Work Text:
“Kid. With me,” he’d said, jerking his head in the direction of the garage; he was already wearing his leather jacket, and she could hear his keys clinking together in his pocket.
“You can’t just take her out of school, Logan,” Cyclops had frowned, as he happened to be passing in the corridor at the same time.
“It’s important,” Wolverine dismissed, without slowing his pace. So she had followed, leaving her schoolbag under a table that she would remember to check later, and Cyclops let them go. In the garage, he handed her a motorcycle helmet, and when she didn’t put it on immediately, he gestured for her to do so impatiently. “Look, the last thing I need is to get pulled over for endangering a minor. Just put the damn helmet on, X.”
They had ridden into New York City. The helmets were fitted with microphones and speakers – they did not talk. The only interaction they had for the entire journey was a slight shift in his posture, when she moved her arm from his waist to wave back at a young passenger in the adjacent lane who seemed very determined to communicate with her. The child had beamed, and she had replaced her hand, and there had been a slight huff against the mic, feeding into her ear. Logan did not really laugh, but he huffed. She could hear his smile, and thought that a strange feeling. To know someone is smiling, even when you cannot see them.
They’d stopped on an unremarkable street in the Bronx, and he had removed his helmet, grunting and gesturing for her to get off. She took her helmet off, propping it under her arm as he had done with his. While he dug in the pocket of his jacket, he nodded at the swinging sign for the Chinese restaurant and takeout, and said, “Order the 3, 9, 19, 21, 25 with chicken, 38 with beef, 39, and a Coke. Then meet me at this address.”
He pressed into her hand a crumpled bit of paper that had an apartment number two blocks away scrawled on it in his handwriting. She read it, memorised it, filed it alongside the code disguised as an order for Chinese takeout, and nodded at him. Understood. He replaced he helmet, revved the bike, and took off, leaving her on the sidewalk to complete her mission.
She reached for the timer on her wrist, and faltered when her fingers didn’t find it, feeling suddenly uncertain. What were the time parameters for this assignment? She looked up at the gently swaying sign, and resolved to complete her orders as quickly as possible.
She grabbed the handles of the plastic carriers so quickly that “Xièxiè,” was out of her mouth and she was two steps towards the exit before she realised that the man at the counter had called out her order in English, not Mandarin. She had lost her edge. Had been relying on teams too much lately.
She found the address that Logan had given her on Melrose Avenue – by all appearances, an ordinary apartment block – and assessed her options. Counting the apartment numbers on the intercom, she found the right set of windows. Using one of the ground floor windowsills as a springboard, she pulled down the fire escape ladder and climbed until she reached the correct floor and pried the window open.
“Jeez, kid, you ever use the front door?” Logan asked, when her leg was halfway into the room. He closed the fridge door, beer in hand, and cracked it open.
“Not if I can help it,” she answered, placing the food on the coffee table as he sat down on the badly worn mustard-yellow sofa with a sigh. He reached over to rifle through the bag, and jabbed downwards at the air with chopsticks in hand, indicating for her to sit down. He began opening the tubs, and Laura waited for the box with the message, but the final one opened was brimming with the smell of sweet and sour sauce, and he plunged his chopsticks in. She looked between each tub on the table, in case she had somehow missed a special note or an order other than one she had been sent for, but there was none.
“You gonna eat?” Logan said, slurping noodles up into his mouth. He raised an eyebrow at her briefly, but at her blank expression, he looked about himself in search of something. The message…? No. At last, he dug the TV remote out of the sofa cushions and turned it on.
She had to ask. It was mortifying, that she appeared so amateur, but it had to be done. “What is… the mission?”
He grimaced at the television screen, flicking through unappealing channels until giving up and leaving it on a channel that had gone to ads. “Fifty channels and there’s nothing on the goddamn TV. Unbelievable,” he said. He caught her eyes and dropped them, clearing his throat. “Your mission…” he handed her the 19 and the other set of chopsticks, “is to try everything.”
She looked between the food and Logan, but it didn’t start to make any more sense the more she did it. “I do not understand,” she told him finally.
“You will. When you find your order. Then we can do this again. Just be… fucking normal, every once in a while. Crummy apartment, Chinese takeout, bad TV. You and me. Wha’d’you think?”
Laura frowned down. She pinced a prawn between her chopsticks and ate it. She kept eating, and opened the Coke he had ordered for her, and when Logan brought more boxes closer and offered them to her, she tried each thing. The 3 went down on the table and was picked up again only to be sniffed at an thrown in the bin later. “Fair enough,” he said.
The first dip her chopsticks made into the 25 with chicken box was just like all the others, but in her memory it would be preserved as the bated calm before a storm of flavour and texture on her tongue. Her past self was suddenly naïve and deprived of the wholly fulfilling experience that was 25 with chicken. She’d hurried several mouthfuls down her throat before she realised that Logan was laughing – reclined in the corner of the sofa, the side of his hand resting against his mouth without managing to hide the corners of his smile or the telltale shaking of his shoulders.
“So, wha’d’you say? Do this again sometime?” he proposed.
