Disclaimer: I don't own the X-men movies or comic book franchise and I don't own the characters. No monetary profit is being made. Alas!
Notes: I really, really hate how hard it is to format stuff on At some point this will be formatted to something approaching the way I wanted it to be done and I'll post it on my LJ.
Triad
Typically, it's John who brings it up, only a few weeks into knowing her. They're sitting on the steps, the three of them, Rogue and Bobby on the same step but with that cautious, careful space between them, and John a step below them, leaning close enough that he's almost got an excuse to bump his shoulder against Rogue's leg. He doesn't, because then she would start and get up and get that flinching, anxious, unhappy look, and he and Bobby between them have made a silent pact that Rogue will never, never, have to wear that look around either one of them ever again.
"So, you think Xavier will ever be able to teach you how to control it?"
It's not a pebble at all. It's a rock. The ripples are the way that Rogue's face goes still and silent and closed, and she bites her lip. For a moment, John feels bad for bringing it up, especially with the death glare that Bobby's shooting him.
"I don't know," she says, soft. She's so soft-voiced that John actually has to listen when she speaks, and he's not used to doing that, not used to doing that at all. But for her, he tries.
"If anybody can," says Bobby quietly, touching Rogue's covered shoulder lightly, "Professor Xavier can." He means it as encouragement, as some kind of show of hope.
Rogue shoots him a quick sideways glance. Her eyes are very dark. John would write poetry about her eyes if he was the kind of guy who wrote poetry, and if he didn't think that it would completely suck. "I'm not sure...it's something that can be controlled."
John frowns. "It sucks." he says, because it does, because someone has to say it. Rogue looks back down at her lap and John lets go of his indignation on her behalf and says, "Come summer, it'll be hell."
Bobby coughs quietly. John rolls his eyes. "S'pose you can always just get Iceman here to breath on you."
Rogue blushes. Bobby doesn't. He and John share a look that isn't long at all, but heavy with meaning all the same. They've been working well as a triangle so far, and Rogue's powers slow things down considerably, but at some point they both know that the balance is going to shift, and that choices are going to have to be made.
The first time he sees her, really sees her, she's uncertain and new and sat apart from everybody else. There's more than a hint of wide-eyed wonder when she sneaks quick looks around her and John tips his head just slightly and slips his hands behind him, and shows the world in fire to her.
He's listening, really listening- and not to Ms. Munroe, talking at the front of the classroom, but to Rogue's soft gasp behind him.
It's his first move.
And Bobby counters it, the way that Bobby always counters John. John's hands are cold and he steps in the puddle of melted ice after the lesson finishes, and so just to get even he sticks his freezing fingers down the back of Bobby's collar when he catches up to him and the girl.
"Sonofabitch damn near froze my hands off," he complains to the girl, who smiles shyly, like a deer caught in the headlights, and he offers his hand. "John."
The girl blinks at his hand and then, hesitant, gives him her gloved one. "Rogue." she says softly. John gives her a charming grin and holds her hand a moment too long.
Bobby's not the only one who can counter.
"Call me Pyro."
John's not a voyeur. Well, no, John is a voyeur, but he's an unintentional one. He stops just outside Bobby's door, his door- their door- and he can hear Bobby's voice, soft and persuasive, and he just knows that Rogue is in there as well.
"I'm not afraid."
Well, great, Iceman, thinks John sarcastically.He's just a bit pissed off that Bobby's the one who gets the girl, when he, John, has been so damn charming and suave and all those things that chicks usually dig.
"But I am," says Rogue, pleading and firm all at once with her soft Southern accent. John thinks she worries too much. John knows she worries too much.
"Just let me try," says Bobby, leader-in-the-making, take-charge Bobby, "Just trust me."
Bobby's trustworthy. John's not. He can't make himself walk away from that almost-closed door. He flattens himself against the wall beside it, slouches with his hands in his pockets and the smooth metal of his lighter cool under his thumb when he rubs it. If anyone looks, he's just loitering. Loitering with intent.
There's a sour taste in his mouth.
Four days ago he found Rogue in the library. She was reading or pretending to read, tucked away in some obscure little corner in between Tibetan Philosophy and books about marmosets. She'd been crying. He could tell. It wasn't a romantic kind of crying, which is the kind of crying you get in movies. She was sniffling occasionally and her face was blotchy. When he sat down opposite her, she glanced at him reflexively and her eyes were pink and watery.
