event } you're never gonna fit in much, kid.

[seeingyou]

WHO: Open to all passengers.
WHAT: Teen time!
WHERE: Anywhere on Navi.
WHEN: The next two weeks (Sept. 11-25).
WARNINGS: Add these to your comment subject lines as needed! And if your teen angst includes a body count, please report it on the death page.

When Navi wanders through this particular nebular cloud, you may find yourself feeling sleepy. Wouldn’t a nap be fantastic right now? Of course it would be. Treat yourself - you deserve it.

When you wake, however … that’s perhaps less of a treat. Where are you? (Or maybe who are you?) How did you get here? And why, when you look in the mirror, do you look so much older than you remember?

Comments

[11calls]

At the beginning, when she realized that he'd been in her apartment and tapping to her (which even Nic had agreed with when it started, before he'd gone home to Amalia and whatever else. She doesn't like to think about that still, how it seems like Nic is involved in all of this. Simon was right about the reasoning, and it made sense when nothing else did but there was still the fact that Nicodemus had been her best friend for half her life. He'd been there through some of the worst parts of it and the fact that he could be making it worse broke Alex's heart to the point where she couldn't even think about him anymore.) Alex had been frightened. She knows that he knows that he frightened her, but in the end despite her fear, Alex hadn't shoved him or his help away. He was more inside of her circle even back home than most anyone. The teenage version of her would never understand how the people who she was close to had shrunk down to three people for all intents and purposes and one of them was possibly evil, one of them was a definite murderer and one of whom is an asshole who may be fated to end the world. It's no wonder Alex as an adult slept so little and had so much on her shoulders.

What's lingering on the teenage version of her shoulders by comparison is much easier, even if she did just kiss someone who isn't her boyfriend. A boyfriend who she doesn't remember at all but Alex isn't someone who cheats--being loyal is someone who Alex is which is why it's so weird when she isn't. But there's something in her that feels loyal to Simon and Alex is definitely labeling that as being his friend and reading the situation wrong. That's it. That's it and she's being herself and jumping to conclusions.

Sitting next to him, Alex just fidgets a bit, and she takes a sip of her coffee. It's like an echo to what she would do later, only with less certainity in her, but it's still a familiar thing. "What kind of thing did I stumble into? Is it like some kind of like Monica Lewinsky thing?" There's more than a little note of excitement in it, because of course Alex would want to hear that she's onto a massive story. "Like is the government doing something sketchy with the paranormal?" A pause and then Alex just frowns. "Wait. Am I Mulder and he's Scully?"

[bilocates]

His stalking was pretty creepy, all things considered, but he had his reasons. Alex may have begun to parse together what those reasons were, and even if she hadn't she didn't seem that upset over the whole thing. In his own strange way Simon was just looking out for her. As he continues to do here in space on Navi, though Simon was the one utterly out of his depth here between social situations and being expected to work alongside others. Dealing with a death cult that worshipped an ancient Sumerian goddess? Sure, no problem. Teenager feelings? No.

Not for the first or hundredth time he wondered just how insane he really was.

It didn't count as cheating if she didn't know, and he stopped her. Everything was fine. One little case of mistaken relationship did not a cheater make. That loyalty was still mutual enough, just as he was there to look after her now Simon wasn't going to abandon Alex to deal with all of this alone. It was a lot, he understood, even more with her having a past she'd suddenly forgotten and all the aches and pains of age suddenly caught up to her. The confusion he can help with, the aches and pains are just something she'll have to learn to endure.

"Bigger," He confirms to the Monica Lewinsky thing. The end of the world was definitely a whole lot larger than a politician having an affair. "Massive energy company with international and government ties, yes." Close enough. They did listen to the end of season 3, after all. That last part earned something of an amused sound as he sipped his own coffee before casing Alex something of an apologetic look.

"Basically." Sorry, Alex, you're in the X-Files.

[11calls]

For a long moment, Alex doesn't say anything, but her nose continues to be crinkled up at the idea of her being in the X-Files. That's weird and not really something that she's ever thought of for herself. In a lot of ways, even at this age Alex Reagan has been looking for something to believe in, and she's never been particularly sure of what it is. Later Alex would find it in the story that she's telling, in the elements of demons and cults and bilocation and the end of the world. Right now, though it seems like an impossible thing to be, even if this entire experience is something that's impossible as well.

