The X-Project

Marie goes to Doug in search of comfort and help. He tells her something she already knew – they need to get someone with more experience to take a look at the diary.



Marie had taken a cab to Snow Valley, not trusting herself to be able to make the drive. She had dark circles under her eyes that she hadn't bothered trying to hide and she was carrying something wrapped in an opaque blue scarf. She needed to talk to Doug about what had happened in Meridian and that thought drove her footsteps forward despite the big part of her that wanted to be locked in her room and huddled in a corner.

The timid knock on his door roused Doug from where he was lounging in his overstuffed chair with a book. Making his way over to the door, he looked through the peephole before quickly opening it. "Em!" he exclaimed, before taking in her body language. "Come in," he said gently, placing his hand on the small of her back to guide her into the apartment. "You look exhausted," he said softly, concern evident in his voice. "Can I help?"

Marie allowed herself to be steered into the room and she sagged even more once she had entered. She found herself leaning against Doug as her shoulders shuddered once. “Ah don’t know. Ah just…home wasn’t good.” Her voice broke on the word home and she her hands clenched on the package she was carrying.

Carefully prying Marie's fingers loose from the package, he set it down on his coffee table, and quickly put on the set of black gloves he wore a decent amount of the time around Marie. Brushing a lock of hair behind her ear, he gently continued to steer her until she sat in the chair with Doug behind her, close enough to lend his support and presence, and far enough away to grant her personal space. "I'd gathered that," he replied. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Doug’s presence was calming and Marie took a few deep breaths before starting. “Ah’m adopted.” The words sounded foreign to her and she had trouble saying them. “And…” her eyes flitted to the package on the table. “Apparently a precog handed me off to my par…the D’Ancantos however many years ago.”

His eyes widened as Doug took the news in. This was a bombshell of the highest order, and he could see how it had affected Marie. She clearly hadn't been sleeping much, if at all, since she'd gotten the news. He noticed the way Marie's eyes flicked to the package. "I take it that was something that the precog in question left for you?" he asked, more a statement than a question.

She nodded. “You can…you can look at it if you want. It’s like the letter Ah got. Just more of it, so much more. Her diary or journal…” Her eyes were haunted as she looked at him. “Ah just don’t know what to believe.”

The diary of a precognitive. Doug's hand halted over the cover, as he remembered what happened the last time he had played fast and loose with a precognitive's diary. His hand drew back to rub his sternum in response to a ghostly twinge.

Even through her haze, Marie noticed Doug’s movement. She reached out a hand to brush his cheek. “Ah’m sorry…Ah didn’t think about that.” Great, still hurting everyone around you because of your own stupid stuff.

Doug smiled weakly and leaned into Marie's touch. "It's not your fault," he assured her. "Just remembering what happened last time I had a precog's diary." He paused for a moment. "So, have you read the diary yet?"

She couldn’t stop herself from shuddering. “No. Well, Ah glanced over it, but a lot of it is in languages Ah can’t read…and Ah wasn’t sure Ah wanted to. Part of me wanted to just burn it and pretend Ah never saw it.” She bit her lip and stared at a spot on the wall as she replayed her and Logan’s encounter with Irene.

"Languages you can't read..." No wonder she'd brought it to him. His instinctive reaction to what the journal was tamped down, Doug reached forward and opened the diary. Each page was covered from top to bottom in rambling script, sometimes in multiple languages per line, wrapped around vaguely drawn images. He lit on a page at random. "Het geschil van Unto een kind is geboren, een kind vooral toe te nemen anderen. Een donkere ster onaangeroerd door allen," he read. He looked up at his...girlfriend? They were still feeling their way around what exactly they were. "It's Dutch. It translates to: 'Unto strife a child is born, a child to rise above all others. A dark star untouched by all.'" He shrugged. "Not very cheerful, if you ask me."

