Politics, Bad. Basketball, Good. [John, Bobby]

[Iceman]

"What the heck is a 'calumniator'?"

Bobby was laying on his bed, the newspaper folded in his lap, his pencil poised over the crossword puzzle. He'd been scouring the paper for mutant-related articles for an assignment for a class, but had quickly become side-tracked and was now attempting the daily crossword.

"My grampa is a champ at these things...Guess he didn't pass that gene down..." Bobby muttered as he re-read the clue a third time. "I need a five-letter word for 'calumniator'. The last letter is 'y'."

"Enemy," said John without even looking up. He was reading 'Catch-22' for what had to be the eighteenth billion time since he'd arrived at the Institute. "That's my guess, anyway." He turned the pages.

It was early evening and they were filling the space before dinner with this rare moment of companionship in their room. The girls were away for the day on some field trip or other and where Bobby would normally immediately have gone off to hang with Rogue and Kitty, he'd found himself having to spend time with John instead.

The two were still in the early stages of getting to know one another. John still had that air of wary uncertainty that he'd brought with him, but the defences were starting to lower.

Bobby blinked, mentally filling the little blank boxes with the letters or ‘enemy’. He looked over at John, one eyebrow raising slightly. “How did you know that?” he asked, as though no one would ever be that smart and/or nerdy.

He looked back to the paper and wrote the word in. “Did you already do your paper?” he asked absently-mindedly.

"You'd be surprised at what I know where words are concerned, Bobby," said John, briefly glancing over at his roommate. "I want to be a writer, remember? And no, I haven't done my paper. I started, though."

That was fairly typical John: he'd start something, like a piece of work, or a school paper, but then he'd get distracted by something else. The years on the street hadn't been good for his concentration levels.

“Oh. Right,” Bobby said as he looked up again. He tossed his pencil onto his bed, then folded the paper (the wrong way, so it didn’t fold so much as crumple) and tossed it aside as well. He sat up and reached for the cut-out article he’d laid on his notebook. “I only found one article in this week’s paper. About some crazy guy who spray-painted ‘mutant power’ on the sidewalk outside the White House.”

“Way to make us all look bad, you know?” he said lightly, eyes scanning the picture of the vandalism.

"You think that's crazy?" John closed his book. "I reckon that showed some serious courage on his part. There's nothing wrong with some guy simply making a stand for what he believes in." The boy leaned back on his bed, his hands behind his head.

"And it's not fair to say that the actions of one guy make all mutants look bad. That's buying into media hype, and that's just what they want. Does the article even mention whether he was acting alone? Whether he was part of a gang? No, I bet it doesn't does it?"

John turned slightly to look at Bobby. "The media's the worst enemy any of us will ever face, you know. This country takes everything they say as gospel truth, all the time."

John had brought up some good points. But Bobby stuck on what he’d said first. “Courage? It says when the cops caught him, the guy started yelling about mutants taking over the world and killing all the humans. That’s not courage, that’s crazy.”

“It says they think he was alone…” Bobby said, scanning the article again. “But I bet Magneto would cream himself to find this guy.”

"So what about all the humans who go around saying that kids like us should be drowned, Bobby? Or doesn't it bother you that way around?"

John's tone was mild enough; but Bobby could hear the underlying annoyance. He'd flipped one of the switches that brought John out of his shell and up onto his soapbox, obviously.

"At the end of the day, humans are scared of us. Why d'you reckon that is?" John didn't wait for an answer. "Because, for the most part, we're better than them. Better, stronger, faster and capable of doing extraordinary things. Is that our fault any more than, say, being blond or being really tall?"

“Of course it bothers me,” Bobby said. It didn’t happen often, but when John got this way, he had a certain tone of arrogance about him. Like he was out to prove you wrong no matter what you said.

“It’s not our fault that we’re blonde or tall, but it doesn’t mean we should go around killing all the short red-head kids,” he replied, keeping his voice on a ‘politely disagreeing’ level. He hadn’t known John long, and they were just beginning to feel like friends, and he didn’t want to alienate him.

“Right?” He asked for John’s agreement, to see if he’d disagree. It was a more polite way of saying ‘you can’t tell me you believe in mutant supremacy'.

[Iceman]

John shrugged easily. "Mass genocide is going on all around us, Bobby. It's not just mutants. Look at people like Milosovich out in Eastern Europe. 'Ethnic cleansing'. Maybe you might want to research a little of that for the paper, it helps to understand where people are coming from."

He remained non-commital about his ultimate standing, trying to remain objective. But he was growing increasingly unhappy with the way mutant-human relationships were going in the world. Part of him knew, that they - as mutants - could wipe humans off the planet if they had to.

