Post by Pyro on Aug 15, 2006 2:44:05 GMT -5
OOC Note:
Timestamp for this post is later in the day after Dharma's arrival. I'm posting it up now in case I don't get another opportunity before I go away, so if anything needs to be completed, feel free to let this simply serve as a 'what they were doing' reminder. The fact that Emma is now back on Genosha will be dealt with when Katie comes back from her holiday, but all BH are aware of her presence, but feel no animosity towards her, perhaps a little suspicious, but no open hostility. Curse her and her wooga-wooga brain powers.
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Everyone was aware that Emma Frost was back on Genosha.
She had arrived sometime mid afternoon, spoken not a word to anybody except Python, to whom she had simply said "let me in", and been shut up in the cell with Pyro for a good five solid hours.
Around seven, there was a banging on the door and Python slid the bolts back. The door swung inwards to reveal Emma Frost, a severe, stern expression on her face, virtually supporting an exhausted-looking, tearful John Allerdyce.
"Let her go where she wants," the young man said, in a voice that was shaking, but obviously lucid. "Nobody's to touch a hair on her head, is that clear?"
Emma guided the young man to Python, who took over supporting him. "We'll continue tomorrow," she said to the young leader of the Brotherhood, and was gone.
Python put an arm around the barely able to stand young man and guided him to the seat he'd been sitting on. "You OK, kid?" he asked, softly, looking carefully into Pyro's eyes for any sign of the former madness. There wasn't even a glimmer of it.
"I've got a headache," he said, quietly. "Not like my old headaches," he added, hastily. "Just ... from crying so much."
It had been another long day, being woken up by the alarms so early, washing and cooking and sitting on the internet and then shutting herself in her room when Emma Frost had arrived back on the island. She was staring vacantly at the computer screen, not seeing the words that she was apparently reading but instead worrying about John again - after all, Angie didn't trust Emma, though she knew well enough that John needed help. The kind of help that only a telepath could provide.
The mangled fork had ended up on the desk, next to the computer that Gill had set up for her, and she tapped it idly against the edge of the desk, a dissonant 'ting' occurring every few seconds from the metal on metal. How long has she been in there? Shouldn't they be out by now? The young woman certainly didn't do anything to push down her fears. God, does it even matter? Have to get him out of your head and start thinking like a normal human being again! And yet there he was, popping up again, giving her a grin bigger than she'd ever imagined him capable of. She found herself on her feet and out the door before she knew what she was doing, passing Emma in the hallway and trying to keep her mind blank. Last thing I need. If Emma knew how Angie felt about her, and about John... Well, that could make life very interesting for the young Australian.
She patted her pocket, looking for her mittens, and upon finding them pulled them on to ward against the cold. As she rounded the corner to the corridor where John's cell was, Angie's face broke out into a grin. Python wouldn't have let him out if he wasn't doing better. Unless Emma had done something to the lanky mutant, but that thought was gone as quickly as it came. "Are you feeling better?" She hung back, unsure how to behave now that he was feeling himself again.
Python and John both looked up at Angie's arrival. "Says he's got a headache, but that it's not like the old ones," Python said before the kid could speak. The faintest flicker of irritation flashed across Pyro's face, but passed swiftly.
"Hi," he said, to Angie and there was deep shame conveyed in a two letter word. "I wouldn't be surprised if you don't want to come over here and punch me in the face after what I said and did. I'm sorry. To both of you."
He stood up, but he was still weak enough that his knees buckled under him. Python caught him. "We should get you to your own room," he said, not unkindly. "You should get some sleep."
"I'll be fine in a bit," said Pyro, with a faint smile. "Just need to literally find my feet again. The day's been a bit...intense."
The work Emma had done with him had started the process of putting his mind back together. Right now, it was a temporary fix not dissimiliar to that which Charles Xavier had imposed on his mind, only not so complex. There was a lot of work still to do and Emma could sense that the boy would never be one hundred percent fixed - but eighty five percent, which was her target, was better than the myriad shattered fragments his mind had been when she found it.
In terms of percentages, she had worked him to a good fifty or sixty percent. It was the edge pieces of the jigsaw. She'd created a stable frame and begun inserting enough of the big picture that he was able to at least recognise which reality he was in now.
