Who: Ness and Julian When: Foredated to tomorrow, around 3 Where: Foyer or stairs, trying to get to the dorms What: A break down and trying to figure things out Notes: Long first post! XD Been sitting on this for a good three or four weeks.
Vanessa walked along a broken up sidewalk in a not-so-great part of town. She had grown up very used to these sorts of seedy locales, so it didn’t phase her. Nor did the fact that there was no one about apart from a small gang of thugs. No other word fit to describe the five men who walked with her: large, all brawn, wearing their tattered clothes proudly. They stood in sharp contrast to Vanessa, who wore a nice dress, new boots, a form-fitting, snug jacket. They also stood in contrast to the man walking directly beside Vanessa, talking to her, taking notes, holding a folder the girl had brought along with her from the mansion. He wore a suit with a white coat, rectangular glasses perched on the edge of his nose. They had been talking for a while now, Vanessa slowly steering the conversation to a place she had never felt the courage to approach before.
But she had to know. She couldn’t go any longer with the ruse without knowing. How much danger was she putting these people in? The people who had come to accept her, some of whom she had grown to love and trust?
“I was just…” she paused, thinking over her choice of words carefully, “wondering. Wondering what the objective is. I mean, I mean I understand what I’m doing. But I don’t understand why. These people, they aren’t bad mutants. Or dangerous. They’re just kids. They don’t pose any threat to you guys.”
The man snorted a little, staring down at Vanessa with cold eyes. “Thinking? You’re just supposed to observe. Thinking makes you useless. You’re getting attached to your assignments.” He said it as a fact, not giving her any room to talk back. Normally she wouldn’t have. That was the Vanessa they had become used to; once broken of her rebellious nature, she had become perfectly obedient and content on the surface. They expected that to continue.
But no one went so deep undercover for two years without changing. The changes had just happened all at once for the mentally unstable mutant. All at once, in the past couple of months weeks, her life had changed. The power outage had helped her to better accept her form – she no longer considered herself such a freak of nature, and that had been what Weapon X took advantage of when dealing with her. That change had helped her form closer bonds – with Theresa, her roommate and Julian, now a boy she considered a close friend, mostly; and with the love she found with Hank McCoy – and led her even deeper into her ruse. Even those she hadn’t grown as close to meant a great deal to her now – hanging out with Megan and Tandy and “the girls,” Angelo’s wonderful antics – whenever anyone looked past rumors, she found herself valuing more and more friendships. It was wonderful! Even something with Regan had clicked… they hated one another, but there was feeling there. She wasn’t alone in the world. She was becoming her ruse, just a lost little student hoping to find friendship and acceptance.
She swallowed hard, steeling her nerves. She looked up through her eyelashes. It didn’t go unnoticed to her keen eyes how they were blond, not white. How when she was out meeting them, she had to wear the disguise she had dropped around the mansion. Xavier could help her; the people at the school were her friends and allies. Not Weapon X. “And if I have?” she dared to ask.
In the next moment, she found herself sprawled on the ground. It was stupid to let her guard down around anyone, least of all these thugs. One fierce backhand later, and she hit the ground. Dammit. They were making a fool of her. She could already feel some swelling, the pain mounting in her cheek, in her lip. She could taste blood. Stupid bastard had split her lip with the attack. She brought the back of her hand up to her lip, to wipe away the blood, glaring up angrily.
She couldn’t retaliate, though. In a moment, two of the others had come up behind her, hoisting her to her feet, holding her arms tightly. She felt like she was back at the beginning again, when they had first found her, had needed to knock the proud teenager around a few times before she would listen to them. She struggled against the hold. This wasn’t the sort of nostalgia she liked. The man smirked as he stepped in front of Vanessa again – he had stepped aside to avoid the blow meant for her.
And then the words came. The man was in her face, spouting off words she could remember, speeches she could recite by heart. With the repetition came the acceptance. It took longer this time, but her body was conditioned to shut down to this stimulus. Tears welled in her eyes as he pointed out how they’d found her, rejected by her parents, the man she thought had loved her, by society as a whole. How Weapon X had cultivated her, given her a level of control to survive in society. And all they asked in return was information. They heaped on the insults. She was a freak, and outcast. She was a copycat and a sham, no use to anyone, but they struggled to find a use for her anyway. And she screwed up even that. Her mind, already fractured from all the times she spent as Julian, all the times in the past week she had picked up so many different forms, already falling to pieces, latched onto this familiarity. The words pounded in her head, but they gave her an anchor. Something to latch on to.
She found herself returning to the mansion an hour later. The bruise had settled in on her face, still red around the edges, darkening quickly. Her upper lip remained badly swelled. She was sure she could pass the injury off as a bad run-in. She had dropped her form in the city, that was it. Attracted some ire. Maybe she could find Josh in time so she only had to repeat the story once, to the healer. Or maybe Mystique, who could each her how to change something as subtle as a bruise, disguise it. She could live with the pain.
She walked into the mansion, shoulders hunched in a defensive posture, hands shoved deep into her jacket pockets. And she didn’t drop the normal Vanessa guise that she had worn into the city. The guise she had promised several – Hank and Julian – to never bother with inside the safety of the mansion. It was no good for her, they insisted, to conform to that outside ideal of “normal,” to instead embrace who she was. She didn’t want to, not right then. Her normal was far too terrifying. Maybe she shouldn’t have even returned. She was going to be a danger to them, wasn’t she? Oh God. What the hell was she doing?
She didn't realize that it was 3:00, a good hour later than she'd promised Julian she'd meet him. She forgot the meeting. Forgot that she needed to talk to him, since his words had left her so dazed and confused. Just like how she had forgotten her place with Weapon X. She sure as hell remembered that now.