Angelo and Jane, Sunday Afternoon

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Angelo and Jane catch up over ice cream.


Angelo had stopped by the kitchen first, on his way up to Jane and Rahne's room. Balancing wasn't made any easier by carrying two quarts of ice cream, but with one in each hand and the help of his powers, he managed well enough.

He did find he had to knock on the door with the end of one crutch, though.

Why on Earth had she saved that? Jane wondered as she shook out the silver-spangled dress. It was the one she'd worn at New Years and it had a huge hole in the skirt where Mike had shut it in the car door and it had tore. It should have been rags ages ago. Jane stuck her fingers through the holes in shredded fabric and waggled them. Huh.

A knock on the suite door caused her to spin around. Dropping the dress on her bed, she bounced out of her room and she swung open the door. "Ange!" She exclaimed happily at the sight of the young man bearing ice cream. She stared to barrel into a hug, and abruptly noticed the crutches. "Here, give me those, " she said, stretching out her arms to relieve Angelo of his precious frozen cargo. "I don't know how you're balancing like that. I'm so klutzy I would be sprawled out all over the floor if I tried."

"My powers are good for it, with the weight the same on each side", he assured her, but was happy to relinquish the ice cream. "Almost kind of like telekinesis, in their way. How're you settlin' back in?"

Jane grinned at him. "I'm doing pretty good. I didn't bring too much back with me, so I'm mostly unpacked. Well, until the rest of it gets shipped." Plonking the ice cream down on a table, she rummaged around the kitchenette for bowls and spoons. "Rahne won't mind if I use her stuff, do you think?" she called.

"So what happened to you? How'd you get banged up?"

"Long as we wash it up after, I can't see why she would", Angelo returned cheerfully, settling into an armchair. "Team stuff - yeah, I joined the team a while back. Broke my ankle."

"That's really cool. Well, I mean, the busted ankle isn't cool, that sounds painful, but being on the team is." Jane passed him a bowl of ice cream and settled into the seat across from him. "Are you going to be on crutches long? Can I ask you what you were doing, or is this one of those top secret 'you never saw me' jedi mind trick things?"

He accepted the bowl, setting it down in his lap for a moment. "Shouldn't be much more than another month. An' this time, I really can't tell you. It was the same thing Clarice was doin', along with just about everybody else - let's just say fallin' from a height isn't fun, 'specially when the telekinetic can't catch you."

Jane winced and made a mental note to bring Clarice a bowl of ice cream. "Okay," she popped a a spoonful of ice cream and miniature peanut butter cups in her mouth and swallowed quickly. "So tell me what's been going on since I left then. What's the good dirt? What have you got on people? Who are all these new kids? I saw a couple of them in the halls earlier. Are they students? Amanda was saying that she and Marie-Ange and Doug and everybody are in this think tank thing out in the city. Did everyone move out there? Is Bobby around or is he out in the city, too?" At this Jane looked a little disgruntled. Sure they'd broken up before she left, but they were still friends. She'd hoped that he'd at least stop by and say hi.

He laughed at the sudden barrage of questions, digging into his own ice cream. "Yeah, we've got a few new students since you left. Everybody that went over to Snow Valley lives in the city now, they've got an apartment block Emma Frost owns so they all live there. An' Bobby, uh... moved to Ireland. He's gonna start Teacher trainin' over there." Nooot mentioning the marriage just yet.

"Really? Wow. That's..." That's really far away. "That's great. You'll have to give me his email address so I can write." A little something in Jane that she hadn't realized she'd been carrying died. "How'd he end up in Ireland?"

"Um, he... you remember Terry?" He wasn't prevaricating, not at all. "Her dad gave her their family castle, so she's livin' over there a lot of the time, an' Bobby's there permanently. Kind of lookin' after it when she's not there."

