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Tommy & Inu-yasha, Saturday afternoon
The boys of 103 meet for the first time.
Inu-yasha was laying on his bed and fiddling with his new phone, trying to make it work - and trying not to let his claws scratch it up.
“Kuso,” he swore under his breath. He wasn't used to actually using phones - usually he just stole them and pawned them. Who would want to get in touch with him anyway? Maybe Kaede-baba, but that was even less reason to have one. Like he needed some old lady nagging him...
The room was still essentially bare. After one night, Inu-yasha hadn't done more than sling his bag on the floor and rummage through it for the things he needed. He hadn't even turned on the computer yet. He had even less idea about how to use that than he did his phone. Fuck, this place was so bizarre.
He heard some voices in the hall, but ignored them. It wasn't until he heard a key in the door that his focus snapped to the boy coming in. He dropped the phone, sitting up and pulling his hood over his ears, amber eyes focused intently on the newcomer.
“Thanks. I’ve got it from here.” Tommy opened the door to his new room —for however long this one lasted—and stepped inside. It was a whole lot more like a dorm room than a jail cell, and despite the bare walls and plain beds, looked a hell of a lot more comfortable than the infirmary. Two beds, two desks, two dressers, two computers that only looked halfway back to the stone age, a bag with his name on it beside one of the beds.
A guy sitting on the other bed sat up and stared at him from inside a hoodie. Not exactly a welcoming committee, but luck couldn’t last forever. Tommy dropped the clothes he was carrying on one of the dressers, the door swinging closed behind him. “Tommy Shepherd,” he said toward the figure on the other bed. “Live and in person.”
Inu-yasha blinked in confusion. Whatever he’d been expecting, that wasn’t it. “The hell?”
“Yeah, that’s been pretty much my reaction to this whole week.” Tommy flung himself down on to the empty bed and bounced to test it out. Not bad. “We’re rooming together. Apparently.”
Inu-yasha took him in carefully. The new guy smelled like a strange mix of a hospital and a sandwich shop. Weird. “You've been here a week?” he asked, confused and suspicious. If that was the case, why was he just getting to the room now? ...and why smelling like a hospital? “They do something to you?”
Kurt had looked weird but acted normal, Bobby was American Normal personified. This guy... this guy was pinging really high on both sides of the weird-o-meter. Still, they were apparently going to be spending a whole lot of time in each other’s back pockets. Better to get some things established now.
“The school? No. Call it...” and he was really tired of telling his story over and over again, so he grabbed on to the easiest shortcut. “-detox.” He bounced back up off the bed and unzipped the bag that had been waiting for him. Toothbrush, soap, whatever, whatever... but there was also a cheap-o smart phone with a charger. Not bad. “What’s your name? Or do I just call you ‘red hood’?”
“What? No!” Inu-yasha glared, but didn't remove the hood. “Name's Inu-yasha. Not red anything.”
And wasn’t he just going to be a bundle of joy to live with? Not that Tommy was looking to ‘bond’ or make lifelong friends either. But knowing that he wasn’t going to wake up with a knife to his throat would be nice. He poked at the phone, got it started. “What is that; Japanese?” he asked, frowning at the phone screen while it took its own sweet time to boot.
“What if it is?” Inu-yasha replied warily. He didn't have much of a read on this guy yet, but almost everyone he'd ever met had found some reason to hate him.
“Stand down on the red alert, dude. Just making conversation.” Tommy tapped the phone screen, paging through settings and apps as quickly as the stupid thing would actually respond to him, tweaking it into something that didn’t feel like a brick of suck sitting in his hand. “I don’t actually care, as long as we can agree on some ground rules.”
“Yeah?” Inu-yasha raised an eyebrow. He moved to sit with his back to the wall, legs tucked under him and arms crossed over his chest. This might be alright. The other guy didn't look like he could put up much of a fight, so probably he wasn't gonna try anything with this. “Like what?”
The tension in the room faded enough to satisfy Tommy. He shoved the phone in his pocket and kicked off his shoes. “You don’t touch my shit, I don’t touch yours. Headphones for music, and keep your stuff on your side of the room. What else?” And now to hope he wasn’t going to add anything really weird.
Inu-yasha paused to think. So far that list made sense to him - they each stay on their own side and don't mess with the others stuff. What else was there? He'd never shared a room with someone before (he'd slept on the floor of the main room at Kaede-baba's...). “Don't bother with the headphones,” he said, still thinking. “I can hear it anyway, and it's fucking annoying.”