Oh. So he did remember then. Her mind was cast back to the fork, dented and bent and with one of the tines broken off, sitting on her desk. She didn't know why she'd kept it, only that she hadn't wanted to put it out in the kitchen with the rest of the cutlery. "It's ok John, don't worry about it." Angie pulled off her mittens as she approached him, but didn't make any move to touch him now that she wasn't sure how he'd feel about it.
"Do... D'you want me to...?" God but it felt awkward. "You ever hear of 'Stockholm syndrome', Nightingale?" She looked down at her hands for a moment, picking at her fingernails uncertainly. He looked like he could use her help, but she didn't want to go throwing herself at him like she was a teenager with a crush. Nor did she acknowledge the part of her mind that tried to remind her that was exactly what she was.
"If you don't mind," he said, tiredness in his voice. "I fully understand why you might not want to..."
Python rolled his eyes heavenward for a few moments. Young people, honestly. His arm still supporting the boy, he moved him forward to Angie.
"Just enough so I can stand straight," said John. He sounded guilty. "Don't waste your energy on me any more if you can help it. But thank you, anyway."
He needed to lose the exhaustion. Really speaking, he needed to sleep in his own bed for a while, to get himself properly rested. He wouldn't always be able to count on Angie being around to heal him up and he knew it. But a quick physical fix right now would benefit everyone.
"Why would I...?" She shook her head slightly and reached out to touch John's face with both hands, the coolness of her skin in sharp contrast to the warmth of his. He felt... exhausted. And there was a headache, but it wasn't the same migraine that she'd been trying to get rid of for days. As her energy flowed into him, washing away the tiredness and the headache, she seemed to be staring past him as she searched for something.
It was the cracks she was looking for, the shattered vase that had been his mental state - but she didn't find it. It was obvious that what Emma was doing wasn't finished, but it was helping, and Angie actually let herself feel a bit of warmth toward the blonde telepath. "I'm not wasting my energy on you, Pyro." The words were soft, yet determined, as she drew her hands away from his face and took a step back. "That should about do it for now, but you should go to bed early tonight, catch up on some sleep." The mind needed sleep to reset and rest, and while she could take care of physical symptoms, she couldn't keep someone awake indefinately and have them still function properly. Angie's cheeks coloured slightly as she remembered the way he'd slept fitfully on her lap. Hopefully what Emma had done would take care of the nightmares so that his mind could rest properly.
He felt her energy flow into him and closed his eyes, feeling the worst of the afternoon's horrors drift away from him. The time spent with Emma had been desperately difficult - for both of them. She had been horrified at the absolute chaos that was the boy's mind and he had resisted nearly everything she had done to help him.
Metaphorically, Emma had picked up the chaos of his mind piece by piece and put it back into the right boxes.
Apart from one box, that she couldn't access. It was like every time she went near one section of John's mind, a literal guard dog would leap out snarling and growling. Intriguing, to say the least.
"I'll get some sleep tonight, I promise," he said. "But right now, what I really want is a shower, a shave - and some fresh air."
His comment about shaving drew her attention to the stubble, which she
actually thought looked good. Her cheeks took on a deeper blush.
Stockholme syndrome. She wondered for a panicky moment whether he remembered that part, or if he was concentrating more on the less lucid moments. She was never going to ask him, though - not only because reminding him of his crazy time might not be welcome, but also because she honestly didn't believe that he'd ever be interested in her now that he was back in his right mind.
"Alright, well... Make sure you do. And come find me if you need me." Not that she could think of a reason that he'd need her, but sometimes things just popped out of Angie's mouth before her brain could catch up. "I'll walk back with you." Why did I say that? "You know, just in case." She smiled weakly. Terrible excuse - she knew as well as him that his legs should work just fine again now.
A totally unreadable expression came into Pyro's face and he glanced briefly up at Python.
"You go with Angie," he said. "I trust you, kid, and besides. I've been sitting here for a day and half watching you. I'm sick of the sight. Go. Get."
"Thanks, man." Pyro clasped his friend's arm briefly, the closest to
demonstrating affection he was likely to get. "I appreciate it, you know."
Python was no fool. He could sense Angie's growing attraction to Pyro and that was all well and good by him. She was a good girl, one who might help him see sense. He had no qualms, therefore, about engineering a reason for him to be around her.
They walked a short distance and then he began to talk, in a low, anxious voice.
"I only remember bits of the last couple of days," he said. "I remember being a complete asshole to you and I'm truly sorry for that. You did nothing but try and help me and I threw it in your face. You gotta know, that wasn't me. Well, I mean, obviously it WAS me, but it wasn't me. Uh."
