Some Girls [IC]

[angrydurf]

Mikes head jerked up at that, "You don't have to do that!" The words were out of his mouth before she even really finished, "Oh ... it seemed like everything was going good between you two." Apparently better then he even knew, his face flushed slightly at the thought.

Mike shook his head to clear the thoughts and refocus, "Like Zoe said nothing says anything has to change between us."

[alderwitch]

Alex sighed and fixed him with her patient 'you're being absurd' look. "Of course this changes things. It was always destined to fail, but it would be wrong to date him with what he knows about our psychic link now. It was never serious, at least. It couldn't be for either of us."

Her voice was a little sad and a little wistful but calmly resolved about that at least.

[angrydurf]

Mike nodded begining to understand and layed one big hand on her shoulder, "I'm sorry Alex," He replied simply, "Marks a good guy I'm sure he'll come around." He was less certain his own behavior would be forgiven but that was something he'd have to deal with later.

He gave her shoulder a gentle sqeeze and pulled her into quick hug. He didn't really know what more to say, the morninghad been an emotional rollercoaster and Mike, generally at least, wasn't one for rash decisions.

[alderwitch]

"It's over, Mike, and Mark will forget all about me. We'll go back to friends. It's fine. I'm fine." Alex's small body relaxed into his side with a soft sigh. Mike could feel the tension leech out of her shoulders. Alex tended to act as if she carried all the weight of the world on her shoulders. Down the bond, he could feel her busy, brilliant mind at work. Re-arranging classes, planning out finances, formulating a plan to talk to Eddie, to talk to Mark. Most people couldn't point to a single moment where adulthood began but for Alex, it would always start with the soft whirr of a the printer in the school lab. She corrected the lie before Mike could protest it. "I'll be fine."

She pressed a fond kiss against his cheek before she headed out of the lab, her shoulders squared with determination. I'll be just fine.

[Electra]

Meanwhile,

Erin waited until they were out of the library before she said anything else, trying to collect her thoughts. Zoe's little game had unraveled about as spectacularly as she'd predicted it would, but at least no one had gotten punched. Mark kind of looked like he had, but he wasn't in the infirmary, so he was ahead of the game. She could ignore her own nagging little regret that, just for practice or not, whatever sort of thing she'd been doing with Mike was decidedly over. If anyone had needed more evidence than the psychic link and the kid from the future, just seeing them together today was enough to prove definitively that Alex and Mike were a unit, and it would be stupid to try and get in the way of that.

As they stepped outside, she looked up towards the roof of the library. "Want a lift?" she asked Mark. "It's quieter up there, easier to talk."

[Avenger Assembled]

Mark gave Erin a look she wasn't used to seeing from him. "I'm not really in the mood to have someone carry me, actually." Casually, he pulled the grapple gun from his jacket and fired it at the roof, the grabber on the end neatly catching onto a gargoyle on the roof. "Meet you up there," he said as he climbed up the building, his grappler and his muscles pulling him up like a rappeller in reverse.

[Electra]

Erin didn't say anything to that, just jumped neatly up to the roof, landing just before he came up over the edge. It was quieter up here, though from the roof they could still see people milling around on the quad. The rumor mill would be spinning today, but that was sort of how things went in high school. After thinking for a moment about the best way to start filling Mark in, she just jumped in with both feet. "That whole rumor thing, it's all a misunderstanding. Not that that's probably any comfort. Somebody overheard Alex and I talking and thought that we were talking about Alex being pregnant. It was all over the school this morning, but it's totally wrong. We were talking about Zoe."

[Avenger Assembled]

Mark covered his mouth, sympathy in his eyes. "Oh, man! Does Eddie know?" He blinked. "That's pretty fast, though. Even if she is a speedster..." He scratched his head. "Was she pregnant on her world, then?"

[Electra]

"No, Zoe's not pregnant," Erin told him hastily. "At least, not that I know of. Probably not. But Zoe's not Alex's sister, and she's not from an alternate dimension. It was all a lie. She's from the future. Alex isn't pregnant, but she does have a kid, or will have a kid, and the kid is Zoe. The parents Zoe was talking about seeing die in fifteen years were Alex and Mike, and nobody could save them. Or maybe any of us."

