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Set before the Blackbird lands, late this evening. Doug comes to relieve Marie-Ange on the comm system, and is his repressing Mini!Scott best.

Monitoring the comm station was -boring-. There were a lot of little routine checks to do, and details to monitor, but most of it was sitting in a chair and listening for ... anything. Since the X-men were not due back until Sunday, Marie-Ange didn't expect to hear anything on the comms. For once, the insomnia was a benefit, she wasn't tired, though she could feel a vague weariness, it was more out of doing nothing but monitor the channels and sketch for the last six hours.

Even in a house with a half dozen or more nocturnal or insomniac residents, the subbasement at night was dead quiet. It did entirely too much to contribute to Marie-Ange's sense of restlessness. Long since abandoning any display of outward dicipline, she was instead sitting in the chair with her feet drawn up in front of her. The pencil in her hand tap-tap-tapped against the spiral binding of her sketchpad as she sat waiting for absolutly nothing.

With the three trainees and Lee Kuk being the only real people in the mansion to cover the comm system, they'd settled on a six hours on, eighteen off schedule. Doug had taken a shortened first shift after the Blackbird had taken off, and was back for his shift again. Not that he'd done much in the way of relaxing during the shifts he was off. He'd taken some catnaps, but it had been difficult to get an extended amount of sleep. He'd been running on a lot of Mountain Dew and adrenaline. There'd be time to crash and sleep after the X-Men returned.

He paused in the doorway, his eyes lingering on Marie-Ange where she sat at the console. "Hey there," he said quietly, feeling like calling her Angie was too informal, but calling her by her trainee codename was probably too formal. "I'm here for my shift," he said gently.

The sigh of relief would have been audible even if the room hadn't been eerily quiet. Marie-Ange had been perfectly willing to take this shift, but she was certain glad it was -over-. She unfolded herself from the chair and stretched, a bit sore from sitting in one place for so long.

"You did not sleep, did you?" Marie-Ange asked. Doug looked...drawn. Not to the point of exhausted, just paler than usual, and a touch more jittery, like he was holding back nerves by sheer will. Or that he'd had far too much caffiene, which was possibly just as accurate.

Doug shrugged. "There'll be time to sleep i...when they get back." He mentally cursed the slip of the tongue, knowing that Marie-Ange would probably catch it. He hadn't wanted to worry her.

"They will." She'd been saying that all day, and the assurance in her voice would have probably fooled most of the students. Might have fooled Jamie, or Amanda or Miles if they were not really looking for more. And it was automatic, the trying to reassure everyone. But Marie-Ange knew Doug probably knew better. Could hear it in her voice, see it on her face.

The doubt in Marie-Ange's voice resonated too much with the doubts Doug had been struggling with all day. He paused, helplessly trying to find something reassuring to say, and coming up with nothing. "Have you looked?" he asked, trying to keep the rampant emotion out of his voice.

"Yes, but not as much as I would have liked to." Her cards were in her jacket pocket, and she had made a point not to touch them for the last hour. They hadn't been helping. "I get the same things I have all week. The Tower, The Hanged Man. Alison bringing in the dawn and Nathan fighting off the winter."

"But are they all coming back?" Doug asked, barely holding back a harshness to the question. He was trying not to take his worry and fear out on everyone, but it was very hard, the longer the team was away. Because the longer the mission stretched, the more time Doug had to come up with a hundred different nightmare scenarios.

Oh, how she hated that Doug could always tell when she was lying. After a long pause of trying to think how to answer the question "I want to say yes." was the best she could do. "I have not seen Death itself, nor the Devil, nor the Five of Pentacles, and those are most closely associated with people dying. But I keep seeing the Tower, and that is change through pain or destruction. So ... I do not truly know."

Doug nodded curtly. It wasn't as clear as he'd like, but if there was one thing he had learned, it was that Marie-Ange's precognition was imperfect at best. He paused, again helpless to determine the right thing to say.

"If ... you want the notes, I saved them on my computer. I could email them to you." The offer was tenative. The last thing Marie-Ange wanted to do was remind Doug of the last time he'd had a chance to go over her visions. "Or print them out and bring them down after I have a shower. I do not think I will manage to sleep this morning."

"I trust your interpretations," Doug replied. Marie-Ange's visions, and going through the notes late at night after not being able to sleep was definitely not a smart idea, even without considering the reminders inherent in the situation. "You should try to get some sleep anyway. We might be needed when the team gets back." This time he remembered not to slip, even though in his head he was still pondering all the 'what if' situations.

They were being so -very- careful. Not to talk about the "if", not use codenames, dancing around every little possible verbal landmine. Which Marie-Ange thought was a little silly of both of them, Doug espically. It was not as if he couldn't read all the unspoken words effortlessly.

"I can try. Even if I cannot sleep, I will eat at least, and rest." Really, sleep was not likely to happen at all, she thought. Even if she did not do any more readings, she had that slight light feeling to her head, the faint touch of detachment that meant that her precognition was active.

"Good," Doug replied with another nod, moving to take his seat at the comm console. It wasn't that he was trying to brush Marie-Ange off, just that if he talked about everything for too long, he was going to lose control of his emotions, and that was something he couldn't afford at the moment. There would be time enough for that when the team got back.

"I left the comm report open." She really didn't even have to say that much. He'd probably seen it the minute he sat down, or even before. "There were no reports, and no noise, so it is still empty except for test signals." It was just that talking, even about this, helped. Made it real, and made it less quiet.

Doug nodded again, putting his earbud in and jacking it into the console while he opened his laptop. Uncapping his Mountain Dew, he took a swig and settled in for what would likely be another long, boring shift.

Doug needed to work, and needed to not be distracted. So even if she wanted to stay, and part of her did, Marie-Ange knew she had to go and try to eat and sleep and wait. And not know what was going to happen, which was the worst. She hated not knowing. Reluctantly, she backed out of the comm room, not once turning her back on Doug until she simply could not see him anymore.