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"So, how long have you been here?"
"A year." The skinny sulky kid didn't stop playing with his lighter. Just Bobby's luck he'd got roomed with the antisocial weirdo. Bobby wasn't, like, judgemental, but John (Dr Gray had introduced them before leaving Bobby to unpack: John had not offered his own name, nor shown any interest in Bobby's) had the look of a kid who had seen off several roommates already. They were both in tenth grade, but they would not have been friends in a regular high school.
But Bobby was the new kid here, and he had to make the best of it. He hadn't even unzipped his holdall yet, just dumped it on the unoccupied bed. He looked at the cheap Zippo. The incessant clicking was getting on his nerves.
"Do your powers control fire?" It seemed a reasonable guess. That, or the guy was just a pyromaniac.
"What gave it away?" A scornful look. Jeez, he was just making an effort.
"That's cool. I make ice," Bobby offered. He held up a hand to demonstrate.
John looked slightly more impressed by the ice crystals forming in Bobby's palm and spreading up his fingers. He was actually looking at Bobby now instead of occasionally flicking him a glance over the top of his paperback.
"Can you cover yourself in it?"
"I dunno. I haven't tried. Maybe that's something they'll teach me to do here."
"Maybe." John, abruptly losing interest, went back to his book.
Great. It was like sharing a room with his kid brother, who was currently going through the roughest puberty ever witnessed in Boston. Bobby gave it up as a bad job and started unpacking. No doubt John would tell him if he started encroaching on whatever he regarded to be his space.
He opened a drawer on the unoccupied side of the room, and found it empty. Score one, because having to start an argument about whose stuff went where would have made this an even worse introduction to his new school and new roommate.
Click, click, click. It was that dumb lighter. Bobby would bet he clicked it at night, too. He was going to start fantasising about throwing it out the window. He shoved a pile of t-shirts into the drawer. Click, click, click.
"Why do you even have a lighter if you're a fire mutant? Can't you make your own?"
"No." John didn't even look up. His voice was even flatter than before.
Fine. Whatever. Bobby sighed as he pulled a handful of socks out of his holdall. The late summer sun was streaming through the big sash window, the bed looked comfortable enough, and his roommate was an asshole. What a start to mutant school.
John was, as predicted, an asshole. But he was also a funny asshole, if not quite as funny as he thought he was.
Bobby got on with him, mostly. Everyone in the Mansion mostly got on with one another, because when you all lived together there wasn't any other option. You found your group, which was the girls and guys you had classes with, and you went around with them. You always had somebody to sit with at lunch.
Bobby assumed he'd make friends with the other kids his age at Xavier's, because there had to be at least one person he'd like spending time with. He'd never found it hard to make friends. He probably wouldn't be besties with his roommate, but so long as they tolerated each other, that was fine. He could ask for a new room assignment next semester.
"You think you're gonna make friends at gifted school?" That had been his irritating little brother. Bobby had been trying to pack, still feeling weird about the whole thing. He'd been the one to research it and ask his parents to go to Xavier's. He hadn't told them what it really was, what the scholarship was for. They'd been so proud when he told them about this fancy school he'd got an acceptance letter from. Regular school just hadn't been the same after he'd manifested his powers by freezing the school pool solid, then had to hastily work out how to thaw it before the next swimming class came in.
"Sure." Did he need his own bedding? The acceptance letter hadn't mentioned it.
"Just because you're all turbo nerds doesn't mean you're gonna have anything else in common." Trust Ronnie to pick this time to start sharing uncomfortable truths. It was like he could read Bobby's mind.
"Thanks, really helpful." He'd take a set of bedding with him just in case. It would smell like home, at least until it got washed.
He did make friends with the other kids at Xavier's. Not just to hang out with because they all needed somebody to hang out with, but because they were interesting people. Kitty, Piotr, Jubilee - and, somehow, John. They weren't, like baring their souls to one another, but after the first two weeks John thawed enough to speak civilly to Bobby with only the same amount of sarcasm as he had for everyone else. This made them friends by default in Bobby's eyes, though he couldn't swear John would say the same.
Their other friends had other ideas.
"Where's John?" Jubilee asked as soon as Bobby came into the library, half way through his first semester at Xavier's.
"Dunno, haven't seen him since lunch." Bobby looked up from dumping his bag on a chair and shrugged. "Don't you know?"
"You're his roommate, you should know."
"Yeah, his roommate, not his boyfriend." Bobby dropped his Chemistry homework on the old wooden table. Was it really homework if you lived at school?
