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Sweet Therapy; Orchard
Topic Started: Nov 17 2014, 10:24 PM (387 Views)
Spitfire
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Superspeed with Pyrotechnic Effects
Date 22nd October
Time: 1435 hours




It was still weird sometimes, being able to walk freely around the Helicarrier with a great familiarity, as if she had always been there. Sometimes the realisation made her feel cold, a little uncomfortable… But that was the sort of thing that she talked about in therapy. Jac’s sessions were slowly being reduced, but she saw Samson every other week still. Now it was mainly to talk about general issues, although some days something might have reminded her of Exodus and the Phoenix, or Greenville, or something smaller that still dug inside her mind anyway. Although it was a little early for her session, Jac carried on to the department anyway. Dressed in a pair of skinny jeans with what resembled boxing boots on her feet and a SHIELD leather jacket unzipped over a plain tee, she was ready to go out into the field if necessary. Really, she just didn’t have that many clothes that weren’t some kind of uniform.

Dropping down on to a bench outside of the therapy rooms, she pulled a magazine out from under her, then twisted up and over to look out one of the port holes. Yep. World was still out there. Digging into one of her pockets, she pulled out a bag of sweets and leaned back on the bench, balancing the bag on her stomach and popping a couple into her mouth. A quick glance at the clock on the wall told her she was pretty early. Sigh.

The corridor was quiet, the noise from the rest of the Helicarrier well muffled as to not distract any sessions. A couple of assistants and nurses were up at the desk but they were all busy working and not paying her any attention, as she didn’t need it. Clicking her tongue around the orange revel, the speedster debated blitzing off to go and get something to drink, but...she’d probably go and get really distracted or something and go and miss her session, even though she had ages.

Glancing across the corridor, she saw someone she knew, although not as well as she probably should given the circumstances. Most of the work she had done had been carried out with the rest of the main Defenders and although she had worked with several general SHIELD operatives, well that was just working. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t count as much as sitting down and getting to know a person.

“Uh. Hi,” Jac spoke up, her voice clear in the relative silence. “So what are you in for?” It was the kind of joke best appreciated by someone British. Or so she hoped... “Want a Revel?” with a grin, she extended the bag and gave it an inviting little shake. Now that was an ice breaker if ever there was one.
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Henry Orchard
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Henry stared past the Revels and his brow curled up into a frown. Likewise he'd never really crossed paths with Jac before today and most of what he knew came from mission briefings:

Falsworth, Jacqueline. Code name: Spitfire. Super-human abilities include; extreme speed, pyrotechnics. Operational blah de blah de blah. Whatever. The only important thing was that she was part of the club. The Defenders were SHIELD's top tier operatives, the A Team, the coolest lunch table, Fury's best pals, and very much on the other side of The Line.

The Line was more or less the main topic of discussion during his sessions with Doctor Samson, although in the last six months they had not managed to completely agree on it's definition or purpose. The common ground between them was that Henry had some trust issues and that The Line separated him from everything he deemed a threat. Samson suggested that that was a mechanism to externalise responsibility, to place it on anything other than himself and thereby avoid confronting the root of the problem. Henry's counter argument was that Samson was on the other side of the god damn Line.

He looked between the bag and Jac. “No, thanks”. The less he engaged with these people the faster they'd stamp his file 'Disavowed' and send him on his way. He crossed his arms and went back to staring at Samson's door. Then, he heard the claws scratching against the metal floor. His hands went to his face and he mumbled something obscene into his palms.

A large grey dog clattered quite cheerfully around the corner. It stopped between them and looked up at each in turn. It's mouth opened into a dumb grin.

"He'll have one," it said to Jac as it went on it's way "Any of them, even orange, he's a fiend."

Henry waited until the scratching of claws had vanished behind the hum of the Liberty's engines and then took his hands down. He pretended very, very hard that no enormous talking dogs were following him around.

