xp_logs | Forge and Dani / Forge and Angel (Reply)

While working on his car, Forge gets visited by some of the womenfolk looking for different things.

A few expert twists of a screwdriver, and Forge slid the expensive stereo unit out of the dash of his car, carefully reaching out to place it on a nearby cart. Music was still blaring from the radio on his workbench, though, and he sat up in the driver's seat to air-drum along with the Who's "Baba O'Riley" for a few bars before hopping back out of the car for the bombastic chorus. Screwdriver and wrench in his hands, he mimed along with the beat, jumping up and down in place excitedly as the music built to a crescendo, then dropped back to a lone Townshend guitar outro.

The cab that Dani had taken back to the school dropped her off at the gates and she'd trudged the rest of the way with her bag on her back. The time away had been good in some ways, bad in others, but Manuel had asked her to come back and...the truth was, she did miss this place. The insanity of it. The tribe.

She wasn't really better per se, but she'd had time to think, to consider and to begin coming to grips with her own mind. She was willing to TRY anyways. A beaded choker that she had found in a shop covered the scar on her neck, but otherwise she looked the same in her jeans and flannel shirt covered by a beaten army surplus jacket. Her hair was in its customary twin braids.

Avoiding the front door, she went around back to the kitchen belatedly realizing that she had forgotten to email Scott or anyone that she was coming back. Well, she'd deal with it when she needed a room since she'd moved out of hers. Music from the garage caught her attention and she headed over to see what was going on.

Forge noticed the motion at the door, and concealed a doubletake at seeing Dani coming into the garage. Slowly, he dropped the screwdriver into his toolbox, but kept his fingers wrapped tightly around the handle of the wrench. "Didn't expect you back... so soon," he added the last after an awkward pause. "Folks have been a bit concerned."

"Manuel asked me to," Dani replied, setting her bag down. It felt weird being back. She'd been at Xavier's a couple weeks before she'd left again, but she hadn't really felt home during that time. It had been months since she had really been there, "Ain't gonna solve anything if I run and hide from everything forever. But...concern is appreciated. You been okay?" he looked okay. He looked the same. Even his fears felt the same. That was...comforting in its own way.

"Manuel also said you'd had a bit of a development with your powers," Forge replied pointedly, crossing his arms on top of his car, wrench still gripped in one hand. "Pulling fear right out of his brain without having to resort to illusions. That's new, and a bit disconcerting, to be honest."

He sighed, levelling his gaze on Dani. "Okay, flat-out. I've already had to throw down with Jay about the whole made-into-a-killer thing. Are we going to have to do that dance? Because I'd rather not, but if I have to..." He twirled the wrench on one finger before catching it in his hand again, his eyes never leaving Dani's face.

The wrench caught her attention for a minute and she stared at it, her face unreadable, "I ain't got a problem with you, Hahkota," she replied evenly, meeting his eyes. "This is the place to be when your powers do interesting things. Mine are doing just that...but I got control. Ain't gonna do something on accident," she'd determined that fairly quickly once she'd stopped to think about it. She DID have control. She always had seen peoples fears when she touched them or if they were especially great and now she just saw them regardless, but that didn't bother her so much. The lack of it bothering her did, but that just got complicated.

What he said about Jay unnerved her though. She felt close to Garrison, Pete and Jay, especially Jay, given what they had gone through. A common bond, even if they weren't really friendly together. She made a note to check on him. "What're you doing to the car?"

The tip of the wrench wobbled like a dowsing rod for a moment, as Forge's stone-faced expression held steady; then he shrugged and twirled the wrench with a flourish and shoved it into his pocket as he turned back to the vehicle. "Just some retuning. Got a bit of a project coming up, wanted to make sure everything was in order."

The answer was obviously an evasion - Dani knew as well as anyone that Forge was fastidious about everything he worked on being constantly "in order" - it wasn't unheard of for him to retune his car's engine two or three times a week just to keep it in top condition.

Accepting his answer, though she knew it wasn't entirely truthful, she indicated the tool box, "Want some help?" It didn't matter if he was being truthful or not right now, she was glad to see him. It didn't show so much in her expression or manner, but she was. "You look good."

