Tommy & Billy Backdated 9/4
Sep. 4th, 2017 09:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ax_wiccan posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
ax_mainBilly and Tommy finally get to trade info with each other on their weird crazy maybe family.
Monday morning, bright and early-ish (so much for long weekends), Tommy was waiting at the hidden door. He played with his phone, reading the text from Fatale over again just to have something to do. No news yet, bla bla. But it meant something; now that Billy was there it all had to mean something.
He probably should tell her about Billy. Share the news that there were more of them. But then he thought about Billy-the-dork with his static shocks facing off against the crazy blonde who’d flash-fried him, or the kid with the fire, or Alex and whatever the hell he’d done to melt the fork at the mall – and a shiver of some kind went up his spine. Like hell he’d let that happen.
Billy had immediately gotten up when his alarm had gone off, shucked his pajamas and replaced them with jeans and a t-shirt. He made sure to give a quick wave to a sleepy Teddy before he booked it out the door, his converse squeaking loudly on the floor as he ran down the halls toward their meeting place.
He was gasping by the time he got to their meeting place and hand to brace his arms on his knees. "Tommy!" He gasped loudly. "I made it. I'm here."
"No shit, Sherlock," Tommy drawled, displacing his irritation with the entire goddamn situation onto the nearest target. He shoved his phone back in his pocket. "I could hear your heavy breathing a mile away. On the plus side," he went on, his mood lightening as swiftly as it had darkened, "if you have a heart attack, you can be your own defibrillator."
Billy caught his breath and glared as he stood up straight, moving over to stand a little closer to his brother so that he could speak a little quieter. "Shut up, dick. So, what exactly was all that nonsense you babbled at me last night? Also, thank for jumping my roommate. I'm sure he's regretting rooming with me even more now."
"He'll get over it. And if you'd bothered to tell me you had a roommate now, the whole thing could have been avoided. But no, no-one ever bothers to fill me in." Tommy sighed a little extra-dramatically, just to see if Billy would go red.
"Oh please. He just moved in and I didn't even see you yesterday." Billy waved away his brother's theatrics before glancing down the hall and then pushed Tommy further so that they wouldn't be seen. "Now, tell me. What were you talking about with the texts and the sister? Are you talking about Wanda?"
Tommy let himself be pushed, dropping the pain-in-the-ass act now that they were apparently going all-business. Billy must care more about what his roommate thought than Tommy had realized. He filed that little bit of information away to check on later. He pulled his phone back out and scrolled through the texts, finding the one he wanted.
"Okay, so. I told you about the brother and sister pair we ran into at the Right's facility." It was easier to say it fast and move on to the real topic than to dwell on it or figure out euphemisms. "Wanda and Pietro. He calls himself Quicksilver, of all the dumb things, but I dunno what her callsign is." He shrugged it off. Keep it simple, that had been the sum total of his own decision making process for code names.
"A couple of days after - and you can't tell anyone about this-" Tommy stared into Billy's eyes and tried to impress on him just how important that was - "I ran into a couple of their friends. Or they ran into me, whichever. And we talked some. It turns out that Wanda and Pietro are twins. And their dad is in charge - or he's one of the ones in charge, they were a bit cagey on details - of whatever gang it is they're running with. And, that they didn't know he was their dad at first. He'd fostered them out or had them adopted out or sent them away -- I dunno exactly what. But they didn't grow up with him."
Tommy shook his head. "I didn't get a name, they wouldn't tell me. But Fatale told me that Wanda was putting pressure on her dad to find out if there's a chance that I'm his kid too. Because I didn't know about you at the time. And she texted me yesterday -- I wasn't sure she actually would -- even if it was just to say that Wanda's dad won't 'fess up to anything. But this shit is all too weird to be coincidence."
Billy took a deep breath in through his nose as he let everything Tommy had said settle in his mind, picking out the pieces that he knew was true and tossing the ones that he knew weren't. "Okay. Okay. So, the whole theory that you, and I'm guessing you think me too, are this leader's love children on the side is like a hundred percent wrong."
He glanced around again even though they were pretty much hidden the wall, paranoid that anyone with a certain power or something could come up to them without them knowing. "Alright, so here's what I know and it's the real deal because.... because Simon looked at my DNA. He's a mutant."
