Archive of Our Own ^beta

Now that he’s back from the junk heap between universes, John brushes his teeth a lot.

Bobby notices it first on John’s first night back, when Bobby goes up to let him know it’s time, if he wants to come down to dinner with the rest of them.

“You can get a lot of stuff out there,” he tells Bobby, meeting his eyes in the mirror where Bobby is leaned up against the doorframe of the room the Professor has him set up in. “Food sometimes, occasionally alcohol. Really annoying people in spandex. A lot of those. But one thing that rarely gets excised from reality and stuck in an in-between place to rot is toothpaste. People pretty much never decide that toothpaste is the thing that’s going to cause society to crumble.” He’s got a smear of white foam along the side of his face, and there are suds between his teeth as he talks. It’s both a little disgusting and oddly mesmerizing.

“Uh, right,” Bobby says. “So, uh, dinner is — if you want, they told me to tell you that dinner’s ready.”

Bobby had actually volunteered to be the one to come tell him, remind him, because everyone else had mostly shrugged and figured that maybe John was skipping dinner, or had fallen asleep already. No one really seemed to know exactly how to treat a former student who had gone off to join a mutant terrorist group, been presumed killed, possibly by someone in the X-Men, disappeared for nearly two decades, and then showed up on the mansion’s doorstep one day looking grubby and hangdog with a head full of impossible memories of years spent in a nothing-place that shouldn’t exist, stuffed there by an organization of such mind-blowing power and authority that Bobby thinks they’re all mostly just going to ignore the fact that it exists for a while. Bobby is pretty sure that the rest of them would have been just as glad to let John sleep through dinner and put off an awkward conversation until morning.

Bobby doesn’t feel that way, though. Bobby feels like there’s a magnet that was pulling him up the stairs, like if he hadn’t had an excuse, he’d have drifted up here anyway to stand awkwardly in the doorway and stare at this …person, this man, this stranger with the stringy, greasy hair and the fucked up teeth who used to be Bobby’s best friend, once upon a time.

…

Because he had been, even if Bobby thinks he hadn’t thought so as often, as thoroughly, at the time.

The first time someone had said it — oh, and that’s Pyro and Iceman, Kitty, maybe, giving a new kid a tour, they’re best friends, they’re cool mostly but you don’t want to get in the middle when they’re fighting, Bobby had been kind of startled by it. Was John his best friend? He’d felt, in kind of a vague way, that Kevin who he’d grown up up the street from, should still be his best friend, probably — they hadn’t talked much since Bobby left for Xavier’s but surely that kind of thing didn’t change that fast.

And Bobby had had lots of friends back then, too — John was his roommate, and in his year in school, and they were well-enough matched in their powers that they were paired together in a lot of their classes on control, too, so Bobby probably spent more time with John than with anyone else, but that had just been — chance. Circumstance. But Piotr was Bobby’s friend, and Jubilee, and Kitty and — Bobby wasn’t going to go around ranking them. Declaring which one was the best friend felt very grade school.

But, well — Bobby had had lots of friends, back then, but John hadn’t, mostly. This had largely been because John was a little bit of an asshole — because he’d been suspicious and antisocial and made of sharp edges — and most people hadn’t had Bobby’s cheerful lack of giving a shit about that fact going for them. But that hadn’t been because John was something special, especially — back then, Bobby had shrugged off his friend’s moodiness, had clapped a hand on his shoulder and cheerfully told John not to be a dick and then moved on with his day because Bobby had grown up with a moody little shit of a baby brother, and he’d felt that being cheerfully unresponsive about the moodiness was usually the best way to handle it, and because it was always easier to get along with your roommate.

After, though — after John had gone, he’d felt something missing, something he hadn’t known how to get back without the person it had been attached to. A two-in-one-ness, a sense of being one half of a set, an unmatched sock. And then he’d fought John, outside the clinic, and for a moment it had all snapped back into place. Two halves of something, maybe, and that didn’t have to mean they were on the same side, fighting John had felt like it was fixing the broken piece, too, and Bobby had thought, hubristic and grandiose and awful, about the Professor and Magneto, years and years of them, together and apart, fighting each other and missing each other, never able to occupy the same space again, but never quite outside of each other’s orbit, and he’d thought that maybe he could see how that could be alright. That could be a kind of fitting together, too.

Maybe even a safer one.

