cautionarytale | 098 - probably backdated a little bit

I don't think so. Yours might have something that makes your skin smoother, but that's all I can think of.

I guess I'll have the silkiest skin of any guy on board, then.

You know, for a guy that's not much to be proud of.

I'm not normally a guy, so I can live with it.

My face isn't going to be really cut up when I go back to being a girl, is it? ...Not that it's really cut up, I just... my hand slipped.

I have no idea. I don't think so, but the Admiral might do something sadistic like that.

Ugh, he better not.

Agreed.

Then we'll talk. In person or here?

In person. People can read these things.

Understood. I'll be down in a minute.

[Elle had spent the morning wrestling with a can of shaving cream and a razor. She thought it had turned out okay - she was only bleeding a little bit.

She'd borrowed some of Peter's clothing, even though it was ego-damagingly baggy. And his shoes were too big.

She flopped down on the couch to wait for Howie, trying to decide how high to button her shirt.]

[Howie had actually brought her a razor, in the thought she might not be able to get her hands on one. He did realise about half way down there that Peter would probably have some, so it was a bit pointless.

Anyway. That wasn't why he was going down there. He knocked on the door and let himself inside. He had imagined she'd be taller than that, for some reason.] "I see you managed to shave. Afternoon."

[Elle touched the side of her face self-consciously.] "Yeah. It was easy." [The fact that there was a speck of blood on her fingertip when she dropped her hand made it a bit obvious that she was lying.

Moving on.] "When do I get more of my ability back?"

[No matter what else was going on in her life, one thing Elle knew for sure was that she wanted her full ability. So she'd made the decision to focus on that and forget all the other stuff, at least for now.]

[Howie didn't believe her for one minute, as he could see it wasn't a particularly good job, but it wasn't quite important. He was, though, a little taken aback at her question,]

"When you actually decide to talk to me about other things."

"Alright, I'll talk," [Elle huffed, crossing her arms, then uncrossing them and recrossing them because it felt weird and different.

She gave him a petulant glance.] "What am I supposed to talk about?"

[Howie paused, because it felt a little odd to be talking to a man instead of Elle, but quickly got back into it,] "What I wanted to discuss before. Why everything started becoming about wanting to be normal all of a sudden? Or... well, what changed. That's a good place to start."

[Instead of leaning against something, like he usually did, he found somewhere to sit, signalling his intention to stay for a proper answer.]

"You want me to lie down, you could get out a notepad, make it like a real therapy session?" [Elle snitted. If talking about this was what she had to do to get her ability back, then fine. But she didn't exactly feel comfortable doing it.]

"You were the one who wanted to talk. You don't get to make sarcastic comments. Come on, I'm not here to make your life more difficult, I just want to have a real, honest answer from you. I'm prepared to wait, but I'd rather not."

[He had a point. Elle tried disappearing into the couch, which didn't exactly work.]

"The flood," [she said reluctantly.] "That other Elle was as normal as I think I'll ever be, and everything that was wrong in her life was just as bad as everything that's wrong in my life." [She didn't think that summed it up quite right, but it was close enough, or at least the beginnings of close enough.]

[Howie nodded, and thought for a moment, trying to put the pieces together in his mind as much as he could before he said something else,] "What exactly do you think was so wrong in her life? Nobody really has a perfect, normal life, Elle, there's things wrong in everyone's life."

"People were after her, because of this." [She held up a hand and generated a ball of electricity, watching it intently for a few moments before extinguishing it.] "And she didn't know how to use it as well as me because nobody ever trained her." [Of course she knew by now that 'training' meant Daddy had experimented on her, but that didn't change the end results. She was good at using her ability because of what Daddy had done.]

"People who had a ridiculous religious principle, from what I could see. Not... everyone." [He watched the ball in her hand for a second, then realised that the second point was the far more important one.] "But your training... the way it was done, was that really worth better control of it? Do you really believe it was?"

I could pull it off if I really wanted to. Probably.

You seem pretty clean cut in your little pictures. I wouldn't try it without an honest friend.

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