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om_mainBack from Canada, Lil checks in on her baby Brick Midnighter. Backdated to September 10th.
Between moving back, unpacking and prepping for her new job as PE Junior Faculty member, Lil felt like the last five days had flown by. Granted, she'd spent the first one and half of the second all but confined to Brian's - their room (it was still weird remembering that sometimes) - but still! Reunions were happening here and there, some planned, some on accident and her current trip to the boys' wing fell squarely in the former category.
Her fist fell against the door in a timed, triple beat. "Mid? You home? It's Lil."
Midnighter had looked up from his computer - the one Stark had put together for him when he'd first gotten here - a few seconds before the knocks even sounded on his door. Sure, he'd heard that she was back (rumors were fucking rampant around the place, and enhanced senses made them pretty difficult to ignore, even if he wanted to, sometimes), but he hadn't expected her to stop by. Despite her very fucking weird goodbye.
He opened the door right after her third knock, looking her up and down and letting his brain figure out what kind of shape she was in. Which was: even better than before she'd left. "You muscled up," he stated, which was his own sort of greeting.
"Damn straight!" Lil said with a beaming smile and a flex of one bicep. Gone were any soft curves of baby fat that had stubbornly clung to her even during her exercise regiment at the school. "Military life'll do that to you. No drinking, no partying, no fucking. Only thing I could do was spend time in the gym."
Midnighter opened the door all the way, walking out of the way for her to come in. "How did things go?" he asked as he closed the door. It wasn't as if anybody had kept him informed, and he could care less about the lack of drinking, partying or fucking.
Lil shrugged one shoulder and shut the door behind her. Both hands slipped into the pockets of her jeans as she sighed. "Overall? On my end, it wasn't bad. No one fucked with me, I got to be a hero, made my dad proud - and now I probably can't go back to my country for a long time, if ever." She puffed her bangs out of her face, giving a look around the room. "It was everything we thought it was, good and bad. Thinly disguised registration program with mutant figureheads to show everyone how good and sparkly it is when really the team is so full of holes, it makes swiss cheese jealous."
"Registration program?" Midnighter echoed, because like hell if he wasn't going to go for the most important thing. She was physically sound, and sounded as if she was psychologically sound, too.
"Yeah. Gamma Flight. Get kids signed up for training to learn how to control their powers and stuff. Voluntary, but not really." Lil huffed out another breath then leaned on the edge of the nearby dresser. "All tied up in a nice big bow. Education, training, and possibility of a job, all the things kids like me would jump at."
"How is it not really voluntary?" Midnighter pressed. Of course he wanted fucking details. He'd never been big on the big picture.
Lil fixed her gaze on him. "Fuck up even once and you get the choice between maximum time or being part of the program. Alpha Flight's mostly just a front, made to make it look all pretty and tempting. And it will to lotsa kids - especially those from the poorer parts and the First Nations. There might also be a Black Ops kinda team in the works but you'd hafta talk to Jean-Paul about that 'cause I apparently wasn't good enough to have that carrot dangled in fronta me."
Fucking awesome. "So, not as bad as we feared, but fucking awful all the same."
"Guy they got leading the team, Mac? He seems like a decent enough guy who wants to do good but he's pretty blinded by all the patriotism. I wanna hope he'll find a way to make things good but he's pretty boxed in," she admitted, toeing at the floor with her boot. "Rest of the team is pretty green or unpredictable."
"They're a disaster in the making," Midnighter translated for her, but fuck if he wasn't even more worried about that registration program - never mind the fucking Black Ops. At least any Alpha Flight fuck-up would happen in the public eye, most likely. Fucking hopefully.
She made a little humming noise of agreement, forcing herself to swallow down the feelings of guilt once more. Staying wouldn't have helped anyone.
Silence stretched between them for a few moments before Lil spoke up again. "What about you? What went on around here while I was gone?"
"No, tell me more about them," Midnighter requested, because nothing had been going on with him that mattered as much as this. He did belatedly remember that she might not want to keep standing, and he nodded at his desk chair in invitation, moving over to sit on the edge of his bed.