Because Rogue had been on her way to take the cure — the cure, back when they’d still expected that that was a real thing, was something that was going to create the shape of the world going forward — and so Bobby and Marie were going to have to figure out what being together looked like after that, and that was a thought that didn’t feel safe at all.

And then John was gone — dead, they all thought, but no, it turned out he’d just been gone from the world as they knew it, slipped through a crack in time, space, something — and the difference between that and dead only became clear twenty years later, when he suddenly wasn’t anymore.

…

John spends a significant amount of the next few days holed up with Ororo in her office. Bobby assumes he’s giving her some kind of information breakdown about whatever might end up being life-threatening or world-ending about the crack in the universe he’d stepped out of, or the secret, extra-governmental organization which seemed to have power over that crack between the worlds.

And on the third day, in brightest part of the afternoon, he ventures down to the basketball courts where Bobby is casually refereeing an intramural game, and asks if he can get a ride into town later

These days, Bobby teaches at the mansion, but he doesn’t live there. He has his own apartment in town, and he drives in most days, although occasionally he’ll stay in with the kids if the live-in teachers are out, either on a mission or just on vacation. His car is a hybrid, a few years old, small and a little dinged up, and it has some trouble with big hills, and Bobby braces himself to be laughed at for it. Teenaged John wouldn’t have hesitated.

He doesn’t say a word about it, though, just reaches for the stereo, flicks on the radio, and, “NPR, Bobby, really?”

Bobby laughs. “I mean — no, not usually. I usually—”

Bobby pulls out of the driveway, and then, once they’re headed in a straight line, fishes out his phone. “Here, there’s an adapter—” and then, when John doesn’t plug the thing in right away, “Wait, do you not—?”

“It’s like an iPod, right?” John asks, peering curiously down at it. “Guy came through with something like this a few years ago, wouldn’t believe me that there wasn’t anywhere he could get service. Took off for the mountain at the edge of the world, and I think maybe he got eaten by the goats. Better way to go than sticking around to get turned inside out by Cassandra. I think his had buttons, though.”

There is — a lot, in that sentence. Bobby stalls for a second, thinking about where to tackle it. “Here,” he says, glancing away from the road for a moment to flick the phone on, thumbprint his way through the passcode. “It’s — you just touch it. Music is in that little icon in the bottom corner with the green, put on whatever you want.”

“Hmm,” John says, and whatever culture shock he’s speed-running here, he seems to be picking up the touchscreen thing pretty quickly.

Bobby thinks about letting it go — the wildly out-there thing John just said, but the car is quiet now in a way which probably shouldn’t be awkward but still somehow is, and also — “The goats?”

“Vampire goats,” John says, absently, flicking through Spotify with a fascinated look on his face. He used to do this thing, back when he was first at the mansion, fifteen and a pain in the ass, where he would tell people blatant lies about Australia until he got them to call him on it. At first, Bobby wonders if this is like that, but John genuinely looks so completely uninterested in what he himself is saying, so fully invested in what he’s seeing in Bobby’s phone. “There are seriously six Linkin Park albums since I’ve been gone? And one of them from this year?”

“Uh, I guess.” Bobby can honestly say he hasn’t actually thought about Linkin Park once since John left the mansion.

“They any good?”

“Um, I don’t know. Hey, what do you mean, vampire goats?”

“Like goats, you know, but with pointy bloodsucker teeth,” John says, looking up. “You can pull over here.”

“Here?” Bobby had honestly thought they might be heading to the Greyhound station, the beginning of John’s trip back outside of Bobby’s reality, this bizarre, awkward car ride as some kind of gentle goodbye, or something. Instead, they’re in front of a pretty ordinary strip-mall, just a coffee shop, and boarded up storefront that used to hold a Kinkos, a gyro shop that’s closed for the day, and a CVS.

“Here,” John confirms, flinging himself out of the car door and heading towards the CVS without looking back.

Bobby follows, a little slower and still not quite sure where he’s going.

He finds John in the dental care aisle, basket full of three different colors of mouth wash, deliberating over the types of floss.

“I use this kind,” he offers, tapping on a package. “The box is refillable, so it’s better for the environment, supposedly. Though the refills also come in a package, so I don’t know how much good it does."

John visibly considers this for a second, then shakes his head. “Nah, the environment I’ve been in, it mostly tries to eat you. Might as well get some of my own back,” and he reaches for a bag of disposable plastic flossers.

