Bobby and Tommy | Backdated to 6/24
Jun. 24th, 2017 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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ax_mainBobby and Tommy meet. The world may never be the same.
The door to the infirmary opened, and Tommy rose to his feet. But it wasn’t one of the adults coming in, not this time. He could take the moment for the chance it was, zip past the guy in the doorway before he even registered Tommy coming. But – and he was going to kick himself for this later on, that was for damn sure – he didn’t. He was poised to make a break for it if something happened, mind you, ready on his toes and his arms loose. And he waited.
Bobby entered the infirmary with a bundle of clothes in his arms and looked around. Huh. This was definitely a few steps up from the health room at his old school, but then, he supposed the health room at his old school had the option of calling the students' doctors. Or the hospital. Or...
Right. On a mission. He caught sight of a student standing near one of the beds, and grinned crookedly. “Tommy Shepherd?” After all, there couldn't be that many white haired students around. It was a good bet.
Okay, this was fine. Tommy eyed the guy over and dismissed him as an actual threat. Student council dork, more like it, all earnest and nice. Even just the lack of white coat let him dial down the adrenaline a notch, and Tommy settled back on his feet – though he didn’t relax completely. “Who’s asking?” he shot back instead of answering directly, adding the kind of cocky grin that tended to give teachers a twitch above their eye.
Ahh, yes. One of those. Bobby found himself grinning back. At least there'd likely be someone else giving teachers fits. He could get away with murder when there was a genuine smart ass in class. “The laundry delivery guy. Though I mean, if you want to just grab a gown from the infirmary and walk around campus like that? I'm not gonna judge. Much.”
And that required another reframe – he wasn’t a total loss. And it looked like there were actual clothes not designed for dorks in the pile, which helped. “I could,” he replied with a more honest grin. “It’d give the girls something better than you to look at.”
“Girl. Singular.” Bobby grinned smugly and tossed the clothes towards the other guy. “And I've already got the inside track, thank you very much.”
Tommy grabbed the clothes out of the air and ducked behind the curtain to change before the kid had finished his throw. “What kind of lousy operation is this, anyway?” he grumbled aloud. He balled up the sweats and almost chucked them toward the laundry bag by the wall, but thought better of it. No knowing when he'd get anything more. He folded them instead and dropped them on the bed with the rest. The whole operation took less than a second, leaving him in jeans and a long-sleeved tshirt that covered the still-healing iv ports and needle scars on his arms. Not that he cared what anyone thought. “I thought this place was a school. Boys only?”
“Well, pretty sure Kitty's not a boy. And there's a whole dorm set up for girls, so I'm guessing they're expecting more. Maybe they heard you were here and made a run for it?” Bobby smirked, then jerked his head towards the door. ”Ready for the grand tour?”
“May as well.” Tommy shrugged, shoved his hands in his pockets more for the novelty of having clothes with pockets again, and sauntered slowly over. Dragging his heels would probably piss himself off a lot sooner than it would anyone else, but it helped remind him not to be too curious, too interested. Not until he knew what they wanted from him, anyway.
“So where'd Xavier find you, laundry boy? Another rescue operation?” He didn't look like he'd been through the same kind of shit as Tommy - or Kurt - but it could just mean he'd been there longer.
“Nah, I just showed up on the front step one day. With my basket of laundry. I got lost going home from the laundromat.” Bobby rolled his eyes, then looked over at Tommy with interest. ”Seriously, another? Did Shades break you out, too?” Which would, at least, explain the stay in the infirmary. The guy'd probably had part of a wall drop on him.
“Who?” Tommy frowned at him. “I broke myself out. I’d have been in Cancun by now if it hadn’t been for-” if it hadn’t been for the pain, the only half-remembered sensation of his brain on fire, a voice inside his head that had tried to talk him through the worst of the wreckage. “Getting caught up with all this.” He left it vague instead.
But laundry boy had said ‘too.’ He didn’t look like a mutant, but that didn’t mean anything. “How long were you in for?”
“Just overnight. They were still trying to figure out what to do with me,” Bobby admitted. He looked sidelong at the other boy as they headed for the elevator. “You busted yourself out, though? That's hardcore, man.”
