Chapter Two
Chapter Two:
“All the federales say,
They could have had him any day
They only let him slip away,
Out of kindness I suppose.”
Lance stopped singing as he saw Tabby’s head poke over the side of the roof, though he kept idly strumming his guitar. Tabby climbed the rest of the way onto the roof, and then reached down to pull a cooler up after her.
“You know,” she said, “When it comes to singing, you’re a halfway decent guitarist.”
“Thanks,” said Lance, absently, and then, “Hey!” Tabby grinned and blew him a kiss.
“You’d better have beer in that cooler,” Lance said, carefully cradling his guitar in a nook of the roof.
“Or what?” Tabby asked, and then yelped and clutched at Lance’s arm as the steeply pitched roof bucked under her. “Okay, you win, asshole.” She pulled a bottle from the cooler and handed it to Lance, the cap already off. Lance almost took a swig from it, and then, considering everything he knew about Tabby, held it away from him just before it erupted in a shower of beer.
“Worth a shot,” Tabby shrugged, handing him an unopened beer. “Truce?”
“Short term truce,” Lance allowed. “I don’t want to drop my guitar.” He cautiously opened the beer. “So, you get that shopping emergency sorted out?”
“Yeah,” said Tabby. “At least until next week.”
“You know, I meant it when I said I wasn’t going to try and make you do this if you didn’t want to.”
“Ha! Like you could if you tried.” Tabby took a long swig of beer. “You remember when things were simple?”
“When the hell was that?” Lance asked.
“You know, when it was just the five of us against the X-geeks. After I figured out I belonged here, but before Mystique came back.”
“Oh, yeah. Us against the world, the city cutting off the water or the power every other week, slugging it out with Scott and them about that often, living off stolen Ramen and school free lunches?”
“Yeah. You ever miss it?”
“Every day. I don’t miss fighting with Kitty all the time, though. Or getting our asses kicked on a regular basis.”
“We gave as good as we got. A couple times. Almost.”
“I don’t miss showering at the school, either.”
“Yeah, well, that’s because you had to shower with the guys. I had the girls’ locker room all to myself in the morning. It was fucking luxurious.”
“Well, if you’d invited me to join you, I might have had a different perspective.”
“Hah! Like you’d have taken me up on that. When you weren’t mooning over Kitty, you were swearing off all women forever because she’d dumped you. That’s what I’m not going to miss.”
“Things are pretty great with Kitty right now,” Lance said, indulging in a sappy grin. “But what’s got you all nostalgic?”
“It was just nice to know what people expected, so we could tell them to go screw themselves. I feel like kicking out against something, doing some damage. Skipping out on totally voluntary training with the X-geeks just isn’t cutting it.”
“I get that,” Lance admitted. “After Sabretooth-” he shuddered despite himself, “I could stand to kick some ass myself.”
“Anyway,” said Tabby, scooting to the side of the roof, “I’ll leave you to your warbling. Fred’s making red sauce, so I’m gonna go get even with him for dumping my bed in that mud puddle last week.”
“Leave some for dinner!” Lance called out after her, knowing it was hopeless, then leaned back against the roof and began idly picking at his guitar again with a slight grin.
***
Todd’s head was under his bed, closing in on an especially juicy looking beetle, when a loud BAMF of air behind him made him jerk upright, and crack his head on the bed. “Cloaca licking son of a cockmongler!” he cursed, pulling his head out and glaring at Kurt. Then, despite himself, he had to chuckle at the expression his curses had drawn from the X-man. “Yo, my house, fuzzball,” he said. “I don’t gotta censor myself.”
“I hadn’t realized that you had been,” Kurt replied, uncertain whether to take offense or burst out laughing.
“Yeah, well there’s a lot you don’t know. Like, f’r instance, knocking. I thought you X-geeks were supposed to be the polite ones.”
“My apologies,” Kurt said, lifting a small bag. “I wasn’t sure if I would be welcome here, and I thought it best just to drop these off and be on my way.”
Todd squinted at the bag, and then his tongue shot out, snaring it and pulling it back to him. He tore it open and looked inside. “Hey!” He said, pulling out a pair of shoes- unusually long and narrow ones, which flared out at the toe. “Nice!”
He sat on the bed, shucking his own shoes and socks, and pulling the new ones on. “Not bad,” he said, standing up and bouncing lightly in them, before leaping to the corner of the ceiling, planting his feet against perpendicular walls while his hands stuck to the ceiling. “Not bad at all.” He dropped back to the ground. “So, we cool? You’re not going to be coming around guilting at me anymore?”
“We are cool,” Kurt agreed. “Although I did not do very much. The professor had already designed the boots.”