When the shopping basket is half full with dental care products, John turns toward the counter, and Bobby thinks to wonder, belatedly, “Hey, uh, do you have, I mean—”

“Cash?” John asks, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out a worryingly thick stack of bills. “Oh, probably.” He hands Bobby half the stack. “Here, you check these, pull out anything that looks, you know. Legal.”

Bobby looks down, and he can see what John means — all of the bills in his stack look real, soft with wear, useable — but the top one has a stately-looking giraffe in a monocle in the place of the familiar George Washington head. The next looks like a ten that’s familiar to Bobby, but in pale blue. The third looks alright at first, but right when he’s about to hand it over, he notices that it says it’s legal tender in The Untied States of Emerice.

Eventually, he finds a few likely-looking bills and hands them over. He holds up the giraffe and asks, “Can I keep this one?”

John looks up, takes in what Bobby is asking for, and laughs out loud. “Sure, man. Finder’s fee.”

On the way back to the car, Bobby asks, “So, have you just been carrying around a wad of useless cash for twenty years straight?”

“Never know where you’re going to wind up,” John says, fumbling to hold his armful of dental care products. “Hey, when the fuck did they stop giving you bags in stores?”

“Twenty-twenty? Ish?” Bobby says, squinting to himself as he tries to remember. “I have a tote in the car, I didn’t know how much you were getting or I would have grabbed it. Here, let me carry some of that.”

Bobby reaches for two of the bottles of mouthwash, one of the bulk packages of toothbrushes in neon colors.

“You don’t have to be so nice, you know,” John says, smiling sideways at him. “Impromptu high school reunion is one thing, but you know even driving me over here was already above and beyond, right?”

“You’ve been dead for twenty years,” Bobby blurts before he can think about it too much, reaching into his pocket with his free hand to click the doors of his car open.

“Right,” John agrees, nodding to himself like Bobby has reminded him of something, instead of saying something that turns out not to have even been true after all.

“I mean,” Bobby says, once they’re both in the car. “I really didn’t think I’d ever see you again.” Bobby is sure that if this weird new status quo continues, he’ll regain his ability to say no to John again, but for right now — it still feels like looking at his ghost any time he walks into a room. His strange, older ghost, the person he never got to become. Bobby can think of worse things to do then drive him around running errands for a few days.

“I don’t know,” John says, reaching up to mess with the car’s visor with an excess of nervous energy that is both familiar and not — it’s only then, with a jolt, that Bobby realizes John hasn’t taken out a lighter to mess around with since Bobby has seen him back again. He’s older, now, steadier and more controlled, and that’s probably all it is, but Bobby thinks of that day at Alcatraz, about Mystique stripped of her powers. John, oblivious to this bolt of shocked concern suddenly running through Bobby, goes on, “Maybe you didn’t, you know?”

“Didn’t what?” Bobby asks, unsure whether John is making as little sense as Bobby thinks, or whether the thing he’s suddenly worried about has completely swamped his ability to make sense of this conversation.

“Didn’t see me again,” John says, which, yeah, is what Bobby thought he said. Bobby pulls out of the strip-mall parking lot, mostly just for something to do, not sure where he’s driving them next. John goes on, “I think this is the universe where I started, but I — everything feels weird, like walking into a room where all the furniture is six inches to the left of where you expect it to be, you know? It’s close enough, probably, but.” He shrugs. “If you think your John died, then, like. Maybe he did.”

That’s a dizzying, horrifying thought. Bobby shakes his head, quickly, like that will shake the strangeness free. He says, “There’s got to be some way to test that. Like, something about this world specifically that you and I know, that no one else would.”

John shrugs and reaches into the pile in his lap for the bag of disposable flossers. “Yeah, probably,” he says. “But, like. How would we know which thing it is?”

“You sound pretty calm about all this,” Bobby observes, a little annoyed. He gets another shrug in return.

“I’m pretty sure I did die, Bobby,” He says. “On Alcatraz, before I woke up there, you know, and then again just before I wound up back here. Cassandra Nova, that freaky Xavier clone-twin queen bitch thing — I could feel her fingers in my brain. So, like. All of this is bonus, right? No matter where I am. When. Who. I don’t know, maybe this is even some kind of convoluted, boring afterlife. Kind of doesn’t matter, right? All there is is what’s in front of you right now.”

“That’s—” Something about that doesn’t feel quite right to Bobby, but he’s not sure how to argue with it, either. “How about,” and he clears his throat here, half to give himself a second, to give himself a chance not to say this, because what the hell, Bobby? “How about this one?” he finds himself asking, anyway. “How about — in my universe, with my John — I had kind of a crush on him, before he left. Does that — is that what it was like for you?”

