Tommy and TJ - Mildly backdated
Dec. 1st, 2017 02:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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ax_mainTJ gets dropped on the front lawn, and gets to meet the first member of her alt-family.
TJ wasn't sure what kind of drug the Timebroker was on, because this wasn't what he'd advertised. Why would she remain on this Earth that wasn't hers? Either her timeline was fixed, or it wasn't, but benching her like this made no sense. ...although the thought of seeing this world's Kurt again was nice in a way she didn't want to look at too closely. Still, she clung to Clarice for what felt like a good minute or two, the last of the Exiles she said goodbye to.
"Okay." She reluctantly let go of her recently returned friend. "Take care, babe."
Clarice smiled at her, and threw the pink javelin.
There was a characteristic blink, and TJ appeared in front of Charles's mansion. She looked just like she had last time she'd been there: blue, furry, long black hair, pointy ears, yellow eyes, and a brown leather outfit that only just covered what needed covered. Her tail was out, swinging nervously behind her as she headed to the familiar front door.
Tommy was just abouthome back to the school from a quick trip to the city when a familiar pink flash caught his eye. He'd been teasing Tamara about Clarice, sure, but that conversation had made him realize that he didn't actually know that much about the girl. What better time to fix that than now?
He veered toward the front doors, skidding to a halt at the steps. Tommy dropped his headphones back down around his neck, and shoved his ski goggles back up on his head. The green hoodie and black skinny jeans he had on weren't exactly super-aerodynamic, but they worked better for walking around downtown NYC than sweatpants or workout gear.
And then he really paused, because the girl there wasn't Clarice at all. Not unless Clarice had gotten stuck in some kind of accident with Kurt's image inducer. Or maybe it was Kurt, exploring a power Tommy hadn't known about. And an exhibitionist side. Unlikely. Did Kurt have a sister? Much more probable. And in that case...
Tommy slipped back into normal speed, flashing Kurt's sister a bright, sharp grin. "Damn. The view around here really is improving daily."
TJ started slightly at the sudden appearance of - a speedster, right. Wait, what? He looked like a younger version of, not her uncle, but... "Tom?"
That caught him up short, because while there were some gaps in his memory from the spring particularly, he couldn't have forgotten meeting another mutant looking the way she did. Right? He cocked his head at her. "Have we met? Because I'm sure I would have remembered that. Or has Kurt been telling stories? I promise only the good stuff you've heard is true."
That made TJ laugh, giving him a quick glimpse of her fangs. "No, sorry. I'm offended Kurt hasn't said a word about me, though." She didn't sound very offended; she was just happy at the thought of seeing Kurt again. And Tom, Tom as a teenager, that was bound to be fun. "I'm TJ. I stopped by a while back with my friends? That whole business with Havok? Unless you just showed up and have no idea what I'm talking about," she finished with an amused pout, since he didn't look like he had a clue. "Long story short, I come from another world and I just got dumped on your front step. Any clue where Kurt is right now? Or Logan?"
And now he was trying to fit more pieces in that really didn't want to go. Another world, okay. Fine. He could cope with time-travelling reincarnated souls, he'd seen Limbo, he could cope with 'another world.' Probably.
"I go by 'Tommy' in this world, for the record... and Kurt's around somewhere. I think he had a study group this afternoon. But I have no idea who Logan is. Is he another one of your relatives?" Except she'd said something else that might be a lot more important. "What thing with Havok? Is he okay? I just saw him and Fatale, like, last week." He probably wasn't supposed to be talking about the Arizona trip to anyone, but if there'd been trouble he wanted to know about it.
"Wait," TJ said, holding up a three-fingered hand. "Study group? Kurt has study group? Like, he leads study group, right?" That would make more sense. Except... how did he not know who Logan was? He wasn't running things here like he was in her world, but everybody knew who he was, all the same.
What did that have to do with anything? Unless Kurt had been telling them something different back home? "Taking, as far as I know. He's pretty on the ball in Algebra, but that's like the only class I have with him. The circus wasn't really big on teaching English lit, go figure, so he's a couple of years behind there. What thing with Havok?" he persisted.
