Every Man's Dream Battle [Husk, Iceman]

[Iceman]

Bobby sat on a bench in a cove of the hallway near the Danger Room. He was bent over, lacing up his boots and chuckling quietly under his breath. He was thinking about the Danger Room session he was about to go into with Paige. It was just the two of them, because Paige was still unsure of how much her clothes would be shredded up with her skin when she shed it.

Bobby was hoping the outcome would land somewhere between 'most' and 'all'.

He was also excited to be running through a session with Paige, whom he'd never seen use her powers in any way other than to show him. It wasn't going to be a battle scene, in fact he'd asked Forge to just make it be a large, open concrete room of some sort. As long as they had plenty of room. They'd decided on a car garage, so that way, they'd have plenty of space, and get to crunch a few cars if they wanted to. It had a practical purpose; Bobby was curious to see how much invulnerability Paige had in her metal form.

[Iceman]

Paige giggled to herself in the mirror. Her hair was pulled back high on her head, braided and twisted into a tight bun. She wanted her hair out of the way while she got used to the way this whole thing was going to work. She’d always had time to carefully peel her layers in the past. And what about this nakedness thing?

They didn’t want to tear the new uniform yet, but she had convinced Bobby to let her try it on for him. She made a little turn, digging the way the knee-high boots, kneepads, black leggings, thigh-length leather skirt, and sleeveless bodice with the cute rib-length jacket all went together in black with red trim. She felt like a real X-Man.

Now to see if she could pull it off. Literally.

Stepping out, she peeked around the corner. “You ready?” She hopped out. “Tada!” Turning in a circle, she beamed. “Well? What do you think??”

Bobby looked up when he heard a door swing open, pulling the leg of his pants down over his boot. His mouth gaped just slightly as he looked at her, and as he stood he began to smile slowly. “Wow,” he said through a grin. “It’s so…tight…” he pinched the leather at her stomach, knowing she’d barely be able to feel it. It didn’t move a millimeter when he tried to pull on it.

“You look great,” he said honestly, and for his credit, he turned his eyes off of her body and said it while looking into her eyes.

It only lasted a moment, though, as shortly after he remembered something. “Oh, yeah…” he said, turning away and grabbing a pile of clothing from the bench he’d been sitting on. “Did you bring clothes? For when we leave? I didn’t think about it until I was changing, but I keep a clean change in one of the lockers so I have this…” Bobby gestured to the t-shirt and jeans in his hand. "The jeans might stay on for long enough to get you up to your room, at least," he said.

A moment later, he thought about what he said. "Because...they'll be too big..." he clarified.

Paige laughed, and kissed his cheek. She grabbed them. “I brought a bathrobe, but who could resist running around in their boy’s things?” She winked.

Looking down at her outfit, she nodded. “It’ll be a shame if I never get to wear it. But I –really- like it. I’m glad I nabbed this design before someone else got around to it.”

Looking at him, she tried her very best to keep a professional attitude, but just couldn’t. “Now. Did –you- want to undress me before we go in, or…?” She cracked a grin in spite of her best efforts.

Bobby considered it, but he had a feeling she was joking, and also, he wasn’t quite keen to undress her in the middle of a hallway. Besides, there were at least two security cameras that could see them where they stood. He made a note to ask Forge if he could really do any setting in the Danger Room.

“Work first, play later,” he said, giving her a nudge and then – he couldn’t help himself – a push on the hind-end toward the Danger Room. He pushed the button to open the door, hoping Forge had already set it up for them.

He had. The car garage stretched out before them, dimly lit, with faint sounds of the street. Either they were high up, or the outside noise had been turned down for concentration purposes. Bobby walked it and looked around, grinning. “Amazing,” he said appreciatively.

Paige rolled her eyes, giggling as he nudged her. Paige didn’t have a problem with nakedness, and while she didn’t want to advertise her assets to the world, Forge at least was going to end up seeing them at some point if she was in the danger room training.


“Pretty darn cool,” she nodded, looking around. “I swear I can even smell the axel grease.” She chuckled, and bent over to unlace her boots and step out of them. The jacket came next, then she unzipped the bodice and dropped that- it left her with her black lyrca top underneath- and then slipped out of the skirt and kneepads. The lycra outfit that made the legging was a one-piece suit going to her ankles with straps over her shoulders. She hopped up and down, just stretching her leg muscles a little as she swung her arms back and forth.

“So how do you want to do this?” She said, stepping into the room barefoot.

[Iceman]

As an answer, Bobby turned and pelted her with a snowball as the doors closed behind them. He laughed, backing away from her. “Howabout I pelt you with stuff and you try and dodge or…shed,” he said. “And we’ll see how fast you can react, among other things.”

He paused, forming a ball of ice in his up-turned hand as he looked at her with a hint of worry. “And if something hurts…stop me. The shots coming from enemy sims in here don’t hurt, but our powers still work on each other.” He’d found that out the hard way; he blinked away the memory of the intense, intense pain of his head being burned by Pyro’s fire. He got into a baseball pitcher’s stance and swung his arm in practice once. “You ready?”