Without looking, Forge withdrew a multitool from his belt and pitched it over the top of the car to Dani and jerked his head towards the open passenger-side door. "Speakers," he said casually. "Go ahead and pull them out and strip the wires. Using them for... another project coming up." Again, more evasive answers.

He knelt by the driver's door, sneaking the occasional glance through the car at Dani while they worked. The choker around her neck wasn't escaping his notice, and the differences in her voice matched up with the injuries he'd been told about. "So how was being dead?" he finally asked with his customary bluntness.

Catching it, she shrugged out of her jacket and rolled up her sleeves to get to work. Sliding in the seat and adjusting it back, she got to work, not at all put off by Forge's lack of explanation. She wasn't an inquiring sort of person and really hadn't ever been that much. "Probably more interesting to you than me," she replied evenly from under the dash, "Don't remember too much of it. Dreamt a little at the end. Ain't probably what you wanted. No answers on the afterlife or existence of God or anything. Guess because wasn't really dead."

Forge just raised an eyebrow as he fished the large speaker magnet out of the door, shaking his left hand to relieve the uncomfortable tingling sensation that affected his prosthetics when exposed to high-strength magnetic fields. "If I wanted to know the details of the existence of God," he said sarcastically, "I'd build a phone and ask him myself."

He kept working, removing various circuit boards and audio controllers from the interior of the car and placing them in a tray. "Control, you'd said?" he asked earnestly. "That's kind of a new thing for you. How's that working out?"

His comment about phoning God did make Dani chuckle. She'd been raised Baptist, but more and more she was simply not caring about the religion. She had maintained for years that she didn't care for the services in English, preferring them in Cheyenne, but it was more than that. They just didn't seem to matter much in her life anymore. Well, that was fine. "Control," she repeated, "Not fine detail control, but I ain't gonna slip up on accident unless you throw that wrench at my head," it hadn't taken a rocket scientist to figure out he had most likely considered just that or something similar.

"I ain't gonna throw a wrench at your head unless you slip up," Forge shot back in a teasing mockery of Dani's Midwest accent. He laughed along with Dani, but then his voice dropped into a more serious tone. "Are you going to be okay?" he asked - and for a moment, it was like the last span of years was gone and they could pretend that they were the same people who'd taken a road trip to Oklahoma and bonded over divorce papers, powwows, and Waffle House breakfasts.

It was easy to talk while under the dash, pulling the speaker out, she sat up and looked at Forge, taking time to think before answering, "Don't know," she finally said. "My head's pretty screwed up. I think a lot of it will be a lot of work, but I did a lot of thinking just...wandering. Didn't go too far, but didn't go anywhere in particular either. Made some decisions. I want to live, mostly. And that means I gotta deal with what happened somehow. Just don't know how."

"I ran off to Scotland after that mess a few years back with Glorian," Forge admitted. "Same thing. These days I usually just hit my lab or fly off to Attilan with Crystal for a long weekend. You have to find some moments of real life amongst the crazy. But we are who we are," he proclaimed. "The crazy's never going to let us go."

"No it ain't," she agreed, ducking under the dash to get the wires and strip them, "So then...you and Crystal...ain't talked about that. You serious then?" for a while she had tried to speak properly, not use 'ain't' and 'gonna,' but right now, she didn't care. It was who she was and comforting in its way.

"For a little more than a year now," Forge replied with a wide smile. "It's... oddly normal. Which you wouldn't think, being one of the seven smartest people on the planet and a mutant superhero dating a princess of a sovereign European nation... but she grounds me. Reminds me to live a little instead of just surviving day to day."

Wow. She knew it had been a while, but that was longer than she expected, though she had been missing too. She tended to forget that actually, "That's good then. If you're happy," she didn't really know Crystal, "She like frybread?"

"Don't rightly know," Forge said after a brief pause. "I can't cook it for crap and it's been conspicuously missing from the kitchen for a while." He looked up and smiled at Dani. "If you'd like to make some and come over some evening, I'm sure it'd be appreciated."

If Crystal didn't like frybread then Dani wasn't sure she could like her, Forge's opinion aside. Not knowing about frybread though, that needed to be remedied. "Subtle, Hahkota," she laughed, getting the wires separated and tossing them up onto the seat. "Okay. Give me some time to adjust? Then frybread. Promise."

"Deal."