He held up a hand to stop any words that might come out of Tommy's mouth. "You have to promise you won't tell anyone that. I swear, Tommy. It's serious, no telling anyone about Simon. He helped me figure a bunch of this stuff out so his secret needs to be kept."
Tommy had told him not to tell and if Billy could keep his secret, then Tommy should keep his and he nodded. "Okay. Simon's power is that he can read DNA and find out about people, so I went over there yesterday to see if he could help us with the whole, look-a-like thing cause I had heard he was a geneticist. Well, surprise! He's a mutant and such, so he grabbed my hand and used his powers...and then promptly was knocked unconscious from it. Which, by the way, I was told is not normal for him."
He took another deep breath before looking Tommy dead in the eye. "But what he found...we are related to them Tommy, just not how you thought. We are...we are Wanda's kids...from the future."
Simon was a mutant? That didn't make Tommy trust him any more than he did -- a total already way into the negative numbers. He was just about to tell Billy exactly why he should stay away from Simon, and keep his DNA to himself, when Billy let off the absolute dumbest thing Tommy had ever heard him say.
Tommy didn't even blink, didn't need to take time to process that piece of garbage, he just burst out laughing. "Seriously? And you bought that? Dude, I know you're not exactly wise in the way of people, but even you can't be that gullible. He's fucking with you."
Billy quickly shook his head, knowing that it sounded completely crazy and really messed up. "Look, I know how it sounds, okay? Trust me, I know, but you didn't see him after he had woken up. He was disturbed, like what he saw in me was something that he had never seen before."
Billy frowned when he remembered Simon going unconscious and how drained he had been when he was trying to explain the mess he had seen. "Also, you never told me Wanda's name or Pietro's and has Simon ever been on these weird missions you guys go on?"
"Tam started out disturbed," Tommy shot back. But the rest of it... nah, he could explain that away too. "It's only been one mission, and Simon wasn't on it, but he rooms with Jean-Paul, and JP led the entire thing. And he and the other guys had a lot more time to talk to the rest of the other mutants while I was getting my ass fried by a floating blonde electromagnet. Simon could have gotten that information from Jean-Paul, easy."
But the more he thought about it, the more that didn't sit right either. Xavier had beat the drum about confidentiality, and JP - well. They weren't close friends, per se, but JP didn't seem like the kind of guy who'd take the first chance to blab secrets all over school. One of the least likely, frankly, given how close to the chest he played his own stuff.
"Say he's only fucking with you a little - the time travel thing, because I don't know about you, but I've seen baby photos that prove pretty damn conclusively that I was born in this century. We could be part of some genetic experiment. That kind of thing goes on more than you'd think."
"That would mean you're throwing everything he said out the window. And no, we didn't time travel like...ugh. He says we were reincarnated. Like...we died in the future, so we were brought back, only backwards." He was explaining this all wrong, he had never been good at arguing with facts, just arguing till he was blue in the face.
"Look, I get that it's crazy, hell I don't even want to believe it, but he can read our genetic code Tommy. How else can you explain how we look exactly alike, but we're born from two different couples living miles away from each other? We smell the same, we have the same birthday, we have the same genetic code. That's just too much evidence."
Billy felt a little manic trying to explain the impossible. For all he knew Simon could have been messing with him, but he really wanted to believe Simon wouldn't do that when it was this important to Billy.
"It's evidence of something, yeah. Test-tube babies or cloning experiments or whatever, but time travel?" Tommy scoffed. "And brought back by who? You'd need a time ..." he trailed off, memories of Limbo and Yana's half-explanations about her powers and stepping discs and sorcery flooding in. "You'd need a time-traveler with magical powers to do it."
Exactly how badly was Tommy going to anger Yana in the future to make her kill him, and his brother, and reincarnate them back into bodies in a time frame where he could piss her off all over again?
"Okay, look." Tommy regrouped, faintly aware that he'd obviously lost the plot for a moment there. "Say Tam is right, then. That we're the sons of a girl who's, like, a year older than us. Two, at the most," he added for emphasis. "Then we'd have half of her DNA, right? That's how they do paternity tests. And I've got her brother's powers, not hers."