"There was no thing with Havok," TJ muttered from behind her facepalm. Her tail had slumped at the news, but now she straightened up, and it flicked through the air in irritation. "Seriously, Timebroker?" she let out at, well, the sky, for lack of a better direction to aim her anger. Not only was he benching her, but in a world she didn't know, where her dad was still a student? Ugh. At least her dad existed, she supposed.
She looked back at Tom - Tommy - and took a deep breath. "Sorry. Wrong universe. Who's in charge here?"
"Xavier, who else?" Tommy shrugged and poked his thumb toward the name plate beside the school doors. "Old dude, bald, wheelchair, lofty ideals about human-mutant coexistence. Who's the Timebroker?" he asked, suddenly very interested indeed. "Were you hanging out with a time traveler?" Actually confirming the existence of a powerful time traveler could go a long way toward finally proving or disproving the whole him and Billy and Wanda mess.
Charles was alive, and not evil! That, at least, put a smile on TJ's face. "Time construct. He sent us around on those missions, from one world to the next, and he's... stranded me here now. I don't even know." She smiled hopefully at Tommy. "Take me to Charles?" Who knew where his office was in this world.
"Yeah, sure," Tommy replied, distracted. "But wait a sec. If you're from an alternate world, and you're not Kurt's sister, then who are you? Or are you from an alternate world where you are his sister but he's not at Xavier's?" Because why else would she be surprised by any of this?
TJ made a face, not because she didn't want to tell him, but... Some people freaked at the thought of alternate families. Still, given who he was, Tommy totally deserved to know. "I'm his daughter, actually." She paused, then added, "And kind of your half sister. My mom's Wanda."
"You have got to be fucking kidding me." That actually floored him, and he gaped at her, the skidding halt of his mental processing abilities replaced with amusement bordering on hysteria. The grin spread wide across his face at the absolute utter absurdity of the entire thing. "Kurt and Wanda. Wanda. Seriously? She's freaked out enough about having kids practically her own age already. Those probability powers of hers are the worst, you know that? The literal worst. Between her and Billy I'm amazed we aren't getting alien invasions and volcanoes hitting on the regular."
He paused, processed a little bit more. "Are you saying that there's a universe where Kurt is my stepfather? You cannot tell him that. No. He'll be insufferable. He'll try and ground me for pranking him."
TJ laughed at that, and shook her head. "I've never been to a world where that happened. I'll tell him. Repeatedly, if I need to." Her tail swung restlessly behind her, and she touched her tongue to one of her fangs, a thoughtful tick. "So both of them are teenagers here? I've never met them as teenagers. This is gonna be a special edition of the weirdness of world-hopping."
"You're as bad as he is," Tommy groused aloud. "And yeah. She and Pietro are seventeen, I think? Kurt's my age. Him, me and Bobby were some of the first guys here when Xavier starting collecting kids this summer."
Tommy narrowed his eyes at her, frowning. "You called me 'Tom' when you saw me. I assumed it was 'cause you knew me through Kurt's stories, but since that's not the case - what version of me do you know?" Was he a bad guy? A dork like Billy? Dead?
"You were all grown up, and happily married," TJ stated with another one of her sharp grins. "You were pretty cool, actually. Totally snarktastic."
"See, now I know you're full of shit," Tommy snorted. "Not on the cool part, that's obvious. But the rest of it? Deeply unlikely. You must have mixed me up with Billy."
"Let me see..." TJ tilted her head to the side, looking him up and down. "The hair, the speed, the attitude. The not being my uncle." Because come on, all of those worked for Uncle P as well. "Nope. It was you."
Pietro was a thing, because of course he was. It was like Billy and Tommy, he guessed - whatever reality accepted one of them had to take both. Or maybe they always went as a foursome? Except not, because TJ was here and their ages wherever she was from didn't line up. Married? Poor sucker, whoever they were. "This is making my head hurt, for the record," he pointed at her as he began walking backwards up the stairs, regular snail-speed.
"Welcome to my life for the past two years," TJ told him with a grin, bouncing up the steps after him.