"Ain't much else to tell," Lil admitted, sliding into the seat with another shrug. "This was Jean-Paul's show; I didn't do much but give him backup and hit the gym. I didn't make friends or enemies with any of them..." Her high ponytail swished back and forth with each shake of her head. "It's green. It's unorganized - but it looks pretty and shiny and in a few weeks, the country's gonna forget all about me because they'll have some other puppet up there with a human interest story to tug at the heartstrings of the nation. I don't know what you want me to tell you, Mid, 'cause that's about all I got. I was just... there."
"Tell me about them," Midnighter insisted, bluntly and to the point. "Tell me about the missions you did. When they let you onto the team proper." Fucking everything, pretty much.
"Only mission I did was the one that got plastered all over the tv," she sighed and made a vague gesture, not sure how to give him what he was asking for. She hadn't done anything. Not really. "The kids in the house with the bubble shield. We kept things from escalating. I went in first, Kyle jumped the gun and things got a little rocky but in the end, everything worked out. No one got hurt, no one got dead. Speedy and I got onto the team within a coupla weeks being there; we could run circles 'round everyone else in the training stuff in the beginning."
"And what prompted your departure," Midnighter went on, mercilessly. He was a guy on a mission, yeah.
That made her brow draw into a tight line. "What do you mean? We got done what we needed to get done. It was never a plan to stay." She didn't feel right telling Jean-Paul's business to everyone.
"So you just up and left," Midnighter stated, making no effort to hide his disbelief. They had to have jumped on an occasion to leave, especially both of them at almost the same time.
"Gamma Flight. The Black Ops stuff... we started laying down hints we weren't happy weeks before will pulled out, Mid. If you want anything more than that, you're gonna have to talk to Jean-Paul, 'cause it's his business, okay? I gotta respect his privacy but I can tell you, something went down with another member and him and it gave us the final piece we needed to leave without getting our assess tossed in jail."
Fucking fine. It wasn't as if anybody ever kept him in the loop about any-fucking-thing - why, admittedly, would they, but it didn't rankle any less for it. But he swallowed that simmering anger back; he'd work it out later on the punching bag. "And you're back for good."
"Yeah. As long as I can stay employed and my visa doesn't get revoked," Lil answered with a dark sort of chuckle. Wouldn't that just be the perfect end to all of this. "Doing the Junior Faculty thing for PE starting Monday... and rooming with Bri."
"You're gonna be my teacher," Midnighter spelled it out. He really didn't care one way or the other about her rooming with Braddock. But the teacher thing, that was weird. She'd been a helpful sparring partner, but - yeah. Talk about a change of dynamics.
"Junior Teacher. I really doubt Juddsie's gonna have me doing mucha anything in the beginning." Her smile was a bit warmer now that the topic had changed, her shoulders not quite as tense. "And it's PE, not history or math or anything."
"Yeah, well," Midnighter shrugged, a little. "It's PE." It was just about the one thing where he didn't need much teaching at all. Strategies and perfectly physical control, and efficiency, were part of his package.
"Which means we'll get to spar more when I ain't gotta work with the people who do need help. And then you can kick my ass and show them I can be put down," she added. "Ain't anything really gonna change."
Midnighter paused, then, "Seems more productive if we each work with them, instead." It was what he'd been doing with kids all the time, when PE was about kicking ass and not about one sport or another. ...but even when it was.
"When they need help, yeah," Lil agreed. It wouldn't be all the time - or so she hoped. "We can keep our sparring out of the classroom, if you'd prefer."
"As long as we keep it up," Midnighter allowed, even if he would prefer to keep it that way, yeah. She was willing to put in extra hours with him; other kids that weren't willing to put extra hours in anywhere would benefit more from each of them working with them during class.
"Oh, we most fucking are," she laughed. "Sparring with Brian tends to lead to a shit ton of distraction. Plus, he's got his hands full with his own classes and lab stuff. If I wanna keep in this shape, I'm gonna need a partner I can trust to keep me working."
"Bring it," Midnighter confirmed. Sparring with Talon had made him improve by leaps and bounds, so, whatever Lil was ready to dish out, he would gladly take it.