Dog, as it had named itself, had been making increasingly frequent appearances since The Most Recent Incident. PSIDIV had confirmed Henry's claims that it was an autonomous process connected to, but not a part of, his mind and as such was not symptomatic of debilitating mental illness. It was unfortunately a complete arsehole. Henry made plans to kill it with a spade. Again.
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Spitfire
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“Sure?” Jac stretched a little and put the opened bag beside her on the seat, then went into her jacket pocket. “Now if this isn’t good enough, then I don’t have anything else unless you want me to actually get up and go kick a vending machine - fruit pastille?” extracting the green cylinder from an inner pocket, she wagged it. Really, she didn’t care too much if he took a sweet or not. Heck, if he didn’t that meant there were more left for her. But he looked like he needed to talk...and she was just a nosy little bugger. It wasn’t often she got the chance to interact with SHIELD operatives like this and it could be a good thing if she did it more, so starting now couldn’t hurt, right?

“So what are you in for?” the question was as light as it could be, given the circumstances. Again, if he chose to respond was his choice but neither of them seemed to be doing much in particular at that moment in time. One of her eternal problems was always going to be this. Talking to the prickly, the ones people tended to avoid, or the ones with the temper. The ones who were distant or otherwise… Well Orchard wasn’t really in the ranks of Primal or Bucky, but there was something that made her want to...help was a little patronising. Relate? Maybe?

Snagging another revel out of the bag, she bit it in half, making a face at the coffee flavoured centre. “I like coffee, but these ones always taste vile. Still, I can put a certain amount on my expenses. Having a metabolism like mine has some benefits. It kind of balances out in terms of how much material they save on in my suits.” Jac grinned before breezing along with her side of the conversation.

“So...I don’t talk enough. About how I feel I mean. Like, something bad happens and I pretend like everything is okay with me so no one worries, because I’m worrying about them. Even if my bloody arm is hanging off or I just got dropped off a cliff or something. And I don’t ask for help as much as I could either. It kind of makes me a bit…” she pulled a small face as she tried to sum up her feelings. “Overwhelmed? Mostly I’m just too stubborn for my own good. It doesn’t go well with my tendency to get in a lot of trouble.” Spitfire smiled again and looked to Orchard, folding her hands together on her stomach.
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Henry Orchard
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Henry elected not to respond to further questions and instead took a few Revels from the bag. Stolen, he felt, even though they were quite happily offered. Small victories. Small, entirely fictional victories.

As he chewed he listened to her expound the virtues of her metabolism and then segue flawlessly into Happy Sharing Time. When she was done he made quite plain his dissaproval.

“I don’t think that we should be talking about why either of us is sat here.”

That said, he could follow the strand of her process, moving anxieties beyond her control into an internal space where they could be contained. It seemed familiar, perhaps not so far removed from his own habits of compartmentalisation. It was an entirely unpleasant realisation and so in turn he made use of those habits and put it away.

It’s called empathy, you toolbox. Dog’s voice whispered over their psychic connection, Maybe don’t stuff it away like that. Because, you know…

Henry couldn’t quite find the energy to argue, quite possibly because he knew that Dog had a point. What exactly that point was he couldn’t be sure, somewhere a conclusion had been made but in looking for it he could only brush against it. He blew air through his teeth until the frustration was expelled.

“Ssssssssso, I had a professional disagreement with Steve Rogers. He didn’t accept my resignation, let’s put it like that.”

As he recalled the particulars of that ‘disagreement’ he ran a thumb over the knuckles of his right hand, felt where the synthetic skin had split and the exposed the titanium beneath. There had been some internal damage but he’d patched it himself, lacking the patience to sit while the techs did their work. Besides, he expected that before long they’d just pull the thing out and leave him to pin up his sleeve.

“Captain America, well, what he says goes. He says, and I go here.”
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Spitfire
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“Probably not, but what’s the worst they can do to us over that? And considering I get in trouble for not talking about how I feel enough, it would be sort of hypocritical for them to then tell me, no you can’t talk about things. Right?” Jac knew how to follow orders, it was one of her redeeming features. Just, that did not mean she always did follow them. Sometimes, there were things she was not going to do, no matter who told her. Maybe it was a way of asserting control on her life, that usually felt so uncontrollable. “Anyway, that’s not even half of why I have to come here...But mostly it usually comes down to me blaming myself for whatever it is that’s happened, despite how much proportion of the blame is actually mine.”

