PRE-A/N: I'm typing this while at home for winter break; sans internet access. That's right, I'm back to uploading at the library. Damn.
-heartsyhawk: We made you fear drunk people? That's so great. Sorry we're making you want to run away. Hope you stick in there.
-Chica de los Ojos Café: You are so mean to Rogue. Of course, Remy has the same idea, so we can't be too mad.
-ish: Oooo… "Face got run over by a 10-wheeler?" Ouch. Oh well. Besides, we all know our Rem's way hot!
-SickmindedSucker: You're so evil. We love you.
-Relwarc: Oh, THANK you so much! Only Ish agreed with us about Remy's sexual preferences. Thank you, thank you, thank you! We totally agree. And, yes, that Sam/Bobby comment did sound dirty. Hope you like Sam and 'Berto together, as well.
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Dr. McCoy walked back into the Professor's private living room to rejoin the party. Ororo came in a moment later, shaking her head. She had been on a second trip to the kitchen, this time to get more ice from the freezer. Hank wondered what she had seen to make her look so disapproving, and if it had anything to do with Remy's room.
"Has anyone else noticed that the children are acting strangely? Well," Ororo amended, "stranger than usual, anyway."
Logan took the ice tray from 'Ro's hands. She smiled down at the shorter man, and he gave her a little, one-sided grin back, along with a wink. "It's New Year's Eve; let 'em have their fun for one night," he declared.
"That is exactly what she is worried about, I think," Charles said.
The adults looked back and forth between each other and came to the same conclusion: Not their problem tonight. Tomorrow they'd deal with it. (A/N: Can't have them running to ruin our fun, can we?)
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Back in Remy's room, Rogue drunkenly glared at the Cajun. "Tha's the stupides' thang Ah evah heard you say."
He shrugged, glad that the awkward moment had passed. (A/N: Neither of us knows what he said. It's one of those great mysteries, like Stonehenge, or the Pyramids, or the mystery flavor in Dr. Pepper.) He did, however want to get back to what she had said out in the hall. "So, whaddja mean, 'ya liked me over you'?" he asked.
Rogue rolled her eyes. "Didn' mean nuthin', Swamp Rat. Stop tryin' ta ruin ever'thiang."
"Not tryin' t' ruin anythin', Cherie." Remy settled back against his pillows again and dropped it, if only for the moment. He poured another two shots for round…whatever they were on now. He held her glass out for her. She reached out to take it from him. There was a good six or seven feet between the chair and where Remy sat on the bed, so the reaching was pretty ineffectual.
"Ah cain' reach," Rogue complained and pouted, letting her arm drop.
"So come an' get it, lazy ass," Remy said, smirking at the double meaning.
Rogue stuck her tongue out at him, but slung her leg off the arm of her chair and stood up. Little spots started to shimmer in front of her eyes as she leaned too far forward. Arms caught her before she splattered on the floor. Rogue looked up once the fuzziness eased back from her vision and kind of smiled at Remy.
"Come up here," he told her. "Ya too drunk ta stand on ya own."
Remy pulled Rogue up onto the bed with him so that she could get her equilibrium back. Rogue kicked off her boots and leaned back against the pillows Remy'd recently vacated for a reason she'd already forgotten, and made herself comfortable. Once she settled in, she reached out for the shot of whiskey and tossed it down her throat, once again, shivering from the sharp alcoholic burn.
She really is drunk, he thought happily. I'm so gonna win. Once again, the Star Wars theme played internally. Victory was only a few shots away, he was sure.
Rogue was happy to lean back, drink, and take in the details about Remy she usually tried to ignore. Like how his T-shirt was a little tight through his shoulders, and that his eyes were really the damn coolest things she had ever seen. How tall he was—six-foot-two—and those long legs. It was small things, like the cording of the muscles in his forearms as he poured himself another drink, his big hands (she had a definite fascination with his hands), and there was something about his collar bones that was just plain distracting. Even barely conscious, her imagination was being no frickin' help at all.