"Uh, yeah." Billy rolled his eyes, information from Biology class coming screaming at him. "But that's still her genetics. My brother has my aunts on my Dad's side’s nose. Just because a gene doesn't show up in a parent, doesn't mean it won't crop up in their kid. It's still there."
Tommy frowned at him, willing Billy to see his point, to let it go, to stop making Tommy's life a lot more complicated than the mess it already was.
But then, hadn't he just been a little bit jealous of JP and JM's closeness? And made jokes about speedsters coming in two-packs - jokes that were only a little bit bitter?
And Billy was the one with wishing powers, so he was shit out of luck on that score, as well.
"Hang on," he muttered, flipping his phone over. He'd been playing with it while they talked, flipping it over and around between his fingers, but he swiped the screen and started to tap at it with a sense of renewed purpose.
Tommy: P's got speed -- what are W's powers? Even just basics. I won't spill, but it's a serious need to know.
Billy tilted his head and leaned in closer, their foreheads almost touching as he watched Tommy type out an incredibly fast message to someone with the name Pam, whoever that was. "Who are you texting?"
Then his eyes widened. "Wait! Are you texting them? Or people who know them? How'd you get that number? Aren't they like..."
Bad guys?
"I told you that," Tommy grumbled, and he looked up from his phone. "I ran into a couple of them. Friends of theirs, anyway, who weren't at the facility. They were looking for me, because of the whole-" he gestured around his face and hair. "Thing. It's fine," he shrugged, keeping his mouth tightly closed on the other subjects the three of them had discussed. "They're cool. Just not really ... school people. And she gave me her number so we could keep in touch in case they find out anything at their end."
Did that mean Tommy was becoming a 'school people'? That was a terrible thought.
His phone buzzed, then buzzed again.
Pam: Hi to you too. Probability manipulation. Which means fuck all, so basically, she makes random shit happen. Think fence at the shithole - that was her.
Pam: The boss insists no kids in Jersey, btw. W's giving up.
Tommy read the messages as they came in, then he tipped his phone so that Billy could see the reply as well.
He grabbed the hand that Tommy was holding the phone in so that it was steady while he read the reply whoever Pam was had sent back. "Holy shit...that's...that's kind of what I do."
Then a huge smile spread across his face and he tilted his head up just a smidge so that he could make sure Tommy was looking at him. "I love to say it, so I told you so."
"Fuck off," Tommy replied, too distracted by the implications to give the insult more than lip-service. It still didn't have to mean time-travel. It could just be... coincidence?
Even he wasn't that much of a cynic.
And a faint little feeling somewhere deep down inside - it tried to get smug at him. To convince him that the weird niggle of right-ness meant that he could trust Billy, trust that it wasn't Billy punking Tommy on all of this bullshit. No, one look at his face and Tommy could see it all there. Kid had his heart pinned right there on his sleeve for the world to break.
"C'mere," he said, then remembering the look in Yana's eyes last week - "if you want," he added. He opened his camera app and flipped it to selfie mode before flashing it at Billy in suggestion. "But if Wanda's giving up on finding answers, then this is going to make them shit themselves."
Billy blinked when Tommy opened the camera on his phone, but caught on quick as he moved in next to the other. Looking at themselves in the small little box made Billy almost choke on a breath, they looked so fucking alike. Not that he ever really forgot, but he didn't see himself constantly and seeing his image right next to Tommy's made it that much more real.
The same face, just different coloring.
He didn't really smile for the picture, not sure who exactly was going to see it and he ended up looking not quite sure about it.
Tommy barely glanced at the photo before tapping out a rapid couple of texts back to Pam.
Tommy: How random is 'random'? Because life around here just got a shit-ton more improbable.
Photo included
Tommy: Looks like all speedsters come in sets after all.
He hit send and dropped his hands, a slow grin spreading across his face. "Let the chaos begin."
At Tommy's grin Billy could feel the start of a headache come on and covered his eyes with his hand. "Let's just hope that doesn't come back to bite us in the ass. Last thing any of us need is another me in here."
But maybe meeting Wanda would help him, if she knew how to use her magic and powers then maybe this whole thing wouldn't be a huge mistake.