[Avenger Assembled]

"Oh. Oh, I see." Mark blinked a few times, taking in her story. He looked considerably less surprised by that than a normal person would have been, but then there was nothing normal about Mark. "Well...well, then, we've got to do everything we can to make sure her future doesn't happen. That's what you do when you find out that sort of thing, you do everything you can to stop it. Did she say how it happened?"

[Electra]

"It doesn't work that way," Erin told him flatly. "If it's already happened, it's already happened somewhere, in some future. Either it's an alternate timeline that Zoe's already changed, or it's our timeline and it's going to happen no matter what we do. Maybe we can try to throw our own particular future onto alternate tracks, but there's still going to be versions of us where all that bad stuff happens. I don't think doing a lot of weird stuff to try and change our lives is going to do much good."

[Avenger Assembled]

"There's always a way," Mark insisted with simple surety. "Our lives are not going to end in disaster and death." He didn't seem to doubt himself in the slightest. "Whatever happened in Zoe's timeline, the important thing is making sure it doesn't happen in ours. That must be why she made it back here, to warn us so we can make sure her future doesn't happen to us."

[Electra]

"She made it back here thanks to an accident," Erin told him. "And maybe you can change things for this timeline, but you're not going to save the ones that are already going to have died." She shrugged. "Maybe that's good enough. I'm pretty fond of this timeline, and tough cookies for the me who gets killed off. In any case, Mike didn't know until, I'm assuming just now when Alex is telling him downstairs. That'll be an exciting conversation, but I figured it would be awkward enough without you and me."

[Avenger Assembled]

Mark nodded at that. "Yeah, I can believe they wouldn't want anyone around for that. Thanks for telling me, Erin," he told her seriously. "It...it clears up a lot of things." And makes other things all the more mysterious. He smiled slightly, looking back where they'd come from. "So, Mike and Alex, huh? I guess they'll make a good couple. Wish he'd said something before."

[Electra]

Erin thought about making a sardonic response to that, but refrained. Maybe it had been obvious to just about everyone that Mike and Alex were meant to be together, but if Mark hadn't seen it, there was no need to hurt his feelings about it. She didn't think being someone's practice boyfriend would bother him, necessarily, but he'd probably had his ego smacked around enough for one day. "I don't think Mike even admitted it to himself," she said instead. She hesitated for a minute. "You okay?"

[Avenger Assembled]

"I don't know," Mark admitted, an almost shocking comment for Erin's friend to make. He remembered the anger on Mike's face, the feel of his hands on him as he pulled him high in the air. Come on, Mark, he chided himself. You've fought actual bad guys and not freaked out about it. Your friend getting mad at you can't be bothering you this much. "I'll be okay. It'll just take a minute."

[Electra]

"Okay," Erin replied, sitting down on a vent cover and folding her arms loosely over her knees. "She didn't mean anything by it, Alex, I mean," she said after a minute. "With the hugging and stuff. It's not like they have some kind of relationship going behind your back. She eventually figured she'd probably end up with Mike, but not for a long time, you know, and plans can always change. But she wasn't really stringing you along or anything."

[Avenger Assembled]

"Under the circumstances, I think I could tell what was on her mind," said Mark with a tight little smile. "And I'm not even the telepath." He shook his head. "Alex breaking up with me doesn't bother me, Erin, really. We just had a thing, you know?" He chuckled faintly. "And now everyone knows what kind of thing we had, too...anyway, yeah, we didn't have any feelings really extended to be hurt." He seemed to mean it, too. "I will have to talk to Mike sometime. Later."

[Electra]

"Okay," Erin said again, raising one hand to rub the back of her neck uncomfortably. "That's good, talking is good. I, uh... I better get going before I'm late for physics. You need anything else, or something?" she asked. Now that the moment of crisis had passed and the vital information passed along, Erin had no idea what to do or how to help. Beating a retreat seemed like the best course of action.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Nah, I'll be all right." Mark grinned at her. "Thanks for the talk, Erin. It's given me a lot to think about. About Zoe...and everything else. I gotta run too, I'm late for meeting with Dr. Marquez. See you around."