Toph and Lydia, backdated to Feb 23
Feb. 23rd, 2013 01:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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om_mainAfter their headmaster meeting, Toph and Lydia go out for burgers, code name and absentee parent discussions, and... freaky ketchup men.
Lydia tucked into the booth once Toph was settled, and tried no to grimace at the bad imitation 1950s vinyl through her leggings. She couldn't feel it, but it was still vaguely gross--and who knew what kind of obnoxious, messy little child had been sitting here last. Still, she didn't mind the place. It was a pseudo-diner, but they had braille menus at the hostess station and a little sock-hop music never went amiss. Toph had said she wanted a burger, so she'd get a burger.
It was a momentary distraction from the absolute weird that had been that meeting with Xavier, anyhow. Not that Lydia expected said meeting wouldn't be a major topic of conversation, but Toph had looked slightly unsettled through part of it, hence Lydia's "out to lunch" suggestion. She'd give her roommate a few minutes to settle in. An Elvis tune or two couldn't hurt.
Toph remained unusually quiet for a good long moment, but the prospect of food seemed to cheer her up a little. By the time they'd given their orders, she cocked her head a little and kept herself facing Lydia.
"So what's Panax mean?" She asked suddenly, apropos of nothing.
"It's the genus name for ginseng--which is meant to be good for the immune system--but more importantly it means Heal All in Greek," Lydia replied, as if the question hadn't been out of nowhere. "The same as Panacea, really--which, you're right, that was a bad idea, thanks for rescuing me from it."
"It just sounds weird," Toph declared with a shrug. "Like, if we're supposed to start using them or whatever. Would you really want someone to call you Panacea?"
Lydia wrinkled up her nose. "Hell no. Then again, this is coming from the only girl at the school smaller than me... who thought Boulder was a good idea..."
"I work with rocks and stuff," Toph said, entirely unphased. "You're probably right that Stone is better, though," she added almost thoughtfully.
Though she knew Toph would hear it in her voice as well as anyone else would see it on her face, Lydia smiled a little. "Then we did each other a favor today. See. Not a bad idea to go in together."
In truth, Lydia had lied by omission. It was true that so far, she felt like she and Toph had gone through all the major announcements, all the general issues, and all the scary shit since they'd both arrived... together. She'd said as much, if not in so many words, when she'd made the suggestion that they do today's meeting together as well.
What she had not said was that Toph was probably the only one of her current "worth my time" acquaintances that Lydia didn't think she'd ever need anything from, and therefore, probably the most trustworthy. As much as she loved Jean-Paul--and she did--she knew she was not first on his list. She wouldn't want to be; he wouldn't be him if she was. But Toph...
Well. It was different. Didn't matter why. At all. Of course.
"It was good," she agreed, with just a flicker of uncertainty running through her expression. Part of her had wanted to ask about her parents, but if she was honest Toph wasn't sure that going alone would have made her actually do it. Lydia's presence had been a good excuse not to bring it up. Better just to put the whole thing out of her head, as much as she could.
Which she did, with a grin that was not quite as wide as normal, but genuine enough. "Lunch is better, though."
The flicker had been there in the meeting too, and was largely responsible for Lydia's lunch suggestion. Something was bothering Toph. It wasn't a completely impossible-to-imagine scenario. Toph didn't like to admit that anything ever bothered her, and it would be too easy (and therefore at least halfway inaccurate) to assume why and how.
Nevertheless, Lydia agreed as the server brought their drinks and trotted off again--chirpy little bastard. Then, "Or, at least, lunch is less confusing and intense. I probably could've asked more questions. I was surprised you didn't have any. Did you really not have any, or just none you were willing to ask Xavier?"
She hesitated for a second, which for Toph said a great deal. She almost never hesitated on anything. But still, she turned it over in her head a few times before saying, "nothing that really matters."
Another moment and then Toph shrugged again. "I don't know what else we're supposed to ask. I mean, they pretty much told us everything, right?"
