|
   |
At least the day itself went well. It was close to the afternoon and Jean gave herself a bit of the day off to relax and decompress. IN the shared cabin that they cohabitate in, fish was already being prepped as she had learned from Logan, the knife scraping against the scales ever so lightly to shear them off. She wasn't a professional, just a beginner who took everything as serious as a heart attack.
"I really just don't know Logan.." Jean starts out. "Its one thing to hear it on the radio, but to actually see science fiction in motion.. I think it's going to ruin the kids."
Close to sixty years later, many children will fall in love with just the mere idea of Time Travel due to Doctor Who…
Logan snorts, sitting in his chair with a book propped up on his knee and a cigar in the corner of his mouth, "Folks been sayin' the kids gonna get ruined long as I been alive, an' that's a damn long time. Kids don't get ruined, it's the adults who always fuck shit up," he says.
He hadn't been sure about sharing his space - he did like his solitude after all. But Jean and he had both needed one another after recent events and, welll, she cooked and she smelled good and she kept him from entering weeklong bouts of brooding and silence. And if he really needed to be alone, he could always go camp in the woods.
He cocks his head as he hears the sound of someone approachin', "'bout to have company," he says.
Logan also likely smells the approaching Archangel on top of hearing the rustling of the metallic feathers as Warren lands softly in front of the cabin that Logan calls home. The playboy reaches out a hand, rapping lightly on the door frame as his wings slowly start to retract into his back with an awful scraping sound of metal on metal. "Logan?" he asks, "You home?"
Jean frowns a little. She carried the space bird within her, and she did at least appreciate the imagination of children..
..The fact being, she didn't want them to blast off into space and be captured by the Kree or Shi'ar..
"You're right. I mean, I suppose when the kids start talking about time and space travel we should warn them to not ignore the dark spots. When they do that, that's when there is trouble." She smiles a little, then begins to cut the fish into fillets. It's a hack job, but with practice, she'd get it.
The mention of an approach has her eyes lifting towards the door, the knock and the metal scraping gets a shrug of her shoulders. "Warren. I know that sound from anywhere. Didn't even need to brain scan.." And she seemed happy about that little fact..
Logan nods, "Yup, smells like him," Logan says, pushing up from the chair. He goes to open the door, letting the angel in and turning his back to meander back to his seat.
"C'mon in, kid. Ya got a hankerin' fer trout? Jeannie's just cookin' up a batch I caught this mornin'," he says.
"Glad ya swung by, been meanin' to have a talk with ya. Grab a seat, if you can keep them razors on yer back from cuttin' up my rockin' chair," he grins.
The razor-edged wings are already in the process of retracting fully into Warren's bared torso as the door opens fully. "Trout? I can't remember the last time I had trout. Sure, I'll have some. Hi, Red." he says over to Jean with a smile.
Slipping on the carried t-shirt as soon as the wings fully retract, Warren turns back to Logan and nods. "Yeah, I think I can manage not to scratch up your furniture. If I do, you can just widdle yourself some more anyway…" Warren says with a smirk, "…it's not like these are from Tiffany's or anything." He glances to Jean, then back to Logan. "She told me I should come talk to you, so here I am."
"I bet you he smells great." Great and expensive, is what her thought was. She does look up towards the door as she watches the two men, then takes the board and turns her own back to begin to work.
"Morning.. or soon to be afternoon, Warren." No flying now. Or anything dangerous, save for seasoning the fish as she was taught, which soon went into the frying pan. There was already a smell of butter in the air for the vegetables, and rice steaming in a wicker container she had received from a Chinese store.
All was well on the food front. This was a conversation that she wouldn't take part in.
Logan takes a draw on his cheroot and glances at Jean for a moment, watching her cook and sighing, "Yeah, guess we should."
"I dunno all the details o' what ya been through, what changed ya. Don't expect ya to go into it neither. That sorta thing, I been through it in my own right," he says. "I know it changes ya. And it can be hard comin' to a place like this."
"Chuck's a good man. He means well an' I believe in his mission," he says. "He needs to keep his hands and his conscience clean. But sometimes problems are messy. They don't have easy solutions. THey require blood an' pain an' makin' hard choices," he says.
He looks up a bit more intently, "So what I wanna do is put together a squad o' us that can make those hard choices for him. People who can take gettin' their hands dirty," he says.
Walking fully into the cabin, Warren combs his fingers though his hair, pushing the blonde locks out of his face. He look over to Jean with a smile, "Smells delicious. Didn't know you knew how to cool. I should have come over for sleepovers more often now that I know."
His demeanor turns a bit more stoic as Logan speaks, the smile on his face vanishing. "Well, I don't even know all the details about what happened to me, so you are not going to have to worry about me going into the long of it. Needlessly to say, the changes are more than apparent."
