Friday afternoon: Fred, Yvette, Angel and Kyle - Awkward...

[x-penance.livejournal.com]

Angel and Yvette are engaged in girl talk in the kitchen when Kyle and Fred walk in and overhear. Things get... interesting.



"...So then the professor is deciding that we all need to be providing the full bibliography. Because one person is cheating." Yvette sighed, shaking her head as she and Angel came into the kitchen. They'd just gotten back from class in the city, and were exchanging news of the day. "Any way, that is enough of me. How did the date go? With the boy from your photography club?"

"You know how they say artist guys are deep and sensitive and all that?" Angel asked as she went straight to fridge. "Lies. All lies. A spoon was deeper than this kid. I'm gonna be single forever." She sighed, taking in the fridge's contents. "Want a drink?"

"Orange juice, please." For her part, Yvette had put down her book bag and was climbing up on a stool to reach the snack cupboard. "And you will not be single forever, Angel. You are just having the bad patch with the dating, that is all. Maybe I could find you someone from Helix?" Like all young women in a relationship, Yvette felt the need to set up her single friends so they were as happy as she was. "There is Curt, the boy with the bat wings? He is very nice and maybe you could go flying together?"

Angel laughed as she got the orange juice out and grabbed two glasses. "That does sound nice, not gonna lie, but I think I'll pass on that one. Nope, I'm just gonna have me some good ol' fashioned Angel time." She put the juice away before looking back at at Yvette, smirking devilishly. "Since we're talking about relationships though...how're things going with you and Fred?" It was her prerogative as Yvette's best friend to make sure things were going well, after all.

"Fussy, fussy," Yvette replied to Angel's declining to be set up, but with a grin. "Things are going well. Very well." The grin grew slightly mischievous. "You were right about him being all tongue tied when I mentioned the leather pants on his team thread. The silly man cannot believe that he is having the sexy to me."

Angel took a brief moment to translate that -- she was quite fluent in Yvette -- as she sipped her juice. "I don't know if that's what's surprising him, or if it's the fact that you said it out loud on the journals," she said with a bit of a teasing grin. "'Sexy' isn't exactly part of your every-day vocabulary. Then again it could be both. Did you ask him about it?"

"Possibly both?" Yvette giggled a little. "And no, not yet. We have both been so busy lately, we have not had the time..."

As if on cue, Fred thumped open the door in the kitchen nearest to the garage, holding it open for Kyle as he entered. He was wearing his X-Uniform jacket over a dark t-shirt that has some mustachioed mans face over the word 'PIZZA'. Fred seemed to be finishing a thought he'd started in his conversation:

"No no, the guy named Sarjack isn't Sarjack, he's just a representative of Sarjak. They make that pretty clear in the third, eighth, and twelfth movies that no one can really truly know who Sarjak really is, except his representatives."

Fred thumped, Kyle padded, toes making clicking sounds on the floor. He had his jacket off, and t-shirt untucked and half pulled up so he could dry sweaty hair with it, and muttering was coming from the t-shirt covered place where his face was. "No, that part I totally get, I just... dude, I don't even get what Sarjack even is about. Maybe that's totally the point that I can't know Sarjack but somebody's gotta... hold on." He pulled his shirt completely down, and pointed at Angel. "Waaaait, back up our whole conversation because sexy isn't part of whose vocabulary?" His sensitive ears had picked up the words, but his brain hadn't registered them in all the Sarjack confusion.

"Tsk, tsk," Angel tsked in Kyle's direction. "Your super ears need to learn not to eavesdrop on conversations. It's very rude." She was trying to save Yvette, fairly certain her friend didn't want her boyfriend knowing they'd been discussing the possibility of his sexiness.

Predictably, Yvette's eyes were glowing brightly. "We were just having the after school snack," she exclaimed, hoping to derail Kyle with food. It usually worked. "Would you boys like something?"

"What're we with the what?" Fred was wrapped up in the conversation that he'd been having, and only caught a few words, one of them being 'sexy'. And there was Yvette. And she was eye-bright-blushing. And the conversation stopped when he and Kyle had walked in...

Oh, snacks. They were talking about snacks. Wait, were snacks sexy? Fred had never thought of them as such. The thoughts playing through his head made his face furrow in confusion, until he realized that there'd been a question to him in there somewhere, "Huh? Oh yeah. I could go for a bite. How bout you, Kyle?" If snacks were sexy, was it okay to ask Kyle if he wanted one?...Sure. It had to be. There was something he was definitely missing. Snacks do not equal sexy, as far as he knew...

Fred shook his head some, then looked apologetically to Kyle, "Sorry, man. Ah completely lost mah train a thought. What were we talkin' bout...?"

Kyle was not having any of this, but he wasn't going to turn down food he didn't have to either buy or make. "Oh, yeah, snacks. I totally want food. I mean, I could eat out but that'd require like, going downtown." He flipped a chair backwards, and straddled it, resting his elbows on the back of the chair, and stared down Miss Angelica Jones with a look that said "No, I wanna hear this."

Angel stared right back at Kyle for a long moment before finally letting out a dramatic sigh. "Fine, Kyle, you caught me. I'm actually secretly in love with you and we were discussing your sexiness. Possibly not smart in a place where you live and your girlfriend lives, but hey, live and learn." She held out a cookie for him. "Cookie?"