Oh, come on. “Headphones are annoying, or all music is annoying? Because dude, I’m not living in total silence in here.”
“Hm?” Inu-yasha focused on the other boy again. “Headphones. Makes it sound funny.”
Alright -- could be worse. Still... “Sure. No headphones. But if you're into old-school country music, wait until I'm in class to jack the volume up. I hate that shit.” Frank had loved it; banjos and too much beer had gone hand in hand.
Inu-yasha wrinkled his nose at the idea. “I don't listen to music,” he replied gruffly. Another rule occurred to him. “You smoke anything?” Tommy didn't smell like it, but he'd been in rehab or whatever, so who knew?
Looking up reflexively, Tommy didn’t see a smoke detector that was obvious; he was pretty sure there had been some in the hallway, along with the usual big-building sprinkler heads. “Sometimes. Depends if anyone’s offering.” Inu-yasha didn’t seem like the type of guy to get all puritanical about pot, unless he was one of those straight-edge kids.
It wasn’t like Tommy smoked up regularly (at least not since his last round at juvie, sneaking up to the roof with Lisa... a trip down memory lane he shut down immediately). Fucking with his lungs too much was probably a really bad idea for a runner. It was one of those things that worked to take the edge of the electrical storm in his brain, but it also slowed him down physically. Much less ideal.
“Don't do it in here,” Inu-yasha replied dismissively, seeming to relax back against the wall. He didn't drop his guard entirely yet - the kid looked harmless, but Inu-yasha himself didn't look like much, and the truth was he could tear down a building if he wanted to. No, until he had Tommy figured out, he wouldn't be totally at ease.
Tommy was very briefly tempted to find something to roll up and light, purely for perversity’s sake, but that wouldn’t exactly make life smoother in the shared room. “No problem. I don’t particularly want to know what kind of fire suppression systems they’ve got installed in a place like this.”
Phone figured out, Tommy took a second – half a second, really – and stashed the loaner clothes in the empty dresser, did a circuit of his side of the room, closet space, whatever – and started the computer booting up. “Anything I need to know about your mutation other than super-hearing?” he tossed the question off casually.
“The hell was that?!” Inu-yasha snapped, more in shock than anger as he tried to piece together what he'd just seen (or hadn't). Holy shit, this guy could move!
Hah. Gotcha. Inu-Yasha might be playing everything close to the vest, but he wasn’t unsurprisable. That was something of a relief; it levelled the playing field a bit, at least. “What was what?” Tommy asked innocently. “Ohhh... the speed thing. My mutation. Apparently. As if the white hair and killer good looks weren’t enough.”
Inu-yasha's cheeks tinged slightly pink, and he bit his lip. Tommy was making fun of him, but how was he supposed to know some genetic whatever could make someone fast like that? How was that possible?
“That's a mutation?” he asked, still not quite ready to believe it.
“It didn’t come from high school track and field, my man.” Tommy could show off, maybe try and explode something small, just to prove what he could really do- but that probably wasn’t the best idea he’d ever had. At least not until he got more control. “Molecular acceleration or some shit like that.”
That was... a really bad ass mutation. Damn. Inu-yasha had always been fast, faster than everyone else, but he was nowhere near that fast.
He smirked at his roommate, lip pulling back to show off a fang. “Not bad.”
Woah. Tommy had seen a few of the guys around the school so far, Kurt being the most interesting as far as visible effects went, but that was right up there. Hang on – hood up to keep out the light, eyes that kind of glowed, fangs – “if you’re a vampire, I’m eating garlic for dinner every night. Fair warning.”
“Demon,” Inu-yasha corrected smugly, holding up a hand to show the claws.
Ok, that was unexpected. Tommy narrowed his eyes, trying to figure out if he was being punked. “Demon, like, summoning circle and black magic? I thought we were all mutants.” Were ‘demons’ even a thing? And if they were, did that make ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ a documentary?
“Keh,” Inu-yasha scoffed, rolling his eyes. “Not that kind of demon.” Not that he hadn't benefited from that particular translation before, but Japanese youkai were very different from this American version.
That... was distinctly unhelpful, but okay. “Good, ‘cause my soul’s not for sale.” He cracked the obvious joke, but it would probably zoom right over the guy’s head. Tommy had the distinct sense they weren’t exactly operating on the same wavelengths.