Warren moves over to the previously mentioned rocking chair and sits down into it, listening to Logan's words. He is quiet for a moment, before he glances over to Jean quizzically, "You knew about this?" he says, puzzled as he looks between her and Logan. Settling his gaze back onto Logan, "How exactly would you end up keeping this from Charles? It isn't like he couldn't just pluck a stray thought out and find out."
Jean turns back towards Logan with a smile, then shrugs a faint shoulder towards Warren. "Crystal taught me the basics, now I'm just getting to the hard stuff." But her food was mediocre, more like beginning housewife levels, as if she had one child and a husband to worry about.
Aka, Wags and Beauty, no husband aboot.
But she was quiet as she carefully flips the trout, carving off a tiny piece so that she could lift and sniff. Though once the question was directed at her, she sighs and turns, lowering the heat of the flame so that she could lean against the counter top far away as she was.
"I only know about it because he asked me first." Jean states truthfully. "And I declined. But Logan knows and I know that Charles wouldn't root around in anyones head without permission. And he wouldn't force it unless he felt he needed to.." She frowns a little. "I know it sounds horrible, Warren. But think about it."
"What would you do if -I- get loose?" Logan would know what that phrase meant.
Logan frowns. He doesn't like thinking about the measures necessary to keep Jean contained if the Phoenix went bad. He's braced himself for it as best he could, but he mostly tells himself it'll never come to that.
"I ain't sayin' we go around leavin' piles o' bodies either," he says. "I'm talkin' about last resorts," he says. "Jean's right, he don't go pryin' without permission, don't go diggin' unless needs require," he says.
"An', well…Chuck ain't my daddy. I listen to him an' accept his counsel, cause he's a smart bastard, but if I do somethin' that needs to be done an' he finds out and can't swallow it, then that's the way it is. But I ain't gonna leave the thing undone just to protect him or keep his approval."
Warren is quiet for a long moment, looking between the pair in front of him and nods quietly. "And now you're asking me, because I have been turned into…" A monster? A killer? A murderer? So many choices of words that can end that sentence, all of them with a ring of truth to them and they all run through his surface thoughts before he settles on "…a weapon."
He glances down to the floor, sighing. "I could use a beer…or something stronger."
Warren lifts his head again, glancing to Jean. "If you got loose, I'm not sure there is anything any of us could realistically do, Red. I've seen only glimpses of 'Ms Thing', and even that little glimpse was enough to make me think you might the most powerful of us all.
Shifting his eyes over to Logan, Warren reaches up and rubs at his chin. "That's easy for you, Logan. You have always been a bit more accepting lethality. It's not something I ever thought I would have to deal with, let alone something I would have ever thought I would have done. I'm not saying your moral compass is broken, or even wrong. It's just that mine seems to have gotten swapped out, and I am just now getting used to the new north. That north 'likes' blood and violence.
"I've been through close to a thousand lifetimes to know that what you say about me isn't true, Warren." One billion at least, but a thousand is a bit more reasonable. Still, she goes back to the fish, leaving the convincing up to Logan. Hell, she told him no. She didn't even want to help or recruit. Honestly? She was here to make dinner.
Logan nods, "I can't say I was ever a man o' peace," he says. "Even in my earliest days, I had enough animal in me to bite when it was time to bite," he says. "But I also been made a weapon. I know some of what it means t'be changed, even if it ain't just the same," he says.
"If you wanna try to control that part of you, want to make your way back to a simpler and gentler version o' who you are? I ain't gonna stand in your way. You can forget we had this conversation, go back to your penthouse and fine wine and…figure out the way to do it. Cause I never did," he says.
"I'm just sayin', if you got that in you, we can find ways to use it. What I learned when I got taken by the Morlocks is I ain't ever gonna be…" he takes a moment and thinks, "one of the good guys. Not really. At least, not the way Chuck wants. But that don't mean I can't do good with what I am," he says.
That's the thing though, Logan. I'm not sure I can't control it. I'm not even sure I want to control it. Whatever they did to me, it's changed me more than physically." Warren says with a shrug of his shoulder. "I mean, I know I am still 'me', but in other ways I am not. I've never been bloodthirsty before, never was one for violence just for violences sake. But now?"
HE lifts his eyes again, locking it with Logan's gaze. Before, Warren might have been submissive, but now he looks at Logan predator to predator. Dominant to Dominant. "Now I want blood. My new 'wings' seem to have a thirst for it."
He lowers his eyes again, almost ashamed to having admitted that. "The old Warren is gone. Sure, some aspects of him remain. I still donate my money to the Mutant Town, I still run my business as best I can. I still enjoy some of the finer things in life, but deep down I think I am mostly maintaining that as a mask now, to hide the new 'real' me."
"And the real me scares me sometimes.