Paige shrieked, laughing. “You bastard!!” With a smile, she ran away for a moment.

“Did you know I took gymnastics up until last year? Catch this.” With a bit of a jump she lifted her hands and did a few cartwheels, turned on one hand and landed on her feet again, putting quite a bit of distance between them.

Paige was a jock, deep down. She loved competition and ate up a challenge. So as Bobby prepared to lob another iceball at her, Paige taunted him. “Come on “Iceman”! Give me your best shot!”

Bobby’s eyebrows rose at her show of gymnastics, and he grinned. He tossed the ice ball over his shoulder and applauded her.

Then she starting talking big. Bobby’s eyes narrowed, his grin turning to a playfully challenging smirk. “You got it,” he said, lifting both hands and steadying himself, placing his legs at shoulder-width apart, one leg slightly back to keep him from moving backwards when the ice came. His eyes focused on her; she was far away, but not nearly far enough away to be out of his range.

He formed the ice and sent it at her, at a fast speed but not extremely fast. Different-sized chunks of jagged ice flew at her, and he watched her closely to see which way she would move. He couldn’t control the ice after it was sent in a direction; he had to move his hands to move the line of fire. It was essentially like a gun.

She was able to change to the first skin she’d come up with, and felt herself hardening on the surface, but the top layer stayed in place as she turned- narrowly missing it and getting smacked across the back by a few smaller pieces.

As he shot another blast at her, she turned away from him with just her face and shoulders, keeping her feet planted shoulder width apart. Tearing at her shoulder, as she turned back she was able to take her top layer of skin in one scrape. Closing her eyes to protect them, the ice shards thunked dully against her new blue rubber body- then fell to the ground.

She looked down at herself, and giggled. “I didn’t know if that one would work or not!” She called across the room.

Bobby stared at her from where he was. He started to move forward. "Are you kidding me? So...can you bounce?" He laughed, without knowing if he was being ridiculous or not.

She looked down, and kicked her heel against the ground. She didn’t bounce exactly, but her foot wobbled as the impact joggled through her. It made her laugh hysterically.

“It tickles!”

Seeing him approach, she gave him a cool look with a smirk and backed away. “Think I’m that stupid do you Mr. Drake?” Paige chuckled.

His cover blown, Bobby stopped, digging his back foot into the ground as he sent a volley of ice her way. “It was worth a try!” he said from the other side of a barrage of ice as it flew toward Paige, at a higher speed than the first blast had.

In spite of being smart, she just wasn’t as practiced as Bobby, and had never seen real “combat”. So when he sent the next volley at her she didn’t even have time to dodge- it hit her square in the chest and she went down hard on her back.

She might have gotten up, if it weren’t for having the wind knocked out of her- closing her eyes tight-the impact had really only knocked her head, the rest of her sort of bounced against the floor- but she gasped tightly, trying to get air. After a second she coughed hard, gasping again.

[Iceman]

Bobby scrambled to Paige’s side, crouching next to her. “Paige—I’m so sorry—are you okay?!”

Lifting a hand, she crossed her arm over herself and locked her palm around Bobby’s neck. With a kick of her hips, she rolled them both over, and pinned Bobby down with her knees on his arms. Tearing at her body as quickly as she could, Bobby could feel Paige’s weight get heavy as the blue rubber gave way to blacker-than-black LEAD!

Paige’s head hung a bit lower, the density of the metal holding her down. She chuckled- still breathless, the winding seemed to have been real, if not as bad as she made off.

“Gotcha.”

Bobby didn’t even register that she’d been tricking him until he found himself looking up at her between her legs, his arms pinned down. He felt the enormous weight of her fall on his arms, and his eyes looked over her lead body in awe. “Damn…that’s heavy…” he grunted.

His hands opened, and the muscles from his shoulders to his fingers tensed as he hurled two streams of ice at her chest at a high speed.

Paige lifted her arms to block it from her face, but was surrounded by ice before she could do much good. Squealing, then giggling as she realized she couldn’t move very well, she dropped a knee off one arm and rolled off of him, her arms and shoulders and neck frozen in place. It would likely have been easy enough to break out of it with some effort, if she weren’t tremendously weighed down by her lead self.

“Oh god,” she laughed, a little muffled by the ice. She was face down with her knees on the floor, trying to get up but unable to with all the added weight on the upper part of her body. The more she got stuck, the more she laughed. “I’m beat! Heeh… he… you have to help me out of this one Bobby!” More laughter as she rolled onto her side, her body thunking to the floor heavily.

Bobby sat up as soon as she was off of him, but he didn’t get far. His amusement at her predicament grew as she struggled to move, since clearly it wasn’t painful for her. When she couldn’t lift her head, his chuckles turned to uncontrollable guffaws, his eyes squeezing tight as he doubled over.

He wasn’t sure if he ought to trust her, but he took the chance – after all, if she was tricking him again, he’d just end up with another tremendous view. He wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to do, so as he got to his knees beside her, he asked, “Do you want to shed, or…stand?” Bobby wasn’t completely positive that she even could stand in her leaden state.

