Forge and Jean-Paul

[x-cynosure.livejournal.com]

Forge emerges from the lab long enough to eat and be lectured.



Forge made his way up through the corridors from the lab to the stairwell and thus on to the kitchen, a familiar trek that seemed longer lately. Possibly due to exhaustion - he'd slept... sometime recently. He distinctly recalled being horizontal at some point during the past week, but couldn't quite pinpoint when. Even with the side effects of his mutant power mostly substituting for REM sleep, he could recognize when his body was just getting too exhausted to perform with any degree of reliable accuracy. While his prosthetic left arm didn't suffer from muscle fatigue and lack of coordination, the biological majority of his body was rebelling from the nonstop activity he'd thrown himself into.

Therefore, Forge decided, he could at least put some fuel in the machine in lieu of proper rest. And given that he'd exhausted his small cache of Powerbars and energy drinks in the lab office, he found himself somehow in the kitchen, only having gotten lost twice on the way.

He was somewhat surprised to find it occupied, however, before remembering that yes, there were other people in the mansion and occasionally they needed to eat as well.

"Hello," he said politely in a gravelly voice, then cleared his throat, reminding himself that he hadn't actually spoken out loud in days. "Hi," he repeated to the kitchen's other occupant. "Jean-Paul Beaubier, I presume?"


The older man turned away from the the stove, seemingly undisturbed by the intrusion. If anything he seemed more irritated by the contents of the pot bubbling on the range than by Forge, though whatever it had done to draw Jean-Paul's ire wasn't immediately evident -- the steam wafting through the kitchen was savory and smelled of bay leaves and cayenne.

"You'd be correct. And you would be?"


"Forge," the young inventor mumbled, then stood in awkward silence for a moment before continuing. "I was looking for food. I thought I'd find some here. Why wouldn't I? It's the kitchen. Of course there's food here. I am... rambling," he digressed, turning to one of the pantry cupboards. "Peanut butter. Rich source of protein but low in essential aminos. So, complementing with an amino source... wheat, aha. If I put the two together and add some source of potassium and Vitamin B6... what has potassium? Wish I'd paid more attention to Lorna. Bananas! Nonreactive source of potassium, good! Bananas are good."

As he rambled, Forge was setting various foodstuffs on the counter in almost a haphazard manner, reading through ingredient labels as if they were material data sheets. "Fuel for the machine," he announced as he looked at his array of items, then exhaled loudly. "What was I here for again?"

Jean-Paul gave the assembled ingredients a slightly pained look, then assessed his companion. Dark circles under the eyes, disoriented, swaying slightly on his feet. Fuel for the machine indeed.

"I believe you are here to sit down and keep me from strangling a pot of turkey gumbo. There are only ten minutes left and it would be a shame if I snapped now."

"Turkey. Source of tryptophan, also an essential amino. I..." Forge looked over his ingredients before opening a cabinet and shoving the entire pile in without any sort of organization. "It was Thanksgiving this week, wasn't it? American Thanksgiving, anyway. Not Canadian... Quebecois... yeah. Gumbo? What's the problem with it?"

He peered around Jean-Paul's side to squint at the stove, looking first with his eyes and then letting them unfocus and seeing with his unique sense for machinery. "The heating element's working fine, is it just not... what, congealing? Coming together? What does gumbo do?"

"Mostly it takes an abominably long time to cook and needs to be watched for most of that time." But not so closely, apparently, that the cook couldn't take time out to steer Forge toward the nearest chair. "You're the resident genius, is that right? We talked briefly via the journals when I arrived."

Forge shrugged and managed to look sheepish. "Well, technically I suppose intelligence isn't a precisely quantifiable characteristic, but I do have a completely intuitive knowledge of any sort of machinery or technology, have your basic post-graduate knowledge of a number of engineering fields, and I suppose if you wanted to use the urbane and outdated I.Q. measurement -- yeah, all right, I'm a genius. I should get a card or something." He sat in the chair almost automatically as he talked, picking up a set of utensils and beginning to balance them on the edge of the kitchen counter. "Do you know if they've found anything more out on our missing people from the other week? I've been busy, I didn't hear if we've found them yet."

"Around here, I should have been more specific anyway. Half of the staff likely has degrees in subjects I've never heard of." Jean-Paul watched the balancing act for a moment, then headed to the microwave to retrieve a rice cooker. "If there have been any further developments, I haven't heard of them. The last news I heard concerned the smashed comms. But I suppose it's too soon to stop searching."

"Never stop searching," Forge immediately riposted, clenching his hand, then opening it to reveal the bent remains of a soup spoon. Arching an eyebrow, he tossed the bent metal towards a bin and continued balancing a skeletal tower of silverware as if nothing had happened. "We don't give up on our people, not any of them. Don't believe it until you see the body, that ought to be a rule somewhere. Put it up on the wall --"

The smell of the turkey distracted him for a moment and a series of images flooded the young man's brain. Turkey was poultry, a bird, wings and feathers, turkey feathers were brown but he was thinking only of the light red feathers, Jay's wings in a sealed Biological Material crime scene bag stained dark brown with blood.