The smirk touched her eyes. "Oh, I definitely will." This is what she'd missed when in Canada; the familiarity of bonds that had been forged through genuine like instead of thrown together because of the military. "You gotta tell me about your summer now, since you brushed over that before."
"Nothing much to say," Midnighter assured her. "Maximoff and I made sure I could handle crowds now." That was about it, really, since like fuck he was telling anyone, fucking anyone, about what might or might not fucking be happening with Paul. Well, he could say this much, nodding towards the other side of the room, "Changed roommates. That's about it."
The genuine happiness was back in her face and voice. "That's fucking great, Mid! About the crowds!" It was a major step for him, she knew, and partner of her couldn't help but feel some sort of maternal pride. "Who's the new roomie? New kid or someone who was here before?"
"Paul Bolton," he replied. "Apollo." He'd started to think of him more and more as his codename, as the days passed. The guy pretty much fucking looked like he figured the Greek god of light ought to.
Lil chewed on her lip briefly then gave a little shake of her head. "I think I heard the name before but I dunno if I can put a face to it. I'll be sure to keep my eye out in class though for him."
Midnighter shrugged; he wasn't going to volunteer his own description. He looks like a fucking Greek god wouldn't exactly cut it. "He's a good guy." He almost added that he'd requested the shift, but didn't. That would lead to questions he didn't want to answer.
"Kinda figured that," Lil chuckled. "No offense, you don't seem like the kinda guy who'd put up with a roomie who wasn't."
"I don't need to spend that much time in here." Then again, maybe she was right. He hadn't expected the way it had turned out with Stark, in the end, but he did think that he was a good guy, too. Probably. Time would tell.
"But it makes things a lot easier if you get along with the person you live with. Trust me," she insisted. "You get along with this 'good guy' Paul, yeah?"
"Yeah." If Midnighter was scowling, it was because it felt weird admitting that he got along with anyone.
"Good. You need more friends," Lil told him, still smiling that soft, almost teasing grin.
Midnighter rolled his eyes. "I don't need friends." But maybe he had a couple. It was weird, thinking of anybody like that in relation to himself.
She snorted once. "Right. Fine. You should have more friends," Lil corrected herself. "You know, people to do stuff with other than just spar and snarl at. I'm sure we could get Brian to treat to dinner some night in Salem Center or the city and the four of us can just hang out?"
Midnighter stared for a couple of seconds; a long time for him to process anything. "He doesn't eat," he finally settled on. And he was so fucking glad for that right now. That, and the fact that Crawley knew that he himself didn't give a shit about food.
"He doesn't eat at all?" she asked with a surprised blink. Not tasting food or caring about it, okay, Lil got that but not doing it?
"All his body needs is solar energy," Midnighter confirmed evenly. No eating, no drinking, no sleeping, only breathing to be able to talk.
"Huh." She wondered briefly what he did when it was cloudy or raining. "Okay, so not out to eat. Then, maybe a sports game or something. Soccer, football..."
"I - don't think he cares about sports any more than I do," Midnighter stated evenly. He could be wrong, of course; it wasn't like he'd ever asked Apollo if he gave a fuck about sports.
Lil rolled her eyes again - she couldn't help it. Even in her mild frustration, though, there was a smile. It was all just so... Mid. And she'd missed it. "Well, if you do find out he likes sports or whatever, let me know and I'll talk Brian into getting a box somewhere to watch. It'll be fun."
"For you," Midnighter pointed out with raised eyebrows. He had very little doubt that it would not be any kind of fun for him, even without considering the level of control needed to behave a stadium full of sports fans. He... really didn't know if it would be for Apollo, but he had an inkling it wouldn't be, either.
"Right. Fine. I'll stop," Lil chuckled, shaking her head once more. And people said she was stubborn. Of course, she really wouldn't stop - only employ more help from Brian - and maybe this Paul kid. "You doing anything important now? We could go to the gym and you can see my new muscles in action."
"Sure," Midnighter agreed, headed for the door. Yeah, it was still that easy to get him to spar.