Which explained why the kid didn’t look like he’d been through the same kind of wringer. He’d gotten off easy. Torn between envy and relief, Tommy ignored the whole bundle of weird feelings and moved on. “Not like anyone else was going to do it. As far as I knew at the time. So what’s your deal?” He moved the conversation on as well. What kinds of things were mutants supposed to be able to do? He was the only one he knew of with the speed trick. “Shapeshifting? Flying?” He made a show of looking the guy up and down. “Not super-strength.”
“Hey, you don't know that? Look how I easily carried that pile of clothes!” Bobby protested. Which...yeah, okay, that probably made the other kid's point for him, didn't it? “Anyway, wrong on all counts. Flying would be cool, but...” he paused for a moment and concentrated and, once the pile of clothing the other boy was holding acquired a thin layer of frost, grinned. “I'm cooler.”
Tommy could immediately think of about a half-dozen ways that power could be really useful, almost all of them illegal. He juggled the cold clothes back and forth until they warmed up a bit again and he wasn’t at risk of anything frost-biting itself to him. “Not bad,” he conceded. “But ‘you’ and ‘cool’ still aren’t even in the same zip code.” He kicked off down the hall, skidding to a halt at the door to what looked like stairs way at the other end. “Is this a tour or what? Show me something I don’t know.”
“Whoa, is that your thing?” Bobby said instead, ignoring the request as he started at the now distant figure, his jaw dropping. Talk about getting away from the scene of the prank. He was going to have to watch out for that, wasn't he? “And also? You can take the stairs if you want, but the elevator's right here.” Grinning, he took another two steps and pressed the button.
Tommy didn’t bite. The stairs were unlocked, which surprised him for a moment. Places like this, everything that didn’t require regular access was usually under lockdown. Part of him still wanted to believe in fairy tales – that this was a regular school, not some new kind of detention; that he’d been plucked out of danger out of the goodness of someone’s heart and not because they needed him for something. The rest of him knew better.
But the stairs were unlocked, which was a good first step. And he could take them up and keep going, if he wanted to – all the way out the front door and say ‘so long’ to whatever bullshit was going to land on his head next.
Except the stairs weren’t locked, which meant that they weren’t actually prisoners, at least not as far as moving around inside went. And that made him curious. So he just went up the one floor, and made sure he was leaning against the wall outside the elevator door, examining his nails, when it slid open. “Took you long enough.”
“Show off.” Bobby stepped out of the elevator, his eyebrows rising. “The thing is? I'm the one who knows where your room is. And the kitchen. And the way to the girls' dorm. Are you sure you want to ditch me?”
Point made. Tommy snorted, and he didn’t fight the small smile that tugged up one corner of his mouth. Kid was alright. “If I wanted to ditch you, you’d never even see me go.”
“Oh come on. Who'd want to ditch me?” Okay, the list was long and varied, but whatever. Bobby feigned an air of nonchalance and started down the hall. “Anyway, this is the main floor. Boring, mostly, other than the dining room and kitchen, unless you're a fan of libraries or classrooms, which I'm not.” He paused and turned to look at the other boy. “Hungry? Because we can stop at the kitchen if you want.”
Trick question. And friendly face or not, all of Tommy’s instincts flipped back to high alert, status: be very, very careful. Frank had only put the locks on the fridge after Tommy’s mutation had emerged, but that had been standard operating procedure everywhere else Tommy had lived. They were bad kids, after all. Not to be trusted. “Meals down in the gulag have been at eight, noon and six, sharp,” he tested the waters carefully. “We’re nowhere close to dinner. Someone’s going to notice.”
That wasn’t going to stop him, but he could be in and out faster knowing what he was dealing with.
Bobby shrugged, obviously unconcerned by the prospect. “So? That's what the kitchen's for - it's a help-yourself kind of thing. Kitty and I made pizza yesterday at four after she stole my sandwich. No one cared.”
That seemed fake, but okay. Maybe it would be more carefully watched once more kids arrived, though from the empty halls it seemed like that was going to take a while. “Sure,” he said after a pause that felt like forever to him, but followed fast on the heels of laundry boy’s words. “Whatever’s there can’t be worse than hospital trays.”
“Were they really awful? What were you down there for, anyway?” Bobby asked curiously. After all, the other guy seemed pretty okay to him.