Lydia was, of course, pretending not to notice anything was up with Toph. She sucked on her straw and winced a little at the tooth-rotting sweetness of vanilla Coke. Satisfied there was no one near enough to hear, she still lowered her voice to get into specifics, "Mmm, they told us a lot, but they were fairly vague. And I'm not sure why they picked the the things they did. That Shadow King thing, as Xavier's motivation for starting the school? Was kind of out of nowhere.
"Plus, Shadow King sounds almost as much like some terrible WWE wrestler name as Boulder."
Toph snickered a little and gently skimmed her hand across the table to find her glass. "I guess it makes sense though," she said almost thoughtfully as she pulled her drink closer. "I mean, a lot of us could probably really wreck things if we wanted to." Toph herself chief among them. "Better make sure none of us feel like taking over anything now."
"I'm sure they were gauging the odds." Lydia's wry mini-smile came through in her voice clearly enough. "I am curious about what kind of left field questions they got from some of the kids who are more... out there, though."
"You think people asked some stupid stuff?" Toph grinned widely at the idea. "Maybe we should've done that."
"Convince them we're even more insane than we are?" Lydia cocked an eyebrow--another expression that tended to come through in her voice, somehow. "Ask them if they want you to carve out safe-caves from here to Mexico, maybe?"
And Toph actually considered it for a moment, though from the grin on her face she wasn't being serious about it. "I probably could," she decided finally. "Be awesome to try, anyway."
"Ha." It was as near to a laugh as Lydia ever got. "I said it to be ridiculous, but it's actually not a terrible idea, now you mention it." Because, welcome to her life, lately.
She was about to ask what Toph had really wanted to say to Xavier when the server returned with a basket of fries and two little plates. Not only did he have the most annoying timing ever, but he chattered on for a few moments, then grabbed the ketchup and drew little red smiley faces on their individual plates with it before bopping away again.
Lydia stared in horror, trying to recover so she could explain it. She just... needed a second.
She may not have been able to see anything with her feet off the floor, but Toph was by that point tuned in enough to Lydia's speech patterns that the sudden, dead silence was an easy giveaway. "What?" She frowned, hands skimming lightly over the table top and then flattening against it. "Lydia? What happened?" In a moment, she was going to get up and start kicking some ass, booth seat or not.
In a tone that would fully express her what-the-fuck-tastic horror, Lydia said, "He just drew ketchup smiley faces on the plates for the fries. Ketchup smiley faces, Toph."
Toph took a moment to let that sink in. "That's...weird," she declared, nose wrinkling with it, though she at least let her grip on the table go.
"It's terrifying. I can't even decide why."
"Because your food shouldn't have a face?" But Toph sounded slightly unsure about it. Not something she'd ever had to deal with before, really.
"Or my condiments shouldn't. I can't even decide." She grabbed a fry and swiped it through the odd little smiley-face. "There. I've smudged him. He can't look at me accusingly any more. God, this place is weird."
She snickered a little and reached to take her own plate before Toph suddenly stopped. "Is there one on my plate too?"
"Mmm-hmm. Right next to your thumb, the little ketchup man is smiling at you."
So Toph carefully and deliberately smudged her thumb right through it. "Better?" She grinned.
Lydia smiled, really and genuinely. "Oh, much." She popped a fry into her mouth, chewed and swallowed. And then, as if out of nowhere, though in fact it was calculated, "I didn't get the feeling you wanted to ask something, but decided not to. Of Xavier, not about the ketchup smiley."
"I don't really want to know," Toph said, low but firm, and made a point of gathering up her burger. "It won't make a difference anyway, so there's no point."
"Mmm, you say that now. But you looked pretty intense back there." Lydia gathered up her own, which was dripping with cheese in the best imaginable way. Oh god, she should feel guilty, but she just could not. "Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of not asking question to which I don't want answers. Just, I generally always want answers."
Toph wriggled a little, taking a big bite out of the burger to cover her uncertainty. Though the second the mouthful disappeared, she put the burger back down. "Xavier did something to my parents so I could come," she said, all on a rush, and scowled a little like the words were somehow being forced out of her. "I don't know what. I don't know if I want to know what."
