{electrical} treeing

WIP: Young Avengers, Switch AU, PG-13

2011-08-12T20:57:13Z

SEND HELP.

---

Teddy hangs out with Billy most afternoons after that. He likes Billy. Billy's funny, and they like doing a lot of the same stuff, and Billy gets what he's going through with his powers without either of them having to talk about it a lot.

Also, and Teddy tries not to think about this too hard, but also, because Greg might have been close to the mark about Teddy not having a lot of friends at the moment. Most of the people who used to be his friends took Greg's side after they fell out, even though Teddy's sure that none of them know that the falling out was over how Teddy likes to stick his hand down other guys' pants and how Greg likes other guys to stick their hands down his pants as long as they never mention it ever.

So Teddy doesn't have to feel guilty about blowing anyone off to hang out with Billy and though Billy never actually says so specifically, Teddy gets the feeling that the situation is kind of the same for him too.

The fact that he ends up talking about Billy all the time, when Billy's not around, is less easy to explain. It's not like he's oblivious to it. It's just there's no stopping it. Every time he and his mom sit down for dinner, he finds sentences popping out of his mouth that all start with "Billy said..." or "Billy did..." His mom's smile keeps growing increasingly amused until one night Teddy just puts his head in his hands and tries to disappear.

"I'm not doing it on purpose," he groans.

"I know, darling," she says, reaching over to rub his back. "Eat your chard."

By Teddy's count, he has had twenty-two crushes in his life. His first was on Robin Hood in the Disney movie where they're all cartoon foxes. This, he thinks, has sort of set the tone for the rest of his life.

He freely admits that Billy is the most recent. He only wishes there was a way he could freely admit it that was a little less obvious to other people. A nice, safe round of pining sounds good to him after his last disastrous excursion into romance, but it's hard to pine and be obvious at the same time. Usually one cancels the other out.

Teddy gets used to always arriving at the coffee shop after Billy. Collegiate lets out at 2:30, not 3:00, and is closer anyway so until Teddy learns to teleport – not likely – it's just the way things are going to be.

Except then one afternoon, he arrives, and Billy's nowhere to be seen. Kate's closed off in her office, talking to someone in a low murmur. Teddy stands, perplexed, in the hallway until Kate's voice gets loud enough that he hears the words "really fucking irritating police investigation" and decides to hide in the den where he doesn't have to feel morally conflicted.

He watches TV for a while and thinks about whether or not he should text Billy to see if he fell down a well. It's not like they have a set meeting time, though, so it feels like a clingy thing to do. Teddy figures he'll give it another fifteen minutes.

Just as a Power Rangers rerun is beginning, Kate comes in and sits down on the other end of the couch. Teddy smiles at her to be friendly and then stares at his fingernails because she actually intimidates the shit out of him.

"Are they in space?" she asks, gesturing at the screen.

Teddy hasn't been paying attention, but a quick glance confirms that they are probably not in space, so he says, "No."

"Thank god," says Kate and then continues right on, barely taking a breath. "So here's the deal with me and Billy."

Teddy looks at her and tries not to seem suddenly over-interested.

"There is no deal with me and Billy," she says. "We're just friends. I dated his brother for a while, so I won't deny that I think his genetics are cute, but I'm surprisingly terrible at relationships, and I like him too much to inflict that on him."

"Also," she says, "I think he's pretty gay."

Teddy, who had been starting to nod in a mixture of relief and gratitude at having this question finally answered, freezes. Kate's eyes are suddenly off the TV and pinned on him, watching his reaction closely. He thinks about how she's used to having her attention split up in a million different directions, having hundreds of thousands of bytes of information flowing through her brain. Her attention, singularly focused, is a blinding thing.

"I'm not telling you this because I'm matchmaking or condoning your interest in him or anything like that," she tells him. "I just wanted to say two things. One, Billy's one of my best friends, and I love him, so you better not hurt him. Two, you seem like a really sweet guy, and Billy's... not always. Before you get in too deep, take some time and look for his flaws." Her mouth twists into a self-deprecating downward curve. "Trust me, I've been there. It's worth it."

Even though holding his breath is starting to deprive oxygen to his brain, Teddy can tell that it's good advice and kindly meant, if not actually any less intimidating as a result.

He pinches his own thigh to make himself breathe again and then says, "I'm not. I mean. I'll think about it?"

Kate reaches over and tousles his hair approvingly, which Teddy grunts at but allows.

"You still terrify me," he says.

"You and half of Wall Street," she replies and then grins at him with tooth.

By the time Billy does finally get there, Kate's taken over three-quarters of the couch and has her cheek pressed into Teddy's shoulder while they debate over who has the best classic Zord. Kate says yellow, which doesn't even make any sense.

"What do you think, Billy?" Kate asks when he's been standing in the doorway for a solid minute, staring at them suspiciously.

"Green," says Billy automatically. "It's a dinosaur."

Teddy spreads his hands triumphantly because that's what he's been saying this whole time.

"Why am I not surprised?" Kate mutters and pushes herself up to sitting and then up to standing. She pats Billy on the shoulder as she passes him by and then once she's safely beyond him, she catches Teddy's eyes, points to her eyes meaningfully, points to him, and then disappears around the corner.

Billy moves awkwardly toward the couch, still giving Teddy a strange look. Before his conversation with Kate, Teddy would've assumed that finding them smooshed together on the couch might make Billy jealous, like Teddy is competition for Kate's affections or something ridiculous. He guesses that might still be true since Billy might still be interested, even if Kate isn't.

Or. Or.

But Teddy doesn't let himself finish that thought because that way leads to not pining, and all he really wants is to sit around and enjoy Billy's company and laugh at his jokes and admire the way his hair curls at the back of his neck. And he will straight up ignore anyone who says there's anything wrong with that.

"Everything okay?" he asks.

"Yeah, you know," Billy says. "Accidentally turned blue at the end of third period and had to hide in the bathroom until most people cleared out, so I could sneak to my locker. The usual."

"The usual," Teddy agrees, pressing his lips together to keep from smiling. Billy looks at him and sees through it anyway, and his expression finally clears, his eyes lighting up.

"I think I can do it again," he says. "Want to see?"

So Billy spends a half hour turning his skin every colour imaginable, and Teddy spends a half hour trying not to think about how touchable Billy's clavicles look when they're purple and by the end, whatever weirdness was there when Billy first entered the room has gone away again. They watch a few hours of an Ice Road Truckers marathon and make giant hot chocolates with the mix Kate says is too old to sell to customers.

"It probably won't make you go blind, though," she says.

"We love you too, Kate," says Billy.

Teddy goes home just before 5:00 so that he can help his mom make dinner. He does his homework after and showers and cleans spam out of his inbox. He has to get up again later because it starts to pour rain and his mom needs help shutting all the windows. His phone is blinking with a text from Billy when he gets back.

Rain drops on roses and whiskers on kittens, it says.

Teddy makes a face. ugh earwormed you suck, he types back.

No reply comes for long enough that Teddy goes back to watching Youtube videos aimlessly until he's ready to go to sleep. He's just shutting down his computer when his phone rumbles noisily against his desk.

Just doing my patriotic duty. :).

your AUSTRIAN patriotic duty? Teddy replies and then shuts off his phone so that he doesn't stay up all night talking to Billy, crawls into bed, and turns off the light.

He dreams. In his dream, he's back in the coffee shop living room, sitting on the couch, with his lap full of Billy and his hands full of Billy's hips. Billy's wearing the awful Super Mario shirt he was wearing the first day they met, the one that's so old it's fraying around the collar in a way that makes Teddy want to bite his shoulder. He thinks, given where Billy is sitting, that biting might even be allowed.

"Kate says she thinks you're pretty gay," Teddy tells Billy, and Billy smiles smugly at him.

"Very gay," he says and then wiggles backwards, out of Teddy's grasping hands, and slips down to the floor. He pushes Teddy's knees open with an impatient shove and then does the same thing with Teddy's shirt, hitching it up until his stomach is exposed and Billy can press his mouth, hot and open, just to the left of Teddy's bellybutton. Teddy sucks in a lungful of air like it's the last he's going to get for a while.

Billy's hand stays braced on the inside of Teddy's thigh, as though he doesn't trust Teddy not to pulls his knees together again. This is pointless given how helplessly wide Teddy's legs fall the moment Billy's tongue brushes his skin, but Billy's hand doesn't budge. Slowly, though, Billy's fingers do uncurl and pet their way up to the crease of Teddy's hip where they wander up and down and split Teddy's attention between the desire to arch against Billy's mouth or buck his hips toward Billy's knuckles.

Then Billy scrapes his teeth over the skin just above Teddy's hipbone, and Teddy tries to do both at once, his head flopping to one side, biting down hard on his lip to keep from moaning, eyes squeezing shut.

When he manages to open his eyes again, he finds Kate sitting there, looking at him.

"If you hurt him," she tells Teddy, "I will cut you."

Teddy jolts awake, conflicted and confused and horny but mostly conflicted. He looks down at where he's still half-hard under the covers and then pulls his pillow over his face and tries to suffocate himself because that seems like the most preferable option, honestly.

---

They've never spent time together on a weekend before, but they do that Saturday, browsing through the comics down at Midtown and then buying way too many really cheap dumplings in Chinatown. Billy tries to start a competition to see who can fit the most dumplings into their mouth at the same time, but Teddy just prods him in the ribs.

"You're a shapeshifter," Teddy says in a low, secretive voice.

"So?" asks Billy, popping another dumpling in his mouth.

"You can't think of a reason I don't want to compete with someone who can make his mouth bigger?"

"Are you implying that I'd cheat?"

Billy looks pleased, not offended, so Teddy says very firmly, "Yes."

"Probably," agrees Billy. "That sounds like something I'd do."

Teddy chooses not to point out that Billy has hoisin sauce on his chin.

They go to a movie in the afternoon and share a bag of popcorn, which Billy mostly eats, claiming that his metabolism's been ridiculous ever since his powers showed up. Teddy's fine with this because it's not like it's a giant hardship to have a reason to reach over into Billy's personal space now and then.

The movie is okay. There are explosions and guys kicking other guys in the head and other things that Teddy generally likes out of his movies. But he spends most of the run time watching Billy's fingers, shiny with fake butter topping in the dark, because it seems like the better use of his time.

He tries to think about Billy's flaws, like Kate suggested, but it's hard. Teddy doesn't imagine Billy to be some sort of strange, flawless unicorn boy, but the flaws he's been able to pick out so far – impatience, general irritability, stubbornness – are all things that Teddy doesn't mind so much. This, he suspects, was not the point of the exercise.

It's early evening when they get out, the time of day when Teddy's either got to call his mom to beg out of dinner or head home so he isn't late. He stands near the curb and tries to decide which he's going to do, since which he wants to do is obvious. Billy stands beside him and frowns.

Suddenly, Billy's eyes are darting to the right, looking at something far past Teddy's head. He's pointing and saying, "What the hell is that?" And when Teddy turns to look, Billy shoves his hand into Teddy's pocket and steals his cellphone.

"I can't believe I fell for that," Teddy tells him, looking back.

"I can't believe you fell for that either," says Billy and presses Teddy's phone to his ear.

"Hi, Ms. Altman?" he says after a moment. "This is Billy. Yes, it's nice to sort of meet you too. I wanted to know if it was all right if Teddy came over to my place for dinner tonight?" Billy pauses and then laughs, eyeing Teddy with a look that means he's plotting something. "Yeah, I'll make sure he invites me over some night too. Okay, I'll tell him. Okay, thanks, bye."

He holds out the phone to Teddy, raises his eyebrows, and says, "She says don't stay out too late and call if you need to get picked up and invite me over for pasta night so that she can meet me."

Teddy pockets his phone again. "Are we actually going to your place for dinner?"

"Do you want to actually go to my place for dinner?" Billy asks, looking genuinely surprised, and Teddy shrugs because he's curious about Billy's family but also pretty easy where Billy's concerned, ultimately.

"Well," Billy says, slowly, still uncertain, "not this time, but I can get you invited over some other time, if you really want."

"Sure," says Teddy with another shrug.

Billy just looks at him, like he's trying to figure something out, but he lets it go with an "Okay," and they fall into step with each other, heading in the vague direction of the coffee shop. As they walk, Teddy shows Billy the one trick he's picked up with any success, making blue sparks jump from his fingertips and shielding the sight from other pedestrians with his chest and free hand.

"Cool," Billy whispers appreciatively.

"And pointless," Teddy says, dropping his hand back to his side.

Billy tilts his chin up. "People can overlook a lot of pointless for something cool," he declares.

Teddy snorts because, yes, life has definitely taught him that much.

They're only a few blocks from Kate's when Billy's phone starts ringing. They both startle at the noise, and Billy goes scrabbling at his pants pocket to get it out in time only to pause and frown at the call display name before answering.

"What?" he says when he finally does answer. He makes a deeply put-upon face at Teddy at the same time, and Teddy smiles back supportively. Billy starts to mouth something – it looks like Oh my god – but then his attention shifts back to the phone, and his frown gets frownier. "Are you serious? It's only six. Are you serious?"

He waits, and Teddy does too and from the look on Billy's face, it seems that whoever it is is serious. Eventually Billy sighs and rubs his hand over his forehead. "Okay, just stay where you are. Stay, okay? All right."

Billy hangs up. He looks down at his shoes and can't seem to make himself look up at first. When he does finally, he has an expression on his face that is part annoyed and part embarrassed and part rueful. His eye colour is all over the place.

"My brother's drunk, and I need to go get him," he says on a big exhale.

Teddy doesn't think about it for very long before asking, "Need some help?"

"He's kind of annoying drunk," Billy says, looking at his shoes again. "He's kind of annoying sober too, but whatever. You could wait, and I'll come back when I'm done."

Teddy looks at Billy pointedly even though Billy isn't look at him. If he stares long enough, Teddy assumes, Billy will have to look up. He's right.

"Need some help?" he asks again.

"Yes, please," says Billy.

They grab a taxi and head back downtown and then out through warehouses and office buildings until the neighbourhood stops looking trendily dishevelled and starts looking kind of rundown. A block or so before they reach their destination, Billy shouts at the driver to stop, shoves a bunch of money at him, and climbs out.

"Do you think you could wait for a second?" Teddy asks quietly. The driver makes an affirmative noise and starts counting out his bills, so Teddy climbs out of the cab after Billy.

"Are you serious?" Billy is shouting again at some guy slumped on the front steps of an apartment building. The guy is wearing dark jeans and sunglasses but otherwise he looks a lot like Billy, except that Billy's bone structure is fluid even on good days and the guy's hair is shockingly white.

"If I wanted someone to yell at me, I would've called mom," the guy snips back, though it comes out petulant, whiny.

"Would you like me to call mom, Tommy?" Billy asks. "I have no problem calling mom."

"No, no, shit," mumbles Tommy, slumping further. "Don't do that. I'm just coming down with, you know."

"Alcohol poisoning?"

"I forget what a pain in the ass you are when I'm drunk," says Tommy.

"You should work on that," Billy suggests tartly.

Teddy doesn't really want to get involved or intrude, so he stands awkwardly off to one side and waits while Billy huffs and glares at his brother. Eventually Billy does look Teddy's way and makes a weary, beckoning hand gesture.

"Come on," he says, "let's get him in the cab."

In the cab, Teddy ends up sitting in the middle because it seems like the best, and perhaps only, option for keeping the peace. Tommy spends the first five minutes with his head between his knees, blinking blearily at the rug in the footwell, and Billy spends it staunchly pretending his brother doesn't exist. Teddy spends it trading commiserating looks with the driver in the rearview mirror.

When Tommy sits up again, he blinks at Teddy and says, "So you're Billy's new guy, huh?"

"I'm Teddy," Teddy tells Tommy.

"I wish people would stop making it sound like I've had old guys," Billy tells the window.

Tommy leans forward enough to look around Teddy's shoulder at Billy. "Could you protest too much more over there, bro?" he asks.

"Yes," says Billy.

"I think I'm going to barf," says Tommy.

He doesn't barf until they're out of the taxi, at least, and then it's mostly just spitting a bit into a storm drain while Teddy braces his shoulder and Billy watches them both with an odd expression. They take Tommy into Kate's through the back shipping doors, and Kate meets them at the bottom of the stairs, arms folded over her chest.

She takes one look at Tommy, who is leaning on both Billy and Teddy to keep his walking straight and also to not fall down, and says, "Why did I ever find you attractive?"

"Try not to make out with me in front of the kids," Tommy says, wiggling his eyebrows without much coordination.

"Try not to make out with him at all, actually," suggests Teddy. "He just threw up outside."

Kate points down the hall, at one of the rooms Teddy's never been in before, and says, "Bedroom." Between them, Teddy and Billy manage to manoeuvre Tommy into the room with the bed and the table lamp and the green plaid bedspread. They throw him down on the bed, and he curls up on his side and is dead to the world before long.

They go back to the living room, and Billy sits at one end of the couch and tucks his knees into his chest and seems generally on edge, like he's balancing on the tip of something, waiting for his mood to tip one way and be okay again or go the other and tumble off into something blacker. Teddy waits it out, chewing on his lip and wondering if he should turn the TV on.

Sooner rather than later, Billy exhales and tugs both his hands through his hair. "Whatever," he says and smiles weakly at Teddy. "Sorry. This isn't how I expected the night to go."

"It's fine," says Teddy, meaning it and not just being polite.