She crinkled her nose as she processed his words. "Well, Irene didn't exactly strike me as the cheerful sort. She basically said that some decision we make or Ah make will either save or end the world. Real encouraging, huh? And vague as hell." She began twisting the material of one of her gloves.

"That's the way precog works," Doug replied exasperatedly. "No hard and fast answers. Everything is shades of possibility." He'd learned that lesson the hard way. He grimaced and shook his head. "I can translate for you, but I'm not really the one you want trying to piece this thing together." And good gravy, he didn't like what he was on the verge of suggesting.

Some part of her dimly remembered Nate's comment from their conversation…was it only three days ago? She had shrugged it off then because she had still held out hope that the letter was an elaborate hoax. Her eyes were firmly locked on her hands, fingers entwined with each other as she waited quietly for the suggestion she was almost sure Doug was about to make.

"You need to show this to Angie." The words were quiet, and came out in a deceptively calm tone. To involve his ex-girlfriend raised all kinds of questions and demons Doug would rather not have to face. But she was the most experienced person Doug could think of when it came to precognition, with the probable exception of whoever had written the journal. But they weren't available to question. Marie-Ange lived down the hall.

Even expecting it, her eyes grew wide. Right. Because she'd want to help me. "Ah don't know if that's a good idea," she said doubtfully. "Ah mean…" she gestured at the two of them. "And you two…" she trailed off, finding herself unable to complete any of her sentences.

"I know," he replied shortly. "Believe me, I know. I don't feel all that great about it either." He shrugged. "But all I can do is translate. If you want to make heads or tails of it, you need her." He bit his lip. "Whether we like it or not," he added in a whisper.

Marie tried to generate alternate scenarios in her head. Anything that wouldn't involve Doug's ex-girlfriend. Unfortunately, as precogs were not available at the local market, absolutely nothing came to mind. She sighed and reached out to squeeze Doug's hand. "Ah know this isn't easy for you either. But you're right and Ah can't think of another option. We need to show this to someone who can make sense of it."

Doug rolled his head backwards on the top of his chair to stare somewhat listlessly at the ceiling. "Do you want to talk to her, or should I?" he asked in a neutral tone of voice, his nervousness obvious even through his calm responses.

"You know her best. What…who would she respond better to?" Marie asked flatly. She wrapped her arms around herself. Ah don't want to go alone. Ah'm not ready to be alone again. But that's how it always seems to end.

"I don't know," Doug admitted. "Maybe we should both go," he suggested. It wouldn't be fair to ask Marie to do something alone that neither of them wanted to do.

Marie's face flooded with relief as she nodded. "Together." She reached out to take the notebook and stared at it. "Can't be any worse than everything else that's happened."


There’s no denying that there is a resident precog expert in the house. Of course, the fact that she happens to be Doug’s ex-girlfriend adds a bit of awkwardness to an otherwise productive meeting.



Marie-Ange had been in the middle of stripping the old countertops off so that she could replace them when the knock came on the door. Which was why, after Doug and Marie explained, she blinked at them curiously, and then very carefully set down the very sharp knife she'd been holding the entire time.

No sense in having either of them run off panicked. Doug might know that she had simply been too distracted to put it down, but Marie wouldn't.

"An entire diary? And the woman is still alive?" She asked, after a long silence that felt as long as then entire duration of her relationship with Doug.

Marie had barely been able to keep a visible sign of relief off her face when Marie-Ange finally set the knife down. She knew it couldn't do much harm against her, but she still didn't want this whole situation to come to anything like that. She had all but held her breath until Marie-Ange finally spoke, not having any idea of how the girl would react to the abbreviated explanation of how she had come by the book. Nodding at the redhead's question, Marie continued to nervously pull at the material of her gloves. "She gave it to me herself, or at least she said it was hers."

"It's in quite a few different languages," Doug offered, not knowing much about Em's trip to Meridian. "I can translate it, obviously, but...” Mentioning what had happened previously would be a bad idea. No need to dig up old problems. "You've got more experience with precog," he lamely stated the obvious.