“That’s a little creepy, right? Baldy playing dress up games with us?” Todd leapt from the floor to the wall, and then the opposite wall. “Still, don’t look under a gift horse's tail, right?”
“Not quite how the saying goes, I think, but I understand the sentiment,” Kurt smiled, before his eyes fell on the complicated accumulation of equipment- mostly speakers, but with several dials and switches, and wires sticking out in seemingly random patterns- beneath Todd. “What is that?”
“You like it?” Todd said, obviously quickly warming to his subject. “My sound system. Pretty hot, isn’t she?” He dropped off the wall, and ran a hand over a speaker. “‘Course, the wiring in this place is so old I can’t run the whole thing without blowing every fuse in the house. Still, even at half power, this baby is so sweet…” he took in Kurt’s expression, once more torn, this time between enthusiastic admiration and guilty doubt. “Yo, it ain’t stolen.”
“I didn’t…”
“You think I’m stupid or something? You don’t steal electronics for yourself. That shit has serial numbers all over it. You sell it to a guy who has a buddy out of town- out of state is even better. Or if you’re real hard up for cash, you hit a no questions pawn shop, but that’s kinda risky when you got a beautiful face like mine. Nine times outta ten, those guys will roll over if the cops lean on them.”
His explanation obviously hadn’t particularly reassured Kurt. “I built it, fuzzball.” The fact that he had built it out of parts that were either too small for electronics stores to bother trying to track them down when they vanished, or that he had bought with stolen money was, he considered, not any of Kurt’s business.
“It is impressive,” Kurt allowed, and then got distracted as he spotted the long boxes full of vinyls. “What do you have here? Zeppelin, Floyd, Lila Cheney… oh!” He straightened up, holding an album cradled in his arms. “Is this really?”
“Nazgûl’s first single? Damn straight. You think this is something, you shoulda seen the collection I had before Mystique ditched us and we had to pawn most of it to keep the heat on.”
Kurt’s face darkened at the mention of his mother. “Hey, I’m not saying anything tyou don’t already know,” Todd said defensively, then, as much to change the subject as anything added, “You wanna give that album a spin, or keep hugging it like it was your date for your first slow dance?”
“Could we?” Kurt’s eyes lit up. “Listen to it, I mean. Not dance.”
Todd laughed. “Yeah. Sure. Just let me…” he leaned forward, fiddling with several wires, then leaping back, almost into Kurt’s arms, as the system sparked violently. “Never quite got around to putting a power switch on it,” Todd explained, taking the record and setting it on the turntable, then adjusting several dials before touching another two wires together.
The opening chords of “Black Song of Orthanc,” began playing, tinnily, from a single speaker. Todd grunted in irritation, and leaned back into the system, crossing a few more wires. Several more speakers came to life, dramatically improving the sound.
“I did not know you were so handy with electronics,” Kurt said, when the music had faded away, and Todd was carefully returning the system to its resting state.
“Yeah, well, when you’re elbows deep in a car’s stereo system in an underground parking garage, and the owner gets off work early, you learn quick,” Todd said with a shrug. “Plus, you know, alarms systems and shit.”
“You know, I’m sure Doctor McCoy would give you some pointers, if you wanted. He is a real whiz at this stuff.”
“Thank but no thanks,” said Todd. “Busting up your murder room is one thing.”
“Danger room,” interrupted Kurt.
“But that don’t mean that I want to sign up for more school, you got me?”
“But you could really do something with this,” Kurt protested. “Don’t you ever want something more out life?”
“What, like being a do-gooder type like you guys? We tried that once- didn’t really work out.”
“You mean when you ran around stopping disasters that you had caused? To be fair, you weren’t trying to be do-gooders. You were trying to look like do-gooders. I’m talking about changing the way you look at the world, not the way the world looks at you.”
“Pretty smart. You get that off a fortune cookie or something?”
“Let me put it this way. The last ten years of your life, if you could do them over again, would you do everything the same? Not based on any new knowledge you have, just how you feel about your decisions looking back at them.”
“I never said I was perfect. Of course there’s stuff I’d do differently,” Todd said, shifting uncomfortably.
“So. Ten years in the future, when you look back at now, what do you think you will wish you had done differently?”
“Man, what kind of question is that? Are you stoned right now?”
“I’m not-”
“Do you want to be? You haven’t lived until you’ve listened to Cheney while smoking up.”
“I should go,” Kurt said. “But think about what I said.”
“Yeah, sure. Whatever fuzzball.” Todd opened his mouth and drew in breath to say something further, only to cough as he received a lungful of sulfury smoke.