Kyle and Doug, on the fire escape

[x-wildchild.livejournal.com]

Kyle visits Doug to 'borrow' the Danger Gym, since he often finds the one at the mansion too loud. They spar off-screen, eat lunch and talk about Jubilee's mouth. Yes, exactly like you think they do.



Doug stretched and wandered into the living room area of his (and he could almost manage to think of it as his without a twinge these days) apartment. He'd gracefully managed the morning-after dance with...Valerie, that was her name, and seen her off, and now he had the rest of the day to himself. For a moment, he wondered if the fact that he was getting very good at mornings-after, and the fact that his...partners were becoming a bit blurred together said something about his coping mechanisms, but then he kicked the thought into a mental closet and shut the door behind it.

The fire-escapes outside the Brownstone were actually more comfortable than Kyle had expected. The metal wasn't, but stretching out with his legs kicked up on a ladder rung and his head resting on his backpack and reading a book was actually a good way to relax. It was early enough that he could hear the noises of the city waking up around him, and catch the smells of the street vendors and their bagel-and-egg sandwiches and coffee coming in over the constant smell of exhaust and concrete and people.

He finished the chapter in his book, dog-earing the page to mark his place, and then rapped with the back of his knuckles on the window.

Doug tensed, mentally cataloging weapons within easy reach before his brain caught up and realized that an invader probably wouldn't have shown the courtesy to knock on his window. Then he recognized Kyle, and went over to unlock and open the window. "What's up?" he asked, leaning on his elbows with his torso partly out the window.

First, Kyle handed in a paper bag that smelled suspiciously like a hot breakfast sandwich. "So, can I bribe you into letting me use your gym again? Because, dude, the odds of me running into one of your bosses is way lower than..." He noticed the suspicious look on Doug's face and shrugged off the sentence. "Okay, look, you guys have a -quiet- gym, and we don't. We have people in and out of ours all the time and I don't like to talk when I'm working out."

"It better be a damn good bribe, after the whole 'is your sister hot' thing. Just sayin'." Doug grunted and waved a hand. "But yeah, whatever, I'm pretty sure nobody's using it this morning. You owe me big time if I ever get chewed out for it, though." Doug accepted his tribute and cleared the window so Kyle could climb in. Not that he really thought he'd get chewed out for letting the young man use the gym, but you never could tell what might crawl up Remy's butt and piss him off on a day-to-day basis.

"If I bring them breakfast too, do you think they'll just let me show up whenever I want? Because Eddie down at the Bagel-and-Go makes a good bagel." Kyle stuffed the remains of his own breakfast in his backpack and clambered in through the window. "It's still cheaper than a gym membership and damn, those places are way loud which is what I'm trying to avoid here."

"Who the hell knows? Remy's probably the only one you might have to worry about, and these days I'm preoccupied enough making sure he doesn't kill -me-." Doug supposed his opinion might be colored by recent events, but whatever. "Loud and full of jackasses," he replied to the second half of the discussion.

"Loud and full of dudes who use spray tanner and think their abs mean they can ... wait, back that up, why does your scary boss want to kill you?" Kyle had been halfway to suggesting that jackass and 'dudes who use spray tanner' were synonymous, and then got throughly distracted. "No, you know, on second thought, don't answer that. If you don't tell me, I don't know anything about it."

"Guidos." Doug crammed a wealth of expressive disdain into the single word. "Seriously, I'd like to find the guy who thought 'The Jersey Shore' was a good idea and break his kneecaps." He shrugged in reply to Kyle's 'on second thought'. "Your call. Some of my coworkers are pissed at me, but I don't think any of them actually want to kill me."

Kyle shrugged. "I really really don't wanna know all the weird spy stuff you guys do that might make your boss wanna kill you. I just wanna exploit your totally empty gym." He hoisted his backpack over his shoulder and turned to shut the window behind him. He might as well be a reasonably polite 'guest'.

"Is it really exploiting when you bribe me every time you come over, and I let you in every time?" Doug asked with a raised eyebrow. "I mean, this is beginning to turn into a habit. You're pretty much just a member of the Danger Gym at this point, except your membership fee is paid in breakfast bagel sandwiches." Speaking of which, he tore open the wrapper around Kyle's 'membership fee' and laid into it with gusto.