Getting up from the chair with a smile still on her lips, Lil followed closely behind. Somethings never changed.
Between moving back, unpacking and prepping for her new job as PE Junior Faculty member, Lil felt like the last five days had flown by. Granted, she'd spent the first one and half of the second all but confined to Brian's - their room (it was still weird remembering that sometimes) - but still! Reunions were happening here and there, some planned, some on accident and her current trip to the boys' wing fell squarely in the former category.
Her fist fell against the door in a timed, triple beat. "Mid? You home? It's Lil."
Midnighter had looked up from his computer - the one Stark had put together for him when he'd first gotten here - a few seconds before the knocks even sounded on his door. Sure, he'd heard that she was back (rumors were fucking rampant around the place, and enhanced senses made them pretty difficult to ignore, even if he wanted to, sometimes), but he hadn't expected her to stop by. Despite her very fucking weird goodbye.
He opened the door right after her third knock, looking her up and down and letting his brain figure out what kind of shape she was in. Which was: even better than before she'd left. "You muscled up," he stated, which was his own sort of greeting.
"Damn straight!" Lil said with a beaming smile and a flex of one bicep. Gone were any soft curves of baby fat that had stubbornly clung to her even during her exercise regiment at the school. "Military life'll do that to you. No drinking, no partying, no fucking. Only thing I could do was spend time in the gym."
Midnighter opened the door all the way, walking out of the way for her to come in. "How did things go?" he asked as he closed the door. It wasn't as if anybody had kept him informed, and he could care less about the lack of drinking, partying or fucking.
Lil shrugged one shoulder and shut the door behind her. Both hands slipped into the pockets of her jeans as she sighed. "Overall? On my end, it wasn't bad. No one fucked with me, I got to be a hero, made my dad proud - and now I probably can't go back to my country for a long time, if ever." She puffed her bangs out of her face, giving a look around the room. "It was everything we thought it was, good and bad. Thinly disguised registration program with mutant figureheads to show everyone how good and sparkly it is when really the team is so full of holes, it makes swiss cheese jealous."
"Registration program?" Midnighter echoed, because like hell if he wasn't going to go for the most important thing. She was physically sound, and sounded as if she was psychologically sound, too.
"Yeah. Gamma Flight. Get kids signed up for training to learn how to control their powers and stuff. Voluntary, but not really." Lil huffed out another breath then leaned on the edge of the nearby dresser. "All tied up in a nice big bow. Education, training, and possibility of a job, all the things kids like me would jump at."
"How is it not really voluntary?" Midnighter pressed. Of course he wanted fucking details. He'd never been big on the big picture.
Lil fixed her gaze on him. "Fuck up even once and you get the choice between maximum time or being part of the program. Alpha Flight's mostly just a front, made to make it look all pretty and tempting. And it will to lotsa kids - especially those from the poorer parts and the First Nations. There might also be a Black Ops kinda team in the works but you'd hafta talk to Jean-Paul about that 'cause I apparently wasn't good enough to have that carrot dangled in fronta me."
Fucking awesome. "So, not as bad as we feared, but fucking awful all the same."
"Guy they got leading the team, Mac? He seems like a decent enough guy who wants to do good but he's pretty blinded by all the patriotism. I wanna hope he'll find a way to make things good but he's pretty boxed in," she admitted, toeing at the floor with her boot. "Rest of the team is pretty green or unpredictable."
"They're a disaster in the making," Midnighter translated for her, but fuck if he wasn't even more worried about that registration program - never mind the fucking Black Ops. At least any Alpha Flight fuck-up would happen in the public eye, most likely. Fucking hopefully.
She made a little humming noise of agreement, forcing herself to swallow down the feelings of guilt once more. Staying wouldn't have helped anyone.
Silence stretched between them for a few moments before Lil spoke up again. "What about you? What went on around here while I was gone?"
"No, tell me more about them," Midnighter requested, because nothing had been going on with him that mattered as much as this. He did belatedly remember that she might not want to keep standing, and he nodded at his desk chair in invitation, moving over to sit on the edge of his bed.