He reached for 'Catch-22' again, indicating that for him, at least, the conversation should take a different turn. He didn't fancy getting into an argument.

John clearly wanted to drop it, and though Bobby had a retort on the tip of his tongue that would probably turn things more heated, he let it drop. He didn’t really want to talk about it anymore, either. The nonchalant way John talked of genocide gave him an unsettling feeling in the pit of his stomach.

He didn’t want to know where John stood on the issue. He was at Xavier’s, after all, so he must agree with their ideals somewhat.

“So, have you always wanted to be a writer?” Talk about random. It changed the subject, though.

"Always?"

John looked up from the book and his brow crinkled in thought. "Pretty much since I first learned to read," he confirmed. Books had offered the miserable young John Allerdyce an escape from the world of foster homes and upheaval that had become his in his formative years. Reading allowed him to become someone else, even if only for a short while, and writing, he'd discovered, allowed him the chance to express his innermost thoughts and feelings without having to try to explain himself.

"What about you? What are you going to do when you leave here?"

“Some kind of business,” Bobby said vaguely. “You wouldn’t think it’s my thing, but I do okay at it and I like it. I’m still considering some other stuff, though.”

He laid the article back on his notebook and scooted down his bed, laying back so that his head was on his propped-up pillow. “I used to want to be a pitcher for the Red Sox,” he said, looking up to the poster by his bed of Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling. There was something to his tone that said that this dream had not completely died with time and (slight) maturity.

He glanced over to John, a slight smile on his face, and shrugged. “But I mean, before that I wanted to be either an astronaut or a snake-charmer. So who knows.”

John snorted with unconcealed laughter. "An astronaut or a snake charmer? Talk about diverse. My weirdest career option would have to be the time I decided I was going to be an adventurer. I planned to take a trip to Africa and discover an animal nobody had ever seen. I was gonna be famous, y'know? But I've never really travelled outside of New York. I was born in Australia, but we came here when I was just a baby."

It was the first time he'd ever even hinted at his past.

[Iceman]

Bobby grinned when John laughed. John usually kept to himself, so Bobby enjoyed the times when John came out of his shell a little bit. It wasn’t so much like he was shy as he’d just rather keep to himself, at least that’s how it seemed to Bobby. “An adventurer would be sweet,” he agreed, putting his hands behind his head and intertwining his fingers together.

“You could probably find a ton of new species, too. Of bugs, anyway. You know the scientists searching for that kind of stuff shake trees in the rainforest and thousands of bugs rain down, and they find new species in like every tree?”

“Australia? That’s really cool,” Bobby said when John had finished talking. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ve barely been anywhere, either. New Jersey, New York…California, Arizona, and South Carolina. And Niagra Falls, but that was in sixth grade and I had the flu.” It wasn’t really the same thing as never venturing outside of New York, but at least Bobby was trying.

“So where in New York? The Big Apple?”

"Here and there." John shrugged lightly. "The Bronx, Brooklyn...came here from the streets after I got the Prof's number off a cop who helped me out a couple of times."

They'd known he'd come from the streets. He hadn't even really needed to tell them that: his attitude and demeanour, the guarded way he reacted to people and the need he had for sneaking down to the kitchen in the middle of the night and stealing food instead of eating in the communal hall with everyone else. It was clear that at some point he'd had an education though. They'd taken him through a number of tests when he'd first arrived and academically, he was clearly no idiot.

Bobby nodded as though he understood, not wanting to say something awkward like ‘oh, I’ve never been there’ because that much was probably obvious. As much as Bobby was able to make friends with people no matter their differences, he would never have empathy for them. Not because he was rich or privileged, but simply because he’d grown up in a token American town with a token upper-middle-class family.

“Was the cop a mutant?” he asked, intrigued.

"Not that she ever let on," said John. "She seemed pretty normal to me, but was just kinda sympathetic, y'know? Had a kid, was raising it by herself...decent woman who got me the number for this place and said the Prof could help me."

He stared up at the ceiling.

"Should probably call her sometime," he mused.

Bobby nodded. “Yeah…Let he know you’re here. She’d probably be glad to know she helped,” he agreed.

[Iceman]

He paused then, for once thinking before he spoke. “You know…You’re not what I’d think of when I’d think about a guy from the streets of Brooklyn…” Bobby looked over to John and continued. He didn’t want John to take it as an insult somehow. He was trying to compliment him, but of course with teenage boys such things aren’t always easy.

“I mean, you’re smart. And, you know, polite and stuff.” Bobby cupped his hands for a moment, and when his top hand moved away, a round ball of ice about the size of a baseball was in his hand. There were jagged ridges in it that looked almost like a crude representation of baseball stitches; Bobby was still working at detailing anything he made. But if he was going to get so serious, he had to have something to do to keep him moving.

