Gabriel and Quentin
Oct. 29th, 2021 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsQuentin catches Gabriel, uh, working through some things in the Danger Room and wisely intervenes.
The smoke was worse this time; it brought tears to his eyes. And the acrid smell, familiar had it become, practically made him retch. But even through the haze, he watched as the enemy slammed a clawed hand through his teammate's shoulder. Behind him, the portal opened. Choices, he thought to himself. He first started toward the woman on the ground, then pivoted and diverted his course toward the demon.
But his foe, busy though he was, caught the juke. A wall of flames sprung up before him, and though he tried to stop, he was moving too quickly, and he swore as they singed his skin.
"End the simulation," Gabriel said, adding a few more "fucks" in for good measure. The words seemed to reverberate off the metal walls of the Danger Room as the holographic projections disappeared and he was once more alone in a steel box. "Reset the program."
He crossed the room to grab his water bottle and a towel, stopping to avoid the drones as they reset their locations. It had taken no small effort for him to program the Danger Room to give him a scrubbed-up replica of the pocket Hell dimension in which Garrison had been left behind. But the chaos faced by the X-teams in the last few weeks had left the Danger Room largely unoccupied, and with Gabriel keeping to himself, he'd had ample opportunity to tinker until he felt things were more or less right.
"Not that it matters," he muttered, wiping his skin dry. Already, today, he'd run this scenario about a dozen times. And this is where it left him: covered in sweat, mentally drained, and no closer to finding a solution to the problem that Garrison's absence had posed.
Still, Gabriel was determined to try and find one. "Okay," he tossed the towel and the bottle toward a corner and braced himself. "Let's start again."
The mansion had been a psychic miasma since the failed mission against the Brotherhood's righteous mission to destroy the US government's robotic mutant genocide program. Quentin found it pathetic that these supposed superheroes were holed up and licking their wounds instead of striking back against the government that had set them up as accomplices to mass murder, but it's not like anyone ever listened to him. He was sure they would some day, whether they liked it or not. Hopefully it would not take more deaths to do it.
And it was the thought of death that drew him to the Danger Room. It had called to him when he was up in his own room, a familiar mental signature colored with violence, determination, and regret. It called to him, though he could not place it until he approached the training facility. He expected maybe Jean or one of the other X-Men pathetically putting himself through futile exercises to prove they were not a complete loser. He was surprised instead to recognize the well-known presence as Gabriel.
Curious, he passed the entrance to the Danger Room itself and stepped into the control room to watch the speedster put himself through Hell once again.
Down below, Gabriel was surrounded by flames. The sulfur was practically choking him as Garrison — well, a drone projection of Garrison — threw a punch at the demon. He knew what was coming next, he thought: The portal would open up soon, and then he'd have to make a monumental split-second decision, yet again. He steeled himself.
And then, something dismaying happened: The projection of an 8-foot-tall monster of bone and muscle sinew turned from Garrison, met his eyes and grinned.
Gabriel, caught off-guard, felt his stomach drop. He found himself frozen; more unsure than he had been in any of the simulations so far. The Olivier — not Olivier, he thought urgently to himself — seemed to sense his panic, or maybe he was imagining this, maybe his mind had finally lost it. Unperturbed, it looked away from Gabriel and stabbed not-Garrison with a talon through the chest.
"I — fuck!" he said, practically choking on the word as he backed away from the sight and retreated. "Stop, stop, stop."
Quentin hesitated. He was intruding on something serious, but he was nosy. And more importantly, he didn't want to see Gabriel torture himself anymore. "Hey, G," he softly said into the mic, trying to catch Gabriel's notice through the thick glass that separated the control room. "Take a break."
Gabriel practically jumped at the voice, an intrusion he wasn't expecting. A little bewildered, he looked to the control room. His expression lightened some upon registering the speaker as Quentin, though he couldn't help but look a little sheepish. "I — yeah," he said after a second. "Yeah."
"Yeah," Quentin echoed. He took a moment before leaving the control room, carefully assembling his shields so no one else's thoughts or feelings could flood his mind. Even after all this time taught by the world's greatest psis, his defenses were still comparatively rickety, but they would do for now.
He met Gabriel in the hallway and nodded. "Take a walk with me? It's a beautiful 80-degree October day thanks to climate change."
“Sure,” Gabriel shrugged. Suddenly feeling quite tired, he pulled an energy bar out of his pocket and unwrapped it. “The apocalypse is not without its perks.” Though having lived through one, he wasn’t entirely sure that was true.
