![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Billy & Tommy | Backdated to Thanksgiving weekend
Billy and Tommy have a run-in after Tommy returns from doing recon on Laura's old facility. The conversation starts well enough, but goes rapidly downhill.
Billy hummed some unknown tune as he ran a towel over his head, making his way over to the sinks in his pajamas. Yeah, seven thirty was a little early for it, but Teddy was still at his mom’s so what else was he supposed to do? Not like Tommy was answering his phone and he didn’t want to bother Kitty and Yana.
He frowned a little at his phone on the counter that still showed no messages from Tommy, but the guy probably had it on silent again like last time. Whatever. He grabbed his toothbrush and set to work fighting cavities, bringing out the children's toothpaste he had bought in Salem because tasted so damn good.
Even though the hard drives were with Kitty and Laura had reburied her mother's body on the grounds, Pam and Alex were back at Asteroid M -- Tommy was still having one hell of a time putting Arizona behind him. It was the smell, he decided, the smoke and ash lingering in his nostrils and - worse, in his hair and on his skin. The lingering stench of decay was a figment of his imagination. A shower would fix those problems, and it was a weird enough time of day that he wouldn't end up having to fight it out for one of the stalls.
Tommy slung his towel around his waist, grabbed his shower stuff, and headed down the hall. And wouldn't you know it -- someone was already in there. He nodded to Billy as he passed by, the smears of dirt and ash on Tommy's bare arms stark against his bare skin.
Billy glanced up in the mirror when he heard the door open, notching the mop of platinum white hair and lack of dog ears made it obvious who it was. Well, speak of the devil. Billy was about to nod back, then really took in his brother’s appearance and turned around to stare at him.
“Wha- appen ta ou?” He asked around a toothbrush and mouth full of foam.
"Didn't your mother teach you not to talk with your mouth full?" Tommy asked, the flash of his grin more tired than usual. He ditched his shampoo and stuff in the first empty shower stall. "Did a little recon, some grand theft-hard drive, dug up a dead body. The usual busy holiday afternoon shit."
“Re -on?” Billy blinked then quickly turned to spit, white foam still lining his mouth. “Dig up a dead body?! What the hell are you talking about?”
Tommy snorted at the toothpaste mustache Billy was sporting, as well as the owlish blinks he was making as he tried to parse out Tommy's half-assed explanation. "Exactly what it sounds like," he replied, as though that would actually help. "We were helping Laura," he said finally, taking pity on the dork. "About yay-tall, kind of homicidal, can pop blades out of her hands and feet? She was raised in a lab in Arizona. Same bastards who had Fatale and Alex and me."
Billy paled a little at that. Tommy...had gone to one of the labs? He briefly remembered that girl named Laura, having seen her in the halls, but to know she was another one was a little shocking.
“Did the professor know about this? Did you go by yourself?” He couldn’t help how his voice raised a little on the last question. What if there had been people there? What if they had caught Tommy again? He saw the dark smears on Tommy’s arms and moved forward to grab his brother’s bicep. “What the hell happened?”
"Dude! Chillax. You're embarrassing yourself. Nothing 'happened,' not in the bad-guy sense anyway," Tommy scowled at him and shook Billy's hand off his arm. "A bunch of us went. Laura, Alex, Fatale and me. Shen came along for air support, Kitty had us on comms the whole time. The place was deserted, just like Laura said it would be. We checked it out, grabbed the hard drives and shit, and blew the place. Added a nice big crater to the desert floor," he added with a wolfish and satisfied grin.
“Wait, Fatale and Alex?” They went with him? How close Tommy was to them made something in his gut squirm and he frowned when Tommy shook him off. He’d decided to go to them for help against those assholes, not even bothering to tell Billy. Shen and Kitty too?
He felt the hurt hitch in his throat, but he let anger roll over it instead. “Why didn’t you tell me? I texted you like four times today. Why am I always the last to know when it comes to you?”