He tossed the ball of ice up in the air and caught it, his eyes on it rather than on John. “You’re pretty cool.”

John glanced sideways and rubbed his nose. "You don't have to work hard at being polite, and smart is objective. I like to learn, and I try to learn. I had some pretty decent foster parents before I hit the streets."

He watched Bobby play with the ball of ice for a while.

"I'm not cool," he said, quietly. "I'll never fit into that category and I'm not sure I want to, you know what I mean? I am who I am."

Wow. Guy didn’t like compliments, did he? “I meant you’re cool with me,” he specified, rolling the ball from one hand to fall into his other palm. “There isn’t really a ‘cool’ here. Which is cool…I mean, nice.”

John shrugged again. "I didn't come here with the intentions of being the most popular kid on campus, I came here 'cos I needed help. My powers have been getting a little...out of hand, and the Prof said he could help me hold them back a bit."

Plus Xavier had wanted to help John as not only a young mutant, but also as a young man he had sensed was very deeply troubled psychologically. Better for him to let his anger and fury loose in the Danger Room than on some - other, the Professor had sensed - unsuspecting individual in a moment of uncontrolled rage.

Bobby nodded, unsure of exactly how to respond to that. It wasn't really his place to ask what 'a little out of hand' entailed. "Mine kind of crept up on me, but the time I really realized something was weird was when I set the stove on fire and then froze half the kitchen with a half a foot of ice without even realizing I'd done it." He chuckled at the memory, but winced as well - how he'd ever gotten his parents to forget that, he didn't know.

Well, when in doubt, change the subject. Sports was something Bobby could relate to, and hopefully something John had an interest in as well. "Hey, are you a Knicks fan?"

[Iceman]

"Depends on your definition of the word 'fan'," said John. "When I was living with Pat and Mike, my last foster folks, I used to watch games with Mike on the weekend. Enjoyed playing at school, too, even though I was probably the shortest kid there. I can move pretty quick. Not played for a long time now, though."

It was almost wistful.

"Why d'you ask?"

“Well…we play games here – no official teams or anything – but we play just about every week. It’s kind of the closest thing we’ve got to team sports. You should play,” Bobby answered, jutting his chin at John once.

“Hey—wanna play now?” Bobby glanced across the room, where his basketball sat in the corner, with a baseball bat, a football, and a hockey stick. He'd been sitting still trying to work on that essay for too long, and he was itching to do something to release his energy.

John looked faintly surprised at the suggestion, then a scowl crossed his face. He scooped up his book and started reading with renewed vigour. After a couple of moments of having Bobby stare quizzically at him, he looked up again.

"I haven't got any sports kit."

He'd only owned two t-shirts when he'd first come to the Insitute.

Bobby was glad when John spoke again, because it gave Bobby an entrance to shake off the tense silence. “Oh,” he said, scooting to the edge of his bed and standing up. “Not a problem. I’ve got shorts,” he said, crossing to his dresser and opening a drawer.

He pulled out a pair – drawstring, in case John was as scrawny as he looked. He grabbed a t-shirt from the drawer and tossed both to John together. The clothes landed on his bed.

John stared at the shorts and the t-shirt for a few seconds, then rubbed at his nose thoughtfully. "You didn't have to do that," he said, eventually, "but thanks. Um." He picked up the shorts and considered them briefly.

"Do you have a spare pair of sneakers as well?" he asked, sounding - without doubt - ashamed.

Bobby nodded, either not noticing the shame in John’s question or not acknowledging it. He opened his closet and stooped, picking up a pair of shoes. “These’ll probably fit…” he said as he tossed them to the floor beside John’s bed.

He was already in shorts and a t-shirt, so he slipped on some tennis shoes and was ready to go. He scooped up the basketball and dribbled it on the floor a few times. “Got my first basket with this one,” he said, cradling it affectionately in his arm.

John slipped off the t-shirt he had been wearing to replace it with the sports one. It was the first time he'd changed in front of Bobby, always preferring the privacy of the bathroom. There was something strangely trusting in the gesture, as though Bobby had helped John take a hesitant step forward to at least trusting him a little.

And yes, he really was as scrawny as he looked.

"I played a few times with some of the guys back at the home," he said, as he changed into the shorts and laced up the shoes. "I wasn't too bad. But it's been a while."

Bobby nodded as he pulled out his desk chair and sat down, bending down to tie up his shoe. The basketball slipped from his arm and rolled into the assortment of other sports gear in the corner, causing the hockey stick to fall and hit Bobby in the back of the head. Bobby jerked and sat up, grabbing the stick and wincing as he rubbed the back of his head.