He paused.
"Know what I mean?"
Her last hope at not walking back with him and potentially making a complete fool of herself was dashed when Python told John to go ahead, and she wondered for a moment if there actually was any danger of the fragile framework Emma had put up crashing back down. Couldn't get any worse, could it? She gave Python an embarrassed little wave as they left, walking silently for a moment until John started to speak. He sounded anxious. Angie just felt awkward.
"Yeah, I know what you mean. It's ok, John, you don't have to apologise." She gave him a small smile, thinking to herself that if she hadn't been such a fool and kept going back in there, John would never have had the chance to act the way he had. "I'm sure that a lot of what you did in there would never happen normally." She could have been talking about the screaming, the gouges he'd taken out of his own skin, the thinking he was one of the X-Men. But what she was actually referring to was the endearing smile when she'd
offered pancakes, the way he'd fallen asleep on her lap, how charming he'd been before the whole fork incident. "So don't worry about it." The last sentence was so soft that he might not have even heard it.
"I do worry," he said, indicating that yes, he had in fact, heard her.
"Famous for it, I am." He smiled slightly. If what she had come to think of as the 'pancake smile' had rated a 9/10 on the attractiveness scale, the small smile he managed now was a mere 4.
He ran a hand over his stubbled chin. "I hate not shaving," he said,
vaguely. "Feels weird. Looks worse."
It made him look older, more careworn. It changed his appearance rather more than he knew.
They rounded a corner and passed Gill going the other way. The half-fish man stopped, looked Pyro up and down, said "Alright, Boss?" in his quasi-Jamaican accent, and flapped off in the other direction.
"Gill's like an oak in a forest of saplings," mused Pyro, watching his
retreating back. "Amazing. I think he's been here for like, ever."
"You shouldn't. It's not always your fault." She tried to return his smile but her own expression was worried. Slightly hypocritical? Perhaps.
When he started playing with his stubble, she managed to get a proper smile out. "Doesn't look as bad as you think." She had no doubt that he'd still shave it off, though. She wondered if it was just one of his things, similar to the way she'd always worn her hair in plaits. But that had been a rebellion thing, since her mother was always trying to get her to wear her hair down - now that she was free from her mother, Angie had worn it differently every day. It was currently hanging straight down, longer than most people would have realised in comparison to her plaits, and tucked behind her ears.
She was distracted from the line of thought by Gill, and she gave the
chain-smoking mutant a smile as he passed. "Yeah, he's pretty interesting - I went and saw him yesterday, he got me set up with a computer and we had a bit of a chat." She'd been surprised at how articulate he was, at how enjoyable it was conversing with him. But then, she hadn't really interacted with him beyond a few stares until then.
They'd reached the hallway where Mystique's room was, and Angie realised that she didn't even know where Pyro slept. If he had his own room or not. She'd seen his lighter lying on Mystique's bed the previous day, and wondered if anyone had picked it up or not. She didn't want to think about why his lighter was in there, or what kind of relationship the two of them had had - everytime she thought about Mystique, Angie felt like a little kid. It strengthened her resolve to deal with her feelings for Pyro and move on - if Mystique was his type, then Angie had about a snowball's chance in hell of ever being noticed.
As they passed Mystique's room, John's head automatically turned. The
lighter was still there, lying on the bed. It was his prize possession, his original lighter; the custom-painted shark Zippo. He paused and stared at it for a few moments, until one of Emma's more gentle, yet insistent suggestions came to the fore.
"It can stay there for now," he said, aloud, mentally answering the question he'd asked himself. "It's not going anywhere, and I don't need it in the shower, right?"
Then he reached over and pulled the door to Mystique's room closed.
"I'm just down the hallway," he said.
"I'd hope not." She answered his question, even though she was aware that it was probably rhetorical. "I don't know about you, but my showers seem plenty warm enough." She gave him another grin that faded only slightly at the announcement that they were almost at his room.
"Guess I'll leave you to it, then." She steadfastly kept her mind off John in the shower. "You know where I am if you want me for anything, right?" She realised that she still didn't know who had brought her into the base and put her in her room after passing out in that truck.
"Come back in twenty minutes," he said. "I wouldn't mind company, and I like yours."
He didn't voice why, but Angie put no demands on him. It was easy to talk to her. She reminded him very vividly of Kitty in that respect. He gave her another smile (all the way up to a 6!) and disappeared into his room.
