ax_main | Alex and Pam - New Years Eve

Alex and Pam talk a little about the last few years, and make some plans for the next.

Pam looked at her reflection in the mirror, and made a face.

She wanted to do this. Mostly. She had the feeling she should, anyway, which was close enough. But it said a lot that the face in the mirror, the one she'd been born with, with its original coloring, didn't really feel like her anymore.

Moreover, she didn't like how she'd done her eyeliner, and couldn't seem to fix it.

With one more face at the mirror, she turned away and went to grab her coat. Considering she was the transportation, no one'd be leaving without her, but that wouldn't make Eileen any less pissy if she made her wait.

There was a perfunctory knock on the door, just before Alex stepped inside. He gave Fatale--Pam--a once over, then shook his head. "I'm never gonna get used to that. Not sayin' you don't look good," he added quickly. "It's just ... y'know. Takes some getting used to." He was dressed in a secondhand leather jacket and jeans; the cold didn't bother him as much as it did most, so he wan't too worried about bundling up more. "Eileen sent me to check on you. See if you were ready."

He loved Eileen, and he was pretty sure Pam did, too--in her own way--but the older girl was not really known for her patience.

"Do I look ready?" Pam snapped. She grabbed her hat, twisted her hair up to tuck it inside, and stuck it on her head. "Why am I even doing this? You'd prefer Liz anyway. Or Toni. I could do Toni. Her eyeliner's never crooked." Neither of them would leave her feeling anywhere near as exposed, and apparently, Alex didn't give a fuck, anyway.

"Hey," Alex said, not really sure what he'd said to upset her, but certain he needed to fix it quickly. If Pam wasn't going to enjoy this outing, there was no possible way he could. He stepped further into the room, and rested a tentative hand on her hip. "I can't tell the difference between Liz and Toni," he told her honestly. "I like it best when you look like you. Even if it's a version of you where the colors are wrong. Need any help with anything?"

"Yeah, but I'm guessing you can't fix my fucking eyeliner either." Pam sighed and turned towards the mirror, trying to tug her hat into a better position. "It's easier doing this as someone else," she complained. "And Liz is the one with the red hair. Toni looks like she could be Eileen's little sister."

"I'll try to remember that," he promised, standing beside her and watching her reflection in the mirror. "And you don't have to do anything, not if it makes you unhappy. We can stay here and watch the whole thing from the rec room, if that would be better." Alex paused for a few moments, then tentatively added, "I like your hat."

Pam smiled, just a little. "I do, too." She gave up adjusting it and turned towards him. "And yeah. I kinda have to. Just...to prove to myself I can. Does that make sense?" She hoped so. Otherwise, she was doing this for nothing.

His expression brightened almost immediately at that faint smile. "Well, of course you can," Alex said. "But if you really wanna prove it, I guess this is the best opportunity we'll have, until twenty-nineteen comes around." He shrugged. "Anyway. It doesn't matter if it makes sense or not. It's something you wanna do, so I'm pretty sure you'll own the hell out of it."

"Y'know, Tommy may have been on to something with that whole Hallmark thing," Pam pointed out, but she smiled as she hugged him. Maybe he didn't get it - fuck, she wasn't altogether sure she did, herself. But it didn't matter. He had her back, anyway.

"I don't really think we'd fit in that well with the whole sappy greeting cards set," Alex noted, wrapping his arms around her to return the hug readily. "But I can't remember the last time I actually got a card, so I can pretend I'm an expert. Maybe they're stabbier and explodier than they used to be?"

"I saw one at the store that sang when I went and got Simon a thank you card," Pam mused. "Kinda made me want to stab it? But nothing that exploded." She smirked. "That would be kinda cool, though. And you're sounding kinda sappy lately." Which, okay, was kind of nice, sometimes. Weird, but whatever. She could deal with it.

"I've always been sappy," he protested. "I'm just re-discovering outlets for it, is all." It helped knowing he wouldn't be drugged or electrocuted into unconsciousness for actually forming attachments to things. Or people. Alex tilted his head. "Who's Simon?" he asked. There was nothing accusing or suspicious in his voice, just straightforward curiosity. He didn't recognize the name immediately, and he usually made a point of knowing Pam's friends to the extent it was feasible.