They began to walk, silent for a bit. As Gabriel chewed, he contemplated what, if anything, he had to say for himself. “How long were you there?” He finally asked.
"Couple minutes. I saw you were trying to save the co . . . um, Kane." Quentin frowned. He couldn't have anticipated how deeply the supercop's absence would be felt here. "You looked like you were doing well until that whateverthefuck came out. The fuck was that?"
The question was met with silence as they stepped into the elevator that would bring them up toward the mansion’s grounds. “Demon,” Gabriel said, trying to look and sound as placid as possible but coming off more weary than anything else.
Quentin kind of hated how blase they could be about that. He could read people's innermost thoughts, Gabriel would slow down time itself around him, and monstrous creatures could cross over from other worlds to slaughter people. Just another day in Westchester County.
"Well, for what it's worth coming from me . . . I'm sorry for what you're going through now." Those may have been the most earnest words he ever said, and he would surely ruin it with something cruel or crass in a minute, but he had to let it out.
Without really meaning to, Gabriel let out a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a bark. “Sorry, I — thank you,” he said, and he meant it. But he wasn’t entirely sure what he was going through, let alone how to explain it. Quentin’s vagueness — which Gabriel attributed mostly to the discomfort both men had whenever they talked earnestly about feelings — really seemed to get at that.
The elevator doors opened, and Gabriel stepped out of them, eager for some hint of relief from the pressure that seemed to be building inside it. “I’m not — god, I’m a mess,” he said, suddenly irritated with himself.
"Join the fucking club," Quentin snorted. "Sorry. We don't have to talk about this." It was almost a plea to talk about literally anything less melancholy. "Maybe you need to get out of here for a while. I know you've got this whole workaholic vibe going, and I love that for you, but take a break. I went to LA over the summer for some X-Factor work and then just stayed there. That city sucks, but it was better than being cooped up here."
"Maybe." Gabriel shrugged again. He wasn't really working that much lately, actually, but he didn't expect Quentin to know that.
They left the mansion and stepped into the sun, and Gabriel closed his eyes for a second. His skin felt cool; he hadn't realized just how drenched in sweat he'd become in all that Danger Room time. "I don't think I realized that's where you'd gone," he admitted, without even the decency to pretend to be embarrassed. "I mean, I looked for you, I just..." He shrugged. "I can see you in L.A.," he added after a second. "Openly hating everything about it but never mentioning how much you prefer the weather."
"I won't deny that I had a decent time at Ginger Rogers Beach," Quentin admitted, grinning. "It would've been much nicer with far fewer people, though. And you wouldn't've known because I didn't tell anyone. Except for Dane so she knew I wasn't MIA. I just . . . needed me time. Sorry if that makes me sound like a middle-aged white woman going through her Live, Laugh, Love midlife crisis."
Gabriel chuckled. He did not want to point out that he wouldn't have known where Quentin was because he spent most of August avoiding everyone and didn't really ask. "Imagine that being the worst of your problems. Instead..."
Instead, Quentin had died and come back to life. Instead, Garrison had been abandoned to near-certain death. Instead, Gabriel had surrendered, helplessness, to a demon that — he tried to stop the thought, but not soon enough that it didn't hurt. "Beach sounds nice," he said, sensing he'd been silent for too long.
Quentin couldn't help it. He was inquisitive, he was concerned, and Gabriel was quiet for just a moment longer than necessary. Quentin lowered his shields just a bit, not so he could actively pry into anyone's head, but just enough that Gabriel's vulnerability was plain for him to see. He tried not to frown. He failed. He kicked a pile of leaves in his path.
"It was nice to pretend for a while that the worst thing in the world was getting a sunburn or my daiquiri being too weak. Though I can't recommend denial as a long-term plan. Fuckwad would have starved if I hadn't come home," he said lamely.
Gabriel made a vague noise of assent. He instinctively bristled at the comment about denial, but he recovered quickly; he knew it wasn't meant as a barb. "I'm sure someone would have taken care of him," he said, not sounding particularly convinced. It was clear he was not that somebody. "The do-gooders here frown on animal abuse."
"If X-Factor is good for anything, it's that they're very easy to guilt-trip into pet-sitting." They continued down the trail, and Quentin closed his eyes for a moment to enjoy the gentle cool breeze over the lake. "Have you considered a pet? They do wonders for your disposition," he said sarcastically. He knew, even without reading Gabriel's mind at the moment, that it would take another apocalypse for Gabriel to even entertain the thought.