"Ain't much else to tell," Lil admitted, sliding into the seat with another shrug. "This was Jean-Paul's show; I didn't do much but give him backup and hit the gym. I didn't make friends or enemies with any of them..." Her high ponytail swished back and forth with each shake of her head. "It's green. It's unorganized - but it looks pretty and shiny and in a few weeks, the country's gonna forget all about me because they'll have some other puppet up there with a human interest story to tug at the heartstrings of the nation. I don't know what you want me to tell you, Mid, 'cause that's about all I got. I was just... there."
"Tell me about them," Midnighter insisted, bluntly and to the point. "Tell me about the missions you did. When they let you onto the team proper." Fucking everything, pretty much.
"Only mission I did was the one that got plastered all over the tv," she sighed and made a vague gesture, not sure how to give him what he was asking for. She hadn't done anything. Not really. "The kids in the house with the bubble shield. We kept things from escalating. I went in first, Kyle jumped the gun and things got a little rocky but in the end, everything worked out. No one got hurt, no one got dead. Speedy and I got onto the team within a coupla weeks being there; we could run circles 'round everyone else in the training stuff in the beginning."
"And what prompted your departure," Midnighter went on, mercilessly. He was a guy on a mission, yeah.
That made her brow draw into a tight line. "What do you mean? We got done what we needed to get done. It was never a plan to stay." She didn't feel right telling Jean-Paul's business to everyone.
"So you just up and left," Midnighter stated, making no effort to hide his disbelief. They had to have jumped on an occasion to leave, especially both of them at almost the same time.
"Gamma Flight. The Black Ops stuff... we started laying down hints we weren't happy weeks before will pulled out, Mid. If you want anything more than that, you're gonna have to talk to Jean-Paul, 'cause it's his business, okay? I gotta respect his privacy but I can tell you, something went down with another member and him and it gave us the final piece we needed to leave without getting our assess tossed in jail."
Fucking fine. It wasn't as if anybody ever kept him in the loop about any-fucking-thing - why, admittedly, would they, but it didn't rankle any less for it. But he swallowed that simmering anger back; he'd work it out later on the punching bag. "And you're back for good."
"Yeah. As long as I can stay employed and my visa doesn't get revoked," Lil answered with a dark sort of chuckle. Wouldn't that just be the perfect end to all of this. "Doing the Junior Faculty thing for PE starting Monday... and rooming with Bri."
"You're gonna be my teacher," Midnighter spelled it out. He really didn't care one way or the other about her rooming with Braddock. But the teacher thing, that was weird. She'd been a helpful sparring partner, but - yeah. Talk about a change of dynamics.
"Junior Teacher. I really doubt Juddsie's gonna have me doing mucha anything in the beginning." Her smile was a bit warmer now that the topic had changed, her shoulders not quite as tense. "And it's PE, not history or math or anything."
"Yeah, well," Midnighter shrugged, a little. "It's PE." It was just about the one thing where he didn't need much teaching at all. Strategies and perfectly physical control, and efficiency, were part of his package.
"Which means we'll get to spar more when I ain't gotta work with the people who do need help. And then you can kick my ass and show them I can be put down," she added. "Ain't anything really gonna change."
Midnighter paused, then, "Seems more productive if we each work with them, instead." It was what he'd been doing with kids all the time, when PE was about kicking ass and not about one sport or another. ...but even when it was.
"When they need help, yeah," Lil agreed. It wouldn't be all the time - or so she hoped. "We can keep our sparring out of the classroom, if you'd prefer."
"As long as we keep it up," Midnighter allowed, even if he would prefer to keep it that way, yeah. She was willing to put in extra hours with him; other kids that weren't willing to put extra hours in anywhere would benefit more from each of them working with them during class.
"Oh, we most fucking are," she laughed. "Sparring with Brian tends to lead to a shit ton of distraction. Plus, he's got his hands full with his own classes and lab stuff. If I wanna keep in this shape, I'm gonna need a partner I can trust to keep me working."
"Bring it," Midnighter confirmed. Sparring with Talon had made him improve by leaps and bounds, so, whatever Lil was ready to dish out, he would gladly take it.
