by dilly r
The first time John tries to write again, the first two words that come to mind are: Love is... But he doesn't know how to finish it without making it into some cliché. Everything's been said.
When John was in high school, he wrote. Mostly at lunch, to distract himself from the smell of burnt fish and old soap water filtering up from his free lunch gray or during classes when he could get away with it. When his teacher was out of the room one day, one of the guys in class stood up and started reciting a poem. What John remembers isn't which poem it was, but the sickening feeling that overtook him when he realized the poem was his. The boy was doing a comic rendition of the words microcosmic dystopia which, judging from his movements, he didn't know the meaning of, and the class was laughing. The teacher came back a few minutes later and threw the poem away.
That night, John burned his notebooks.
It's not like he ever expected to win; not once in his life and definitely not this time. It wasn't a subtle metaphor when Bobby froze his fire. But the metaphors between the Iceman and the Pyro could never be subtle, could they?
Not all that long after Logan's gone and the competition for Marie's affections is down to a healthy one-on-one, John is standing in the hallway at night, smoking. He's not supposed to, but he does anyway when no one's looking. Funnily enough, the telepaths don't seem to care to mention it. Or maybe they don't notice as much as they pretend to. Either way, John doesn't care as long as he can get a smoke in now and then.
He hears footsteps. He's standing in a funny little alcove, so he has to poke his head out to see who's coming, ready to put out his cigarette and hide it if it happens to be a professor. It's not. It's Marie. John retreats back into the alcove to an extent, but he can still see her. She has her arms wrapped around herself and her head bowed. Those two little strands of white are hanging out of her ponytail and obscuring her face, but her posture gives John the impression she might be crying. John straightens his back. If she's crying, he doesn't want to embarrass her, so he coughs.
She starts at the sound. "Who's there?"
"Nobody in particular," he says.
Marie takes a few quick steps forward toward his voice until she spots him. She takes a deep breath. "Oh. Hi..."
"John."
"What?"
"My name's John."
She furrows her eyebrows. "Yeah. I know."
John looks around. "This isn't near your room, is it?"
"No." She chews at her lip. "I'm just walking. I couldn't sleep. Are you supposed to smoke in here?"
John shrugs. "You going to tell on me?"
"No. But you shouldn't do it."
"Shouldn't is a point of view," John says, and he takes a long drag from his cigarette.
Marie crinkles her nose. "Maybe. But smoking's gross anyway."
"Here I thought it made me one of the cool kids."
"Nope," Marie says. "It just makes you smell funny."
"Oh well." John puts out his cigarette with his power and stuffs it back in the pack in his jeans pocket for later. He gestures vaguely with his free hand. "I think they look neat."
"Cigarettes?"
"The streaks."
Marie looks down for a moment, sweeping the white hair behind her ears.
John frowns. "It wasn't an insult."
She looks up at him again. Moonlight is filtering in from the window to her right and reflecting off of her eyelashes, nose, and lips. "I know, but. I'm just... I'm not used to them."
"'I'm just' what?"
"I'm just not used to them," she says.
"That's not what you were going to say."
She quirks an eyebrow, smiling just a little bit. "How do you--"
John grabs her gloved wrist and pulls her into the alcove. She tries to speak but he puts his finger in front of her mouth to hush her. His finger is so close to her mouth, he can feel her breath.
"I heard someone coming."
Both of them are silent for a long moment, listening.
"I don't hear anything," she whispers.
"Guess not."
Marie frowns. "What would happen if someone was coming? You put your cigarette away."
"Yeah, but they might catch me doing this." He leans down and kisses her before she can do anything about it.
It's just a moment. He realizes that later, when he knows first hand how it feels to have her skin against his for longer than just a moment. But, at the time, it feels like maybe one third of forever. Everything he is and everything he would be pulses up from inside of him to the place where his lips meet hers. He can feel himself letting go of it, giving it over to her. Then, he feels her hand on his chest, shoving him away.
She is a few steps back before he opens his eyes again. Her face seems paper white in the moonlight.
"Don't do that," she says. "Don't do that ever."
"I didn't mean--"
"But you did," she snaps. "And that's the last time."
John listens to her footsteps, quick and light, as she runs down the hall.