It would be easy enough to lie; from what he’d said he’d barely been through the front door before he’d been rescued. He’d never know the difference. On the other hand- “Docs at the research facility were screwing around with my powers.” He dropped the information casually, keeping eye contact, watching to see what kind of response he’d get. Shock value made everything more entertaining. “Doped me up with all kinds of shit, tried to turn me into a living weapon. They got pretty pissed when I blew up one of their labs instead.”
And a lab tech, though he’d seen the guy later – shorter hair, missing an eyebrow, jabbing Tommy with a needle the size of an elephant tranquilizer, but alive. So Tommy didn’t have murder on his conscience, at least. Not that he’d had control at the time, though they’d treated him like he had anyway. He was sorely tempted to go back and show them the kind of hell he wanted to unleash, now that his head was clear. “If you really were at the same place, you’re lucky Xavier and his guy pulled you out when they did. I was there three months.”
“I wasn't.” And thank god for that, at least - Bobby'd thought his experience had sucked, but it had nothing on what Tommy had dealt with. He took a deep breath and shook his head, breaking free of the horror of the other guy's story. “I was in police custody, for...well, something that had happened. But nothing like that, man. You're right - I was seriously lucky.” And wouldn't have been, most likely, if it hadn't been for Summers breaking him out.
Fuck. He was going to have to feel guilty about that prank now, wasn't he?
And now things were getting much too serious again. Tommy grinned. “Police custody? What’d you do, knock over a dry cleaner’s? They sentence you to cleaning erasers and giving tours to the latest inmates?”
“Oh please. Forget the dry cleaners - I went straight to the laundromat,” Bobby lied, gesturing away the rest of Tommy's guesses. “All those quarters? Way too good a target.”
“Good choice.” Tommy smirked. “So where’s the kitchen? Unless you were bullshitting me.”
“About food? Never.” Relieved that Tommy wasn't going to push the issue, Bobby made a “follow me” gesture and headed through the reception area towards the kitchen. “So where are you from? Originally, I mean?”
Tommy followed, checking out the room as they moved through. He must have come in this way originally but that was as hazy as everything else that came before, only some of his memories clear enough to be believed. “Jersey.” Like the accent didn’t give it away? “What about you?”
“Long Island.” Bobby smirked. “By comparison to Kitty, we're practically former neighbors.”
“Unless she’s from China or something, Kurt’s got her beat. The other guy down in the infirmary with me,” Tommy added, because this guy – who still hadn’t introduced himself – wasn’t the only one who knew things. “He’s German.”
“That's definitely got Kitty beat. She's from Chicago.” Bobby grinned. “Which may seem like a foreign country, but probably isn't.” He turned the corner into the kitchen and waved his arm with a flourish. “Welcome to Chez Xavier. If you can't find it, it's probably in the next cabinet.”
Tommy had expected an industrial kitchen, cold and clean, the kind of place that could get sprayed down with a firehose and produced three meals of incredibly dubious origins per person per day. The kind of place with inventory lists taped to each cupboard and locks to keep out the curious. Not... this.
It looked like the kind of kitchen you’d find in a home. A really big home for someone really rich, but a home. There was wood everywhere and chairs that looked like they’d been designed to actually be comfortable to human beings. He did a zip around the kitchen while laundry guy was still talking, the cabinets flapping shut in his wake. None of them were locked, all of them were full. As promised. That sense of hope flared up again, deep inside, before he squashed it flat again.
Fine; they said food was available for anyone? He’d take them up on it. Find out just how far that permission really went.
The sandwich he shoved together wasn’t a real fatboy – couldn’t do that without cooking and he didn’t have time to wait for the oven to heat up – but between the cold cuts, cheeses and stacks of vegetables, he managed to pile the slab of bread pretty damn high. By the time laundry guy would probably be turning around and looking for him, Tommy had settled in the chair at the far end of the kitchen island, his feet up on the counter, massive sandwich in hand.
Bobby's eyebrows climbed as he looked around, then found Tommy'd already made himself comfortable at the table. With a sandwich. Bobby glared at him mock-accusingly.
“You could have made me one while you were at it,” he complained. “Delivery service and tour guiding is hard work, y'know.” That said, he headed over to the fridge himself. Obviously, if sandwiches were being had, he needed one, too.