It’s a convoluted way of telling something that had once felt very important to someone Bobby really thought once that he’d never have the chance to tell anything to again, not really a serious proposal of a way to test what original universe anyone came from. When Bobby looks over into the passenger’s seat, though, when they’re idling at the crosswalk, John’s forehead is furrowed like he’s really thinking it through, and when he looks over to catch Bobby’s eye, he says, “I don’t know, maybe. Did he know? Your John?”

The way he says it, Your John makes it feel real again, like the guy Bobby remembered from the next bed over in his dorm room for over a year in high school is someone completely separate from the guy in the seat beside him in the car, someone still lost to Bobby. “I don’t know,” Bobby says, accelerating as the light changes. “I thought you did, sometimes. We never talked about it, not really. But it felt like you always caught me checking you out.”

“Sometimes right over your girlfriend’s shoulder,” John says, soft and agreeing, but then, shaking himself, “It’s not really a very good test, then, is it? If you don’t know for sure if we both even knew it.”

“I came out the next year,” Bobby says. John hasn’t actually asked him anything about himself, which he guesses is kind of fair — he’s been in the same universe the whole time since they saw each other last. The same state, even, for most of it. He works in the same place where they went to school. Nothing all that interesting has happened to Bobby. “Full gay — I thought about saying I was bi, just so it didn’t sound so bad, the way everything went down with Marie,” and he feels like he’s trying to say this to John at seventeen, John who this guy in the car next to him has maybe never even been, maybe they’re not the same version of themselves at all, “But then I just figured if that was what I wanted, if that was how guilty I felt — it really was a sign that I needed to tell the truth for real.” Tell the truth to everybody, everybody except for John, who was already long gone by then.

“Bobby,” this John says. “You were, what? Sixteen when you met Marie? Eighteen when you broke up with her? And it’s almost twenty years ago. And it’s not like you — you know. Killed somebody. I think you can be forgiven.” John, who has, presumably, killed more than one person, has a look on his face that Bobby remembers, abruptly, from high school — a condescending smile that had always made Bobby feel immature and childish and defensive.

“Sure,” Bobby says. It really is all ancient history. He doesn’t even know why he’s talking about it.

“Do you ever still talk to Rogue?” John asks, though, a moment later, looking out the window like he doesn’t care much about the answer.

“Of course,” Bobby says. Being an X-man — it’s a pretty exclusive club. Even if he and Marie weren’t still personally close – which they are -- they’d have figured out a way to get along by now.

…

“It’s kinda like two boyfriends for the price of one,” Rogue had said, back then, one of those lilting, dimpled smiles stretching across her face the way they did when she was young.

And that had been what it was like. They’d go out, the three of them, and Bobby would open doors and pay for drinks, and John would piss people off and make Marie laugh, and Marie would egg John on when he picked fights and tuck herself along Bobby’s side with her gloved hands wrapped around his arm and the hood of her sweater pulled up to make an extra barrier between the bare skin of her face and Bobby’s shoulder.

And Bobby would step in the middle when whoever John was picking a fight with looked like whoever it was was maybe actually going to try and hit him, and Bobby was never sure whether he wanted to put his body there are a barrier because he thought John and his lighter might do some damage that he, Bobby, was best equipped to weather, or because John, despite being only an inch or two shorter than Bobby, had always felt kind of …small, to him. Small and defensive and loud, like an angry little dog, and as many fights as he picked, Bobby had never actually wanted to see him get hurt.

Piotr had thought that he should, some day. “Nothing serious, but if he’s looking for trouble, let him find some,” but Bobby hadn’t wanted to. He’d wanted to be an X-man, he’d wanted to protect people, and John had felt like a fine place to start, whether he’d wanted Bobby to or not.

“I always thought he was showin’ off,” Marie said, once, not too long after the memorial they’d done after Alcatraz. For everyone, not just for John, who Bobby had still kind of hoped might turn up again, one way or another — no body no crime. But still — he and Marie had slipped away from the group, and she’d had a bottle she’d liberated from the Professor’s liquor cabinet — “Well, he’s not using it, is he?” “Marie!” — and they’d traded the bottle back and forth, unnecessary, proxy kisses, an intimacy they’d grown used to.