"Can you imagine?" Gabriel snorted. He shivered a bit at the breeze — his shirt was still wet — but he felt as if he hadn't been outside in days. He'd rarely spent this long in the Danger Room; he forgot how easy it was to lose track of time inside. "Maybe a fish. They're low maintenance. Easy to replace. And you don't get too attached, when it inevitably kicks the bucket."
To Gabriel's credit, he winced a little after he heard himself say that. Dark, even for him. "Or not," he said, again sounding a little weary. "Maybe I can keep a fish alive."
Quentin shook his head. "Oh, honey. Fish are not low maintenance, not unless you want them to die after a week. All that time just to clean their tanks and make sure the water is right." The thought of Gabriel spending his Saturday night up to his elbows in shit-filled aquarium water made him laugh, and with his shields down, the image briefly flashed in Gabriel's head, too. When he realized what he'd done, Quentin frowned. "Sorry, I . . . that was an accident."
"Oh, no, it's... it's fine." Gabriel had frozen for a moment, then tensed up when he realized what Quentin had done. He'd — well, he hadn't forgotten what Quentin could do, but he was reminded suddenly of it, and of the time the shared brain space, and of the things that Quentin Quire knew about Gabriel that few others did. Or at least few others who were still around to talk about them. "I'm, uh — it was funny." He couldn't sell it. He was suddenly so uncomfortable standing next to the person with the best understanding of why everything that Costa had done—
"I should go," Gabriel said somewhat suddenly. "I think I overdid it in there. You were right, I mean, to stop me. But I'm feeling... you know, like I should just grab a Gatorade and lie down for a second."
Quentin had a mind to protest, to call out Gabriel for backing away when things got a little too intimate. It angered Quentin to be pushed away, but this whole conversation had felt like walking on broken glass. He had to get off the path to stop getting cut up so much. So he just left it, nodding to Gabriel and keeping his expression neutral. "Yeah, go relax. I'll see you around."
"I hope so," Gabriel replied, and he did mostly mean it. Quentin really was one of the few people Gabriel felt comfortable around, because he knew the younger man wouldn't ask too many questions and would generally respect boundaries. But right this second, he just felt too exposed, too vulnerable to hang around any longer. "And hey," he said, giving the man a small smile. "Thanks. Really."
The smoke was worse this time; it brought tears to his eyes. And the acrid smell, familiar had it become, practically made him retch. But even through the haze, he watched as the enemy slammed a clawed hand through his teammate's shoulder. Behind him, the portal opened. Choices, he thought to himself. He first started toward the woman on the ground, then pivoted and diverted his course toward the demon.
But his foe, busy though he was, caught the juke. A wall of flames sprung up before him, and though he tried to stop, he was moving too quickly, and he swore as they singed his skin.
"End the simulation," Gabriel said, adding a few more "fucks" in for good measure. The words seemed to reverberate off the metal walls of the Danger Room as the holographic projections disappeared and he was once more alone in a steel box. "Reset the program."
He crossed the room to grab his water bottle and a towel, stopping to avoid the drones as they reset their locations. It had taken no small effort for him to program the Danger Room to give him a scrubbed-up replica of the pocket Hell dimension in which Garrison had been left behind. But the chaos faced by the X-teams in the last few weeks had left the Danger Room largely unoccupied, and with Gabriel keeping to himself, he'd had ample opportunity to tinker until he felt things were more or less right.
"Not that it matters," he muttered, wiping his skin dry. Already, today, he'd run this scenario about a dozen times. And this is where it left him: covered in sweat, mentally drained, and no closer to finding a solution to the problem that Garrison's absence had posed.
Still, Gabriel was determined to try and find one. "Okay," he tossed the towel and the bottle toward a corner and braced himself. "Let's start again."
The mansion had been a psychic miasma since the failed mission against the Brotherhood's righteous mission to destroy the US government's robotic mutant genocide program. Quentin found it pathetic that these supposed superheroes were holed up and licking their wounds instead of striking back against the government that had set them up as accomplices to mass murder, but it's not like anyone ever listened to him. He was sure they would some day, whether they liked it or not. Hopefully it would not take more deaths to do it.
And it was the thought of death that drew him to the Danger Room. It had called to him when he was up in his own room, a familiar mental signature colored with violence, determination, and regret. It called to him, though he could not place it until he approached the training facility. He expected maybe Jean or one of the other X-Men pathetically putting himself through futile exercises to prove they were not a complete loser. He was surprised instead to recognize the well-known presence as Gabriel.