Logan lets Jean lay out the plates for them, asking her for a beer while she's at it. He takes a few moments to dig in. She may not think much of her culinary skills, but he's got no complaints.
"You an' I probably disagree about what the finer things are," he says. "I never had much use for your rich boy shit," he says. "An' I ain't expectin' you to start likin' me all of a sudden, just 'cause you know a bit more what it's like to be a killer."
"Comes down to it, I don't really give a shit about your personal struggles. You want your head shrunk, Jean or Chuck or Moira all prob'ly better fer that than me," he says. "I'm offerin' opportunity. Outlet. I need folks I can rely on to get the job done. I'm gonna do what's gotta be done either way, but havin' resources at hand makes it easier,' he says.
Warren snorts, "Fuck you."
"You don't know me, Logan. You never have and you never tried to. You, just like everyone else, assumes just because I come from money, that is all that defines me." The white of Warrens's eyes starts to change color, shifting slowly into a yellow. "If that is all I ever cared about…"
He takes a deep breath, his eyes closing as he tries to calm himself down. A voice, barely above a whisper manages to squeak out "I don't have to justify myself to you, you asshole."
He reaches forward, taking a forkful of the trout and slipping it into his mouth to chew for a while, forcing his mouth to do something other than spout off. "An outlet. I can't say that wouldn't be…helpful."
Logan grins, "An' I ain't askin' you to," he says. "Man don't never gotta justify himself to nobody. Woman neither," he says, glancing over at Jean. "Like I made clear, I ain't Chuck. I'm not your daddy figure, I'm not your teacher, I'm not yer pal. Yeah, I don't really know ya, but I met plenty o' the like. You ain't that special, wings or no wings. Sad little rich boys are a dime a dozen," he says.
"I'm a mean motherfucker who's willin' to give you somebody to kill what needs killin', so you can go back to your silk sheets and maybe have a dream that ain't about cuttin' folks t'ribbons," he says.
He lights a fresh cigar off its predecessor, having cleaned his plate in short order, leaving nothing but bones. "We find a way to put that talent to good use, you might find keepin' sane comes a little bit easier. Did for me. Cause bottlin' it up don't work. That much I can tell ya from experience," he says.
|ROLL| Warren +rolls 1d100 for: 12
Continuing to eat, Warren finishes off the trout relatively quickly himself. He sets the plate aside as Logan continues to talk, but at the line about being a sad little rich boy something triggers.
Without warning Warren's eyes blaze an angry red and his wings tears through his t-shirt, shredding it and slicing though the chair he is sitting in as the former Angel lets out a feral growl, "SHUT UP!". The bladed edge of the wing slashes forward towards Logan at face level, the blade moving centimeters from Logan's face to slice the cigar into nothing more than a stub. "You don't know me! You don't get to make judgments about who or what I am!"
Logan manages to keep himself still. For one, this ain't his first rodeo and he's been threatened plenty of times before, albeit not usually with razor-sharp feathers. For two, he kind of knew he was goading the kid and expected something of a response. He wouldn't have been surprised if he came up bleeding. He ain't afraid to bleed, if it comes down to it.
He spits out the remnant of the cigar. "Everybody makes judgments, kid. An' everybody gets judged," he says.
"Cuttin' me up ain't gonna prove nothin' an' it certainly ain't gonna change my opinion," he says. "You wanna show me yer a man, that yer better'n that? I'm offerin' you a chance to prove it," he says.
"Up to you either way. But if you wanna get down an' dirty with me, bub, you better be damn sure o' yourself. Cause you an' me tangle, you ain't gonna be pretty again for a long, long time."
"So throw down or go blow, either way, I'm done talked out."
|ROLL| Warren +rolls 1d100 for: 71
The wing in front of Logan's face quivers, the blade just wanting to go the last few centimeters to give Logan a nice shave and a haircut, about a few millimeters past where the epidermis ends. A moment passes before there is a frustrated scream, and Warren turns his head away from Logan and closes his eyes. Slowly, the wings start to recede back into his back as he forces himself to regain control of himself and his new appendages.
It takes a moment before Warren turns his head back to Logan, his eyes mostly that neutral white once more but a slight tint of yellow to them remains.
"You want me on your team of killers? Fine, you got me. At the very least I can just pretend whomever I go see is you."
Logan grins, "Sounds like we got a deal then, Warren," he says.
"I'll let you know when I have a target in mind. I might wanna do a little more recruitin'. An' I still gotta pick a target. But I have a few in mind," he says. "In the meantime, I dunno if Jean's got anythin' cookin' up for dessert or not. I might have a puddin' pop left in the freezer."
Warren glares at Logan, but then finally nods at the older man. "I guess we do."
