#ig this is a universe where mags is working with xavier and moira to make krakoa

[ncrosha]

@warlockisaslur

despite being the smartest person the room at any given time, david alleyne is by far and above the least subtle person josh foley has ever met.

they'd only been reunited for - what, two weeks? and already he sees the gears turning. he doesn't need to know the ins and outs of young avengers interpersonal drama to know that he wants his alone time, and that this right here is both an effort to get that, and an earnest attempt at forcing a friendship between his two biggest problems in the hopes that'd become a solution.

great job, man. wonderful.

pairing up might be the wrong word. this feels like a playdate, like the drop-off at another house and run kind. the kind that had happened a lot when he was a kid and was categorically too much compared to his significantly older brothers. these days the too much he was came in the depressing variety, not the desperate for attention and willing to do anything for it kind. no, this was the opposite. the we did not talk for six years because i threw my sim card and tracking chips into the fucking ocean after some shit i refuse to tell you about and then six months after my funeral, which apparently you attended with your new team, not jealous or anything, glad you found the time, you found me at a bodega buying chips and forcefully injected yourself back into my life, not that i'm complaining, and now you feel compelled to "fix me" when i cannot be fixed variety.

that being said - well, there's the guilt. unspoken secret ontop of unspoken secret, the greatest of which being that he was no longer an x-man and now if someone could compel him to wear a uniform, it'd bear the insignia of the good ole brotherhood of evil mutants. that had yet to come up organically in any conversation and while it was probably the lightest of weights he was carrying, there never seemed to be a good time to drop it.

and speaking of dropping it. josh's blank eyes cast a glance at the dark haired boy seated across from him. a far younger and less tactful version of himself would have asked, point blank, why it was that wiccan of wiccan and hulkling now seemed to be just wiccan... but that seemed self-evident. people break up. superheroes most of all, and most messily.

especially when you had powers of a magnitude you could scarcely fathom... that left you feeling lost and lonely when you contemplated the gulf between your abilities and those of the people around you. and how easily harm can come without meaning it.

( okay. fine. maybe they did have something in common, something that can't be quantified and probably needs some kind of group therapy that the x-men sure as hell can't provide. touché, david. touché. )

he sits up straight, deciding that if they are going to sit here in this apartment while his former-slash-maybe best friend and his boyfriend have a sorely overdue date night, they can do better than just stewing in the awkward silence. once this would've been easy as breathing, but that was two deaths and three dozen murders ago.

the best he can fire off is...

"david tells me you're a comic guy," josh says, half a smile plastered across his face. "what's your favorite? uh, non-superhero if that' y'know, loaded. i was big into wolverine before i met the guy, now i'm really into, like, giant mech manga."