“Hey, I don’t know what snowmen eat.” Tommy shrugged eloquently, and wrapped his face around about half of the sandwich. Screw polite; there wasn’t anyone here he was trying to impress, and he was hungry.
“Food? Hence the kitchen?” Letting out a snort of disgust (because honestly, it took ages to put together a sandwich, and why couldn't he have gotten super speed, because that would've been awesome), Bobby opened the fridge and started pulling out ingredients.
“So ‘Kitty’s’ our Pink Ranger – who’s ‘Shades’? If you tell me that’s a real name, I’m going to have to go punch someone.” Tommy’d seen Xavier, of course, and he and the medical staff were on way too intimate an acquaintance. But as far as other students went – not so much.
“Scott Summers. You can't miss him; he wears these red sunglasses everywhere. I guess they keep his powers in check - and believe me, you want them in check.” Bobby grinned crookedly over his shoulder as he put his sandwich together. “I used to say my dad had a death glare, but he's got nothing on Scott.”
Hunh. That was interesting. “Laser beams?”
“Kinda? They don't seem to burn anything, though.” Sandwich assembled, Bobby tossed the leftover ingredients back in the fridge and came over to plop down in one of the remaining chairs. “I saw the guy punch through a wall with them, though. Like, BAM!, no more wall.” He took a bite of his sandwich and mumbled “Wa' dos Kur' do?”
“He’s blue?” Tommy offered up. “He’s a gymnast or an acrobat; he seems alright. He’s about as messed up as I was when I first got here, so I dunno if he’ll be up soon.”
Bobby swallowed hard. “Blue? Seriously? I didn't know mutants came in technicolor.” Which was cool, actually, though it definitely put a whole dent in his dad's theory that mutants should just keep their abilities to themselves. Kinda hard to do if you were blue.
Actually, it was kinda hard to do anyway. But being blue had to make it a whole hell of a lot harder.
Tommy shoved the rest of his sandwich into his mouth and rolled his eyes. “We can make ice and have laser eyes and break the sound barrier, and 'blue' is what's weird to you? My hair and eyes were brown until a couple of years ago. Boom - superspeed, and boom - unasked-for bleach job, all at once.”
“It's a pretty crappy bleach job,” Bobby retorted, adding a smirk for good measure. “Just saying.” Granted, the other guy had a point, but still. He'd never seen anyone who was blue outside of Avatar. The idea was pretty cool.
“Blame my X-gene. It wasn’t my idea. Still,” he considered, stretching. “It adds to the mystique.”
Bobby smirked. “There's no mystique. It just looks like you got pranked. By someone who bought a shitload of bleach.” Leaning back in his chair, he took another bite.
“Eh, what would you know about style, Long Island?” Tommy shot back without any heat. “You dress like you lived next door to Wal-Mart.”
“Gimme a break.” Bobby grinned and stretched his legs out in front of him. “Next door was the Food Fair. The Wal-Mart was up the block. Obviously you've never been to Port Jefferson.”
Tommy actually caught that echoing grin curling up his lips again, and he didn’t try and stop it. “I’ll put it on my list of places to avoid at all costs.” The part of Tommy that had kept him alive this long was shrieking at him—why wasn’t he running? Maybe it was the surreal experience of sitting and chilling in a freaking mansion with a guy who actually talked like a human being. And besides, the more information he had about where he was and the other people around him, the better. “Other than make pizzas and go to class, what passes for fun around here?”
“Dude, I've been here for two days. I'm not exactly an expert. But there haven't been any classes yet,” Bobby grinned, “and there's an X-Box hooked up to a fucking huge TV in what the Professor calls the Day Room. If you like video games.”
Now that sounded more promising. Tommy nodded, exuding Innocence. “Depends on the game. I haven’t exactly had a chance to play anything recent. Bet I could still whup your ass, though.”
Bobby got to his feet and grinned, sandwich still in hand. “That sounds like a challenge.”
“You might as well just concede now, Olaf.” Tommy followed, running his dishes to the sink purely out of habit. “Even without my powers you don’t stand a chance.”
“No powers or I'll freeze your ass, Gonzalez.” Bobby smirked as he dumped his own in the sink. He'd clean them up later, whatever. The game was on.