Yeah, she was Kurt-like all right, even beyond the really blindingly obvious similarities of her physical mutations. Was there Wanda in her as well? Tommy caught himself looking her over, trying to pick out any similarities that might prove she was somehow an extra relation. "So if Kurt and Wanda are your parents," he asked, his doubts really obvious in his voice, "where did you grow up? With the Brotherhood? Is she even with them still in your 'verse?"
The bounce went right out of TJ's step. "What? She's... seriously? She's with the 'annihilate all baselines' squad here?" Please tell her the Brotherhood stood for something else here, please.
Maybe the Brotherhood wasn't on great terms with everyone in her world either. "Her dad's running it, what else was she going to do?" he asked, shrugging. "We've partied with them before -- most of them are alright. Magneto grandstands a bunch, made this big public address on tv recently that shook a bunch of people up, but no-one's killed anyone if that's what you're worried about. They're all noise." Right now, anyway. He had his doubts, especially about Eileen, but it didn't seem like the time to delve into details.
TJ kept looking at him for a moment, and then said, "I really gotta talk to Charles." She paused, though, worrying a fang into her bottom lip. "Will you let me tell Kurt about... well, me? I'd rather he heard it from me."
"Yeah," he agreed, abandoning his plan to start texting Kurt the minute he got TJ to Xavier's office. 'Charles'? Since when was anyone but Dr. MacTaggart on first-name basis with the old guy? "No worries. But try and get a photo when you do," he added, and grinned, just because. "I'm dying to see the look on his face. It'll be epic."
"I'll think about it," TJ told him with an amused smirk, although it was a moot point. Even if she'd had a cell phone to pull it off, she wouldn't have done it.
"We're going to get along just fine." He didn't need to watch where he was going as they headed down the hall. Xavier's office was right underneath the boys' dorm rooms, and he knew that hallway blindfolded and backwards. "As long as we can forget the whole 'hitting on you' thing when you first popped in there. Considering we're apparently related."
"Not really, but something like it," TJ agreed, already cataloguing differences from the mansion she'd grown up in as they went. "Enough of something like it that, yeah. Don't check me out again. It's gross."
Tommy made a face. "Agreed." The hall wasn't long and they were at the door before he was ready to walk away, so many more questions bubbling up. And she hadn't even answered most of the ones he'd already asked. Don't think he hadn't noticed. "Behold, the headmaster's office," he proclaimed anyway, gesturing at the door.
"It's even in the place I'm used to," TJ stated mock-cheerfully. She was pretty sure Charles was expecting her by now, and she gave Tommy a genuine smile. "Thanks. I guess I'll see you around, if I really am stranded here." She wasn't happy at the prospect of being stuck here, but at least Tommy seemed all right. Alternate families could be very bad things, on occasion, but maybe this time, things would be okay.
"Say goodbye before you vanish into the timestream." Hardly likely, and this was probably all just so much bullshit anyway (any second now Teddy was going to un-shift or something and start pointing-and-laughing at Tommy for being gullible). But he said it anyway. "Hey. Just in case I don't see you again. Who the hell was dumb enough to marry me?"
TJ paused then, and gave him a bright smile, although it looked sharper than she meant on account of the flash of her fangs. "An amazing woman, actually, deadly with a bow. Kate Bishop. You know her?"
The name meant absolutely nothing. Something faintly disappointed curled up in him, but what had he expected to hear? She was hardly likely to name someone like... Jeanne-Marie. Or Shen. "Never heard of her." He replied breezily, backing up a couple of steps and returning her smile. Not quite as sharp, given his regular old teeth. "Probably for the best. High school romance never lasts anyway."
"Yeah, that's what they say," TJ confirmed, tail swinging a little restlessly. "See you around, Tommy."
And with that, she turned to knock on Charles's door, heart swelling when she heard the familiar voice inside her mind tell her, "Please come in, TJ."
Of course he was expecting her. Baldy knew everything except when it was convenient for him not to. And Tommy didn't care if he'd heard that, either. He watched the door close, then headed back the way he'd come, pulling out his phone as he went. He'd promised not to tell Kurt, and that probably applied to Wanda as well, but she hadn't said anything about Billy.