"--so gumbo's complicated," he continued, switching conversational tracks like a racecar shifting from fifth to reverse in the middle of a high-speed lap. "Dani usually cooks a stew up. Cooked. Cooks. She used to..."

Jean-Paul didn't have the same breadth of mental range available that Forge did, but he could at least keep up, and this was familiar territory anyway.

"If we're waiting for bodies, it is also too soon to pick a tense," he said quietly. "Don't tangle yourself over it."

"I don't want to be tangled," Forge admitted, letting loose a long sigh. His hands paused at either side of his impromptu sculpture of tableware, the metal left calm and steady, the flesh right shaking like a leaf in the wind. "I don't want to believe the worst, but... you have to expect the worst, hope for the best, and what you get falls somewhere in the middle if you're lucky."

"If you expect the worst, you can at least move forward, non?" Jean-Paul set bowl of hot soup and rice near Forge's steady hand. "Hope can keep you standing still, if you're not careful with it. And if it turns out to be other than the worst, it is better than what you had before." He headed for the fridge. "Usually, anyway. What do you want to drink?"

"Rum, dark, slice of lime," Forge rattled off quickly, before catching himself. "Um, belay that. I suppose..." he sniffed the gumbo, then blinked his eyes and coughed. "Okay, spicy. I think there's some cranberry juice in the fridge. I'll get it--"

He stood up abruptly, awkwardly banging into the counter and sending the arrangement of balanced forks and knives clattering down against the tiles. "--or I'll sit down because I'm having a bit of a low blood sugar moment, I'll wager."

"And if you fall and land on something sharp, it just makes more mess for me." Jean-Paul carried over the juice bottle and a glass with an expression of faint curiosity. "You are not old enough to drink, or did you simply think better of it?"

"I'm twenty-two," Forge said, then leaned down to pick up the scattered silverware. "I just have to keep reminding myself that I can't go down to Harry's and get shitfaced and tomorrow Dani's going to be standing there cooking frybread and Jay's going to be playing something horrible on his guitar and Garrison's... going to be playing something horrible on his guitar - I don't want to just dull this, I want to do something about it!"

He got up and angrily threw the handful of implements into the sink, listening to the metal clatter. "We know it was Sabretooth, we know Sabretooth means Brotherhood - I can understand Charles sitting on his hands after they kidnapped and tortured four of us. After all, we got away. Sure, I got an arm ripped off but I can build myself a new one. We should be out there finding them, getting our people back or taking an eye for an eye, not... not running lab work and making turkey goddamn gumbo!"

Jean-Paul watched the display impassively. "In that case, I have three suggestions. One, do something about your low blood sugar, preferably eating. It helps with thinking clearly. Two, sleep. See above. Three, wake up and explore courses of action currently not being exhausted by any of your better-connected teammates. You are with security here, so know their capabilities and shortcomings better than I." He set the juice and the glass down. "But then, you did say 'we'. I cannot speak to the importance of your lab work, but I have had it driven home recently that finding someone who does not wish to be found is outside the reach of my talents. Finding people who are being deliberately hidden, as prisoners or as corpses, is, unfortunately, much the same. So here I am, recycling leftovers, plotting classwork, and capable of being of being of some use if this turns into an all-hands-on-deck rescue in the next five minutes or even if I am left behind to help man things here. You, I am not so sure of."

The calm rebuke managed to cut through Forge's anger and hit home, as the younger man accepted the juice and sat back down with the proffered bowl of gumbo. "Thank you," he said after a few bites. Jean-Paul's words made sense; there'd been a mission of sorts to Wakanda, and he hadn't been asked along - they'd taken two of the trainees, and left him back in the lab. The Canadian speedster was right, he admitted silently, he really wasn't going to be any good to the team - or his missing friends - like this.

Before he knew it, his spoon was scraping the bottom of the bowl, and he'd downed at least three glasses of juice to kill the burning sensation in the back of his throat. "I'd call that a success," he said by way of thanks, standing up again and leaning his knuckles on the counter. "And... thank you," Forge said softly with a trace of humility edging into his words. "I need to rest, and then probably talk to the Professor about what I can do, directly."

"See, you are thinking more clearly already." Jean-Paul moved to collect the dishes, moving around the tired young man easily. "When this is resolved, I would like to talk with you about your book."

"Ah yes," Forge mused. "My fleeting fourteen-and-a-half minutes of infamy. When I eventually hunt down Erik and the rest of the Brotherhood, I'll have to ask if Mystique ever gave him his copy. But first, tryptophan coma."

Jean-Paul didn't even try to follow the reference; it seemed a better idea to let Forge go while he still had a chance of making it to a bed prior to collapse. "Of course. Pleasant dreams."