***

Angel wasn't a very audio-oriented person - audible, though, was another story - but even she paused in the hallway that passed by the door to the garage and tilted her head at the noise blasting from inside of it. Cracking the door open, she was relieved to spy the normal "Forge is in the house" signs. And then she realized he'd be perfect to talk to.

Perking up, she hopped into the garage and tried to get his attention.

Oblivious to the young girl's entrance, Forge was busy removing CDs from his car and tossing them into a shoebox along with various tech manuals, half-finished gadgets, and what appeared to be a driving map of Finland.

The radio on the workbench was blasting something with a Southern-tinged rock feel to it, and the inventor's fingers were tapping out the beat on the hood of the black sports car. "Sweet Home Alabama," he sang along under his breath, "something something don't rhyme, wah wah wah..."

In typical girl fashion, Angel put her hands on her hips and glared in his direction. Well, talking hadn't done much good and the last time she'd set fire to anything in the lab, she'd almost been evicted - for good. But the song was catchy and after a second, she decided that he could wait as she broke out in an impromptu dance.

She was about as good at regular dancing as she was DDR; an Angel dance involved a lot of headbanging and spastic arm movements while she wiggled her butt.

The flailing caught Forge's eye in the rear-view mirror of the car, and his mouth quirked in a smile. He stood up through the car's open sunroof and followed along with the melody on air guitar for a moment before laughing out loud at Angel. "Okay, to be added to the notes -one cannot boogie to Skynyrd. At least not without copious amounts of cheap beer being involved."

She had to stop dancing because of a bad case of the giggles. Which was probably a good thing considering that she could have dislocated something at the rate she was going. Angel hopped onto the hood of another car, making sure it didn't belong to anyone who would protest loudly and drop her from a great height, and settled crossed legged. "So that means I won't be boogie-ing any time soon to them, again," she said cheerfully. "Blech, beer."

Forge's mouth quirked in a smile. He remembered being an adamant teetotaler at Angel's age, concerned of the effects alcohol would have on his highly unusual mutant brain. As it had eventually turned out, discovered through many rowdy evenings among his Attilani fishing boatmates, instead of creating chaotic weapons of mass destruction, Forge's brain tended more towards off-key singing and uninhibited declarations of everlasting friendship of the "No, I love you, man" variety when exposed to alcohol. In other words, blissfully normal human behavior.

He lowered the volume on the radio with a gesture, scratching between his shoulder blades with a long-handled socket wrench absently. "So what brings you down to Grease Monkey Central, eh?"

"Well, I had just been wandering by when the call of the old siren - no, really, aren't they, like, ancient? - call grabbed me. Not your normal stuff but when I saw it was you, I figured I could ask you some questions that I might have been thinking about." Angel pillowed her chin on her hands. "What's it like being an X-Man? I mean, really like and not the stuff that we sometimes get told."

A year ago, she knew what she had wanted. All she'd wanted was to turn 17 and be offered an actual job with the fire department. Something had changed a little in that year and she didn't know what it was or how to pin it down. But asking questions of everything seemed like a smart idea.

Hoisting himself up to sit on the edge of the car's roof, legs hanging in through the open sunroof, Forge thought about the question. "I never planned to be an X-Man, to be honest," he admitted. "Way back in the day, Alison - speaking of ancient music - asked me to help out with the tech side of things. Communicators that wouldn't fuzz out around Lorna, for instance. They even dragged me along on a student pickup once. Ororo crashed the jet and of course I had to fix it. Anyway, when I got to the point in the training when Scott asked me to join... I was a bit surprised. I mean, I believe in what they do, I just always thought I'd be the guy on the sidelines playing Hero Support, you know?"

He breathed out, looking down at his hands. Even thinking about the events of the previous summer sent a jolt of sympathetic pain up his arm. "When I had to go to Japan, to catch one of the Brotherhood who'd gotten loose after the space station crash? I was good at it. I held my own, I kept it together. And it was terrifying, I'll be honest. But in the end, I knew I was doing good work."

Still looking down, he tapped his fingers together. "It's good work," he said, "and it needs to be done. And if you can do it, and it takes more than powers, trust me. If you can do it, you should be doing it. Not running off to CalTech or some Irish castle," he added in a snarky tone.