"Hey." he said.
She looked back down, tucked her hair behind her ears- white streaks now- and said, "I'd really much rather be alone right now, if you don't mind." Ah'd really much rather be alone right now, if ya don't mind. He liked her accent, soft and sweet and drawling. It made him think of his lighter and the way it heated in the palm of his hand, familiar and seductive.
He shrugged at her and stayed right where he was. She turned a page and stared at it, her hair falling forwards to curtain her face again. John doubted very much that she was reading it and he wasn't surprised when a tear plopped down on the middle of the page, right in the middle of a paragraph about- John tilted his head- Chaos Theory. Butterflies. John knows a bit about that.
"Hey," he said again, and Rogue shot him a pained, painful look from under her hair. Right then she wasn't beautiful. She wasn't pretty. She was soft and damp and far too fragile, and she needed a tissue, so John gave her one.
"Blow your damn nose," he said, and she did. "That sniffing is driving me nuts. And that's Chaos Theory you're crying over. No respect. Mr. Summers will go nuts--" and he'd just carried on like that, talking until Rogue hiccuped laughter and asked if he ever left people alone when they told him too.
"Nah." John said, tilting back on his chair and hooking his thumbs into the beltloops on his jeans, grinning lopsidedly. "Never abandon a beautiful woman. Haven't you learnt anything here?"
Rogue smiled, tremulous and as brilliant as the sun. "I'll try to remember that." she said.
And now she was in his room, only it was Bobby's room because Bobby was with her, and Bobby was trying to persuade her to kiss him, and John's stomach seesaws in that uneasy jealous way and he takes his lighter out and opens it, closes it, opens it, snap-click-snap-click, a rhythm as familiar to him as his own pounding heartbeat.
He tells himself to walk away, just walk away.
But of course, it's not that easy. Yet.
"She's beautiful," says Bobby.
"She's hot," says John. He clicks the lighter shut and squints over it at Bobby, tough. "And I saw her first."
Bobby grins at him, eyes crinkling at the corners. It's a nice grin, friendly and open and honest, and it doesn't fool John one bit because he knows better and knows Bobby better than that. "Prove it."
"Eat shit and die, Drake," replies John, slouching back and shoving his hands into his pockets. "You saw that guy she arrived with. She's gonna want someone badass, someone with /edge/," and he flips his collar up, smirking. "And I'm the biggest badass in the school."
"Actually," says Bobby, "I think you're the shortest."
John scowls and clicks his lighter, "Whatever, man," he says, staring into the flame. It licks at the edges of his mind with a tug like an addiction, a craving, something he just can't get out from under his skin, and he snaps it shut again. "She's not gonna want some clean cut good ol' farmer boy from Iowa."
"I'm from Boston," Bobby objects mildly. "And I've never milked a cow in my life."
John waves a gracious hand at him in a way that should seem camp but doesn't, because John knows just how to do it. "Yeah, yeah. You're missing out."
"On cow milking?" Bobby raises an eyebrow. John bets that he practises it in the mirror secretly, when nobody else is around, probably in the morning whilst John is still trying to become one with his pillow.
"Yeah." says John. He thinks again about the girl, who looked so remote and self-contained despite her obvious uncertainty. He clicks the lighter open, snaps it shut. He'd felt that way too when he first arrived, but he'd had the arrogance and the flamboyance and everything else to carry him through.
Eventually, at some point, he'd got Bobby too.
"You're a man of many mysteries," says Bobby, amused, and John slings a companionable arm over his shoulders. "That I am, buddy, that I am."
When Bobby and Rogue first become official, John spends a week pretending everything is fine and he couldn't care less anyway, and then he spends another week and a half refusing to talk to either one of them and making loud, bitchy comments about sickening couples and god this is a school not a porn studio do you mind? when it's not just the three of them in a room, and avoiding it ever being just the three of them in a room because that would mean actually having to talk to them.
Feelings would probably come into it. John has given it some thought and decided that no, he doesn't do feelings, and this is where he thinks it would be better if he and Rogue had hooked up or him and Bobby, because Rogue's a chick and Bobby's a wuss and so both of them would be fine with having the Feelings talk and then maybe, just maybe, he'd still have his friends.
Never mind that John, who is reasonably open-minded, doesn't really think he's gay and that would probably be an issue if he wanted to hook up with Bobby, because despite Drake's admitted wussiness, he's still a dude.
John thinks, sometimes, that maybe he's been overthinking this.