"That's fair," Lydia said, voice measured. She tucked it away--good to know, if not entirely unexpected. "Considering what we learned of his past today..."
French Foreign Legion types didn't always have to have dodgy pasts. Just, well. They were certainly a little more suspect.
"Obviously, just tell me to stop asking questions if this is annoying," because god knew there were questions Lydia didn't want to answer, sometimes, "But do they seem different, now--apart from being okay with you living at the school?"
"I haven't talked to them," Toph said a little flatly. "At all. I thought maybe they'd call or write or something for my birthday, but." She just shrugged and focused on her food again.
It was a long moment before she muttered, "not like they payed all that much attention when I was actually living with them, either."
Lydia considered that carefully. "I guess that doesn't really imply that they're any different, then. Which means that if he did brainfry them, it was at least a localized effect." A slight pause in which Lydia destroyed more of her ketchup man with a fry.
Anyhow, as she'd expected (and part of why she'd decided to ask Toph to go with her to the meeting, if she was being honest), "Same with my parents, for the record. We could be outed on national television tomorrow and they'd fail to notice. Even if my powers were a little more obvious, they never would've noticed."
Once upon a time, Lydia seemed to recall that had bothered her. But it was so far away now, she spoke of it almost clinically.
"They think I'm helpless," Toph said, her expression twisting into pure disgust with the idea. "They said I shouldn't come because I was too delicate to go to a real school." And that was so much worse than just being ignored.
"Parents are idiots." If her own experience hadn't already proved it, Toph's certainly would have. "Evidence being that--and that mine think I'm an idiot."
"Seriously," Toph agreed with feeling. "But whatever. We don't need them, right?"
"No, we don't." Lydia kept her voice even, though there was a little pang buried deep under there--an old one, blunted by long years. "I'd say we've already proven that pretty well."
Toph grinned widely at her, and just like that her earlier discomfort was completely forgotten. It wasn't gone, she wasn't that oblivious, but she could at least go back to ignoring it. "Sure. We can just be as awesome as we need."
Lydia tucked into the booth once Toph was settled, and tried no to grimace at the bad imitation 1950s vinyl through her leggings. She couldn't feel it, but it was still vaguely gross--and who knew what kind of obnoxious, messy little child had been sitting here last. Still, she didn't mind the place. It was a pseudo-diner, but they had braille menus at the hostess station and a little sock-hop music never went amiss. Toph had said she wanted a burger, so she'd get a burger.
It was a momentary distraction from the absolute weird that had been that meeting with Xavier, anyhow. Not that Lydia expected said meeting wouldn't be a major topic of conversation, but Toph had looked slightly unsettled through part of it, hence Lydia's "out to lunch" suggestion. She'd give her roommate a few minutes to settle in. An Elvis tune or two couldn't hurt.
Toph remained unusually quiet for a good long moment, but the prospect of food seemed to cheer her up a little. By the time they'd given their orders, she cocked her head a little and kept herself facing Lydia.
"So what's Panax mean?" She asked suddenly, apropos of nothing.
"It's the genus name for ginseng--which is meant to be good for the immune system--but more importantly it means Heal All in Greek," Lydia replied, as if the question hadn't been out of nowhere. "The same as Panacea, really--which, you're right, that was a bad idea, thanks for rescuing me from it."
"It just sounds weird," Toph declared with a shrug. "Like, if we're supposed to start using them or whatever. Would you really want someone to call you Panacea?"
Lydia wrinkled up her nose. "Hell no. Then again, this is coming from the only girl at the school smaller than me... who thought Boulder was a good idea..."
"I work with rocks and stuff," Toph said, entirely unphased. "You're probably right that Stone is better, though," she added almost thoughtfully.
Though she knew Toph would hear it in her voice as well as anyone else would see it on her face, Lydia smiled a little. "Then we did each other a favor today. See. Not a bad idea to go in together."
