by Palladian
Grabbing her schedule and Casey's as well, she made her way to the bathroom and shut the door before turning the light on. She breathed a sigh as she noticed that their activities for the day began after noon. When she came back out a few moments later, she noticed that Casey had begun to stir. She waved at the other woman, put her finger over her lips as she glanced down at Serena, and handed Casey's schedule to her.
Casey looked at it in the dim light and smiled in relief. When Lex gestured to ask if she could put Serena into her bed, Casey nodded again and moved the other woman as Lex pulled back the covers. Lex tucked her friend in and then walked with Casey to the door.
“Meet downstairs for breakfast in a half-hour?” Casey questioned in a whisper.
Lex nodded as she silently opened the door, and then smiled as she shut it behind her friend.
Much later, after she’d cleaned herself up and had a delicious breakfast of buckwheat pancakes and blueberry syrup with Casey, Lex reluctantly wound her way downstairs to the martial arts studio. She sighed as she opened the door, but forced herself to smile as she saw Mr. Chen there, standing barefoot on the wooden floor, waiting, and nervously cleared her throat.
“Mr. Chen, did you hear what happened yesterday?” she asked, trying not to cringe but uncertain of what he might have been told.
“I understand your team was called to help evacuate an apartment building that had caught fire,” he said, looking her in the eye. “I also hear that you had a lot to do with getting the people out safely.”
Lex ducked her head, feeling her stomach flop and realizing that he probably hadn't been told about what happened with George.
“Well I guess, but I had a fight, too.”
He looked at her in surprise, an eyebrow raised. After a moment, he gracefully sat down on the floor, his legs crossed underneath him, and gestured to the floor in front of him.
“Sit down, Lex. Let's talk about it.”
Nervously, she sat down and then launched into the story of what had happened after she saw George shaking and cursing at Casey, and how she'd reacted. Once Lex had finished, she looked at the floor and her own hands, her fingers threading together and clutching each other. After a few moments of silence, Lex chanced a glance back up and saw Mr. Chen looking calmly at her.
“I see,” he said. “What did you do afterwards?”
“I wasn't sure what to do after I saw that Casey was OK, so we talked to Clara about it, and I apologized and helped George get free.”
“I see,” Mr. Chen repeated, nodding this time. “Well done, Lex.”
She looked at him in disbelief. “But I shouldn't have kicked him over! And, I don't know, I just feel like I went too far overboard in–”
Lex stopped as she saw Mr. Chen raise a hand in the air. “One of the worst things you can do to dampen good intuition is to needlessly doubt your actions after a confrontation. From what I know of the man you faced, I think the course of action you took was one of the few that would have resolved the conflict in as peaceful a manner as possible. Of course you were upset and may have overreacted. That is to be expected when people one cares about are being threatened. However, what you did seems fairly mild and you did your best to put things right afterwards. How could I find anything to criticize in what you did?”
“But I probably should have…I don't know, figured out a way to do it without fighting.” Lex could feel her shoulders slump as she responded.
“Lex, life is a journey where we all learn things in every step we take,” Mr. Chen replied, his tone gentle. “We can all only do our best based on what we know at any given step. I could look back in my life and think about how I would have done things differently if I had the knowledge I have now, as an old man, but the fact is that I could only do my best with all of the tools I had when I was young. You did your best to prevent your friend from being hurt without even injuring the person who threatened her. What more could you have done with the knowledge and expertise you have now? I think you did very well.”
Glancing at him from under her eyebrows, Lex gave him a slightly skeptical look, not quite ready to accept that she wouldn’t be punished. “Really?”
He gave her a mildly reproving stare in return. “I wouldn't say so if I didn't think so.”
She nodded, again looking at her hands. “Thanks, Mr. Chen.”
Lex glanced back up again as Mr. Chen rose to his feet in a single, smooth movement. “All right, let's get to work. We missed enough time yesterday and this morning. Are you ready?”