"It isn't," Billy says. His smile gets bigger and a little crooked. "But thanks."

"So, is Tommy..." Teddy asks, trailing off and wiggling his finger to suggest superpowers, as Billy unfolds and goes to get the remote.

Billy flops down again, spreads out, taking up more than his actual fair share of room. "Nah," he says. "He's just Tommy."

And then they settle in to watch Survivorman until Billy's metabolism reminds him that he hasn't eaten dinner.

WIP: Young Avengers, Switch AU, PG

2011-08-12T00:01:08Z

This morning, I was struck by a desperate craving for an AU where everyone's powers are switched around. And then in a fit of not wanting to do my actual work, I wrote some.

---

It's apparently the worst kept secret in the history of the universe because Teddy swears that about three days pass between the first time he ever turns the microwave on from halfway across the kitchen and the afternoon that his mother conveniently leaves So You Have Superpowers: A Guide for Parents and Teens on the living room coffee table. He'd be annoyed by that or by the lack of privacy it implies, except his mom seems to have been able to predict that he's on the edge of a nervous breakdown before he actually does the breaking down so instead, he spends a few hours flipping through it and when his mom gets home, they warm up leftover Indian take-out in the microwave and don't talk about how apparently he's a witch.

This wouldn't necessarily qualify it as the worst kept secret in the history of the universe except that , like, a week later, Greg figures it out too after Teddy throws one too many perfect baskets from the three-point line just to see if he can.

"Nice throwing today, Altman," Greg says after practice in the locker room. "It was almost like magic. Hey, Mike, what's the news always saying about mutants getting their mojo around sixteen?"

They're saying stop being a sore loser, Teddy thinks irritably, but he doesn't say it because the parts of his brain that controls his tongue muscles still freeze up around Greg.

He settles on slamming his way through getting changed and thinking wistfully back to the days when he actually liked Greg. Deep down, he always knew he was kind of an asshole but for a while there, he was convinced Greg was an asshole but a great guy once you got to know him not an asshole and even more of an asshole when you got to know him.

He manages to leave before anything too improbable happens like all the showers exploding at the same time or Greg Norris's dick falling off. Even for Teddy, there are limits to unsubtlety. But as he walks out the door, he still half-heartedly wishes that Greg will get his thumb caught in his locker when he closes it and then smiles when he hears a bang and a lot of swearing behind him.

All in all, he thinks he deals with it pretty well. It's more like winning the genetic lottery than like the "massive disruption to self-perception and identity" that his mom's book thinks it should be.

His mom only brings it up once directly in those first few days, after dinner, while she's watching Animal Planet and wearing her yoga pants because she had an extra serving of Teddy's foolproof mac and cheese modification and he's waging an implacable cold war with his algebra homework.

"You'll tell me if it ever starts feeling like it's too much for you, right?" she asks, eyes still fixed on some thing about anemone ecology.

He has to scrunch his eyebrows at her for a minute before he's read between the lines enough to figure out what she's talking about. Then he finds himself blushing and looking down at his graph paper, embarrassed in typical sixteen year-old fashion by displays of parental concern, however mild.

"Sure, mom," he says.

She turns her face and squints at him, as if trying to see through any lies, but he's not really lying because he tells her almost everything already, so she eventually looks away, satisfied. Five minutes later, Teddy decides to just look up all the answers in the back of his textbook and joins her on the couch.

It's October. The days are getting shorter and colder, and Halloween isn't that far off. Teddy's not sure if that's why he feels inspired to poke at these new powers of his, prodding around the edges like he has a loose tooth, or if that's just something that anyone in his position would do. There's a chapter in mom's book about stages of coping, but he hasn't gotten around to reading it yet.

He's been doing unintentional stuff for what feels like weeks when he makes his first concentrated attempt – and has blown up three lightblubs and made it so that his iPod now only plays his music in Croatian in that time – but somehow that makes it actually harder to do something on purpose. Teddy guesses it's like those Magic Eye pictures, which he's always been terrible at, always seeing the picture when he isn't trying and never seeing it when he tries, no matter how much eye-crossing and unfocusing he does.

The irony of it all doesn't escape him. Teddy feels like he's spent his whole life wishing for things, since he was old enough to miss his father to the period when he wanted a T-Rex for a pet and on through extremely awkward fifteen when no day went by without Teddy either wishing guys would notice him or wishing he was straight.

It's probably good that these powers didn't show up until now, when he's a little more settled and a little less desperate to change who he is, except that even now that he has them, his wishes don't work.

After two afternoons of blowing off basketball practice to sit in his room, trying to levitate his pillow off the bed, he decides he's probably trying too hard or something and gives up. He gets that it's not his pillow's fault, but he still throws it across the room when he climbs into bed at the end of the day and sleeps without it. He wakes up the next morning with a crick in his neck and the faint indent of his mattress pressed pink into his cheek.

He sighs at his reflection in the mirror three times before going to school.

There's a kid hanging around the edge of the yard when Teddy gets there. His school takes in a lot of kids from the middle of Manhattan, so it's not like it's small or like Teddy knows everyone in it on sight, so there's no reason he should notice this guy, except he's got a distinctly sketchy air to him, hanging by the big oak tree, just on the public property side of the fence. Fifteen or sixteen, Teddy guesses, with a mess of dark hair and an intense, kind of cranky thoughtful expression on his face.

He's cute, actually, and if Teddy were another person in another life, he might go over there and say hi and introduce himself.

And then it occurs to him that he basically is a different person in a different life, at least compared to who he was and what his life was like two weeks ago. It makes something hopeful and slightly brave flare up in his chest, but he only makes it about three experimental steps in the guy's direction before his feet are veering traitorously off-path and back towards the school entrance.

So maybe he's not that different.

The more you know, Teddy thinks to himself and tries not to be disappointed.

He's got English and then shop, so he gets to dump all his math books in his locker and load up on just a lone, featherweight Shakespeare play for the first half of his day. He's searching around at the bottom of his locker for a pen or pencil or anything to write with, really, when someone thunks up against the lockers beside him.

"S'up, Freakazoid," Greg says with his broad, asshole grin.

Teddy frowns at the contents of his locker but tries not to tense up otherwise. "I don't think you even know who that is," he says.

"Obviously," agrees Greg in that way he has of agreeing while also implying that he's thinks you're an idiot. "Since I'm not a freak, it's not like I need to keep a freak phone book in my head, right?"

Teddy doesn't answer. He shuts his locker door and snaps the lock back on.

Sensing that he's on to something here, Greg leans in close, grins a little wider, and says, "Speaking of which, don't you have some freak friends you should be hanging out with? I mean, do you have friends, period, these days?"

Teddy takes a breath and reminds himself that it's not like Greg can do anything to him, that Teddy's at least as big as him, that it's not like he cares what Greg thinks anyway. But even in the middle of remembering all that, he still feels his tongue unsticking so he can hiss back, "So is this actually about you hating mutants or is this about that time you asked me to stick my hand down your pants?"

Greg opens his mouth and then turns kind of purple, and Teddy decides that he's very much done with today. He picks up his backpack, turns on the ball of his foot, and leaves.

It's only been fifteen minutes, but he'd forgotten about the guy hanging around outside until he pushes out the front door and finds him standing there at the bottom of the steps. The guy freezes, eyes wide like he's been caught doing something he really shouldn't be doing, and Teddy stops at the very top of the stairs and looks down at him.

"Hi," says Teddy after a moment because surprise has pushed away his anger at Greg Norris and what else is there to say?

"Hi," says the guy back and then he abruptly seems to decide that he shouldn't have said that and presses his lips together. A blush spreads over his cheeks, but the weird thing is that a scattering of freckles do as well. Then both disappear completely.

Teddy drops down a step, bracing his hand over the strap of his pack to keep it from falling off his shoulder when he does. "Can I help you with something?"

The guy hesitates before saying, "No." He has warm brown eyes, except then Teddy drops down another step closer and he can see how they go a little purple and then slightly green, like the guy changes his mind about what colour he wants them to be between every blink. Like that's a thing people can do.

"Are you a mutant?" Teddy asks, despite how adamant his mom's book is that that's not a thing you can just ask people.

The guy's eyebrows seem to jump right up to his hairline in surprise, and Teddy, who has always been good at reading people when he's not deluding himself for reasons mostly related to teen hormones, watches as the guy quite transparently tries to decide whether or not to lie.

"Yes," he says finally, and it's not a lie.

"Cool," says Teddy. "Me too."

The words freak friends roll around in his mind a few times, but his internal head-voice makes it sound a lot less bitchy and condescending than Greg's did. It sounds actually nice. Friends who get what it's like to be a bit of a freak. Impulsively, he finds himself adding, "I'm about to skip. You want to come?"

The speculative look the guy shoots him suggests that he thinks one of them here doesn't understand how normal social interactions are supposed to go, but he's not sure which one.

"Okay" is what he actually says, though.

---

His name is Billy, and they buy four dishwater dogs together and then find the nearest park that isn't crowded with strollers or drug dealers or strollers and drug dealers. They sit out on the bumpy, rubbery surface of a tennis court because it has just the right mix of sun and shade and because Billy has a thing about people who play sports and likes the idea of making their lives harder.

"People who play sports during the day," Billy corrects between mouthfuls, mustard spilling all down his thumb. "I have a thing about people who play sports during the day. I mean, come on. Get a job."

"I play sports during the day," Teddy points out, and Billy's mouth twists into a thoughtful purse.

"Exception allowed for high school students," he declares eventually. "It's fine. We can still be friends."

Grinning, Teddy lies back on the ground, loops his arms behind his head for a pillow, and hopes that watching Billy eat is not a profoundly creepy thing to do. He tries to excuse himself with the fact that they've only just met and that he really is just fascinated by the way Billy's ears grow a little bigger when he chews. Except that's also creepy, probably. In its own way.

Mostly, they just talk. Billy goes pink and freckly again when he admits that he was hanging outside Teddy's school as sort of a test run, to see if he could pass himself off as someone from the school well enough to sneak inside and not get noticed.

"I go to Collegiate, actually," he says.

Teddy whistles and eyes Billy's grubby fall jacket and faded Super Mario Bros. t-shirt and says, "So are you rich or super rich? Are we doing a Pauper and the Prince thing here?"

"Shut up," says Billy with a snort that sounds more amused than annoyed. "My parents just like education."

According to Billy, he's had his powers for a month and a half but even though they still don't behave most of the time, his parents haven't picked up on it.

"The first day was the worst, but they were visiting my grandmother," he says and then goes ominously quiet and refuses to expand on how, exactly, the first day was the worst.

So Teddy fills the conversational gap by telling the story about his mom and her book, school and a censored version of how Greg found out, and then wraps it all up with a rambling, vague description of what it is he's actually managed to figure out about what he can do.

"I haven't managed to do much on purpose yet," he interjects when he can see the question forming on Billy's face.

Billy shrugs one shoulder without judgement. "I think the ease of figuring out how to do stuff is proportionally inverted with the coolness of what you can actually do," he says, and Teddy laughs.

"You mean I need to sink more points into it before I can roll without critically failing."

Billy just grins.

Eventually, Teddy's butt starts to feel flat, so he prods Billy in the ribs until he stands up and helps pull Teddy to his feet too. Billy's hands are surprisingly smooth and his grip unexpectedly strong.

They walk around for a while longer, talking about things that they're not as worried about other people overhearing. Billy has two brothers. He does not consider hot dogs to be actual pork. He's pretty determined to go to a terrible college after he graduates, just to throw off Collegiate's Ivy League admittance statistics.

"It's a good cause," he insists.

Around lunch, they buy terrible milkshakes at McDonald's even though it's too cold out to enjoy them properly. Then they stand around on the sidewalk and drink them and watch the midday traffic.

"I should probably go," Billy says after a while, when Teddy's chocolate milkshake has been reduced to just the thick, slushy ice cream part that he has to dig at with the end of his straw. "I didn't actually plan to skip the whole day."

Teddy feels disappointed, but he resolves not to show it. Before he gets a word out one way or another, though, Billy's shifting his body around in Teddy's direction and saying, "But we should hang out tomorrow. There's somewhere I want to take you."

"Or," says Teddy, "we could just skip and go now."

Billy's nose wrinkles and then smooths out. He raises his eyebrows in a way that is all aloof and cool and says, "One does not simply walk into Mordor. Tomorrow."

"Sure," Teddy says around the stupid smile on his face.

Billy takes his phone away and types in his number and then texts himself from Teddy's phone so that they're both all set. Teddy offers to throw both their cups out so that Billy doesn't miss his train, and Billy hisses "Tomorrow" at him one more time before he heads off, like Teddy might have forgotten.

By the time Teddy gets back to his own school, lunch is practically over, and it's almost like those first awful fifteen minutes of the day didn't happen. Of course, then Greg spots him in the wave of students dragging themselves to class and waves and shouts "Hey, fag!" loud enough that a few people turn to look at both of them.

And for the first time, Teddy looks at Greg and doesn't feel embarrassed or angry or ashamed or filled with pathetic teenage lust. He just feels pity.

"Really?" he asks, his voice coming out mild but also deeply incredulous. Greg's sad. The things he says are sad. It's all just sad. And Teddy realizes, with startling suddenness and clarity, that he doesn't care anymore. So he goes to math class instead.

---

Greg ignores him the next day. It's been a very long time since Greg outright didn't acknowledge his presence, so Teddy spends a few seconds thinking about it while he's loading up his bag before deciding that it's probably just that Greg can convince himself he's still winning or whatever as long as he doesn't talk to Teddy. And Teddy can live with that, so he slings his bag over his shoulder and gets on with things.

At lunch, he gets a text from Billy. The text reads, Okay, we're a go.

are you going to tell me what we're go for? Teddy types back, and it doesn't take more than a few seconds before his phone is buzzing with another message.

S, says Billy's text.

E, says the one after that.

C, says the one after the one after that.

By the time Teddy gets the message that is just the letter R, he gives up and interrupts with yes, secret, okay. where should i meet you?

The reply takes longer. I'll find you, it says and then that's all Teddy hears from Billy for the rest of the afternoon. But after the bell rings at 3:00 and Teddy emerges, squinting, into the sunlight for the first time in hours, Billy is waiting behind the fence, by the tree, like the yesterday all over again except there's a lot more red in his hair today and his chin looks pointier.

"We're not going to do anything illegal, are we?" Teddy says instead of saying hello.

Billy's eyes narrow and shift about, and he is thoroughly unconvincing when he says, "No."

But Teddy follows him to the subway station anyway, which maybe says something about Teddy's morals and/or the things Teddy will do for a pretty face, but Teddy already had suspicions about that, so he's not overly scandalized by himself.

Billy talks about school for most of the ride. He's wearing a green button-up shirt, indented around the collar as though there might have been a tie there earlier in the day. Since he did his own fair share of complaining about stupid kids at his school the day before, Teddy is content to listen and make sympathetic faces and try not to fall over as they head uptown.

After one particularly sharp stop, Teddy catches Billy eyeing Teddy's legs and then Teddy's white-knuckled grip on the pole.

"Bad subway legs," he says, trying not to blush.

"I just make one of my legs longer than the other," says Billy.

One stop later, the old lady with the walker gets off, and Billy glares at everyone around them so that no one swoops in to steal her seat, and Teddy finally gets to sit down for a while. They get off not long after, but he appreciates the gesture anyway.

Once they're up top again, Billy leads Teddy to a coffee shop on the corner of a busy intersection. It looks very independent and like it's probably filled with hippies and thus exactly like the sort of place his mom would go to buy coffee. Billy doesn't pause in the front of the store, though. He only waves vaguely at the twenty-something behind the counter and moves on through to the backrooms. They head down a flight of stairs and through a white, unlabelled door and into a hallway with a handful of room leading off it.

"Kate," Billy shouts, as the door swings shut behind Teddy.

"Kaplan," a female voice calls back from the door at the end of the hallway.

Thoroughly confused, Teddy trails after Billy as he heads down the hall. The room at the end is small and filled with computer monitors, some running programs and some running security footage from the coffee shop and the stairs and the hall. There's a dark-haired girl sitting in front of the monitors with no keyboard around that Teddy can see, but this doesn't seem like it would be a problem since the girl's arm has a cable running from it into the computer tower below her desk.

The girl half-turns, tilts back in her chair, and smiles a bright white smile at them. "So this is your new boy?" she asks Billy.

Teddy feels himself blush, and he glances at Billy to see if he's alone in that. Billy hasn't gone pink at all, but there are telltale freckles now across the back of his neck.

"This is Teddy," Billy tells her.

"Hi," says Teddy.

Kate twists some more and holds her free hand out across her chest so that she and Teddy can shake hands. "Kate," she says. "Billy's been playing super spy again and didn't tell you where he was taking you, huh?"

Billy squawks quietly but with great indignity. Teddy smiles and shakes his head.

"Not a thing," he says.

Kate isn't surprised. "Well," she says. "Consider this Kate's Club for Metahumans who Need a Break. Since Billy brought you, you must be a..."

"Witch," Teddy supplies because it's still the best word he's found for it.

"Technopath," Kate replies cheerfully, pressing her hand to her own chest and then gesturing at her plugged-in arm. "Basically, the rules are nothing absurdly illegal, don't talk about fight club, and no coming here when I'm not around. I've got a website I update when I'm here, so I'll send you the URL."

"Sure," says Teddy. "My e-mail's—"

But Kate cuts him off with another bright "Technopath!" and then Teddy's phone buzzes against his thigh, right on cue. Billy hides his smile against the side of his hand.

