Gabriel & Miles (backdated)

[x-velocidad.livejournal.com]

Gabriel and nu!Miles finally meet for real (no Spider-Man costumes involved!). And it's a little weird but not as weird as it could be, so there's that. (Backdated to Monday evening)

Moving over to a school where students wanted to learn and not just smoke pot or play games all day was good, but it also meant that Miles had to start actually doing homework. And as he'd missed a week of this new term because of his late transfer, he had a lot to catch up on. Nothing was going to get done in his room because Bobby was there and he'd surely be a distraction. It was still too cold to go outside. The library was a good idea, but he wouldn't be able to get through AP chem on an empty stomach, so down to the kitchen he went. He took a can of Coke from the fridge and a package of Oreos from the pantry, sat down at the table, and kicked up his feet while he read about kinetics and equilibrium.

Gabriel had intended to time the trip he made out of his room that day with a time he wouldn't need to run into other people, especially the new Jean Grey. But after smoking pot and playing games all day (or at least the portion of it he'd been awake for), he was plenty hungry.

So his face fell a little when he saw a figure sitting at the kitchen table, but as he made his way out of the hallway and into the kitchen, it brightened. Of all the faces he might have seen, this was one of the ones he dreaded least.

"Oye," he grinned, suggesting a joke about to come that he thought was far better than it would turn out to be, "new guy. You know they discovered all the elements already, right?"

"Only up to, uh . . ." Miles flipped to the inside back cover of the textbook to check the periodic table. "Ununoctium. They could still do number 119." His eyes narrowed when he looked up at the other guy. Something about him seemed really familiar but Miles couldn't place it. "Have we met? I swear I've seen you before somewhere."

"We have," Gabriel tried to look cryptic, "but not in the way you'd think." Because that was probably true, and it didn't really break any of Xorn's Rules For Reality-Bending Mutants. At least as he interpreted them using stoner logic. "You'll figure it out." He snagged an Oreo from the pack and went toward the fridge in search of leftovers.

Miles snorted and split open a cookie and licked out the cream. "Maybe you've been running through my dreams," he said with sarcasm so thick that even the proverbial knife couldn't cut through it. "Me llamo Miles."

"Somehow I doubt it," Gabriel snorted back. He rifled through the fridge, feeling downright existential, whatever that meant. "I'm Gabriel." He grabbed a large Chinese container and opened it, ignoring the name scrawled in permanent marker on the top. "Oh, score." He plopped it on the counter nearest the fridge then went in search of a fork. "Guess I must just have one of those faces."

"You're not also some famous celebrity I'm completely brain-farting on, are you? Because I've already done that and I don't want a repeat performance." His brief acquaintance with Roxy Washington so far had just been one embarrassing moment after another. Ugh.

"Ugh, no." He made a face. "Yeah, right." A fork in hand, he grabbed someone else's leftover lo mein and sat across from Miles at the table. "Anyway, what's your deal?" The idea of pretending like he didn't know made him grin, because this whole thing was ridiculous, and even if it wasn't ridiculous, he was still pretty damn glad to know that Miles was alive.

"¿Qué quiere decir? What's my deal?" Miles shrugged and split open another cookie. "Same as lots of others, I guess. Everyone hates mutants and I am one, so here I am. With the added fun of not being able to tell my parents that this isn't anything more than a boarding house for a nearby magnet school. ¿Y usted?"

"Usted?" Gabriel wrinkled his nose. "Hijo, how old you think I am?" The sense of deja vu he was getting was too much to handle, and Gabriel knew if he thought about it too much, he'd get a headache. "Certainly don't deserve that level of respect." He speared a few noodles on the end of his fork and shoved them in his mouth. "Come on now."

"I don't know, you could be a teacher or one of the Generation X mentors." Miles looked more closely at Gabriel, taking in his scruffy appearance and apparently very lived-in clothes. Maybe not. "What's your deal?"

"Eh, no deal," he spoke around the lo mein he'd liberated from the fridge. "God, that's good." Gabriel tried to ignore the way Miles was looking at him, since he was probably just a little paranoid. "Just a guy with powers, trying to figure shit out and make things happen. Obviously that's a lot more complicated these days. What with, you know..." He stood and went back toward the fridge in search of a soda. "Everything. You thirsty?"

Miles drained the rest of his Coke and nodded. "Gracias. I know what you mean. It's getting harder and harder out there. Pues, are you also on Gen X? They've been saying it's not just for people in high school. Viejos can sign up, too," he said, smirking behind Gabriel's back.

Gabriel, one soda in hand, resisted the urge to power up and flick Miles on the ear. "One, rude." Instead, he grabbed the other and started vigorously shaking it while his hand was still inside the fridge. "Two, no. I'm not really..." He slammed the fridge shut and went back to his seat. "I dunno. Organized group activities aren't always my thing. Plus I'm a bartender, and I work nights, so... scheduling's a problem." He plopped the soda he thought was meant for Miles down in front of him. "But Angel's great, so, yeah, do it."

