ax_main | Teddy and Duo

Duo meets Teddy and the talk gets very deep, very fast

It was the noise that attracted Duo first, then the tv screen flashing something that was obviously not a show, and lastly the blond boy working the controller for... the video game system? What kind of school offered video games to its pupils? Duo wandered over and leaned over the back of the couch for a moment, then climbed over the back to drop onto the couch beside the boy playing.

Teddy had been caught up in the game enough that he hadn't noticed the new arrival in the lounge, not until someone landed beside him on the couch. He hit pause and glanced up, half-expecting to see Billy there, but the kid sitting beside him was definitely not someone he'd seen before. Not one of the Brotherhood either, not unless it was another new kid they'd added since the party. "Hey," Teddy greeted - him? her? It was hard to tell, given the braid and the skirt - the new kid with a nod and a smile. "How's it going?"

"Well enough," said Duo, returning the boy's smile. "Forgive me, I'm just curious. Does this belong to the school, or you?"

"The school, definitely," Teddy replied. "There are a couple of systems and a box of controllers under the tv. It's a first-come-first-serve thing, but I'm mostly just messing around... if you needed to use the tv, I can move."

Duo shook their head. "No, no. I just thought it was strange that a school provides these and... well, now that I'm here it looks like it might be fun to watch. If you don't mind."

Teddy shrugged easily. "No problem. I guess the Professor figured it was better to have enough options around to keep us busy in the evenings, rather than run loose causing trouble? I have no idea," he laughed. "I'm just taking advantage. I'm Teddy, by the way. I don't think I've seen you around before. Are you new?"

"Very. I got here a few days ago. I haven't even managed to sort out classes yet." Duo pulled their feet up and turned themself around so they could talk to Teddy better. He was another friendly face in what was turning out to be a sea of helpful people. "I'm Duo."

"I just jumped into junior year classes. It turned out to be pretty much in line with my old school, except for the online ones." Teddy set the controller down for a minute while they chatted. Age was another detail he couldn't be confident guessing, not when so many mutations did things to appearance. "What grade are you in?"

Another question with no easy answer. "I don't know. I was mostly taught privately by one man with very set ideas about what made a good education; it's making it a little difficult to decide what to take here. I'm 15 if that helps."

He - they - Duo had an accent, a kind of pretty lilting thing that Teddy couldn't quite place. "Yeah, I can see how that would be an issue. A bunch of students did placement tests when they got here, but fifteen would make you a sophomore. Second year," he added, just in case.

"You'd be in class with my-" he hesitated for a second, but with the androgynous face, the way they were dressed - there was every chance Duo wasn't going to find Teddy a problem. "My boyfriend. He's mostly taking sophomore courses."

The boyfriend comment only caught Duo's attention because Teddy said it so easily. There had been many wonderful things about growing up at the orphanage, but the Catholic attitude towards such things wasn't one of them, even when filtered through Father Maxwell's compassion. But the sophomore thing hardly made sense... "But I was thinking of Calculus. Can I choose that if I'm a sophomore? Maybe Japanese too. It's a little ridiculous that I know Latin and Greek before I know my parents' language."

"I don't see why not. Billy's in my history class and he's a year behind in his core courses, and Kitty's younger than he is and she's taking some really advanced math classes. Did the Professor make you do placement tests?" And that comment about languages answered a couple of Teddy's questions about Duo's heritage, but definitely not all of them. "Do you mind my asking - if your parents are Japanese but you don't speak it, where did you grow up?"

And here came the interview portion of the talk; it seemed to be a thing here. Duo held up a finger. "San Salvador - I'm Spanish. In an orphanage. I possess people. And yes, you can use whatever pronoun you wish for me. They insisted on 'he' back at the orphanage, but I'm queer...?" Except that wasn't exactly the right word. As fluent as they were in English, there were moments when words escaped them. Wait... Duo smiled."Non-binary. Also, no, I haven't cut my hair in years. Really, they should give us surveys to fill out so we can just pass them to each other when we meet."

Torn between laughing at the assessment and the defensive hurt at being called out for being nosy... Teddy tried to land more on the first half of that set of mixed feelings. "Okay, wow. You had that one all locked and loaded, didn't you? I wasn't trying to pry into your business. There're kids here from all over the world, and it makes for a decent ice breaker. Most of the time."

"Oh no, I don't mind at all!" Duo leaned forward and offered an apologetic half-smile. "I've just been through the ice breaker bit a few too many times. It's my impatience to blame, not you."