Kyle took the cookie, broke it in half and poked at it with a claw. Raisins. He could handle those. "I'm pretty sure you were not talking about cookies. Fred and I were talking about why the eff after like, sixty mumble movies that NV Studios still won't tell us who Sarjak is, and you guys were talking about how sexy isn't part of someone's vocabulary and I'm pretty sure you broke Fred, and now I'm never gonna find out who Sarjak is, so you must pay."

Then he devoured the cookie.

"Ah think Ah know what it was."

Came the deep and dark and-husky? throaty? something...different-voice from across the table.

Frederick Jacobi Dukes was not a stupid man. Well, okay, he wasn't the brightest; that's a fair assessment. Given that, it made sense that it'd taken him this long into the conversation to figure out a few things. Namely what the conversation was about: Yvette and Sexiness, and what he was going to do about it: Something.

And that Something was...not Frederick Jacobi Dukes-like whatsoever. At all.

Broad shoulders leaned across the table, towards the bright red mutant. Rich brown eyes took her all in, not looking at anything else. Not Angel. Not Kyle. They didn't exist right now, and if they did they weren't important just right now. What was important was looking right at Yvette, right into her bright bright eyes. What was the spark in his eye? A glint? A gleam? The gleam, bright and almost burning out of the brown around it. Had it ever existed before? It was hungry and sharp and seemed to be saying nearly a thousand things to Yvette. Quiet little things, that had no business in a chaste, pleasant conversation between friends in the kitchen. Things that seemed to intimate many, many fun things they could be doing besides chaste conversations in the kitchen. It was a very, very talkative little gleam.

What the gleam wasn't saying, the thumb across the back of Yvette's hand was trying its best to express, rubbing the little space between her thumb and forefinger back and forth and back again. It wasn't insistent or frantic or very forceful at all; in fact, if the room wasn't so quiet and the next words out of his mouth so Un-Frederick Jacobi Dukes-like, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was hardly there at all.

The next words out of his mouth were in that same unfamiliar resonant tone. The words weren't directed at all at Angel and Kyle. He and Yvette and the words were the only three things that existed in the universe at that point. Well, that and his small little smile as he spoke:

"Ah think it was about what Yvette thinks is sexy. And Ah'm very...very interested in that."

For her part, Yvette was staring up at Fred, transfixed. Eyes glowing brightly, her breath noticeably quickening, she reached out with trembling fingers to pull his face towards hers...

Then she remembered they weren't alone and she halted, looking almost guilty. "Perhaps..." Her voice cracked slightly and she cleared her throat. "Perhaps we could talk about this more? In private?"

Angel nearly choked on air as she watched the couple. She opened and closed her mouth a few times, not entirely sure what to say. Fred was one thing, but Yvette? She looked over at Kyle, hoping she wasn't just overreacting and this was every bit as strange and alien as it seemed.

Kyle's eyes were approximately the size of eleven inch dinner plates, and his mouth was open. Then he shook himself all over, rubbed his eyes with his fists, and carefully turned away from Yvette and Fred. "Okay, there is like, -way- too much concentrated something going on here, and I seriously do not want to be here if they like, destroy a table." He pulled his uniform jacket on, and looked directly at Angel. "Come with me, if you want to live." His fake-Austrian accent was atrocious.

Little did Kyle know that escape would not come soon enough. He had waited too long, and now was midst the shockwaves.

Fred was sort of aware of something going on with the two people behind him. He cared only in so much as Yvette seemed to care, so he nodded at her, his finger leaving her hand as he moved slightly towards the garage door, "...Ah gotta idea then, Copper Top. Why don't you grab a bottle of wine or two while you're up there, I'll go pull the car around the front, and we can drive out to the lake and have a more private...hands-on discussion about this out there? Would that be better?"

Yvette shivered slightly as his finger moved along her hand, more a psychological reaction than a physical one. All of a sudden, it seemed that years of pent-up sensations were bubbling up to the surface. "Much better," she replied, almost huskily. She stretched up on the stool to reach the higher-up cupboard where Lorna stashed a couple of bottles of wine for cooking.

Fred smiled broadly before he nodded at her and moved to the door leading out to the garage, without another word and with what could genuinely be described as an honest-to-goodness swagger.

After a few heartbeats, he came back through the door. He seemed, at least, to be normal Fred Dukes again. Looking around the kitchen confusedly, he grins and spots his keys on the kitchen island, holding them up on the same hand he uses to wave goodbye to Kyle and Angel. "Knew Ah left em in here somewhere. Ya'll take it easy, we'll catch ya later." Forgetful. Polite. Drawl-y. Phew. It seemed the worst had past; Normal Fred was back...

*pop!*

...except that he swatted Yvette on the backside on his way back out to the garage as she stood on top of the stool, "Nice jeans, by tha way..."

Angel blinked, looking between Yvette and Fred for a moment before turning back to look at Kyle. "Did we...fall into some whacked out dimension or something? Am I hallucinating? What was in these cookies?!"

"Someone go check for that pink haired girl with the wings. I bet she's hiding under the table." Kyle looked, no winged pink-haired anyones. "Or maybe not. Maybe she's hiding close by. I have a -great- idea. Lets go find her!" Any excuse to get out of a very very weird situation.

For her part, Yvette was looking the way Fred had gone, a goofy smile on her face. "Huh? Oh. Yes. Perhaps... perhaps you should be doing that," she replied absently to Kyle. Then she blinked and turned to look at her friends. "I... have to be going. With Fred. Yes. Now. It is very important." She slid off the stool, bottle in hand. "Tell Lorna I will be replacing this later?" The goofy expression turned into something outright gleeful. "Do not be waiting up."