He turns away from Logan and moves from the wreckage of the chair to head towards what constitutes a kitchen, looking for the icebox to find himself a beer. "Do you have other options for this team of yours? If I am going to be a part of it, I suppose I should help recruit."
After all of the ruckus, Jean remained a silent wall in the kitchen, watching both of the men intently. Was it because she was slightly amused, or really figuring they were going to fight. Either way, the Lady She remained close by, and her glee was apparent.
And written upon /Jean's/ face was a half smirk. Entities divided. One side worried and the other smirking.. until she was not.
As Warren moves she sighs quietly, her head shaking and she slides on the mitts to remove the yellow cake she made. Both circle tins were set upon the counter as she mutters quietly to herself. Something akin to it being a bad idea.. or how she's going to get -so- much shit for this..
Logan snorts, "Long as you can be quiet about it, yeah," he says. "I admit, I ain't that close with much o' anybody cept Jean here," he says.
He takes a long sip of his beer and kicks up his feet, "I ain't sure about ol' Scarlet. She's got a dark side, I think, but she also…well, truth be told, I ain't sure what she believes. I think she tried to explain it once, but I couldn't really follow it, if I'm honest."
"Yeah, because I am about to just go running off and telling everyone that I am going to be part of a wet works team, who wants to come along and join the fun!" Warren rolls his eyes at Logan, finding the beer, opening it and taking a long pull from the bottle. "Give me a little more credit than that, Logan.'
He looks to Jean, "Oh, cake…what kind of frosting are you going to put on that? Lemon or chocolate?"
He looks back to Logan and shrugs, "You know, I can't rightly say myself with her. You know her the best out of all of us, Red. What do you think?"
"Chocolate." Jean blurts out. And she does get to work, both saucers of the cake placed upon the serving tray, the bottom one soon slathered with a quick thickness of chocolate before she takes on the sides.
"I don't know." She purses her lips. "I do know. I'm lying." She sighs as she begins to place another layer upon the cake, adding frosting, carefully spreading it out. "She knows better. She knows that there is a time to nurture and a time to force nature.."
She was careful, even ducking just a touch to eye her work. "At the end of the day, you have to ask her. Her fingers are spread wide across the city though."
Logan shrugs and nods, "Yeah, I suppose I'll have to ask her myself. I just might need somebody to interpret a bit for me," he grins.
He's anticipating the cake, even if its imperfectly made. His usual dessert consisted of sprinkling some sugar on some beef jerky, so this was all luxury, far as he was concerned.
Warren nods to Jean, "Chocolate is my favorite. Good choice."
He looks between Logan and Jean again, taking another sip of his beer. "Too be honest, I don't know her all that well…or if I do, it's hazy. My memory isn't exactly all that great in regards to what happened before I 'got back'. Not sure if it is a side effect of whatever they did to me to keep me docile or if it is forcibly blocked." He shrugs, "Guess it doesn't matter, really."
"If she nods her head when she speaks, that means yes." Is all Jean could offer, but then again, she's gotten used to her red-headed bohemian's jargon. It was pretty!
Though, Warren does warrant pause, but then she continues on with drawing out two saucers so that she could cut the three layered cake to lay upon it's side for the men to partake.
"If you want it out, I can help you. We still need to plan for a sleep over, but I'm guessing you should stay here. Just in case."
Aka, Jean doesn't look pretty cut to ribbons, thanks!
Taking another pull of his beer, Warren looks to Jean. "Well, I think that is about universal. I've yet to run into someone where nodding means no, so hopefully that form of communication retains uniformity."
He takes the offered cake, lifting his plate to his nose and taking a whiff of the fresh baked desert. "Smells wonderful, Jean." He looks over to her and offers a small smile, "You want me to sleep over….here?" He eyes Logan and then looks back to Jean, "I'm not sure short, dark and hairy over there is exactly up for having me as a bunkmate."
Logan looks up a bit, "Yeah, I don't think that's much likely. Don't really see how the kid would need it either. He could buy his own cabin fifty times the size if he wants. With hot tubs and shit," he says.
"I wonder if I could build a hot tub," he mutters.
Jean grins, it took a while for her to perfect the cake, until she just went out and bought the mix. Though, as she begins to clean up, she stops to look to the both of them.
"It's for my safety that we're here. But.. you both are right. We should use the medbay for this." And back to cleaning she goes, "I'm going to head into town in a little bit. Anyone mind putting the food away for me?"
Warren purses his lips. "Just…forget about it, Red. I'll manage. I can't be sleeping in the medbay every night. It'll be ok." He pulls the remains of his tattered shirt from his body and stuffs an end of it through his belt. Since he is in the kitchen anyway, he moves over to help Jean with the food. "Sure. I can help. Of course, I have no idea where any of this is supposed to go. Not my place. I'm assuming there is at least a sink in here?"