Goodnight, My Angel
Chapter 1: The Mistake
Author: the laws of transitivity
Neither of them had been in a good place.
"Wait for it, Tabby! Wait for it!" Toad was screaming in her earpiece, the one she'd let fall out while she was taking down those last two security guards. She placed the bomb in the central control booth and took off down the hall. As she rounded the corner into the north end of the building, she finally bothered to put the earpiece back in. "Tabby! Do you copy? I said wait to place the bomb!"
Tabby skidded to a halt on the north fire escape. She hit her comm device. "Shit."
"What's that supposed to mean?" he barked.
"I already placed the bomb. Get out!"
"You fuckin' stupid bint!"
And then the control booth blew. It was a spectacular explosion, one she would have been proud of in different circumstances.
The helicopter ride back was no picnic. Sabretooth, who scared the ever living shit out of her to begin with, had been almost directly below the explosion. His hair was fried, his skin blackened and regenerating in places. His left eye was swollen shut, but the right was glaring at her enough for the both of them. Toad had gotten out relatively unscathed, but he was still pissed as hell. "We've been staking out those files for six months, Tabby," he reminded her once they reached open water. "Six months down the drain."
"I thought you'd already extracted the files—" she began to protest, but he cut her off.
"Six months! You bloody idiot bitch!"
She heard plenty more of that when they got back to the island. Toad, as her immediate superior, had the responsibility and privilege to knock her around and call her a fuck-up and a lazy tramp before sending her off to re-build her self-esteem with booze and men. She'd gotten damn good at covering up bruises with make-up. When in doubt, big battered-housewife sunglasses were in style.
She ended up on the mainland, in a bar. A guy with a buzz cut and a lip ring bought her drinks—shots, mostly vodka, maybe some tequila—until she let him finger her in a booth in back. Afterward, she dragged him into the men's room. He pulled some coke out of his coat pocket and made some lines on the grimy bathroom sink because she was too drunk to make them. She gave him head in the handicap stall. He called her a sexy little tramp, and around 1 AM, she stumbled out of the bar, keyed up and out of it and not feeling any better about herself.
Magneto had shitty little apartments scattered all over the world for Brotherhood members to hide out in. Most of them were single bedroom with little more than a bed, medical supplies, and nonperishable food, but the ones in New York City, the ones they used all the time, were much nicer. They had couches and real food and one of them had a TV with pirated cable. When Tabby finally made it to the Brooklyn apartment, John was already draped over the couch, clothes rumpled and drunk off his ass.
"Party boy," she teased. Tabby slid over the back of the couch and sat on his legs.
John sat up, one arm circling around her middle and the other hand tracing up her thigh and playing with the hem of her skirt.
She raised an eyebrow at him. "What did you do tonight, Johnny bear?"
He nuzzled at her neck. "Went to a club. Did some E. Fooled around with a couple people." By "people," John meant girls and boys. Tabby teased him sometimes, said Johnny wasn't bisexual, he was sex-sexual.
Snickering, she pushed a hand through his hair and made a face. He used too much gel.
Tabby remembered that part very clearly, but the after there it got hazy. She didn't remember when they started to kiss or who initiated it. She remembered unbuttoning his pants, straddling his thighs. She didn't remember how they ended up on the floor, but she remembered wondering if she would have rugburn on her ass the next morning (she would). She remembered that John said "Bobby" when he came inside of her and started crying afterward. She didn't remember how she John ended up on the couch and she ended up in bed, sticky, still drunk and still not feeling any better about herself.
"Heard you fucked up the mission yesterday." This was the first thing he said to her the next morning that was anything more than a pained moan. The two of them sat hunched over coffee mugs while the painkillers kicked in. He was wearing yesterday's clothes, gel-goopy hair sticking up like a birds' nest and face still sporting the pattern from the couch pillows.
Tabby just stared down at her coffee and shrugged.
"What time did you get in last night?"
Her head snapped up, bloodshot eyes suddenly wide. "You don't remember me coming in?"
John snorted. "I hardly remember me coming in, to tell you the truth. I was really out of it."
"I noticed." She blushed. "About that…"
"It was Bobby," he told her, thinking she wanted an explanation, "again."
Of course it was. After a night of drunken bonding—not last night's God-touch-me-there bonding, but a deeper, I-love-you-man sort of bonding—Tabby had managed to get a detailed synopsis of The Johnny and Bobby Soap Opera, all seven seasons. They'd been fucking behind closed doors since they were fourteen, even when Bobby got a girlfriend and taking just a brief hiatus after John left the X-Men to get away from him. They'd been meeting up in motel rooms sporadically to fuck and not talk about it and make each other miserable. Oh, they were both risking their necks fraternizing with the enemy, but, oh, it hurt so good. That sort of shit. Tabby hated Bobby almost as much as John did, which was almost as much as John was ass-over-brains in love with the shit.
"I told him it was over," he mumbled.
"Again," Tabby supplied.
John glared at her. "Anyway, I don't really wanna talk about it. It's just…complicated."
She took that as her sign to forget about last night. They didn't need more complicated.