That made things slightly better. At least Teddy hadn't managed to offend someone else at first sight. Shen had been more than enough. "That's okay. It's one of those things around here -- suddenly it's okay to talk about a lot of stuff we've had to hide, and the freedom goes to people's heads," he grinned, definitely not excluding himself from that assessment. "Though I appreciate the heads up on the pronoun thing."

Teddy's assessment made a lot of sense and, to Duo's way of thinking, showed that he was thoughtful and sensitive, a good person to get to know.

"You're welcome. I was always a little fuzzy on the idea of gender, but there's nothing like weeks of hopping bodies to confirm that it's not for me."

Teddy smiled for real, and he slid his shape over to the girl version of himself that was almost-but-not-quite as comfortable and familiar as his usual. She stayed tall, though not quite as tall, Teddy's tank top and button-up plaid shirt hanging differently now on somewhat narrower shoulders and a small bust. "Yeah, I get that.

"Shapeshifter," Teddy explained, probably unnecessarily. "Though my baseline shape is a guy. Can I ask about the body hopping, or are you done with that subject too?" she asked teasingly, staying in girl-shape for the moment.

Duo didn't bother stopping the wide smile that spread across their face. The myriad of tricks and talents of the students here was something that they were never going to grow bored with. "Ask away, as long as I can ask questions about you."

"It only seems fair," Teddy agreed, relaxing a little bit more now that she knew she wasn't going to have to start playing the pronoun game with regards to Billy. Though of course she'd just confused the issue by turning into girl!Teddy, but.... yeah. Anyway. "What do you mean 'possess people?' Is that like something that requires an exorcist?" Because she'd had just about enough of demons already, just from being exposed to Billy's Limbo nightmares. Somehow that didn't seem like it would be the same thing.

"I hope not!" Duo chuckled at the thought. "No, I phase into people, like stepping into a pond, and then I control their bodies. I can't read their thoughts though. When I've had enough, I just step out again."

That still gave Teddy serious pause. The whole concept of someone controlling her body, making her do things she didn't want and couldn't control... yeah, she had baggage. "What happens to the original person?" she asked, more subdued now.

"Ah." Duo sank back against the arm of the sofa, their smile fading. This was the part that no one had asked them about yet, and the part that troubled them the most, but parsing out what to tell Teddy, when so much of this was still fresh and nothing they wanted to poke at yet, wasn't easy. "I think they mostly black out. I've stayed a few times, to make sure they were okay, and that was what they assumed." Except the one who died. And they had no idea what had happened to those people they'd leapt into in the few frantic weeks after Father Maxwell's death. "When I was traveling here, I had no money and no papers, so I thought I had to use people. I wish I'd talked back to that voice in my head a little. Now that I see where the Professor lives, I think perhaps he might have had the resources to find a way to get me here without that."

That didn't do anything at all to ease Teddy's fears, but bursting out with 'promise you'll never, ever use your powers on me' in the first five minutes probably wasn't the greatest idea. So she nodded, catching her bottom lip in her teeth. "The Professor seems to have strange priorities sometimes, when it comes to recruiting students. As far as I know, my mom was the one to get in touch with him." It was definitely easier to change the subject for the moment.

"Ah, well, that wasn't an option in my case. He just popped into my head one day and encouraged me to come." And that hadn't been pleasant either, not when Duo had already been teetering on the edge of something not quite sane. The Professor had helped with that in the end, but there had been some interesting moments."But! You promised to answer some of my questions, and I need to know... when you shift like this, do you feel different? In terms of gender?" Ugh. There was no way to ask questions like this without feeling awkward.

"Oh." Teddy hadn't entirely anticipated that one, and she really wasn't sure she had a good answer - or knew the right language for any of it. "Not... really? Maybe? I'm not sure," she confessed. "I didn't know I could shapeshift at all until a few years ago, so I'm used to being a guy - having a guy's body? But I don't feel like not-me in this shape." And then she had to sit with the thought for a minute, pulling one leg up underneath her.

"Some shapes are hard to get into," Teddy tried to explain it that way. "The farther away they are from being me, the more of a stretch it is. Like pulling an elastic band, it gets harder to hold the further out you go. This one barely registers as being different. And I don't feel like I'm... you know. Not right. Or missing parts. Is that even what you're asking?" she wound down, frustrated with her inability to find the words.

"I'm not exactly sure what I'm asking, but I understand that. I understand not having the words too." Because who did these things? Who changed their body on a whim, whether by shapeshifting or by stealing the body of another? "I've never felt like I wasn't me. Different bodies had different challenges, and maybe... there were things about them that would have shaped me in different ways if I'd stayed in them, but I don't think different parts was one of those things."