"Aw, you'd make a cute couple." Jubilee fluttered her lashes. "Fire and ice, baby!"
Bobby wrinkled his nose.
"Thanks, remind me never to come to you for dating advice."
Jubilee laughed. Bobby sat down, bent over his homework, and pretended the idea of being a couple with another boy didn't make a funny thrill go through him.
Bobby went home for Christmas. John didn't.
Bobby couldn't, like, ask him about it. You can't just ask a guy if his parents are dead or he just doesn't talk to them. John didn't really do personal questions, answering or asking. A full ten weeks with the guy, and all Bobby knew was that his new roommate was an only child from the East Coast who was good at English and didn't snore. And he was a dick most of his waking hours.
Bobby kind of liked him anyway. They agreed on 80s rock and what to put on the television in the rec room, even if John made sarcastic comments about stuff Bobby watched unironically. They had stupid conversations about who would win in a fight. Bobby didn't ask for a room transfer, even when John came in steaming with fury and set fire to the wastepaper basket and Bobby had to freeze it to put the fire out, and then he bullied John into cleaning it up because it was his fault for setting the fire in the first place.
"Fuck off," said John, and some creative language besides. But he did it, and as Bobby stood over him with the somewhat singed metal can for John to lob the soaked tissues into, Bobby realised that this probably made him the closest friend John had.
He left the wastepaper basket incident out of his weekly letter to his parents, but he did write My roommate has chilled out a lot since we met, which was both a pun and as much emotional honesty as his parents could probably handle.
Bobby and John got to the end of Bobby's first year without killing each other or trashing their room beyond repair. Since this was such a rousing success, they got roomed together the next year. Bobby was prepared for John to make a sarcastic comment about this being blatant stereotyping based on powers - sure, put fire and ice together! - and he did, because that was what John did. But he didn't actually complain.
Nor did Bobby. Sure, Piotr would probably be an easier and more considerate roommate in many ways, because John really was still a total dick half the time. But while Bobby got on with everyone, John only really got on with Bobby.
The summer in upstate New York was gloriously hot. Bobby had to slather on sunblock. Hilariously for a fire mutant, so did John.
The boys went for a swim in the lake. They hadn't said the girls couldn't come, but they'd all kind of tacitly agreed that it would be just boys. Bobby liked the girls, obviously, but it was nice to do stuff sometimes that was just guys. Girls did just-girls stuff all the time and it was fine.
It was funny to prank the others by using his powers on them unexpectedly, but Bobby quickly tired of it and changed to swimming underwater. He'd always been a good swimmer and swimming in natural bodies of water was way better than a swimming pool.
He came up for air with the water still up to his nostrils and found that he was a little away from the main action of the group. He floated there, just observing.
Everyone had on trunks of varying length and tightness, revealing torsos in varying stages of puberty. Pietro was tall and built and already hairy, with a full treasure trail and some growing round his nipples. Several of the other boys were younger and flat and lean, more like kids than men. One of them, a small skinny boy of fourteen, had a large patch of discoloured skin across half his chest and his upper arm which looked like an old burn scar. He was unselfconscious about it as he splashed about in the lake.
John was built more like Bobby himself, but narrower and less athletic. He was pale and skinny with sharp hipbones and little visible musculature, though Bobby knew from grappling with him (usually on the floor of their bedroom) that he had wiry strength in his thin frame. Bobby saw him in a towel all the time, and it wasn't like either of them was overly modest; they just weren't the kind of guys who let it all hang out and had whole conversations buck-naked, as Bobby had seen some of the boys do. Bobby didn't stare at John's bare back in their room as he was putting on a shirt. But here at the lake, where everyone was half-naked, it would be weird if he just refused to look at anyone below the neck. Right?
He sank back below the surface and swam for John's legs. John never saw him coming. Bobby grabbed, pulled, and John lost his balance and went under with a splash. Bobby swam over him, grinning.
John grabbed at Bobby's arms and clawed his way up, clinging to Bobby to propel them both. They surfaced together, chest to chest, pressed right up together. A pulse went through Bobby's body, starting in his chest and rippling down to his belly, his groin, his thighs, right down to his toes.
He broke away from John and swam away so fast he couldn't be caught, his face hot.
Rogue turned up. Bobby liked her. He couldn't work out if John liked her or not, which was unusual, because John usually made it very plain when he didn't like someone.