Shit. Pam looked awkward and shrugged. "That guy at the school who was babysitting the boss when the doctors had to do shit," she replied. "He does a thing where he can read DNA."

"Huh," grunted Alex thoughtfully. "Did you ask him to read you?" It seemed like the natural question to ask; the Right had manipulated Pam's genes extensively, and it would have been stranger if she wasn't curious about it.

"Yeah." Pam shrugged, trying to look casual about it. "Not that it matters, I guess. But I figured I might as well since we were there."

Alex waited a few moments before prompting, "... and?" It wasn't like her to drag things out like this; if she wanted to tell him, she would, and if she didn't, she'd never had a problem telling him it wasn't any of his business before. This was different, and kinda worrying.

Pam sighed. "And it turns out they didn't know what the fuck they were doing. Huge surprise, huh?"

"What?" Alex asked dumbly, though if that curdling feeling deep down in his stomach was any indication, he had understood exactly what she'd meant. They'd both seen the results of the Right's failed attempts to manipulate mutant genetics often enough to grasp the implications. Making her say it would be ... It would just be too much.

His arms tightened around her briefly, then fell away. "Eileen's still waiting for us," he pointed out, his expression a poor attempt to hide the pained feeling gripping his insides. "We'll never hear the end of it, if she has to come up here."

Yeah, maybe she hadn't worded that too well, huh? "You stay here. I'll be right back." Pam opened a portal and stepped through, only to return a couple of minutes later. "I sent them on ahead." She frowned. "Why are you looking like you're gonna throw up?"

He folded his arms across his middle. "How bad is it? I mean ... Seventeen only lasted six months, after they started screwing with her DNA. And she had a healing factor." Seventeen. Easier to call them by number than by name. Easier to remember without danger of cracking than Lauren, freckled and just a little too tall, who'd made him laugh with her stupid dad jokes at meal time, and showed him how to fold a napkin into something that looked sort of like a bird.

Pam frowned, trying to figure out what he was talking about, then winced when she realized who he meant. "Oh. Fuck. No. No, it's...I'm okay. Alright? Everything's...stable." She grimaced. "Lauren wasn't the only one who had a healing factor."

Exhaling a relieved sigh, Alex breathed, "Thank god." He didn't think about the others much anymore, but when he did, the weight of feeling was usually too much for him. It was more difficult than usual to function when his memory drifted in the direction of Seventeen, or Three, or Twenty-Six. Or any of the others, really. Numbers made it easier, but only marginally. His look turned quizzical. "So what did they fuck up, then, if it's all stable?" And she wasn't headed for the same kind of catastrophic biological meltdown that had claimed the others.

"Damn near everything." Pam sat down on her bed, and patted the spot beside her, hoping Alex would take the invite, because she wasn't sure she could talk about this without hanging onto him. "Simon got a good look at what they did. Which wasn't stick their DNA into me to see if it'd stick. They fucked around to see if they could make me manifest their powers." She grimaced. "Which is why the ones I got are fucked up variations on a theme. They didn't get any of them right."

Hardly needing the invitation, he settled onto the bed beside her, and half-turned in her direction. "I don't understand," Alex admitted. "If they were just messing around with your genes ... what killed the others?" He'd always assumed it'd had something to do with the attempts to transfer additional powers into Pam. If that wasn't the case, if they'd just been trying to replicate them instead of transplant them, then those deaths made even less sense.

Pam shook her head. "I don't know. Maybe trying to figure out how they got theirs so they could duplicate it." She made a face. "Simon tried to explain some of that, I think, but I didn't understand it all. And in the beginning, I had something they probably didn't."

"So, on top of everything else, it was all for nothing," Alex mumbled, trying to fit this new information into what he'd thought he had known about their time with the Right. "They just ... blundered their way into amping up your powers, and ended up killing Seventeen and the rest because they were too incompetent to know they couldn't make lightning strike twice? Christ," he bunched up Pam's blanket in his fists, "that just makes it worse."

"Yeah." Pam rubbed at her forehead. "He said they were fumbling around, trying to figure out how to make it all work. They just got lucky with me." She made a face. "Lucky me." Though she guessed she was, actually. She was alive, right? That was more than the others could say. She reached for Alex's hand and laid hers over it. "Sorry. I shouldn't have said anything."