Rogue shook her head and took the shot he offered her from his new seat on the edge of the bed. She sat up to drink it, then let herself flop back against the pillows and headboard, her arms flung out. She frowned, looking side to side. She had just noticed something. "Ya know, Ah think ya have th' only queen sized bed in th' ins'i…inss'too…in th' whole damn p-place."
"Helps t' be one o' de 'adults' 'round here." He added a very sexy smile, and rolled onto his stomach. He crawled closer to her until his head right above the waist band of her black jeans. He dropped his chin to her pelvic bone and rubbed slowly back and forth.
"Ah think Ah'm'a get mah nose pierced," Rogue announced.
Remy stopped and frowned up at her. He hadn't exactly planned on that being the conversation turn. He'd had a whole different direction in mind.
"Ya nose, huh, Cherie?"
Wow. Oh the sparkling repartee was really flowing in that room.
"Uh-huh." She nodded against his pillow. "Eithah that, or mah eyebrow, since Ah already did mah belly button."
"You did?" Remy asked. He went up onto his elbows and pulled up the hem of her shirt, taking his life into his hands. "Huh. Look at dat. Ya pale all over."
Surprisingly Rogue let him see her spikey orange naval ring, giving him only a little, "Be careful. Ah'm ticklish."
"I'll 'member dat, Chere."
She breathed out a little laugh. "You do that, sugah."
Remy was about to say something, but Rogue's eyelids fluttered down. And up. And down again. "Mmm…Rem…Ah'm cold."
"No prob, Chere. I c'n warm you up."
She tried to smile, but her mouth wasn't working too well. She said something that sounded like it might have been, "Ah bet you could," and then she passed out.
Remy lay there, propped up on his arms, and studied her sleeping face intently. He briefly wondered if his boxers had been this small when he'd put them on that morning. Snorting out a sigh, he contented himself that he'd at least won the bet, and then let himself pass out, too.
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Meanwhile, Sam—still in Rogue and Kitty's room—was busy bugging the holy crap out of the valley girl by singing every song he'd ever heard in his life. "Ah've got a luv-i-ly buncha co-co-nuts, deedely deedely doo."
"Saaaaaaamm," Kitty grumbled, half her face buried in her pillow. "For the love of goodness…shut up!" She pulled the pillow out from under her cheek and through it at him, just to help get her message across.
Sam responded by stopping his singing, and starting to laugh like an idiot. Not five seconds into it, he stopped laughing very suddenly and ran for the balcony windows. A few seconds after that, Kitty was treated to the sounds of Sam tossing his cookies—oh joy for her.
The person below the window wasn't too happy about it, either.
"Hey!"
Bobby had been drunkenly ice skating on the pool that had frozen over, and then he smoothed off, only a few minutes ago. He had been having fun before the urge to puke—a result of drinking too much, too fast, and then trying to do a triple sow-cow—had come over him, so he had gone to a bush to throw up. The bush was right under Rogue and Kitty's balcony. And now Bobby got to see what it felt like to be that bush, as regurgitated milk and Kalhúa fell on him.
"Sorry," Sam said thickly from above. He stayed over the rail of the balcony just long enough to see Bobby flip him the bird.
Not two minutes later, Sam stumbled out of Rogue and Kitty's room with Kitty yelling drunken expletives at the Kentucky boy's back. He was pretty sure that she had learned most of them from her roommate, because there were a few really creative ones that Sam didn't think Kitty had thought up on her own.
The poor teen collapsed a few steps down the hallway, unable to keep his feet under him, or his stomach under control. It was a very good thing that Sammy's knees buckled near one of the big potted plants Ms. Munroe had scattered about the Institute. His stomach lurched, and up came the rest of its contents into the fern.
Roberto had been coming down from seeing a singing, maniacal Tabitha to her room before she hurt someone. He had left her with Jubilee and washed his hands of the mess.
