Alison. It wasn't just someone who'd been his mother when he showed up, frightened and fucked up and "I never lived in a house before I came to the mansion. I've lived there longer than pretty much any of them and - you know? Before that, I was a Morlock. And now, there are dead people walking around in my house and I have to pretend that it's all fine. People I've known since I was ten."

"Yeah." Gabriel wasn't sure exactly what to say. "That..." He shook his head. "Jesus. That's heavy shit." It probably wasn't coffee that Artie needed after all. Maybe it was gin. "I'm sorry, dude, I wish I had something more helpful to say I just... Jesus." He'd been through some shit, but it wasn't anything near to this. There were a few ghosts in Gabriel's past, but they were easily dispatched with therapy from Charles Xavier and a handful of marijuana. He'd never faced anything close to like what Artie was dealing with; he'd made a point to go on the move just to ensure that.

"I'd run too, I guess," he said. "I mean, I have. I did. Ran away, ran to the booze and the drugs and all. This shit just sucks, and there are what, like, a dozen of us who can come close to understanding it?"

"Last time I left, I got caught robbing one of Arcade's casinos." Time, and, well, not having been horribly murdered let him smile crookedly at that. "Maybe you're right and I need to get some space or something. Beats, well, yeah." Beat getting stupid drunk and finishing most nights off with sleeping pills he bought on trips out because like hell he was asking fake-Jean for those. Or worse, asking Laurie for them.

"Oh God, did I accidentally give you advice? Me?" Gabriel feigned horror. "Don't take life advice from me, I wasn't — I'm not qualified. You know my track record." He shook his head, but then his expression became more serious. "Look, I really didn't mean it as a suggestion, but, you know, something I think about a lot is, like... it is a school for gifted youngsters. Or it was." He tilted his head. "I'm not sure, I guess, what we're doing these days. Point is, at some point, we've all got to graduate, right?"

Artie shrugged. "I mean, you're less of a literal train wreck than I am right now, so..." He slid a hand through the text and sent it scattering into motes of light. "I might go talk to Marie-Ange about some time off."

"Can't hurt," Gabriel said with yet another shrug. "And I'm only less of a train wreck because for a while, I was the biggest fucking train wreck. We all have our processes."

He smirked. "Guess we can't all be this amazing."