The door to the infirmary opened, and Tommy rose to his feet. But it wasn’t one of the adults coming in, not this time. He could take the moment for the chance it was, zip past the guy in the doorway before he even registered Tommy coming. But – and he was going to kick himself for this later on, that was for damn sure – he didn’t. He was poised to make a break for it if something happened, mind you, ready on his toes and his arms loose. And he waited.
Bobby entered the infirmary with a bundle of clothes in his arms and looked around. Huh. This was definitely a few steps up from the health room at his old school, but then, he supposed the health room at his old school had the option of calling the students' doctors. Or the hospital. Or...
Right. On a mission. He caught sight of a student standing near one of the beds, and grinned crookedly. “Tommy Shepherd?” After all, there couldn't be that many white haired students around. It was a good bet.
Okay, this was fine. Tommy eyed the guy over and dismissed him as an actual threat. Student council dork, more like it, all earnest and nice. Even just the lack of white coat let him dial down the adrenaline a notch, and Tommy settled back on his feet – though he didn’t relax completely. “Who’s asking?” he shot back instead of answering directly, adding the kind of cocky grin that tended to give teachers a twitch above their eye.
Ahh, yes. One of those. Bobby found himself grinning back. At least there'd likely be someone else giving teachers fits. He could get away with murder when there was a genuine smart ass in class. “The laundry delivery guy. Though I mean, if you want to just grab a gown from the infirmary and walk around campus like that? I'm not gonna judge. Much.”
And that required another reframe – he wasn’t a total loss. And it looked like there were actual clothes not designed for dorks in the pile, which helped. “I could,” he replied with a more honest grin. “It’d give the girls something better than you to look at.”
“Girl. Singular.” Bobby grinned smugly and tossed the clothes towards the other guy. “And I've already got the inside track, thank you very much.”
Tommy grabbed the clothes out of the air and ducked behind the curtain to change before the kid had finished his throw. “What kind of lousy operation is this, anyway?” he grumbled aloud. He balled up the sweats and almost chucked them toward the laundry bag by the wall, but thought better of it. No knowing when he'd get anything more. He folded them instead and dropped them on the bed with the rest. The whole operation took less than a second, leaving him in jeans and a long-sleeved tshirt that covered the still-healing iv ports and needle scars on his arms. Not that he cared what anyone thought. “I thought this place was a school. Boys only?”
“Well, pretty sure Kitty's not a boy. And there's a whole dorm set up for girls, so I'm guessing they're expecting more. Maybe they heard you were here and made a run for it?” Bobby smirked, then jerked his head towards the door. ”Ready for the grand tour?”
“May as well.” Tommy shrugged, shoved his hands in his pockets more for the novelty of having clothes with pockets again, and sauntered slowly over. Dragging his heels would probably piss himself off a lot sooner than it would anyone else, but it helped remind him not to be too curious, too interested. Not until he knew what they wanted from him, anyway.
“So where'd Xavier find you, laundry boy? Another rescue operation?” He didn't look like he'd been through the same kind of shit as Tommy - or Kurt - but it could just mean he'd been there longer.
“Nah, I just showed up on the front step one day. With my basket of laundry. I got lost going home from the laundromat.” Bobby rolled his eyes, then looked over at Tommy with interest. ”Seriously, another? Did Shades break you out, too?” Which would, at least, explain the stay in the infirmary. The guy'd probably had part of a wall drop on him.
“Who?” Tommy frowned at him. “I broke myself out. I’d have been in Cancun by now if it hadn’t been for-” if it hadn’t been for the pain, the only half-remembered sensation of his brain on fire, a voice inside his head that had tried to talk him through the worst of the wreckage. “Getting caught up with all this.” He left it vague instead.
But laundry boy had said ‘too.’ He didn’t look like a mutant, but that didn’t mean anything. “How long were you in for?”
“Just overnight. They were still trying to figure out what to do with me,” Bobby admitted. He looked sidelong at the other boy as they headed for the elevator. “You busted yourself out, though? That's hardcore, man.”