What the hell was Billy on about? "Yeah, Fatale and Alex. They were lab rats too, they want to take these guys down as much as Laura and me. Well, probably Laura. I never know what she's thinking." Tommy frowned at him. "Why do you care so much? There wasn't any danger, except maybe of losing my lunch once or twice. It's not like I - oh, I dunno - decided on the spur of the moment to go take a week's vacation in Limbo." Frankly the further he could keep Billy away from the kind of shit that went on in those places - Arizona especially - the better.
Billy’s frown turned into an actual scowl at the mention of Limbo, that was hitting further south than he liked. “Yana needed us and we didn’t know we would get stuck. You went running right after the same people that kept you prisoner and we’re known to have killed other mutants. Killed, Tommy.”
He gritted his teeth. “And I care because you’re my brother, which I thought you understood, but I guess that was me just being stupid again.”
"We went to a base that Laura already trashed, that we were pretty damn sure was already empty. To see if we could find anything on other mutant kids who might still be locked up somewhere," Tommy corrected him, scowling right back. "And we actually had backup. If something had gone wrong, Kitty could have rallied the troops. Last I remember, you guys didn't even tell anyone you were going."
“They are a god damn organization, Tommy!” Billy exclaimed, his hands moving out in front of him as he tried to make Tommy see what he meant by moving them around frantically. “These people were smart and sneaky enough to get a ton of mutants into their lab. You really think they are going to be dumb enough to leave sensitive information laying around for anyone to come pick up?! What if they still have eyes on the place? What if they’ve now seen all of you and know?”
What if they come for you? Billy covered his face with his hands and groaned, the foam finally being wiped away. “At least I had no real idea what I was going into and I told you as soon as I could once I was out. Were you even going to tell me, or just like everything else, I find out days later from Kitty? Or worse the Brotherhood?”
Yeah, and have Billy trying to shake the smell of rotting corpses out of his nose same as Tommy was right now? He was being an infant and totally unreasonable. (That Tommy hadn't known about the bodies when they'd been planning the thing was totally beside the point.) "They know who we are already, dumbass. Teleporting in from somewhere isn't going to tell them anything more than they already knew about us. Except Shen, but she barely went inside.
"Besides," Tommy scowled darker, folding his arms across his bare chest. "You'd actually know what was going on in my life if you weren't spending every waking moment up that meathead's ass."
Billy froze for a moment, the topic changing so quickly that he had take a quick second to catch up, but when he did he glared at the other. How fucking dare he say that about Teddy. Teddy had nothing to do with this! He reached out and shoved at Tommy’s shoulder with a growl. “Don’t call him that. You don’t know anything about him.”
Tommy hadn’t seen it coming, had let his guard down once too many times. He flinched away, his body spinning to the side before Billy could get a second hit in. His heart in his throat and pulse rabbiting wildly in his chest, Tommy grabbed Billy’s wrist and put their arms between them. “Don’t even think it,” he snapped, the fear-adrenaline rush taking over. But Billy was his size, not his father’s, he wasn’t in danger- “Do you really wanna go?”
Go? Billy took a sharp breath in through his nose as he thought about that. No, he really didn’t want to fight Tommy, he never would want to, but the idea of him bad mouthing Teddy made him want to try. Something in him wondered what exactly that meant although now wasn’t the time for it and he ripped his arm out of Tommy’s grasp. “I’m not going to fight you, just don’t call him that again.”
Tommy didn't fight him. He let go, dropped Billy's hand and backed up to put space between them before he did something really stupid. "Whatever." Tommy scoffed, and looked away. "You spent weeks blowing smoke up my ass about being 'brothers,' and as soon as that- as soon as Teddy winks at you, you're on him like a bad rash 24-7. And then you call me out for doing my own thing without begging you to come along? You don't get to have it both ways."
