tampered | (no subject)

(no subject)

When; Late evening, the 25th.
Rating; PG13 probably.
Characters; Nick & Remy
Summary; Interrogating the new telepath will obviously go much better if he's hammered first.
Log;

Nick's Christmas has been quiet, really; he and Ein meandered down to midnight mass behind the Pied Pipers of Merriment on the eve before, was startled to receive a book about chess from Jean Paul and otherwise largely ignored the holiday. (Except for the parts of a party upstairs that were hard to miss even when you weren't attending.)

When it's quieted down all around, he leaves the corgi to his own devices a while and makes his way to meet with Remy, as per previous arrangement.

(People that'll understand explanations he'd give if he were inclined to have been few and far between; his actually giving the explanation is even rarer. When any sort of ability of the sort is generally considered to definitely not exist and be the realm of hoaxers and the delusional, and on top of that half of yours is invasive by nature, one gets out of the habit of volunteering much. He's pretty sure this'll be interesting from either side of the conversation.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"So could a lot of us," he says, and he sounds a little wistful at that. Remy LeBeau never attended Xavier's School for Higher Learning as a student. He got put in a madman's lab. "It... was de only good thing in de world for a long, long time. Got destroyed totally twice. Under siege from.. well." He shakes his head. "Don't matter. Point is, world was bad. Still is. Politics hit us pretty literally day to day."

Remy exhales, looking at his shot glass. "Eventually anti-humanity, pro-mutant leaders came up. Violent, militant, an' usin' de same horrible force against de flatscans that they were usin' against us. De mos' prolific, de mos' damaging, was a man named Magneto. He's commonly assumed to be de antithesis of Xavier. He's done some good, but mostly, he stands for genocide an' murder. He's Wanda's father."

The timing of the shot could be accidental coincidence. Sure. In the face of such anti-mutant sentiment, anti-human sentiment seems inevitable; the unfortunate particulars make Nick wince slightly.

"I take it she favours her mother."

"Or somethin'."

Remy pours Nick another shot. Welcome to Marvel. "If we're superheroes he's a supervillain. He tried to make Wanda an' her brother like him. She defected an' joined a team called de Avengers. For justice an' all. Pietro... well, he does good things an' bad things. Neither of 'em helped, when she broke."

He fiddles with his own shot glass some more.

"Anyway, what I said 'bout dimensions - in every one there's different people. Sometimes... you meet different versions of yourself. You know. As if life wasn't weird enough to begin with."

"God forbid," Nick replies, dryly, knocking back the shot after. Conversations of this nature always go down a little easier (that's a word for it, sure) if you don't have to stay entirely sober for the duration. That's probably hell on the hangover, for those who get them.

This is going somewhere, he can tell, but he's not sure yet if he wants to prod or just see how it plays out on its own.

"A man named Magneto who's never heard de named Wanda Maximoff is here."

He's just going to let that one sink in for a bit.

Nick evidently lets it sink a while too - marinating, if you will, in a drawn out silence.

"Bastard's got a devil for timing."

"And!"

What a lead in! "De man 'round de city named Tony Stark, also called Iron Man, is an Avenger, and de Secretary of Defense in America. He pushed a bill in Congress to register all superhumans through de government. Originally it included all mutants regardless of status. One of our people got in there an' had it amended for only active vigilantes, but still. So things are tense lately now that she remembers some things. An' you can see why I'd just... like to make sure you two are gettin' along."

The name 'Tony Stark' gets filed away - he doesn't think he's heard of the man before now, and he'll keep this in mind if he does later. "I think I'm getting the idea," he says, grimacing.

"Also you're likely gon' be in some considerable amount of mortal peril jus' by assosciatin' with us, I'm not gon' lie about it. Magneto's liable to kill people 'cause it benefits him. An' you may already be dead but there's worse things, too."

Nick downs another tequila shot before he decides how he wants to respond to that. 'Honestly' turns out to be the way he goes- "Rose Red was a dormant psychic phenomena," he says - more conversational than lecturing, really, "built around the turn of the century for a woman named Ellen Rimbauer. A psychic told her she'd never die until the house was finished, and it's not finished 'til she says it is. She went missing in the fifties - 'round about when I was born, as a matter of fact, if I'm remembering rightly. I might not be."

He exhales, lights another cigarette and breathes out smoke again. "In Rose Red, women go missing and men die - horrifically, usually. It lay dormant 'til 2001, when a woman named Joyce Reardon paid a group of psychics five thou apiece to go with her. She wanted to make it twitch - get herself some proof. She'd all but destroyed her reputation academically trying to prove the existence of people like me and things like Rose Red - she'd completely destroyed her own mind by the end of it. Annie Wheaton's the little girl I mentioned - she was one of us. Me, young man named Emery, there was Pam, Cathy, and Victor. Annie's sister Rachel came with us, and Steve Rimbauer - his house. He's due to have it knocked down, but he hasn't done it yet."