To Billy: Dude. You are never going to believe this.
TJ wasn't sure what kind of drug the Timebroker was on, because this wasn't what he'd advertised. Why would she remain on this Earth that wasn't hers? Either her timeline was fixed, or it wasn't, but benching her like this made no sense. ...although the thought of seeing this world's Kurt again was nice in a way she didn't want to look at too closely. Still, she clung to Clarice for what felt like a good minute or two, the last of the Exiles she said goodbye to.
"Okay." She reluctantly let go of her recently returned friend. "Take care, babe."
Clarice smiled at her, and threw the pink javelin.
There was a characteristic blink, and TJ appeared in front of Charles's mansion. She looked just like she had last time she'd been there: blue, furry, long black hair, pointy ears, yellow eyes, and a brown leather outfit that only just covered what needed covered. Her tail was out, swinging nervously behind her as she headed to the familiar front door.
Tommy was just about
He veered toward the front doors, skidding to a halt at the steps. Tommy dropped his headphones back down around his neck, and shoved his ski goggles back up on his head. The green hoodie and black skinny jeans he had on weren't exactly super-aerodynamic, but they worked better for walking around downtown NYC than sweatpants or workout gear.
And then he really paused, because the girl there wasn't Clarice at all. Not unless Clarice had gotten stuck in some kind of accident with Kurt's image inducer. Or maybe it was Kurt, exploring a power Tommy hadn't known about. And an exhibitionist side. Unlikely. Did Kurt have a sister? Much more probable. And in that case...
Tommy slipped back into normal speed, flashing Kurt's sister a bright, sharp grin. "Damn. The view around here really is improving daily."
TJ started slightly at the sudden appearance of - a speedster, right. Wait, what? He looked like a younger version of, not her uncle, but... "Tom?"
That caught him up short, because while there were some gaps in his memory from the spring particularly, he couldn't have forgotten meeting another mutant looking the way she did. Right? He cocked his head at her. "Have we met? Because I'm sure I would have remembered that. Or has Kurt been telling stories? I promise only the good stuff you've heard is true."
That made TJ laugh, giving him a quick glimpse of her fangs. "No, sorry. I'm offended Kurt hasn't said a word about me, though." She didn't sound very offended; she was just happy at the thought of seeing Kurt again. And Tom, Tom as a teenager, that was bound to be fun. "I'm TJ. I stopped by a while back with my friends? That whole business with Havok? Unless you just showed up and have no idea what I'm talking about," she finished with an amused pout, since he didn't look like he had a clue. "Long story short, I come from another world and I just got dumped on your front step. Any clue where Kurt is right now? Or Logan?"
And now he was trying to fit more pieces in that really didn't want to go. Another world, okay. Fine. He could cope with time-travelling reincarnated souls, he'd seen Limbo, he could cope with 'another world.' Probably.
"I go by 'Tommy' in this world, for the record... and Kurt's around somewhere. I think he had a study group this afternoon. But I have no idea who Logan is. Is he another one of your relatives?" Except she'd said something else that might be a lot more important. "What thing with Havok? Is he okay? I just saw him and Fatale, like, last week." He probably wasn't supposed to be talking about the Arizona trip to anyone, but if there'd been trouble he wanted to know about it.
"Wait," TJ said, holding up a three-fingered hand. "Study group? Kurt has study group? Like, he leads study group, right?" That would make more sense. Except... how did he not know who Logan was? He wasn't running things here like he was in her world, but everybody knew who he was, all the same.
What did that have to do with anything? Unless Kurt had been telling them something different back home? "Taking, as far as I know. He's pretty on the ball in Algebra, but that's like the only class I have with him. The circus wasn't really big on teaching English lit, go figure, so he's a couple of years behind there. What thing with Havok?" he persisted.
