Kyle and Jean-Phillipe

[x-wildchild.livejournal.com]

Kyle and JPC talk about lunch, and that one time that Jared kissed Jean-Phillipe, and India and alcohol poisoning and Laurie's constant need to bake cookies for people.



Jean-Phillipe did his best to avoid eating from the fast food franchises on Empire State's campus. Partly from a desire to save his pocket money, partly from a concern about the health issues with heavily-processed American foods, and partly because his power required a hefty amount of fuel. So instead he brought a number of sandwiches and other items in a battered lunchpail that he still retained from his time working in the docks and warehouses of France. It was one of the few sentimental items the normally unsentimental Frenchman kept with him. Today's lunch was cold roast beef cuts on a variety of breads with a variety of toppings. If he needed to eat as much as he did, he preferred to mix it up.

"Trade you. I've got turkey, bacon and avocado." Kyle dropped his backpack at Jean-Phillipe's table and then shrugged a messenger-style bag off his shoulder and dug in it for one of the many paper sacks he'd put his lunch - and breakfast - and snacks - in. "And cookies but Laurie made 'em so I figure you've got the same."

Jean-Phillipe grunted. "Bonjour, Kyle." By this point of the semester, he'd gotten used to the feral's tendency to simply arrive at a table and sit if there was someone he knew at it. It wasn't that Kyle was being rude, it was just that he was...amiable. It wasn't even really possible for Jean-Phillipe to be all that cranky at him. Perhaps it was a secondary mutant power, akin to Yvette's tendency to make everyone around her smile. "Enh," he replied. "If you like roast beef, help yourself." He was also used to Kyle's gradeschool-style trading of food.

Kyle snagged one of the sandwiches, and left one of his own in it's place. "Dude, this is me. I eat raw ground beef as a snack. Of course I like roast beef. You have cookies or did you actually like, manage to escape Laurie deciding to make everyone she knows cookies to take to school?" He didn't know what went on in Laurie's head sometimes but it meant he had cookies, and so he wasn't going to complain. "So, like, I have a stupid possibly totally fricking offensive question, can I ask it?"

"Escape Laurie and her 'you must eat better things' crusade? Ha. Not likely." Jean-Phillipe cocked his head. "Well, we cannot know how offensive the question might be until you ask it, so you may as well, non?" Besides, he doubted it could be -that- offensive.

"At least they're cookies and not like, rice cakes or whatever." One of the few foods Kyle could eat that he just plain hated. "Okay, so what is up with my dumbass roommate and kissing you or whatever? Because I think he's having some kind of like, dude I might be into dudes crisis or something I dunno, but he texted me about it and was like, totally freaking out."

"I have absolutely no idea." Jean-Phillipe shrugged expressively. "I am sure that the numerous shots he had to drink had his judgment...impaired." He was far from one to cast stones about a person pushing the limits of a situation, but... "I was not interested in simply being a drunken experiment. Besides, he is not entirely my type."

Kyle waited a beat to make sure he wasn't going to get a bad shock from the sometimes cranky Frenchman and then nodded. "Okay, so basically what I figured, he's dumb and was drunk. Which is kinda what he does, but whatever, as long the the dude doesn't puke in the room I'm not gonna give him shit. It's his liver." Living with Jared wasn't entirely different from living with Manuel and his baby sister. In that in Kyle's opinion, Jared acted like a five-year-old sometimes.

"Liver damage is not a pleasant way to die," Jean-Phillipe said after a pause. He had seen it once or twice among his coworkers and their families before his power had manifested. Men who drank to escape the drudgery of their day-to-day life, and then drank to escape the harsh words of their friends or family, until they finally just drank to drink. "But then, I supposed most ways of dying are unpleasant, all things considered."

"Electrocution sucks." Kyle said, chuckling. "Just so you... aw, shit." The wince from the other man was fairly obvious. "Not gonna ask, don't wanna know, feel free to throw something at me that I can't eat if I just say something totally asinine." He knew Jean-Philipe's background, anyone on the team did, but not all the details and if the Professor saw fit to keep him around and no one else was throwing a shitfit, Kyle wasn't gonna ask questions.

Jean-Phillipe waved off Kyle's apology. "It is fine. It was during Day Zero," he explained, despite Kyle's protest that he didn't need to know. "One of those situations that was full of poor options." He doubted that he was the only one that had faced that kind of decision over the several days of Apocalypse's attack.

Oh, that he kind of understood. "Yeah, I hear that. Lose-lose situations suck. So, total subject change before we both get totally emo, uh, they give you a trainee name yet, or what, dude?" Kyle figured a subtle subject change wouldn't be remotely possible, and it was easier and less stressful to just be honest about the whole thing.

"I am not sure. I think that some variation on 'Sparky' seems to be the consensus." Jean-Phillipe wasn't actually all that annoyed by the 'trainee codename' thing. When he'd worked on the docks and in warehouses, his coworkers had coined nicknames for each other. It was a mark of respect, in an odd sort of way, the goodnatured teasing. And so he took the codename from the other X-Men in the same way.

"Could be worse. You could be Hamster." Kyle couldn't call Lex by his codename without at least a little bit of snickering. He shortened it to Ham a lot. "I mean, Lex kinda got the shit end of the stick there."

"Merci a dieu for small favors, I suppose."