"Ah," says Teddy.

"Have fun," Kate says, turning back to her monitors and waving her hand over her head.

Billy catches Teddy by the wrist and pulls him backwards out into the hall. The door immediately to their right opens up into a little living room with a couch and a big TV. Billy drops Teddy's wrist again and throws himself onto the couch facefirst with the airy whomph of soft leather and fluffy pillows. Teddy reminds himself that his wrist does not actually have feelings of its own and thus can't miss Billy's hand around it and then follows, perching on the end of the couch near Billy's feet.

"So, you come here a lot?" he asks.

Billy mumbles something incomprehensible into the couch pillows and then, probably judging that it was incomprehensible, he lifts his head and says, "Yeah. Kate helped me out a lot when the whole," he waves his hand around his face, makes his nose grow bigger and then shrink again, "thing happened."

Teddy gets the sense that there's more of a story there, perhaps much more of a story. Maybe one that involves dating, in which case Teddy's not sure he wants to know yet.

"So the whole coffee shop thing is just a front for her secret hideout?" he asks instead.

"Yup," Billy says.

Teddy glances toward the door and then overhead, wondering if Kate has secret cameras or bugs in this room. "What does she do here?"

"Insider trading and corporate espionage," Billy says and then laughs at Teddy's stunned expression. "I'm joking."

"Mostly," he adds after a moment.

While Teddy's still mulling that over, Billy gets up and leaves the room but only for a second. He returns with two cans of Coke. When Teddy catches the one tossed his way, it's so icy cold that it makes him shiver.

"Xbox?" Billy asks, popping his can open.

"Definitely," says Teddy.

He helps Billy haul the console out from the cupboards below the TV, and Billy just boots the thing up, like he can be certain that what's in there already is something that he wants to play. They settle back together on the couch as the loading screens play, sipping their pop, Teddy with his controller on the cushion beside him and Billy with it balanced on his knee.

"I know she said it like it was a thing," Billy says suddenly. "'Your new boy.' Like I bring guys here all the time. I don't."

"Oh," says Teddy, not sure what to do with this information.

"You're the first," Billy continues. He's freckled all over his face now, like he's spent weeks and weeks out in the sun.

Teddy makes himself stop staring at the freckles on Billy's ear long enough to say, "Okay."

DRABBLES: 4x UNTITLED, INCEPTION, G

2011-02-17T22:40:04Z

An exercise in working out some backstory ideas.

(1)

Gray was an old school son of a bitch, the kind of hardened military lifer that Eames had been raised to expect from a childhood of war movies and the stories his grandfather used to tell. He was impervious to brown-nosing or charm or the kind of half-serious insubordination Eames had specialized in during his Phase 1 training.

But even he wasn't insurmountable. Adults, he'd observed, especially adults of a certain age who had reached a place in their professional life where it was clear that they would go no higher and achieve no more, had a tendency to gravitate toward potential and the rougher the package, the more eager they seemed to lift you up and clean you off and take credit for the great things you'd do in your future.

Eames had spent years crafting the appearance of potential, scattering it in everything he did like a tangible brilliance you could pick up and hold in front of your eyes. If he had also made a habit of ruthlessly and pointedly never achieving that brilliance, that was a different matter entirely. It drove his mother to distraction, but Gray didn't need to know that.

"Lieutenant," Gray said, drawing out the f-sound with his teeth against his lower lip, a habit that Eames had seized upon when performing impressions for the other Credenhill boys in their free hours, "what do you think about America?"

Eames considered. "Practically or metaphysically speaking?” he asked finally.

--

(2)

Mallorie believes in beauty like other people believe in oxygen, a necessity. And Eames may not agree, may find her ethereal constructions of old world Europe as improbable as Arthur's cities of geometric perfection, but he finds it fascinating nonetheless.

"You sanitize everything," he accuses as they sit by her Seine, and the air smells clean, and they are served coffee in spotless white porcelain mugs by politely silent projections.

Her foot hits his thigh under the table, the sort of playfulness she can indulge in with him because he's the one man in her life who isn't in love with her.

"And you rub dirt on everything and call it real," she counters, hiding her smile in the palm of her hand. "Who's to say what's more correct?"

They're all young and stupid, Eames thinks – and after a moment, he'll even include himself in that assessment. Sooner or later, they'll find the answer to that question.

--

(3)

Eames is driving near Jerusalem when he turns 30 because a rich guy in Tel Aviv wanted confirmation that his corporate paranoia was justified. (It wasn't.) The Judean Mountains roll all around him, dropping away into a series of valleys and, eventually, the sea. There are tombs all through the mountains, they say, and it makes Eames think about Arthur's obsession from when they were soldiers together, always building ancient cities that don't exist anymore.

He composes letters in his mind. Dear Arthur, Haven't written in a while. But I'm feeling old, and it made me think of you. I bet you've been old since you were born. Or Dear Arthur, I'm not one for nostalgia, except, apparently, when I am.

But it's only an intellectual exercise, something to keep his thoughts busy as he tries to avoid the instinct to drive on the other side of the road. Because he and Arthur haven't been friends for years, and Eames has never been the sort to spend his time building things that don't exist anymore.

---

(4)

The story of the Danish accountant is one of Eames's favourite. In his brain, it occupies a central place as a cautionary tale about what can happen to a young, overconfident, newly-minted international criminal when he gets a little ahead of himself. At one times, Eames preferred to bury it away out of shame, but Eames's ego has grown solid and substantial enough over the years that he can now look back and admit that a lot of it was very funny, even if all the jokes are at his expense.

So really, there's no reason why he should avoid actually telling anyone anymore. He just does it out of habit at this point.

"You shouldn't keep bringing it up if you're never going to bloody tell me," Yusuf tells him one night when it's so hot that neither of them are particularly willing to move. Yusuf's balcony is a mess of dehydrated house plants and ugly stonework and his cat's water dish which, once a week, gets pushed off accidentally onto a passerby below. But it's about the only place in Mombasa that gets a breeze half the time, so Eames finds himself sitting with Yusuf more and more often out of practicality if nothing else.

Eames is silent, considering and drinking in alternating bursts of activity. The rational part of his brain has to admit that Yusuf has a point. The less rational, but more fun, part is unperturbed.

"All I'll say," Eames says in the end, "is never forge someone in their own subconscious."

In the beat that follows, Yusuf's expression becomes increasing incredulous, like levels of a dream: an incredulity within an incredulity within an incredulity.

Eames nods his head in agreement and waves his hand. "It was all very Escher after the first few seconds."

WIP: Young Avengers, Skrull President AU, PG-13

2011-01-30T21:56:59Z

Don't you love it when your brain completely switches fandom tracks in the middle of writing a story? I know I do! Putting this here as a promise to myself to come back and finish it and not just let it get forgotten in my writing folder. D:

---

All feats of modern technology aside, the shuttle ride from Earth to Tarnax IV still takes 25 Earth hours, is severely lacking in the foot room department, and is air-conditioned to nearly arctic temperatures. Billy tries to compensate by watching C-SPAN repeat feeds on his laptop and ordering a copious array of drinks in tiny bottles from the in-flight menu, which he shares with Kate only because he knows he's likely to pass out around hour 18 and this might keep her from drawing on his face while he sleeps.

Of course, the problem with watching C-SPAN is that Earth news has been slow for the last month, and so every news cycle seems to be made of about 7% Congress's Latest Attempt to Rename a National Park After that One Congressman who Got Eaten by a Bear and 93% the Skrull presidential race. And because the human race has decided to be not at all subtle about who their favourite candidate is that means endless streams of footage in which Dorrek "Theodore" Altman gets in and out of cars and smiles at small green infants and stares off into the distance with determined expressions on his face.

Billy, watching a clip from five hours earlier in the day when Dorrek and his tiny, blonde aide stopped for ice cream somewhere, sighs.

Kate, watching over his shoulder with a half-finished bottle of Taylors Late Vintage pinched between her thumb and index finger, opines, "When we get there, you should write a press release about how his flaxen hair in the sunlight is the colour of freedom."

"Given the audience," Billy replies with a barely contained snort, "it should probably be about how his hair in the sunlight is the colour of dawn on the day we vanquish our enemies and eat their livers for afternoon tea."

Kate, obviously, does not even pretend to have listened to him and immediately starts whapping him on the arm instead, pointing at the tiny laptop screen with the unabashed joy of someone on her third miniature bottle of port. "Oh, oh," she cheers, "gratuitous smiling b-roll. Take a shot!"

With a wrinkle of his nose, Billy downs the last of his brandy. "You make up the worst drinking games," he tells her seriously.

"Only another one-point-seven-five million light-years to go." She gives him her most dazzling smile.

---

Billy never planned on going the professional media-wrangler route after college. Having majored in journalism, he'd walked out firm in the knowledge that people who work in PR and PR-related activities were the Enemy, soul-sucking demonspawn whose entire purpose in life was to distort the Truth and keep the wool pulled firmly over the eyes of the American public.

But then, Billy had also believed that people were wrong about the print journalism industry's steady march down the toilet and that a young man living in Manhattan could totally make enough money on investigative journalism alone to still actually eat, so Billy must admit that, in retrospect, he was kind of a tit back then.

It was his bubbe who had eventually tossed him on the path that inevitably led to getting blazingly drunk on the Andromeda Galaxy red-eye three years later. She had been persistent, in a way that only bubbes could be persistent, about him working on the campaign of a well-intentioned son of a friend's cousin who had delusion of senatordom and absolutely no viable political prospects whatsoever.

After two weeks of guilt and disapproving tongue-clicking, Billy agreed, assuming that all he'd ever be asked to do would be stapling things together and answering phones. They worked out of a tiny office in midtown over a twenty-four hour grocery, and the staff seemed to change daily. The only people Billy could consistently recognize were the candidate himself and the young dark-haired woman who spent most of her time yelling at anyone who wandered into her line of sight.

On the anniversary of his fifth week with the campaign, the candidate had made a passing remark at a meeting of the Civic Planning Association about the future of cars running on fuel made of human waste, and Billy, the lone volunteer in the office that day, had found himself mobbed by the press within the hour.

"Does Mr. Reiss believe the FDA should approve human waste for other household uses?" asked one reporter.

"Was Mr. Reiss making a statement about American dependence on foreign oil?" asked another.

And Billy, in the face of about seven running microphones with their tiny, blinking red lights, found his brain stuck in a loop of God, reporters are ridiculous people at about the time his mouth decided to make a bid for autonomy and said, "It's the context that's important here. Mr. Reiss has been a long-time supporter of both the American small businessman and the preservation of our natural resources. He believes that our future lies where business and the environment meet and foster each other's growth. He'd also remind you that we've always been a country unafraid of innovation and exploration, and the challenges of the next few years are not beyond us as long as we remember that."

There'd been a few follow-up questions after that, but it wasn't until he'd shepherd them all out of the office that Billy realized he wasn't precisely alone after all. The dark-haired woman, Kate Bishop, was standing in the door to her cubicle, wearing the same shirt she'd worn the day before, looking at him with a curious expression.

"You're surprisingly good at that, you know," she said neutrally and then laughed. "Or, at least, that's the most eloquent way I've ever heard anyone say we should put our cultural-national tendency for being full of shit to good use."

Billy resisted the urge to put his head in the nearest garbage can only because it was filled with shredded draft press releases, and it would probably have all gotten stuck in his hair. "I'm not actually good at that," he corrected briskly. "I'm terrible with people."

Kate continued to stand in the doorway for a moment more before pushing away with only a click of her heels and a bare shift of her weight. She walked over to his desk and stared down at him, a focused light growing in her eyes. "I know. For some reason it works. D'you think you could do it again?"

When, four months later, David Reiss lost the New York senatorial race, Billy and Kate were already six hours away in Maine, celebrating getting their first senator elected.

---

By the time they get to their hotel, Billy is so bleary-eyed with shuttle-lag and hangover-induced dehydration that he can barely stand up straight in the lobby long enough for Kate to check them both in. He makes it to his room only by leaning on Kate for most of the elevator ride up to their floor and into bed only because that's where Kate chooses to deposit him with a pat on the head and an affectionate, "You utter lightweight. I'll come get you in a few hours, okay?"

Billy manages to have the good sense and sufficient coordination to tug off his shirt and pants before collapsing spread-eagle on the bed. His pillows carry the universal hotel smell of detergent and stale air which has become as familiar and home-like to Billy over the past few years as his actual home. He's solidly asleep in under three minutes flat.

Sometime later – and Billy can't really judge how much later because the clock on his bedside table swears that the time is 27:34 – he wakes to the sound of his door chime going off enthusiastically and repeatedly. He blinks muzzily a few times and then slides off the bed to a symphony of cracking knee and elbow joints. As quickly as he can, he pulls on his shirt and pants and then goes to answer the door.

He fully expected it to be Kate on the other side but instead, he's greeted by a very human-looking girl dressed in a dark suit, with her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. It takes a few seconds before Billy can place her as the aide who always shows up behind Dorrek at press events. Improbably, she looks even younger in person.

"Mr. Kaplan?" she asks. "Ms. Bishop said I should come get you. We're about to start our full strategy meeting just down the hall."

"Um," says Billy, running a hand through his hair, aware that that only makes it stand up worse. "Do I have time to shave or brush my hair or gargle with industrial-strength disinfectant for, like, an hour?"

"Nope," she replies with pointed, obnoxious chipperness. "C'mon." And then without another word, she pivots on one toe and starts off back down the hall, leaving Billy to scramble for his keycard, shove it into his pocket, and stumble after her.

"So you're...?" he asks once he's fallen in step with her.

She doesn't turn to look at him, but her eyebrows rise and fall with amusement in profile. "Cassie Lang. I head up Teddy's security team."

For a moment, Billy isn't sure what part of that sentence is more surprising: the informal "Teddy" or the part where someone who looks about thirteen is supposed to be heading anyone's security team. Billy tries to keep the surprise out of his voice when he replies, "Really."

Cassie does glance his way then, and her eyes crinkle with a sort of mischievous glee that probably only develops in someone who has had to explain Yes, really over a hundred times already.

"I know thirty-five ways to kill a man with a piece of dental floss and a paper clip."

"Ah," says Billy.

Cassie nods and then adds reflectively, "I'm basically MacGyver if MacGyver was more into carnage and mayhem."

They walk a few more steps in silence before Billy says, "I should probably never introduce you to my brother."

---

Kate is already ensconced in one of the two high-backed chairs near the suite's wall of windows when Billy and Cassie arrive. She has her heels kicked off on the floor underneath the chair where they'll be out of the way, and her bare feet are tucked in beside her on the seat, her skirt coming down to just above the curve of her kneecap. She's sipping from a large glass of water with ice cubes, which reminds Billy immediately that he's still definitely dehydrated.

Eli Bradley, who Billy has never met but knows well by reputation and Kate's gossipy stories about "the old days," is pacing a loose loop in front of the coffee table with his hands clasped behind him. When the door swishes open to admit Billy and Cassie, he looks up and gives them a brief nod before his eyes flicker over to the half-closed bathroom door.

Dorrek, whose crisp, Skrull-inflected vowels and cadences Billy knows intimately from watching a solid fifty stump speeches over the last week, is speaking from behind the door, over the sound of running water. "I know it's not the popular thing to do," he's saying. "I'm trying to make a point."

Billy lets Cassie usher him over to one of the couches from where he continues to look longingly at Kate's glass of water.

"A point that no one who can actually vote for you cares about," counters Eli, frowning at the door.

The running water shuts off, and there are some shuffling noises from the bathroom and then Dorrek finally emerges. His signature blonde hair is damp and, as a result, more of a deep gold colour than usual. He has a towel wrapped around his neck to catch the drips, and it pushes down on the collar of his shirt in a way that makes it stick out at strange angles. He's also not green today and between moments of open-mouthed gapping, Billy wonders if he's done that for his and Kate's benefit.

Dorrek grins at Eli with his perfectly straight, white teeth. It's a sharper smile than the ones that has earned him legions of devoted and adoring fans at C-SPAN. "Since when is that a good enough reason not to make a point?" he asks.

Since you're a politician trying to get elected, Billy thinks, but he doesn't have the opportunity to say it because that's when Dorrek takes a look around the room and first notices his existence. It's like being a deer caught in headlights, except that instead of headlights it's a laser beam that could probably liquefy your digestive track.

"Oh," says Dorrek, "you're the other new guy. Hey."

Billy finds himself presented with a hand which he shakes because good manner have been inculcated into him at an early age hard enough that he can still manage things like handshakes while having a full-body seizure.

After a moment, still holding Dorrek's hand, he says, "Oh my fucking god."

Dorrek's eyebrows take on a worried expression. "Um?" he says.

Kate takes pity on both of them. "Don't worry," she says, smiling over her glass in a way that makes her bottom lip just touch the rim. "That's just the sound press secretaries make when they realize that you don't actually need hours with a make-up team to look that good."

Of all the things Billy has expected to see, Dorrek blushing, light and pink along the crest of his cheekbone, was not even on the list.

---

Dorrek – or Teddy as he apparently prefers to be called in private and among friends – was one of the first of a generation of truly galactic children. A war orphan like many of his contemporaries on Tarnax IV, he'd been raised by a relative of some sort who had felt that the best way to deal with a half-Skrull, half-Kree hybrid baby boy born in the aftermath of bitter war was to forego any attempt at instilling patriotic zeal in him and instead bounce him around the near-universe for a few years and let him choose where he wanted to stick when he was old enough to make the decision for himself.

