Logan & Jean-Paul, Late Saturday Night

[x-quebecois.livejournal.com]

Logan stops by to welcome Jean-Paul back... with several bottles of liquor.


Jean-Paul's suite was still empty except for the furniture that had been in it when he walked in. He'd arranged to have a few necessities shipped from Laval once he'd had confirmation that he was, in fact, welcome at the mansion once more. Those necessities had become lost somewhere between Canada and the state of New York, which meant that he was sitting on the couch, thoughts occupied by how many people were in residence here, how chaotic the whole of the mansion was, the dangers he now posed to the colleagues and students he'd lived with before.

If there was anyone who might have understood worrying about slipping and killing someone, it was Logan. So when the Mansion grapevine finally got around to him he made sure to purchase a disturbingly large amount of alcohol before going up to knock on the speedster's door.

Raising his head, Jean-Paul looked toward the door and debated the pros and cons of actually getting up to get it. It was unlocked, after all, but that didn't necessarily mean he wanted whoever was out there to come inside. Standing, he moved to the door and opened it, using his body to block the opening until he saw who it was. "Logan."

"Paul," he said, sniffing the air. "I'd tell you welcome back, but by the looks of it this is really the last place you want to be. How about we go get you drunk somewhere that has nothing to do with mutant teenagers or black leather?" he asked cheerfully.

Brow rising, Jean-Paul eyed the other man for a moment, then stepped back and nodded toward the couch. "This would be better than leaving the grounds," was all he said, though.

Logan shrugged. "Your call. Lemme go get the booze." he said, stepping back out to go fetch the aforementioned items. He returned a few minutes later with a case of Moosehead under one arm and his bike's saddlebags filled to the brim with bottles of booze held in the other. "What's yer poison?" he asked as he set everything down and closed the door. "And what the hell brings you back to Westchester, anyway?" he asked.

That was an easy answer - it wasn't even a lie. "Powers training - something... has happened. I do not understand it." Jean-Paul's eyes moved over the saddlebags full of liquor, the case of Moosehead, and then back to the other man. "You are really serious about getting me drunk."

"Two things I don't screw around with. Luckily for you, in this case it's drinkin'." he said with a grin as he grabbed a beer from the case, uncapped it, then handed it to the speedster. "Yeah. Mutation's a bitch and it loves you. This is twice now yours has up and changed on you?" he said, taking a lusty swallow of his own beer.

"Trice, if you count the loss of the light making ability as the first," Jean-Paul said, shrugging as he sat on one end of the couch. The light wasn't such a problem, really. Not knowing what triggered the concussive blasts, though. That was dangerous. Tipping the bottle toward the other man in a vague sort of toast, he took a long pull from it and then looked at it consideringly. It wasn't bad, though he wasn't necessarily a fan of beer most days.

Lucky for Paul he had a saddlebag full of whiskey, vodka, tequila, rum, all sorts of potent potables. "It's a bitch. How's your sister, speaking of?" he said, killing off the last of his beer.

"Fine," Jean-Paul said, shrugging. "How have things been here?" He took another long pull from his bottle, looking at the other man's saddlebags. There seemed to be a very interesting array of potential drinks there.

"The usual crazy. Kids blow up, kids do stupid shit, we put on black leather and curbstomp people for justice. The usual." he said with a shrug. "Nothing terribly exciting."

"Good to know," Jean-Paul muttered, upending his bottle and finishing it off. If they were going to get drunk, then they'd need to get serious about the drinking. "Vodka?"

"Yeah." he said, pulling out a bottle of said from the saddlebags. Along with a pair of shotglasses. "Shall we be civilized about this, or just say fuck it and take pulls from the bottle?" he asked curiously. Paul occasionally got bent about stuff like that.

"Do you not have two bottles?"

Logan just grinned and pulled the OTHER bottle of vodka out. "Good enough for me." he said, uncapping his bottle and holding it by the neck. "Skoal." he said, saluting Paul with the bottle, then drank deeply.

"Oui," Jean-Paul said, unscrewing the cap of the bottle he'd been handed and taking a pull from it. Vodka was rough going down, but if he had his way, he wouldn't be tasting much by the end of the night, anyway, so it wouldn't matter how bad it burned.