“Dog demon,” Inu-yasha replied, completely unimpressed with the joke. “It means I'm strong and fast and shit. Nothin' about souls.”
“Strong and fast works.” And then Tommy ran out of things to say. The computer beeped, finally, finally finished booting and updating or whatever the hell took chips and circuits so long to become useful, and he flung himself into the desk chair. First step, figure out exactly where the hell they were, geographically. Then look up everything he could about Xavier, and make sure Tommy hadn’t made the worst mistake of his life by deciding to trust him.
Inu-yasha watched this curiously. He didn't know what to do with a computer really, hadn't used one since he'd dropped out of school a few years ago.
“You do anything else?” he asked, aiming to sound disinterested. His own mutation was a mix of strength, senses, and animal-like traits, so who knew what else Tommy might have going on?
Charles Xavier, doctorate in genetics- co-authored papers with Moira Mactaggert, another genetics expert... and look at that. She’s on the board for the school. And didn’t that just figure. Out of the frying pan, into another research facility. Tommy glanced up from the computer screen when his roommate started talking to him again. “You mean like a secondary power? No such luck.” He kicked back in his chair, hands locked behind his head, and grinned sideways at Inu-yasha. “But it turns out that if I make other shit go really fast, it blows up. That’s always fun.”
Inu-yasha's eyes narrowed. That had to be a lie. ...right? Fast things didn't just explode. “Bullshit.”
“Negatory. How d’you think I ended up the delinquent with a record that I am today? Google Central High School in Newark if you don’t believe me.”
...only about half of those words made sense to Inu-yasha, but he tried not to let on. Google was one of those computer things, right? “Things don't just blow up like that.”
“You’re right,” Tommy replied, turning back to the series of tabs he was pulling up – maps of the area, news stories about Xavier, all that sort of thing. “They blow up when I happen to them.”
“Keh. Sure.” Inu-yasha wasn't going to believe that until he saw it. “Just don't blow up my stuff and we're fine.”
Tommy ignored the challenge, memories of dust and smoke, the smell of gas and flame still lingering in his nose. It was easy to brag about it, a lot harder to shake off. No promises.
Inu-yasha was laying on his bed and fiddling with his new phone, trying to make it work - and trying not to let his claws scratch it up.
“Kuso,” he swore under his breath. He wasn't used to actually using phones - usually he just stole them and pawned them. Who would want to get in touch with him anyway? Maybe Kaede-baba, but that was even less reason to have one. Like he needed some old lady nagging him...
The room was still essentially bare. After one night, Inu-yasha hadn't done more than sling his bag on the floor and rummage through it for the things he needed. He hadn't even turned on the computer yet. He had even less idea about how to use that than he did his phone. Fuck, this place was so bizarre.
He heard some voices in the hall, but ignored them. It wasn't until he heard a key in the door that his focus snapped to the boy coming in. He dropped the phone, sitting up and pulling his hood over his ears, amber eyes focused intently on the newcomer.
“Thanks. I’ve got it from here.” Tommy opened the door to his new room —for however long this one lasted—and stepped inside. It was a whole lot more like a dorm room than a jail cell, and despite the bare walls and plain beds, looked a hell of a lot more comfortable than the infirmary. Two beds, two desks, two dressers, two computers that only looked halfway back to the stone age, a bag with his name on it beside one of the beds.
A guy sitting on the other bed sat up and stared at him from inside a hoodie. Not exactly a welcoming committee, but luck couldn’t last forever. Tommy dropped the clothes he was carrying on one of the dressers, the door swinging closed behind him. “Tommy Shepherd,” he said toward the figure on the other bed. “Live and in person.”
Inu-yasha blinked in confusion. Whatever he’d been expecting, that wasn’t it. “The hell?”
“Yeah, that’s been pretty much my reaction to this whole week.” Tommy flung himself down on to the empty bed and bounced to test it out. Not bad. “We’re rooming together. Apparently.”
Inu-yasha took him in carefully. The new guy smelled like a strange mix of a hospital and a sandwich shop. Weird. “You've been here a week?” he asked, confused and suspicious. If that was the case, why was he just getting to the room now? ...and why smelling like a hospital? “They do something to you?”