“I’m not just blowing smoke up your ass, damn it. You didn’t even care about what I said, so why are you suddenly so up in arms about it?” Billy folded his arms across his own chest, glaring at Tommy because he just didn’t get him. He’d blow off any attempt Billy made at getting closer and then get upset when Billy went off with Teddy? What the hell? “And I didn’t ask you to beg me to come along. All I’m asking is to know so I’m not the last to know if-“
I lose you.
Billy shut his mouth with a click. “Forget it. Forget it.”
Tommy stared at him for a beat, then nodded. "I don't get you," was all he had to say to that. And he didn't. What would Billy care, anyway, except for this weird fantasy about brotherhood that he'd been the one to push -- and then pull back on when Tommy didn't take the bait right away. "But if you wanna be the one on-call the next time Laura decides she needs to dig up her mother, be my guest." He waved dismissively in the air and turned to head in to the shower stall. "There's some shit you can never un-see."
“Dig up her mother?” Billy asked to the shower curtain, even though he already heard the water start to run. Was that the dead body Tommy had been talking about? Had they killed Laura’s mom because she wouldn’t sell her kid like Tommy’s had? They’d actually dug up a dead body?! Billy ran his hands through his hair, all the anger kind of dissipating now that it had no where really to go. He moved back over to his bag numbly and placed his toothbrush back in, looking at himself in the mirror.
“This is all so messed up.” He told his reflection.
Tommy stayed under the shower a really long time -- for him, anyway, time slowing and stretching out in that rubber-band way he was getting more and more used to. The water trickled slowly over his skin, the steam and the strong smell of the shampoo burning away any traces of other things left in his sinuses. The more he scrubbed, the more Arizona dust swirled down the drain in slo-mo, taking a layer of skin and most of Tommy's shaky nerves with it.
He felt a hell of a lot better by the time he toweled off, re-wrapped it around his waist and pulled the curtain back. He expected to see the bathroom empty, Billy run back to his love nest to complain about how mean Tommy was.
Billy looked up when the curtain opened only two minutes later and Tommy came out, his pale skin red from the hot water. He couldn’t help but be slightly amused at the fact that a speedster's shower was ridiculous as he turned to look at Tommy. “Waste all the water, why don’t you.”
He turned back to his bag and zipped it up, not quite sure where to go from here. They could continue to fight, they were apparently good at it, or ask Tommy more about wherever the hell they had gone, but he was kind of done with it for now. Tommy was here and not under some creep’s microscope, so why make it a big deal anyway? So what if he didn’t get why Billy was upset or hurt and so what if he probably never would? Billy took a deep breath in and let it out as he picked up his bag, turning to look at Tommy with a small bitter twist of his lips that belonged more on the speedster.
“Well, glad you're not dead. Have fun,” He trailed off, raising a hand and then gave a small shrug. “Doing whatever it is you do.”
Billy's dismissal cut Tommy to the quick, and that was the entire fucking problem. That was what caring did. It left you open, it made you not notice when someone was about to hit you, it made someone else's problems with you into something that couldn't just be ignored. And Tommy'd fallen for it too many times already.
"Yeah, that figures," he snorted, his hair dripping water down onto his shoulders. "All that bullshit about being family - you're as bad a liar as my parents. The moment I go off-script it's all 'have a nice life, don't let the door hit you.' To hell with that." He could have vanished then, zipped off down the hall faster than Billy could see, never mind stop. But he didn't. He walked for the door at a normal stride, the ends of his towel flapping around his knees.
He was being compared to the people that sold Tommy to the god damn lab and Billy’s anger spiked suddenly, the frustration of being constantly rebuffed then getting attitude when he finally pulled away was unbelievable. “The moment you go off script? When were you ever on a script? It’s been nothing but ‘stop it with the emotions’ or ‘you’re being stupid about this’, and now when I’m finally giving you what you want you’re mad.”
Billy grit his teeth as he watched Tommy’s back. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
"Yeah," Tommy said, his hand on the door. Sad hit him in a terrible, awful wave, and that was way, way too uncomfortable to live with. Anger was better, powerful instead of weak and exposed. He pushed the door open and left the bathroom. "I know."
