The Thing About Bad Pennies
Disclaimer: I don't own Xiaolin Showdown or any of its characters, nor do I make any profit or attempt to with the writing of this or any of my other pieces.
Warnings: Language, homosexuality, (eventual) sexual situations, etc.
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Theory confirmed, Jack thought as he stumbled back into the timestream from yet another empty sleep.
Or that's what he might've thought if his stumbling hadn't been literal, leaving him wobbling on an uneven slope of ground and flailing his arms in a frantic attempt to regain balance for a long, adrenaline-drenched moment.
When the catastrophe was avoided, Jack cast a brief glance around to find no one in sight and breathed a sigh of relief.
"Thank god the kid's an antisocial loner," he quipped, "or else somebody might've seen that."
Of course, this was something of an oversight on Jack's part. Simply the fact that he was in this place and time meant that at least one person would've seen him.
As it turned out, that person had heard him, too, if the scoff of, "At least I was raised to have more manners than a common beast," was any indication.
The voice was still just a pitch or two higher than he was used to, but it was so startlingly similar (especially the haughty sneer in it) that Jack's spine automatically straightened as he turned to look.
Jack's Jump seemed to have been a little bigger than his last, because the Chenglei glaring at him was by no stretch of the imagination a little boy. He'd put on some height, lost some more baby-fat, and developed sharper facial features, the overall effect being that he looked more like Chase Young than any other version of Chenglei that Jack had seen so far—and god, especially so with that pissed off face he was wearing.
The differences were still obvious, though. Chenglei was considerably shorter than the height he would eventually grow to and gangly in a way a boy could only be when teetering on the precarious edge of puberty. That would fit quite well with the fact that his voice had yet to fully deepen and that he was sporting some seriously atrocious acne.
Of course, the most salient difference was the kid's short hair, apparently naturally spiky and unruly, but cropped into line perhaps an inch shorter than Jack's.
It was more than a little bizarre to see someone with (mostly) Chase's face and no dark hair to frame it.
Jack put it out of his mind as best as he could, shrugging off Chenglei's insult with practiced ease and straightening out his coat. "Alright," he said graciously, "fair point, kid, that was rude. I'm not sorry, but it was rude."
Instead of having the desired placating effect, though, Chenglei's expression only darkened. "I'm not a child!" he snapped, bristling. "I'm thirteen!"
With great difficulty, Jack found the tact within himself to not immediately ask, 'Really?' He'd have pegged Chenglei for something closer to ten or eleven, not thirteen.
The kid was kind of on the short and twiggy side for thirteen and by Chenglei's reaction, it was a common enough, hugely unappreciated assumption.
Hormone-tortured tweens were always particularly touchy about those kinds of things.
Having so absolutely been there, Jack threw up his hands in a gesture of harmlessness. "Okay," he conceded, "that, I'll be sorry for. You're not a child. That was just me being totally irreverent; it's part of my personality."
Chenglei huffed a snort at him, but his hackles were easing back down and he no longer looked like he was about to try picking a fight with a guy ten years older than him.
Only belatedly did Jack realize that this would be a great opportunity for some payback—his Chase always had an unerring knack for harping on the things that got to Jack the most with harsh words that never missed their mark. Jack had never had any way to retaliate because Chase was so confident and if he had any flaws to be insecure of, Jack sure as hell didn't know what they were. The dragonlord had one fantastic poker face.
Chenglei was a different story. He clearly hadn't yet learned that same self-confidence, and even on a basic level, hadn't learned how to at least hide his weaknesses from people who would exploit them. It would be so easy for Jack to take advantage, have a little revenge…
But probably too easy.
Chenglei was only thirteen and whatever Jack said to appease his ego, thirteen was a kid. Jack, on the other hand, was an adult and he didn't act like it nine times out of ten, but goddammit, he was not about to bully a kid for some shit he hadn't even said and done yet.
Plus, not that Jack was entirely above low blows, but going after somebody's body issues was pretty low. He had a vivid enough recollection of being Chenglei's age, feeling all kinds of awkward and weird once his body had started changing in ways he didn't fully comprehend.
In Chenglei's case, Jack would guess the anxiety would be coming from the fact that he wasn't changing when everybody else was. Still, when you're in that kind of fucked up place and you're pissed at your body and you feel like everybody's looking at you (and god, the zits on Chenglei sure drew the eye!), the last thing you want is to have your issues validated by somebody else pointing them out.
In retrospect, even Chase had never gone so far as to tease Jack over anything related to his body. Mostly, he'd just cast aspersions on Jack's character (and sometimes his parentage), which was…fair, in an evil sort of way.
If even Chase Young couldn't be that cruel to puberty-stricken kids, how could Jack ever manage it?
"So, Chenglei," Jack began slowly, meaningfully. "What's going on?"
The youth narrowed his eyes at him. "What do you mean?" he demanded.