Kurt had looked weird but acted normal, Bobby was American Normal personified. This guy... this guy was pinging really high on both sides of the weird-o-meter. Still, they were apparently going to be spending a whole lot of time in each other’s back pockets. Better to get some things established now.
“The school? No. Call it...” and he was really tired of telling his story over and over again, so he grabbed on to the easiest shortcut. “-detox.” He bounced back up off the bed and unzipped the bag that had been waiting for him. Toothbrush, soap, whatever, whatever... but there was also a cheap-o smart phone with a charger. Not bad. “What’s your name? Or do I just call you ‘red hood’?”
“What? No!” Inu-yasha glared, but didn't remove the hood. “Name's Inu-yasha. Not red anything.”
And wasn’t he just going to be a bundle of joy to live with? Not that Tommy was looking to ‘bond’ or make lifelong friends either. But knowing that he wasn’t going to wake up with a knife to his throat would be nice. He poked at the phone, got it started. “What is that; Japanese?” he asked, frowning at the phone screen while it took its own sweet time to boot.
“What if it is?” Inu-yasha replied warily. He didn't have much of a read on this guy yet, but almost everyone he'd ever met had found some reason to hate him.
“Stand down on the red alert, dude. Just making conversation.” Tommy tapped the phone screen, paging through settings and apps as quickly as the stupid thing would actually respond to him, tweaking it into something that didn’t feel like a brick of suck sitting in his hand. “I don’t actually care, as long as we can agree on some ground rules.”
“Yeah?” Inu-yasha raised an eyebrow. He moved to sit with his back to the wall, legs tucked under him and arms crossed over his chest. This might be alright. The other guy didn't look like he could put up much of a fight, so probably he wasn't gonna try anything with this. “Like what?”
The tension in the room faded enough to satisfy Tommy. He shoved the phone in his pocket and kicked off his shoes. “You don’t touch my shit, I don’t touch yours. Headphones for music, and keep your stuff on your side of the room. What else?” And now to hope he wasn’t going to add anything really weird.
Inu-yasha paused to think. So far that list made sense to him - they each stay on their own side and don't mess with the others stuff. What else was there? He'd never shared a room with someone before (he'd slept on the floor of the main room at Kaede-baba's...). “Don't bother with the headphones,” he said, still thinking. “I can hear it anyway, and it's fucking annoying.”
Oh, come on. “Headphones are annoying, or all music is annoying? Because dude, I’m not living in total silence in here.”
“Hm?” Inu-yasha focused on the other boy again. “Headphones. Makes it sound funny.”
Alright -- could be worse. Still... “Sure. No headphones. But if you're into old-school country music, wait until I'm in class to jack the volume up. I hate that shit.” Frank had loved it; banjos and too much beer had gone hand in hand.
Inu-yasha wrinkled his nose at the idea. “I don't listen to music,” he replied gruffly. Another rule occurred to him. “You smoke anything?” Tommy didn't smell like it, but he'd been in rehab or whatever, so who knew?
Looking up reflexively, Tommy didn’t see a smoke detector that was obvious; he was pretty sure there had been some in the hallway, along with the usual big-building sprinkler heads. “Sometimes. Depends if anyone’s offering.” Inu-yasha didn’t seem like the type of guy to get all puritanical about pot, unless he was one of those straight-edge kids.
It wasn’t like Tommy smoked up regularly (at least not since his last round at juvie, sneaking up to the roof with Lisa... a trip down memory lane he shut down immediately). Fucking with his lungs too much was probably a really bad idea for a runner. It was one of those things that worked to take the edge of the electrical storm in his brain, but it also slowed him down physically. Much less ideal.
“Don't do it in here,” Inu-yasha replied dismissively, seeming to relax back against the wall. He didn't drop his guard entirely yet - the kid looked harmless, but Inu-yasha himself didn't look like much, and the truth was he could tear down a building if he wanted to. No, until he had Tommy figured out, he wouldn't be totally at ease.
Tommy was very briefly tempted to find something to roll up and light, purely for perversity’s sake, but that wouldn’t exactly make life smoother in the shared room. “No problem. I don’t particularly want to know what kind of fire suppression systems they’ve got installed in a place like this.”
Phone figured out, Tommy took a second – half a second, really – and stashed the loaner clothes in the empty dresser, did a circuit of his side of the room, closet space, whatever – and started the computer booting up. “Anything I need to know about your mutation other than super-hearing?” he tossed the question off casually.