"There was no thing with Havok," TJ muttered from behind her facepalm. Her tail had slumped at the news, but now she straightened up, and it flicked through the air in irritation. "Seriously, Timebroker?" she let out at, well, the sky, for lack of a better direction to aim her anger. Not only was he benching her, but in a world she didn't know, where her dad was still a student? Ugh. At least her dad existed, she supposed.
She looked back at Tom - Tommy - and took a deep breath. "Sorry. Wrong universe. Who's in charge here?"
"Xavier, who else?" Tommy shrugged and poked his thumb toward the name plate beside the school doors. "Old dude, bald, wheelchair, lofty ideals about human-mutant coexistence. Who's the Timebroker?" he asked, suddenly very interested indeed. "Were you hanging out with a time traveler?" Actually confirming the existence of a powerful time traveler could go a long way toward finally proving or disproving the whole him and Billy and Wanda mess.
Charles was alive, and not evil! That, at least, put a smile on TJ's face. "Time construct. He sent us around on those missions, from one world to the next, and he's... stranded me here now. I don't even know." She smiled hopefully at Tommy. "Take me to Charles?" Who knew where his office was in this world.
"Yeah, sure," Tommy replied, distracted. "But wait a sec. If you're from an alternate world, and you're not Kurt's sister, then who are you? Or are you from an alternate world where you are his sister but he's not at Xavier's?" Because why else would she be surprised by any of this?
TJ made a face, not because she didn't want to tell him, but... Some people freaked at the thought of alternate families. Still, given who he was, Tommy totally deserved to know. "I'm his daughter, actually." She paused, then added, "And kind of your half sister. My mom's Wanda."
"You have got to be fucking kidding me." That actually floored him, and he gaped at her, the skidding halt of his mental processing abilities replaced with amusement bordering on hysteria. The grin spread wide across his face at the absolute utter absurdity of the entire thing. "Kurt and Wanda. Wanda. Seriously? She's freaked out enough about having kids practically her own age already. Those probability powers of hers are the worst, you know that? The literal worst. Between her and Billy I'm amazed we aren't getting alien invasions and volcanoes hitting on the regular."
He paused, processed a little bit more. "Are you saying that there's a universe where Kurt is my stepfather? You cannot tell him that. No. He'll be insufferable. He'll try and ground me for pranking him."
TJ laughed at that, and shook her head. "I've never been to a world where that happened. I'll tell him. Repeatedly, if I need to." Her tail swung restlessly behind her, and she touched her tongue to one of her fangs, a thoughtful tick. "So both of them are teenagers here? I've never met them as teenagers. This is gonna be a special edition of the weirdness of world-hopping."
"You're as bad as he is," Tommy groused aloud. "And yeah. She and Pietro are seventeen, I think? Kurt's my age. Him, me and Bobby were some of the first guys here when Xavier starting collecting kids this summer."
Tommy narrowed his eyes at her, frowning. "You called me 'Tom' when you saw me. I assumed it was 'cause you knew me through Kurt's stories, but since that's not the case - what version of me do you know?" Was he a bad guy? A dork like Billy? Dead?
"You were all grown up, and happily married," TJ stated with another one of her sharp grins. "You were pretty cool, actually. Totally snarktastic."
"See, now I know you're full of shit," Tommy snorted. "Not on the cool part, that's obvious. But the rest of it? Deeply unlikely. You must have mixed me up with Billy."
"Let me see..." TJ tilted her head to the side, looking him up and down. "The hair, the speed, the attitude. The not being my uncle." Because come on, all of those worked for Uncle P as well. "Nope. It was you."
Pietro was a thing, because of course he was. It was like Billy and Tommy, he guessed - whatever reality accepted one of them had to take both. Or maybe they always went as a foursome? Except not, because TJ was here and their ages wherever she was from didn't line up. Married? Poor sucker, whoever they were. "This is making my head hurt, for the record," he pointed at her as he began walking backwards up the stairs, regular snail-speed.
"Welcome to my life for the past two years," TJ told him with a grin, bouncing up the steps after him.
