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Summary: Skyler goes to find Robin to apologize for disappearing on her. It goes better than expected.
Date: May 5, 2012
Log Title: Reconciliation
Rating: PG
Xavier Mansion - Art Room
The Art Room has pictures of classic artists and small sculptures of famous pieces of art around the room. Any art supply you need may be found in this room, a large variety of paints, charcoals, markers, pencils, clays, canvases, easels, paper, and much more are accessible for the students. A large kelm is in one of the far corners of the room as well. On one side of the art room are a few sewing machines with a large variety of fabrics and sewing supplies for the students as well.
At the moment, Robin is sitting in front of one of the tables, working on painting one of the projects she's working on. Unusually for the young woman, she's actually wearing a short sleeved top, exposing her arms and the many horizontal lines that mark her skin, most scars and some seeming relatively fresh, her jacket just hanging off of the chair she's sitting on. She stares at the sheet blankly for a time, every once in awhile adding a few strokes, as she paints out what looks to be a sort of alien landscape.
Skyler has been spending the majority of the day trying to hunt down and talk to people that she needs to catch up with. The first stop was his sister, Alex, which is why she now wears her shape. It's a comfortable body, one that she's familiar with, and is something recognizable for other other people that he's hunting down today. Unfortunately, spending time with her ended up as an all-day affair, so she's going straight to finding the second person on her list: Robin. Eventually she finds his ex in the art room, and stands in the doorway, silently watching her paint for a while, trying to figure out what the hell to say. Eventually she settles on making a polite cough so as not to scare the girl. "Hello, Robin," she says, voice filled with trepidation. "It's me, Skyler. I'm back."
Robin looks up when her name is said, as does her puppet which is sitting further back off in the corner of the room, both carrying a somewhat curious look to them, up until Skyler continues. She seems unsure of what to do for a few moments, putting down her paintbrush and then pushing up her glasses. "Skyler? I… I heard that you were back, but… What even happened? It's like you dropped off the face of the planet… I mean after… after the last time we spoke…" She glances off, as the last time they spoke was during their breakup.
Skyler looks to be equally awkward when Robin turns around. "I.. kind of did," she says. "I was too wrapped up in my head with what Sinister did to me, that I never really got a chance to tell you, and you deserved better than that." Even though she looks just like her sister, there is one glaring difference: Sinister's mark that's in the middle of her forehead. She purses her lip in thought before continuing. "Can I sit down? I want to apologize and tell you about what happened."
Robin frowns and looks at the mark for a few moments and then nods, "Yeah, yeah… sit down… And you know I never cared about what you looked like, but I did care about, I dunno, feeling like I didn't exist…" She sighs and rubs her face and shakes her head, canines pressing together against her lip, "Sorry. I mean. Yeah, tell me what happened?"
"It was more to what Sinister did to me than just what I looked like," explains Skyler as she moves to take a seat next to Robin. "There was always a part of him in the back of my mind that made it easier to not do the right thing. As well as… well… I'll get to that. I didn't learn about it until later." She takes a deep breath and continues. "At the time it wasn't about you hating me. It was about me hating myself. It was kind of a new experience for me, and I didn't know how to deal with it. I broke up with you, at first, because I wanted to wallow in self pity." She winces when she says that, looking pained to admit that she did something as stupid as that. "But I never meant to disappear. And when I did, I did it literally. I got unstuck in time and wasn't able to get back for five years."
Robin rubs her arms with her hands lightly at the story by Skyler, though she stops shortly and puts on her jacket after that, trying to do it without being too obvious. "What do you mean you got unstuck in time? What happened, you just happened to, umm, fall out of reality or something?" She seems a bit skeptical, but only as skeptical as an Xavier's student can be.
Skyler's pained expression never leaves her face. She knows how lame this sounds. "That's actually more accurate than you think, though I didn't fall as so much got pushed. I don't really understand the technical aspect of it, but most people are locked to their own realities. But occasionally things happen where people can move from one to the other. We've had plenty of examples of that around here." She takes a breath to gather her thoughts. "But sometimes people get removed from all realities. There's a being called the Timebroker that gathers these people up and have them do… chores, for lack of a better word. It was explained to me that some realities get broken, and if left unchecked they will collapse. This happens more often than you might think, actually, and the collapse of a singular universe, cosmically speaking when you're talking about an infinite number of universes, is pretty insignificant. But occasionally universe will break in such a way that it will take other universes with it. And if enough of these break, then the entire multiverse would collapse."
Robin looks a little bit blank at the explanation and she says, "I guess I believe you. I mean, it sounds crazy, but… I dunno, we've both been in pretty crazy situations before…" The young woman sighs softly and then shrugs, "So you ended up doing like, time chores? What brought you back to here and now? I mean, who's going to take care of broken universes now? I'm glad you're back, though… it's like I told you when we last spoke, I still at least wanted, you know, to be friends or something… I still cared about you…"
Skyler gives a helpless little laugh. "I don't know what brought me back. We learned that this Timebroker only ships corpses back, despite all of his promises. Once you're in with the Exiles you're in it for life, however short that may be." She shakes her head. "I'd died on a savage little world trying to save a … a girl who didn't deserve to die. And then next thing I know I got spat out at the Grind Stone in Westchester in the middle of the lunch rush."
"You… you died? What happened?" says Robin, furrowing her eyebrows slightly and then rubbing underneath the blacked out lens on her glasses, "I'm glad you're okay, Skyler… Do you think that you'll, I dunno, fall through reality again like that? And… did you save her? The girl you tried to save?"