Boys looked at Rogue. She was cute, and the slightly Goth thing she had going on was extra cute. Bobby paid attention to her, because she was cute as well as being a really cool person. Rogue had been through stuff. Bobby, who'd never known that kind of life and probably never would even if he did get outed as a cryokinetic mutant, took it all in secondhand. He even held her hand through the gloves and felt like he was winning at being a boy. They hadn't got to calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend, but other people called them that, and that was pretty great and pretty close to actually being boyfriend and girlfriend.
John looked at Rogue no more and no less than, say, Pietro; but there was a different quality to his attention. He wasn't noticing her like the other boys did. Bobby thought he might be the only person who knew John well enough to realise.
If Bobby ever turned the subject in their dorm room to girls, John had always swiftly averted the conversation by scornfully implying that he was so much more experienced than Bobby that it would be sad to even talk about it. Bobby had had to admit to himself that even though John must be exaggerating, the disparity was probably unflattering, so he always dropped it. John had once mentioned someone older, and Bobby had lain in the dark for long minutes thinking about it, imagining a sexy young woman introducing him to sex (look, you were supposed to say that it was inappropriate even if the woman was seducing the teenaged boy, but it was still really hot).
So maybe Rogue just wasn't old enough and sophisticated enough for him, even though she was very cool and sophisticated. You got girls who weren't interested in boys their own age and only dated men, after all, no reason a guy couldn't be exclusively into MILFs.
Bobby didn't dwell on it - other things took up his attention pretty soon after that. But he didn't forget about it either, and he spent more mental energy than he really should have wondering what John's type of girl might be.
John looked like he'd been dropped in Bobby's family living room out of an alien spaceship. He looked wired, antsy. Bobby had never envisioned John and his parents meeting, two happily separate worlds colliding, and the only reason it wasn't going worse was that Logan was doing the talking while John surveyed the living room with a tight mistrustful expression. He was wearing Bobby's clothes, old stuff he'd grown out of because John was a couple of inches shorter and narrower than Bobby, and it made Bobby feel weird to look at him wearing his long-sleeved t-shirt, like a girl borrowing her boyfriend's sweater.
Other things happened after that. Cops, fireballs, on the run, yadda yadda. John being fucking stupid about his power, what was new? On his hands and knees, staring at the decking of his family home, Bobby remembered Scott once remarking that 'John will live down to expectations'. Too fucking right.
Much later, in the jet perched precariously by Alkali Lake, John sat huddled up against the cold, clicking that lighter - a present Bobby had got him last Christmas, because the shark tooth design was cool and he'd known John would like it - over and over, a little pin-prick of combustion bursting into a tiny flame. What did it feel like? John said it felt like an animal, like a little weasel putting its head up, then expanding into anything from a kitten to a mountain lion. He'd also said it felt kind of like getting a boner, though he might just have been messing with Bobby.
But he'd enjoyed torching those police cars, those police officers. John loved his power. The look on his face when he unleashed a gout of flame wasn't steely determination but wild uninhibited joy. He'd torched the policemen like a boy burning ants with a magnifying glass, for sheer pleasure - because he could.
John would never have made it as an X-Man. Lack of interest melded perfectly with lack of aptitude: John had never been a team-player and was almost incapable of taking suggestions, never mind orders. Whatever path he took after finishing high school at Xavier's, it would diverge from Bobby's. They'd both known that.
Bobby reminded himself of that a few times a week, back at the Mansion after Alkali Lake, in a room he now had to himself. He hadn't put away or thrown out John's stuff. He felt weird about even touching it. Someone - who? - had made the bed, but his faded red sweater was still thrown over the end of the bed and Infinite Jest was still on the nightstand with a dog-eared page about two-thirds of the way through. John never had a bookmark to hand.
John might as well have just left the room to shower. It took Bobby nearly a month to stop turning to the other bed in the darkness, already opening his mouth to say something.
Bobby didn't really think about him during the day. There was too much else to do. He was one of the adults now, as he'd always wanted. He helped run the Mansion. He was an X-Man. Sure, he was the kid on the team, but he was respected as a member of the X-Men. Mostly. It got awkward when they started talking about people he was too young to have met and missions he was too young to have been on. Then he really did feel like a kid. He grumbled about it with Kitty, who also found it super annoying.
He worked for his position. He was basically an RA in the Mansion during the day when it ran as a school - as well as trying to finish his senior year with a decent GPA - and when he wasn't either doing schoolwork or organising the weekly kitchen delivery he was training and talking strategy with the team. They had to be ready, and Bobby was well aware that he and Kitty as the newest members of the team had never fought in a pitched battle, mutant-on-mutant, before.