She nodded eagerly, already awaiting the next fateful meeting of her and a delicious box of 25 with chicken.
---
“I think that’s everything,” Gambit said, just as he put down the last box. He moved to close the door, and she looked around at the boxes that – despite how few possessions she had according to everyone who had seen her packing and moving – had quickly eliminated all the floor space in the living room of the apartment.
He shimmied around the boxes and shoved one out of the way with his boot so that he could look in the fridge. The only thing in it was a case of beers, and Laura was relieved when he closed the door again and she didn’t have to snap at him to leave them be. Logan had left strict instructions in the form of a hastily-scrawled post-it note not to touch the beers until he got back, and it didn’t matter how irrational it was to adhere to those instructions under the circumstances, she was going to do it.
“Guess we’re ordering in. Know anywhere good?” he asked, and she was already pulling out her phone. It was saved in her contacts as ’25 with chicken.’ She indicated the sole menu that was magneted to the fridge.
As she brought the phone to her ear, she asked, “What do you want?”
He was skimming the menu with his eyes. “What are you having?”
“25 with chicken.”
“What’s it like?”
“Good.”
He blinked at her. “But what’s in it, petite? What’s it taste like?”
“25.”
“Alright, I don’t know,” he shrugged irritably, “I don’t really want anyth—”
She brought the phone to her ear and said, “Two twenty-fives with chicken, please. Pickup.”
Gambit started unpacking the kitchen boxes. Putting her second-hand sets of pans and cutlery into the cupboards and drawers. She emptied her clothes into her wardrobe and chest of drawers, although both seemed sparse. Jubilee would take one look and drag her out the door to go shopping, she could tell.
There were boxes partially blocking the front door, and she didn’t particularly like the stairs on the inside of the building, where her footsteps could be heard by the other apartments. They might even watch her through the peepholes in their doors. So, as was customary, she used the fire escape instead. She was early when she arrived at the takeout, so she sat down on the nice leather couch in the waiting area.
When Jia called her order and she got up to take it, they exchanged a few words in Mandarin. Most of the front-of-house staff knew her well enough by now to recognise her order, and some of them had managed to extract from her simple small-talk questions, none of which ever included her name. This time Laura asked about Jia’s cat who, last she had heard, had been routinely squeezing into the crawlspace of their apartment and hissing at anyone who came near. It turned out the cat had had kittens, and Jia asked if she wanted one. She declined.
“Your dad doesn’t like cats?” he asked.
She clenched her teeth and shrugged, and Jia wished her a good evening.
She climbed back into the apartment the same way she had left, and found Gambit channel surfing. They sat in a forest of boxes and dug into their twenty-fives while watching a channel that seemed to air more ads than programmes.
“This is really good,” he said around a mouth of food, and Laura made an ‘I told you so’ hum, too engrossed in her own meal to give him a more involved answer. Which was a pity, because he seemed determined to make conversation. “You know what you’re gonna do yet?”
“I have not left Professor K’s X-Men,” she reminded him, wrapping noodles around her chopsticks, ensnaring another piece of chicken.
“Not formally. But they’re still in Alberta, and you’re here, in NYC.” He cast his eyes around at the boxes, and added, “To stay.”
“Why do I have to have it so figured out?” she mumbled. “I don’t believe you think through your life choices this much.” She shovelled her latest generous potion into her mouth.
He made a fake hurt face and said, “Harsh. But true. I’m not saying you have to have it all figured out, I just don’t want you to get… bogged down. Living here, on your own.”
The way he said here like a euphemism. She swallowed her food insistently to accuse him, “You are avoiding saying his name.”
“Of course I’m avoiding saying his name,” he protested, interrupting his noodle-slurp. He resumed, chewed a few times, and then pointed his chopsticks at her. “You are too, if you hadn’t noticed.” She lowered her takeout container into her lap and poked at her food. The commercials played on the TV, for some pseudoscientific medication or other. Saltwater threatened to join the aroma of her beloved twenty-five, and she fought the tears. Gambit didn’t try to hug her; she appreciated that. He just said, softly and as if his attention was still divided between her, his food and the TV, “You’re allowed to cry, petite.”
“Don’t want to,” she sniffed pettily.
He chuckled. “Just like your dad.”
She rested her head on his shoulder, and he leaned his against hers briefly to affirm that she was welcome. He wouldn’t be so easily diverted from his new discovery of the wonders of twenty-five with chicken, though. “I don’t know whether to call him Dad,” she said.
“Do you want to?”
She shuffled her shoulders in an approximation of a shrug. “It feels weird. He said from the start to just call him Logan.”
“Yeah, cause he didn’t want to force a relationship w’ you,” he said. “You didn’t want to be a kid, he wasn’t jazzed about suddenly being a father. But the words we use for each other can change.”
“Does that mean you’re gonna stop calling me ‘petite’ anytime soon?” she cracked a smile at him, which he side-eyed.
“Not unless you ask, petite.”
“Hm. Good.” They sat in silence like that for a while, until the scent lured her once more into the temptations of twenty-five, forcing her to sit upright. She picked the box clean, savouring every last morsel, and thought her dad would be proud.