Billy hummed some unknown tune as he ran a towel over his head, making his way over to the sinks in his pajamas. Yeah, seven thirty was a little early for it, but Teddy was still at his mom’s so what else was he supposed to do? Not like Tommy was answering his phone and he didn’t want to bother Kitty and Yana.
He frowned a little at his phone on the counter that still showed no messages from Tommy, but the guy probably had it on silent again like last time. Whatever. He grabbed his toothbrush and set to work fighting cavities, bringing out the children's toothpaste he had bought in Salem because tasted so damn good.
Even though the hard drives were with Kitty and Laura had reburied her mother's body on the grounds, Pam and Alex were back at Asteroid M -- Tommy was still having one hell of a time putting Arizona behind him. It was the smell, he decided, the smoke and ash lingering in his nostrils and - worse, in his hair and on his skin. The lingering stench of decay was a figment of his imagination. A shower would fix those problems, and it was a weird enough time of day that he wouldn't end up having to fight it out for one of the stalls.
Tommy slung his towel around his waist, grabbed his shower stuff, and headed down the hall. And wouldn't you know it -- someone was already in there. He nodded to Billy as he passed by, the smears of dirt and ash on Tommy's bare arms stark against his bare skin.
Billy glanced up in the mirror when he heard the door open, notching the mop of platinum white hair and lack of dog ears made it obvious who it was. Well, speak of the devil. Billy was about to nod back, then really took in his brother’s appearance and turned around to stare at him.
“Wha- appen ta ou?” He asked around a toothbrush and mouth full of foam.
"Didn't your mother teach you not to talk with your mouth full?" Tommy asked, the flash of his grin more tired than usual. He ditched his shampoo and stuff in the first empty shower stall. "Did a little recon, some grand theft-hard drive, dug up a dead body. The usual busy holiday afternoon shit."
“Re -on?” Billy blinked then quickly turned to spit, white foam still lining his mouth. “Dig up a dead body?! What the hell are you talking about?”
Tommy snorted at the toothpaste mustache Billy was sporting, as well as the owlish blinks he was making as he tried to parse out Tommy's half-assed explanation. "Exactly what it sounds like," he replied, as though that would actually help. "We were helping Laura," he said finally, taking pity on the dork. "About yay-tall, kind of homicidal, can pop blades out of her hands and feet? She was raised in a lab in Arizona. Same bastards who had Fatale and Alex and me."
Billy paled a little at that. Tommy...had gone to one of the labs? He briefly remembered that girl named Laura, having seen her in the halls, but to know she was another one was a little shocking.
“Did the professor know about this? Did you go by yourself?” He couldn’t help how his voice raised a little on the last question. What if there had been people there? What if they had caught Tommy again? He saw the dark smears on Tommy’s arms and moved forward to grab his brother’s bicep. “What the hell happened?”
"Dude! Chillax. You're embarrassing yourself. Nothing 'happened,' not in the bad-guy sense anyway," Tommy scowled at him and shook Billy's hand off his arm. "A bunch of us went. Laura, Alex, Fatale and me. Shen came along for air support, Kitty had us on comms the whole time. The place was deserted, just like Laura said it would be. We checked it out, grabbed the hard drives and shit, and blew the place. Added a nice big crater to the desert floor," he added with a wolfish and satisfied grin.
“Wait, Fatale and Alex?” They went with him? How close Tommy was to them made something in his gut squirm and he frowned when Tommy shook him off. He’d decided to go to them for help against those assholes, not even bothering to tell Billy. Shen and Kitty too?
He felt the hurt hitch in his throat, but he let anger roll over it instead. “Why didn’t you tell me? I texted you like four times today. Why am I always the last to know when it comes to you?”