So Teddy had spent his early years on Tarnax IV, learning to shapeshift and attending what probably amounted to Junior Warlord Academy. Then he'd moved on and served in the Kree military for a few years because the Kree, generally speaking, had never met a fourteen year-old they hadn't attempted to draft into military service.

And then, unexpected by everyone, he'd come to Earth and stayed just long enough to get a degree from Georgetown and win a couple of basketball games and write a thesis on comparative political philosophy before he'd flown back to Tarnax IV to work a mid-level paper-pushing job and bide his time.

All of which added up to the fact that Teddy spoke four languages at least, had a desk drawer full of military commendations, had a world-class education from three different worlds and a quiet but fierce dedication to ideals like peace and equality. He was, in essence, the perfect candidate, like someone had gift-wrapped him and left him waiting for Eli and Kate and Billy to discover.

And, Billy finds himself thinking repeatedly during his first week, if the Skrull could just get over being terrible racists for long enough to elect him, he might even do some good.

---

Their first two weeks of news cycles end up being kind of a circus. The thing is that Billy has plenty of experience now in fielding questions he likes and subtly ignoring ones he doesn't. He can probably find a way to make an illegitimate baby scandal into a positive if he just rambles long enough, but he's also thoroughly unused to being news himself. And yet, unexpectedly but inevitably, for the first few days after word that Teddy's flown in consultants from Earth begins circulating, that's what he becomes.

It strikes home the first day that a picture of him ends up at the top of the homepage for Tarnax IV's biggest publication. The phorographer had caught him behind the desk they'd set up in the unofficial press room, snapped in mid-point as he calls on a reporter to answer a question. "Dorrek Campaign Goes Intergalactic" reads the title of the article; the caption beneath the picture says, "William Kaplan, 25, is one of a team of humans candidate Dorrek has imported to aid in his presidential bid."

"It makes me sound like a crate of oranges," Billy complains morosely as they drive through the capital to the theatre where Teddy is supposed to be attending a performance of The Many Victories of X'ridak the Subduer. Traffic being notoriously bad through the centre of the city, the going's slow, and Billy splits his time between thumbing the touchpad on his phone to scroll up and down the article and tugging self-consciously on his bowtie.

On the opposite seat, Cassie gives him a slight, not particularly genuine smile of sympathy. Teddy tilts his head to one side and does a much better job of looking like he actually cares. Kate and Eli are not present, having been banished to their own car when it became obvious to everyone that they can't go five minutes without arguing at any time ever.

"If it makes you feel better," Teddy says, "I'm sure it was much worse for global warming to fly you up here than it would've been to fly a crate of oranges."

Billy feels strangely mollified by that, enough to agree to pocket his phone for the time being. There's only so long he can stare at a picture of his own face before he has to start wondering if he's secretly vain or just developing some shiny new self-esteem issues, anyway.

"I don't suppose you'd do a last minute reconsideration of the not-going-green thing, would you?" Billy asks, but his tone already gives away that he doesn't have much hope of getting a positive answer.

Sure enough, Teddy just grins, stretches his arm out along the back of the seat until he can almost touch the top of Cassie's up-do. "Nope," he says cheerfully.

"Right," Billy sighs and looks out the window.

To green or not to green, that's the question Billy can already foresee plaguing this campaign, the one already picking up some currency among the yellower journalists, the one that probably won't drive Eli to drink because Eli is twenty times the professional Billy is but will probably drive him a little nuts in the short term regardless. The one that Teddy absolutely won't budge on out of principle. Billy's dealt with stubborn politicians before. Without trying very hard, he can think back to a mayoral campaign in Texas, and a candidate who had levelly refused to stop sleeping with a stuffed racoon toy until Kate had somehow managed to get it arrested for public lewdness. That had been a fun press conference.

Teddy's decision to spend at least half his time looking human (or as he points out every time Eli raises the issue: "Looking Kree. You just can't tell the difference.") is on the same level of stubbornness if not the same level of blatant ridiculousness. He shoots down all pleas to reconsider with the same smile, the same faint amusement in his eyes, like he can't understand how they all fail to see the pointlessness of what they're asking.

And the most unfortunate part of it is that they all get it. They all know that Teddy's doing the right thing – or at least a thing that really shouldn't matter – regardless of how many green eyebrow ridges it raises every time he walks into a building with his skin pink. It's what makes it hard to ask.

The front of Teddy's shoe bumps the front of Billy's, and Billy can't suppress the moment of professional terror as he glances down to ensure that no scuff marks have been left behind. Teddy's shoes gleam back at him, as polished as when they first left the hotel.

"Ever been to a Skrull opera before?" he asks with the most forebodingly angelic look Billy has ever seen.

"No-oo," Billy says slowly, drawing out the word so that his eyes have enough time to narrow. Teddy just looks more angelic at him in return, so Billy continues: "But Kate makes me go see an off-off-off-off Broadway production of that musical where everyone dies every year, so I consider myself prepared and pre-psychologically scarred."

Teddy brings his hand up to his mouth, covering it to conceal his smile and then drumming his fingers against the side of his chin. "Ah, good," he says.

Three hours, four fake decapitations, and one probably burst ear drum later, Billy leans forward from his seat in the back of the box and taps Teddy on the shoulder. Teddy half-turns so that his profile is illuminated by the orange light streaming up from the stage where the actor playing X'ridak is singing about how he'll have to decapitate more people tomorrow.

Billy looks at him seriously. "I say this with all due respect: Your culture disturbs and alarms me."

"Guys," Kate hisses from over to Billy's left. "I just thought of a great new drinking game."

---

Most nights, they order take-out from the only place they've found that they can all agree on and eat while working. Kate has put up a whiteboard for tracking polling numbers in the living room of Teddy's suite; Cassie has made it pretty by drawing flowers all around the edge in blue and red dry-erase marker. Billy has claimed the spot right below it as his permanent position for all staff meetings and pseudo-staff meetings. It gives him a near endless supply of marker caps to throw at people when necessary.

It also gives him the bittersweet duty of being the one to chart the new numbers every morning, usually while ingesting coffee with one side of his mouth and grimacing with the other. The ups and downs are expected. Polling numbers, except when they are absolute bullshit, never stay steady in a campaign; things always shift. It's the overall trend that matters, not the day-to-day minutiae.

But as Billy learns quickly, the combination of Skrull militaristic obsessiveness and their fear-slash-awe of everything government tends to result in startling response rates on opinion polls, massive sample sizes, and nearly second-by-second figures. When Teddy drinks someone's least favourite brand of pop, they know about it. When Teddy's tie looks particularly nice with his eyes, they know it. Before long, Billy's had to scrub out the chart they started on the first day and redraw it, with all its heart-stopping jagged peaks and valleys.

With the first round of debates on the horizon, they're currently stuck in a protracted valley, broken up only by a small peak when Billy had less than subtly leaked some pictures of Teddy out to dinner with his mom earlier in the week. No Skrull alive could resist the family values angle, especially when Sarah Altman was a bit of a war hero in her own right.

"We already know that we've got no shot at the ultra-traditionalist vote," Eli says to Teddy over chapati and chicken madras as Billy scribbles an irritable letter to the editor that he will never actually send into the column of his briefing notes and Kate and Cassie pour over the security plans for the convention centre.

"Yes," Teddy says with a look of mixed amusement on his face. "I think we let that ship sail a while ago. Also, my aunt."

"Your aunt," Eli repeats, managing to agree and also make the word ‘aunt' sound like a swear word with barely a twitch of his eyebrows. "Exactly. Her base is never going to vote for you. Her base kind of hates you."

"It's hard being me," Teddy sighs, and Billy glances up just in time to catch three seconds of Teddy staring at him before he looks back at Eli.

Eli taps the table and continues on as if he wasn't interrupted. "Usually, I'd say just leave her alone. Forget about tearing down Veranke's qualifications, focus on building up yours. Focus on the other candidates. Focus on winning over people in the centre who think you're over-educated and soft on Earth." The tapping stops, and Eli grimaces. "Except," he says, and Billy interrupts without hesitation.

"Except the other candidates aren't really important right now."

Teddy looks at him again, and he doesn't look amused. By now, Billy has begun to recognize this expression as his "Serious Political Face," and it doesn't seem to matter if he's green or pink or mauve when he makes it, it always makes Billy suck in a breath and have weird pre-cognitive visions of what it will look like on currency in a few years.

"Because she's my aunt," Teddy says again, only barely keeping from frowning.

"Because it's too good a story." Billy waves his hand in the air, nearly toppling his notebook out of his lap. "Because she's the dynasty and the return to the way things were when everyone's parents were young, and Tarnax IV was a big military power with a truly stupid stupid defence budget. And you're the idea of what the Skrull could be in the future if they just leave that behind and move on. I guarantee whatever happens in the debate, short of an invasion of cows from the moon, that will be the story the day after."

Silently, Teddy presses his lips together and leans back in his chair. He crosses his arms over his chest, and the late afternoon sun coming in through the tinted hotel windows falls across his jaw and the creases in his shirt in a way that makes Billy's fingers itch to yank a photographer into the room.

Finally, Teddy looks at Eli and raises his eyebrows in solemn inquiry. "So I...?" he asks.

"Destroy her," Eli replies firmly.

---

Billy had known about Teddy long before he ever went to work for him. It was hard to miss given that Teddy's arrival on Earth had roughly coincided with Billy living on his own for the first time, and there were more than enough late night grocery shopping trips spent standing in line for the checkout, staring at Teddy's face on the cover of teen magazines.

He'd never bought into it. He'd never followed the tabloid stories about Teddy's weight loss secrets or the November Secret Baby scandal that had obsessed most of his first year reporting class. He could claim a certain amount of smugness over the fact that he had never cut clippings out of newspapers or bought the issue of Vanity Fair with the one official photoshoot and interview Teddy ever agreed to during his stay on Earth. He'd read it, yes, but he hadn't cut anything out.

The only thing he'd never really understood is that even when everyone else moved on, got over the first blush of celebrity obsession and returned to speculating about movie stars and the royalty of other countries, he didn't. And when Esquire had done a profile on Teddy a year ago, presciently choosing to catch up with him before he announced his candidacy and drove every intergalactic correspondent back into his arms in the same breath, Billy must admit he did cut things out of that one.

Billy used to think that the media loved Teddy because his story was so perfect that it was impossible not to. Tragedy and adventure and the plucky refusal to give in, all wrapped up into a devastatingly photogenic package, capable of sheltering a thousand different themes from redemption to the indomitable nature of the human – or Skrull as the case may be – spirit.

Now he thinks that it's a strange thing, knowing someone that you spent the most awkward years of your young adulthood reading about. Billy can see all the things in Teddy that those other journalists saw, but he can also see more, and the part of his brain that still insists he's a journalist can't stop wondering how he'd write the story if given the chance.

He thinks he'd start like this: "Teddy Altman bites his nails when distracted. As he likes to claim, it's probably the key to his political success that he can grow them back again immediately."

---

Two-thirds of the way through the first debate, Billy's heart basically stops beating and doesn't start again until they've made it back to the hotel and he's marched up to Teddy's suite and drawn a straight, swooping line up on the whiteboard. Official numbers won't be in for a few hours, but Billy's natural tendency towards scrappy pessimism has momentarily been swallowed up in a sense of Fuck yes, we're awesome, and he feels like embracing it for once.

Downstairs, he finds Kate and Cassie sitting on either side of Teddy in one of the high-backed booths in the hotel bar, alternating between plying him with drinks and examining Cassie's frightening array of concealed weaponry. The upholstery is plush black leather and less Spartan than Billy would have expected given his experiences of Tarnaxian interior design over the last few weeks. Teddy's hair is bright and unruly, and he's taken off his tie; he's cheeks are going pink, and he keeps laughing and screwing up his nose every time Kate mutters something to him and pushes another drink his way.

Billy leaves them to it and goes to sit at the bar with Eli instead. He gets as far as "I'd like an um" before realizing that he has never had to order alcohol on an alien planet before and doesn't know where to begin. For a twenty-something elite political operative, this is a distressing situation to be in.

"Order the thing in the blue bottle," Eli suggests. "Pretty sure it doesn't take more than one stomach to digest."

The thing in the blue bottle turns out to also be blue in colour, and pretty soon Billy is sitting with his shot glass, trying to decide if he actually wants to drink it, while Eli sips on a cup of coffee and gazes at the backlit fish tank that sits behind the bar.

"Tarnaxian acquatic life: surprisingly not scary," Billy observes and then tilts his head to one side. "Arguably kinda cute."

Eli snorts, knocking his spoon against the rim of his mug and taking another sip. After a moment, he says, "Probably still carnivorous."

"Probably," Billy agrees and then thinks Fuckit and tosses back his drink in one big gulp. It's the consistency of cough syrup but tart, not sweet, which makes it far more pleasant than the Blue Curacao horror he was anticipating. "He was good tonight," Billy says once he's swallowed, resisting the urge to look over his shoulder at Teddy as he says it.

"He was all right."

Billy motions at the bartender to bring him another and makes a face in Eli's direction. "Which is Eli for he was sensational."

Eli sips and then sips again until Billy is almost certain he's conceding the argument through a classic no-comment. But then he sets his cup down on the bar, the click of ceramic on metal lost as Cassie laughs behind them. "We've got a lot of work to do. This is just starting," Eli says.

Billy doesn't say any of the hundred things he knows that Eli already knows, like We could've been done tonight but we're not or Now we get to run the campaign we actually want to. Instead, he just says, "The next twenty-four are ours. Tell me what you want me to do."

---

Over the next four hours, Billy foregoes sleep and writes the following press releases:

"Presidential candidate Dorrek pledges recommitment to pension reform."

"Presidential candidate Dorrek to attend meeting on national-municipal partnership: for our cities' future."

"‘Harsher sentences are an answer but not the smart answer,' presidential candidate Dorrek says on opponent criminal justice policy."

And then somewhere around 6AM, "1001 Reasons You Need to Drop the Fucking Pink Thing, You Idiots; Yes, Tarnaxian Times, I'm Looking At You."

Serendipitously, Kate seems to predict this mental breakdown almost as it's occurring and tackles him to the couch before he can press send in a fit of pique. She forces Billy to sleep at that point and so he does, spread out on the couch in Teddy's suite with one of the cushions pressed over his face and his tie flung over the lamp. He dozes in and out for a few hours to the sound of Eli and Kate debating the pros and cons of highlighting Teddy's military service (pro: it's military service and these are Skrull; con: it was military service for the enemy).

He finally wakes up properly when Teddy almost sits on his feet, making him start and probably snort. There's a little rush of vertigo from sitting up too fast, and Billy claps a hand over his eyes reflexively to block out the light. But when he eases his hand away, he finds that the room is dim, the electric lights shut off and only the early morning light coming in through the window. They're also alone, the room quiet. Billy scrubs his hand over his face, and half-a-day's growth of stubble scratches against his palm.

"Kate said we should let you sleep for a while," Teddy explains and offers a glass of water like an apology.

Billy drinks the whole thing in three big gulps and then stares at Teddy while his brain reorients itself, skips several items down his mental to-do list. "Where are we at?"

"I think Eli's finally fallen asleep, and Cassie's teaching Kate how to throw someone twice her own body weight."

Billy blinks twice and says, "Civilization as we know it is doomed."

"That's what I said," says Teddy and grins brightly. "I've been given the task of going over what you've said I've said in the last few hours, so that I know I've said it."

He takes a moment to parse that sentence. Two moments actually. Then he squints. "Now? Have you even slept yet?"

It's a legitimate question because Teddy's voice has a rough-around-the-edges quality, like he's spent too much time talking without rest. But all Teddy does is shrug and say, "I can go longer without sleep than you can. Biologically."

"Biologically," Billy repeats and has the remote sense of his mind tipping off in strange, sleep deprivation-induced directions before he halts it and sets it back on its proper course. "Just a sec."

Billy rearranges himself, pulling his feet in from where they've been resting nearly touching Teddy's hip, reaching for his laptop with one hand while rubbing his eyes again with the other. Through it all, Teddy waits quietly with a patient but attentive expression on this face.

When Billy's finally got his laptop booted up again, he says, "We're considering being gracious in victory."

"I'd suspected as much."

"It's just better for you to look like the," Billy twirls his finger in the air, "whatchamacallit in this situation."

"The adult?" Teddy suggests, and Billy nods so firmly that he gets Teddy to laugh, his head tipping back. "Considering my aunt, that's not really a problem."

Billy shrugs his shoulders, not wanting to agree out loud no matter how much his own personal opinion of Veranke demands it. It's a family thing, and family things are tricky, and Billy still can't tell where the boundaries of Teddy's political opposition to his aunt are. Whether they extend beyond the political into the personal, whether there's more to his amiable sniping than meets the eye. Billy's started to suspect there is if only because it's hard to believe that anyone as generally amiable as Teddy could possibly exist.

"Do you think you could say that you've always respected her patriotism and desire to do what's best for the Skrull Empire with a straight face?" Billy asks.

Teddy presses his lips together for a moment and thinks about it. Then he shakes his head. "Nope," he says, "but if I just smile the whole way through maybe no one will notice that I'm laughing on the inside."