Continues in Part Two
Timestamp for this post is later in the day after Dharma's arrival. I'm posting it up now in case I don't get another opportunity before I go away, so if anything needs to be completed, feel free to let this simply serve as a 'what they were doing' reminder. The fact that Emma is now back on Genosha will be dealt with when Katie comes back from her holiday, but all BH are aware of her presence, but feel no animosity towards her, perhaps a little suspicious, but no open hostility. Curse her and her wooga-wooga brain powers.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Everyone was aware that Emma Frost was back on Genosha.
She had arrived sometime mid afternoon, spoken not a word to anybody except Python, to whom she had simply said "let me in", and been shut up in the cell with Pyro for a good five solid hours.
Around seven, there was a banging on the door and Python slid the bolts back. The door swung inwards to reveal Emma Frost, a severe, stern expression on her face, virtually supporting an exhausted-looking, tearful John Allerdyce.
"Let her go where she wants," the young man said, in a voice that was shaking, but obviously lucid. "Nobody's to touch a hair on her head, is that clear?"
Emma guided the young man to Python, who took over supporting him. "We'll continue tomorrow," she said to the young leader of the Brotherhood, and was gone.
Python put an arm around the barely able to stand young man and guided him to the seat he'd been sitting on. "You OK, kid?" he asked, softly, looking carefully into Pyro's eyes for any sign of the former madness. There wasn't even a glimmer of it.
"I've got a headache," he said, quietly. "Not like my old headaches," he added, hastily. "Just ... from crying so much."
It had been another long day, being woken up by the alarms so early, washing and cooking and sitting on the internet and then shutting herself in her room when Emma Frost had arrived back on the island. She was staring vacantly at the computer screen, not seeing the words that she was apparently reading but instead worrying about John again - after all, Angie didn't trust Emma, though she knew well enough that John needed help. The kind of help that only a telepath could provide.
The mangled fork had ended up on the desk, next to the computer that Gill had set up for her, and she tapped it idly against the edge of the desk, a dissonant 'ting' occurring every few seconds from the metal on metal. How long has she been in there? Shouldn't they be out by now? The young woman certainly didn't do anything to push down her fears. God, does it even matter? Have to get him out of your head and start thinking like a normal human being again! And yet there he was, popping up again, giving her a grin bigger than she'd ever imagined him capable of. She found herself on her feet and out the door before she knew what she was doing, passing Emma in the hallway and trying to keep her mind blank. Last thing I need. If Emma knew how Angie felt about her, and about John... Well, that could make life very interesting for the young Australian.
She patted her pocket, looking for her mittens, and upon finding them pulled them on to ward against the cold. As she rounded the corner to the corridor where John's cell was, Angie's face broke out into a grin. Python wouldn't have let him out if he wasn't doing better. Unless Emma had done something to the lanky mutant, but that thought was gone as quickly as it came. "Are you feeling better?" She hung back, unsure how to behave now that he was feeling himself again.
Python and John both looked up at Angie's arrival. "Says he's got a headache, but that it's not like the old ones," Python said before the kid could speak. The faintest flicker of irritation flashed across Pyro's face, but passed swiftly.
"Hi," he said, to Angie and there was deep shame conveyed in a two letter word. "I wouldn't be surprised if you don't want to come over here and punch me in the face after what I said and did. I'm sorry. To both of you."
He stood up, but he was still weak enough that his knees buckled under him. Python caught him. "We should get you to your own room," he said, not unkindly. "You should get some sleep."
"I'll be fine in a bit," said Pyro, with a faint smile. "Just need to literally find my feet again. The day's been a bit...intense."
The work Emma had done with him had started the process of putting his mind back together. Right now, it was a temporary fix not dissimiliar to that which Charles Xavier had imposed on his mind, only not so complex. There was a lot of work still to do and Emma could sense that the boy would never be one hundred percent fixed - but eighty five percent, which was her target, was better than the myriad shattered fragments his mind had been when she found it.
In terms of percentages, she had worked him to a good fifty or sixty percent. It was the edge pieces of the jigsaw. She'd created a stable frame and begun inserting enough of the big picture that he was able to at least recognise which reality he was in now.
Oh. So he did remember then. Her mind was cast back to the fork, dented and bent and with one of the tines broken off, sitting on her desk. She didn't know why she'd kept it, only that she hadn't wanted to put it out in the kitchen with the rest of the cutlery. "It's ok John, don't worry about it." Angie pulled off her mittens as she approached him, but didn't make any move to touch him now that she wasn't sure how he'd feel about it.