Curious, he passed the entrance to the Danger Room itself and stepped into the control room to watch the speedster put himself through Hell once again.
Down below, Gabriel was surrounded by flames. The sulfur was practically choking him as Garrison — well, a drone projection of Garrison — threw a punch at the demon. He knew what was coming next, he thought: The portal would open up soon, and then he'd have to make a monumental split-second decision, yet again. He steeled himself.
And then, something dismaying happened: The projection of an 8-foot-tall monster of bone and muscle sinew turned from Garrison, met his eyes and grinned.
Gabriel, caught off-guard, felt his stomach drop. He found himself frozen; more unsure than he had been in any of the simulations so far. The Olivier — not Olivier, he thought urgently to himself — seemed to sense his panic, or maybe he was imagining this, maybe his mind had finally lost it. Unperturbed, it looked away from Gabriel and stabbed not-Garrison with a talon through the chest.
"I — fuck!" he said, practically choking on the word as he backed away from the sight and retreated. "Stop, stop, stop."
Quentin hesitated. He was intruding on something serious, but he was nosy. And more importantly, he didn't want to see Gabriel torture himself anymore. "Hey, G," he softly said into the mic, trying to catch Gabriel's notice through the thick glass that separated the control room. "Take a break."
Gabriel practically jumped at the voice, an intrusion he wasn't expecting. A little bewildered, he looked to the control room. His expression lightened some upon registering the speaker as Quentin, though he couldn't help but look a little sheepish. "I — yeah," he said after a second. "Yeah."
"Yeah," Quentin echoed. He took a moment before leaving the control room, carefully assembling his shields so no one else's thoughts or feelings could flood his mind. Even after all this time taught by the world's greatest psis, his defenses were still comparatively rickety, but they would do for now.
He met Gabriel in the hallway and nodded. "Take a walk with me? It's a beautiful 80-degree October day thanks to climate change."
“Sure,” Gabriel shrugged. Suddenly feeling quite tired, he pulled an energy bar out of his pocket and unwrapped it. “The apocalypse is not without its perks.” Though having lived through one, he wasn’t entirely sure that was true.
They began to walk, silent for a bit. As Gabriel chewed, he contemplated what, if anything, he had to say for himself. “How long were you there?” He finally asked.
"Couple minutes. I saw you were trying to save the co . . . um, Kane." Quentin frowned. He couldn't have anticipated how deeply the supercop's absence would be felt here. "You looked like you were doing well until that whateverthefuck came out. The fuck was that?"
The question was met with silence as they stepped into the elevator that would bring them up toward the mansion’s grounds. “Demon,” Gabriel said, trying to look and sound as placid as possible but coming off more weary than anything else.
Quentin kind of hated how blase they could be about that. He could read people's innermost thoughts, Gabriel would slow down time itself around him, and monstrous creatures could cross over from other worlds to slaughter people. Just another day in Westchester County.
"Well, for what it's worth coming from me . . . I'm sorry for what you're going through now." Those may have been the most earnest words he ever said, and he would surely ruin it with something cruel or crass in a minute, but he had to let it out.
Without really meaning to, Gabriel let out a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a bark. “Sorry, I — thank you,” he said, and he meant it. But he wasn’t entirely sure what he was going through, let alone how to explain it. Quentin’s vagueness — which Gabriel attributed mostly to the discomfort both men had whenever they talked earnestly about feelings — really seemed to get at that.
The elevator doors opened, and Gabriel stepped out of them, eager for some hint of relief from the pressure that seemed to be building inside it. “I’m not — god, I’m a mess,” he said, suddenly irritated with himself.
"Join the fucking club," Quentin snorted. "Sorry. We don't have to talk about this." It was almost a plea to talk about literally anything less melancholy. "Maybe you need to get out of here for a while. I know you've got this whole workaholic vibe going, and I love that for you, but take a break. I went to LA over the summer for some X-Factor work and then just stayed there. That city sucks, but it was better than being cooped up here."
"Maybe." Gabriel shrugged again. He wasn't really working that much lately, actually, but he didn't expect Quentin to know that.
They left the mansion and stepped into the sun, and Gabriel closed his eyes for a second. His skin felt cool; he hadn't realized just how drenched in sweat he'd become in all that Danger Room time. "I don't think I realized that's where you'd gone," he admitted, without even the decency to pretend to be embarrassed. "I mean, I looked for you, I just..." He shrugged. "I can see you in L.A.," he added after a second. "Openly hating everything about it but never mentioning how much you prefer the weather."