Magneto was out there. He might have dumped John by now - John could be very annoying - but Bobby didn't think so. He was going to see John again, probably pretty soon, and he didn't know how he felt about it. Tense, maybe even angry. Mostly just really bummed out. He didn't want to fight his now-ex best friend, even if John did deserve a few ice-hardened punches to tender parts of his body. It was strange to think that was the least of what would happen. That John had really, for real, defected.
Had they even been that close, really? Bobby sure missed him like they'd been that close. There were still swathes he didn't know about his supposed best friend. He had only a vague idea of John's family background or even where he was from - East Coast, like Bobby himself, but he'd 'moved around a lot'. He didn't know how John had discovered his power, even though Bobby had shared the story about accidentally freezing his school swimming pool and made him laugh.
He knew John's likes and dislikes, though, and could mostly predict what he'd enjoy and what would send him into a sulk. Ironically for a pyrokinetic, he didn't have an explosive temper: he got sarcastic and mean instead. He knew John's habits, what he was proud of being good at and what he tried to hide or not care about not being good at. He recognised John's footsteps. He liked spending time with John, even though John was a dick half the time. It was weird to think that they just weren't going to shoot the shit any more; weird to think that a guy Bobby had had some personal conversations with, a personal connection with, was now someone who simply no longer cared what his friendship had meant to Bobby.
He couldn't really say this to anyone, even to Kitty. He'd been John's only friend at the Mansion apart from Jubilee, so the response if he confessed to missing his erstwhile roommate was a sympathetic reminder that John was a dick anyway and always had been, so Bobby shouldn't feel too bad about it.
He mostly just felt weird about it. Sad, frustrated. Powerless. He fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow these days, but he woke up and thought about the strange absence of his best friend every morning. It didn't get worse, it didn't get better. He had no-one to talk to about it so he chased his own feelings round in circles.
He didn't break up with Rogue, but they'd also never, technically, been together. So they just drifted apart. They had other stuff going on, it was fine. He hadn't been all that into her anyway, to be honest. Not as much as he thought he should be.
Maybe Kitty would be better? He already knew Kitty well, and they already liked each other. There couldn't be too much between that and being a couple.
But there were still plenty of other things to take up his attention. Dating wasn't exactly a priority right now. Honestly, it was kind of a relief being able to put it on the back burner.
Bobby carried him off Alcatraz. Over his shoulder, like a sack of potatoes. John was in no state to complain.
He took John all the way back to Westchester. No-one tried to stop him: they had other things to do in the aftermath of a fight that had destroyed so much vital infrastructure. A paramedic asked if the body he was carting around needed medical attention and he let her check John's vitals, which were fine. He'd almost certainly wake up concussed - Bobby waved away the explanation of what to do with somebody with a concussion. He'd heard it a million times and taught it to others half a million. John was lucky to get off so lightly.
He sat in the Blackbird before take-off, John's unconscious body lying next to him, and no-one said anything. Kitty glanced at it, then glanced at Bobby significantly. He shrugged. It only occurred to him when he saw the lights of cop cars that he could have handed John over to the police.
So, all the way back to Westchester, coast to coast. The X-Jet was three times as fast as Concorde so it didn't take anywhere near as long as that sounded. Bobby found he had a headache now, even though the ice had presumably cushioned him from the worst of the blow. He was exhausted but also jittery, like he'd had too much coffee too late at night. No-one, weary and battle-grimed, spoke on the journey.
He found he was cradling John's head with one hand. God, that was an atrocious dye-job. He suspected John had done it himself.
Beneath John's eyes was bruised purple - maybe exhaustion, maybe the headbutt. He was lucky Bobby hadn't broken his nose.
John was hardly looking his best. Bobby was still goddamn furious with him for being a goddamn idiot. But Bobby looked down into John's dirt-smudged face and his heart turned over in his chest, a sick loop-de-loop that had nothing to do with the Blackbird's speed, and left a nasty ache under his breastbone.
A hot prickling started in the small of Bobby's back. It ran up his spine and warmth diffused into his head, his face. A new awareness was creeping over him.
He raised his head and looked around the interior of the Blackbird. Everyone was safely absorbed in their own preoccupations, many either sleeping or close to it. Kitty, sitting next to him, leaned in. She was pretty, she was nice, she was badass. Objectively, she would make a great girlfriend. Bobby was never going to ask her out.
"I don't know what you see in him," she murmured. Bobby smiled weakly.
"Me neither," he said truthfully.