Logan sighed lustily as the alcohol burned its way down his throat. His healing factor neutralized the alcohol nearly as soon as it hit his system but the burn still felt good. "So." he said. "Missed you at the Alpha funeral." he said, with more than a little hint of accusation in his voice.

"Yes," Jean-Paul said, knowing he had and that he'd had reasons at the time. He couldn't blame his sister. He remembered well enough his own reasons for deciding against attending the funeral. Jean-Paul couldn't even sincerely apologise for his actions. Instead, he took another long pull from his bottle, let out a slow exhale, and said, "I have no good reason for not attending."

"You're damned right you don't." he said agreeably, then took another pull of vodka. "Shitty thing to do, Beaubier. Yeah, you got a beef with Walt. Right now, we all fuckin' do. Marie's chasin' down leads to see who was really behind it." he said. "They were your team, shithead. And you left Judd standin' alone."

"They were not my team," Jean-Paul said. And it was true. Only Judd had been part of Alpha Flight when he'd been there. None of the people who had died had meant anything to him. "But I should have gone, perhaps." Or sent condolences, at least. Another, almost contemplative swallow of vodka followed that. "It seemed unwise at the time."

"You're so full of shit." he said, still sounding friendly rather than hostile. "I get that they weren't your favorite folks and all that, but c'mon. For a man who moves at Mach WhatTheFuckEver would it have killed you to fly over, wear your black suit, and try to pretend that they meant something?" he said, guzzling more vodka now. "Ahhh. Doesn't really matter, I suppose. You don't give a shit about Heather and Mac and Judd and the others, you don't give a fuck. Your prerogative."

There was something so fundamentally odd about those words being spoken at him in that tone. Jean-Paul couldn't place why that struck him as odd, but it did. "I do not know." He didn't want to explain the concentric circles he and Jeanne-Marie had flown in for so many years, the fights and the reconciliations. Over and over again, always centering on one thing or another that had to do with Alpha Flight or the Program in general. He shrugged, though, and swallowed another few mouthfuls of liquor. Sometimes his metabolism was highly inconvenient.

"So you planning on sticking around after you get this new powers-thingy figured out?" he asked as he guzzled more vodka, enjoying the burn.

"No," Jean-Paul replied, because he wasn't. He eyed the bottle he was drinking from - it was actually starting to feel like some of the taste buds at the back of his tongue were dead. Slouching down against the arm of the couch, he made a face. "I think I will go back to Canada."

"And do what? Surf couches at the speed of sound?" he asked, killing off his vodka bottle. "Shit, I'm empty." he grumbled and reached blindly into the saddlebags for something.

Tequila.

He could deal with tequila.

Checking his bottle, Jean-Paul was almost surprised to find it mostly empty as well. "Why would I surf couches?" He asked, reaching out with one foot to see if he could hook one of the saddlebags and pull it closer to himself. "I do not know what I will do, when I go back to Montreal." He also didn't know how long it would take him to do whatever he needed to do to control his new power, but he wasn't interested in talking about that.

His foot couldn't quite reach the saddlebags, so Jean-Paul just killed the rest of the vodka, then set about seeing if, in the jumble that had created this problem for him with his power, he hadn't suddenly developed telekinesis.

He hadn't.

But Jean-Paul really wanted some of that rum.

Decisions, decisions.

Logan, with his keen powers of observation, tossed Paul the other tequila bottle. "Not like you gotta lot of life skills, there, speedy." he said with a shrug. "Can't exactly go back to skiing competitively thanks to whoever runs the Olympics having a bug up their ass, and I just can't see you in an office job." he said with a snicker. "You'd last a week. Tops."

Jean-Paul's nose wrinkled. "I do not want an office job, as you say." He uncapped the new bottle, then pointed one finger at Logan and said, "Next, we drink the rum," before tipping it back and taking a good, long swallow. It was smoother going down - not that he was really going to notice or care, anyway. His metabolism was fast, yes, but not necessarily fast enough to adequately combat an entire bottle of vodka in so short a period of time.

"Then what do you want to do?" he asked curiously as he worked on polishing off his own bottle.

Logan's liquor was disappearing very quickly. "Right now? I do not know. To understand my mutation again. After?" He shrugged. "One thing at a time."

"One damned thing after another." Logan said agreeably, then drank deeply.