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He made a non-committal noise when Alex called him pushy. He could have said the same about her. He took the earpiece and stuck it in his ear before weaving his fingers between each other and placed his joined hands over his stomach.
As the music began, Wes found himself in an empty field on a clear day, much in the same position as he was in now. The air smelled sweet and a soft breeze pushed through his hair, tickling his forehead and ears.
Beside him, a girl in a light blue dress lay, her fingers tracing lazy patterns on the back of his hand. He couldn't see her face but a smile curved on his lips.
He might not understand what Alex personally felt but the song transported him to a peaceful place. His peaceful place.
When the song ended, he took the earpiece out and handed it back to Alex. "Mm." He hummed. He wasn't a poet, he didn't have the words to describe how he felt but somehow, he knew Alex could understand what he meant by that one small noise.
His response, although not very eloquently put, made her smirk. She'd been right. He didn't think she was right before, but she was. And she liked being right. "I told you it was better than just 'very nice.'" She sat back up and pulled her knees to her chest with the smirk still gracing her lips.
Alex tapped her fingers against her legs and her eyebrows pulled together. "What'd you mean when you said you had to get back to the little monsters? D'you have kids or something?" Because she couldn't quite imagine the man beside her having children. He may have been the proper age, but there was something about him that just didn't seem right for a parent. Then again, what did she know about that? Her parents weren't really parents either.
Rolling his eyes, he sat up again and resumed his earlier position, leaning against the wall. "I bet your friends love when you tell them how right you actually are, eh." He smirked.
Her question made him snort. "Fuck no. And ruin this body? No, no. I'm a trainer here." He answered. "That lot are ridiculous when they're at that age." He shivered as his fingers skirted over the bulge of his cigarette box in his pocket.
He still wanted to smoke but less so than when he first got on the roof. "How about you then, still a monster?"
Alex lifted her shoulders in a shrug. It wasn't like she gave a shit what people thought of her. And she only had one friend, really. Sam didn't much count even if he knew her inside and out, and he was typically the only one that she told she was right to. "Almost as much as your friends must like your high and mighty attitude," She shrugged again and started wrapping up her headphones, plucking them from the headphone jack.
As soon as she did it, she regretted it because now there was no muffled voice, it was on full force. Oh please, you two are just feeding off of each other with your attitudes. The sexual tension is palpable, can we please get that taken care of soon? I can't handle this. Alex pressed her lips into a tight line and wished that she could just turn it off, but then she realized that she could, so she powered down her phone and pocketed it.
"It's a shock they let you influence anyone," Not that she knew him all that well to judge. She couldn't imagine having him as a trainer. "And I guess I am, yeah," But with an ability like hers, she could use all of the training she could get. Otherwise she was going to end up in a padded cell after being diagnosed with schizophrenia.
"Oh yeah, they lap it up like soup." Wes nodded. It was a laughable notion that she thought he had that attitude. Prue would approve of this girl.
Wes noticed the way she seemed to tighten up before she switched off her phone and he raised an eyebrow. He decided to concentrate on her next words with a smirk. "Isn't it? I'm so glad someone noticed. I've just been running around with scissors hoping I don't nick anyone in the head with them."
Finding out that she was a student had him sighing. "You don't have a physical power do you?"
She didn't like talking about her ability and when he asked, she knew that as a trainer he probably knew how to read people. His question was simple, but it held a lot of weight because he was able to draw the conclusion that her ability didn't manifest physically. Of course, it was also relatively obvious seeing as she didn't have wings sprouted from her back or a forked tongue. It piqued her interest however about his own ability, whether he was a sensor or a mimic. Clearly not a suppressor.
"No," She answered simply. What else was she supposed to say? That her ability was mental and made her feel like she was mental. Alex didn't know him, she didn't how him anything, he wasn't her trainer. But she was curious and her curiosity often got the best of her when she was around people.
Alex looked down at her hands and bit her lip, "It's mental, I guess. Although, it works in some kind of physical way. Sorta complicated." She shrugged, but didn't look back up.
The short answer relieved him, which meant he won't have to train her. Not that he wouldn't want to spend more time with her but having to do it while wanting to know her on a more intimate level was going to jeopardise things.
He suppressed those thoughts and whacked himself mentally for even thinking it. He then decided to concentrate on the rest of her explanation. "Some form of kinesis then?" He asked.
Having a kinetic ability would have been easier, she thought. The ability she was given had painted a clear path for her perhaps career-wise, but it only made things complicated everywhere else. She learned things about people that she didn't need to know, she heard voices that weren't there, the only benefits she got from it were the ones that came with helping her brother and keeping him safe. If it weren't for that, she'd have looked for a way not to have the ability at all.