His hand turned over immediately and held tightly to Pam's. "No, I ... We're still here. That's something. That's important. It's just, Sevent--Lauren. Lauren and Jeremy, Carmen and Theo. All of them." They'd been his friends, to a greater or lesser degree. If nothing else, they'd shared the solidarity of suffering in common. Over two dozen. "We watched them die--in training accidents, or slowly wasting away, or just ... disappeared with no explanation. And now we know it was for nothing. It advanced nothing. I can't even take some comfort in the fact that maybe their ... maybe it helped you survive. It was nothing but a waste." Alex closed his eyes tightly, and took a deep breath. Why did it have to be a waste?

Pam's fingers tightened around Alex's, and she grimaced. She sucked at this. So much. It wasn't like she didn't feel bad about the others, but she'd never gotten close to any of them, really. Not like Alex had. Not in the beginning, when she'd still been really fucking excited about the opportunity that'd been dropped in her lap, in her conviction that she was going to be something special, and not later, when reality had hit and she'd realized she'd be lucky to get out alive herself. Alex had been the exception, not the rule. She'd never realized just how much she hadn't been the exception, for him. "Sorry," she offered again lamely. "You...you and Lauren were close?" She didn't remember that, if she'd ever known, but then, there was a lot she just...didn't. Mostly, she liked it better that way.

"We were all pretty close, once ... you know, the way I'm close to Mort or Fred or Lance. Friendly, because it made it a little easier." He swallowed heavily, squeezing Pam's hand back. "A little. Lauren used to tell stories with bad pun endings in the cafeteria, when they'd let us eat together. They were awful," Alex smile faintly, "but they made the rest of us feel better, for some reason. Theo used to steal our deserts when we weren't looking. Nobody actually minded that much." Bigger things were harder to recall with any kind of clarity, but the odd, little detail, a stray feeling, still came through. When he let himself remember. "Carmen and Jeremy didn't want anybody to know they had a thing for each other, even though we all did. But everybody just ... drifted apart, after a while. When some of us started getting sick, or stopped coming back from testing. It was the only thing we could do, since we didn't know who was gonna be next."

"Yeah. I get that." Pam leaned into him and closed her eyes. "I remember April. She was there before I was, even. She was gonna be it, y'know? She could teleport, and was already really fucking good with a knife - I think she ran with a gang before they picked her up. I was so jealous. And then they put up the shielding, so she couldn't teleport out, but...I don't know, maybe she tried? Or maybe something wasn't set right, and it fucked with her portals." She swallowed hard. "I saw her. Half in the wall, half out. And then I was in the infirmary for the first time, and...fuck." She rubbed at her forehead. "Why are we talking about this? It doesn't matter. They're dead."

Alex shifted into her, too, and listened to her story. He hadn't known April--before his time, he supposed--but he could imagine what that had been like. Had seen, in passing, the aftermaths of enough "miscalculations" and "unanticipated variables" that it wasn't hard to get the gist. Kissing the side of her head, he murmured, "They're dead. But they mattered. As much as I wish I couldn't remember any of it, as much of it as I've managed to forget, I can't forget it all. I can't treat them like they never existed, like they might as well never have been born. That would be as bad as what the Right did to them. And I want to remember what little I have left of it, I want that memory to be front-and-center when we take those ..." he struggled for a second; there really wasn't a swear word he know scathing enough to articulate his actual feeling. "When we take them down."

He sighed. "Did I just fuck up New Year's? I feel like I might have fucked up New Year's."

"It was pretty fucked up, anyway. But I started it, not you," Pam admitted. She rubbed at her forehead, then shook her head. "I don't want to remember. I just want..." she grimaced, trying to figure out what it was, exactly, that she wanted, and let her head fall forward into her hand. After Alex's confessions, she felt selfish admitting it - but maybe she was selfish, and whatever. It was still true. "I want to not need a fucking babysitter." Because that summed it up, didn't it? At least to her, anyway.

Though his face remained slightly pained, most of his features shifted toward confusion. "Since when have you ever needed a babysitter?" Alex asked, genuinely curious.

Pam turned her head to look at him, with an expression that suggested he was messing with her and she knew it. "How often does someone tell you to keep an eye on Fatale?"

