PL: Ten Forward, Marion

[fallaces_sunt]

It's been decades since Natasha smoked, but she still gets cravings, sometimes. When she's restless, bored, can't sleep. There's a nice ritual with smoking, and it gives her something to do with her hands.

But there are...downsides. And anyway, she's on a spaceship, they'd probably look down on someone lighting up.

Instead, insomnia has sent her to the lounge, where she's ordered a gin and tonic that she couldn't get drunk on even if it was made with actual alcohol, taken a seat by the window, and proceeds to not drink it.

She fiddles with the straw. Straws are good like that.

(Fiddles and...well. She's Natasha. She's still watching the room, even if she looks the picture of idle insomnia.)

Comments

[fallaces_sunt]

"Writing?"

It's a good cover. And even if not (as it usually isn't), writers can be interesting people to deal with. Too used to making connections and narratives.

On the other hand: sci-fi geek since the 1930s, and the kind of woman who is incapable of not amassing a library whenever she puts her suitcases down for more than a week.

"What kind?"

[didnotwant]

"Horror fiction," Marion admits freely. She doesn't hide who she is when it comes to that. She loves a good ghost story anyways.

Even if she is a living B horror movie on most days. At least she can use what she knows to try and do something a bit different,

"I've been trying to keep up with my writing here. It's not easy. This place doesn't exactly... inspire that part of me."

[fallaces_sunt]

"Really?"

Natasha eyes her, brows a little creased in bemusement.

"Freaky superpowered to possibly god-like proportions zapping people in and out. Body changes," she didn't like being twelve, but she keeps her voice the same, kinda amused drawl, "costume changes, pigs on the ship...

Or is it too close?"

[didnotwant]

"Powers I've uh..."

Marion winces slightly. She doesn't want to go into that. "Q is probably the strangest life form I've ever heard of."

Not the only non-human being she has run into. Marion is just aware that he isn't as dangerous acting as he could be. "Not the first non-human I've encountered."

She rolls one shoulder thoughtfully with a slightly guarded look on her face. "Vampires are real in my reality. I... really, really don't like them."

[fallaces_sunt]

"Aliens," Natasha says carefully, watching her as she swirls the ice in her glass a little, "in my experience back on Earth, tend to be dicks."

Thor isn't enough to counter his brother and that army.

(Not when Thor could be a dick, too.

Sometimes Natasha is amazed that the walls are still standing when Thor and Stark get their egos on.)

"I take it, not Twilight vampires?" A faint smile. "Vampires never did seem likeable, to me."

[didnotwant]

"I don't mind the ones here. Some of them seem to have a lot of compassion." She shrugs her shoulders.

"I haven't met any in my home universe to compare them against."

Marion gives Natasha a baffled look. "Twilight? What?"

She frowns slightly. "I guess that's a book series my universe doesn't have. But then I don't like actual vampires anyways considering they're murderers who can't be redeemed in any fashion."

And also she is magically programmed to want to kill vampires. She has no desire to want to shake off that little effect either.

[fallaces_sunt]

"Ones here didn't try and invade New York," Natasha points out, but there's little heat behind it.

She has nightmares about New York. About what if they'd failed. About being ground zero for an invasion. About being ground zero for a nuclear strike thanks, World Security Council, thanks so much.

But she's good at hiding that, nearly all of the time, and when offering the information just for the sake of 'hey, my world's weird, too, I hear you'?

She doesn't sound that upset.

"It's a book series, and a movie series, and you are so lucky to have missed it. There's sparkling. In my country, vampires are walking corpses."

She pauses.

"I'm originally Russian."

[didnotwant]

"That sounds like a story. The kind that doesn't begin with once upon a time," Marion says slowly.

She holds up a hand. Marion wants Natasha to know she doesn't have to talk about it. Marion will not force someone to speak about their own demons.

Not when she has difficulty facing her own.

"The ones I've met are.... like that. Kind of. It's hard to explain. They don't have the same 'feel' a normal person does."

And Marion is sure that it just isn't her need to kill vampires shining through.

"Really? Huh. Your accent is very good. I can't tell that English isn't your first language."

[fallaces_sunt]

"It doesn't," Natasha says, and then nods a thanks for not being pressed. Not a conversation for a late night with an acquaintance.

(Not when she exploded at Peter Quill a.k.a. Star-lord over the whole thing. She knows her control is good for casual, not so much when she's actively pushing those buttons.)

Which also explains why Natasha doesn't press about the 'feel'. She merely arches her eyebrows. "...Uncanny valley?"

It's open, for Marion to explain or not.

"Thanks. A lot of elocution classes. And a lot of tv shows," she adds with a smile.

[didnotwant]

Marion doesn't think pressing for details would be smart. Not when she personally knows how prickly she can get about certain things that she won't talk about.

"You... could say that," Marion agrees as she takes a careful sip of her drink. She isn't trying to be evasive.