"Uh. I'm here?" Jack spread his arms pointedly. "Any idea why that is?"
Chenglei turned his head, apparently disinterested. "How should I know?"
Son of a bitch. Jack had seriously been hoping that it would get easier to talk to this kid the older he got, but this was already worse than pulling teeth. A better metaphor might be trying to interrogate a wall while simultaneously navigating landmines.
Fucking tweens.
Already starting to reconsider his decision about payback, Jack said, "I have to be here for a reason. Guardian spirits don't just pop up for nothing, you know."
The look Chenglei gave him was pure conceit and Jack had the foresight to brace himself as the kid opened his mouth.
"I just told you I'm not a child," he sneered. "That means I'm not an idiot, either. I know for a fact that there's no such thing as guardian spirits. There's only demons and pedophiles, so which one are you, old man?"
Jack was very glad he'd braced himself for that, because otherwise, he might've done something considerably less polite than he did—which was to scoff aloud in disbelief.
Wow. This kid sure was something.
Jack didn't really make it a habit to hang around anybody, much less people this much younger than him, but Chenglei was starting to make him see that there was probably a good reason for that.
He wasn't in the habit of being physically aggressive, either, but that right there? That had made Jack want to smack the little jerk upside the head.
It wasn't even the condescension. That, Jack was more than used to. What really rubbed him the wrong way was how Chenglei was this arrogant as a snot-nosed thirteen-year-old kid.
At least when Chase Young was arrogant, he had reason to be. Chenglei had nothing.
"Okay, you know-it-all," Jack said tightly, crossing his arms. "If you're so smart, how come you didn't think about magic?"
Jack had the satisfaction of watching the confidence in the boy's splotchy face waver. "You're a sorcerer?" he asked warily.
"No," Jack reluctantly admitted, "but I'm here by magic."
"How?" Chenglei asked.
Oh, boy. How to phrase this clusterfuck of a situation without making things even more…clusterfuck-y?
Jack sighed, his hands ending up on his hips. Probably best to only give the bare bones. "I know you," he said to Chenglei, "years from now."
Chenglei blinked at him. "How many years?"
"Wh—does it matter?" Jack asked. Seeing Chenglei opening his mouth, Jack shook his head. "No," he said firmly, "it doesn't, never mind. The point is, I know you then, and I caught somebody trying to use magic to come back and screw up your life."
"Why?"
"What?"
"Why did somebody want to complicate my life?" Chenglei wondered.
"It…" Jack exhaled through his nose. "It's not for you to know," he said, going for vague and mysterious.
Chenglei didn't buy into it. "That's not an answer," he pointed out skeptically.
Ugh.
"Okay, fine: shut up, that's why." Chenglei looked like he might actually squawk in offense, so Jack quickly spoke over anything he might've said. "Anyway," he said, "for reasons unfathomable to me just now, I actually like you and didn't want your life to be messed up, so I came back instead of the guy who wanted to sabotage it. Which, by the way, you can thank me for at any time."
Chenglei quirked an incredulous eyebrow at him. "Why would I thank you? You have no proof of what you say. I have no reason to believe you're telling the truth."
Jack felt a serious headache coming on, along with a growing desire to bash his head against a wall because fine, touché, but really? It felt like Chenglei was making a concentrated effort to be difficult at every turn.
Jack could easily prove that he was from the future with any one of the dozens of technological marvels he had stashed in his coat right this very second—especially the one currently strapped to his back, but even the totally useless phone in Jack's pocket would probably make the twerp's jaw drop in sheer amazement.
Unfortunately, all of that stuff was decisively off-limits. It was futuristic, certainly…but too futuristic. If Chenglei figured that out—and he would, if just to make things harder for Jack— he might also realize that the future Jack was claiming to know him from was roughly a millennium and a half from now. From there, it wouldn't be too hard to figure out that he eventually goes Dark Side, and then he might try harder to avoid it and avert the entire timeline Jack called home.
Exactly like Guan was hoping for.
Once more cursing the Master Monk and the nebulously terrifying consequences of time travel in general, Jack just shrugged. "Fine," he said shortly, "believe whatever you want. Just don't be surprised if this isn't the last time I pop into your life."
If Chenglei rolled his eyes any harder, they'd have probably fallen out of his skull. "That just figures," he muttered under his breath. "Dashi leaves, and I get stuck with a moron like you."
Jack could really get used to lame insults that were as easy to wave away as Chenglei's, but then his brain caught up to the rest of the sentence. "Wait," he said, taking a curious step closer to the youth. "What about Dashi?"
"He left," Chenglei repeated, fixing Jack with another infuriatingly superior look. "He went to train at the Xiaolin Temple. Obviously."
Unable to restrain his sarcasm, Jack replied, "Oh, of course, obviously. Why wouldn't I have known that?" It was only after he said it and Chenglei was (for once) without a snappy, snotty retort that Jack registered the unbridled bitterness in the kid's tone.