And then she’d said, “‘First I just thought he was showin’ off for me, and that’s — you know. It’s normal boy stuff, but it’s not the best, tryin’ that hard to get your friend’s girlfriend’s attention. But then I realized.”

She’d paused there to take another drink, and Bobby had asked her, “Realized what?” But his voice had felt distant from his body, his thoughts floating somewhere far above his head, and he really already knew what she was about to say.

“Realized he wanted your attention just as much.”

Because yeah, he’d noticed that as well. Instead of answering that time, Bobby had reached over and taken the bottle from her, taken a long swig.

…

A few days later, Bobby wakes at about three in the morning to a light at the end of the hallway, and the faint sound of a muffled humming. He follows the light and sound to the bathroom door, which is propped open wide enough that he can see John leaning up against the counter to get nearer to the mirror, peering back and forth between his reflection and the instructions on the back of a box of over-the-counter tooth whitening strips. He must see Bobby over his shoulder in the mirror between glances because he speaks, tone weirdly casual even around an increasing, muffled clumsiness as he begins to carefully apply the white strips.

“Teenage Ninja Mutant Twenty-Two-Year-Old Warhead tried to set me up a LinkedIn today,” he says, and there’s nothing in his voice that says that he thinks it’s weird that Bobby has padded over to watch him do his dental care in the middle of the night. “I told her, wha’ am I 'oing to put’ on it’? Minion? And ‘en she laughed and made me look at these jacked-up cartoon things. ‘ut she says ‘at’s how everyone gets jobs these days.”

“I don’t know,” Bobby says. He’s worked in one or two places that weren’t the school he grew up at, over the years — there was that pizza place in grad school, and the middle school where he’d done his student teaching — but he hasn’t really done the job application process the way Negasonic is talking about it ever. “What is it you want to do?”

John shrugs. “I’unno. I — ow. Is ‘is supposed to hurt ‘ike ‘is?”

“I don’t know.” Bobby says. “You’re not liking the tutoring?” This week, Storm has John working with a couple of the middle school kids in something like a book club. Bobby had been pretty impressed that she’d come up with it — something John had actually been good at, had liked, even when he’d acted like he didn’t really like anything.

“I—” John winces again, then reaches in and starts ripping the white strips off. “It’s fine, ow. I mean. The kids are cool.”

“They are, right?” Bobby asks, and finds himself beaming. “So what’s the rush?”

“Look,” John says, clicking his teeth together and wincing. “Fucking ouch, it cannot be supposed to feel like that. Look, it’s nice of Storm to find me some payable busywork, but there’s not a lot of scope for a professional evil henchman at a junior high school, right? If she’s smart she doesn’t want me to stay long, anyway.”

“I guess.” Bobby says, leaning against the door frame. “Hey, what’s with the teeth thing?” Because it’s been about a week now, and it hasn’t slowed down, the constant, obsessive dental care.

“Obviously it’s because they’re gross, Bobby,” John says, turning around to bare them at him in a rictus grin presumably designed to showcase this fact. They look pretty normal now, though — maybe a little yellow, but nothing out of the range of normal anymore. He hasn’t done anything to change his hair, since he stumbled through the portal from another world — it’s clean now, but still kind of stringy and ragged and uneven along the ends, combed back in a way that falls in his face more often without layers of post-apocalyptic wasteland grease, and he shaved a couple of days ago, which had made him look weirdly young and naked for a day or so before the stubble had started to fill back in. He looks good, mostly — still kind of sharp-edged and wolfish, like someone who’s both willing and able to stab someone in a post-apocalyptic wasteland over an expired can of beans — but still, good.

John turns back to the mirror and digs out another flosser. “She tried to get me to set up a grindr, too. Negasonic. Wild kid,” he shakes his head at himself in the mirror. “Anyway, I told her she should do you instead.”

“What?” Bobby asks.

“Well,” John says, thoughtfully angling the pick-end of the flosser between two back molars, “You’re clearly desperately lonely, so.”

“I’m not lonely,” Bobby says, and even as he says it, he can hear how defensive it sounds. He looks down, notices he has his arms crossed over his chest, uncrosses them. Feels a little weird and vulnerable with his hands at his sides, thinks fuck it, and crosses them again.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” John says, airily, peering back at his own face in the mirror. Bobby wonders what it is he’s looking for. “I poked around online a little bit the other day, apparently there’s a male loneliness epidemic on. Plus, everyone you talk to either used to be your teacher or is fifteen years old.”