What the hell was Billy on about? "Yeah, Fatale and Alex. They were lab rats too, they want to take these guys down as much as Laura and me. Well, probably Laura. I never know what she's thinking." Tommy frowned at him. "Why do you care so much? There wasn't any danger, except maybe of losing my lunch once or twice. It's not like I - oh, I dunno - decided on the spur of the moment to go take a week's vacation in Limbo." Frankly the further he could keep Billy away from the kind of shit that went on in those places - Arizona especially - the better.
Billy’s frown turned into an actual scowl at the mention of Limbo, that was hitting further south than he liked. “Yana needed us and we didn’t know we would get stuck. You went running right after the same people that kept you prisoner and we’re known to have killed other mutants. Killed, Tommy.”
He gritted his teeth. “And I care because you’re my brother, which I thought you understood, but I guess that was me just being stupid again.”
"We went to a base that Laura already trashed, that we were pretty damn sure was already empty. To see if we could find anything on other mutant kids who might still be locked up somewhere," Tommy corrected him, scowling right back. "And we actually had backup. If something had gone wrong, Kitty could have rallied the troops. Last I remember, you guys didn't even tell anyone you were going."
“They are a god damn organization, Tommy!” Billy exclaimed, his hands moving out in front of him as he tried to make Tommy see what he meant by moving them around frantically. “These people were smart and sneaky enough to get a ton of mutants into their lab. You really think they are going to be dumb enough to leave sensitive information laying around for anyone to come pick up?! What if they still have eyes on the place? What if they’ve now seen all of you and know?”
What if they come for you? Billy covered his face with his hands and groaned, the foam finally being wiped away. “At least I had no real idea what I was going into and I told you as soon as I could once I was out. Were you even going to tell me, or just like everything else, I find out days later from Kitty? Or worse the Brotherhood?”
Yeah, and have Billy trying to shake the smell of rotting corpses out of his nose same as Tommy was right now? He was being an infant and totally unreasonable. (That Tommy hadn't known about the bodies when they'd been planning the thing was totally beside the point.) "They know who we are already, dumbass. Teleporting in from somewhere isn't going to tell them anything more than they already knew about us. Except Shen, but she barely went inside.
"Besides," Tommy scowled darker, folding his arms across his bare chest. "You'd actually know what was going on in my life if you weren't spending every waking moment up that meathead's ass."
Billy froze for a moment, the topic changing so quickly that he had take a quick second to catch up, but when he did he glared at the other. How fucking dare he say that about Teddy. Teddy had nothing to do with this! He reached out and shoved at Tommy’s shoulder with a growl. “Don’t call him that. You don’t know anything about him.”
Tommy hadn’t seen it coming, had let his guard down once too many times. He flinched away, his body spinning to the side before Billy could get a second hit in. His heart in his throat and pulse rabbiting wildly in his chest, Tommy grabbed Billy’s wrist and put their arms between them. “Don’t even think it,” he snapped, the fear-adrenaline rush taking over. But Billy was his size, not his father’s, he wasn’t in danger- “Do you really wanna go?”
Go? Billy took a sharp breath in through his nose as he thought about that. No, he really didn’t want to fight Tommy, he never would want to, but the idea of him bad mouthing Teddy made him want to try. Something in him wondered what exactly that meant although now wasn’t the time for it and he ripped his arm out of Tommy’s grasp. “I’m not going to fight you, just don’t call him that again.”
Tommy didn't fight him. He let go, dropped Billy's hand and backed up to put space between them before he did something really stupid. "Whatever." Tommy scoffed, and looked away. "You spent weeks blowing smoke up my ass about being 'brothers,' and as soon as that- as soon as Teddy winks at you, you're on him like a bad rash 24-7. And then you call me out for doing my own thing without begging you to come along? You don't get to have it both ways."
“I’m not just blowing smoke up your ass, damn it. You didn’t even care about what I said, so why are you suddenly so up in arms about it?” Billy folded his arms across his own chest, glaring at Tommy because he just didn’t get him. He’d blow off any attempt Billy made at getting closer and then get upset when Billy went off with Teddy? What the hell? “And I didn’t ask you to beg me to come along. All I’m asking is to know so I’m not the last to know if-“
I lose you.