Logan is rummaging around in the kitchen. Bobby and his girlfriend are upstairs. John is downstairs in the living room wearing Bobby's little brother's shirt. He tries sitting on the couch, but he can't. Then, he tries sitting on the coffee table, but he can't. Then, he tries pacing. That works for a second or two, but he ends up standing in front of a wall full of family photographs.
They're the nice kind. The kind people in the upper middle get in a studio. He focuses in on this group shot-- Bobby and his brother and his parents. For a moment John imagines that Bobby's mom has hazy eyes and maybe she was drinking before the picture was taken. Does Bobby's dad look angry? Maybe they had a big fight just before drunk Mom yelled at them to get their damn happy faces on for one fucking minute so they could take a nice picture.
No. Mom just had the red-eye edited out, and Dad just looks a little uncomfortable. They're exactly the kind of happy family that they appear to be. John is certain of it.
For the past few months he's been trying to figure it out. Trying to figure out why Marie was disgusted by John's kiss and plays at kissing Bobby every afternoon during lunch a foot or two away from him. Looking at that photograph, he realizes how stupid he was.
On the way to Bobby's house, John'd been in the backseat with him. Logan and Marie were up front. More than once you watched her glance over at Logan with this look in her eye. It made him sick to his stomach. Maybe the look wasn't love, maybe it was. That's not what mattered to John. What mattered was that Logan was her bad boy fantasy-- and he was better looking and less attainable. Bobby was her good boy. John was just her friend. There wasn't room for him anywhere else.
Fuck that, he thinks, glaring the frozen image of Bobby straight in his photographed eye. I'll show her how bad a boy I am.
John had never had any intention of staying with Magneto and his blue lackey. When he left Bobby and Marie standing there staring dumbly at him, he didn't know what to at all. He just knew that if they didn't follow him, he wouldn't go back to the mansion.
He ends up in Mexico. He hates it in Mexico. The weather sucks and he doesn't know the language. The upside is that he doesn't know any of the people either. In this void, on a crappy hotel room bed that smells like at least a dozen disgusting things, he starts to write again.
His ballpoint pen hovers on the notebook paper for a long time before the words come out, as though they were just waiting for him to show up and write them.
Love is
Then, he puts the notebook down and leans back against the headboard.
Before Marie came to the mansion, John and Bobby were best friends. People joked that they were boyfriends, but it was only joking. No one believed it.
John remembers sitting with Bobby at lunch, back when Bobby didn't have any friends except John. It was cold out, but Bobby said he didn't feel the cold. John felt it, of course, even through the two sweaters, the jacket, and the coat, but something about the way Bobby was acting made him stay. They were sitting at the edge of the basketball court where a little band of ants were braving the beginning of winter. Bobby had a piece of peppermint he'd gotten from a bowl in the dining room. He played with it in the plastic for a long time, and John watched him.
"I lied to my parents," he said, finally.
John tried not to laugh. The way Bobby said it. Like it was a bad thing. "Yeah?"
"They don't know I'm a mutant." Bobby finally unwrapped the peppermint, stuffing the plastic into his shirt pocket.
"Doubt my parents know for sure I'm alive, so."
Bobby didn't say anything for a minute, then he looked away. "Guess I sound stupid."
John just shrugged.
Bobby bit off a chunk of the peppermint with his teeth, then put it in the middle of the little line of ants. At first, they seemed shocked, but a few of them ended up swerving toward what they probably thought was some kind of manna from heaven, if they thought at all.
"You know," John said. "They're just going to stick to it and die all weird and curled up, right?"
Bobby squinted up at the gray sky. "Winter's coming. They're going to die anyway. They may as well die happy."
John snorted. "Whatever. Let's go inside. I'm freezing my balls off out here."
John looks at his notebook again a week later. Still, it reads love is. Somehow, he'd thought the rest of the sentence would magically appear. He looks at the words for a while, all six letters of them, until the words don't seem like words anymore.
He picks up his pen and writes, muttering. Not.
Then, John presses his palm against the paper and balls it up right out of the notebook. He leaves it all there on the bed -- the paper, the pen, the notebook -- and sets the sheet on fire.
He will go back up north, and he will leave a trail of ashes behind him.