Kyle & JPB | Friday Evening (backdated)

[x-quebecois.livejournal.com]

Kyle visits JPB's apartment so he can write his paper in peace and bacon.


Kyle had a sort of vague idea of just where the place he was looking for was. He knew where Laurie's job was, and once he got there it was really easy to just follow the right smells. Which he supposed would have looked really goddamn weird anywhere else, but District X's residents had already picked up a tolerance of unusual habits.

One man occasionally stopping to re-orient his nose wasn't such a big deal when you looked at the bigger picture.

He shifted his bookbag back up on his shoulder and knocked twice, and then sort of ... sagged against the wall.

Jean-Paul quirked his head to the side when he heard the knock at his door and then got up to answer it. There weren't very many people who knew where he lived, after all. Upon opening the door, though, he found himself looking at a... very tired-seeming Kyle. "Bonjour," he said, raising an eyebrow at the younger man.

"Hey. So, you know that like the entire path from your guys office to here smells like you? I mean, there's gaps and stuff where I guess you fly or something, but yeah." Kyle said. "Is that weird? I mean, maybe that's weird, I dunno."

"You are the one with the super nose," Jean-Paul pointed out, tone reasonable. "So I think you are the only one between us that is qualified to say whether it is weird that the pathway to my apartment smells like me." He stepped back, holding the door open for Kyle as he gestured for him to come inside.

Kyle grinned. "You know, it's just that I totally stalked you because I kind of want to flush my roommate's head and all, and I figured maybe that was kinda weird." He ducked past Jean-Paul into the apartment. "Okay, more than kind of. I could live with the dude when it was just like he didn't know he was being a dick but how can he not know? I mean, dude."

"Je ne sais pas," Jean-Paul said, shaking his head. "I have no idea, but since I am only antagonized for the amusement I provide him, I have decided to ignore him." He closed the door behind Kyle and turned the music on his radio down before heading into the kitchen. He'd leave the fact that Kyle was able to scent-stalk him out of the conversation for now and just made a mental note to fly farther, if he wanted to get away from people at the mansion.

"I don't know what that means!" Kyle was sometimes aggressively mono-lingual. Eventually he was going to take ASL classes because fuck, there was Artie and he was a cool guy, and he had to take two semesters for his degree, he was just putting it off. "So, can I hide here until I don't want to flush his head? Because well, he's annoying and stupid, and also Jubilee made me a map of all the places that'll deliver into District X."

"Je ne sais pas - it means 'I do not know,'" Jean-Paul translated. "Also, I would not have let you in if it was not okay, as you say, for you to hide here." He walked into his kitchen and opened the refrigerator. "I have bacon."

"You have bacon and I can hide here? God damn, man, can you just adopt me or something?" Kyle said, laughing . "No offense or anything but I am totally gonna forget what that means on purpose. It's not that I don't care, it's just that Jean-Phillipe says French stuff in the Danger Room and I tell him I don't know what it means and then he gets all cranky and staticy, and it's really funny."

"Consider yourself adopted, oui?" Jean-Paul said, nodding even as he pulled the bacon from the refrigerator. He got a frying pan out as well, and then paused to consider Kyle's reasons for not remembering the French. "You like when Jean-Phillipe is staticy, as you say?" He couldn't really imagine why, since getting static electricity everywhere could be really uncomfortable, but maybe it was a thing younger people were into these days. "This seems... odd." He got the bacon in the pan, though, and it was sizzling nicely - there was a lot of it to cook. He supposed, between the two of them, they could get through the two packs he had. And probably most of the other food in the refrigerator, too. Perhaps pizza would be in order a little later.

Kyle laughed. This was going to go to the 'why are you smelling his pants' place again, he was half-certain. "Not that much. He's funny when he's mad - the guy's got a real like, talent for making up creative insults, and right now I'm on Danger Room babysitting duty. We rotate off sometimes, and it gives me something to do while I'm bored." It wasn't like easy mode in the Danger Room was boring, but Kyle's attention span was just so short sometimes. "So how's being like, what are you guys, private eyes? Is that a cool job?"