Which explained why the kid didn’t look like he’d been through the same kind of wringer. He’d gotten off easy. Torn between envy and relief, Tommy ignored the whole bundle of weird feelings and moved on. “Not like anyone else was going to do it. As far as I knew at the time. So what’s your deal?” He moved the conversation on as well. What kinds of things were mutants supposed to be able to do? He was the only one he knew of with the speed trick. “Shapeshifting? Flying?” He made a show of looking the guy up and down. “Not super-strength.”
“Hey, you don't know that? Look how I easily carried that pile of clothes!” Bobby protested. Which...yeah, okay, that probably made the other kid's point for him, didn't it? “Anyway, wrong on all counts. Flying would be cool, but...” he paused for a moment and concentrated and, once the pile of clothing the other boy was holding acquired a thin layer of frost, grinned. “I'm cooler.”
Tommy could immediately think of about a half-dozen ways that power could be really useful, almost all of them illegal. He juggled the cold clothes back and forth until they warmed up a bit again and he wasn’t at risk of anything frost-biting itself to him. “Not bad,” he conceded. “But ‘you’ and ‘cool’ still aren’t even in the same zip code.” He kicked off down the hall, skidding to a halt at the door to what looked like stairs way at the other end. “Is this a tour or what? Show me something I don’t know.”
“Whoa, is that your thing?” Bobby said instead, ignoring the request as he started at the now distant figure, his jaw dropping. Talk about getting away from the scene of the prank. He was going to have to watch out for that, wasn't he? “And also? You can take the stairs if you want, but the elevator's right here.” Grinning, he took another two steps and pressed the button.
Tommy didn’t bite. The stairs were unlocked, which surprised him for a moment. Places like this, everything that didn’t require regular access was usually under lockdown. Part of him still wanted to believe in fairy tales – that this was a regular school, not some new kind of detention; that he’d been plucked out of danger out of the goodness of someone’s heart and not because they needed him for something. The rest of him knew better.
But the stairs were unlocked, which was a good first step. And he could take them up and keep going, if he wanted to – all the way out the front door and say ‘so long’ to whatever bullshit was going to land on his head next.
Except the stairs weren’t locked, which meant that they weren’t actually prisoners, at least not as far as moving around inside went. And that made him curious. So he just went up the one floor, and made sure he was leaning against the wall outside the elevator door, examining his nails, when it slid open. “Took you long enough.”
“Show off.” Bobby stepped out of the elevator, his eyebrows rising. “The thing is? I'm the one who knows where your room is. And the kitchen. And the way to the girls' dorm. Are you sure you want to ditch me?”
Point made. Tommy snorted, and he didn’t fight the small smile that tugged up one corner of his mouth. Kid was alright. “If I wanted to ditch you, you’d never even see me go.”
“Oh come on. Who'd want to ditch me?” Okay, the list was long and varied, but whatever. Bobby feigned an air of nonchalance and started down the hall. “Anyway, this is the main floor. Boring, mostly, other than the dining room and kitchen, unless you're a fan of libraries or classrooms, which I'm not.” He paused and turned to look at the other boy. “Hungry? Because we can stop at the kitchen if you want.”
Trick question. And friendly face or not, all of Tommy’s instincts flipped back to high alert, status: be very, very careful. Frank had only put the locks on the fridge after Tommy’s mutation had emerged, but that had been standard operating procedure everywhere else Tommy had lived. They were bad kids, after all. Not to be trusted. “Meals down in the gulag have been at eight, noon and six, sharp,” he tested the waters carefully. “We’re nowhere close to dinner. Someone’s going to notice.”
That wasn’t going to stop him, but he could be in and out faster knowing what he was dealing with.
Bobby shrugged, obviously unconcerned by the prospect. “So? That's what the kitchen's for - it's a help-yourself kind of thing. Kitty and I made pizza yesterday at four after she stole my sandwich. No one cared.”
That seemed fake, but okay. Maybe it would be more carefully watched once more kids arrived, though from the empty halls it seemed like that was going to take a while. “Sure,” he said after a pause that felt like forever to him, but followed fast on the heels of laundry boy’s words. “Whatever’s there can’t be worse than hospital trays.”
“Were they really awful? What were you down there for, anyway?” Bobby asked curiously. After all, the other guy seemed pretty okay to him.