"Do... D'you want me to...?" God but it felt awkward. "You ever hear of 'Stockholm syndrome', Nightingale?" She looked down at her hands for a moment, picking at her fingernails uncertainly. He looked like he could use her help, but she didn't want to go throwing herself at him like she was a teenager with a crush. Nor did she acknowledge the part of her mind that tried to remind her that was exactly what she was.
"If you don't mind," he said, tiredness in his voice. "I fully understand why you might not want to..."
Python rolled his eyes heavenward for a few moments. Young people, honestly. His arm still supporting the boy, he moved him forward to Angie.
"Just enough so I can stand straight," said John. He sounded guilty. "Don't waste your energy on me any more if you can help it. But thank you, anyway."
He needed to lose the exhaustion. Really speaking, he needed to sleep in his own bed for a while, to get himself properly rested. He wouldn't always be able to count on Angie being around to heal him up and he knew it. But a quick physical fix right now would benefit everyone.
"Why would I...?" She shook her head slightly and reached out to touch John's face with both hands, the coolness of her skin in sharp contrast to the warmth of his. He felt... exhausted. And there was a headache, but it wasn't the same migraine that she'd been trying to get rid of for days. As her energy flowed into him, washing away the tiredness and the headache, she seemed to be staring past him as she searched for something.
It was the cracks she was looking for, the shattered vase that had been his mental state - but she didn't find it. It was obvious that what Emma was doing wasn't finished, but it was helping, and Angie actually let herself feel a bit of warmth toward the blonde telepath. "I'm not wasting my energy on you, Pyro." The words were soft, yet determined, as she drew her hands away from his face and took a step back. "That should about do it for now, but you should go to bed early tonight, catch up on some sleep." The mind needed sleep to reset and rest, and while she could take care of physical symptoms, she couldn't keep someone awake indefinately and have them still function properly. Angie's cheeks coloured slightly as she remembered the way he'd slept fitfully on her lap. Hopefully what Emma had done would take care of the nightmares so that his mind could rest properly.
He felt her energy flow into him and closed his eyes, feeling the worst of the afternoon's horrors drift away from him. The time spent with Emma had been desperately difficult - for both of them. She had been horrified at the absolute chaos that was the boy's mind and he had resisted nearly everything she had done to help him.
Metaphorically, Emma had picked up the chaos of his mind piece by piece and put it back into the right boxes.
Apart from one box, that she couldn't access. It was like every time she went near one section of John's mind, a literal guard dog would leap out snarling and growling. Intriguing, to say the least.
"I'll get some sleep tonight, I promise," he said. "But right now, what I really want is a shower, a shave - and some fresh air."
His comment about shaving drew her attention to the stubble, which she
actually thought looked good. Her cheeks took on a deeper blush.
Stockholme syndrome. She wondered for a panicky moment whether he remembered that part, or if he was concentrating more on the less lucid moments. She was never going to ask him, though - not only because reminding him of his crazy time might not be welcome, but also because she honestly didn't believe that he'd ever be interested in her now that he was back in his right mind.
"Alright, well... Make sure you do. And come find me if you need me." Not that she could think of a reason that he'd need her, but sometimes things just popped out of Angie's mouth before her brain could catch up. "I'll walk back with you." Why did I say that? "You know, just in case." She smiled weakly. Terrible excuse - she knew as well as him that his legs should work just fine again now.
A totally unreadable expression came into Pyro's face and he glanced briefly up at Python.
"You go with Angie," he said. "I trust you, kid, and besides. I've been sitting here for a day and half watching you. I'm sick of the sight. Go. Get."
"Thanks, man." Pyro clasped his friend's arm briefly, the closest to
demonstrating affection he was likely to get. "I appreciate it, you know."
Python was no fool. He could sense Angie's growing attraction to Pyro and that was all well and good by him. She was a good girl, one who might help him see sense. He had no qualms, therefore, about engineering a reason for him to be around her.
They walked a short distance and then he began to talk, in a low, anxious voice.
"I only remember bits of the last couple of days," he said. "I remember being a complete asshole to you and I'm truly sorry for that. You did nothing but try and help me and I threw it in your face. You gotta know, that wasn't me. Well, I mean, obviously it WAS me, but it wasn't me. Uh."
