Late Sunday night/early Monday morning: Jamie, Wanda, and a carton of fudge ripple ice cream

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Jamie and Wanda, on parallel missions to the kitchen for a snack, run into each other.  Luckily, Jamie makes a fool of himself right off the bat, which puts him on familiar territory long enough for them to find a few common interests.



Wanda sighed and tossed the covers off.  She'd been having dreams again--the ones with Pietro.  Lately, they hadn't been very happy dreams, mainly because she was still irritated that he had left.  Irritated and scared.  There had been no word from him since she had left and she was starting to worry about her brother.  She tossed on a pair of shorts and a top and padded softly downstairs.  She wouldn't be able to sleep for a while, so she might as well eat.

It wasn't that Jamie couldn't sleep: there were just some things that were more interesting, like video games, for which he needed fuel, like fudge ripple ice cream and chocolate chip cookies.  Which was why he was currently rear-end-uppermost with his head wedged between the frozen pizzas and some very suspicious tater tots, reaching for the half-pint of ice cream he'd hidden in the very back corner of the freezer.

She stopped in the doorway and stared, bemused, as the person in front of the fridge attempted to climb into it.  "I think there might be an easier way to cool off," she offered, clearing her throat as he--or so she thought--tried to jam themselves in a few more inches.

Jamie started, which was a bad idea, as it sent about a ton of freezer frost and a couple of loose tater tots down the back of his T-shirt.  He managed to extract himself from the depths of the freezer with only incidental damage to his remaining dignity and with the ice cream in one hand.  Shaking out his shirt, he turned around, and somehow managed not to drop the ice cream when he saw who it was.  "I, ah . . . it was in the back?"

It wasn't hard to see the wide range of emotions that crossed his face and Wanda smiled softly.  "Jamie Madrox, right?" she asked, already knowing the answer.  She pointed over her shoulder.  "I could...leave, if you wanted.  There are other places for me to wander and I would not want to make you uncomfortable."

"No--I mean, yeah, that's me--I mean--"  Jamie shook his head and set the ice cream down on the counter.  "I'm not . . . I'm okay now, pretty much.  I just had a thing.  And I actually, I wanted to say I'm sorry I reacted like that.  You don't deserve to catch your dad's flak."

"Actually, I expected far more than what I got.  And what I did get was fairly reserved in that sense."  Since he had made the effort to have her stay, stay she would.  But she would at least give him the space he might need.  "You have nothing to apologize for, so please, don't.  Something was done, obviously, something enough to warrent a response."

"Something like that, yeah.  He hurt . . ."  The whole Skippy thing was way too complicated and, to massively understate the case, he didn't really feel like getting into it.  "Family.  Some of my family.  And there's also the whole . . . his mutant supremacist kick, and the terrorism, and all that.  So . . . you came as kind of a surprise."  He pointed a spoon at the ice cream.  "Tempt you to any of this?"

She leaned forward, eyebrows raised slightly.  "Does it involve chocolate?  If it does, then yes."  Wanda walked into the kitchen, needing to get something to drink as well.  "I am sorry for whatever he did.  I know it caused a lot of pain.  He seems good at that."

"We're not gonna do that thing where we're both apologizing while we tell each other we don't need to apologize, are we?  Because that's always, like, the Awkwardness Tango."  He shrugged.  "I've got an amazing support system, and I'm getting better.  And it's fudge ripple."

"Chocolate is good, fudge is even better."  Ducking her head inside the fridge, she rummaged for a second before pulling out the milk.  "And a support system beats both of those hands down.  Family and friends, you can never have enough of either."

"That's for sure."  Jamie pulled two bowls out of one of the cupboards and served the ice cream, then eyed Wanda and ventured a grin.  "And I think you might be a little tall to tango with anyway, so there's all sorts of reasons to be glad we're not going there."

She laughed suddenly at that and stiffled it, not wanting to wake anyone.  "So I am not going insane and thinking that everyone here is just short?" she teased, settling herself down into a chair after she poured herself a glass of milk.  "Insane, no, hideously tall, yes."

"Hey, I'm still hoping for another inch or so over here.  And at least you'll always be in demand to get things off top shelves.  That's a valuable role in today's society."  Jamie slid one of the ice cream bowls over.  "'Sides, I wouldn't go as far as 'hideously.'  'Very,' maybe, but unless you start collecting neon green bandaids from bumping your head on things . . ."

Wanda snickered softly at that.  "No, but I am rather tall.  Two more inches and I would topple cheerfully into the six foot range.  I find it very useful in bar fights, though."