"Well, that's very nice of him. And he's got somewhere to stay while he's taking classes, too, I guess." Bobby was always doing nice things for people like that, and he and Terry had been getting pretty friendly there...wait a second. Jane looked at Angelo appraisingly. He looked kinda twitchy to her. Or maybe not. It'd been a while. Maybe Ange looked kinda twitchy all the time and she'd just forgot. But on the off chance that she was right... Jane leaned forward in her seat. "What aren't you telling me, Angelo? Are they dating? You can tell me if they're dating. Bobby and I are just friends, you know. It doesn't matter if they're dating."

"...yeah, they're together", he said finally, reluctant to tell her the next part. But she had to hear it from someone, right? "They got married last year."

"Oh." Married. She hadn't been expecting that. The dead spot in her chest got a little bigger. "I guess I missed the announcement," she joked with a weak smile. "Is he happy?"

"Seems it to me", Angelo said quietly, watching her with careful dark eyes. "He calls once in a while - writes more often. Timezones're a bitch."

"Hm. Yeah, I guess they would be." You're being silly, Jane, she thought, admonishing herself. It's not like you were pining over him or anything. I mean, hellooooo, Mike? If anything, you should be irritated that you didn't get an invitation to the wedding.

"Sorry," she said finally with a visible mental shake. "I guess that kinda threw me. Married. Wow. Did anybody *else* get married I should know about?"

"Not yet", he said with a crooked grin. "Jennie an' Marius might try an' convince you they did, but that's just a joke they pull out for the newbies sometimes. There's a whole lot of other good gossip, though."

"So? What are you waiting for? Get telling. Start with the juiciest, spare me no details." Jane bounced in her seat and smiled at him expectantly. It was good to be home. She'd missed this.

"Ah, well... don't know about the juiciest, but let's start with me an' Amanda. Been datin' now since March", he offered. "An' then there's Clarice an' Shiro - that didn't end so well, but at least they're still talkin' sometimes... Forge got dragged off into an alternate dimension for two years his time, couple of months in ours..."

"We're gonna come back to this whole alternate dimension Forge thing in a second, but You and Amanda? Really? That is so fantastic, Ange!"

"Me an' Amanda", he confirmed, grinning. "Can't remember if you were still here or not when Paige an' I broke up, but that was a year or more before things started with Amanda, so I guess it's as good as ancient history now."

"No, I completely missed that. Gosh, that's just the best thing. Well, not the breaking up with Paige thing, but you know what I mean." Jane grinned back at him foolishly. She liked the idea of the two of them together. They made a weird kind of sense.

"We're pretty happy with it", he said cheerfully. "But you know, you haven't said much about this whole adventure of yours out in the big wide world."

"Well, in some ways it was really boring. I spent a lot of time looking through old records. The Professor gave me a whole bunch of possible leads when I left so spent about a year tracking them down," she explained with a shrug. "I didn't find much and kinda gave up on it after a while."

"What else...I almost got arrested a couple of times, which was exciting in a not-good way. I got to see a lot of Chicago, which I liked a lot. The pizza they have there is so good, Ange. I also saw this huge ball of twine in Minnesota, and Paul Bunyan, which was kinda neat. I sat on Blue. The Garden of the Gods in Colorado was really pretty. I flew through that."

Jane gnawed on her lower lip. "After a while I just kinda ended up in Helena. I liked it so I stayed for a while."

"Helena? Where's that?" He'd never heard of the place. "An' what'd you nearly get arrested for?"

"Public nudity, as usual. You'd think people would be happy it was just a naked girl and not some weirdo who crash-landed in your backyard, but no." Jane rolled her eyes. "I really don't get people."

"Helena is a little college town in Montana. I worked at a juice bar for a while -- 'The Guava Hut.' I had to wear a little hat shaped like a guava." She made a face. "Everything was made with Guavas. I kinda of never want to see one ever again."

Angelo grimaced in turn. "Can't really blame you there. But you liked the small-town life, huh? I think it'd drive me crazy if I stayed there too long."