There was plenty she was not about to bring up seeing as they had just formally met and all, but if he was shrewd enough to read between the lines, it probably wasn’t too hard to figure out Jac’s main problem was her self-worth. Especially now, with what Pietro had told her about Magneto, she was doubting it more than ever and as usual, pretending that she wasn’t.

Silence fell over them both for a moment, while Jac sat and ate some more sweets, while Orchard seemed to think about whatever he was thinking about. When he started to speak again, Jac shifted over a little and listened, propping herself up on her elbow with blue eyes boring into the SHIELD agent.

“What Steve says is pretty much law, you know. He’s kind of earned that right, he’s not the sort for blind faith and all that. Some people might think he’s well out of the loop and outdated, but if anything he was just before his time back then and we’ve just caught up to his wavelength now,” shrugging, she slowly chewed a sweet and held the bag out again. “I know it’s hard, trust me I really do, but if he believes in you, it’s for a reason. He won’t be trying to humour you. He’s a soldier, the soldier and he knows who should be in the game and who shouldn’t be when it comes to looking after the world.

“D’you need any help with that?” she asked, motioning to his hand. After all, she was something of an expert onlooker when it came to false limbs now. Maybe if she packed in gallivanting around trying to change the world, they’d just let her work at it in the infirmary.
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Henry Orchard
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Henry tried to avoid Falsworth’s gaze. Lately he hadn’t been doing so well with eye contact, he saw confrontation everywhere and his contrarianism only ever carried him so far. He changed tack and raised the hand, the fingers relaxed and fell into their default positions.

“No,” Henry replied “It’s superficial.”

He cycled through the exercises he’d been taught. Fingers splayed, then curled back into the palm in sequence, then out again. Smooth, rhythmic, inorganic.

“This is all titanium and kevlar. The primary functions in the control software aren’t like hold cup, wave to friend, or hold baby.”

The fingers snapped into a new configuration, extended together with the the thumb drawn back to deepen the strike. In the blink of an eye they folded in on themselves and the wrist snapped back, presenting the heel.

“It rates low on a super-human strength scale, and the output is limited at the shoulder so I don’t pull out my own spine. Still, this is legally classed as a weapon.”

He made a fist until he could hear the musculature strain.

“The majority of the applicable force is generated in the hand and at the elbow. I can crush a tennis ball without pushing the safety locks.”

The fist expanded to fit an imagined pistol grip. The trigger finger twitched twice before the whole hand relaxed and returned to it’s resting pose, not unlike that of a store mannequin.

“It’s been to the bottom of the sea, the edge of space, and once a zombie ninja stuck a whole katana through it, but bouncing it off Captain America’s face by far did the most damage.”

He waggled the fingers gently and turned back to Jac.

“Do you know how I got this?”
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Spitfire
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While he talked about his hand, she tried not to show her amusement. Even before Bucky, the speedster had gotten used to artificial limbs through the Brotherhood and her side line as a medic had also brought her into contact with plenty of fake bits and pieces. But as he went on, she shuffled around and looked at him, pointedly.

“You do know who I spend most of my time on the clock with, right?” it was a rhetorical question though, as considering, it was probably good that Orchard was talking. As he asked her if she knew about its origins, the former Acolyte shrugged and ate a couple of revels.

“I read a file. I’ve read lots of files though, so if you wanted to talk about it, I’m not due in for a little while yet,” Jac held the bag of sweets out again, really not about to take no for an answer. “Hearing about something is not the same as being told something. I’m sure you’ve heard plenty about me for one thing,” ooor maybe he hadn’t. Jacqueline didn’t have a problem if he hadn’t, as that would make a nice change to be perfectly honest. She’d earned her rep though, for good and bad, so as much as it had once gotten under her skin, now it was just water off a ducks back if it ever came up again.

Glancing up and down the corridor, they still seemed to be relatively alone, which was probably a good thing. “Ever been to the past? I mean as well as the other wonderful locations. Can’t say I’ve been to the edge of space myself, though, so you have me beat there at least. So what’s the edge of space like, should I ever find myself there? I’ve lived in a jungle, under the sea, been to nineteen forty-five, been a Stepford Sleeper Agent Wife, lived in prison on here…” she rapped on the wall, indicating the helicarrier, “oh and I tried uni for a while but that didn’t work out so well. Probably a good thing, really.”
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