As her brow furrows up, and her thumb returns to her mouth in order to chew on it, Alex's dark eyes grow distant. Thoughts swallow her for a long moment, spiraling around her as she attempts to take the puzzle pieces of what Simon's told her and assemble them to something that the teenager does on a regular basis but this feels different. It's bigger, as Simon said, but that makes it all the less tangible to her.

But then Alex does come up with a question, at least a sort of question with her brows still pulled up to her hairline. "Pulled in, you said. And it's big. So is it like dangerous? I mean I guess it has to be when you've got a corporation involved with what's going on. Is that's what's causing me nightmares here?" Cause Alex figures that there's a difference in her nightmares now and what they will be. And of course that leads to a different question considering how they woke up. "Are you a part of the story too?"

[bilocates]

Simon gives her the silence and space to mull this new information over. Meanwhile, he takes the moment to enjoy more of his coffee and the stars. Not as nice as sunsets, but they were beautiful. It almost made all of this bearable. It would be more bearable if he didn't have to try to figure out how to explain Alex's life story to her without traumatizing her.

It's difficult to assemble something so deeply repressed as the story she's uncovering now. Only after showing her again and again evidence of what she's hunting is real had Alex begun to believe, and even she still falls back on skepticism from time to time. As much as she didn't want to be Scooby-Doo, here she was.

"Extremely," He says with some degree of regret in his tone. He never wanted this for her, he tried to push her away before it was too late but... Well, here they were. Space was arguably safer. "Yes, I am. I'm one of several... pieces you've collected along the way." That's one way to put it.

[11calls]

Alex just lets out a long huff of breath, a precursor to the dramatic sighs that she'd give him later on, but it's more of surprise than anything else. The regret about the level of danger that was involved is entirely too worrying and Alex knows it. "Okay." She begins, talking aloud like she almost always does when she's assembling pieces of the puzzle of the story that she was working on. Some things never change; Alex is even still making the attempt to try and figure out where she, herself is in the story given the pieces that Simon has given her.

"So, you're a piece of something I've picked up along the way, and this skeptic Strand guy is as well." Not so much the leapfrogging of logic that Alex is normally so proficient in, but it's the first layer. "And if this Strand guy is someone I'm working with on this major story and he's a skeptic that means that whatever big thing with a corporation is paranormal in like some way. So two things: you've got some sort of ties to the paranormal and if I was helping you then..." Pausing in her thought process, Alex's brow furrows up tightly above her glasses. "Wait. Am I paranormal in some way too?"

[bilocates]

It's uncanny now much Alex is still like her older self, and yet still so different. Her intuition wasn't quite as honed, yet still present. She still huffed and sighed in ways not entirely unfamiliar, and still sought answers to puzzles she may not truly wish to know. Simon has a feeling that Alex might just be too curious for her own good.

"Yes," She's not quite there yet, but getting close. He's figuring out he's going to have to be a little more explicit in his hints for her. Or just wait for her to catch up, she will, Alex is smart. Simon isn't necessarily charitable. "I'm helping you." He corrects. Simon's involvement is more from the outside after all. It's Alex and Richard who are in the thick of it. "You're a part of this." Whether she likes it or not. It's not really a definitive answer.

[11calls]

If there’s one thing that anyone can say about Alex Reagan at every point in her life it’s that she’s too curious for her own good. Even Alex as an adult would definitely agree with that too. If she wasn’t so curious, this story would have probably died in the early stages of its birth. Yes, she’s fated to be part of it, one note in a symphony and all of that but also if she wasn’t so curious about the tape from when Strand called her, and the reasons that he’d done it, Alex never would have returned the call and it would have simply been a one off with a massive asshole who she didn’t have the patience for. Yes, it’s far too late for that now, but then it wouldn’t have been.

But for now there’s nothing that Alex can do about it, even if her nose screws up a bit at his agreeing that she was paranormal. He was helping her which made sense and the whole nightmares thing made sense too but also: “are you sure? Cause I’m not paranormal now. I don’t ever remember doing things that were paranormal.” And that was a big part of it: all of the things that she doesn’t remember from her childhood and hadn’t remembered until she was here and in the form of a child again herself.

Denial is one hell of a drug, just ask one Richard Strand about that.