Lex nodded and smiled, jumping to her feet and readying herself to follow along with Mr. Chen's movements.
And so her days slipped back into their regular schedules and events, with the new addition of Lex asking Riss at least once a week if she'd like to eat with her and Casey. The first new thing happened about a week and a half after the building fire. When Lex came up for lunch that day, she stopped by her room and noticed a package in front of her door. Upon opening it, she found a pair of heavy gloves very similar to the ones included in the uniform she'd worn to the building fire, but they had Velcro at the wrists to fit them and had been connected to one another by heavy-duty strapping, like what would be used for a seatbelt. The box also contained a pair of boots that looked like the uniform boots Lex had worn that day.
With a puzzled frown she took the items out of the box and put on the gloves, finding a strap attached to both sides of each glove that she wound around her arms, crossing once at the elbow, then again near her shoulder in order to lie flat across her back. Spotting some papers in the bottom of the box, Lex reached for them, only to find them stuck to her hand. She waved them around in the air wildly, trying to get the sheets off her, but they still stayed. Finally, taking off one glove, she managed to pull the papers free without ripping them by using a downward and back motion.
At the top of the sheet, Lex noticed a handwritten note.
Dear Lex, just wanted to send along a little thank-you gift for including us the other day. We got so used to sitting around waiting that it was really fun to be involved with the evacuation the way we expected when we decided to get into this game. Hope you enjoy these; Victor got an idea when you mentioned that you'd like to be able to climb walls, so you can be his guinea pig for this invention. Let us know what you think, or just write because we both liked working with you and would like to hear from you some more. – Kate & Victor
Lex read their email addresses as she swallowed once, blinking and smiling to herself, and quickly read the instructions for the equipment. She couldn’t see the microscopic hooks that the instructions said were there to adhere the gloves and boots to surfaces, although she did feel a bumpy roughness as she stroked down the opposite direction the hooks faced. With a grin, she went into her room to put everything on and then headed back out to the hallway. After crawling up the wall nearly to the ceiling and almost falling once or twice on her way down, Lex thought she had gotten the hang of them, so she ran back into her room to put them in her closet by her jumpsuit, a huge grin spreading across her face.
Later that evening, she emailed Kate and Victor both a thank-you note and explained how she’d probably get some Velcro to put on the straps and on the back of her uniform, since one of her mishaps came when the straps across her back slipped. After that, she got a note back from Victor thanking her for troubleshooting his design and assuring her that her suggestion would be included in future versions. Lex laughed to herself as she read that, and then dug into Kate’s reply: a longer letter talking a lot about daily life with the Alpha team (including funny bits that she thought Lex would like) and asking questions about Lex and how things were with her.
From then forward, Lex usually found an email in her inbox from Kate every few days, and quickly got in the habit of corresponding with her. Lex found herself telling the other woman about her past and her thoughts about everything going on currently, and ended up finding out a lot about Kate, as well.
Two weeks after the
first letter she’d gotten from Kate, Lex replied to Kate’s latest email.
Victory today! Riss finally agreed to eat dinner with me and Casey once a week if I stopped asking her about it. We ate together for the first time today. It went kind of quietly, but I think we all had a good time. I feel like I can stop worrying about her so much now.
Also, I started something new. Mr. Chen told me that I needed to be more well-rounded in my life to help my martial arts practice and suggested I take up an artistic pursuit. I asked him what he did, and he said that he’d practiced Chinese calligraphy for many years. Since I’ve never taken up a brush before in my life, I went back to something that I did a bit as a kid and liked, but never had time to pursue. The only things my mom ever browbeat my dad to force me to do other than martial arts training was the school chorus and some piano lessons. I could only take them for a few years before my other coursework and martial arts practice became too demanding, though. So, I got a little electric piano and I’ve been working on the scales I remember the chorus director teaching us and trying some of my most favorite voice pieces from the music I listen to. I don’t know if it’s helping my martial arts, but it is sort of fun. Gotta sign off now, but let me know how your last trip went. And I hope George is being less of an idiot to you since some time has passed since…well, you know.