Skyler gives Robin a helpless shrug. "I don't know. I hope so." She scowls and shakes her head. "I don't think I'm going to fall through reality again. At least I hope not. But… the thing that determines where we go isn't with me, and I can interact with people normally. That's a good sign that I'm here to stay." She leans over and hesitantly puts a hand on Robin's knee, looking for comfort. "I'm glad that you're okay. And it means a lot to me that I didn't totally burn any bridges with you because, despite all this time away, I still care about you as well."
Robin looks down at Skyler's hand, and reaches up to rub under both lenses of her glasses before putting one of her hands over Skyler's, nodding. Her visible eye is a more than a bit wet if looked at, and she says, "'m sorry, I don't know why I crying… I missed you, Sky…" She sniffs and then continues, wiping her eyes again, "I don't know what any of this means…"
Watching Robin makes Skyler's lower lip tremble in sympathy, looking like she's about to start breaking out bawling as well. "I don't know either," she admits. "I missed you to. Very, very much. I was so worried that I'd never get to come back and tell you how sorry I was. How much I regretted breaking up with you…" She squeezes Robin's knee in comfort, but looks hesitant as to what to do next.
Robin looks down to her knee when Skyler squeezes it and she puts her arms around her in a hug, spending some time crying and, if not interrupted, speaking, "Even if I don't know what it means, I'm glad you're okay and back… I… I really hope that you aren't feeling the same kind of bad feelings as before, anymore… I was scared I'd never-" she's cut off just by her own crying, and she makes no effort to resume.
Skyler moves closer to Robin, and gathers her in her arms to hug her when she starts to cry. "No, I got that fixed," she says, holding back her own tears. "I was scared, too."
"Fixed?" mumbles Robin, after a few moments of crying on Skyler, rubbing at her face to try and make the wet go away, "What do you mean f-fixed?" She sniffles and mumbles, "Sorry, I'm all emotional…"
Skyler leans back from the hug and wipes away the tears from her own eyes. "Yeah. One of the places we ended up at was… really bizarre. You remember that episode of Star Trek where they ended up in a universe where everybody who was good was evil? Same thing, but with the added twist that everybody swapped genders as well." She sniffles a bit to keep her nose in check and continues, "Well, as it turned out Xavier's was established by Apocalypse, and the headmistress there was Ms. Sinister, of all things. Just as brilliant as our guy, but she was as caring as he was evil." She unconsciously rubs Sinister's mark on her forehead as she speaks. "She was able to figure out exactly what Sinister… our Sinister did to me and…. that reminds me I have to talk to Ms. Frost about that… and was able to undo all of it." She sighs and shakes her head, "She wasn't able to find the original genetic blueprint of my original body but, honestly, I wouldn't know what to do with it even if I did. She did, however, offer to, well, 'upgrade' me, which I let her do. You know how if I were to, say, turn into a cat? Like how I ended up here? And my brain would be all cat like and dumb? This mark makes it so that it can't happen now. No matter what I turn into I'll always have my intellect." She shrugs. "It also means that I won't ever become a super genius if I copy one, but I think I can live with that."
Robin nods at that a couple of times and then says, "Well, that's good, I mean, no worries of being caught in a cat's body anymore, right?" She bites her lip lightly and brushes her hair back, presently cut into a short pixie cut, "I'm glad that she fixed things for you, I mean, you just always seemed so distant towards the end, I didn't know what to do…"
Skyler looks pained as her eyes fall to the floor. "I was. It was unfair to you, and I wish I could take that back." She sighs heavily, "But I can't. I want to be friends with you again. At least. But it's been so long."
Robin nods her head slowly and then looks down, "Yeah. Yeah, I'd like to be friends again, at least, I think… I just, I dunno… I guess I've been kind of blaming myself lately. I… I'm sorry, but I have been kind of seeing this guy but… he's just been getting so distant, the same way, and I was starting to worry that it was something about me…" She takes off her glasses for a proper eyerub, even though that exposes her dead eye. "You know how I can get, though…"
Skyler grips Robin tightly in her hands and brings her eyes up to catch Robin's when she's done rubbing them. "Robin, it's not you," she says. "Do NOT blame yourself for what happened to us. The weight of that blame is entirely on my shoulders. I can't speak for this other guy, but I know if that if he's acting the same way, then he's going through something similar." She swallows the pain of what she's about to say next. "If you love him, then you need to go to him and help him through whatever he's going through. If it's anything like me, he needs help but is too stubborn to ask for it."
Robin sniffles and then says, "I try, y'know? I'm always trying, even if you weren't asking me to… I care for him but… I dunno…" She shakes her head and sighs, looking towards the floor, "I need to talk to him, though, I know that… I feel like sometimes he trusts me and others I feel like he thinks I'm going to hurt him and… I never know what's going through people's heads, I guess… but I do try…"
Skyler nods slowly and leans back in her chair. "I know you do, and look. Only telepaths know what's going on in other people's heads, so don't beat yourself up over it." She looks a little defensive when she says, "I know this seems like an empty promise all things considered, but I'm here for you whenever you need me. I won't ever disappear on you again."
At the promise from Skyler, Robin smiles, albeit a bit weakly, "Thank you. I'm gonna hold you to that, Sky…" Robin hugs her again before wiping her eyes with the sleeves of her jacket, "I missed you, and I'm really glad that you're back… I've gotta clean this stuff up and get to bed now, though. I've got premed interviews to prepare for… We should get dinner or something sometime…"
Skyler looks shocked. "Premed…? I…. we… yes. We're going to have to have dinner and get caught up," she says sounding bewildered and lost. Returning Robin's hug she echoes, "I missed you, too. C'mon. I'll help you get cleaned up."