"Investigators, oui," Jean-Paul said, nodding. "It is interesting, lots of watching people do things." And killing, but that wasn't something that had really been in the job description and... well. It'd been a special case. It should probably bother him more than it did. "Boring things, most of the time. Following them from here to there and back again. Grocery stores, they seem to be a favorite." He shrugged, flipping the bacon. "Do you like your bacon crispy?"

"There are other ways to eat bacon?" Kyle asked, rhetorically. "So a lot of sitting around and watching people and doing those sudoku puzzles? Aww, I was kinda hoping you guys did the like, sneak around in the dark in fedoras thing." He knew better, but it was fun to tease.

"If I am doing puzzles, I cannot watch the people I am meant to be watching," Jean-Paul pointed out, flipping the bacon again. "Vanessa, she owns a fedora. She wears it in the office sometimes."

Kyle feigned a disappointed face - it was just a bit ridiculous. "See, nobody tells me these things! I would totally go bother Laurie more if I knew that." He liked Vanessa, she was fun. and he liked Laura. And Laurie. And Jean-Paul. He didn't know Bishop hardly at all, but 4/5ths of the X-Factor was fun, so that was good enough for him. And they had fedoras. "So I kinda missed it, what did my idiot roommate do to piss you off? Or was it the whole 'gay' as insult thing?"

"He attempts to hide behind ignorance, but I do not believe anyone can be so ignorant as he says he is and the fact that he persists after being told that he is being offensive... these are the things that bother me about your roommate, not necessarily the things he says specifically. It is that he does not listen, he does not learn." Jean-Paul let the bacon sizzle for another few minutes before taking it out of the pan and carrying the plate over to Kyle. "Eat, there is much more."

"Don't have to tell me twice." The bacon disappeared very quickly into Kyle. Because it was bacon, and the only thing better than bacon was bacon sandwiches. "So basically the same crap that pisses me off about him. He's a choad and he thinks he can get away with it 'cause he's from redneckville."

"Oui, and I do not believe this is an acceptable excuse. I do not think there is any excuse, truly, but certainly not where he has come from. Also, he continually asks me out for things like drinks. I do not drink much for the fun of it and not with people I do not like. Though he does this for the confrontation only, he says." Jean-Paul shook his head. "This annoys me, also."

"Dude, I'm kinda afraid to tell him that Cammie tried to get me drunk on screwdrivers." Kyle said. "And it didn't work." It might have, if he'd kept drinking the way Cammie did, maybe. "It's kind of terrifying how like, obsessed he is."

Snagging the last piece of bacon, Jean-Paul nodded. "And it is not healthy." Some people might have called him a hypocrite for that, but the Quebecois at least knew going into certain situations that he was going to get himself drunk - and he had to drink with a single-mindedness that was truly impressive if he wanted to get drunk. He hadn't gotten trashed since he'd come back to the mansion. Even drinking with Logan hadn't left him as sloshed as it could have. "But here, I will make more bacon and you will work. Do whatever you need."

"Are you sure you can't just adopt me? I'm clean. I do dishes..." Kyle said, laughing. "Mostly it's just a history paper, and my butthead roommate thinks he can copy it for a class, and I am so totally 'oh hell no' about that."

"As I said, consider yourself adopted," Jean-Paul said, quirking a smile. "I will even tell you that I leave the window over to the left unlocked, so if I am not here, you can get inside." He wouldn't subject anyone unnecessarily to Jared, after all, and Kyle had to share space with the idiot. "Text me if you are here, though, so I will not be surprised."

"Dude, I learned that lesson the first time Ramsey threw a shoe at my head after he found me reading on his fire escape." Kyle said. "No surprising anyone who is twitchy or sneaks around for their job." Because the sneaky people were also twitchy. Sometimes more than the just plain twitchy folks. "Getting boots thrown at my head fricking hurts."

Laughing, Jean-Paul shook his head. "Oui, I imagine it would. You should be able to dodge, though, I think." God knew pretty much no one had been able to hit him with regular, household objects in a very, very long time.

"Yeah, funny how that doesn't work if I'm busy trying to read a textbook and have headphones on." Kyle explained. "So yeah, I totally warn people now."

Comments

[x-wallflower-.livejournal.com]

<3 them both. I am amused that Laurie's response to Kyle coming to bother her at work is to feed him. But she does that with everybody.