Miles was about the open the can until his spider-sense weakly pinged. A mild danger awaited him, and looking down at the soda in his hand, he reasoned what that danger must have been. But if Gabriel had taken the trouble to play a trick on him, then it would be rude to not play along. He just had to make his own adjustment. So he leaned over the table so he was close to Gabriel and opened the can, pointed at his face. "Oops," Miles said without any hint of remorse. "How did that happen?"

Had he not been high, Gabriel might have anticipated this a little faster and sped away from the table. As it was, he only managed to lean his chair back enough so that he got sprayed, but it wasn't like a hose of Coke started pummeling him in the face. "Ugh, dude, come on." He frowned. "You're gonna call a dude old, then you're gonna try and clown him like that?" He looked down at the puddle forming on the table. "Your maldito danger-sense gonna clean that up?"

"Danger sense?" Now it was Miles's turn to frown. How could he have known? "I don't think I know what you're talking about," he lied. "Really, though, who are you?"

"Por favor, kid, come on. My last roommate had a danger alarm too. I know the signs." Actually, he didn't, but going into too much detail wold have ripped the world apart or something. He really needed to be more careful, weed or no weed. "Already told you. I'm Gabriel." Because he was nominally the adult, he left the table to grab some paper towels. "Bartender by night, not-so-mild-mannered kinda-speedster by day. Estranged from my family, left standing after M-Day. What more do you want to know?"

Este loco had an explanation for everything. Miles sat back down, still a little wary but because his spider-sense had remained silent throughout this exchange, he had some assurance that he wasn't in danger.

"I'm sorry about your family," he said, latching onto the most awkward conversation topic he could because that's how he rolls. "I'd probably be there, too, if I told mine the truth." Although maybe he could pull an Annie and get Warren to adopt him.

"Oh, no, not about that." Gabriel returned, paper towels in hand, and threw them on top of the small pools of Coke on the table. "I'm not sure they know about that. No, no, no." He sat in a different chair and reached across the table for his own soda and the carton of lo mein. "It was the gay thing. That was a problem."

"You're gay? For real?" Why that seemed so shocking, though, Miles couldn't figure out himself. It wasn't like Gabriel was the first gay person he'd ever met. And at least Miles hadn't tried hitting on him like he did with poor Roxy. As if he could make an even bigger jackass of himself. Maybe he just needed his gaydar app updated. "Sorry your family sucks," he offered instead.

"Yeah, dude, whatever." Gabriel raised an eyebrow, surprised at the reaction. Old Miles had been way more chill. "I'm gay. We come in all shapes and sizes. Not everyone's that kid from Glee." He sipped from the Coke can. "Doesn't really matter. Well, it did to them, but whatever." The vigor with which he stabbed the lo mein suggested it bothered him a little more than it let on, but what didn't these days? "Most people in New York are cool about it. 'Specially here."

Miles didn't need his spider-sense to figure out that he'd pressed the wrong button, inadvertently or not. "I'm sorry," he said, shrinking a bit into his seat. "I didn't mean that to come out so crappy."

"No," Gabriel sighed. "It's not your fault." He crossed his arms and leaned back in his seat, trying to think of how to phrase this. (The high was long gone at this point - all he could fixate on was how much more fun this conversation had been last time.) "I'm – M-Day kind of fucked me up, and I'm probably taking everything way too personally and being totally..." He shrugged, his eyes fixed on the Coke can. "I dunno. Weird."

"I can't even imagine. All these mutants here, there must've been a lot you guys lost. I don't even know what to say about that." Miles took another pair of cookies from the package and split them open so he could make a double-stuffed one. "Someone at my school . . . my last school, that is, M-Day hit them and half the building collapsed so they had to close it for renovations. I don't even know who it was. Could've been a student, a teacher, a janitor . . . Doesn't matter, though. They were still someone in my community, so it still hurt to lose them."

Gabriel just nodded, unsure what to say. The usual can't-even-imagine refrain didn't apply, since he could. And did. "It's been shitty." He looked up at Miles finally and reached across the table for an Oreo. "A lot of us are taking it hard. Even the ones who didn't..." He wasn't sure how to explain it, because he wasn't sure that he could. Did this version of Gabriel lose his boyfriend to a mysterious mutant event? Did it matter?

"That's why it's been nice having new faces come along." He twisted the Oreo apart and put the half without cream on the table. Well, not new faces exactly. Kind of new faces. And it wasn't always nice. Actually, up until Miles showed up, it had mostly sucked. "So, you know." He smiled, something he hadn't done enough of in this conversation. "No pressure or anything."

A smile reappeared on Miles's face, too, and his posture relaxed. "I do pretty good under pressure," he quipped back.