The smirk touched her eyes. "Oh, I definitely will." This is what she'd missed when in Canada; the familiarity of bonds that had been forged through genuine like instead of thrown together because of the military. "You gotta tell me about your summer now, since you brushed over that before."
"Nothing much to say," Midnighter assured her. "Maximoff and I made sure I could handle crowds now." That was about it, really, since like fuck he was telling anyone, fucking anyone, about what might or might not fucking be happening with Paul. Well, he could say this much, nodding towards the other side of the room, "Changed roommates. That's about it."
The genuine happiness was back in her face and voice. "That's fucking great, Mid! About the crowds!" It was a major step for him, she knew, and partner of her couldn't help but feel some sort of maternal pride. "Who's the new roomie? New kid or someone who was here before?"
"Paul Bolton," he replied. "Apollo." He'd started to think of him more and more as his codename, as the days passed. The guy pretty much fucking looked like he figured the Greek god of light ought to.
Lil chewed on her lip briefly then gave a little shake of her head. "I think I heard the name before but I dunno if I can put a face to it. I'll be sure to keep my eye out in class though for him."
Midnighter shrugged; he wasn't going to volunteer his own description. He looks like a fucking Greek god wouldn't exactly cut it. "He's a good guy." He almost added that he'd requested the shift, but didn't. That would lead to questions he didn't want to answer.
"Kinda figured that," Lil chuckled. "No offense, you don't seem like the kinda guy who'd put up with a roomie who wasn't."
"I don't need to spend that much time in here." Then again, maybe she was right. He hadn't expected the way it had turned out with Stark, in the end, but he did think that he was a good guy, too. Probably. Time would tell.
"But it makes things a lot easier if you get along with the person you live with. Trust me," she insisted. "You get along with this 'good guy' Paul, yeah?"
"Yeah." If Midnighter was scowling, it was because it felt weird admitting that he got along with anyone.
"Good. You need more friends," Lil told him, still smiling that soft, almost teasing grin.
Midnighter rolled his eyes. "I don't need friends." But maybe he had a couple. It was weird, thinking of anybody like that in relation to himself.
She snorted once. "Right. Fine. You should have more friends," Lil corrected herself. "You know, people to do stuff with other than just spar and snarl at. I'm sure we could get Brian to treat to dinner some night in Salem Center or the city and the four of us can just hang out?"
Midnighter stared for a couple of seconds; a long time for him to process anything. "He doesn't eat," he finally settled on. And he was so fucking glad for that right now. That, and the fact that Crawley knew that he himself didn't give a shit about food.
"He doesn't eat at all?" she asked with a surprised blink. Not tasting food or caring about it, okay, Lil got that but not doing it?
"All his body needs is solar energy," Midnighter confirmed evenly. No eating, no drinking, no sleeping, only breathing to be able to talk.
"Huh." She wondered briefly what he did when it was cloudy or raining. "Okay, so not out to eat. Then, maybe a sports game or something. Soccer, football..."
"I - don't think he cares about sports any more than I do," Midnighter stated evenly. He could be wrong, of course; it wasn't like he'd ever asked Apollo if he gave a fuck about sports.
Lil rolled her eyes again - she couldn't help it. Even in her mild frustration, though, there was a smile. It was all just so... Mid. And she'd missed it. "Well, if you do find out he likes sports or whatever, let me know and I'll talk Brian into getting a box somewhere to watch. It'll be fun."
"For you," Midnighter pointed out with raised eyebrows. He had very little doubt that it would not be any kind of fun for him, even without considering the level of control needed to behave a stadium full of sports fans. He... really didn't know if it would be for Apollo, but he had an inkling it wouldn't be, either.
"Right. Fine. I'll stop," Lil chuckled, shaking her head once more. And people said she was stubborn. Of course, she really wouldn't stop - only employ more help from Brian - and maybe this Paul kid. "You doing anything important now? We could go to the gym and you can see my new muscles in action."
"Sure," Midnighter agreed, headed for the door. Yeah, it was still that easy to get him to spar.
Getting up from the chair with a smile still on her lips, Lil followed closely behind. Somethings never changed.