That sounded familiar, and Teddy nodded slowly. "There have been times I've felt like I wasn't me when I was shifting," she said aloud. "But I don't think it had anything to do with the shape so much as the circumstances. At first I had to spend a lot of energy remembering where all my edges were if I changed size, because I'd walk into walls or clip door frames with my shoulder or something. Using this one has never done that, but I couldn't begin to explain why. So I guess the answer is no -- I don't feel different. My inside's the same, no matter what the outside is doing."

"But when you're back in your usual form, you're a boy?"

"Yeah," Teddy said confidently, slipping back into his usual shape, paying a little more attention, this time, to how his body changed and resettled. It was more familiar, sure, after seventeen years of being in it. But was it any more him? Suddenly he was less certain than he'd been ten minutes ago, before he'd had to put thought and words around it. "Yes? I mean, I don't have to put any effort into being this shape. And before my powers emerged I was a boy. Am a guy. Whatever that actually means." He frowned at Duo, his brow furrowing.

"I think of this-" Duo tapped their chest - "as home. Maybe that form and being a boy is for you? I never felt like one myself. 'Boy' was always a... foggy mirror." They could understand Teddy's troubled expression completely. It was one thing to feel these things, a whole different thing to try and shape those feelings into words. "But being in other bodies gave me a clearer view and I just decided to be done with the whole question."

"Foggy mirror definitely doesn't fit," Teddy mused aloud. And just out of curiosity, tried to find some shape in between. Longer hair, softer jaw, slimmer build but no bust- the shape tugged on him, trying to slide one way or the other, lock into something more familiar. He frowned and released the change, slid back into his boy form. "This is home, yeah. I think of it like a baseline -- I go back to this when I'm asleep. And it took me long enough to be comfortable with calling myself a gay man out loud." He smiled, a lopsided thing that still had a little pain behind it. "I'll stick with that. For now, anyway."

Duo returned his smile. "It sounds like it makes sense for you. And hard-won battles shouldn't be abandoned so quickly." And there, he sounded like Sister Helen who despite her religion, had always managed to listen to Duo's odd questions about themself. They learned their head against the back of the sofa and sighed. "I can't take credit for those words. They were said to me by someone else."

"It's not a bad mantra. Was it your tutor who said that?" Teddy tried to remember back to the beginning of the conversation -- had Duo said anything else other than that they'd been taught by one person? Not that he could recall.

"No, a nun." They would have liked to have left it at that, but what 15 year old got advice from nuns? Better to tell a bit more to cut off further questions. "She lived at the home I was raised in." They waved a dismissive hand to steer the conversation away from her, despite how unjust it felt to push aside her memory like that.

Teddy nodded, not particularly startled. "We didn't have nuns at my school -- Episcopalian doesn't really go in for that kind of thing -- but from everything I've heard, you don't want to mess with them," he replied with a grin. "Jeanne-Marie did grow up in a convent school, though she doesn't talk about it much," Teddy admitted. "But I bet she'd say the same thing."

"I wouldn't. Sister Helen wasn't a pushover, but... " She was dead and this conversation was going to get maudlin if they decided they needed to defend her. "We're getting off topic."

Fair enough; even Teddy could spot a change away from a touchy subject when it was that obvious. "No worries. I think that was me being nosy that got us on to that one, which makes it your turn to ask something?"

Duo grinned. Time to move things on to lighter matters. "Who is your boyfriend? I think this is something I should know so I don't end up flirting with the wrong person."

That was an easy one, a whole lot better than the metaphysical questions about gender and shapeshifting they'd been dealing with before. Teddy pulled out his phone, his lockscreen set to a picture of Billy caught in a rare pensive moment, glancing at Teddy out of the corner of his eye and a smile just starting to grow. "Billy Kaplan," he explained, handing the phone over. "He's my roommate as well, which was purely luck.

"He's not hard to find," Teddy added with a grin. "Just look for the direct center of whatever chaos is going down. He's bound to be involved somehow."

"Very cute." Duo meant it. In keeping with what seemed to be the general theme amongst the students here, he was definitely someone who would have caught Duo's eye outside the school.

"I think so," Teddy confessed as he took his phone back, "but then I'm not exactly an impartial judge."

This was so different from home. Not simply because Teddy had shared a picture of his boyfriend, but because he'd done it openly with no furtive glances around the room at who might be watching. Duo would still take the home in a heartbeat if there were any way to get it back, but there some freedoms here that made for sweet moments they could appreciate. They smiled again. "And you shouldn't be."

