Kyle and Jan

[x-wildchild.livejournal.com]

Backdated alllll the way to July, before Kyle and Laurie are speaking again. Jan and Kyle, in the kitchen, talking about missing Forge and broken toes and how to cope with anger and grief.



"Man. I am gonna set a record for broken toes in a week. This like, the third one." He hadn't really noticed the toe hurting until after he'd come into the kitchen, toasted a pair of waffles and sat down. Only then did he bend down to look at his foot, and then reach down, his actions hidden by the table. Hidden or not, the quiet pop and then grimace from Kyle spoke of what he'd done. "I miss Doctor Moira. At least then if I did something dumb, like slice open my thumb in the middle of dissecting baby sharks, I got fed and doctored at. Dr. Voight just gives me the dirty looks and lectures." And while Dr. Grey was nice about things, it just wasn't quite the same without the threats of being turned into a haggis.

"What is it with you and abusing those cute Kyle toes of yours?" Jan asked, shaking her head. "Poor little toes." Jan peered into the fridge, trying to figure out what was up for grabs and what might incur the wrath of someone if it was found missing. "Want me to kiss it and make it all better?"

At the expense of his lesser judgement, Kyle didn't respond to the offer. Someday women would make sense, today was not that day, and tommorow wasn't looking likely either. "I don't wear shoes, I kicked one of those drone things in the Danger room, and snap, broken toe. Or fractured toe. Same thing. It's cool though, it'll heal before I'm done my waffles." And indeed, despite it not being breakfast time, Kyle had a pair of waffles on his plate.

"Ow!" Jan winced, then settled on a couple of slices of pizza. If anyone complained, she'd offer to order another pizza to share. "Did you at least win over the evil drone?"

"That one, yeah. Punted it into a wall. And then got tackled by another one." Kitchen or no, Kyle's approach to waffles was to tear them into strips and eat them with his fingers. Forks were just inefficient sometimes. "Which I think was the point or something. I dunno, I'm saved from debriefing or disbriefing or whatever it's called until my toe heals."

Jan didn't bother reheating the pizza. "Which won't be long, right? If I broke a toe, ow, I'd be in so much pain and it would take forever to heal, but you can just break them all the time and be ok almost right away, not that you should just do that all the time. Still, it has to be nice to know that if you get a bit hurt you'll be ok pretty quickly."

"I guess, yeah." Kyle said, although quieter then he'd been only a few moments before. He shrugged a bit, and tore off another piece of waffle. "It should take about an hour, give or take. It's faster if I eat, or if I'm asleep. Not sure how that works, exactly, but there you go. And healing's faster then growing stuff back."

"I think people always heal faster when they're rested and have eaten too, I guess," Jan replied, then took a bite of the pizza. "Body's way of saying 'hey, you take care of me and I'll take care of you.' So, um, are you ok after yesterday?"

"Mostly, yeah. Laurie's not talking to me yet, but she also didn't throw the apology donuts at me or anything, so it's a start." Kyle shrugged again. "Doc Samson had a bunch of things to say about suppressed anger and healthy ways to, like, cope with it. But that might've been more because Marius and I tried to beat each other up in the locker room." It was possibly not the best time to be honest, but Jan would find out eventually, one way or another. That sort of thing always ended up coming out and it was just best to get it done and over with.

Surprised by what Kyle had just told her, Jan stopped in mid-bite. "You and Marius did what? Why? Was this a real fight or an out-of-hand training session?" She wondered who had started it, but didn't really want to ask Kyle about that.

"We both kind of snapped at the same time. Forge was my roommate, before he moved in with Angelo, and Marius was in the suite at the same time." Kyle explained, voice only cracking the once. "So, yeah, kind of a real fight. There was some punching and some shoving, but nothing more than a couple of bruises."

Jan sat down across from Kyle. "I'm so sorry. I know that's not much to say, but I am. I didn't really know Forge, but he seemed like a pretty cool guy. I didn't understand half of what he said, but still."

Kyle laughed. "If you got half of it, you're better off then I am. I used to just start asking for explanations in Kyleese because otherwise I had no freakin' clue what he was saying." It wasn't easy to talk about, harder still to use the past tense. "It's stupid, but I totally miss the stupid annoying stuff. Like that he smelled like burned ass about half the time, or having to track down my keyboard because he decided it needed to even more Kyle proof."

"'Kyleese'?" Jan grinned; it was a small one, but it was there. "I'll bet he sometimes threw in fake works just because no one would know the difference. Like, words that were almost real but not quite, just because people would think it must be right." Jan decided that Kyle needed a hug, or at least a shoulder squeeze, but he was a bit too far away for that. "But, see, thinking things like that is good, I think. You wouldn't want to forget all about him, right? Yeah, thinking about someone you lost can be painful. It's kind of weird sometimes when I think about missing my mom because I don't remember her that well, but you've got all of these memories of Forge. I wish I had those sorts of memories about my mom. Not the burned ass one, though. I'd like to think she smelled nice."

"Kyleese. It's like English, only if there's science involved, you use sports metaphors." Kyle explained. "It's the only way I passed Algebra and Biology. Forge did my tutoring, and I know he said he was gonna be bad at it, and sometimes I wanted to chuck him in the lake, but I passed, and he wasn't -that- bad at it."

"Do people really get tossed into the lake a lot around here?" Jan asked. "I heard about that, but really? And yeah, I'm thinking tossing Forge into the lake wouldn't have been that great what with the metal parts and all unless they were really water resistant and not very heavy."

"More then you'd think. I think I've been laked more than a couple of times myself." At least once by Nate. "I think they're waterproof. Forge can't really swim for crap, but I ponded him once way back a ways." Kyle shrugged. "I think it's like, an initiation thing. I'm surprised nobody's ponded you yet. But then, you've got an easy out. You get tiny and hide and it's hard to throw something in the lake if they're only an inch tall."

He then grinned in a entirely troublemaking way. "Course, on the other hand, we could find out just how easy you can get out of being tossed in the lake...."