Monday morning, bright and early-ish (so much for long weekends), Tommy was waiting at the hidden door. He played with his phone, reading the text from Fatale over again just to have something to do. No news yet, bla bla. But it meant something; now that Billy was there it all had to mean something.
He probably should tell her about Billy. Share the news that there were more of them. But then he thought about Billy-the-dork with his static shocks facing off against the crazy blonde who’d flash-fried him, or the kid with the fire, or Alex and whatever the hell he’d done to melt the fork at the mall – and a shiver of some kind went up his spine. Like hell he’d let that happen.
Billy had immediately gotten up when his alarm had gone off, shucked his pajamas and replaced them with jeans and a t-shirt. He made sure to give a quick wave to a sleepy Teddy before he booked it out the door, his converse squeaking loudly on the floor as he ran down the halls toward their meeting place.
He was gasping by the time he got to their meeting place and hand to brace his arms on his knees. "Tommy!" He gasped loudly. "I made it. I'm here."
"No shit, Sherlock," Tommy drawled, displacing his irritation with the entire goddamn situation onto the nearest target. He shoved his phone back in his pocket. "I could hear your heavy breathing a mile away. On the plus side," he went on, his mood lightening as swiftly as it had darkened, "if you have a heart attack, you can be your own defibrillator."
Billy caught his breath and glared as he stood up straight, moving over to stand a little closer to his brother so that he could speak a little quieter. "Shut up, dick. So, what exactly was all that nonsense you babbled at me last night? Also, thank for jumping my roommate. I'm sure he's regretting rooming with me even more now."
"He'll get over it. And if you'd bothered to tell me you had a roommate now, the whole thing could have been avoided. But no, no-one ever bothers to fill me in." Tommy sighed a little extra-dramatically, just to see if Billy would go red.
"Oh please. He just moved in and I didn't even see you yesterday." Billy waved away his brother's theatrics before glancing down the hall and then pushed Tommy further so that they wouldn't be seen. "Now, tell me. What were you talking about with the texts and the sister? Are you talking about Wanda?"
Tommy let himself be pushed, dropping the pain-in-the-ass act now that they were apparently going all-business. Billy must care more about what his roommate thought than Tommy had realized. He filed that little bit of information away to check on later. He pulled his phone back out and scrolled through the texts, finding the one he wanted.
"Okay, so. I told you about the brother and sister pair we ran into at the Right's facility." It was easier to say it fast and move on to the real topic than to dwell on it or figure out euphemisms. "Wanda and Pietro. He calls himself Quicksilver, of all the dumb things, but I dunno what her callsign is." He shrugged it off. Keep it simple, that had been the sum total of his own decision making process for code names.
"A couple of days after - and you can't tell anyone about this-" Tommy stared into Billy's eyes and tried to impress on him just how important that was - "I ran into a couple of their friends. Or they ran into me, whichever. And we talked some. It turns out that Wanda and Pietro are twins. And their dad is in charge - or he's one of the ones in charge, they were a bit cagey on details - of whatever gang it is they're running with. And, that they didn't know he was their dad at first. He'd fostered them out or had them adopted out or sent them away -- I dunno exactly what. But they didn't grow up with him."
Tommy shook his head. "I didn't get a name, they wouldn't tell me. But Fatale told me that Wanda was putting pressure on her dad to find out if there's a chance that I'm his kid too. Because I didn't know about you at the time. And she texted me yesterday -- I wasn't sure she actually would -- even if it was just to say that Wanda's dad won't 'fess up to anything. But this shit is all too weird to be coincidence."
Billy took a deep breath in through his nose as he let everything Tommy had said settle in his mind, picking out the pieces that he knew was true and tossing the ones that he knew weren't. "Okay. Okay. So, the whole theory that you, and I'm guessing you think me too, are this leader's love children on the side is like a hundred percent wrong."
He glanced around again even though they were pretty much hidden the wall, paranoid that anyone with a certain power or something could come up to them without them knowing. "Alright, so here's what I know and it's the real deal because.... because Simon looked at my DNA. He's a mutant."
He held up a hand to stop any words that might come out of Tommy's mouth. "You have to promise you won't tell anyone that. I swear, Tommy. It's serious, no telling anyone about Simon. He helped me figure a bunch of this stuff out so his secret needs to be kept."
