log: eugenie + beckett WHO: Eugenie Abler + Beckett North WHEN: Today WHERE: Deep in the woods, near the Abandoned House WHAT: Beckett comes across an Eugenie practicing her powers, gets a brief pop culture lesson along with a surprise. WARNINGS: Reference to Beckett’s past power use and far from ideal childhood, but vague.
She was just a girl standing in front of a big tree, asking herself what the hell was going on.
Eugenie took a swig from her water bottle, staring up at the sky. The overhanging branches spared her the worst of the midday heat and the air beneath the trees wasn’t as muggy. She recapped the bottle, slid it into her backpack. She was as alone as she’d ever be, sure, although with a fully charged cell phone and an external battery—and her silver chains looping around her wrists.
Maybe Grandma had been onto something. If she could fly, who was to say that those kept at bay by silver weren’t a Thing either?
Flying. Right. Eugenie fixed her sight on a branch above her, brows furrowed in concentration. Maybe if she thought of it like jumping…
He had thought about leaving a note in the house to tell his sister where he had gone but in the end he had realised, with a small sigh, that they didn’t have any paper to leave said note on, and did they even own any pens or pencils? It was possible that there was one (or the stub of one, in the case of the latter) lying around somewhere, or tucked in a drawer after their tidying, but it was easier to just make sure the volume on his phone was switched on and turned up enough that he would hear it if Dinah reached out.
All of this was still so new to him that it was difficult to know what to do in situations that most others would probably have no trouble navigating. But Beckett had come from a world where things were very, very different, to say the least, and these things that most people saw as ordinary were just strange and confusing to him.
Even going for a walk was unusual, something he hadn’t been permitted to do back where they had come from. Where they had run from.
But it was good to get out and see the area. Beckett liked the idea of knowing the lay of the land and he had already roamed their surroundings a few times since their arrival. It never hurt to build on that familiarity though, which was why he was out today.
He had been out about ten minutes, give or take, when he came through a clump of dense trees and bushes and lifted his head from the slightly treacherous path to see something— unexpected felt like an understatement.
“Uh—hello?” Far from eloquent, but he had nothing else to say, and perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to call out to someone who was very literally floating off the ground but it was too late to take it back now.
The floating woman in question let out a noise that could best be described as “WHA-YELP!” She plummeted downwards then appeared to catch herself, stopping with her face hovering a couple of feet off the forest floor. “Uhhhhh,” she said as her body curled around to a sitting position and she lowered herself gently to the ground, showing more finesse than she had before.
If I vanish right now, she thought, then maybe I can convince him that he never even saw me.
Such was her life, the vanishing didn’t occur.
Beckett felt momentarily guilty about making the woman fall but then he was concerned all over again, glancing fleetingly back over his shoulder to try and gauge just how far away the house was. If this woman turned out to be a threat of some kind would she be able to find the house, and therefore Dinah? He turned his head back to the stranger just in time to see her catch herself and perform that impressive shift mid-air so she didn’t land on the ground face-first.
“Did you—” He paused, eyes narrowing a little, lifting one hand to make a rough gesture up and down. “Were you just—” Beckett hadn’t set out to ask the question in such a stilted fashion but finding the right words for things, especially bold statements of any kind, was never easy for him. “Were you flying?”
Eugenie’s mouth opened and shut as she considered a denial, then finally splayed her palms open, almost an upside down Jazz Hands! style.
“Surprise!”
The smile that followed had a definite edge of panicked hysteria about it. If she gave as little of herself as possible, said as little, did as little as possible, got out of the situation quickly, then perhaps he would come to a—conclusion far more logical than seeing a woman flying in the forest. Falling asleep and having a bizarre daydream? Sleep deprivation? Some bad weed?
Surprise indeed. Shocked was a better word for it, and perhaps even disbelieving. The irony of that, of course, was that Beckett quite literally ignited either when he needed to or during times of extreme duress. That irony was lost of him, naturally, as he continued to stand there not knowing what he had just seen or what to do about it.
“You—” He paused, cleared his throat, narrowed his eyes and then tried again, “You can fly.” He didn’t phrase it as a question that time because she hadn’t denied it and he was fairly certain of what he had seen with his own eyes. Not completely convinced but perhaps more ready to accept it, at least at face level, because of what he could do himself. And because of what Dinah could do, obviously.
“How do you do that?” Perhaps it was rude to ask but he also couldn’t help himself.
“I woke up one day and I just could.” Still giving out too much information, but she hadn’t exactly expected to be encountered, this deep in the woods. Part of her felt like she was having this conversation on another plane of existence, it was that surreal.
(And later she would note that after the initial shock, he seemed more… curious than anything.)
“I’m not here to start any trouble,” she added. Although really, who would be? Unless you were burying a body, one typically didn’t venture out this far. “I was just looking for a quiet place to practice.”