---

The problem with pension reform, like so many things that Billy has encountered in his relatively short professional life as an elite political operative, is that it is fundamentally, crucially, and unbearably important and also boring as hell. It is a thing that involves many, many meetings with people in many, many uniformly uninteresting boardrooms, looking at many, many pieces of boring paper with boring tables of numbers on them.

When Billy calls around the night before to see if anyone wants a chance at an exclusive photo-op of Teddy at these meetings, he mostly gets laughed, and he can't really blame them.

He sits next to Kate the entire time so that they can share a pad of paper to pass notes between them and listens as Teddy asks honestly intelligent questions about underfunding and coverage and the impact of investment expense ratios on pension adequacy.

We have managed to find the geekiest candidate in the entire universe, Billy observes in a scribble across the top of the page.

Kate reads it, gives a little sigh, and writes back Billy, Billy, Billy in her looping, casual cursive. Kate's handwriting conveys exasperation better than many people's faces.

When Billy waits but finds that no further explanation is forthcoming, he steals the pen back from her. What?

We've managed to find the only candidate in the entire universe who still really cares.

Billy looks at her, at the way she raises her eyebrows at him like she can't believe he hasn't figured this out already, and then he looks at Teddy who is flipping pages on the report in front of him and noting things down along the margins.

"Okay," Teddy's saying, "I wanted to talk a little bit about improving benefit portability," and Billy has to acknowledge that Kate has a point.

---

The third campaign Kate and Billy ever worked together was a nightmare of truly epic proportions, the kind of horror story that Billy refuses to talk about at parties not only because he doesn't like to relive it but also because he plans to write a tell-all book someday when he's old and crotchety (crotchetier) and retired from political life. He will title it Dfdhjkdsf: The Campaign that Almost Drove Me to Murder-Suicide.

They were in Oregon of all places, and it was raining all the time, long days of drizzling grey skies and eating Cheetos for dinner and explaining how writing a memo intervening on one pro-union case twenty million years ago did not a pinko commie left-wing wacko make.

And Billy can remember how Kate had to fight their candidate every step of the way, about the meetings he had to go to and the parties he couldn't go to and the briefs he absolutely had to read. He remembers how she'd grip her hair like she wanted to pull it out and fall asleep on his bed because she was too tired to remember that she was in his hotel room not hers when they finished work at night.

They were kids and almost no one knew them, and they had to take the work they could, but Kate had still grabbed him by the shoulder as the votes were coming in and steered him out the back entrance of the building. They'd stood under the awning and watched the rain and shivered in their shirtsleeves.

Kate had looked at him with bright, tired eyes and said, "Here's the plan. We get a reputation. We build that all the fucking way up and then we only work for people we'd actually vote for, okay? We only work for good people." She'd said it like either of them had any idea what that meant anymore, and Billy hadn't said anything because he'd wanted to agree but couldn't believe in it enough to form the words.

It's something Billy thinks about a lot after meeting Teddy: how all the things that happened in his life before now led him here.

au bingo card;

2010-11-15T16:59:48Z

Canon event changed	In space!!!	Gods & Godesses	The Afterlife	Napoleonic Europe
Regency	Medieval Europe	Future: Author's Choice	~~Slaves~~	Police
Utopia	Aliens	WILD CARD	Actors	Major historical event changed
Feudal Japan	Western	Vampires	Ancient Civilizations	Sword and Sorcery
Sports	Evil Goateed Universe	Band	Military	Victorian

FIC: Young Avengers, Billy/Teddy, NC-17

2010-11-14T00:36:33Z

Spoilers for Children's Crusade #3.

So this is 1) mostly written because I do not want to wait until January to resolve an argument between my OTP through gratuitous sex! Doomed to be jossed! I don't care! and 2) my first time ever really writing gratuitous sex! Hurray! I will leave it here until I decide whether I actually want to repost it to the comm so consider this your sneak preview of questionable quality, lovely people!

They don't see the betrayal coming but with the way their lives work, they usually don't see stuff like that coming anyway, no matter how obvious in hindsight. It's practically expected at this point. Still, Billy has the hazy sense that at least some of the others are thinking "We told you so" whenever they glance in his direction. And to be fair, Billy gets that he's probably owed a few We told you so's over this whole mess. Probably.

After the fighting's stopped, they stand on the overhanging cliff for a while, looking out at the flaming wreckage of Doom's castle in silence. Every few minutes, a Doombot that escaped Magneto's vortex of magnetic destruction crawls its way out from under the rubble, wobbles a few steps, and then falls over. And then usually catches on fire. It's kind of depressing but at the same time, there's a peaceful sense of a job well done hanging in the air.

Eventually, Billy gets the feeling that someone needs to say something to mark the occasion, another win for Team Young Avenger, so he says, "I think it's important to keep in mind that I managed not to end the world or accidentally give us all moustaches or anything like that."

The others all look at each other and then all look at Teddy, who is ominously silent and looking fixedly out at the sky. It eventually falls to Tommy to sling his arm over Billy's shoulders, hold his hand up near Billy's mouth, snapping his fingers shut, and say, "Bro, I think I speak for all of us when I say, you? No talking. For at least an hour. Cool?"

It's, of course, not cool at all, but Billy dutifully shuts his mouth anyway.

---

No one is really surprised when they get back to the old inn to find no traces of anyone. Magneto and Quicksilver have cleared out so efficiently and quickly that it's like they were never there. Which is something you learn when you are ex-master super villains, Billy guesses. It's still kind of a letdown as far as denouements go, though.

The idea of going right back to New York gets raised and then tiredly waved away. Cassie wants a shower to get the bits of castle out of her hair, and no one's looking forward to the official Avengers dressing-down that will probably be waiting for them stateside. Nothing, they all agree with weary head nods, will really be hurt if they take just one night to recuperate first.

Dinner is whatever they can scrounge up that looks edible. There's still some bread from their first night, and Teddy goes off for a bit, looks at someone in the kitchen with his big blue eyes (or so Billy figures), and manages to come back with a hunk of cheese. It's very rustic Wundagore dining, and Tommy keeps talking about how great a hot dog would be right now until Eli tries to shove a towel in his mouth, but they don't go to bed hungry, at least.

When the food's gone and they all start packing up to go back to their own rooms, sweeping crumbs off Eli's bed and putting books-slash-makeshift dishes back on their shelves, Teddy doesn't wait around for him, and that's when the first little siren of worry goes off in Billy's head.

The second goes off when Kate finishes folding up the blanket she and Cassie were sitting on, catches his arm right above the elbow, and purses her lips at him. She says, "Good luck, Kaplan."

Billy furrows his eyebrows back at her and says, "Yeah. Right. Uh, thanks?"

Their room is down the hall and to the left. Billy makes the trip quietly, hunching his shoulders and trying to look as harmless and – more importantly – as apologetic as possible. When he gets there, Teddy's already sitting on the bed, pulling off his shoes and socks. He doesn't say anything as Billy scoots in and shuts the door behind him. He doesn't even look up. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck forever, Billy thinks, feeling the tiredness in his muscles drain out only to be immediately replaced by buzzing nervous energy.

It isn't until Billy has lingered by the edge of the bed for three awkward minutes, trying to decide if he should be going to do the Wundagorian version of sleeping on the couch, that Teddy finally speaks. He doesn't actually turn in Billy's direction, but he does speak.

"You get that I'm mad at you, right?"

"Yeah, Teddy, I—" Billy begins, but he comes to an abrupt, stumbling halt when Teddy turns just a bit and holds up his hand.

"And you get that what you did was pretty frigging stupid, right? And selfish?" He twists his hand about as if to say Now it's your turn.

"Yes," Billy says immediately, and it comes out breathless in a way that he hadn't intended but won't let stop him. He drops one knee down on the bed. "Yes, I'm an idiot, and you are totally right to be mad at me, and I'm not saying I probably wouldn't do it again – because I'm an idiot – but I'd probably find a less stupid way, and I'm really sorry anyway, Ted."

Teddy's eyebrows draw together for a second but only for a second. They smooth back out again, and Teddy stays silent for long enough that Billy's brain starts scrambling for other, better ways to apologize. He doesn't get much beyond Crap, maybe if I grovel? before Teddy lets out a long exhale and pulls his legs up onto the bed and stretches them out in front of him.

"Okay," he says.

To Billy's ears, it doesn't sound like a very enthusiastic okay. It sounds grudging and tired and now that he is well past the original post-battle joy of victory, Billy can clearly see the restrained irritation along Teddy's shoulders, the way his hands are fisted in the bed covers rather than just pressing into them. Still angry, Teddy's body language says, and Billy bites down very firmly on the impulse to babble at him again in the hopes of fumbling his way to forgiveness. Instead, he pulls his other knee up onto the bed so that he's sitting on the edge, a little ways away from Teddy, hands awkwardly resting on his knees, resisting the urge to pick at the inner seam on his right pant leg.

"What kind of okay?" he asks.

Teddy shuts his eyes tightly closed for a moment and then opens them and looks levelly at Billy. Most of the time, most seconds of most days, Billy can read Teddy pretty well. But when Teddy wants to close himself off, he's good at it. And right now, he's being really good at it. The silence is not, objectively speaking, that long, but it's long enough that Billy can feel himself getting tenser too with each passing second. When Teddy finally shifts to speak again, Billy literally twitches in response.

"It's the kind of okay," Teddy says, and he still sounds tired but not quite so grudging, at least, "where I'm still really mad at you. But if you give me some time to get over it, I'll get over it."

"Ah," says Billy, managing to be both deflated and still tense at the same time. Had he hoped for instant forgiveness? Sure. Obviously. Deep down, who wouldn't? But the part of his brain that sometimes manages to be adult about things understands that maybe, in this situation, he doesn't deserve. Maybe, in this situation, Teddy really does have a point. So he says, judiciously, "Yeah. Of course. Whatever time you need."

At some point, he's started picking at the seam of his pants anyway, and he looks down at his fingernails now and watches them try to get a solid grip on the sliver of fabric and mostly fail. Billy is feeling almost self-indulgently tragic enough to think of it as a metaphor. Then he looks up again and blurts out, "If you want, I can kick Tommy out of his room for the night and sleep there. I mean. If you want."

One of the surprising things about Teddy is that he can be pretty graceful when he wants to be, even if his build doesn't make him look capable of it. It's a shapeshifter thing, Billy figures; Teddy knows how every inch of his own body works better than just about anyone else ever will. When he needs to move with precision, he can, and it sometimes makes up for the fact that he'll never be particularly fast.

Especially when the person he's moving toward is Billy who will never manage to be fast or graceful. When Teddy moves suddenly, pressing himself away from the mattress and up to his knees, leaning in toward Billy, Billy responds by nearly losing his balance and falling over. But by then, Teddy's hand has already made it around the back of his neck, holding him firmly, and Teddy's managed to crowd into his personal space so that his knees bracket Billy's. He doesn't fall. He looks up at Teddy and swallows dryly instead.

"I don't want," Teddy says, sounding kind of hoarse.

"Oh, good," Billy says and wraps his hands up in the collar of Teddy's uniform and kisses him before he even realizes that's what he's planning to do.

They've been together long enough that there's not much purpose in being coy about any of this, and Teddy doesn't seem in the mood anyway. His fingers dig into Billy's neck hard, and his other hand finds its way around Billy's back, gripping onto the waistband of Billy's pants and dragging him forward. Billy does his best not to crack their knees together as he scrambles up to straddle Teddy's knees and then bites at Teddy's lower lip in a mix of frustration and desire that he doesn't have the attention span to dissect right now.

Teddy kisses him hard, his tongue against Billy's and then against the back of Billy's teeth, barely a chance to breath at all. It's like it always is when something's gone wrong, when one of them was nearly hurt, nearly killed, when things in the universe conspire to find a way to keep them apart. And it's probably the stab of guilt in Billy's stomach that he was one of those things this time that has him grasping at Teddy's jaw and Teddy's hair a little harder than he should.

Teddy doesn't seem to mind. Teddy bucks up against him, hard against the inside of Billy's thigh, and breaks the kiss. But it's like he can't get very far away. Their foreheads rest together, and their noses keep touching. When Billy strains for another kiss, he gets a slight brush of Teddy's mouth, a warm tease of breath over his lips, for his trouble.

"You seriously scared me," Teddy says. His voice rumbles in his chest, and Billy can feel the vibrations where they're pressed together.

"I know," Billy says. "I'm sorry." But being sorry – and he really is – doesn't stop him from shifting his weight, using his lack of grace to his advantage, so he can throw them both off balance and push Teddy back onto the bed. Teddy doesn't fight it. He flops back against the pillows, sending up little motes that are extra visible in the yellow lamp light. Billy squeezes his legs against Teddy's hips to stay upright, taking a moment to sit back and just look down, admiring the curve of Teddy's bare arms, the redness of his mouth, and the way he sprawls back, anything but relaxed, ready to sit up again in a second if Billy doesn't get on with it.

Billy's fingers find the hoop of Teddy's zipper and slip through it to give one short, sharp, mostly ineffective tug down. Teddy follows his gaze down with mild interest and then looks back up again. He's still being so hard to read that Billy almost lets go. Only the twitch of the corner of Teddy's mouth, a faint curve upward, stops him.

"Next time you're going to do something suicidally stupid," Teddy says, putting his hands on Billy's hips, "you wake me up and take me with you."

"Okay," Billy agrees and bends over and presses his mouth against the place behind Teddy's ear, just at the curve of his jawbone. Teddy makes a quiet noise in his throat, lifts his chin, and Billy drags his teeth over this exposed stretch of skin because it's the only thing he can do to stop the possessive growl that wells up in his throat. It says I wanted to keep you safe better than he'll ever know how.

From this angle, it's easier to pull the stupid zipper down. It slides smoothly, only catching once around Teddy's belly-button. Billy pulls slowly anyway, lets his knuckles brush against Teddy's chest as it appears a little at a time, enjoying every moment of it until Teddy's squirming and rubbing up against him in a way that makes it unclear whether he likes it or wants to beat Billy with his pillow to get him to speed up. Then Teddy gasps, "God, Billy, seriously" from between gritted teeth, which makes it a little clearer.

So Billy sits up, unable to resist the urge to put his hands on Teddy's stomach for a second and feel it twitch, a little dazed as always by the fact of all of this bare skin under his hands and that he has complete permission to touch it all. He observes, "You're having that problem with not talking."

Teddy's laugh is mostly a thick huff of air. It makes his stomach contract, like it's trying to pull away from the tips of Billy's fingers, and Billy decides that the most logical thing to do in response is hunch over and chase his stomach with his mouth instead. Which only makes Teddy suck in a deeper breath. He tastes salty like drying sweat and smells mostly like smoke and motor oil. Billy sucks skin into his mouth, wanting to keep the taste there to roll it around over his tongue later, and mouths his way lower.

"Usually that's you," Teddy manages in a thin voice, after a long pause where he seems to mostly be holding his breath.

"Usually that's me," Billy agrees quietly. And honesty makes him pause, fingers now curled under the waist of Teddy's pants and nose pressed against the rise of his hips. Honesty makes him consider telling Teddy that he isn't talkative right now because he really scared himself as well. That he didn't think he was capable of betraying Teddy's trust so casually and now that he has, he doesn't know what that means. He doesn't want to have to think about what that means.

But the heat of Teddy's skin and the heavy way he's breathing and the fact that Billy is so beyond half-hard now leads him to decide that this is not the time for serious conversation. This is really not the time. So he kisses Teddy's hipbone one last time, lingering, like a bookmark, a promise for later, and says, "We are both shutting up now, okay?"

It takes both of them to get Teddy's pants off, sweat making the fabric slip and cling unpredictably. Billy abandons the task when they get them down to Teddy's ankles because he feels like he's been waiting forever to get his mouth on Teddy's cock at this point. This is a feeling he's well acquainted with, honestly, but he's just not that patient in the end and as soon as he has the chance, he's scrambling at Teddy's underwear and taking the heavy weight of his dick in his hands. Teddy groans loudly and presses his head back into the pillow when Billy licks up along the underside the first time.

When Billy actually gets around to wrapping his lips around Teddy's cock – and it doesn't take long because, again, no patience – Teddy barks out a sharp "Fuck yes," and his hands grip onto the sheets out what is definitely not anger now. His hips jerk up, and his whole body arches in a way that Billy imagines would be a little breathtaking if he was at an angle to appreciate it more. Billy doesn't bother to brace a hand on Teddy's hips to keep them down because experience and super-strength leads him to believe there's no real point. And besides, it leaves him free to shove a hand into his own pants and underwear, shivering too hard at first to get a proper grip and then jerking himself off as well as he can manage. His fingers are too dry at first, but the tip of his cock is already wet, so that doesn't last very long.

It feels better than it should, given that it's just his own hand on his own dick, but there's not much that Billy likes more, that makes Billy's blood run hotter, than having Teddy's taste in his mouth and his weight against Billy's tongue, than the moment where Teddy gives up on the sheets and winds his hands into Billy's hair instead, blunt fingernails scrapping once against his scalp before Teddy remembers to try to be gentle. "Shit," Teddy whimpers and then "Billy" and then back and forth between those two for a while. Billy curls his toes against the fabric of his socks and takes Teddy down as far as he can, sucks greedily and rubs with the flat of his tongue, lets his nose get tickled by Teddy's pubic hairs and doesn't even fucking care a bit.

It's over sooner than he'd like – not that Billy is someone who will ever actually complain about having an orgasm. He hears the familiar hitch in Teddy's breath and presses his knee down harder into the bed to brace himself and swallows as best as he can when Teddy comes a second later. After that it only takes a little more pressure, a few quick jerks of his wrist, and Billy comes too, hot over his own hand, the room going a little fuzzy at the edges as he gasps into the inside of Teddy's thigh.