A couple days later, Kate responded.
Glad to hear about Riss…I remember her being so silent, you barely ever saw her before now. Ha! I didn't take you for a vocalist. Make sure to have something ready to sing the next time I see you, because I hope you know I'm going to ask. ; )
The trip I just got back from ended up being too rushed. We were only in California a couple of days, with no time for sightseeing. They did have some really interesting deep-sea creatures they wanted me to look at, but I just ended up feeling sorry for them. They need to live in these super-pressurized tiny tanks, so they're probably not going to be able to live long, especially if there's a power outage. : (
Anyway, George is back to being his normal jerky self: the one that isn't mad at anyone for anything in particular, but is sort of annoyed at the world in general. But that's good, since when he's in that type of mood, I can usually avoid him indefinitely. I usually focus on working out or playing assistant for Victor in the lab. Fortunately, the Alpha facilities are big and full of places to go if you want to be unnoticed. : )
Got to get going now, but tell Casey and Serena I say hi. I really liked having the chance to work with Serena especially; she's a real trip.
A few weeks later, late one night when Lex wasn't able to sleep, she wrote to Kate, explaining how she and Kurt had broken things off.
I hope it doesn't seem too silly, but I really haven't had much time to think about what happened with Kurt until now. There was too much going on here, everything was so new, and something else always happened to distract me. But every once in a while, like tonight, I wake up and remember. We were only together for a couple years and only lived together a few months, but I really thought he was the one at the time. How could I have been so wrong? I wake up and just feel so empty, but I try not to be too loud if I cry so that Casey doesn't worry. I wonder how I can miss someone who treated me the way he did at the end, but I do. I also wonder if maybe that's going to be it for me, if I'm never going to find someone else.
I'm sorry. I don't mean to be so depressing, but I didn't want to worry anyone here and I had a feeling you might understand. Maybe I shouldn't send this, but thanks for reading my ravings, if you do. You really don't have to write back about this, just delete it. More later (hopefully when I'm feeling more cheerful.)
By lunchtime the next day, Lex found a reply from Kate.
Doesn't sound silly to me at all. I'm sorry that guy was such an asshole to you, too. I don't care who he thinks he is: he had no right to treat you like that!
I know what you mean about still missing someone, though. I was dating the best guy in the world, Neil Howard, for a few years, but a year and a half after I joined up with the Alpha team he disappeared. The police seemed to think that he’d packed a bag and gone somewhere, but it didn't make any sense to me. He didn't take anything he'd need to have with him—he has asthma and he didn't take his inhaler, he didn't take any of his guitars or gear (and he's a musician), and he didn't tell me or any of his bandmates anything. It just didn't add up. I filed a missing persons report, of course, but nothing ever came of it. It's been almost a year now, and no sign of him. Some nights I miss him like I miss my eye. I wish I could figure out what happened. I've tried hiring private detectives, but still no news. I just keep hoping he shows back up one day. I won't even care where he was, I'll be so glad to see him, but I’ve mostly lost hope now.
Anyway, my letter isn't any more cheerful than yours, so I guess we're even. : / Just wanted to let you know I’m right there with you, unfortunately.
Not long after that, Lex fired off another email to Kate. After commiserating for a paragraph or two, she brought up something new that had come out of the day of the fire.
Remember how I told you that I reported on what we did that day we worked together as a strategic exercise? Well, our sponsor asked me to write some recommendations for improving teamwork afterwards. Apparently someone finally got around to reading them, because I'm supposed to set up our first team training! I'm excited and terrified; I've never planned anything like this before. I was hoping it would be something that someone else could arrange and that I could participate in, but it seems like they assumed I volunteered to run it since I made the suggestion.