“That’s not true,” Bobby says, starting to get a little annoyed.

“And there’s no reason for it,” John barrels on, tugging lightly at the corner of his eye like he can pull the light play of crow’s feet, the weathered look of his skin like he’s been out in the desert in wind and sand and sun for the last two decades, out of place. “You’re a good-looking guy, and like you were saying in the car the other day, you pulled the stick out of your ass about the gay thing a long time ago. Which, good job. At sixteen I would not have guessed that that was happening any time soon. And you’re a superhero, kind of. Even if you are a little bit of a boy scout, some people are into that kind of thing.” He flashes Bobby a sly little grin in the mirror. “Negasonic showed me on grindr.”

“I’m not lonely,” Bobby insists.

“Plus,” John goes on, final piece of evidence, throwing down the gauntlet, “you haven’t said a word about when you want me to get gone and stop sleeping on your couch and eating all your toaster waffles, even though I know you like to eat them when they’re still frozen, you sick freak. And the last thing I remember, you were pretty pissed at me. Lonely as shit, Bobby.”

And that’s where Bobby could snap. If they were still seventeen years old, it’s where he’d probably stomp off and bitch to Piotr until Piotr suggested that, the next time, he should let the guy in the food court take a swing at John. Instead, he laughs, drops his crossed arms to his sides again, and asks, “Was the wind-up all so you could get me to admit that I missed you? You don’t have to work that hard. I missed you. See? Easy.”

John meets his eyes in the mirror again, raises his eyebrows. Bobby thinks maybe he’s actually managed to surprise him for once. “I was pretty sure I was dead to you when I joined the mutant terrorist separatist organization, is all. And I’ve done way worse shit since then for way worse people. Magneto had a cause, at least, you know?”

And yeah, that did used to feel like a lot more of an insurmountable barrier to Bobby. He thinks it through, because he’s kind of been running on instinct since John showed up on the mansion’s doorstep last week. He says, “I mean, there’s dead to me, but then — then, you know, you were actually dead.”

“I mean,” John says, “I wasn’t, though.”

“Yeah, but I thought you were. And I missed you,” and now that Bobby has started saying it, it’s like he just can’t stop. “And I guess… what you did before doesn’t matter to me as much as what you’re going to do next.”

John sets the toothbrush he’s been fiddling with down and turns around again to face Bobby, and this look on his face, it’s not a familiar one, not one Bobby knows from before. He asks, “And what is it that I’m going to do?” and there’s something in the words that sounds like a challenge.

“I don’t know,” Bobby says, because he’s never known what John was going to do next. That has, historically, been a big part of the problem between them. “But it sounds like you don’t know, either. Let’s stick around to find out, and then we’ll see how I feel about it.”

…

Bobby hears Rogue before he sees her.

This is in part because her guy these days drives a motorcycle that’s louder than Logan’s ever was, and in part because before she’s even fully through the door she’s calling out, “John! Pyro! I’m not believing you’re here until you get out here and give me a hug!”

John is leaned up against the wall in the living room, trying to act cool and unaffected about the fact that Storm has invited a group of their old classmates back to the mansion to welcome him back and quite a few of them have turned up. Negasonic and Yukio are there, too, and while most of the kids are in bed, a few of the older ones, including John’s little book club, are there, too, and the whole place feels weirdly festive.

Bobby raises his eyebrows, and then, when John doesn’t react beyond mirroring the expression back to him, says, “She’s going to hug you, you know — you can go to her, or you can wait for her to chase you down here in front of everyone.”

“That a threat, popsicle?” John asks, and there’s Rogue in the doorway, and Bobby warned him—

“Pyro!” she calls out again, and she’s smiling so wide, wider than she ever would have when they were kids and she was as cool, disaffected runaway and John was a cool, disaffected runaway, and god, Bobby really had had a type, hadn’t he?

John steps away from the wall to meet her, and just in the nick of time — she’s a whirlwind, a hurricane, a dervish, and she’s swooped down upon John in a whirl of wild curls and a light, slightly spicy perfume. He catches her, and, as far as Bobby can tell, hugs her back for a long moment, face ducked into her shoulder, and Bobby hasn’t done that yet, not really. John, when he first appeared, had been grimy and wary and untouchable-seeming, and the longer he’d stayed, the more familiar it had gotten, the less a reunion moment like this had felt approachable or in-reach.