Teddy's looking down over his chest at him when Billy finally looks up, and his expression is finally entirely open, completely readable. He smiles, makes a little motion with his hand like Come here, and Billy, instead of doing what he's asked, turns his face against Teddy's knee to disguise wiping his mouth off as a kiss.

And Teddy pauses for a moment, then wrinkles his nose and laughs, not fooled at all.

---

They rock-paper-scissors to see who's actually going to get up to turn off the light. Teddy wins because winning rock-paper-scissors is like his second or third super power. Billy doesn't exactly curve around him when he crawls back into bed, but he lets his hand fall on the pillows between them, close enough that he could flick one of Teddy's earrings if he wanted to.

"You're going to have to apologize to the others too." Teddy's voice is already thick with sleep, and his eyes are closed when he says this, but he cracks one open to peer at Billy right after. His look is incongruously serious. "Especially to Tommy," he adds. "He was really pissed."

"I will in the morning," Billy promises and means it.

And it's not forgiveness exactly, but Teddy turns his face towards Billy and shifts forward to bump his forehead against the back of Billy's knuckles before closing both his eyes to sleep again.

DRABBLEVEMBER: the good wife, g

2010-11-06T15:16:27Z

This whole magically disappearing tags thing is really annoying. THIS ONE IS PLAYING CATCH-UP FOR YESTERDAY.

People tended to assume that interning for the Innocence Project had been his girlfriend's idea, and Cary mostly let them. When you were taking Bus Org and Commercial and Franchises all in the same term and conspiring to find a way to take Trial Ad twice, people thought they knew what kind of person you were (ie. a douchebag). And Cary got that in his case they weren't completely wrong, that talk about helping people was always going to sound insincere when it came out of his mouth. So he let them think what they wanted, even if it wasn’t the truth.

DRABBLEVEMBER: young avengers, pg-13

2010-11-04T22:20:31Z

The main reason they haven't yet is that it's been impossible to get more than a few minutes alone with Teddy ever. There's always some new interruption, and by silent, mutual agreement they’re waiting for the moment when there finally isn't one. For the day when they're at Teddy's, eating pizza, and Billy lets his hand fall under the table to touch Teddy's knee and then slide up just a bit, and Teddy's mom doesn't come home because she forgot her wallet. For the moment after practice when Teddy's skin taste like sweat, and his hands are twined in the hair at the base of Billy's skull, the hard line of his hip pressing just on the inside of Billy's thigh, and Kate doesn't burst into the room, cover her eyes, and immediately announce in an over-loud voice, "Oh god, I didn't see anything. Carry on. I was never here."

Teddy's been good about it all because, in the end, Teddy's just a fundamentally good person. He can have a short fuse sometimes, and a temper that can go off lightning fast but for the big things, the ones that really matter, he knows how to be patient.

Billy, on the other hand, absolutely does not at all.

DRABBLEVEMBER: young avengers, idek au, pg

2010-11-03T16:58:43Z

Sometimes I feel a little guilty that 98% of what I seem to want to write for this fandom is increasingly stupid AUs. And then I go ahead and write it anyway! DEDICATED TO ATTI BECAUSE TODAY IS A BAD DAY.

After auditions were over, after his acceptance letter arrived with a fancy official crest at the top and everything, Billy'd hoped that it meant the end of typical high school bullshit. They'd all made it, which suggested ipso facto, that they were all relatively talented people. And there was just something about "I go to an arts academy" that suggested a level of semi-obsessive geekery that seemed fundamentally at odds with cliques and popularity contests and getting your lunch money stolen.

Of course, Billy's hopes had been ruthlessly crushed on the first day but after sixteen years of what is my life, he'd mostly come to expect that.

DRABBLEVEMBER: inception, g

2010-11-03T02:03:39Z

"I believe this is our left," Eames says seconds before they rush past it. Eames' expression – mildly expectant – remains so even as the crossroad passes and more highway stretches ahead, framed by farmland. Arthur grits his teeth harder, and Eames says, "Ah, well" like this isn’t the fourth time this has happened.

"No blood on the interior," Ariadne reminds. "This is a rental." She's sitting cross-legged in the back with her laptop open, her seatbelt buckled loosely in a vague nod to car safety. In her wool sweater and jeans, she's the only one who doesn't look out of place driving around the countryside in a teal rented compact.

DRABBLEVEMBER: the hunger games, au, g

2010-11-01T17:44:01Z

In winter, the mines become wind tunnels, pulling the cold air down and funnelling into the deepest corners where chill hangs even during warm weather. Katniss wears as many layers as her family can afford to spare. Old clothes, barely hanging together, are shredded into ribbons she can wrap around her fingers to keep them warm. It makes holding a pick awkward, slippery-treacherous, but it's better than letting them numb. During the ten minutes break she gets at midday, she presses her nose to the inside of her wrist to warm it and leaves black smudges all down her arms.

wip: YOUNG AVENGERS, DETECTIVE AU, PG-13

2010-05-29T17:21:29Z

[ CONTINUED FROM HERE ]

They took Teddy's car out to the scene because Billy's, while in generally good condition, had accumulated a lot of single male detritus in the time since he last had to drive anyone but himself around. Teddy's car, on the other hand, had a freshly-cleaned look to it that suggested someone had not only washed the outside recently but had gone over the inside with a vacuum cleaner. Either his new partner was secretly a neat-freak or this was another part of whatever had led Teddy to get a transfer to Major Cases. He was erasing his old partner from his life and his car.

For the first half of the trip, they made pretty good time, but they got stuck in a traffic snarl as they got closer to Central Park, and Teddy had to lean on the horn more than once as someone tried to butt into their lane and squeak ahead.

"Ever done a kidnapping before?" he asked during one of the periods when they'd had to come to a dead stop. He kept watching the taxi behind them suspiciously in the rear-view mirror.

Billy, with his elbow planted on the slim ledge of door under the window, had taken to studying the dashboard to avoid watching Teddy.

"Once," he said. "There aren't a lot of kidnappings that get considered major enough to pass onto us. But there was this daughter of a big health food line who disappeared after school a couple years ago."

When Billy looked up, he found Teddy looking at him now in the mirror. "And?" Teddy prompted.

"And it turned out her bio-dad had nabbed her after school and tried to get out of the country. We picked them both up at the airport."

Teddy seemed more than satisfied with this answer, his hands relaxing on the steering wheel just a little as the light ahead turned green and they started to inch forward again. "A happy ending."

"Could've been worse," Billy agreed.

In all, it took them a stupid half-hour to get where they were going and by the time they got there, parked, and were able to stretch their legs again, Billy felt nervous and tightly-wound again. He told himself to grow up once more and firmly shut off that part of his brain. For the time being, at least.

Wanda Maximoff lived on the seventh floor of a big apartment complex on the Upper West Side. Teddy stopped outside the front door for a few seconds to stare up and up and up, but it was all shades of his childhood for Billy, nothing new, so he pushed through the rotating door and flashed his badge at the doorman before the first polite "Can I help you?" had even formed in his mouth.

The apartment itself still had a few CSU geeks trailing around it when they got out of the elevator. Billy scanned around, trying to figure out who was in charge, and ended up spotting van Dyne who just raised an eyebrow at him and made the universal hand gesture for Don't try to talk to me. Can't you see I'm doing science here?

"Anxious father approaching at two o'clock," Teddy muttered and faked a cough into his fist to cover it up. Billy shifted his gaze a few inches to the right and, sure enough, there was Eric Lensherr – CEO of Magnus & Co. Inc. and on-again, off-again media darling who had really been more off-again since the economy took its nose dive – walking right toward them.

"Are you here about Wanda?" Lensherr asked as he stopped in front of them, and Billy opened his mouth to go through the usual canned condolences and requests for patience when Teddy stepped in, taking the man's hand with the sort of easy professional warmth that Billy had never tried to master and wouldn't be any good at even if he had.

"Mr. Lensherr," Teddy said, "I'm Detective Altman. This is my partner Detective Kaplan. We don't have any news yet, but we're working hard to find out what happened to your daughter. What can you tell us about what happened?"

Lensherr's face seemed to rest in a scowl simply as a default facial expression, but it deepened now as he glanced back toward the people poking through his daughter's things. "Wanda missed an appointment with me this morning," he said, "so I came by to see if something was wrong, and I found the front door open, but Wanda wasn't inside and she hasn't been answering her phone."

"Is there any reason to think that something happened?' Billy asked, trying to exchange a look with Teddy and ending up staring at his ear for a few seconds instead. "Is it possible she just decided to take a surprise vacation?"

If anything, Lensherr's scowl grew deeper. "No. It is not possible. Wanda's very responsible. If she had needed to cancel our meeting for any reason, she would have contacted me."

Now Teddy did look over, and Billy could tell by the way one corner of his mouth twisted down minutely that he felt there was something strange about all of this as well. If nothing else, Lensherr seemed keyed up, glancing back over his shoulder again and trying to pretend like he wasn't.

"Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kidnap Wanda, Mr. Lensherr?" Teddy asked, and it was like all of the gravity that had been weighing that scowl down suddenly disappeared and Eric Lensherr looked like the cool, confident businessman that Billy was more used to seeing on TV.

"Of course," he said. "I told the officer when I first reported it. It's obvious her brother did this."

---

"So what do you think?" Teddy asked later when they were piling into the car again, Lensherr having been provided with their number if anything came up and van Dyne harassed into promising an e-mail when and if her people found anything interesting. It was well into rush hour and going on end of shift and with everything that had happened, Billy felt like he'd just worked three consecutive shifts without pausing to sleep or eat.

"I think rich people are bonkers, and we should probably make some calls about Pietro Maximoff before we fling ourselves at any conclusions," Billy replied, and Teddy gave a short snot and a thoughtful nod of his head.

The drive back to the office was marked by the same stressful silence that had been following them around all day. Billy pretended to flip through his notes again. Teddy kept his eyes steadily on the road. When they pulled into the parking lot, Billy tucked his notebook away again and drummed his fingers once against the window before saying, "Y'know, all I'm going to do is get the printer going on whatever we've got on this Pietro guy. You could call it a day now if you want."

Teddy's eyebrows went up in a look of genuine surprise, though whether it was pleased or not was much harder to tell. It occurred to Billy suddenly that in all the ice-breaking they'd done that morning, he'd never gotten any sense of what home life was like for Teddy. He could have a toddler and a wife waiting anxiously for him for all Billy knew. The thought made him feel itchy all over.

"You sure it's cool?" Teddy asked as Billy undid his seatbelt.

"Completely cool in every way," Billy promised and went reaching for the door handle only to have Teddy reach out and catch his wrist before it could get that far. His surprise, if not the acute, panicked flush that came with it, must have been obvious on his face because Teddy cleared his throat in an embarrassed grumble. But he didn't let go of Billy's wrist.

"I just wanted to say," Teddy said, "that I think it's going to be great working with you."

Billy's tongue felt like a lead weight in his mouth, which he couldn't get to move no matter how much he tried. Teddy's hand was firm but warm and gentle, and the entire car smiled faintly of lemon Pinesol, and Billy was really fairly sure that he'd been gay for too long to be having a gay crisis now.

"Yeah," he managed to say finally. "Same here. Looking forward to it."

With a small smile, Teddy let him go, which was both a giant relief and the worst part of Billy's day. He got out, shut the door, and waited the three or so minutes it took Teddy to drive away before he put his face in his hands.

---

First thing the next morning, Billy armed himself with a large latte and a cinnamon bun and went and sat in Kate's office until she finally put down her newspaper and pretended to notice him for the first time.

"What's up, Billy?" she asked, swinging around in her chair and tearing into the cinnamon bun in a way only perfectly groomed nails could really manage.

Billy took a big breath, which didn't really stop him from feeling like a jerk and a coward, and said, "I think you should probably reassign Teddy Altman to be someone else's partner."

Kate, very carefully, did not look surprised at all, which was a deceiving and hard to decipher kind of reaction from her. A lot of people tended to assume that she'd gotten to where she was only because of who her father was, but Billy'd seen her juggle a political firestorm and a divided department and the worst corruption scandal to hit the NYPD in years when everything went down with Nate two years ago. She'd barely blinked the whole time, and it had been enough to teach Billy that he'd only ever make assumptions about Kate Bishop if he was prepared to let her kick his ass over it afterward.

"Why do you say that?" she asked finally, after another moment of silently processing this. It was the question Billy had been up half the night trying to come up with a suitable fake answer for, so he was more than prepared for it. Sort of.

"Because I'm actually just a really bad detective," he answered. "I mean, I could probably detect that I was in a paper bag, but I don't think I'd be able to detect my way out of one.”

Kate just kept looking at him with an expression that suggested she was passively unimpressed by this, so Billy switched to his back-up answer, which he'd devised at three in the morning when he'd given up on trying to sleep and had ended up watching one of the Michael Keaton Batmans on TV and eating Cheerios.

"I'm not sure we're clicking," he said.

The expression on Kate's face shifted to something more open and exasperated. She leaned back in her chair again and carefully peeled off the outer ring of her cinnamon bun. If she were a lesser woman, she would have rolled her eyes.

"Okay, first," she said, "I've met with him twice, and I'm already pretty sure that Teddy Altman can click with anyone he wants to." Billy made a face but could not, exactly, argue with this. Kate didn't make any sign of noticing his face at all. "And second, you've known him for twenty-four hours. Can we at least agree that your clicking expectations might be a little high here?"

Billy sighed and made a weak, tired gesture in the air. "His car smells like Pinesol, and I think I might be allergic to Pinesol?" he said.

"Seriously, get out of my office," said Kate.

---

The worst part was having to walk back to his desk and find Teddy waiting there with all the print-outs Billy had made the night before. He even waved when he saw Billy coming, and Billy felt like possibly the worst person in history for having tried to secretly dump him just a moment ago. For an instant, he was torn between the urge to apologize profusely and to yell, "Run! Run while you still can!"

He didn't do either, of course. All evidence to the contrary, it wasn't like this was Billy's first encounter with secret, inappropriate longings. The extended stretch in high school and college where he'd refused to come out to his parents, to the point where his mom almost begged him to, had taken care of that easily. It was just that secret, inappropriate longings, in his experience, didn't often come over and sit on your desk so that their hip was about at eye-level when you sat down. Billy put a hand over his eyes and faked a headache.

"Everything okay?" Teddy asked in polite concern.

"Yeah," said Billy, uncovering his eyes again and looking up. "What have we got?"

Immediately, Teddy's attention was back on the papers in his hand. He shuffled through the pile and handed a few of the most important ones down to Billy. The topmost page included a picture of a white-haired man in a suit and, surprisingly, the second page had booking photos of the same man, only a few decades younger.

"If I didn't know better, I'd say Pietro Maximoff had an evil twin," Teddy said. "On and off trouble with the police for years and then he hits his twenty-third birthday, goes away to Japan for a while, and comes back as a perfectly upstanding American citizen."

"Perfectly upstanding?" Billy asked, eying some notes on page three that seemed a little less than perfectly upstanding. Maximoff's name had a tendency to pop up in connection with a surprising number of little thefts over the years.

Teddy gave a slight shrug of his shoulders. "Mostly perfectly upstanding. And whatever we might suspect about his not perfectly upstanding hobbies isn’t something we've been able to pin him with."

"Did you call–" Billy began.

"– to see when we can get in to talk to him?" Teddy said and showed no signs that he noticed the way Billy blinked. It was hard to tell whether already finishing each other's sentences was a good thing or a bad one. "Yeah, I did. He's in a meeting until lunch. We're booked in to grab him as soon as he's done."

Billy gave a silent nod of his head and read through Maximoff's rap sheet and the little jotted notes of rumoured crimes again. They were familiar in a way that would make Billy wrinkle his nose in confusion if he didn't already know what they were reminding him of. So instead he just wrinkled his nose in annoyance until he started to worry it might stay like that if he kept doing it too long. Then he sighed and pushed himself back from his desk.

"C'mon," he said.

Teddy's head tilted to one side in patient confusion. "You caught the part where our meeting isn't for a few hours, right?"

In a fit of Why not?, Billy reached over and grabbed the sleeve of Teddy's shirt, giving him a tug. "Caught that," he said. "It gives us just enough time to buy me something to eat and make a stop."

Teddy reached backward for a moment, almost breaking out of Billy's grasp, and snagged his jacket with the tips of his fingers. After that, he seemed content to let himself be pulled along like the world's most slightly perplexed anchor. "What kind of stop?" he asked.

Billy tried to keep most of the annoyance out of his voice when he answered and was only mostly successful. "We're going to visit my evil twin."

---

Though Billy was now technically an adult and thus technically in possession of great depths of wisdom, he still couldn't decide whether it was more comical or tragic the way Tommy's life had turned out in comparison. One kid goes off and becomes a cop. The other ends up a semi-successful petty criminal. Some days, he wondered why HBO hadn't made a TV series about them yet.