In truth, Lydia had lied by omission. It was true that so far, she felt like she and Toph had gone through all the major announcements, all the general issues, and all the scary shit since they'd both arrived... together. She'd said as much, if not in so many words, when she'd made the suggestion that they do today's meeting together as well.
What she had not said was that Toph was probably the only one of her current "worth my time" acquaintances that Lydia didn't think she'd ever need anything from, and therefore, probably the most trustworthy. As much as she loved Jean-Paul--and she did--she knew she was not first on his list. She wouldn't want to be; he wouldn't be him if she was. But Toph...
Well. It was different. Didn't matter why. At all. Of course.
"It was good," she agreed, with just a flicker of uncertainty running through her expression. Part of her had wanted to ask about her parents, but if she was honest Toph wasn't sure that going alone would have made her actually do it. Lydia's presence had been a good excuse not to bring it up. Better just to put the whole thing out of her head, as much as she could.
Which she did, with a grin that was not quite as wide as normal, but genuine enough. "Lunch is better, though."
The flicker had been there in the meeting too, and was largely responsible for Lydia's lunch suggestion. Something was bothering Toph. It wasn't a completely impossible-to-imagine scenario. Toph didn't like to admit that anything ever bothered her, and it would be too easy (and therefore at least halfway inaccurate) to assume why and how.
Nevertheless, Lydia agreed as the server brought their drinks and trotted off again--chirpy little bastard. Then, "Or, at least, lunch is less confusing and intense. I probably could've asked more questions. I was surprised you didn't have any. Did you really not have any, or just none you were willing to ask Xavier?"
She hesitated for a second, which for Toph said a great deal. She almost never hesitated on anything. But still, she turned it over in her head a few times before saying, "nothing that really matters."
Another moment and then Toph shrugged again. "I don't know what else we're supposed to ask. I mean, they pretty much told us everything, right?"
Lydia was, of course, pretending not to notice anything was up with Toph. She sucked on her straw and winced a little at the tooth-rotting sweetness of vanilla Coke. Satisfied there was no one near enough to hear, she still lowered her voice to get into specifics, "Mmm, they told us a lot, but they were fairly vague. And I'm not sure why they picked the the things they did. That Shadow King thing, as Xavier's motivation for starting the school? Was kind of out of nowhere.
"Plus, Shadow King sounds almost as much like some terrible WWE wrestler name as Boulder."
Toph snickered a little and gently skimmed her hand across the table to find her glass. "I guess it makes sense though," she said almost thoughtfully as she pulled her drink closer. "I mean, a lot of us could probably really wreck things if we wanted to." Toph herself chief among them. "Better make sure none of us feel like taking over anything now."
"I'm sure they were gauging the odds." Lydia's wry mini-smile came through in her voice clearly enough. "I am curious about what kind of left field questions they got from some of the kids who are more... out there, though."
"You think people asked some stupid stuff?" Toph grinned widely at the idea. "Maybe we should've done that."
"Convince them we're even more insane than we are?" Lydia cocked an eyebrow--another expression that tended to come through in her voice, somehow. "Ask them if they want you to carve out safe-caves from here to Mexico, maybe?"
And Toph actually considered it for a moment, though from the grin on her face she wasn't being serious about it. "I probably could," she decided finally. "Be awesome to try, anyway."
"Ha." It was as near to a laugh as Lydia ever got. "I said it to be ridiculous, but it's actually not a terrible idea, now you mention it." Because, welcome to her life, lately.
She was about to ask what Toph had really wanted to say to Xavier when the server returned with a basket of fries and two little plates. Not only did he have the most annoying timing ever, but he chattered on for a few moments, then grabbed the ketchup and drew little red smiley faces on their individual plates with it before bopping away again.
Lydia stared in horror, trying to recover so she could explain it. She just... needed a second.
She may not have been able to see anything with her feet off the floor, but Toph was by that point tuned in enough to Lydia's speech patterns that the sudden, dead silence was an easy giveaway. "What?" She frowned, hands skimming lightly over the table top and then flattening against it. "Lydia? What happened?" In a moment, she was going to get up and start kicking some ass, booth seat or not.