Honestly, he didn't get American drinking habits. There was no drinking age in Brazil, and he, frankly, had never felt the need to get smashing drunk. Whatever. Not his problem. He'd dropped Tabitha off with her roommate, and now he was going to bed.
Just as he turned the corner that led to the boy's hall, he came across a rather pathetic, blond-mulleted classmate, puking his guts out into a potted fern. With a long suffering sigh, Roberto went to hold Sam's hair out of his face while the boy continued to throw up.
Once his stomach was empty, Sam slumped to the floor. He started making pathetic little noises, and, every once in a while, closed his eyes tightly to block out the hall light.
Roberto muttered under his breath and knelt down in front of his friend. "Sammy? Hey, Sam? Think you can walk back to your room?"
Sam opened his eyes to look at the speaker, almost too drunk to recognize him at first. "'Berto? Mmmmm… Ah don' fil good."
"I guessed that. Can you walk?" he repeated.
Sam thought about it and shook his head.
Roberto hung his head for a second, thinking. Sam was bigger than he was, and heavier. There was no way 'Berto could carry him on his own, at least not without using his powers, and the sun was still hours from coming up.
"Look, Sammy, you have to help me here. I'll help you up, and you can lean on my, but you have to walk. Okay? Sam!"
"Mm? Okay, yeah."
Roberto pulled Sam's arm over his shoulders and slid his won around the other boy's waist. Sam, on the other hand, was just sober enough—or drunk enough, depending on how you look at it—to get paranoid. "Watch were ya put'cha hands," he warned Roberto with a frown.
'Berto rolled his eyes and repositioned Sam's arm more securely over his own shoulders. "Oh yeah, Sam, the only reason I'm helping you is because I wanted to feel you up. Grow a brain."
"'M jus' sayin'…"
"That you're a paranoid little freak?" Reberto asked. "I got the memo, thanks. Now, come on. We're standing up on the count of three. One, two, three."
After a lot of pulling, and Sam turning a little green again, they got to their feet and headed for the boy's wing. The halls were deserted, so Sam's weaving walk didn't bother anyone but Roberto, who was beginning to wish he'd just left Sam to pass out in the hallway. When he got to Sam and Evan's shared room—of course, with Evan AWOL, the room was just Sam's—Roberto reached out to push the door open. He tugged his friend over to the twin bed that looked slept in, the one with the poster of some American football player above the headboard, and let Sam sit down. Sam grunted and grumbled, then laid down, his feet still hanging off the bed.
"You are pathetic," Roberto said, shaking his head down at his friend. He sighed, and squatted down to tug Sam's brown, suede work boots off his feet, then lifted his stokinged feet up onto the bed so that Sam was lying down. "You better say thank you in the morning, or I'm telling Storm you puked in one of her plants."
"'Berto?" Sam mumbled, opening one eye.
"Yeah?"
"Thanks…y' th' bes'," he slurred, managing a weak smile, and then he officially passed out.
"And you're a sad, drunken little ass-wipe," Roberto said. But, after a second, he smiled down at Sam's sleeping face. "Admittedly, though, you're a cute, sad, drunken ass-wipe. Sleep tight, Sammy. See you in the morning."
Roberto closed the door behind him when he walked out.
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After Bobby flipped Sam off, he went back inside. He surveyed the destruction in the Rec Room. Many had puked. Most were now in bed, or sleeping on the floor, or one of the couches. He wondered if this would ever happen again. And then he went to go take a shower before collapsing onto his fuzzy flannel sheets and drifting into a near-coma for the next 12-18 hours.
A quick glance at the VCR clock showed that it was 12:47 AM. They'd all been too busy to watch the ball drop.
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POST-A/N: Sorry it took so long. The holiday season is a stressful time. Plus, Cincinnnait, Ohio—where Panther Nesmith and I live—got hit with a big snow storm, so it's taken a little while to get up to the library to update. Hope you had a good ChristmaChanuKwanzSolsiticaswinter holiday of some other ethnic origin that I don't know of.