"Or... Well," Marion pauses and decides to just go with it. "It's like this one was giving off a kind of... fear effect, I guess? The air was a bit colder around him. Not enough to throw me off but... It was there. Vampires all have mind effecting powers. To make it easier to hunt, I suppose. This one could make people so frightened that they would stop moving. I wasn't as effected by that little 'gift'."

She sneers slightly not bothering to hide her utter contempt for the vampire. It takes Marion a moment of control to not tell Natasha about what she ended up doing but it wouldn't be hard to get Marion to talk. After all, it was just a vampire. Not a human.

"Hey tv is awesome. Scooby-Doo is how I learned what a gondola was when I was a kid."

[fallaces_sunt]

Natasha's eyes are, most of the time, perfectly ordianry. Nice eyes, pretty and green, maybe 'old' looking for those who tend to see it, but otherwise, ordinary.

Now, they are focused.

They sharpen as soon as Marion says 'mind effecting powers', and Natasha is just a bit more still than she was before.

"Charming," is what she says, flatly. "Please tell me you got him."

She'd say 'get away', but for that little sneer.

[didnotwant]

"Oh yes," Marion has to use every once of control to keep the wolf inside of her from reacting.

"I surprised him. He didn't expect me to have00 Bite." Inside joke. The kind she can't share just yet. It's morbid too considering everything.

"I don't usually get involved but this was an exception. We all have lines. Or maybe that was more of a button?" Does it really matter?

[fallaces_sunt]

Bite is interesting word choice, all things considered. She files that away, next to how Marion moves.

"Could be a button."

Consciously, Natasha lets her body slump a little again.

"Good. There's enough predators of the human kind. Don't need others."

It's not as if she's going to judge anyone getting a little violent because of a button being pushed. She's not that hypocritcal.

[didnotwant]

"I guess. All I know is that something... Gave." She takes a sip of her drink. The whiskey is decent but would be better if there was that subtle bite from the alcohol.

"Like I said, I don't usually get involved. But... There are reasons." She looks like she wants to smile but can't manage it.

"Mostly I'm just a writer. It's a bigger part of who I am than... the other stuff." That sounds like Marion is lying a bit. Not very well but a token effort.

[fallaces_sunt]

"Probably a good way to live. The... other stuff can take over your life a bit."

Not that she's speaking from experience.

Much.

(And if she can tell about the lie, well. She's not poking.)

[didnotwant]

"My... sort of mentor back home calls it a bit of a cop out." Marion cracks a smile because Charles is amazing but can be an over bearing ass at times. Just because he went and had both insane and nearly possible adventures doesn't mean she has to.

"I don't think it is. It's... a matter of knowing my limitations." Wow that sounds depressingly bland somehow.

"How about you? You ever walk away because you knew better?"

[fallaces_sunt]

Natasha's smile is faint, wry, and complicated.

"Not...as much as I should," she answers, a very short sentence with a wealth of history and bad life choices behind it.

"But at least it's not dull."

[didnotwant]

"Nope." Marion lets her Southern drawl take over as she agrees with Natasha. There may be a bit of a cow girl fighting to get out of Marion.

She tries really hard to not indulge that part of her. "Can't say I know the meanin' of the word when I'm back home. Here it's different. Promised to behave. Didn't help that our dear Mister Worf found me carrying."

By carrying she of course means a weapon. What else could she possibly mean?

[fallaces_sunt]

The wryness in her smile deepens.

"No, wouldn't help. It always pays to play nice with the local security."

Even just a token of playing nice, not that she clarifies further. She's having fun with this conversation, but she has fun in conversations with lots of people. Doesn't mean much.

If Marion winds up needing to know that Natasha handed her glocks over to the captain, well, she'll clarify when the time comes.

(Besides, handing over her guns doesn't mean that she handed over all of her weapons.)

[didnotwant]

"Plus he.... sort of pings as a less obviously violent version of who I'm used to dealing with," Marion admits with a rueful smile. "I don't like the idea of adding more to his plate than I've already had to."

She admitted to Worf that she is a werewolf. He doesn't seem to get the reality of the situation outside of her having some kind of disease.

And Marion is willing to admit she handed off a sword to Worf should Natasha start making inquiries about the kind of weapon she had been carrying. Marion doesn't think that will happen tonight. "Funny thing is that I'm not normally armed. I just needed to.... dress to impress some people I was supposed to be meeting. I needed them to take me seriously."

[fallaces_sunt]

"Definitely pays to play nice with security under these circumstances. I don't envy them dealing with us."

She'd say she's surprised the displaced haven't caused more trouble, but she's superstitious so she doesn't. She doesn't even think it.

Then she looks amused, but the kind of amused that has been there, done that all over it.

She's a short, very pretty woman. It comes with the territory.

"I know those kind of situations," she says, drily. "Never had to use a sword, though."