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Who: Morty and Pris
What: They need to talk
Where: Mort's apartment
When: The 11th
Rating: PG-13, possibly to be adjusted
Status: Closed, ongoing

He was trying to clean. It wasn't something he was very good at--no real reason to practice. And further complicated by the new scars. Clotho's healing had helped, but there'd been plenty of damage done, first. He wished he'd just owned up right away, but that might have meant doing it with an audience. And maybe The crazy lady in charge would have been even worse on the network if he'd just yelled it right away. What else was B going to stand for, anyway? Breakfast? He didn't get any credit for that.

And so, to keep himself busy, he was trying to tidy. The space was small and cluttered, since he seldom bothered so much as picking things up, but it worked out, since it gave him something to do now. Carefully. His hands hurt.

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Nothing about what happened had been okay, not in the slightest. Pris was a lot more worried about Morty than she was about the fact that it'd been her image that had tortured him. Not that she wasn't concerned about that all on it's own. It was definitely upsetting all on it's own to see an image of herself somewhere. Even more upsetting was the fact that she, it, was doing terrible things to someone she cared about. What would that mean for how he'd look at her? Would it change things?

She wasn't sure but she intended to find out. That needed to be spoken about and she needed to see how he was doing. She knocked on the door gently.

"Morty you here?"

He jumped and dropped things, but that was his normal response to her showing up unexpected. Or expected. Sometimes to seeing her exactly where it was reasonable to expect her. She made him more stupid than nature had intended, even. He didn't mind too much.

He opened the door with a minimum of hesitation. Mort had been betrayed for real by people he trusted and looked up to (and had a bit of a thing for, in Dom's case). What was obviously a creepy manifestation of Tartarus didn't feel anything like that. Maybe he'd be nervy next time the claws came out, but for the time being, he just looked a little twitchy and tired in a way that was completely normal for him. "Hey?"

She gave him a smile as he opened the door. The smile was bright and she hoped it was at least a tiny bit warm. Sometimes it was hard to tell. "Hey yourself. How's it going?" It seemed lame to ask it that way, but maybe casual was good for a tiny bit? Or at least not bad.

It wasn't like he was good at reading people anyway. Any smiles from her in his direction were pretty cool. And casual? Casual was just fine. He hoped it would go on that way. "Back to normal, so, y'know, not much goin' on." After that last one, he was prepared to be pretty pleased about the periods of relative inactivity Tartarus provided. "Didja wanna come in, or... just walkin' by?"

"Back to normal is pretty good," she said with a tiny smile. Normal seemed relative here, but at the same time it was also all they could ask for. "I kinda would like to come in. If you don't mind."

"Sure." The apartment continued to be pretty void of personality. He just wasn't used to having his own space to inhabit and tended to treat the place the way he had any of the corners he'd squatted in before and with the Brotherhood. "Sorry, I was kinda in the middle of..." It barely even looked like he was cleaning. He took a short hop and self-consciously swept a jacket off the sofa so it was clear to sit down. He mostly managed not to wince. Stupid hands.

"Sorry to have dropped in announced. Maybe I should have called first?" She looked around briefly without any judgement and then just shrugged. "It's cleaner than a lot of places I've been to honestly. Or places I've lived in. Jeremy was a terrible mess." Most science nerds were she'd determined. It might be rude of her, but she'd never claimed to not be rude.

"I don't, y'know, cook or anything, so it probably wouldn't have made that much difference." Since she didn't mind, apparently, he relaxed a little about that specific point. He made himself sit down on the arm of a battered armchair, since standing would be weirder and crouching in a defensible corner was definitely not an option, tempting as it was. "Since it's usually just me." And he was only very recently coming around to the idea that it didn't always have to be.

"You don't cook at all? If you ever wanna learn then I'm not an awful teacher. Or so I hear." Sometimes. Not that he'd ever seriously thought of teaching someone or anyone but hey she couldn't be worse than her own teachers. Save for her Voodoo teacher, she was pretty great. "Does it get lonely just being you?"

"Ahuno, only time I really had roommates was when I was crashin' with the Brotherhood. That was cool, I guess." He's prefers company, all things being equal, but he'd have no idea how to propose or arrange such a thing without being part of a really lousy terrorist cell that picked him up off the street.

"How many of you were there then?" She realized sometimes that a lot of people down here didn't know that much about each other. They knew about sins and wrongs they'd done, but not always that much about their actual live.s

"Just five. Six for a while, but Rogue was double-agenting, I guess." Too bad. She kind of tolerated him sometimes. And since she'd probably yanked intel from his memories when she grabbed his powers that time, Pietro had given him hell about it. Ah, well. "We picked big spaces to squat in, so that was okay."

"You uh, squatted? You didn't have an actual place?" Well, that was mildly depressing.

The webbing on Mort's hands didn't let him quite perform the universal thumb-and-pinky-against-the-ear gesture for "phone call," but he did his best. "Hello, yes, rental office? Yeah, I got my reference list. There's this creepy senator who wants us dead, and the world's most wanted superpowered weirdo, and you're cool with the MRD comin' in to arrest us all twice a month, right?"

She gave him a sad little lopsided smile and shrugged her shoulders. "I Can see how that miiiight not have gone too well. There was nobody that could help you?"

"Guy we worked for hung us out to dry for the big stuff all the time. Don't think he, y'know, remembered we existed a lotta the time. Definitely wasn't gonna set us up a place to stay." He shifted a bit, feeling whiny. "Um. I prolly have... some kinda drinks, in the kitchen, or..." Hospitality!

"Why'd you keep working for him if he did that?" The question just kind of came out in a rush without any thought. "And sure, if you have something I'll take a drink. Whatever you have."

"Iiiiiit's... complicated." He stalled for a moment by ducking around to the kitchen. Fortunately he did seem to have grabbed sodas last time he was at the market, so he actually had something other than water to bring back. "Different reasons. Pietro's got daddy issues, Dom and Avalanche actually, like, believe in this stuff." Mort used to. "Me? I don't really have, like, options. The destroy all mutants thing kinda comes and goes, but lookin' like me, there's no way I get to exist without bein' arrested, so might as well do some crimes while there's bigger, badder powers to back me up. Maybe if I'd made it to Genosha, but... nah."

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