Gambit comes in behind Rogue at a slightly slower pace, twirling the keys to his bike jauntily.

John catches sight of him and laughs, which Bobby thinks could easily just be about Gambit’s – head-thing, hat, decorative helmet? – but there’s something that sounds a bit more like personal recognition in his voice when he turns to Rogue and asks her, “This is your guy?”

“I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure,” Gambit says, holding out his hand to shake, and even though it’s a little cheesy, it’s still smooth, Bobby has wished more than once that he had a little bit of that charm.

John doesn’t seem too impressed, though – folds his arms over his chest a moment, and it’s not until Marie reaches out and swats at his forearm, hissing “be nice!” that he unfolds and reaches out.

“Nice to meet you,” he says, but there’s some kind of secret joke in his voice about it that Bobby’s going to have to try to get out of him later.

It’s a good party, as X-mansion bashes go – mutants from all over drop by at some point, Kurt’s busy as a kind of time-displaced taxi service all night, which he claims not to mind. Bobby sees people he hasn’t in years – since the last time they threw a somebody-came-back-from-the-dead party, maybe.

At a certain point, Bobby winds up on the fringes of things next to Rogue.

“You know,” she says, “Of all the impossible things in our lives, this one I wasn’t expecting.”

Bobby looks at her, and he thinks she’s thinking about all the other people they’ve lost. He says, “You know, John was saying, the whole – thing, about him winding up here. There was Logan -- a Logan, but, you know, we’re not even really sure if he’s the John who was originally here, and it’s, it’s good,” and good feels like an understatement, really, “To have him back, so. If you wanted to get in touch—”

Rogue stops him with a hand on his shoulder. “It wouldn’t be the same, Bobby,” she says, and then, “It’s alright. Of course I miss him, but—” she shrugs. “And what do you mean, you don’t know if he’s our John?”

“He said,” Bobby tells her, a little helplessly. “The universes could be so close together we’d never know,” and Bobby doesn’t pretend to know about that, this is the only universe he’s ever been in—

Rogue shakes her head. “Crap, Bobby,” she says, no nonsense in her tone, “That’s crap and you know it. You’re a grown man, are you really still letting him get away with that?”

“With what?” Bobby asks, and he’s not deflecting, he’s genuinely not sure.

But she says, “You know who he is. You can feel it, right?” and—

Bobby thinks so, has always thought so, when he wasn’t letting himself get all turned around by whatever story John was spinning about what was going on.

Rogue swats at his arm, lightly. “The one that got away came back from the dead for you, Bobby, and now instead of hitchhiking out of this town faster ’n a jackrabbit, he lives on your pull-out couch. They don’t make signs more obvious than that.”

“A jackrabbit, really?” Bobby asks, to avoid engaging with that. “Gambit’s rubbing off on you, you know, you’ve got to watch out for that.”

Rogue grins, slow and sweet and sticky as honey and says, “That’s the point, sugar,” and “You gonna think about the rest of what I said?”

Bobby looks across to the other side of the room, where John stands deep in conversation with Yukio, who is enthusiastically holding forth about the popularity mutant-kink erotica novels in Japan. John glances over, catches Bobby looking, winks.

“Yeah,” Bobby agrees, and then, “Yeah, maybe,” but he knows there’s no maybe about it. He’s going to make a move soon, and it’s probably going to be today. And when he does, John is probably going to say yes.

…

One of the things they probably would have already known about each other if they were actually high school exes, and not people who never actually bothered to get together back then, just skipped straight to the breakup, is that in addition to being a really fun piece of emotionally charged imagery, the fire and ice thing makes it really hard for them to share a bed.

Physically, that is, logistically, and it’s not just because Bobby, predictably, runs cold, and John runs hot. It’s that Bobby’s body wants to be cooler, and gets cold when it isn’t, and John’s body wants to be warmer, starts shivering and wanting to layer up at the same time that Bobby’s contemplating stripping down to a t-shirt.

Navigating this is tricky enough when it’s just the air temperature in Bobby’s apartment they’re dealing with – they’re both used to defaulting to normal human temperature ranges and just dealing – but when it comes to trying to sleep in the same bed—

“That’s it,” John says, yanking the rest of the light sheet and bedspread he’s swaddled in like a large and awkward-looking, desert-weathered infant off of Bobby and tucking it tighter around himself as he sits up, “I’m crashing back on the couch.”