"Haven't been in any of those.  Getting hit was kind of a problem for me until I came here, and also I don't drink.  I can see where it'd be handy to be tall, though.  Me, I always used to be the skinny one.  Squeezed into all kinds of places I wasn't supposed to be."  Jamie grinned.  "Oops."

"Skinny is useful as well."  She paused and eyed him for a second.  "You look older, by the way.  I thought you were twenty-one?"

Jamie blinked.  "Well, that's never happened to me before.  Nah, I turned seventeen last July."

There was a sound of near choking as Wanda blinked at him.  "Oh my.  I'm normally not that far off on ages."

Jamie snickered.  "Would it help if I said I gained three extra months in Asgard?  Interdimensional jet-lag is a mind-blower."

"Please, no breaking my brain so late...early...at night."  She shook her head with a wry smile.  "Other dimensions, dragons from said dimenions...I would never had believed it.  But I saw the dragon."

"You think that was freaky, you should've seen his dad."  Jamie spread his arms theatrically.  "Hundred-foot-long firebreathing punster.  I don't think I'm ever going to be weirded out again."

Wanda tilted her head, trying to fit the image into her brain.  "It is a very good thing it takes a great deal to startle me," she said after a while.  "I take everything in stride."

"You'll fit in pretty well around here, then.  Good stride practice, usually."  He crooked a smile.  "You gonna stick around long enough to get roped into teaching a class, you think?  Happens to most of the adults who show up."

"Well," she said slowly, poking at the ice cream, "I did volunteer to help Nathan record the Askani information.  So I am not sure how long I will be here."

Jamie brightened.  "Oh, the music project?  I was hoping he'd get back to that one of these days--been all sorts of stuff happening since he started with it."

"Actually, Alison is still working on that.  Though I do need to get in touch with her."  Wanda leaned back in her chair and cradled her bowl of ice cream on her lap.  "I volunteered to use my anthropology skills to help him record the history, the stories, beyond the music.  He seemed quite intrigued with the idea, apparently had never thought about doing that before."

"Neat."  Jamie stirred his ice cream idly.  "We've been getting a little of the history in the Askani language club, because a lot of the idiom is culture-specific, but there pretty much has to be so much more."  He smiled wryly.  "Every so often I stop to think about how he's carrying a million plus people around in his head with him, and I get a little weirded out.  Not like I can really talk, though, I guess."

"Which language has he been teaching you?" she asked, curious.  "Straight up battle language or has he been delving into the other ones yet?  And...yes, that is rather startling.  It is--"  She paused and raised an eyebrow at him.  "Not that you can talk?"

"There's others?"  Jamie checked himself at her expression, looking sheepish.  "Sorry.  Forgot you're new and, y'know, I've been avoiding you.  My power is, well, it's a little weird.  I duplicate myself.  Nobody knows how exactly.  And usually it's just me driving all the bodies, but they come with their own brains, too, exactly like mine, so if I--well, not concentrate, exactly, it's--"  He waved a hand vaguely.  "Thing, sort of unfocusing, only in a focused kind of way, I'm not very good at it yet--they can run as their own separate people, just with my personality and all my memories up to the point I split them off.  So I can--sort of--have different people in my head too, if you don't count that they're all pretty much me."

Wanda stared at him, wide eyed.  "That is completely fascinating," she said, blinking.  "And I would assume that you would receive their memories of the time they were seperated from you, yes?  That must be rather disorienting.  And the amount of concentration it takes...what do you have to do to duplicate yourself?"

"It's like an ice cream headache, yeah, when they come back.  All the memories show up at once when they've been separate, instead of me just, y'know, taking them as they come."  He grinned.  "And, well, all I have to do is snap my fingers, these days.  Kinetic energy trigger, but nowhere near enough energy to generate that much mass."  His grin turned unrepentant.  "I do horrible things to thermodynamics and make physicists cry."

She laughed at that and shook her head.  "I can see why!  And I thought my powers were confusing.  Yours, my dear boy, break the laws of physics.  And a few others while they're at it."

Jamie snickered.  "They really do.  I make baby Einstein cry."  He took a thoughtful bite of his ice cream.  "What's confusing about yours?  If you don't mind me asking."

"I don't mind.  The best way to describe my powers is that I play with chaos.  I see strings attached to everything when my powers and I can affect them.  Luckily, I've learned by now which ones are the not so good ones to pull."  Wanda shrugged a little and smiled.  "Things tend to break when I'm around though the powers are very useful at times."