Tommy had told him not to tell and if Billy could keep his secret, then Tommy should keep his and he nodded. "Okay. Simon's power is that he can read DNA and find out about people, so I went over there yesterday to see if he could help us with the whole, look-a-like thing cause I had heard he was a geneticist. Well, surprise! He's a mutant and such, so he grabbed my hand and used his powers...and then promptly was knocked unconscious from it. Which, by the way, I was told is not normal for him."
He took another deep breath before looking Tommy dead in the eye. "But what he found...we are related to them Tommy, just not how you thought. We are...we are Wanda's kids...from the future."
Simon was a mutant? That didn't make Tommy trust him any more than he did -- a total already way into the negative numbers. He was just about to tell Billy exactly why he should stay away from Simon, and keep his DNA to himself, when Billy let off the absolute dumbest thing Tommy had ever heard him say.
Tommy didn't even blink, didn't need to take time to process that piece of garbage, he just burst out laughing. "Seriously? And you bought that? Dude, I know you're not exactly wise in the way of people, but even you can't be that gullible. He's fucking with you."
Billy quickly shook his head, knowing that it sounded completely crazy and really messed up. "Look, I know how it sounds, okay? Trust me, I know, but you didn't see him after he had woken up. He was disturbed, like what he saw in me was something that he had never seen before."
Billy frowned when he remembered Simon going unconscious and how drained he had been when he was trying to explain the mess he had seen. "Also, you never told me Wanda's name or Pietro's and has Simon ever been on these weird missions you guys go on?"
"Tam started out disturbed," Tommy shot back. But the rest of it... nah, he could explain that away too. "It's only been one mission, and Simon wasn't on it, but he rooms with Jean-Paul, and JP led the entire thing. And he and the other guys had a lot more time to talk to the rest of the other mutants while I was getting my ass fried by a floating blonde electromagnet. Simon could have gotten that information from Jean-Paul, easy."
But the more he thought about it, the more that didn't sit right either. Xavier had beat the drum about confidentiality, and JP - well. They weren't close friends, per se, but JP didn't seem like the kind of guy who'd take the first chance to blab secrets all over school. One of the least likely, frankly, given how close to the chest he played his own stuff.
"Say he's only fucking with you a little - the time travel thing, because I don't know about you, but I've seen baby photos that prove pretty damn conclusively that I was born in this century. We could be part of some genetic experiment. That kind of thing goes on more than you'd think."
"That would mean you're throwing everything he said out the window. And no, we didn't time travel like...ugh. He says we were reincarnated. Like...we died in the future, so we were brought back, only backwards." He was explaining this all wrong, he had never been good at arguing with facts, just arguing till he was blue in the face.
"Look, I get that it's crazy, hell I don't even want to believe it, but he can read our genetic code Tommy. How else can you explain how we look exactly alike, but we're born from two different couples living miles away from each other? We smell the same, we have the same birthday, we have the same genetic code. That's just too much evidence."
Billy felt a little manic trying to explain the impossible. For all he knew Simon could have been messing with him, but he really wanted to believe Simon wouldn't do that when it was this important to Billy.
"It's evidence of something, yeah. Test-tube babies or cloning experiments or whatever, but time travel?" Tommy scoffed. "And brought back by who? You'd need a time ..." he trailed off, memories of Limbo and Yana's half-explanations about her powers and stepping discs and sorcery flooding in. "You'd need a time-traveler with magical powers to do it."
Exactly how badly was Tommy going to anger Yana in the future to make her kill him, and his brother, and reincarnate them back into bodies in a time frame where he could piss her off all over again?
"Okay, look." Tommy regrouped, faintly aware that he'd obviously lost the plot for a moment there. "Say Tam is right, then. That we're the sons of a girl who's, like, a year older than us. Two, at the most," he added for emphasis. "Then we'd have half of her DNA, right? That's how they do paternity tests. And I've got her brother's powers, not hers."
"Uh, yeah." Billy rolled his eyes, information from Biology class coming screaming at him. "But that's still her genetics. My brother has my aunts on my Dad's side’s nose. Just because a gene doesn't show up in a parent, doesn't mean it won't crop up in their kid. It's still there."