"If I call it exploiting I totally feel like I'm... I dunno, it sounds better." Kyle said, watching the sandwich disappear into Doug. "Dude, I'd ask what made you decide to try to eat that whole thing in two bites but, uh... well I'm pretty sure I saw her in one of your shirts about half an hour ago. Long night?"

"You could say that," Doug replied unselfconsciously after he swallowed the last of the sandwich. Valerie had been...enthusiastic. And athletic. There had been very little sleep involved, not that Doug was complaining. Besides, Kyle had been the one camped out on the fire escape, so it wasn't Doug's fault he'd gotten an eyeful.

"I could also say that dude, you are surprisingly comfortable with your pantlessness." Kyle jabbed a thumb in Doug's direction, indicating the boxers the other man was wearing. "And as a dude who has been naked with another dude, I am not pointing this out because I am like, freaked out here. I'm just saying, pants. Or shorts. Or a man skirt, I don't care, I just didn't want to have this new information about your underwear."

Now there was an explanation. So yeah, my body modesty's never really been the same since I was eaten by a giant Russian meat computer. Even considering the wacky things that happened in their lives, that one was a bit much. "Sure, whatever," Doug said dismissively and wandered into the bedroom to fetch his jeans from where they'd been rather haphazardly flung over a flatscreen monitor.

Kyle paused halfway out the door, and turned. "Dude, you know you'd risk getting bitched out a lot less if you'd just come down to the gym with me. I need a spotter anyway, and you know, me kicking your ass means you won't have to buy coffee to wake up." And sparring Doug was actually kind of fun.

"Okay, whatever, but I still need pants for that." He dropped the jeans on the floor and went to find a pair of workout shorts and a tank top instead.

---

A long and intense workout naturally led to the need for food, as Doug had demonstrated with the breakfast sandwich. And so working out with Kyle, which was an actual workout and not "workout" like had happened overnight, led to the two young mutants attempting to eat their own body weight in brunch at the greasy spoon Doug had declared the spot for lunch, since he was buying this time around. "It's a good thing I get paid pretty well," Doug noted as he watched Kyle put away another serving.

"Dude, you work with Jubilee and you're surprised at how I eat? I took her out for lunch cause she's doing this restaurant map thing and I figured that'd be the decent thing to do if she's gonna crawl all over the city and -Jesus-. I watched her, seriously, no joke, put an entire waffle in her mouth." Kyle had been fascinated and horrified and kind of turned on by it. "Fair's fair, I might've kinda suggested she couldn't and she was proving me wrong but still. Dude."

"I didn't say I was surprised so much as I'm glad my wallet can cover this," Doug corrected Kyle. "You're right, I work with Jubilee, and I know how much she can put away. She has...a very talented mouth," he noted with a straight face that broke for the slightest of smirks.

Kyle pounded the table a few times as he struggled to not choke on the mouthful of water that had gone down the wrong way. "Yeah, she said the same thing when I said I didn't think she could do it." He coughed out. "My mistake, I shoulda known better, since she didn't even blink at some other stuff I said."

"Jubilee doesn't know how to back down from a dare. Just sayin'." Doug shook his head wryly. "And yeah, I haven't seen the topic of conversation yet that will make her blink. At best you get that California 'dude, grody' look out of her. And even that takes quite a bit of doing." Granted, it happened a fair amount in their line of work, but still.

"I knew there was a reason I liked her." Kyle said, grinning. "She's crazy, but she's fun. And she's totally doing this mapping restaurants in the city by like, mutant metabolism needs project, which is wicked awesome." Which reminded him. "Oh, hey. When you see her, can you give her these?" He pulled a stash of assorted fine-tip permanent markers out of his saddle-bag-turned-messenger-bag. "We ran out of colors, and the teaching supply store had a sale."

"Sure thing," Doug said, and tucked them away in the large pocket of the hoodie that he'd brought along in case the weather took a turn toward the chilly. "And I'll make sure she gets all the really good hole-in-the-wall places I know that she not might on there." He grinned. "She may know a bunch, but I know more."

"She mentioned that too." Kyle said, flashing a grin. "Mentioned something else too, I think she, uh, figured the gossip network had already gotten hold of it or something. So... you hit that, huh?"

When he was younger, Doug would have been mortified by this kind of frank 'guy talk'. But these days, he just took it in stride. "Mm-hmm," he agreed with a upward flick of his eyebrows as he took another sip of his water.

Kyle shook his head, and didn't bother to hide his grin. "So, total freak, or what?"