And that doesn’t have to be – meaningful. Plenty of people prefer sleeping in their own beds even when they don’t have opposite mutant physiology to contend with. This is a first time, though, and Bobby would very much like it not to be a last time, so – “Wait,” he says, knowing he sounds a little desperate. “Just wait a minute.”

“I’m not going far, Frosty,” John says. “I still don’t have a legal identity, remember? No way I’m going to try to talk my way into a hotel room at this time of night, even if I wanted to. You can even still make me breakfast.”

“Just wait a minute,” Bobby tells him, digging through the back of his closet for a vacuum-sealed bag.

What he’s looking for – what he eventually finds – is a big, fluffy, down quilt that he has never in his life used, a Christmas gift from his mother on one of his family’s sporadic attempts to pretend it’s not awkward these days – this one, Bobby thinks, was one of the years after he came out to them as a mutant and before he came out to them as gay. Things had been pretty good, and he absolutely hadn’t had the heart to explain that it was something he was never going to use, but he’d also not quite had the heart to get rid of it.

So it’s been sitting in its original packaging, moving between places every time Bobby did, up until right now, when he tears it out of the bag it came in and tosses it so it moves through the air like a heavy unwieldy football of a jellyfish of a quilt, to come to rest half-flung over John’s face.

When he pushes it back so it hangs around his shoulders like a quilt, he’s got an odd look on his face, half annoyed and half — blank. Like the other emotion is something he’s very deliberately not putting on display.

“This is the big plan?” he asks. He does tug it closer around his shoulders, though.

“Nope,” and Bobby gets why he does this, why he holds the punchline back sometimes, just to wind Bobby up. It’s fun, being the one with a secret. He clambers back up on the bed, ignoring the fact that his knees are screaming at him a little, and reaches for the edges of the blanket. He drags them tighter, wider, till John is wrapped all the way up, enveloped, and lets his arms go with it, wrapped around the whole lumpy parcel of quilt and John. Then he flops backwards towards the pillows, taking John with him. “That was the plan.”

“Hmm,” John says, shifting slightly in his hold, considering. “A barrier?”

“And insulation,” Bobby agrees. “It’s just physics. Try it out?”

“Sure,” John agrees, turning his face into the weave of the blanket in a way that is, frankly, pretty adorable.

And it’s comfortable. It’s comfortable, and it’s late, and it feels strange and safe and familiar, having John here in the room, and Bobby is almost asleep when he hears, “You know how you keep saying that I was dead for twenty years?”

“Well, you were,” he mumbles, trying to drag his eyes open.

“Feels like it sometimes,” John agrees, hand snaking out from his blanket burrito to wrap around Bobby’s wrist. “I wasn’t, though.”

“Yeah,” Bobby agrees, not sure where he’s going with this.

“It’s gonna be weird,” he says, finally, a long moment later, when Bobby has nearly drifted off again. “Figuring out how to be alive again.”

This one, though, Bobby knows something about. “Already was weird,” he says, only half-coherent and mumbled. “Figure it out together.”

…

In a dream, once, some time in the years between then and now, Bobby had asked him — had said, "I never really knew you at all, did I?"

The John he'd dreamed up had laughed sharply and said, "Not really, no," had said, "Does that bother you?” and “I don't think anyone really knows anyone, anyway. Except maybe Charlie X," which was exactly the kind if thing he would have said at sixteen.

By the time Bobby gets around to asking it for real, though, the guy that kid grew into just cocks his head to one side like he doesn’t know what Bobby means, like he's waiting for Bobby to elaborate.

"You know, back then," Bobby says, and saying it momentarily makes him feel just as inadequate and immature as he used to with John back when they were kids sometimes.

But John says, "I don't know," and there's a smile that makes its way across his face as he says it, but it's not the teasing, self-assured smirk from Bobby's memory. It's something smaller, sharper. Turned inward, maybe. "You came closer than anyone else, anyway,” and that’s — awful, maybe.

Because it feels worse than Bobby’s own little theory, but it’s also the logical extension of it. Bobby had been John’s best friend, back then, and if Bobby hadn’t really known him, then who had?

And that should be the end of it, it really should, Bobby should just stop talking, but instead, after a moment, he asks, “And now?”

“Now?” John laughs a little, shakes his head like he doesn’t know how to answer. “Now, I don’t even know me. You’re welcome to try. Don’t know what you’ll find, though.”

“Okay,” Bobby agrees, reaching out to link their hands together. “Let’s find out.”

[end]