"All the time," he told her immediately "Wanda usually tells me three or four times before lunch. But I don't try to look out for you because you need it. You'd be fine, with or without me." Which, in Alex's mind, was the simple truth. Even if Fatale were to give in to her every violent impulse, the way everybody seemed afraid she would, she could take care of herself. Without the Right. Without the Brotherhood. Without Alex. "I do it because I need it. I couldn't do anything for the others. I can't really do anything for anyone now, unless they want something blown up. But I want to try to do something for you, even if it's something totally unnecessary. I can stop, if you want."

"No." She shook her head, then dropped her eyes from his. "I just..." She shook her head. "I wouldn't be fine. Without you, I mean. I know that, even if you don't."

"I wouldn't be fine without you, either," Alex said. He was a bit skeptical as to whether that was actually true on Fatale's end, too, but she seemed to think so, anyway. He wouldn't challenge it. "I wouldn't even be kinda-sorta-okay. I'd be an even worse mess than I am now."

"Which is saying a lot," Fatale retorted, offering a faint smile, just because the dig was expected. She doubted it, personally - other than a knack for saying really weird things at weird times, Alex was a whole lot more together than she was. "And I'm not going anywhere. You know that. Just..." She shook her head. "Fuck. This is why we don't talk about this shit. It's hard. But I hate knowing people think I need someone to keep an eye on me. And I hate them being right."

"It's hard," he agreed. "But ... y'know. We keep an eye on each other--it's not all one way, or anything. We've always done that. Always. As for what anybody else thinks? Fuck 'em." Even if it was their new team. He was loyal to the Brotherhood and fond of its members, for the most part. But his first and most important priority would always be Pam. At least, until she decided it wasn't necessary anymore.

"Fuck 'em," she agreed, and tilted her head into her shoulder. She liked their teammates, mostly, but Alex came first. She took a breath, and exhaled it slowly as she straightened back up. "I think...I maybe want to try being Pam. With people other than you and Tommy. Sometimes. That's why..." she gestured at her still-not-blue face, that was otherwise actually hers, and craned her eyes up, trying to see Alex's reaction. Because...at the end of the day, if he wanted or needed Fatale? That's who she'd be. There wasn't any question.

He looked down at her seriously. "You're always you," Alex said. "And you're the one who decides who you want to be. I love Fatale. Fatale and I have been through a lot together. But I love Pam, too. If she's a better fit now, or a goal you want to achieve, then be Pam. I'll be right there next to you, like always." His look grew a bit critical. "We really should redo your eyeliner, though, either way. I think there's some YouTube videos I could pull up."

Pam wrinkled her nose at him. "I know how to put eyeliner on. It's trying to do it with light that's the problem. If I just put it on, it gets covered up when I change the color." She made a face, and then smiled a little. "And I love you too. Dork." She leaned up and kissed his cheek, then settled in against him, tilting her head onto his shoulder.

Wrapping an arm around her shoulder, he noted, "I think you look better without it, anyway. But if that's the issue, couldn't you ... y'know, illusion the makeup into place without having to worry about putting on actual makeup? I mean, you know your powers better than me. But if you can go from blue to flesh-tone, you can probably do flesh-tone to black, right?"

"I did. That's why it's crooked. I can't seem to picture it right." Pam sighed and concentrated, and the eyeliner disappeared. "Better?" she asked hopefully.

"You always look perfect," Alex said, planting a kiss on her forehead. "But yeah, I like this better, if you're asking. We can work on your illusion makeup skills in twenty-eighteen, though, if you want. You always get it right, with a little practice."

"Yay for New Years resolutions." Pam leaned in and kissed him softly, then sighed. "Okay. Ready for Times Square? We should probably catch up or we'll never find them."

"Ready when you are," he said. "But if the crowd gets to be too much and I start to freak out? Go ahead and teleport me to the Hudson. The shock will be just the kick in the ass I need, and I'm pretty sure temperature extremes won't kill me. Also, I'm a great swimmer. Also-also, if Eileen asks, we were there, like, the whole time and just couldn't find them."

"Works for me." Pam got to her feet and held her hand out to him. "But if the crowd gets too much? We're just coming back here. Who the fuck knows what's in that water."