He's sitting outside and considering taking up smoking, because he thinks it'd make him look cool and it's something that disaffected teenagers do. He knows that. He's seen it in the movies, and anyway, John is a disaffected teenager.
He's pretending to study, because otherwise it looks like he's thinking or brooding or-
"Still sulking?" asks Bobby, and drops down beside him without waiting for an invitation.
John turns the page with his thumb and doesn't look at Bobby.
Or sulking.
"Okay, yeah, guess you are." Bobby sighs and props himself up on his elbows, and John can feel Bobby studying him with that intent look that he gets sometimes, like he's trying to figure John out.
It's been awhile since Bobby looked at him this way.
John turns another page and pretends that it's the most interesting thing on the planet. It's not. It might, actually, be one of the most boring things on the planet. He certainly doesn't understand any of it, and he assures himself that's nothing to do with Bobby sitting right fucking there and staring at him.
"Look, John-" Bobby begins.
"Here's the problem with three," says John and he's interrupting but talking like he's not, talking flat and low and hating the fact that he knows Bobby can hear the anger in his voice, "nothing's stable in a three. No one sits on the chair with three fucking legs. Three wheeled cars look retarded. Hell, everyone says, Drake, that bad things come in three. Three doesn't work."
He's about to add, so just fuck off, because Bobby made his choice and it sure as hell wasn't friendship, but then Bobby says, quiet and even and like saying it isn't exposing any kind of secret, just something that John should have known all along:
"Maybe. But I'd like it to." he says.
And he says, "Maybe you shouldn't give up on stuff without even giving it a chance," and John slams the book shut and scowls at him.
"I don't like waiting," he says, sharp and obscure. "I don't like waiting, Iceman, and I sure as fuck don't like playing gooseberry."
Bobby ignores that last part because it's not the important part and he's still watching John with that scrutinising look that catches far, far too much.
"Waiting for what?"
John ignores him and stares down at the cover of the book in his hands instead. He's not even sure that it's a study book now, come to think. That might explain why it made about as much sense as swahili.
Maybe it is swahili, and then Bobby leans over and takes the book out of John's hands- and John's a bit too grown up and a bit too dignified and a bit too surprised to fight for it- and chucks it across the garden.
"What the fuck," spits John and, "Professor Summers is going to kill y--"
And Bobby says, "Waiting for what, John?" cutting him off like Bobby does so well when he wants to.
John reaches for his lighter because his fingers are starting to twitch and he needs something to concentrate on that isn't Bobby, but then he thinks better of it. Bobby's got that tone that means he'd probably just throw that across the garden as well, and John doesn't feel like trying to look through several feet of shrubbery for it.
Some of it has thorns, for chrissakes.
"Two's company," says John flatly, standing up and brushing his jeans off. He doesn't offer Bobby a hand up and Bobby doesn't reach for one.
"Yeah?" Bobby looks pissed off as well now, like he can't quite believe that John's being this juvenile. "Well so's three. We're not five years old, dammit John-"
"No," John agrees, "because if we were, you'd have brought me candy instead of chucking my book across the garden," and he shoves his hands into his pockets and walks off fast enough that Bobby doesn't try to follow him.
The next day in class Bobby walks past his desk and drops a paper bag onto it that makes an audible clunking sound. John finds twenty six boxes of candy sticks in it, the ones with the collectible baseball cards included.
"Baseball's really kinda lame," he calls at Bobby's back, "and you've still got to find my book, asshole."
"Don't make yourself sick," Bobby replies without looking around.
After class, Rogue's waiting in the hallway and she gives John this hesitant little smile that means that she's not just waiting for Bobby, she's waiting for both of them, and he rolls his eyes and hooks an arm around her neck, ignoring her flinch and not letting her step away- he's wearing a jacket, dammit- and messes her hair.
"Quit being so damn nervy," he orders her, taking the candy stick from between his lips and giving it to her, "You're making me jumpy."
"I don't want-" Rogue says, trying to give him back the candy stick, but John holds up his hands and backs away.
"Don't reject good sugar, Rogue," he advises her, and when she makes that cute little face that she makes when she's frustrated and amused and starts nibbling at it with a pained expression, he grins and says, "Indirect kiss, don't you know? Only kind you and I are gonna be gettin' now you chose the lesser man," and Bobby punches him in the back but not too hard and so it seems like maybe, just maybe, even as three they're going to be stable enough.