“Yeah…I’ve always been better at hockey,” he said, thumping the stick on the floor a few times for emphasis. “After I joined a local hockey team, when I was like six, I started fouling people right and left in Little League. Couldn’t remember which sport had refs who’d ignore that kind of stuff.”

“It’s the best, though,” he said, gazing with adoration at the hockey stick, even though it had just hit him in the back of the head. “Kind of comes with the territory, though. I mean…hockey, skating, ice…” He lifted a hand from the hockey stick, and where his hand had rested there was a gleaming thin coat of frost.

The briefest of brief smiles touched John's face when the hockey stick hit Bobby. Then he stood up and rubbed at his nose again.

"I'm ready," he said, rather self-consciously. "As ready as I'm likely to get, at least."

[Iceman]

They played for well over an hour, before it began to grow close to dinnertime, and Bobby started to wear out due to the sun. They decided to call it a day and headed inside. “You said you weren’t too bad. You should have warned me you were being modest,” Bobby said, flashing a smile back at John between pants for breath. He’d peeled off his shirt, and his shoulders were already looking pink from the sun. Not to mention his face – his nose was borderline red.

He didn’t seem to notice, though, and he wiped his sweaty forehead with his shirt. “Good game, man. So you’ll be on the team, right?”

John was equally sweaty, but was uncharacteristically cheerful. He had a smile plastered across his face, his damp hair clung to him and he looked relaxed. Where Bobby had caught the sun, he had burned, being fairer skinned than his friend - but he also hadn't really noticed yet. He would later, when he cooled down.

"On the team?" he said, in surprise. "Haven't you got a full team already?"

“Well, we kind of switch teams every week. We’ve never really had set teams, since it just depends on who shows. But I bet if we got word out that we were starting two teams, to play like…every other week…Then we could do it.” Bobby sounded excited about the idea, and as he talked he turned to walk backwards and face John.

He noticed the redness of John’s skin, and it made him wonder if he was burnt. “Hey, am I burnt?” he asked, feeling his own cheeks and forehead with his palm to try and determine it for himself. “I’ve never done well with the sun.”

"Now you mention it, you are a bit pink," confirmed John, with a grin. "You'd think, wouldn't you, with my mutation that I'd be immune to sunburn...but I'm not." He crossed to look in the mirror. “Aw, crap, that's gonna hurt later."

At Bobby's suggestion about the teams, he looked a little uncomfortable. "I dunno," he said, hesitantly. "Maybe. Perhaps." It had taken him this long to trust Bobby; he just wasn't sure he was ready to form part of a bigger social circle yet.

Bobby couldn’t help but smile as John looked at his own sunburn in the mirror. When he hesitated about the team idea, Bobby shrugged, passing the ball back and forth between his hands. “We’ll see. Right now, I’m starving. Are you hungry? I think tonight’s chicken.” He might have seemed a little ADD, but he could usually sense when people were uncomfortable, and he smoothly bypassed the uncomfortable topics in favor of something distracting from it.

"I'm a bit hungry."

Now THAT was an advance. John barely ate and NEVER said he was hungry. "Must be all that running around. But right now, I'm going to have a shower and clean up a bit. Unless you want the bathroom first...?"

There were communal showers down the hallway, but John never used them. He preferred to wait until the one in their en-suite bathroom was free. After seeing how skinny and scrawny he was, Bobby could see why, now.

Bobby’s eyebrows raised slightly; he’d been starting to wonder over the last few days whether part of John’s mutation was that he could go without food for days on end. Bobby rarely saw the guy eat. But he just chalked it up to an odd personality quirk. Like the getting-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night quirk.

“Nah, I’m good,” he said as they reached their room. He opened the door and walked in, tossing his shirt at the hamper (it fell in front of it) and grabbed a fresh one from his dresser. “I’ll catch you later, okay?”

"Sure," said John, almost automatically going to pick up the shirt and drop it in the hamper. "Later."

He paused, turned round and fixed Bobby with a serious expression unlike any Bobby had ever seen on his face.

"Thanks, man. I - ah - I enjoyed that."

Bobby stood from setting the basketball back in it’s place in the corner, turning to face John. He could tell that it had been more than a fun way to pass the time, and to his credit, he didn’t ruin the moment by cracking a joke. “Me, too,” he agreed with a nod, his tone not quite reaching the level of solemnity that John was at, but not humorous either. “We’ll definently have to do it again sometime.”

Bobby moved to the door and opened it, shaking out his t-shirt and pulling it over his head. He said a muffled ‘see you’ from inside the shirt and blindly pulled the door shut behind him. Pulling his head and arms through the shirt, he started down to eat, wondering to himself why no one who had come and gone in John’s life had bothered to see all the good things that Bobby could see as clear as day.