He paused.
"Know what I mean?"
Her last hope at not walking back with him and potentially making a complete fool of herself was dashed when Python told John to go ahead, and she wondered for a moment if there actually was any danger of the fragile framework Emma had put up crashing back down. Couldn't get any worse, could it? She gave Python an embarrassed little wave as they left, walking silently for a moment until John started to speak. He sounded anxious. Angie just felt awkward.
"Yeah, I know what you mean. It's ok, John, you don't have to apologise." She gave him a small smile, thinking to herself that if she hadn't been such a fool and kept going back in there, John would never have had the chance to act the way he had. "I'm sure that a lot of what you did in there would never happen normally." She could have been talking about the screaming, the gouges he'd taken out of his own skin, the thinking he was one of the X-Men. But what she was actually referring to was the endearing smile when she'd
offered pancakes, the way he'd fallen asleep on her lap, how charming he'd been before the whole fork incident. "So don't worry about it." The last sentence was so soft that he might not have even heard it.
"I do worry," he said, indicating that yes, he had in fact, heard her.
"Famous for it, I am." He smiled slightly. If what she had come to think of as the 'pancake smile' had rated a 9/10 on the attractiveness scale, the small smile he managed now was a mere 4.
He ran a hand over his stubbled chin. "I hate not shaving," he said,
vaguely. "Feels weird. Looks worse."
It made him look older, more careworn. It changed his appearance rather more than he knew.
They rounded a corner and passed Gill going the other way. The half-fish man stopped, looked Pyro up and down, said "Alright, Boss?" in his quasi-Jamaican accent, and flapped off in the other direction.
"Gill's like an oak in a forest of saplings," mused Pyro, watching his
retreating back. "Amazing. I think he's been here for like, ever."
"You shouldn't. It's not always your fault." She tried to return his smile but her own expression was worried. Slightly hypocritical? Perhaps.
When he started playing with his stubble, she managed to get a proper smile out. "Doesn't look as bad as you think." She had no doubt that he'd still shave it off, though. She wondered if it was just one of his things, similar to the way she'd always worn her hair in plaits. But that had been a rebellion thing, since her mother was always trying to get her to wear her hair down - now that she was free from her mother, Angie had worn it differently every day. It was currently hanging straight down, longer than most people would have realised in comparison to her plaits, and tucked behind her ears.
She was distracted from the line of thought by Gill, and she gave the
chain-smoking mutant a smile as he passed. "Yeah, he's pretty interesting - I went and saw him yesterday, he got me set up with a computer and we had a bit of a chat." She'd been surprised at how articulate he was, at how enjoyable it was conversing with him. But then, she hadn't really interacted with him beyond a few stares until then.
They'd reached the hallway where Mystique's room was, and Angie realised that she didn't even know where Pyro slept. If he had his own room or not. She'd seen his lighter lying on Mystique's bed the previous day, and wondered if anyone had picked it up or not. She didn't want to think about why his lighter was in there, or what kind of relationship the two of them had had - everytime she thought about Mystique, Angie felt like a little kid. It strengthened her resolve to deal with her feelings for Pyro and move on - if Mystique was his type, then Angie had about a snowball's chance in hell of ever being noticed.
As they passed Mystique's room, John's head automatically turned. The
lighter was still there, lying on the bed. It was his prize possession, his original lighter; the custom-painted shark Zippo. He paused and stared at it for a few moments, until one of Emma's more gentle, yet insistent suggestions came to the fore.
"It can stay there for now," he said, aloud, mentally answering the question he'd asked himself. "It's not going anywhere, and I don't need it in the shower, right?"
Then he reached over and pulled the door to Mystique's room closed.
"I'm just down the hallway," he said.
"I'd hope not." She answered his question, even though she was aware that it was probably rhetorical. "I don't know about you, but my showers seem plenty warm enough." She gave him another grin that faded only slightly at the announcement that they were almost at his room.
"Guess I'll leave you to it, then." She steadfastly kept her mind off John in the shower. "You know where I am if you want me for anything, right?" She realised that she still didn't know who had brought her into the base and put her in her room after passing out in that truck.
"Come back in twenty minutes," he said. "I wouldn't mind company, and I like yours."
He didn't voice why, but Angie put no demands on him. It was easy to talk to her. She reminded him very vividly of Kitty in that respect. He gave her another smile (all the way up to a 6!) and disappeared into his room.
Continues in Part Two