"Everything's all over string, huh?"  Jamie thought about that for a moment, then shrugged good-naturedly.  "Don't tell Mao.  He'll get everything tangled up.  Not that I wouldn't laugh at the 'who, little me, the innocent kitten that has nothing whatsoever to do with that mushroom cloud in the background?' expression."

"Oh, I like cats."  She grinned.  "Luckily, the chaos strings are simply in my head, I can only imagine how messy they would be outside of them.  They are not the most straight forward things to deal with."

"Well, neither are cats," Jamie pointed out.  "But I think I know what you mean--Kitty tried explaining chaos theory to me once, and I had to come up with a quick effective distraction before my brain started leaking out my ears."

"It is not exactly the easiest thing out there to understand.  Though it helps if you have the practical applications of the theory running around in your head."

"Imagine it would."  Jamie grinned.  "I've just got . . ." He did a quick mental calculation.  "maybe thirty-seven, forty years of memories in seventeen years of head.  Heh.  Never thought about it like that before."

"You must have to compartmentalize very rapidly," she murmured, thinking about it.  "Too keep all those memories from bleeding over or fading."

"I have a weird brain," Jamie said proudly.  "Seriously.  Funky cellular structures they won't let me name, and I confuse the heck out of psis."

"They won't let you name your own funky cellular structures?  That is a pity."  Wanda grinned at him and leaned on the table.  "I find that incredibly interesting.  The scholar in me, I think.  No doctor, well not yet, but it's still fascinating."

"I keep giving the docs these horrible mental images  of writing academic papers on mutation that reference  the Bob complex, I think.  I'm not supposed to name a cellular structure Bob."  He grinned.  "But the way I see it, they don't have to study Bob . . ."

"You can't name a cellular structure Bob," Wanda replied instantly, blinking innocently.

Jamie snickered.  "Well, Earth doesn't work either."

"Well, no, but it would probably work better than Bob."  She shook her head.  "Where on else on earth can you get a down home American boy and a Gypsy woman who know the same cartoon?"

"When the cartoon's a classic like that one?  Probably the tough part is getting the farmboy and the Gypsy in the same room to start with."  He snorted.  "Especially screwed-up  supervillain-phobic farmboys.  I'm glad I got a chance to get to know you better, though."

She smiled at him, face softening a little bit under the dim lighting.  "It is a good thing I am not a supervillian, then," she responded.  "And I'm glad we did talk.  I felt bad for the reaction to the post I made but I figured it was better to get it all out in the open lest someone discover something and acuse me of hiding it."

Jamie nodded.  "I dunno if I might not've taken it better if I'd had the chance to get to know you first, but that's me--lot of the others are a lot more twitchy about not being told things.  I think you did the best you could, and it all worked out anyway.  And I'm sorry I freaked out."  He smiled back.  "Although, y'know, in a very weird kind of way it was a little comforting that I'm still able to be freaked out by things.  This place does weird stuff to your sense of reality."

"Limbo.  Former assassins.  Asgard."  She shook her head.  "Yes, still being freaked out by what is going on is a good thing.  It means you're not becoming as hard after everything.  And that is a very good thing.  Emotions can be horrid things but it means you're still human."

"And see, there you go.  Human.  Exactly."  Jamie grinned.  "Just . . . very weird humans, who end up going very weird places.  I keep expecting to go home for a vacation and find a pooka scaring the herd, I swear."

Wanda shuddered at the word 'pooka'.  "Very bad stories circle around the pooka," she said, wryly, "and by bad, I mean really badly told.  But some abnormality in your life is probably a good thing.  Keeps things exciting, no?"

"My grandpa used to swear his father used to swear he'd seen a pooka as a boy in the old country.  I dunno if that means I got the good stories, or just the bad ones and I thought they were good because it was my grandpa."  Jamie snickered.  "And the thing about keeping things excited by way of weirdness is usually you can expect a break."

Laughing slightly, she grinned.  "Well, there are some bad stories that can be made golden by a good storyteller.  And breaks are nice, yes.  I think all the weirdness makes you enjoy the sanity breaks all the more."

"When you get them.  Feels like it's been just one thing after another since June."  Jamie shrugged philosophically.  "Law of averages'll catch us one sooner or later."  He scraped his spoon across the bottom of his bowl, going for one last bite of ice cream.  "Tempt you to another bowl, or are you gonna try to get back to sleep?"

Wanda thought about that for a second.  The dreams about her brother were gone for the evening and the day's tolls were starting to get to her.  "I think I will take a...what's the term?  Oh, a rain check on the second bowl.  After one bowl and the company, I think I'm relaxed enough to sleep."

"Cool.  I'll look forward to it."  Jamie smiled.  "Sleep well."

"Good night."