Teddy ducked his head and grinned as he tucked his phone away. “That’s something that took a little while to get used to when I got here. A lot of us seem to be some form of queer. Gay, bi, whatever. I was joking with-” shit, would mentioning her name be too much of a hint? No, he rather thought not, but better safe than sorry. “A friend the other day that it almost seems to be connected to the X-gene.”

Duo held up a finger. "If we're a good sample of the mutant population at large. I have my doubts about whether all mutants are ridiculously attractive teenagers."

Teddy made a face. "I'm not sure I want to think about the Professor's methods or reasons for choosing people if that's one of the criteria. That opens all kinds of weird doors."

"Well then, X-gene it is." They grinned. "I'm certain the only thing questionable thing about the Professor is the super-team he's building and... I'm not sure I think that's a bad idea."

Teddy nodded in response. "I like it, to be honest. We've been given tools that we can use to help people. It would be wrong not to try. Are you planning to sign up?"

"I am. As you said, it seems wrong to sit back when we've got gifts that others don't. Also... I think I need to make up for all those people I used to get here."

"A little bit of karma payback?" Teddy guessed, the sentiment an achingly familiar one. "I get you."

Duo offered a gentle smile. "I think maybe it comes with the territory for some of us? We're barely out of childhood and then get extraordinary powers; that's a recipe for others getting hurt or abused I think. There should probably be a lot more schools like this for just that reason."

"My powers weren't the issue. Not as such," Teddy let it slip without thinking, especially considering he barely knew Duo - they'd been talking for all of fifteen minutes! - and had no idea how trustworthy the other kid was. Somehow the intimacy of the confessions they'd already made had made it easier to confess. "It was trying to impress the wrong people. But we can't go back and change the past," he repeated advice he'd tried to take to heart himself. "All we can do is try and be better in the future."

"Agreed. This is very deep territory for two people who just met, but you're very easy to talk to, do you know that?" Duo had already shuffled Teddy into the 'keeper' pile, and he continued to prove why he'd earned a spot there.

Teddy ducked his head, the tops of his ears warming slightly with an incoming flush. The compliment wasn’t a completely new one, but he’d certainly heard it a lot more recently than ever before. “Thanks,” he said simply. “You too.”

His reaction, blush and all, was adorable in a way that made Duo want to slide over a little closer to him. Alas, he was gay. And taken. "Maybe it's the mix. You, me, and a reasonably comfortable couch. If this were a dining room table we might have just have made bad small talk."

"We'll have to save that one for next time." Teddy grabbed the long-forgotten controller of his knee, the game still sitting there on pause. "Or join the great gaming collective around here, and it'll be trash talk from here on in," he added cheerfully. And -- actually, that was a good question. "Which dorm did you end up in?"

"Boys. They were very good about marking down the pronouns, but when it came down to it-" Duo put a finger on their Adam's apple- "I think good old-fashioned preconceptions won out. Sort of. I did get in my own room, which is nice for now, but company is nice too."

Teddy nodded. "For all the research and care that went in to building this school, I don't think the Professor had gender issues in mind when he set things up. As nice as he is about some things, he's still from a really different generation." Not that their generation was automatically better, but things had still changed a lot since Professor Xavier was young. "Billy and I are in 107, if you ever feel like coming by to hang out."

"I've gone from a half dozen kids to a room to a whole bedroom to myself. I guarantee you I'll be at your door looking for company now that you've issued the invitation. Meanwhile, I think I've kept you from your gaming for long enough?" Besides, they'd spotted the library yesterday and hadn't visited it yet and the books began to beckon.

“You’re welcome to stay,” Teddy offered. “There are more controllers under the tv.”

Books or video games? Framed like that the choice was easy, and Duo was almost ready to climb over the back of the couch (because they had to leave the way they came, right?) and leave, but the real question was, 'books or time with a new friend?' and that was no contest at all. "Alright, I'll try. I warn you, I have almost no idea what I'm doing with one of these things."

"There's no real way to screw this one up," Teddy grinned. "It's an old game, but it's fun. All you have to do is roll around and pick up junk."

Duo started laughing as he bent down to dig out a controller that looked like Teddy's. "They made a game about me?" After all, they'd arrived with two bags of clothing that they'd managed to pick up on the trip here. "You watch, in a few weeks my room is going to be filled with junk that other people don't want."

"Good thing the mansion's big, then," Teddy laughed, and settled in to play again.