xp_logs | Doug and Forge

Per his email, Doug comes by to take Forge out to drink and chatter about things that have no real bearing on anything in particular.

Doug rapped his knuckles against the jamb of the door to Forge's suite. Navigating traffic out of the city had taken a little while, but it hadn't been too onerous. "Ready to go?" he called in, not immediately seeing Forge.

Forge looked up from his laptop, scrolling absently through poorly-designed web pages and photos full of posed smiles. "Southeast Dallas Senior High School. Go Rancheros. Dumbest mascot ever. What the hell is a 'Ranchero'? Sounds like something from Taco Bell."

He shrugged and gestured at the screen. "My old high school. I thought looking at where people are now would... that it'd be...I don't really feel anything. Class of 2006, and not a single one of these people means anything to me."

Doug nodded to himself. He'd guessed right about the kinds of thoughts Forge was probably having. "Anyone who says high school is the best years of your life is lying. Unless you're lucky enough to go here, and even then you have a whole different set of problems." He snagged a jacket from where it draped over a chair. "C'mon, let's go have some drinks."

Forge caught the jacket one-handed and shut the laptop. Reflexively, he picked it up and tucked it under his arm, then stopped and laid it back down on the end table. "Yeah, I could use some air. This place has been a little... tense, you might have guessed."

"Yeah, just maybe," Doug replied, leaving his worry about the line of Forge's thoughts unspoken. Because they were men, and that's what men did. Instead, they took each other out to drink and chatter about inanities to take their minds off of things. "Harry's, or someplace else?" he asked.

"Harry's," Forge said as he shrugged into his jacket. "I have a morning class tomorrow and with my absolutely final finals coming up, I'd rather not have to try and take a 4am train back with a hangover."

"Good point," Doug decided. "I'd thought about staying sober enough to drive you home, but I have a feeling that would be unfair. I suppose I'll be sleeping on a couch or in one of the guest rooms or something." In reality, he'd been planning in that direction the whole time, but again, that wasn't the sort of thing to be said aloud.

Forge jerked a thumb at a mostly-shut door, through which the dim light of a monochrome monitor could be seen. "We've got a spare. Which I really ought to get all my work stuff out of before Crystal comes back. She hates it when I bring work home... well, upstairs. Trust me, you think she's icy on the journals?"

He held his hands up and dramatically mouthed "No IDEA" exaggeratedly.

Doug snickered and tossed his keys from one hand to the other. "Drive down, or just leave the keys here, you think?" he asked. "And yeah, I've been meaning to ask you what it's like to date and move in with the one woman we know who's -more- of a clothes horse than my girlfriend?"

Forge thought, then headed out into the hall. "Walk it, it's warm enough. And dude. I don't think I've seen her in the same thing twice. And speaking of your girlfriend, which we weren't, but for the sake of awkward segues," he added as the two walked down the curving staircase, dodging two of the younger students engaged in a rubber-band duel, "I hear from a little kleptomaniac birdie that you're finally taking the plunge. The big commitment."

Doug raised an eyebrow as he tossed his keys onto an end table and followed Forge out. "If by 'the big commitment' you mean moving in together, then yes," he replied. "And kleptomaniac AND gossipy birdie, more like," he said in a good-natured grumble. The only known thing faster than light was the Xaviers' gossip machine.

"I prefer to think of it as 'unconventional intelligence networking'," Forge replied with a smile as they headed outside and towards the road leading to Harry's Hideaway. "Or what passes for intelligence in Jubilee's case. And back to the point you're attempting to nimbly avoid, moving in together. Crystal and I did it totally by accident. How're you and Angie getting on after the whole, you know, weird dead cocoon thing?"

"Well, between the 'weird dead cocoon thing'," Doug made airquotes and shook his head at Forge's phraseology, "and the return of Angie's precog, things have been a bit...odd at times." Which was an understatement. "But we were sitting around and talking about it one evening, and it just seemed like kind of a natural step to take given how much we were spending the night in the other's apartment."

Forge laughed at the admission, then motioned to his left arm. "When I was recovering from having the giant Hungarian douchebag rip my own arm off and beat me three-quarters to death with it, somehow almost all my stuff made its way into Crystal's suite while she was taking care of me. I swear, I'm one of the seven smartest people on the planet, and that woman still manages to be a step ahead of me. And don't even get me started on when she and her sister get together. You're completely lucky that Angie's an only child."

Doug snorted as they walked through the dimming twilight. "She has enough of a rivalry with her cousin, I can't decide whether it'd be better or worse with an actual sibling." He grinned. "So she just kind of decided for you that you were moving in?"

"I'm just saying I woke up and all my stuff was there. Strange magical powers, I don't know. I suspect a lot of morphine was involved at some point. Hey, maybe that's the connection," the young inventor said eagerly, "I get dismembered, you get turned into mutant linguist Play-Doh and reconstituted - ew, by the way - and then our women take advantage of us in our weakened state and the next thing you know, there's His and Hers coffee mugs next to the expensive espresso machine. My god, they're in on it together!"

He smiled broadly, teeth white in the dim light. "God bless 'em."

Doug held the door to Harry's open for Forge. "I'll drink to that," he said, waving to Harry to set up a pair of pints.