"Cyberlingualism. It's a form of technopathy. I speak binary code more or less, but I hear it in the form of voices. I can cause glitches, fix viruses and I can pretty much control any technological device that I want to," It was the most she'd said to anyone that wasn't her official or her brother. The ability that she had wasn't as cool as she'd initially thought. It gave her ways of cheating, sure, but it also gave her ways of making her want to bash her head into a wall.
She pointed to her temple, "And I don't even have to touch it."
Her actual ability blew his mind and he winced at the repercussions of having such an ability. His own made him deathly afraid of earthquakes, he couldn't begin to try and empathise having to deal with billions of voices in his head.
"Jesus Christ that's heavy." He breathed. "How are you not in a coma right now?" He tried to joke, though he realised it was in poor taste only when he finished saying it.
Heavy, yeah that was one way to put it. Alex frowned, "It explains a lot though, doesn't it?" He had to see the way it effected her, she thought that it made more sense why people were the way that they were once she knew their abilities. The side effects could really do damage to someone's personality. She knew hers did. There were glimpses of who she'd been before, what with her attitude and all, but the truth of the matter was that she didn't feel like herself anymore. And she knew that her brother's side effects had done a number on him. She looked over the man in front of her and she wanted to know what his side effects had done to him.
Alex's eyebrows pulled together in response to his question. She wasn't in a coma because she didn't surround herself around people the way that he had to. "I come up here to sort of get away from everything. I only have to deal with one voice usually, but it keeps quiet when I need it to." She didn't feel it necessary to tell him that she'd been in her own form of isolation for the last few years. He didn't even know who she was really and she felt it was better to save that for later. Assuming there was a later.
Despite the fact that he had just met this woman two minutes ago, knowing her ability did sort of explain her a little better than talking ever could. His abilities shaped him in a way that life didn't. He loved his abilities, however. He liked how it literally kept him grounded.
"Well, this is the best place to be for that." Wes shrugged. He was of the mind that nobody in this school was even close to sane. The ones who were, were fooling themselves.
Abilities messed people up. Hormones messed adolescents up. It would take a miracle for any of them to come out of this unscathed.
"So you know...everything about everyone because of their gadgets, eh?"
Of all the things of him to draw from her ability, he chose the one that showed her to be unintentionally intrusive. Alex looked at him, "Does that worry you?" Only people that asked that sort of thing had something they wanted to hide. At least, that was what she'd gathered from the people she came across. Porn was the common secret people had on their devices and unfortunately, she knew exactly what kind of porn they liked.
"I don't know everything about people from their devices, but I can get a general outlook of who they are. If you're hard on your cellphone, drop it a lot, get it wet, whatever, I know that. If you constantly get viruses because of websites you visit, I know that," She had to smirk at the most recent time she'd used her ability for some kind of vigilante justice. "I can access files from the device and open them sometimes, but it takes a lot out of me when I do."
The question had Wes chuckling before shaking his head. "I live my truth. Got nothing to hide." He responded. And whatever he needed hidden couldn't be traced through his phone.
When she mentioned websites, Wes gave her a grin. "Cheeky. Ever stumble across horse porn?" He asked with a chuckle. "You still don't have control over it?" He asked, his voice laced with concern.
Alex wasn't sure she believed him, but she didn't comment further on it. If he was as truthful as he thought, she figured she'd like him well enough. It'd been programmed into her to hate liars because of her brother's condition, even though she was guilty of it as much as anyone was.
"I've stumbled across plenty of porn and none of it has been all that good. It's usually fetish stuff, so, ya know," She shrugged. If Alex allowed herself to continue on the topic of porn, she had a feeling it would get either extremely awkward or a lot sexual, neither of which she'd come up to the roof for. If he asked, she wasn't going to not say anything though.
When the question turned serious, she shifted uncomfortably. She was twenty-three years old and after ten years of dealing with her ability, she still struggled with it. It's not something she often admitted to because admitting it made her seem incapable. "Not completely. I still struggle with it when it's in constant use among other things," She struggled with the side effects more than the control of the ability itself.
"Ew." He snorted and shook his head. He wasn't about to continue talking about porn with a student. Although, the fact that she had been so clinical about it made it funnier than it actually was.
Wes winced at her response, having already predicted the answer. She was kind enough to be truthful though so props to her.
"Ever considered befriending a suppressor?" He asked. "I'm assuming you don't sleep much."