It would be easy enough to lie; from what he’d said he’d barely been through the front door before he’d been rescued. He’d never know the difference. On the other hand- “Docs at the research facility were screwing around with my powers.” He dropped the information casually, keeping eye contact, watching to see what kind of response he’d get. Shock value made everything more entertaining. “Doped me up with all kinds of shit, tried to turn me into a living weapon. They got pretty pissed when I blew up one of their labs instead.”
And a lab tech, though he’d seen the guy later – shorter hair, missing an eyebrow, jabbing Tommy with a needle the size of an elephant tranquilizer, but alive. So Tommy didn’t have murder on his conscience, at least. Not that he’d had control at the time, though they’d treated him like he had anyway. He was sorely tempted to go back and show them the kind of hell he wanted to unleash, now that his head was clear. “If you really were at the same place, you’re lucky Xavier and his guy pulled you out when they did. I was there three months.”
“I wasn't.” And thank god for that, at least - Bobby'd thought his experience had sucked, but it had nothing on what Tommy had dealt with. He took a deep breath and shook his head, breaking free of the horror of the other guy's story. “I was in police custody, for...well, something that had happened. But nothing like that, man. You're right - I was seriously lucky.” And wouldn't have been, most likely, if it hadn't been for Summers breaking him out.
Fuck. He was going to have to feel guilty about that prank now, wasn't he?
And now things were getting much too serious again. Tommy grinned. “Police custody? What’d you do, knock over a dry cleaner’s? They sentence you to cleaning erasers and giving tours to the latest inmates?”
“Oh please. Forget the dry cleaners - I went straight to the laundromat,” Bobby lied, gesturing away the rest of Tommy's guesses. “All those quarters? Way too good a target.”
“Good choice.” Tommy smirked. “So where’s the kitchen? Unless you were bullshitting me.”
“About food? Never.” Relieved that Tommy wasn't going to push the issue, Bobby made a “follow me” gesture and headed through the reception area towards the kitchen. “So where are you from? Originally, I mean?”
Tommy followed, checking out the room as they moved through. He must have come in this way originally but that was as hazy as everything else that came before, only some of his memories clear enough to be believed. “Jersey.” Like the accent didn’t give it away? “What about you?”
“Long Island.” Bobby smirked. “By comparison to Kitty, we're practically former neighbors.”
“Unless she’s from China or something, Kurt’s got her beat. The other guy down in the infirmary with me,” Tommy added, because this guy – who still hadn’t introduced himself – wasn’t the only one who knew things. “He’s German.”
“That's definitely got Kitty beat. She's from Chicago.” Bobby grinned. “Which may seem like a foreign country, but probably isn't.” He turned the corner into the kitchen and waved his arm with a flourish. “Welcome to Chez Xavier. If you can't find it, it's probably in the next cabinet.”
Tommy had expected an industrial kitchen, cold and clean, the kind of place that could get sprayed down with a firehose and produced three meals of incredibly dubious origins per person per day. The kind of place with inventory lists taped to each cupboard and locks to keep out the curious. Not... this.
It looked like the kind of kitchen you’d find in a home. A really big home for someone really rich, but a home. There was wood everywhere and chairs that looked like they’d been designed to actually be comfortable to human beings. He did a zip around the kitchen while laundry guy was still talking, the cabinets flapping shut in his wake. None of them were locked, all of them were full. As promised. That sense of hope flared up again, deep inside, before he squashed it flat again.
Fine; they said food was available for anyone? He’d take them up on it. Find out just how far that permission really went.
The sandwich he shoved together wasn’t a real fatboy – couldn’t do that without cooking and he didn’t have time to wait for the oven to heat up – but between the cold cuts, cheeses and stacks of vegetables, he managed to pile the slab of bread pretty damn high. By the time laundry guy would probably be turning around and looking for him, Tommy had settled in the chair at the far end of the kitchen island, his feet up on the counter, massive sandwich in hand.
Bobby's eyebrows climbed as he looked around, then found Tommy'd already made himself comfortable at the table. With a sandwich. Bobby glared at him mock-accusingly.
“You could have made me one while you were at it,” he complained. “Delivery service and tour guiding is hard work, y'know.” That said, he headed over to the fridge himself. Obviously, if sandwiches were being had, he needed one, too.