Between my work with Mr. Chen and Riss, and the physical exams they want to do on me every week, I'm not sure where I'll fit this in, but I guess I'll have to figure it out. Anyway, probably anything I think of would be better than what we do for team training right now, which is nothing. Right? (I hope.) If you have any ideas or suggestions, though, or if your team's done anything you thought worked well, PLEASE let me know!
Kate wrote back the next day.
Well, I don't really know much about team exercises. As may not surprise you, George doesn't feel team practice is necessary. (I'd insert an icon here of someone rolling their eyes, but I’d have to look it up and I’m feeling lazy today.) Have you tried asking your martial arts teacher to help you? I bet he'll have some good ideas.
Everything here is kind of slow right now. Victor’s been busy with a number of new inventions, so he’s even quieter than usual. They've been sending me down to the Museum of Natural History and the zoo pretty regularly over the past few weeks to look at new insects that various researchers have been bringing in from all over the world. Believe it or not, a lot of the coolest things I can do I've learned from insects. Their bodies have interesting abilities and their strength is, lots of times, way out of proportion with their size. I keep getting told that our sponsors are planning a trip for me to look at other rare animals, but they can't seem to decide where it's going to be. I've heard Africa, Antarctica, or some sort of ocean trip. Hopefully I should know by the end of the month what the plan is.
A week later, Lex responded.
Thanks for passing on the idea to talk to Mr. Chen about the training. He's been a lot of help, both with ideas for the training session and with planning. He told me that he thought there were training facilities we could use that are part of our sponsors' outfit, and sure enough, when I checked there were some nice outdoor ones. So, we scheduled it, but it's going to be taking place three weeks from now! Only that much time to plan everything! Fortunately, Mr. Chen agreed to continue helping me put everything together, so I guess it'll probably all work out. I may not have much time to write between now and then, though, so wish me luck just in case I can't touch base until afterwards…
Lex received a reply from Kate a few days later.
Good luck with all of that! With your planning skills and knowing what you can put together in an hour or so, I'm sure you'll have something fantastic plotted out in three we
eks. Glad to hear that Mr. Chen agreed to help out; I'm sure that will make everything easier.
Things are chaos here right now. Lots of little jobs they want to send us out on; I can't tell you how many times I've been called in by the local police to find someone by smell. How embarrassing is that? I don't like the things I can pick up about people when I go into a form with a keen sense of smell, either. Let's just say that as bad as some people smell with an everyday human nose, they can smell so much worse with better senses. Plus, it’s a ridiculous idea anyway, with as many strong scents as get produced in our modern, chemical-laden society.
Anyway, I should tell you (warn you? Ha!) that your encounter with George didn't leave him mentally undamaged. He trained with a martial arts instructor for a whole few weeks after you beat his ass, until he got bored. Of course, he had those two suck-ups around to tell him how great he is and how he'll annihilate you if he ever sees you again and whatnot. Good lord, what a bunch of idiots! Unfortunately, intelligence doesn't seem to be a requirement to get onto this team. Seems like most of your group is pretty gifted in the brains department, which is getting me a little jealous…any openings over there? Just joking, I really couldn't leave Victor alone here anyway…even though some days I figure he wouldn’t notice I’m gone until he finishes his latest creation. : )
All right, I should wrap up since I'm sure you won't have time to read long emails right now. I'll let you know if I hear anything more about my trip plans, and let me know how things go with the training. I'm sure it will be great, regardless. Talk more later!
Two weeks later, Lex wrote to Kate.
Well, it's finally over! I thought I would heave with relief once everything was done. I got so nervous as we went out to the facility in the morning I nearly heaved beforehand! Anyway, it was a really nice place, not far away in Maryland with about an acre field with a raised deck to one side, where a few observers could sit, surrounded by a small wooded area. We got there about 10 a.m. and got started reviewing the rules. Since I’d planned the exercise, no one felt it would be fair if I participated, so I served as the advisor to the blue team. I’d begged Mr. Chen to come along too, so he served as the advisor to the red team.