"I won't deny that I had a decent time at Ginger Rogers Beach," Quentin admitted, grinning. "It would've been much nicer with far fewer people, though. And you wouldn't've known because I didn't tell anyone. Except for Dane so she knew I wasn't MIA. I just . . . needed me time. Sorry if that makes me sound like a middle-aged white woman going through her Live, Laugh, Love midlife crisis."
Gabriel chuckled. He did not want to point out that he wouldn't have known where Quentin was because he spent most of August avoiding everyone and didn't really ask. "Imagine that being the worst of your problems. Instead..."
Instead, Quentin had died and come back to life. Instead, Garrison had been abandoned to near-certain death. Instead, Gabriel had surrendered, helplessness, to a demon that — he tried to stop the thought, but not soon enough that it didn't hurt. "Beach sounds nice," he said, sensing he'd been silent for too long.
Quentin couldn't help it. He was inquisitive, he was concerned, and Gabriel was quiet for just a moment longer than necessary. Quentin lowered his shields just a bit, not so he could actively pry into anyone's head, but just enough that Gabriel's vulnerability was plain for him to see. He tried not to frown. He failed. He kicked a pile of leaves in his path.
"It was nice to pretend for a while that the worst thing in the world was getting a sunburn or my daiquiri being too weak. Though I can't recommend denial as a long-term plan. Fuckwad would have starved if I hadn't come home," he said lamely.
Gabriel made a vague noise of assent. He instinctively bristled at the comment about denial, but he recovered quickly; he knew it wasn't meant as a barb. "I'm sure someone would have taken care of him," he said, not sounding particularly convinced. It was clear he was not that somebody. "The do-gooders here frown on animal abuse."
"If X-Factor is good for anything, it's that they're very easy to guilt-trip into pet-sitting." They continued down the trail, and Quentin closed his eyes for a moment to enjoy the gentle cool breeze over the lake. "Have you considered a pet? They do wonders for your disposition," he said sarcastically. He knew, even without reading Gabriel's mind at the moment, that it would take another apocalypse for Gabriel to even entertain the thought.
"Can you imagine?" Gabriel snorted. He shivered a bit at the breeze — his shirt was still wet — but he felt as if he hadn't been outside in days. He'd rarely spent this long in the Danger Room; he forgot how easy it was to lose track of time inside. "Maybe a fish. They're low maintenance. Easy to replace. And you don't get too attached, when it inevitably kicks the bucket."
To Gabriel's credit, he winced a little after he heard himself say that. Dark, even for him. "Or not," he said, again sounding a little weary. "Maybe I can keep a fish alive."
Quentin shook his head. "Oh, honey. Fish are not low maintenance, not unless you want them to die after a week. All that time just to clean their tanks and make sure the water is right." The thought of Gabriel spending his Saturday night up to his elbows in shit-filled aquarium water made him laugh, and with his shields down, the image briefly flashed in Gabriel's head, too. When he realized what he'd done, Quentin frowned. "Sorry, I . . . that was an accident."
"Oh, no, it's... it's fine." Gabriel had frozen for a moment, then tensed up when he realized what Quentin had done. He'd — well, he hadn't forgotten what Quentin could do, but he was reminded suddenly of it, and of the time the shared brain space, and of the things that Quentin Quire knew about Gabriel that few others did. Or at least few others who were still around to talk about them. "I'm, uh — it was funny." He couldn't sell it. He was suddenly so uncomfortable standing next to the person with the best understanding of why everything that Costa had done—
"I should go," Gabriel said somewhat suddenly. "I think I overdid it in there. You were right, I mean, to stop me. But I'm feeling... you know, like I should just grab a Gatorade and lie down for a second."
Quentin had a mind to protest, to call out Gabriel for backing away when things got a little too intimate. It angered Quentin to be pushed away, but this whole conversation had felt like walking on broken glass. He had to get off the path to stop getting cut up so much. So he just left it, nodding to Gabriel and keeping his expression neutral. "Yeah, go relax. I'll see you around."
"I hope so," Gabriel replied, and he did mostly mean it. Quentin really was one of the few people Gabriel felt comfortable around, because he knew the younger man wouldn't ask too many questions and would generally respect boundaries. But right this second, he just felt too exposed, too vulnerable to hang around any longer. "And hey," he said, giving the man a small smile. "Thanks. Really."