Tommy lived in a crappy apartment in Spanish Harlem or, at least, that was the official address he told Billy about so that Billy could pretend he didn't know about the one he sold fake Rolexes and pirated movies out of. On the way over, Teddy bought him half a meatball sub for breakfast and didn't make any snide comments about it, which would've been more than enough to earn Billy's eternal devotion, even if he wasn't already nursing a bit of a crush. He also didn't ask too many questions about Tommy, and that was new and different after Cassie who could never decide whether she found Tommy rakishly charming or whether he offended her strict moral code too much for that. Something about Teddy's reaction, though, led Billy to believe that he'd had some experience with relatives who do things you don't necessarily approve of.

wip: YOUNG AVENGERS, HOUSE OF M AU, G

2010-05-09T00:31:51Z

He knows mom's already home when he spots her purse setting on the hall table, so he shuts the door with care, hoping to avoid a parental unit chat this afternoon. No such luck. The first step to the second floor creaks under his weight, and his mom’s voice drifts in from the kitchen.

"Is that you, Billy?"

"Yeah, mom, s'me," he shouts back, leaning into the railing and rolling his eyes at no one particular. "I was just going up to get changed."

"Okay, sweetheart. Dinner just before seven. Your dad's working late," she replies.

Like usual, Billy thinks, but he only says, "Okay" and then tromps the rest of the way up to his room where he promptly doesn’t actually get changed. Sweat stains under his arms is something he can live with, so he flops down backwards on his bed and stares at the ceiling. Kate ordered no moping, but Billy's never really been good at that.

Maybe it's just being a teenager, maybe everyone feels this way, even Kate when she's alone, but he's got this feeling behind his breastbone like something he can't define and never really knew is missing. He gets it when he watches the news sometimes and sees Ms. Marvel fighting some new bad guy or rescuing a kid from a burning building. It's always strange because Billy is seventeen and knows acutely, in every muscle he's got, what it's like to want to be anyone but who he is. But this feeling is stronger than that. And he can't remember if it ever wasn’t there.

He spends a solid ten minutes just staring before he huffs out an annoyed breath – even he thinks he's being stupid sometimes – and rolls over to grab a comic from under his bed.

---

Teddy.

Teddy has been convinced, for most of his teenage life, that his mom actually has more super powers than she lets on. Realistically, it's not a super power thing; it's a mom thing, and Teddy knows this, but he's also always thought – with an irrational sort of pride – that his mom is especially good at the mom things. Like knowing when he's snuck out at night or knowing when he's doing something that he shouldn't be. She's got Teddy's-up-to-no-good radar.

Case in point: Today, he comes home, sweating from one of the hardest basketball practices of his life. They'd scrimmaged, and the point spread had been even for almost an hour because things always took longer when Coach Gossling made them play without powers. Now, staggering in the front door, he just wants to collapse, but he manages to shuck his shoes and drop his bag near the kitchen door and shuffle over to fridge before his knees start to give out. He uses the door handle to keep himself upright and then somehow manages to wiggle the door open, slumping again almost immediately when he has to let go to find the orange juice.

The bottle is uncapped and most of the way to his mouth – for just a sip, a split-second thing, honestly – when mom's voice calls out from somewhere in the living room: "Put it back or get a glass, Teddy."

And Teddy, not exactly surprised, exhales a weary sigh and sets the bottle down on the island, spinning lazily on his toe to find a glass in the cabinet behind him. When he spins back around, mom is standing in the doorway. She's wearing her red suit today, and her hair is brown, which means she was probably showing off one of her serious, "good for settling down" properties on the Upper East Side. Brown hair always goes over better with those kinds of clients for some reason.

She smiles at him in a way that suggests "good boy" strongly enough that she doesn't actually have to say it. Instead, she says, "Hard day?"

Teddy swallows two glasses of juice without much of a pause for breath, hooks a stool over with his foot, and thumps down, letting his head fall onto the table, cheek flat to cool, fake marble, before he answers: "Dunno. Can zombies have hard days? Because that's what I feel like I am right now." He lifts his head up enough to catch her smile widen as she walks over and leans on the counter across from him.

"Well," she says, patting his head, "it's good to hear someone gets an honest day's work out of you."

"Hey," Teddy objects, but his eyes are shut, and he’s smiling, so he feels it's probably not the most convincing objection in the world. "You're supposed to be on my side."

There's a huff of laughter from somewhere over his head and then he can hear mom straightening back up. Her suits always make crisp noise, which is totally at odds with her home clothes, which are all soft rustles, cotton and flannel, that remind him of the days when his powers were just starting to show, and she'd called in sick for him for the first time ever, and they'd curled up on the couch in their pyjamas and eat cereal out of the box while his back kept threatening to grow wings. Both sets of sounds are nice because they're both her and sometimes, Teddy can't help but feel this desperate, gnawing need to document every last thing about her. It's a strange feeling, and it seems to rise out of nowhere most of the time, but he learned long ago to just accept it.

"So," she says, and Teddy is startled enough out of his thoughts that he looks up again and finds her still smiling, her eyes crinkling at the corners into wrinkles he knows she has to remake for herself every morning. "I was going to suggest that we go out and celebrate my sale today, but I think Friday's has a no shirt, no shoes, no zombies policy."

"Nrrrgh," he replies, more distinctly zombie-like than he'd actually intended, before scrubbing his hair into messy disorder, and whining, "But food."

She laughs again, and Teddy feels that usual rush of pride he feels whenever he can startle one out of her. She leans back down onto the counter, her elbows propped up and her fingers laced together under her chin. "All right. I'll give you twenty minutes to de-zombify and get back down here, deal?"

He grins and nods, mouths a quick "deal," and sprints, with a surprising burst of energy, towards the stairs. He's stripping off his sweat-caked t-shirt on his way up, and it's halfway over his face when she calls, "But I'm serious about the shirt and the shoes part, Theodore."

And when he laughs, he gets a mouthful of cotton that muffles his words when he calls back, "Yeah, yeah. Sure thing, mom."

---

wip: YOUNG AVENGERS, HOUSE OF M AU, G

2010-05-02T20:53:27Z

"Sure," Billy says but then he makes no attempt to move. A couple of Roger Brant's teammates have picked him up now and are running around with Steve held over their heads. Roger's laughing, and Billy has no interest in football at all, would rather die than actually learn the rules, but he's also so jealous he could just throw up right now.

He gives his head a little shake and looks over in Kate's direction fast enough that he just manages to catch the look of confused concern on her face before she looks away and pretends she wasn’t watching him. "C'mon," he says and stoops to pick up his backpack at his feet. When he's upright again, Kate's let go of the fence, and they fall into step easily next to each other, Billy more than accustomed to Kate's quick, purposeful gait and Kate knowing without needing to be told that Billy doesn't want to walk as fast as he usually does on her own. Their shoulders almost bump a few times as they make their way over to where Billy locks up his bike, and it occurs to him again that people would probably assume they're dating if anyone paid any attention to them at all. There are, sometimes, less obvious benefits to being a sapien.

"Y'know," Kate says, her fingers pinching at his elbow to make sure she has his attention, "if you think Roger's cute there are easier ways to moon over him."

"Oh dear god, no, Kate," he says, "just no."

She just laughs and punches him in the shoulder, but it's enough to break his mood for now.

---

Billy walks his bike beside Kate until they get to the station on Sixth Avenue. For a second, she stands, balancing on one foot on the top step, and tweaks his nose. "No moping tonight," she orders, shaking her finger at him threateningly. "I will know."

He makes a little face and rolls his eyes. "Maybe you are a mutant after all," he teases back.

They say their seeya laters and then Kate turns and walks down the steps to the terminal to wait for her train. Billy walks his bike out to the edge of the road, waits for one particularly aggressive taxi to shoot past, and then pushes off and starts to thread his way home.

It's slow going for a while through Midtown, an unexpected bit of construction squeezing the lanes down to two, leftovers from the bank robbery Ms. Marvel foiled on the weekend. There are still scorch marks on some of the buildings, and Billy takes some time to watch the telekinetics clearing rubble off the sidewalk as he wobbles unsteadily along the curb.

His family's brownstone in Greenwich is something they probably wouldn't be able to afford if they were trying to rent it today, tucked in the middle of the neighbourhood with a spindly tree out front and a garage in back big enough to hold three boys' bikes. Mom and dad don't talk about it with them, obviously, but Billy's gathered by paying attention to the edges of conversations that their landlord likes dad and that’s the only real reason they can still afford the rent.

Billy bikes up the driveway and stows his bike and helmet in the garage, runs his fingers through his hair to get it to stop lying so flat as he jogs up the steps to the front door.

wip: ORIGINAL, PG-13

2010-04-04T19:05:31Z

And it was fun. It was a fucking blast, enough so that he still finds time to go out sometimes these days, in between performance and days in the studio. In Ben's opinion, no rush in life will ever compare to the one you get from hearing an audience screaming your name, watching them reach up over the barrier at the edge of the stage in the hopes of getting to touch you for just a second. But there's something to be said for actually being in the mosh-pit for once, for dancing with guys you've never talked to, who'll find out in a few hours that that glitter is a lot harder to get off than they think.

So it's not like he suddenly grew a moral compass one day and decided to stop. It's just that after Carol came along, making music that people might listen to one day got a lot more possible, and it got a lot harder to justify hours spent getting lost because he was drunk to remember his way home or entire days written off when he was too hung over to work.

The choice was make music, for real, or party, and it was the easiest one he ever had to make. Still, sometimes when he crawls into bed at 11 and falls asleep with Simpsons reruns playing on the hotel TV, he thinks about this long stretch of accidental celibacy and how he might have turned into the workaholic his dad always wanted without noticing it. And then, for a little while at least, he'll wonder if the choice was the right one.

He's only 25, but sometimes he feels a lot older.

---

"Since when are you Irish?" asks Janine over breakfast. Back in the days when they were spending more money on airfare then they were actually making at shows, Ben would be all over the free continental breakfast at the hotel pool: free bagels and mostly flavourless fruit salad and invasive smell of chlorine in the air. Yum. Now that he's got money in his bank account, though, he can actually afford to buy himself breakfast at the hotel restaurant, and he's supposed to have a plate of scrambled eggs and toast on the way.

Janine's hair is pulled back in a bushy ponytail this morning, and she's wrapped a purple bandana over the top of her head for extra assurance. She's got the letter in one hand and is chewing on the thumbnail of the other hand thoughtfully. She says that short nails let her play the violin better, and Ben’s never felt the need to point out that he does just fine without chewing his.

"I'm not Irish," Ben says, though the words come out indistinct because his chin is pressed into his forearm, and it's surprisingly hard to talk like that. It's bright out on the terrace, and he wishes he brought a pair of sunglasses. Instead, he cards his bangs down over his eyes and hooks his feet around the chair legs because, as usual, he's too tall to sit comfortably any other way.

Janine puts the letter down on the table between them and taps her finger over the words 'a chuilein.' "Looks pretty Irish to me, boss," she replies.

Ben makes a small noise in his throat and covers his face with his hands, fingers slightly bent. "Tell me I'm stressing out about this too much."

Janine picks the letter up again. "A letter mysteriously appears in your dressing room claiming to be from your long lost mom who you haven’t heard from in, like, your entire adult life? Yes, this is obviously not something to stress out over at all."

Ben is too busy pulling faces against his palms to respond. He feels stupid for still being worked up about this, annoyed that a good night's sleep didn't get it out of his system. And he definitely is regretting telling Janine even if he'd probably have exploded by now if he didn't tell someone. He only uncovers his face again when she swats him on the arm with the back of her hand to tell him that their food has arrived.

And Carol, prescient about food availability as always, arrives soon after. She's tiny, usually coming up to his shoulder at best and then only if he isn't wearing heels, but since he's slouched in his chair already, it's easy for her to brace one hand on his shoulder and reach over to steal a piece of toast off his plate. He doesn't bother trying to steal it back.

"What's up?" she says, still leaning on him and getting crumbs on his shoulder.

"Ben's mom is stalking him," Janine answers, and she grins a little brighter when Ben glares at her.

"My mom's not stalking me."

wip: ORIGINAL, PG-13

2010-04-04T01:17:35Z

The letter is pinned to the mirror in his dressing room after the show with a thumb-sized piece of masking tape. Because they don't know to look for it, Ben's eyes skate right over it as he sits down heavily on the stool, already sticky and half-dehydrated from bounding about and sweating over everything for the last hour and a half. His hair is haphazardly pasted to his forehead and when Ben tries to swipe it away, his fingers come back caked in glitter and smeared mascara.

Carol – note to self: get her something nice at our next tour stop – buys him industrial-size Kleenex boxes for days just like this, and there's one sitting on the corner of the table, just to the right of the minefield of multi-coloured eyeshadow powders and pastes, the eye-liner and the half-empty tub of silver sparkles that he's going to have to replace in the next few days.

Ben pulls out three tissues with efficient tugs. The first, he just swipes across his forehead to clear away the sweat, bunching it up in his fist and tossing it into the trash under the desk, right by his knee. The second, he spits into and gets to work scrubbing at the rainbow painted around the corner of his right eye. It won't clean it up properly, but it'll be enough to get him back to the hotel where he can either devote the appropriate time to it or just give up, collapse into bed, and resign himself to waking up with half his face printed on the white pillowcase.

He's about ready to move onto Kleenex No. 3, with No. 2 almost in shreds in his hands from too much scrubbing, when there's a knock at the door. That, in itself, is enough to make him pause and glance curiously toward the door. No one in the band would bother knocking. If it was Carol, she'd be in here in a whirlwind, talking about the show and the audience and what's on his schedule tomorrow before hugging him around the head and trotting out again before he has a moment to say a word.

So it's with a certain tired hesitancy that he says, "Yuh-huh?" He's not up to dealing with autographs or VIP fans tonight.

But when the door cracks open and a dark-haired head pokes in it makes more sense. Mark or Marc or something. The genius double-bassist Carol had found about two days ago when Ben had swanned into practice, declaring he wouldn’t play "Tranoroa" again without one.

Mark is, honestly, probably a good five years older than Ben is, but he carries himself in a way that makes it hard for Ben not to think of him as a kid every now and then, a weird nervous energy, probably ADHD. He wears thick-framed glasses that are substantial enough that he probably is blind without them, and his hair is cut so that it falls shaggily around his ears. In all the preparation for the show, Ben hasn't had enough time to really talk to him or think about him, but he does so now, in the few seconds before Mark actually says anything. He thinks: Probably smart, surprisingly cute, almost certainly straight. And that's a fucking shame.

"I, uh," is what Mark does eventually say when he realizes that Ben isn't really planning to do anything beyond stare at him in patient amusement. "This is probably lame."

"Is it?" Ben asks brightly, all raised eyebrows and tiny smile. If he was exhausted and just thinking about bed a second ago, he isn't now. He can’t explain it. Shy, nerdy boys have always had that effect on him. It's like Red Bull but made of hormones and, Ben hates to admit it, but with the tour and everything, it's actually been a while since he's been laid.

But, realistically-speaking, that's probably not in the cards tonight given the way Mark shifts awkwardly and stares at his feet. There's no sense that Mark knows the game Ben wants to play here or has any interest in playing it. Again, fucking shame.

"I just wanted to say," Mark says, "you were kind of awesome tonight."

Ben leans back as much as he can on a stool, placing his hands on his knees to keep from tipping back. He smiles, more subdued than a moment ago, and says simply, "Thanks. You were pretty great too. Picked things up quickly."

Mark's shoulder lifts up, and his nose crinkles in humility. "Thanks," he says.

For a second, Ben waits to see if there's more but when it seems like that's really all Mark's going to say, he spins around again to face the mirror, picks up Kleenex No. 3, and starts wiping at his eyes again. "You should think about sticking with us. If you want. At least until we leave the continent."

In the mirror, Mark's face isn’t entirely clear, half-hidden by the door. But Ben think he sees a widening of the eyes, maybe even a little up-tick of his mouth. It makes Ben pause again.

"I'd like that," Mark says.

"Cool," replies Ben.

And then with an awkward duck of his head and a definite smile, Mark backs out, closing the door behind him. When the latch catches, Ben ticks his head to one side thoughtfully. He knows for sure he's dehydrated now because his thoughts have that loose, mostly unconnected, word-association sort of feel to it that only comes when he's pushed himself too hard, is almost half-asleep already.

He's already giving picturing Mark shirtless a shot – 'cause why not? – when he notices he finally notices the letter. It has his name written on it in an elegant cursive and once he's pulled it off the mirror and turned it around, he finds it sealed with a blob of wax, the rough etching of a deer pressed into the centre.

His eyebrows gather together, and the words Menacing obsessive stalker fan? cross his mind in the few seconds it takes for him to dig his thumb under the top flap of the envelope and pop it open.

---

Ben's always been more private than people think he is. Most people are at least dimly aware that Ben Lynx released his first album in 2002 to rave reviews on music blogs and a solid 8.7 on its Pitchfork review but to, at best, middling sales. It wasn’t until the 2005 disc that people started to notice, started actually seeking him out for interviews instead of having to be begged. And from there it was all speculation in tabloids and a flattering but mostly content-free profile in Rolling Stone, culminating in "accidentally" coming out on the Daily Show.

The thing Ben's always somehow known is that the more dirty laundry you throw onto the pile, the less likely anyone is to dig for the stuff you don’t want them to find. So people know hes gay, sure, but they don't know that his dad hasn't talked to him in four years. Or that his full name is Benedict, named for a rich, banker uncle that his dad always hoped he'd be close to, and the only reason Ben didn't change it when he changed his last name is to piss both his father and his uncle off.

Most people don't know that he spent his twentieth birthday busking for quarters in a subway station in New York, and they don't know that the first time he ever performed one of his own songs, it was in his best friends bedroom, they were fourteen, and he'd changed all the pronouns just so his friend would never figure him out.