“Hey, I don’t know what snowmen eat.” Tommy shrugged eloquently, and wrapped his face around about half of the sandwich. Screw polite; there wasn’t anyone here he was trying to impress, and he was hungry.
“Food? Hence the kitchen?” Letting out a snort of disgust (because honestly, it took ages to put together a sandwich, and why couldn't he have gotten super speed, because that would've been awesome), Bobby opened the fridge and started pulling out ingredients.
“So ‘Kitty’s’ our Pink Ranger – who’s ‘Shades’? If you tell me that’s a real name, I’m going to have to go punch someone.” Tommy’d seen Xavier, of course, and he and the medical staff were on way too intimate an acquaintance. But as far as other students went – not so much.
“Scott Summers. You can't miss him; he wears these red sunglasses everywhere. I guess they keep his powers in check - and believe me, you want them in check.” Bobby grinned crookedly over his shoulder as he put his sandwich together. “I used to say my dad had a death glare, but he's got nothing on Scott.”
Hunh. That was interesting. “Laser beams?”
“Kinda? They don't seem to burn anything, though.” Sandwich assembled, Bobby tossed the leftover ingredients back in the fridge and came over to plop down in one of the remaining chairs. “I saw the guy punch through a wall with them, though. Like, BAM!, no more wall.” He took a bite of his sandwich and mumbled “Wa' dos Kur' do?”
“He’s blue?” Tommy offered up. “He’s a gymnast or an acrobat; he seems alright. He’s about as messed up as I was when I first got here, so I dunno if he’ll be up soon.”
Bobby swallowed hard. “Blue? Seriously? I didn't know mutants came in technicolor.” Which was cool, actually, though it definitely put a whole dent in his dad's theory that mutants should just keep their abilities to themselves. Kinda hard to do if you were blue.
Actually, it was kinda hard to do anyway. But being blue had to make it a whole hell of a lot harder.
Tommy shoved the rest of his sandwich into his mouth and rolled his eyes. “We can make ice and have laser eyes and break the sound barrier, and 'blue' is what's weird to you? My hair and eyes were brown until a couple of years ago. Boom - superspeed, and boom - unasked-for bleach job, all at once.”
“It's a pretty crappy bleach job,” Bobby retorted, adding a smirk for good measure. “Just saying.” Granted, the other guy had a point, but still. He'd never seen anyone who was blue outside of Avatar. The idea was pretty cool.
“Blame my X-gene. It wasn’t my idea. Still,” he considered, stretching. “It adds to the mystique.”
Bobby smirked. “There's no mystique. It just looks like you got pranked. By someone who bought a shitload of bleach.” Leaning back in his chair, he took another bite.
“Eh, what would you know about style, Long Island?” Tommy shot back without any heat. “You dress like you lived next door to Wal-Mart.”
“Gimme a break.” Bobby grinned and stretched his legs out in front of him. “Next door was the Food Fair. The Wal-Mart was up the block. Obviously you've never been to Port Jefferson.”
Tommy actually caught that echoing grin curling up his lips again, and he didn’t try and stop it. “I’ll put it on my list of places to avoid at all costs.” The part of Tommy that had kept him alive this long was shrieking at him—why wasn’t he running? Maybe it was the surreal experience of sitting and chilling in a freaking mansion with a guy who actually talked like a human being. And besides, the more information he had about where he was and the other people around him, the better. “Other than make pizzas and go to class, what passes for fun around here?”
“Dude, I've been here for two days. I'm not exactly an expert. But there haven't been any classes yet,” Bobby grinned, “and there's an X-Box hooked up to a fucking huge TV in what the Professor calls the Day Room. If you like video games.”
Now that sounded more promising. Tommy nodded, exuding Innocence. “Depends on the game. I haven’t exactly had a chance to play anything recent. Bet I could still whup your ass, though.”
Bobby got to his feet and grinned, sandwich still in hand. “That sounds like a challenge.”
“You might as well just concede now, Olaf.” Tommy followed, running his dishes to the sink purely out of habit. “Even without my powers you don’t stand a chance.”
“No powers or I'll freeze your ass, Gonzalez.” Bobby smirked as he dumped his own in the sink. He'd clean them up later, whatever. The game was on.