Tommy frowned at him, willing Billy to see his point, to let it go, to stop making Tommy's life a lot more complicated than the mess it already was.
But then, hadn't he just been a little bit jealous of JP and JM's closeness? And made jokes about speedsters coming in two-packs - jokes that were only a little bit bitter?
And Billy was the one with wishing powers, so he was shit out of luck on that score, as well.
"Hang on," he muttered, flipping his phone over. He'd been playing with it while they talked, flipping it over and around between his fingers, but he swiped the screen and started to tap at it with a sense of renewed purpose.
Tommy: P's got speed -- what are W's powers? Even just basics. I won't spill, but it's a serious need to know.
Billy tilted his head and leaned in closer, their foreheads almost touching as he watched Tommy type out an incredibly fast message to someone with the name Pam, whoever that was. "Who are you texting?"
Then his eyes widened. "Wait! Are you texting them? Or people who know them? How'd you get that number? Aren't they like..."
Bad guys?
"I told you that," Tommy grumbled, and he looked up from his phone. "I ran into a couple of them. Friends of theirs, anyway, who weren't at the facility. They were looking for me, because of the whole-" he gestured around his face and hair. "Thing. It's fine," he shrugged, keeping his mouth tightly closed on the other subjects the three of them had discussed. "They're cool. Just not really ... school people. And she gave me her number so we could keep in touch in case they find out anything at their end."
Did that mean Tommy was becoming a 'school people'? That was a terrible thought.
His phone buzzed, then buzzed again.
Pam: Hi to you too. Probability manipulation. Which means fuck all, so basically, she makes random shit happen. Think fence at the shithole - that was her.
Pam: The boss insists no kids in Jersey, btw. W's giving up.
Tommy read the messages as they came in, then he tipped his phone so that Billy could see the reply as well.
He grabbed the hand that Tommy was holding the phone in so that it was steady while he read the reply whoever Pam was had sent back. "Holy shit...that's...that's kind of what I do."
Then a huge smile spread across his face and he tilted his head up just a smidge so that he could make sure Tommy was looking at him. "I love to say it, so I told you so."
"Fuck off," Tommy replied, too distracted by the implications to give the insult more than lip-service. It still didn't have to mean time-travel. It could just be... coincidence?
Even he wasn't that much of a cynic.
And a faint little feeling somewhere deep down inside - it tried to get smug at him. To convince him that the weird niggle of right-ness meant that he could trust Billy, trust that it wasn't Billy punking Tommy on all of this bullshit. No, one look at his face and Tommy could see it all there. Kid had his heart pinned right there on his sleeve for the world to break.
"C'mere," he said, then remembering the look in Yana's eyes last week - "if you want," he added. He opened his camera app and flipped it to selfie mode before flashing it at Billy in suggestion. "But if Wanda's giving up on finding answers, then this is going to make them shit themselves."
Billy blinked when Tommy opened the camera on his phone, but caught on quick as he moved in next to the other. Looking at themselves in the small little box made Billy almost choke on a breath, they looked so fucking alike. Not that he ever really forgot, but he didn't see himself constantly and seeing his image right next to Tommy's made it that much more real.
The same face, just different coloring.
He didn't really smile for the picture, not sure who exactly was going to see it and he ended up looking not quite sure about it.
Tommy barely glanced at the photo before tapping out a rapid couple of texts back to Pam.
Tommy: How random is 'random'? Because life around here just got a shit-ton more improbable.
Photo included
Tommy: Looks like all speedsters come in sets after all.
He hit send and dropped his hands, a slow grin spreading across his face. "Let the chaos begin."
At Tommy's grin Billy could feel the start of a headache come on and covered his eyes with his hand. "Let's just hope that doesn't come back to bite us in the ass. Last thing any of us need is another me in here."
But maybe meeting Wanda would help him, if she knew how to use her magic and powers then maybe this whole thing wouldn't be a huge mistake.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-09 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-10 09:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-10 08:36 pm (UTC)... no, right, probably not >.>
Also:
Exactly how badly was Tommy going to anger Yana in the future to make her kill him, and his brother, and reincarnate them back into bodies in a time frame where he could piss her off all over again?
I died.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-10 09:06 pm (UTC)