Billy shut his mouth with a click. “Forget it. Forget it.”
Tommy stared at him for a beat, then nodded. "I don't get you," was all he had to say to that. And he didn't. What would Billy care, anyway, except for this weird fantasy about brotherhood that he'd been the one to push -- and then pull back on when Tommy didn't take the bait right away. "But if you wanna be the one on-call the next time Laura decides she needs to dig up her mother, be my guest." He waved dismissively in the air and turned to head in to the shower stall. "There's some shit you can never un-see."
“Dig up her mother?” Billy asked to the shower curtain, even though he already heard the water start to run. Was that the dead body Tommy had been talking about? Had they killed Laura’s mom because she wouldn’t sell her kid like Tommy’s had? They’d actually dug up a dead body?! Billy ran his hands through his hair, all the anger kind of dissipating now that it had no where really to go. He moved back over to his bag numbly and placed his toothbrush back in, looking at himself in the mirror.
“This is all so messed up.” He told his reflection.
Tommy stayed under the shower a really long time -- for him, anyway, time slowing and stretching out in that rubber-band way he was getting more and more used to. The water trickled slowly over his skin, the steam and the strong smell of the shampoo burning away any traces of other things left in his sinuses. The more he scrubbed, the more Arizona dust swirled down the drain in slo-mo, taking a layer of skin and most of Tommy's shaky nerves with it.
He felt a hell of a lot better by the time he toweled off, re-wrapped it around his waist and pulled the curtain back. He expected to see the bathroom empty, Billy run back to his love nest to complain about how mean Tommy was.
Billy looked up when the curtain opened only two minutes later and Tommy came out, his pale skin red from the hot water. He couldn’t help but be slightly amused at the fact that a speedster's shower was ridiculous as he turned to look at Tommy. “Waste all the water, why don’t you.”
He turned back to his bag and zipped it up, not quite sure where to go from here. They could continue to fight, they were apparently good at it, or ask Tommy more about wherever the hell they had gone, but he was kind of done with it for now. Tommy was here and not under some creep’s microscope, so why make it a big deal anyway? So what if he didn’t get why Billy was upset or hurt and so what if he probably never would? Billy took a deep breath in and let it out as he picked up his bag, turning to look at Tommy with a small bitter twist of his lips that belonged more on the speedster.
“Well, glad you're not dead. Have fun,” He trailed off, raising a hand and then gave a small shrug. “Doing whatever it is you do.”
Billy's dismissal cut Tommy to the quick, and that was the entire fucking problem. That was what caring did. It left you open, it made you not notice when someone was about to hit you, it made someone else's problems with you into something that couldn't just be ignored. And Tommy'd fallen for it too many times already.
"Yeah, that figures," he snorted, his hair dripping water down onto his shoulders. "All that bullshit about being family - you're as bad a liar as my parents. The moment I go off-script it's all 'have a nice life, don't let the door hit you.' To hell with that." He could have vanished then, zipped off down the hall faster than Billy could see, never mind stop. But he didn't. He walked for the door at a normal stride, the ends of his towel flapping around his knees.
He was being compared to the people that sold Tommy to the god damn lab and Billy’s anger spiked suddenly, the frustration of being constantly rebuffed then getting attitude when he finally pulled away was unbelievable. “The moment you go off script? When were you ever on a script? It’s been nothing but ‘stop it with the emotions’ or ‘you’re being stupid about this’, and now when I’m finally giving you what you want you’re mad.”
Billy grit his teeth as he watched Tommy’s back. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
"Yeah," Tommy said, his hand on the door. Sad hit him in a terrible, awful wave, and that was way, way too uncomfortable to live with. Anger was better, powerful instead of weak and exposed. He pushed the door open and left the bathroom. "I know."
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Pam just agrees with Alex. Come to the Darkside, Tommy (at least for a visit!). They have cookies!
no subject
no subject