Even though she hadn’t said a great deal she had actually managed to convey quite a bit in just a few words, at least to Beckett’s mind. He blinked at her explanation, not really sure how that was possible, but at the same time questioning whether or not that was really so strange. Hadn’t it more or less been the same for him? In his mind’s eye he saw a shed burning, heard the frantic, panicked shouts of a man who had been the devil he knew all along, and Beckett found himself dropping and then averting his gaze. Almost ashamed.
She said she wasn’t here to start any trouble. He looked at her again then, bringing his eyes up from the detritus littering the nearby ground, where his gaze had wandered briefly. “You didn’t want anybody to see you.” That much at least he could definitely understand. It was always better to keep these things secret. Beckett knew how bad it could be when you didn’t.
“I didn’t want anyone to see me,” she confirmed with a rueful smile. Well, she had fucked that up good and proper, as a one-time English roommate would have put it.
Janice would definitely have some choice words to say, if she could see her now.
“You don’t like, happen to know if there’s a school for Xavier’s Gifted Youngsters nearby?” she added as a forlorn attempt at a joke. Humour was the brain’s means to make sense of a situation. Or… something. “They’d probably have better training facilities than out here. And would be more discreet.”
Beckett frowned, his brow furrowing visibly. He actually thought about what he had seen around town, trying to recall whether he had seen anything of the sort. “They have those?” he ended up asking, genuinely, because naturally the reference (like so many references) went right over his head. He was too busy thinking how much easier everything would have been if he had been able to go to a place like that.
“Uh, not that I know of? I haven’t run into any bald English guys in wheelchairs though.” Likewise Eugenie was thinking how much easier this would make life right now. Even if she would have been the only student old enough to legally buy alcohol here.
Another frown. If she had known that she wasn’t likely to find such a place in the area then why had she asked? It was only then that Beckett started to suspect he had missed something, and the very beginnings of embarrassment started to settle in. “Oh.” That was all he said at first, clearing his throat uncomfortably and shuffling his weight from one foot to the other. “So it’s not real?” He had meant to make that more of a statement, but it had ended up coming out as a question instead.
“No. It’s not.” She shook her head dismissively. “Just two decent movies followed by a bunch of crap ones. I hear the original cartoons were good.” Well before her time.
Because that was obviously the most pressing issue here, it was… interesting that he seemed to be literal with his question. Probably his parents had decided not to own a TV (or feed him any dairy) and he was younger than he looked beyond the beard.
“So. Meet flying girls out here often?”
Cartoons. Oh. That explained it, at least a little. Beckett hadn’t been permitted to watch cartoons, even before—well, before. They were seen as senseless garbage designed to fill children’s heads with all sorts of fanciful nonsense. The odd few had been permitted but they were likely ones that people like this young woman hadn’t ever wanted to watch. Church-endorsed only cartoons weren’t exactly a big hit with most kids.
“No,” he said, choosing to seize the opportunity to change the subject, or at least divert it back to what it had originally been. All things considered that was safer (or simpler, more to the point) than any kind of pop culture. “You’re the first.”
“Well,” she said, the corner of her mouth tugging up slightly. “At least I know that I’m an original.” Still, that was kind of lonely? Although the less of her “kind” (as she supposed she would have to start terming herself from now on) around, the less procedures possibly put in place to corral them.
It was safer to be a loner.
“I-” she began after a moment. “I’m at a disadvantage here. Since you know something big about me. And you don’t trust me. Which is fair!” she hastened to reassure him. “Why should you? You don’t know me. Trust should be earned over time, right? I used to trust people until they had given me a reason not to trust them. Beyond, you know, all the ‘usual’ young woman stuff.” A vague hand wave. The days where she would thread a key between her fingers to walk back to her dorm seemed decidedly rose tinted now.
Although a voice in her head nudged her, saying that with this, she wasn’t exactly defenseless anymore.
“So. I’m just going to, like, bid you a nice rest of your day now. Bye!” And finally, she vanished out of sight. A few seconds and twenty paces or so later, a stray branch bent and snapped back into place, signalling an invisible passage through the trees.
It all happened quickly, that spill of almost frantic words and the retreat that followed them. It happened so quickly, in fact, that Beckett didn’t have the time to form any sort of response to any of it. He hadn’t been intending to show his hand (so to speak) to the young woman, whoever she was, by revealing that he too had abilities, but he also hadn’t had any intention of harming or outing her. After what he and his sister had been through that was the last thing he wanted to subject anyone else to.
“Um.” That was uttered right on the tail end of the young woman’s last words, right before she literally disappeared. Beckett might have thought she was simply gone from the area, vanished like she had never been there to begin with, but then he heard the branch, turning his head just in time to see it spring back into place, wavering back and forth for a few moments before stilling.
Beckett blinked. “Bye?” But she was already gone, evidently, and she probably wouldn’t have heard that, given how quietly (and bemusedly) it had been uttered.
After a few moments he looked around the small clearing, part of him wondering if he had really seen anything (or anyone) at all. Yet another frown. Beckett turned then, intending to head back the way he had come. All things considered maybe it was for the best if he just went back to the house. Maybe Dinah could make sense of all of this.