He hesitated for just a second. Remembering the friendless Chenglei of his last Jump, Jack tried, "I bet it's…kinda lonely around here all of a sudden…"
Chenglei gave a stiff shrug, refusing to look Jack in the eye. "I suppose," he said in the most falsely indifferent tone Jack had ever heard, quickly adding an emphatic, "Not that I care."
It was entirely apparent to Jack that the future Prince of Darkness had a long way to go before he'd be able to obfuscate with any skill. His misdirection at this juncture sucked.
But pointing that out would only make the kid clam up again, so Jack bit his tongue.
Taking a deep breath, he reached out and laid a hand on Chenglei's shoulder. "Look," he said gently, "I know… I really know how hard it is to…be by yourself all the time. It's…I guess it's probably worse if you're used to having somebody around a lot, but…what it really helps to remember is—"
Chenglei cut off Jack's sincere attempt at a heart-to-heart by pulling out of his grip and spinning to face him with a wrinkled nose. "Good gods," he breathed, sounding taken aback, "were you trying to mentor me?"
Jack frowned. "So what if I was?"
"Don't," Chenglei said, visibly horrified. "You don't even know me! How could you understand me, or what I'm going through? You probably don't even remember what it was like to be my age!"
Jack's frown deepened and he couldn't help but feel a little offended. "How old do you think I am?" he wondered and once again, as he saw Chenglei opening his mouth to reply, he cut him off. "No, never mind, do not answer that."
Reminding himself that he was dealing with preteen angst here—Like I could forget!—Jack gave into frustration for a moment and massaged the bridge of his nose while he tried to come up with a better way to do this.
"Alright," he said eventually, gesturing sharply with his hand. "I won't try to mentor you. I didn't even really want to," and of course, the damn kid had the balls to look insulted by that, "so fine, we won't do that. But I'm gonna level with you here, you have to work with me."
"Why?" Chenglei asked, and for once, Jack had a good answer.
"You want me to leave, don't you?" Chenglei didn't answer one way or the other, so Jack continued. "Well, I can't leave you alone, or leave at all, until we talk. That's the spell that's holding me here. It sounds like you've got plenty of your own problems to deal with and I'm sure you don't need me following you around on top of it."
Chenglei seemed to think it over for a moment. "So what do you want from me?" he asked at length.
"Talk to me," Jack said simply. "Tell me about 'what you're going through' and then you're free of me."
"You can't fix anything," Chenglei snapped.
"Maybe I don't have to this time," Jack suggested. At Chenglei's confused frown, he elaborated, "Don't take this as mentoring, but when I was your age…" Jack paused, reconciling himself to the fact that he'd actually just said that phrase. "Well, anyway, when I was angry at the world, it helped a little to have somebody to vent at."
Even if in Jack's case, he'd had to build those somebodies with his own two hands.
But apparently, Chenglei didn't think the idea was totally stupid because he seemed to be considering again.
"…And you promise you won't try to advise me?" he apparently needed to be certain.
Jack laid a hand over his heart. "Absolutely not," he said. "Not even a little, I swear."
It looked like that was enough to content the youth because he glanced at Jack out of the corner of his eye and said, "Good. Your advice would be terrible, anyway."
Resisting an eyeroll of his own, Jack plopped down onto the ground and gestured that Chenglei should join him. Once he had, Jack said, "Alright then, just start wherever."
"Dashi," Chenglei started, "never did any of his chores. I used to do some of them for him so our father wouldn't discipline him, but he never did anything. He never did anything, but he was the one who…"
Got popular, made it through puberty first, was the favorite, Jack inferred in the silence.
"And now he's the one who gets to train at the Temple while I'm here, doing everything expected of me and expected of him! I shovel the stalls and I clear out the cooking ashes, and I sharpen the tools and it's…it's not fair!"
Oh, Jesus Christ. The 'it's not fair' rant.
Jack schooled his expression into one of vague, neutral interest and swore that when Chenglei was done venting, he was going to at least make the kid weasel away some food for him; something to make up for the fact that he was sitting through a venting session that had literally included the words 'it's not fair.'
It was Jack's sincerest wish, as he continued listening to Chenglei's bitching, that Chase would remember this conversation when they met 'for the first time.'
I'll admit I was a pretty annoying tween, Chase, he thought at the warlord of his future, but y'know what? So were you.
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A/N: I'm back! Remember what I said about being patient because I take forever at writing and posting stuff? Well... ^^;
It probably wouldn't have taken so long, but a whole bunch of factors snuck up on me to slow me right the hell down. I was sick for a week or so, then my schoolwork was piling up all at once, and then I started getting really into Star Trek which any fan can tell you is one hell of a life-eater when you try to watch all the series and movies.
But anyway, none of that matters now because I'm finally ready to post the next round of chapters for this story! XD
This is the first of the current round. Thanks for reading and I hope you liked it! :D