Yeah, she was Kurt-like all right, even beyond the really blindingly obvious similarities of her physical mutations. Was there Wanda in her as well? Tommy caught himself looking her over, trying to pick out any similarities that might prove she was somehow an extra relation. "So if Kurt and Wanda are your parents," he asked, his doubts really obvious in his voice, "where did you grow up? With the Brotherhood? Is she even with them still in your 'verse?"
The bounce went right out of TJ's step. "What? She's... seriously? She's with the 'annihilate all baselines' squad here?" Please tell her the Brotherhood stood for something else here, please.
Maybe the Brotherhood wasn't on great terms with everyone in her world either. "Her dad's running it, what else was she going to do?" he asked, shrugging. "We've partied with them before -- most of them are alright. Magneto grandstands a bunch, made this big public address on tv recently that shook a bunch of people up, but no-one's killed anyone if that's what you're worried about. They're all noise." Right now, anyway. He had his doubts, especially about Eileen, but it didn't seem like the time to delve into details.
TJ kept looking at him for a moment, and then said, "I really gotta talk to Charles." She paused, though, worrying a fang into her bottom lip. "Will you let me tell Kurt about... well, me? I'd rather he heard it from me."
"Yeah," he agreed, abandoning his plan to start texting Kurt the minute he got TJ to Xavier's office. 'Charles'? Since when was anyone but Dr. MacTaggart on first-name basis with the old guy? "No worries. But try and get a photo when you do," he added, and grinned, just because. "I'm dying to see the look on his face. It'll be epic."
"I'll think about it," TJ told him with an amused smirk, although it was a moot point. Even if she'd had a cell phone to pull it off, she wouldn't have done it.
"We're going to get along just fine." He didn't need to watch where he was going as they headed down the hall. Xavier's office was right underneath the boys' dorm rooms, and he knew that hallway blindfolded and backwards. "As long as we can forget the whole 'hitting on you' thing when you first popped in there. Considering we're apparently related."
"Not really, but something like it," TJ agreed, already cataloguing differences from the mansion she'd grown up in as they went. "Enough of something like it that, yeah. Don't check me out again. It's gross."
Tommy made a face. "Agreed." The hall wasn't long and they were at the door before he was ready to walk away, so many more questions bubbling up. And she hadn't even answered most of the ones he'd already asked. Don't think he hadn't noticed. "Behold, the headmaster's office," he proclaimed anyway, gesturing at the door.
"It's even in the place I'm used to," TJ stated mock-cheerfully. She was pretty sure Charles was expecting her by now, and she gave Tommy a genuine smile. "Thanks. I guess I'll see you around, if I really am stranded here." She wasn't happy at the prospect of being stuck here, but at least Tommy seemed all right. Alternate families could be very bad things, on occasion, but maybe this time, things would be okay.
"Say goodbye before you vanish into the timestream." Hardly likely, and this was probably all just so much bullshit anyway (any second now Teddy was going to un-shift or something and start pointing-and-laughing at Tommy for being gullible). But he said it anyway. "Hey. Just in case I don't see you again. Who the hell was dumb enough to marry me?"
TJ paused then, and gave him a bright smile, although it looked sharper than she meant on account of the flash of her fangs. "An amazing woman, actually, deadly with a bow. Kate Bishop. You know her?"
The name meant absolutely nothing. Something faintly disappointed curled up in him, but what had he expected to hear? She was hardly likely to name someone like... Jeanne-Marie. Or Shen. "Never heard of her." He replied breezily, backing up a couple of steps and returning her smile. Not quite as sharp, given his regular old teeth. "Probably for the best. High school romance never lasts anyway."
"Yeah, that's what they say," TJ confirmed, tail swinging a little restlessly. "See you around, Tommy."
And with that, she turned to knock on Charles's door, heart swelling when she heard the familiar voice inside her mind tell her, "Please come in, TJ."
Of course he was expecting her. Baldy knew everything except when it was convenient for him not to. And Tommy didn't care if he'd heard that, either. He watched the door close, then headed back the way he'd come, pulling out his phone as he went. He'd promised not to tell Kurt, and that probably applied to Wanda as well, but she hadn't said anything about Billy.
To Billy: Dude. You are never going to believe this.