Angel blinked down at her hands and tried to absorb everything he'd just said. It was a lot to think about and she didn't even know why she was asking. Well, she did, really. It was the same reason that had led her to diving into a burning house in the middle of New York with no backup beyond the Professor's talking head and two teachers riding - literally - to the rescue. It was the same thing that had led to her going off with Yvette because, despite the trouble they'd gotten into, if given the choice between watching her friends back and not watching it, she'd do it all over again.

"I thought by now," she said slowly, "I'd be shoving my badge from the city in everyone's faces and pulling shifts every other week at the station, trying to juggle - and managing! - being a firefighter and being a student. But they haven't asked yet and the longer it goes on, I don't know what my answer will be. I love the guys but then I thought about college. And then I thought about the X-Men. And then my head imploded and I drank a case of Red Bull."

She sighed. "That wasn't the brightest idea I'd ever had."

"Nonsense," Forge insisted, "how else are you supposed to get your daily requirements of taurine and caffeine in an efficient manner? But I'll tell you this," he said, smiling and meeting Angel's eyes. "If you can hack it, being an X-Man will be the toughest thing you'll likely ever do. It comes with a price, not just in time, but in..."

He rolled up his left sleeve, running his right hand along the metal fibers and pistons of his artificial arm. "You have to get used to being afraid for your life, all the time," he said softly. "The people we go out there to stop, the things we pledge to do - they could get us killed. They should get us killed and we've been damn lucky so far. Look at what it's done to Nathan. To Scott. To Jean. Logan. Marie. Clarice got nuked. Garrison got his throat slashed open. I got my damn arm ripped off by a schizophrenic Hungarian supersoldier. But it's the good fight, serving the greater good. And if you ask me, that means we do it without question. Pay the price, without counting the cost."

It was kind of amazing what the students were and weren't told - all with pretty good reasons. Angel's hand hovered over his arm, not touching, before she pulled back. "I don't think it's a challenge," she blurted out and then blinked. "Sorry, the firefighting not the X-Men thing. And I feel guilty even saying that. But I'm fireproof and if I'm using my powers, I can probably survive a building being dropped on my head. Maybe. We think. I just - I'm more than being fireproof and a pretty face, you know? And I want to actually see that but I don't know how to go about it."

She took a deep breath. "Do you ever hesitate? Does anyone? What if I do? Because the thing with signing up with the station is that it's safe." Ironic.

"Hesitation," Forge repeated haltingly. "I--"

Carbon-fiber bones snapping and breaking, myomer fibers stretching and separating, greasy graphite coolant pouring out like a severed artery.

"No," Forge answered, hand still clenched around the spot where Nimrod had torn his arm from his body as easily as separating a drumstick from a Thanksgiving turkey. "Never hesitate. You do what's got to be done."

"I want to grow and I want to do important things. I just don't know quite how to get around to doing that." Angel fiddled with a lock of hair. "Is that okay? That I don't know?"

It felt like she was betraying Paul and the others at the station to think that she'd grown beyond her desire to do what they did.

Forge laughed at the admission. "Hell, Angel. I still don't know what the hell I'm doing some days. One of the smartest minds on the planet, and I'm dressing in armored black bodysuits and flying a billion-dollar plane into battle with megalomaniacs who can flipflop the Earth's poles like tossing a coin. Sometimes I wonder if the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could with his life."

He shrugged and spread his arms. "Then I take a look around and I say hey, I'm doing a good thing. And you can't argue with results. It's a law."

Something in Angel's chest loosened at the idea that Forge, who she thought was awesome as was his right, didn't know what was going on sometimes. It made it a little more okay for a confused seventeen year old to throw up her hands and go 'Argh'.

Her lips twitched, just a little bit. "Kind of like 'Stop! Obey gravity! It's the law!'?"

"Says the girl who flies," Forge teased, then nodded to the door. "Tell you what. If you jog on up to the kitchen and bring us some leftovers and Red Bull, I'll let you give me a hand replacing these shock absorbers and I'll tell you all about how I piloted a squid sub and singlehandedly saved the world from this Baron Zemo guy."

"Eee, tall tales, I love those!" Angel shrieked and then scrambled up and over the hood of the car to make a beeline for the kitchen before he managed to retort.