In a tone that would fully express her what-the-fuck-tastic horror, Lydia said, "He just drew ketchup smiley faces on the plates for the fries. Ketchup smiley faces, Toph."
Toph took a moment to let that sink in. "That's...weird," she declared, nose wrinkling with it, though she at least let her grip on the table go.
"It's terrifying. I can't even decide why."
"Because your food shouldn't have a face?" But Toph sounded slightly unsure about it. Not something she'd ever had to deal with before, really.
"Or my condiments shouldn't. I can't even decide." She grabbed a fry and swiped it through the odd little smiley-face. "There. I've smudged him. He can't look at me accusingly any more. God, this place is weird."
She snickered a little and reached to take her own plate before Toph suddenly stopped. "Is there one on my plate too?"
"Mmm-hmm. Right next to your thumb, the little ketchup man is smiling at you."
So Toph carefully and deliberately smudged her thumb right through it. "Better?" She grinned.
Lydia smiled, really and genuinely. "Oh, much." She popped a fry into her mouth, chewed and swallowed. And then, as if out of nowhere, though in fact it was calculated, "I didn't get the feeling you wanted to ask something, but decided not to. Of Xavier, not about the ketchup smiley."
"I don't really want to know," Toph said, low but firm, and made a point of gathering up her burger. "It won't make a difference anyway, so there's no point."
"Mmm, you say that now. But you looked pretty intense back there." Lydia gathered up her own, which was dripping with cheese in the best imaginable way. Oh god, she should feel guilty, but she just could not. "Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of not asking question to which I don't want answers. Just, I generally always want answers."
Toph wriggled a little, taking a big bite out of the burger to cover her uncertainty. Though the second the mouthful disappeared, she put the burger back down. "Xavier did something to my parents so I could come," she said, all on a rush, and scowled a little like the words were somehow being forced out of her. "I don't know what. I don't know if I want to know what."
"That's fair," Lydia said, voice measured. She tucked it away--good to know, if not entirely unexpected. "Considering what we learned of his past today..."
French Foreign Legion types didn't always have to have dodgy pasts. Just, well. They were certainly a little more suspect.
"Obviously, just tell me to stop asking questions if this is annoying," because god knew there were questions Lydia didn't want to answer, sometimes, "But do they seem different, now--apart from being okay with you living at the school?"
"I haven't talked to them," Toph said a little flatly. "At all. I thought maybe they'd call or write or something for my birthday, but." She just shrugged and focused on her food again.
It was a long moment before she muttered, "not like they payed all that much attention when I was actually living with them, either."
Lydia considered that carefully. "I guess that doesn't really imply that they're any different, then. Which means that if he did brainfry them, it was at least a localized effect." A slight pause in which Lydia destroyed more of her ketchup man with a fry.
Anyhow, as she'd expected (and part of why she'd decided to ask Toph to go with her to the meeting, if she was being honest), "Same with my parents, for the record. We could be outed on national television tomorrow and they'd fail to notice. Even if my powers were a little more obvious, they never would've noticed."
Once upon a time, Lydia seemed to recall that had bothered her. But it was so far away now, she spoke of it almost clinically.
"They think I'm helpless," Toph said, her expression twisting into pure disgust with the idea. "They said I shouldn't come because I was too delicate to go to a real school." And that was so much worse than just being ignored.
"Parents are idiots." If her own experience hadn't already proved it, Toph's certainly would have. "Evidence being that--and that mine think I'm an idiot."
"Seriously," Toph agreed with feeling. "But whatever. We don't need them, right?"
"No, we don't." Lydia kept her voice even, though there was a little pang buried deep under there--an old one, blunted by long years. "I'd say we've already proven that pretty well."
Toph grinned widely at her, and just like that her earlier discomfort was completely forgotten. It wasn't gone, she wasn't that oblivious, but she could at least go back to ignoring it. "Sure. We can just be as awesome as we need."