"Well, it's not tiny, although I guess compared to LA and New York it is. But there was definitely a small-town feeling to it." Jane tilted her head, trying to picture Angelo in Helena. "It was nice. I kinda felt like I belonged. When the rest of my stuff gets here I'll show you some pictures, it's really pretty there. But all good things come to an end I guess. The Hut closed and I...suddenly found myself with nothing to do, so I decided to come home. And here I am!" She finished with a bright smile

"An' it's good to have you back", he said with a smile in return. "Maybe you'll go back there someday, but I'm glad you wound up back here for whatever reason."

"Maybe," she agreed. "I'm really glad to be back, too." Jane glanced at her empty bowl with feigned horror. "Oh no! We're out of ice cream!"

He blinked and looked down at his own scraped-out bowl. "...so we are. Wish I could do what Medusa does an' send bits of me to get it. Her hair", he added hastily.

"It would be really weird if she could," Jane confided. Medusa? "Want me to get you some more?"

"She could", Angelo told her. "You never met Medusa - she was here just this last year, but her sister teaches here now so she comes back once in a while. The rest of the time, she's busy bein' Queen of Attilan. An' sure. Distraction from the nicotine cravin's always good."

"You're giving up smoking? Oh *yay*!" Jane stood and gathered the bowls. "I don't think I've heard of Attilan before. Is it in Europe?"

Angelo nodded. "Little island near Portugal. An' yeah, someone decided t'steal all my cigarettes when I was drugged up after the accident an' I can't drive to get any more. Doctors' orders at first, too, so it seemed like a good time."

"Hey, whatever works." Jane clicked the ice cream scoop purposefully. "So that's cool. If Medusa's a Queen, does that make her sister a princess or something?" A thought occurred to her. "Is she like Monet?"

"Yeah, Crystal's a princess", he said with a grin. "An' Monet's loosened up some since the old days. She's still herself, I mean, she hasn't changed that much, but... she's maybe a bit easier to get on with now."

"Clarice was saying something like that on the journals earlier, actually. Old habits die hard, I guess." She handed him his bowl. "Which, by the way, I can't believe everyone is still using. I was so surprised to see the login info on my desk."

He laughed, taking the bowl. "They're pretty useful, in their way. An' kind of fun for everybody to talk without bein' in the same room."

"This is true. Okay, so so far, we have, " Jane set her own bowl down on a table and stated ticking off her fingers, "Married Bobby, X-Man you and Amanda, Clarice and Shiro, which I may need photographic evidence to believe, princesses teaching at the school, a less 'Monet' Monet, and Forge trapped in an alternate dimension. Have I missed anything?"

"Not of what I said", he answered after a moment's thought. "Forge's back now, an' Amanda's not an X-Man. But pretty close for all that. For the rest... Kurt ditched the scars an' grew his fur back, an' changed his name to Sefton, 'cause he an' Amanda are brother an' sister an' so are he an' Marie... long story, don't ask. Sarah's back in New York an' in... somethin'... with Logan. Ms. Munroe's seein' Remy LeBeau. Marie's datin' this new guy called Garrison, he's up in Canada for a while. There's a bunch of new kids an' a few new teachers, you'll get to know all of them soon."

"I think I've been talking to one of them. Yvette? She seems very nice. And it sounds like everyone's been pretty busy." Jane swallowed another mouthful of ice cream and then flushed red as she thought about her choice of words. "Wait. I meant. Not that kind of busy. Um. Active?"

That got laughter, but purely affectionate. "Pretty much. In more ways than one - Yvette's a sweet kid, you're right. Oh yeah, an' Lorna isn't talkin' to Alex right now because his dog got hers pregnant. Kurt's got one of the puppies."

That got her attention. "Puppies? Here?"

"One puppy here. I think Lorna's still got the other two at her house."

"We can work with one puppy," she assured him. "We do not want to overload on cuteness."