Pinching the bridge of her nose to concentrate, Marie-Ange gestured towards her living room. "We should probably take a look at it then.." She said. "I would offer you something to drink, but my kitchen isn't finished, so I've been eating take-in…"

Walking to the area Marie-Ange had indicated, Marie gingerly sat on the edge of the couch. Even if it had been available, she wouldn't have been able to drink anything with her anxiety as high as it was and she was just thankful to be able to sit. "Irene wasn't very helpful." She shrugged. "Ah think she knew more than she told us, but obviously this is all Ah've got. She didn't exactly leave a forwarding address or a way to get in touch."

"Of course not." Marie-Ange said. It sounded like this Irene was just as annoyingly vague as Tante, if not more so. Though, that she left her diary in Marie's hands was... interesting. And very curious. "I would guess that she knew rather much more than she said, and had reasons of her own not to explain. It is an unfortunate habit of having precognition." She sat down in one of her still dropcloth covered chairs and reached underneath, pulling out a worn notebook. "I think, first, I should probably see if anything she said overlaps with anything I have seen. If she contacted you, then she had a reason.."

Marie's eyes darkened and she couldn't stop herself from muttering under her breath. "To mess with my life more." She was still upset that she hadn't gotten the woman to answer almost any of her questions. In fact, she hadn't really answered any of them. Why me? Where did Ah come from?

Doug pulled another notepad out of his pocket, as well as a pen. "I can start translating the stuff that's not in English," he offered. "From the look of it, -most- of the stuff isn't in English." Internally, he breathed a sigh of relief at Angie's willingness to help. Not that he'd expected otherwise, on something as potentially important as this. But he'd worried even so.

"What is it in?" Marie-Ange asked. "All those tiny details are important, sometimes. And sometimes they are utterly unimportant." She got up and seemingly absentmindedly looked around her apartment for a moment before disappearing into her work room, and returning with a folding table. "So we can all see what the others are talking about.." she explained.

Marie nodded, though she didn't know what she was going to be able to contribute at this point. She couldn't read any of the book except the snippets in English and she couldn't make more than a little sense of those passages. or the ones Doug had translated. Her thoughts just added to the question of why Irene had given it to her of all people.

The silence in the room was almost tangible as Marie-Ange paged through the book, pointing out phrases that stood out to her for Doug to translate. She wasn't following any particular pattern – just turning pages slowly and indicating the ones that felt right. Things that stood out or looked interesting.

Doug, for his part, scratched away with his pen, busily translating the passages Marie-Ange was bird-dogging to him. He made a conscious effort to include Marie as well. Unlike her, he was convinced that this Irene wouldn't have given the diary to Em without a good reason. Which meant that his Southern belle had something important to bring to the table as well. There were hardly any coincidences when you threw precognition into the mix.

Stretching his back and neck, Doug looked startled when he glanced down at his watch. It seemed like five minutes ago that they'd sat down at the table, but over an hour had passed in their work, and they'd barely scratched the surface. "Want to call out for food?" he asked the two women, almost managing to forget the awkwardness of sitting at a table with his girlfriend and ex-girlfriend at the same time. "Looks like we've got a lot of work ahead of us."

Marie looked up from the papers she had been arranging on the table, also surprised that so much time had passed. “There’s just so much to process,” she said. Her stomach was still too knotted up for her to even think of eating, but she nodded in response to Doug’s question, hoping that maybe she’d feel hungry by the time food arrived.

Returning her attention to Doug’s writing, Marie read the text silently as she went. Parting at the steps of white stone: eyes of iron, hand of fire, innocence untaken, and all the twain undone. The streets stand open and empty, and the lost is found once again. The phrasing reminded her of something, but she couldn’t quite grasp the thought before it slipped away.