...more alcohol? Yes. "One of the things about Rose Red is that it doesn't precisely kill you. It feeds off you - we were effectively battery-shaped sacrificial lambs. I don't think Joyce acknowledged what she was doing to us, but I do think she knew. It - she - wanted Annie, mostly - I'll borrow Joyce's metaphor, here; I'm a candle. Annie's a searchlight. It wanted Steve, because he's family. I'm meandering, here, sorry - when it does kill someone, they're not dead, they're part of it. Used to manipulate the others, kept to build the house - I shouldn't have let Cathy wander about on her bloody own. I didn't manage to get her back to the others before we got cornered. The place didn't like me very much, I figured that out...shoved Cathy through a door, slammed it behind her, and six months later here we are. I went to hell for a stranger, effectively, so it might be new and interesting to do it for a friend."

Story for a story?

Remy stays quiet through Nick's story, and listens. Everyone's got some screwed up story or another - plenty of people have a deck full of screwed up stories. You don't dismiss them. You can downplay them, though. Brush it off with a few words and take a drink. Sometimes that's all you can do.

After Nick finishes, Remy lets silence hang in the air for a bit.

"What a bitch."

Nick's made a life out of not telling anyone much about himself; the kind of guy who walks away two hours later knowing half your life story but you never got his surname and you don't know what he does for a living. He's good at incisive leading questions and deflecting attention. This wasn't really a conversation where that was an option, but the point remains that Remy's response is the best he could hope for - because he wouldn't have a blind clue what to do with anything else.

"Ironically," he says, mild, "I was in Seattle in the first place to rest." Sabbatical, remember. He shrugs it off. "Funny old world."

He likes that phrase. It works for just about everything.

"De world don' rest, you jus' get tricked," he says, chuckling around his cigarette. It's a dark humor, but oh well. He doesn't think Nick will mind.

"You take good care of her."

Judging by the laugh, Nick's not the type to mind, no. He's...more the type to make terrible dark jokes in times of stress, see: some of the things he said when ... tying Emery's mother up in Rose Red's kitchen look it's a long story.

"That's the plan."

Remy's technically committed genocide before. He's not really one to talk. About anything ever.

"Also I'd... suggest not really bringin' up shit like her dad an' that whole business first if you can avoid it. I'm sure you know how to shrink heads better'n me, but mutants get touchy about things."

"Fathers can be touchy topics, even the bog standard," the voice of experience, though it's psychiatrist's experience of having daddy issues projected onto him, rather than as someone who has his own, "I'll step with care."

He grimaces, then. "I wish I had someone to refer her to."

"Hey man, you started it."

Remy sounds wryly amused, but there might be an undercurrent of 'Now you are stuck with this and if you upset her I will end you' that is... entirely genuine.

Somehow Nick knows better than to think it's anything other than genuine. "It'd be incredibly unethical to take her on as a patient," he says, with a little wryness of his own, "but there's plenty I can do besides that."

He should look into the hospital sometime in the new year, probably. Or practise privately - that's not an idea without merits.

Reasons it'd be unethical include 'because they keep flirting', by the way.

You better be careful about that, Nick. Meddling in peoples minds AND their personal lives? Don't ask Remy to break your face like that. You seem like such a nice guy. :(

"I know she needs help. But she's someone we gotta keep safe." There's a weight to the 'we', there, and it's clear he's not just talking about himself and Nick.

Nick doesn't want to have a personal life, please.

Clear as daylight, yes- "She didn't say who wanted to speak with me, but I did get the impression it wasn't just the one person." A prompt or an observation - no, it's probably a prompt. Even if Nick wasn't particularly observant, he and Remy haven't known each other long enough to be any kind of 'we'.

(Get your damn minds out of the gutter, he can read them.)

"Rictor'll probably say howdy, yeah," Remy tells him. We pertains to mutants, really - the mutants who have existed with X before their names in titles and in warrants, the mutants who have fought and bled and died for their people, who understand that the Decimation was due to Magneto and Pietro and not Wanda.

(You're not his type, Nick.)

Nick's a mild-mannered psychiatrist who plays chess with his dog and drinks a little more than he should, chainsmokes on the rough nights. He burned out on his work and when he died, he didn't leave behind many people who'll remember him a year from now. He's not any kind of a hero, super or otherwise; he cares and he does what he can, when he can do it, which sometimes is enough and sometimes isn't. The world that made Remy and Wanda isn't anywhere he understands, but he likes them enough to want to help out here, so theoretically he could learn.

"It'd be nice to say I've never known anyone to apologize for having people care about them enough before," he says, reflectively, over the tequila.

"It's too little too late," he says with something of a raw edge to his voice. They're all painfully aware that no one cared about Wanda in enough of the right ways. It's not like Gambit and Rictor were anywhere near her, then, and it's not like Donna and Niko and even Nick could have possibly been there, but it's still true.

"All we can do is work at it."

"We do what we can." It's all you can ever do. It doesn't make it any easier.

"Next few weeks are gon' be interestin'," Remy says as he rolls his shoulders, stretching. "I'll make sure you're kept up to date 'bout what's goin' on wit Magneto an' all."