There's a lot Ben's kept to himself over the years, during his shaky rise to fame, motivated by some sense, deep down, that fame will be easier to withstand if he keeps some of him just for himself. But it's also true that there's a lot Ben doesn't talk about because he doesn’t know the answers either. The mess of his earliest childhood years is a long stretch of brightly-coloured, disorienting, non-linear memories, half of which his imagination must have dreamt up and substitute for reality, whatever reality was. When he talks about it at all in interviews, all he usually says is that that's where a lot of his inspiration comes from, half-glimpsed fantasies from the past.

He never tells anyone that he doesn’t even remember his mother’s name anymore.

---

The body of the letter is written in the same practiced cursive as his name was on the front. It reads:

My darling one,

I cannot begin to imagine what you must think of me after all these years. I cannot think what you must have begun to imagine or have been told about why I left. You deserve the fullest of explanations, but the pages of this letter are not the place. Know now, that nothing but the most urgent of reasons could have made me leave you, and I have regretted it every moment since I left.

The time has come to reveal to you all the truths I took with me. I understand if you have no interest in seeing me, if you are angry, but there are things you should now. About me. About yourself. If you wish to see me, there is a bookstore on Bothell Way in Seattle. Give the storekeep a letter, and I will find you.

Be well, a chuilein,

Your mother

Ben stares at the letter, holding it over his bare knees for a very long time before frowning and mentally dubbing it the worst prank Foster's ever tried to pull on him. But even so, even though he's ninety percent sure that this is just his drummer's idiotic idea of funny, he can't bring himself to crumple it up and toss it out. Not yet, at least.

He finishes cleaning up as fast as he can, slips into the clean, green cheongsam shirt he -- thank god -- remembered to bring along with him, and asks one of club staff hanging around outside his dressing room to hail him a cab before heading out, the letter tucked safely in the back pocket of his jeans.

The manager intercepts him before he gets all the way outside, so he's forced to exchange a few pleasant "Yes, it was a good audience"-es and "I'll definitely come back next time I'm in the areas"-es. He's finally allowed to escape but only after promising to have Carol call tomorrow with a ballpark date for when they might be back. She'll probably hate him for it, since she's three times more likely to be hung over tomorrow than he is, but it's the price they all have to pay.

He resists re-reading the letter all the way back to the hotel, but he's keenly aware of it still sitting there in his back pocket. It's like he can feel every ridge and fold through the jean of his pants. It's stupidly like that Princess and the Pea story. If he was even the tiniest bit more manly, he’d probably be embarrassed by it.

Once inside his hotel room, he puts down his bag and clicks the deadbolt into place. He takes his cellphone out of his pocket and types out a quick text to Carol, just to tell her he got back without being kidnapped (which has never happened) or mugged (which has happened twice). He sets it on the bed while he goes into the bathroom and drinks three cups of water.

He spends a few minutes staring at his face in the mirror. He's always had an eggshell complexion, pale and only faintly rosy, even in the middle of the summer, even when he goes out of his way to try to tan. Hell, once, two years ago, their bassist of the day – whose name is lost to history – had got him drunk and dared him to try to get a sunburn, but he couldn't even do that properly. It's a blessing and a curse.

The last traces of mascara and orange eye-shadow are mostly smeared along his lower lids, but it doesn’t look terrible. Ben's always thought that one of the biggest reasons he's managed to make it in this business is that the black kohl raccoon eyes of day old make-up manages to make him look spontaneous and causal and not like a strung-out junkie. He decides he's too lazy to properly wash tonight, not in the mood, and walks back into the bedroom.

There's nothing in return from Carol, so she's probably found a party to keep her busy. There is a text from Foster that reads, DUDE I THINK SOMEONE STOLE YOUR PANTS FROM THE VAN. FANS R WEIRD, but Ben's still pretty sure this whole letter thing is a prank, so he frowns and ignores it. He undresses in short, economic movements, taking only enough time to make sure everything is neatly folded and draped over one of the room’s big armchairs. Then he sprawls out naked on the sheet and pulls the letter out of the envelope to read it again.

Logically, he knows that there must have been a time when he knew his mother. From the little he's managed to coax from his father over the years, she didn't leave until he was four, and there are bits and pieces of memories, a woman who smells like autumn and has a light laugh and long red-brown hair, like Ben's is when it isn't dyed his favourite colour of the month.

But the things he doesn’t know about her and can't remember could fill a book. Could and has filled a couple of songs, at least. In the years since he moved away from home, since dad brittlely and quietly disowned him for pursuing something as stupid and pointless as music, he's tried not to linger on it. Someone someday will probably find out and make a big deal out of it in a tell-all, unauthorized biography, but Ben's always told himself it doesn't matter. She left. The ones that leave you don't deserve a lot of thinking about.

He starts reading from the beginning again, one hand tucked behind his head. Now, he's not so sure.

---

Once upon a time, he'd be out at a party right now too. Back before Carol signed herself on as his manager and he spent most of his time drunk or hung over or having awkward-but-shameless sex in bathrooms with guys whose names were at least as stupid as his own.

wip: YOUNG AVENGERS, HOUSE OF M AU, G

2010-04-02T00:52:22Z

"Not moping," he says, not very convincingly, and he can see Kate's eyebrow twitching in his peripheral vision with the suppressed urge to call his bluff. Out on the football field, Roger Brant, the school's quarterback for one more year, has set a good third of the field on fire again. It happens at least once a season, almost always by accident and most famously during their semi-final game last year. Most of the team's teasing him mercilessly for it, hollering and punching him in the shoulder, ruffling his hair. The small handful of sapien players just stand by and watch awkwardly as the sprinklers come on, and the flames start to sputter out a little at a time.

Kate's elbow bumps against his, and Billy starts, finally looking at her straight on for the first time, and she tosses her head backwards in a gesture that gets her hair out of her eyes and directs his attention toward the line of bike racks in front of the school.

"Walk me to the subway?" she asks because she's nice enough not to say, Stay close, and I'll make sure Kesler doesn't beat you up today. Kate might be sapien like he is, but everyone thinks twice before messing with her. It's her scary poking figure, Billy's always figured.

wip: YOUNG AVENGERS, HOUSE OF M AU, G

2010-04-01T03:41:38Z

Billy.

Generally speaking, Billy Kaplan's okay with different. Some of the time, that's because he honestly is. He can get why different happens, why being different doesn't mean being wrong. Other times, when he's not so sure, he at least knows enough to tell himself not to obsess. That kind of thing can eat up your life if you let it. And Billy likes to think he's smart than that, better adjusted.

But sometimes he can't really help it. He gets this sticky feeling inside, a lot like the air gets on stormy days, thick and heavy and soupy. There'll be this pain in his side, right below his lowest rib, and just next to it the sharper feeling of missing something that you never had to begin with.

When Kate finds him that afternoon, with his fingers spread out over his side, watching football practice from a safe distance away where no one is likely to a) see him or b) suddenly decide to beat him up, she doesn't even ask what he's doing, she just -- unerringly and with the kind of perfect aim that has characterized everything about her existence in all the year Billy's known -- gets her finger in between his index and middle and pokes him in the side.

"Quit it," she instructs.

Billy scowls but not very much and mostly because she kind of poked hard and replies, "We communicate with our words not with our poking fingers, Kate."

Kate doesn't do much more than sniff at that. She leans forward beside him, pressing her arm into the chain fence that runs around the baseball diamond and threading her fingers through the links. Her sleeves are pushed up to just under her elbow, and she rests her chin against the back of her hand before she even glances in his direction again. "I invoke the moping-best-friend exception."

And Billy takes a big breath and lets it out through his nose noisily because sometimes that's all you can do with Kate. Because the thing about being friends with someone like her is that she's fearless, not 100% and not all the time, but more than anyone else that Billy has ever known. And sometimes being around her makes it hard not to think about all the ways in which you aren't. He squeezes his hand tighter over his side.

ficbit: criminal minds, pg, garcia/morgan

2010-03-31T00:27:44Z

Even as a kid, Morgan could never figure out what kind of person would buy the tacky crap they sell in tourist traps – the necklaces and mugs and signs with a range of statistically common children's names printed all over them. Then he joined the BAU and met Garcia.

It took a few years to figure it out. It's not like she's obvious about it since it takes about a week doing the work they do to instil a healthy paranoia about wearing identifying information in a chain around your neck. And, when pushed, she's the first to complain about the proliferation of PENELOPE merchandise when there’s never a single GARCIA to be found.

("Curse our anglo-saxon dominated capitalist society! Damn the man!" she’ll declare, and someone – usually Reid – will just smile perplexedly and reply, "But technically you are the man?")

The first time he notices, they're out for coffee and when she pulls out her wallet to pay, there's a shiny, pink sticker pasted over the coin pocket. He looks at it and raises an eyebrow, but she disappears it back into the bottomless depths of her purse almost as fast as she pulled it out, and he decides not to think anything more of it. But after that, he starts noticing it more: a mug that says PENELOPE with a smiling sun instead of an O which she keeps a safe distance from her keyboard, the set of pencils with her name written all up and down their sides.

"Seriously?" he says the one time he asks about it.

She cocks her head to one side, tilts her chin up just slightly. "Do not make me tell you about the last time someone took my coffee mug by accident. Trauma."

He leaves it alone after that. For a while, at least. But as a famous thinker now doubt observed at some point, there are things that, in the abstract, are understandable but which only become more perplexing when seen up close. And the day that Morgan wakes up to find the pad of paper on the bedside table that has FROM THE PEN OF PENELOPE printed cheerily across the top and a picture of unicorn sitting on a cloud in one corner is one of those things.

"Baby?" he calls, sitting up in bed and picking up the pad, wincing at the way his shoulder cracks loudly when he does.

Garcia's footsteps are loud in the hallway and then the door creaks open, and she pokes her head in. "Good morning to you too, handsome," she says.

With one hand, he holds up the pad of paper and wiggles it back and forth. "What's this?"

Both of her eyebrows lift up high over the frame of her glasses. "It's paper for, like. You know when you wake up with a crazy-brilliant idea in the middle of the night? Those things are awesome, so I like to write them down."

Taking the pad in both hands now, Morgan looks at it again and sure enough, in about the middle of the page, there’s a scrawl of Garcia’s handwriting that reads, "Duck obedience training car wash." He shakes his head, turns the pad around so it's facing her, and taps a finger over the unicorn in the top corner. "What's this?" he asks again.

Her voice is flat now when she responds, only the tug of an almost-smile at the corner of her mouth hinting that she's still amused: "That's a unicorn. Everyone likes unicorns." When he just keeps staring at her, she flings up her hands and walks into the room. Her pyjama pants have purple penguins on them and are riding low on her hips, getting caught under her heels as she walks. She sits down on the bed and asks, "What do you want with me, you fascist?"

He smiles too now – because it’s Garcia, and she’s always made him smile, and no matter how fucking depressing their work gets, she always will. "A little respect for preserving the manliness of my home," he says in his most serious, ex-team leader voice.

When she smiles back in response, it's knowing and unimpressed, though her eyes tell him that she thinks it's cute that he tried. "I’m adorable, and you love me," she says.

And what can he say to that, really? So, with a heavy sigh, he places the pad back on the table where he'd found it and when she taps her cheek, he leans forward, hand on the duvet just beside her knee and kisses her right above her cheekbone.

Four weeks later, he finds that a keychain which reads DEREK in blocky, orange letters has mysteriously been attached to his house keys.

ficbit: the mentalist, G, gen

2010-03-20T04:04:34Z

"Wait here," Lisbon says as they pull up to the cluster of policemen blocking the way onto the bridge. There's a moment when her hand drifts toward the ignition to turn off the car and take them with her but at the last moment, she decides not to. Her hand disappears into the pocket of her jacket, where she keeps her badge, and leans pops the door open and gets out with one more quelling glance. Behave.

Patrick, uncertain what kind of trouble she imagines him getting into in this situation, watches her key chain sway back and forth, listens to the hum of the car engine. It's not very green, leaving it idling like this while Lisbon frowns at the local law enforcement and bullies them into line. But the more Patrick thinks about it, the more he thinks that he's never met a police officer who was particularly concerned with the environment. Van Pelt comes closest and even she doesn't recycle. It works out in the karmic balance, he thinks. Everyone finds different ways to try to save the world.

He gets bored before the keychain stops swinging and starts poking through Lisbon's things. She tries to keep her car as clean as possible, probably thinks it’s more professional, but even she can't avoid collecting some of the detritus of life around her. A half-finished pack of gum in one of the cup-holders. An open package of Kleenex in the glove compartment.

The most interesting find is an unlabelled CD in the stereo. Patrick turns it over in his hands, and the bottom is unscratched, fresh out of the package. He smiles to himself as he pushes it back into the CD player. He could press the play button right now and find out what's been burnt onto it, but that would end the mystery. Lisbon might act like she hates it when he prods away at mysteries. She’ll press her lips together, let the corners of her mouth – which always seem to turn down naturally anyway – pull down a little farther. But then she does things like this, dangling puzzles in front of him and turning her face away before it becomes too obvious that the only reason she’s frowning so hard is to keep from smiling. Before they met, Patrick thinks, that CD would’ve been neatly labelled in black permanent marker. He takes a weird sort of pride in that.

The driver's side door opens, and Lisbon climbs back into her seat. Patrick's hands are already back in his lap like they never left, but she looks suspiciously at him anyway. He looks back in cheerful innocence and waits to see which one of them will give up and say something first. It must be starting to rain because Lisbon’s hair is frizzing and if he looks at it in just the right way, he can see where a few drops are drying on the shoulders of her jacket and on the insides of her sleeves. A sure sign of someone who talks with their hands when they're annoyed, that last one.

"What did they want?" he asks finally because he can be patient, and he can be steady, but it's usually more fun to push and see what happens next.

Lisbon shifts the car into gear and makes a barely contained expression of exasperation. "They wanted to brief me," she says. "It's just stupid posturing local cops who want to make sure they don't feel like they've been cut out just because this one's our jurisdiction. Same old."

"Ah," he replies in a tone of voice that says that he is trying very hard to pretend as though he's interested but, in reality, he doesn't care in the slightest. Patrick understands a lot of things. He understands why Rigsby calls his mother more than most men his age and why Cho doesn't drink things with caffeine in them. He understands why people lie to themselves almost as much as they lie to loved ones, and he understands what it feels like to be very angry all the time and to be incapable of making it stop. But with all the things he understands, he will never, ever understand police politics. It's probably better that way.

Lisbon drives them past the sad blockade and up to halfway across the bridge, not quite into Arizona yet but most of the way. Patrick can see Cho's car a little ways off and beyond it a low, mauve station wagon that has to be the victims. He stares at it as Lisbon parks. Out of the corner of his eyes, he can see her take her keys out of the ignition and tuck them into her pocket. She brings her hand up to her mouth right after and bites down on her thumbnail, a short expression of fidgety anxiety that she only shows in her car and her office and other places where her brain tells her she's safe and can't be seen.

"Did any of your police buddies mention that the victim was in this country illegally?" he finally asks, and he's smiling before Lisbon even manages to whip her head around toward him.

"You figured that out by looking at her car?" she says. "You can’t know that." And, yes, it hits all the right notes for indignation and annoyance, but there's a catch at the end, a half-second where her voice betrays her. Patrick knows it because he's learned to listen carefully for it. It's the moment where Lisbon's protest gives way to curiosity, to interest. The words coming out of her mouth say she doesn't believe him; her voice says she wants him to show her how. It is, ultimately, the reason why they're still working together after all this time and why she didn't kick him to the street long ago.

He doesn't answer, just smiles that pleased smile at her. Wait and see, it says, and Lisbon rolls her eyes but lets it alone for now. She undoes her seatbelt, and he opens the door to get out himself. But just before he does, he leans over toward her, over the cup-holders and the gum packet. He puts his fingers on her arm at the wrist, and the fabric is damp just like he thought.

"Oh," he says, like a thought's just occurred to him, like this isn't calculated in anyway, "Lisbon. You know those meditation tapes won’t actually help with the nail-biting. Talk to me after. I can teach you some tricks."

And before she starts to splutter or say anything, he pulls away and hops out of the car, slipping his hands into his pockets. She'll smile at it as long as he isn't watching, and she deserves a smile first thing in the morning. They have a long day ahead.

introduction;

2010-03-17T04:29:22Z

What the heck, Riko? Yeah, I know. What can I say? Word count targets alone don't work for me. Telling myself to write every week doesn't work unless I can make myself feel like there's some sort of consequence. I need to bust out of my old habits because they aren't working anymore.

So I'm going to make a concentrated effort to post something here every week. Every two weeks at the least (barring things like exam periods). As much as possible, I'll probably be focusing on a work in progress or two, but I'll also try my hand at short things, I guess? I DON'T KNOW. WRITING STORIES SHORTER THAN 2000 WORDS IS STRANGE FOR ME.

But since I basically don't want to inflict this on my friends-list, and I want people who join this community to understand what they are getting into (NO PROMISES ON QUALITY, NO PROMISES ON FINISHING ANYTHING EVER. THERE IS THE DISTINCT POSSIBILITY THAT SOMETIMES I WILL POST, LIKE, TWO SENTENCES.), I feel more comfortable splitting it off into a community of its own. So that you actually have to opt in to seeing this junk, not opt out.

Still interested? Okay! Cool! We'll see whether or not this work then.