Marie-Ange frowned and shook her head. "The few that make sense, the only thing I can tell is that... there are more people involved, more people who want this diary than we have here, or even in the X-men." She pinched the bridge of her nose and let out a sigh. "But even that... I cannot be sure. There is so much in just -this- diary, and, I am almost certain there must be more. I have seven myself, four if I do not count drawings, and I have only done this for a few years."

Doug winced as he translated another passage. He didn't like the first thoughts that came to his mind from it. Still, he read it aloud to the others. "The one who can take all will face temptation. Her choice will determine whether one dies or all perish by her touch." He looked worriedly at Marie.

Marie paled and shuddered...more people after the book? That couldn't be a good thing. She was just about to ask if maybe they would be better off just getting rid of the diary when Doug read the passage. The look in his eyes could only mean that he understood it the same way she did. "Why can't prophecies ever be cheerful?" she asked without expecting an answer. "Irene said we were at a crossroads, that the choices we make now will shape which way the tide turns." She stared at her hands. "But Ah would never do that..." she trailed off. She shook her head, trying to force herself to focus on more than just a few words from the diary and instead think about the bigger picture.

Marie-Ange rolled her eyes in irritation. "Why do old women with mysterious powers always put terrible foreboding on every little thing? Tante does this too. 'Ya do not understand what ya are involved in, chile.', she said, with a halfway passable imitation of Tante's accent. "This is.. going to take a lot more work and time then we have now. One sentence.. Marie, we cannot be certain that means you. It is likely, but precognition is so vague that it could mean anything."

Doug grinned. "Tante makes up for it with jambalaya, though," he joked. "And I suppose it would be a lot more annoying if she were being cryptic at me instead of other people, too," he allowed. "Me, I just get told mostly that I don't eat enough, and here's some jambalaya. It's great." He shrugged and went back to his work. "The child of the elements dances freely in the sky, unaware that from within the madness will come. How long can one remain silent? Death shall fall from the sky." He frowned. "Why does death always have to fall from the sky?" he said irreverently. He leaned back in his chair. "Angie's right, though. This is going to take more than a night of sitting here translating things."

"No, sometimes death comes from below, like in the Buffy show." Marie-Ange automatically quipped back. "Perhaps we should take a break, and come back to it with fresh minds?" She finished her mug of tea, and ran a hand through her now somewhat mussed hair. "Or pass the diary between the three of us as necessary over a few weeks?"

A small smile spread across Marie’s face at the absurdity of the situation – she, her boyfriend and his ex-girlfriend all hard at work on a mutual project with the two of them joking around. Straightening the pile of translated passages in front of her, she smoothed the edges and read one that caught her eye to the others. "Sharper than a serpent's tooth this grateful child. The victim becomes the savior and the meek shall have their champion." Setting the paper down, she stifled a yawn. “Well at least there’s one that’s not all doom and gloom. Ah say that’s as good a place to stop as any, this is definitely gonna take time.” She paused and turned her attention to Marie-Ange. “Maybe you should keep it first, see what you can get out of it…you have the most experience dealing with this type of thing.” Marie kept from saying that she very much wanted the book out of her hands for a while.

"That might be best. And since Doug is down the hall, I can get translations on request faster than you would be able to." She thought for a minute. "I can make copies, once I have time, or scan the diary and archive it." Marie-Ange offered. And then looked around at her still-unfinished apartment. "Of course... that would imply I ever have free time."

Marie shifted in her seat to try and keep her legs from going numb after sitting so long. “Well, Ah’ll be posting something to the team journal, letting them know about this and see if anyone else has any ideas or resources that we could use. And you know how to get a hold of me if there’s anything you come up with that Ah can help with.” She considered offering to help Marie-Ange finish getting her things moved and settled in, but something just seemed a little too odd about that proposal, so she held her tongue.

"Sounds like a plan to me," Doug said. Standing up from his chair, he stretched his arms high over his head to get all the kinks out. "Thanks for your help, Angie," he said politely, before helping Marie up from her chair and escorting her from the apartment. "Everybody keep in touch if you have any more ideas, or figure out what anything means."