Paige chuckled, but was starting to feel a little claustrophobic, stuck as she was. “No, I… I can’t shed if I can’t use my hands, idgit…” she said teasingly. “I promise I’m not tricking, I really can’t stand!”

Just to prove her point she made a new effort to break the ice, but without any momentum to shatter it, there was no hope. Trying to kick at it with her knees, it made her curl up into a little ball, and Paige’s laughter became nervous.

“Uhh… a little help here?”

As soon as Paige told him she couldn’t shed without her hands (he’d planned to offer to pull it off for her, but maybe she had to do it herself), Bobby stood, hunching over Paige’s curled-up form. “Right, sorry.”

He wrapped his arms around her, one across her chest and the other across her stomach, and started to pull her to sit up so that she could use her arms to rip off the lead skin. It was a slow process, but it worked.

“So…” Bobby said, a little bit of strain evident in his voice as he held Paige upright, crouched behind her. “When you’re in a form like this…well, not like this…like metal, maybe?—are you invulnerable?”

[Iceman]

As the ice fell away, Paige cracked her arms together, and the lead splintered all the way up her arm. What proceeded was one part tearing, one part scraping as the lead fell away in chunks both large and small.

“Well I imagine I’m as invulnerable as whatever I turned into was… but I haven’t really tested it out, to be honest…” as she stood and stomped her feet, breaking off hunks of black skin, she looked back at him.

“Why do you ask?”

Bobby took her hand and stood, pulling on her and nodded back toward a few parked cars not far from them. “Think you can do those cars some damage?” he asked, an excited look in his eyes. He was an X-Man, yes, and an adult, yes…But at heart Bobby was just a teenage boy who never lost the giddiness of playing in an incredible virtual reality video game ever imagined.

Paige narrowed her eyes and looked at the cars thoughtfully. “You mean… like hurl myself at them, or give them a punch?” She tilted her head, then smiled. “Well it can’t hurt to give it a shot, right? What do you think I should do. Steel? Think that’ll bend too much? Stone maybe?”

Bobby nodded, inwardly amazed at the plethora of things she could transform into. “Try stone,” he said, reaching the nearest car and patting its hood. He looked down at his hand as it rested on the car, and watched it until he could see the color of the car through it. Frost began to form on the surface as he turned his arm, and then his chest and head, and then the rest of his body, to ice.

With eyes that were no longer more than moving details etched into a moving ice sculpture, he looked to Paige again. “Go for it,” he encouraged her with a grin.

Paige blinked. “WOW….. that’s… oddly pretty.” She smiled. “Pretty boy.” She winked.

“Alright… this is gonna have to be my last one, I can’t shed too much at once without my skin getting sore for a few days.” She pulled that layer off, and as the normal skin pulled away, bulgey bits of stone protruded on curves and corners of her body. She looked significantly more powerful, yet somehow no bigger than she had been a moment before.

“Now I –know- I can do this.” She ran at the car, picking up speed, and turned just as she reached it, slamming her shoulder and part of her back against the side of the car. Turning her head so glass didn’t get in her eyes, the window shattered and the side panel crumpled in. It wasn’t complete destruction; but it was a start.

[Iceman]

A beautiful woman. Who could smash cars.

Bobby could have sworn he heard angels singing as he moved around the car, examining the damage done to the car with an amazed grin. “Oh my God! Holy shit, woman!” he gawked, looking from the car to Paige and back and forth again. “Okay, don’t take that off,” he said; they weren’t done, and he didn’t want her to shed to a new skin if it would make her sore.

Bobby put a foot on the bumper and used it to give him a leg up to the top of the car. He stood carefully once on top of it, and took cautious steps to the front of the roof. He peered down at the hood, then turned and gave Paige a wide grin. He then leapt from the roof, high in the air, and came down hard on the hood, which buckled under the weight. His feet hit first, then his fists came down, creating two even deeper dents in the metal. Shards of ice from his hands, fingers and knuckles, came off at impact and scattered, which was something Bobby had experienced but still found odd but cool.

Paige laughed, clapping stony hands before climbing on top of the car with him. Trying it out, she was heavily reminded of times playing with her brothers- both older and younger- out in the backyard before the sun had set in late summer. Jumping up, her stone feet came banging down on the trunk, crumpling it in almost completely and causing the car to joggle on its shocks and almost bounce Bobby a little.

“We could almost play teeter-totter,” she said, and threw herself over backwards, coming crashing down on the hood. Laying with her head near the dashboard and her feet almost over the back seat, she laughed, covering her stomach and looking up and back at Bobby’s ice form.

Bobby laughed, swinging his legs around and pushing himself off of the car. He stood on the concrete, turning and going around the car. "Let's see how well you fight like that, Pebbles," he said, grinning at her where she laid, her head about a foot from him on the back hood.

He took hold of her shoulders and pushed her heavy rock form to sit up somewhat. He then leaned over the hood and put his arm around her throat in a choke-hold. With his other hand, he gave her a noogie - as best he could with an ice hand on a stone head. Ice shaved off of his knuckles as he rubbed his fist across the stone, laughing in Paige's ear.