“The hell was that?!” Inu-yasha snapped, more in shock than anger as he tried to piece together what he'd just seen (or hadn't). Holy shit, this guy could move!
Hah. Gotcha. Inu-Yasha might be playing everything close to the vest, but he wasn’t unsurprisable. That was something of a relief; it levelled the playing field a bit, at least. “What was what?” Tommy asked innocently. “Ohhh... the speed thing. My mutation. Apparently. As if the white hair and killer good looks weren’t enough.”
Inu-yasha's cheeks tinged slightly pink, and he bit his lip. Tommy was making fun of him, but how was he supposed to know some genetic whatever could make someone fast like that? How was that possible?
“That's a mutation?” he asked, still not quite ready to believe it.
“It didn’t come from high school track and field, my man.” Tommy could show off, maybe try and explode something small, just to prove what he could really do- but that probably wasn’t the best idea he’d ever had. At least not until he got more control. “Molecular acceleration or some shit like that.”
That was... a really bad ass mutation. Damn. Inu-yasha had always been fast, faster than everyone else, but he was nowhere near that fast.
He smirked at his roommate, lip pulling back to show off a fang. “Not bad.”
Woah. Tommy had seen a few of the guys around the school so far, Kurt being the most interesting as far as visible effects went, but that was right up there. Hang on – hood up to keep out the light, eyes that kind of glowed, fangs – “if you’re a vampire, I’m eating garlic for dinner every night. Fair warning.”
“Demon,” Inu-yasha corrected smugly, holding up a hand to show the claws.
Ok, that was unexpected. Tommy narrowed his eyes, trying to figure out if he was being punked. “Demon, like, summoning circle and black magic? I thought we were all mutants.” Were ‘demons’ even a thing? And if they were, did that make ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ a documentary?
“Keh,” Inu-yasha scoffed, rolling his eyes. “Not that kind of demon.” Not that he hadn't benefited from that particular translation before, but Japanese youkai were very different from this American version.
That... was distinctly unhelpful, but okay. “Good, ‘cause my soul’s not for sale.” He cracked the obvious joke, but it would probably zoom right over the guy’s head. Tommy had the distinct sense they weren’t exactly operating on the same wavelengths.
“Dog demon,” Inu-yasha replied, completely unimpressed with the joke. “It means I'm strong and fast and shit. Nothin' about souls.”
“Strong and fast works.” And then Tommy ran out of things to say. The computer beeped, finally, finally finished booting and updating or whatever the hell took chips and circuits so long to become useful, and he flung himself into the desk chair. First step, figure out exactly where the hell they were, geographically. Then look up everything he could about Xavier, and make sure Tommy hadn’t made the worst mistake of his life by deciding to trust him.
Inu-yasha watched this curiously. He didn't know what to do with a computer really, hadn't used one since he'd dropped out of school a few years ago.
“You do anything else?” he asked, aiming to sound disinterested. His own mutation was a mix of strength, senses, and animal-like traits, so who knew what else Tommy might have going on?
Charles Xavier, doctorate in genetics- co-authored papers with Moira Mactaggert, another genetics expert... and look at that. She’s on the board for the school. And didn’t that just figure. Out of the frying pan, into another research facility. Tommy glanced up from the computer screen when his roommate started talking to him again. “You mean like a secondary power? No such luck.” He kicked back in his chair, hands locked behind his head, and grinned sideways at Inu-yasha. “But it turns out that if I make other shit go really fast, it blows up. That’s always fun.”
Inu-yasha's eyes narrowed. That had to be a lie. ...right? Fast things didn't just explode. “Bullshit.”
“Negatory. How d’you think I ended up the delinquent with a record that I am today? Google Central High School in Newark if you don’t believe me.”
...only about half of those words made sense to Inu-yasha, but he tried not to let on. Google was one of those computer things, right? “Things don't just blow up like that.”
“You’re right,” Tommy replied, turning back to the series of tabs he was pulling up – maps of the area, news stories about Xavier, all that sort of thing. “They blow up when I happen to them.”
“Keh. Sure.” Inu-yasha wasn't going to believe that until he saw it. “Just don't blow up my stuff and we're fine.”
Tommy ignored the challenge, memories of dust and smoke, the smell of gas and flame still lingering in his nose. It was easy to brag about it, a lot harder to shake off. No promises.
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