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It was too early to be planning out the rest of his future with another man, but Victor was a damn romantic. After Mystique and Destiny’s disaster wedding of the century – he fucking called it, mind – Paras had taken his hand and asked him if he wanted to see what color green and purple made.
Brown. The answer was brown. But Victor was smart enough to spot the innuendo, so he had taken Paras to the bathroom stalls of the venue before they could get roped into any heroics for round one, then he had taken Paras home for rounds two and three. It was fucking amazing. So amazing that Victor was now making morning after pancakes and mapping out the course of the next twenty years of his life with Paras to the tune of a generic top fifty hit blasting from his beat up radio. He was way too old to be doing teenager shit like this, but Victor didn’t really have a normal childhood, so maybe this was just him making up for lost time.
“I didn’t know you cook.” Paras, smiling with his sleep tousled hair and chiseled chest, standing half-naked in the middle of Victor’s apartment. Victor could hear the wedding bells – god, he really needed to stop acting like a lovesick schoolboy, no matter how fun it was.
“Picked it up on Krakoa,” Victor said casually. He could mention the old mutant nation without feeling like his heart would break in two, now, though a piece of him would always remain there with everyone who chose to stay.
Paras crossed the space between them to wrap his arms around Victor. What a privilege it was to be touched by another man. “Whatcha making?” Paras asked.
“Pancakes.”
“Yum. Need help?”
“Making pancakes isn’t really a group activity,” Victor said, “Why don’t you go and look pretty on the couch and I’ll bring you a plate when it’s ready?”
Paras pressed a kiss to Victor’s cheek before making his way to the couch. He was very good at looking pretty. Victor was already picking out the wedding ring in his mind.
He stacked them both two plates of fluffy pancakes, bringing the plates and utensils out to the coffee table with maple syrup and butter in one single trip. Hooray for that summer he spent as a waiter on Krakoa before he landed the bartending gig.
Paras dug in. After one single bite, he moaned, the sound delicious and familiar to Victor’s ears. “God, Victor, these are amazing.”
“Family recipe,” Victor said. The recipe was actually from the FoodNetwork, with a substitution of buttermilk after Victor spent one too many nights on food YouTube, but Paras didn’t need to know that.
They ate their pancakes in silence, knees and elbows bumping as Victor contemplated when would be a good time to ask Paras to move in, marry him, and start round four, in that order.
Then he had to open his big stupid mouth and ask, “What are we doing today?”
“Round four,” Paras said, and Victor’s hopes had been bolstered until Paras added, “Then I’ve gotta catch my flight to LA.”
There went Victor’s Borkowski’s hopes and dreams, dashed against the cold, hard rocks of reality. Honestly, he kinda expected this. The fantasies were fun while they lasted. He should’ve just said “yeah, okay,” played it cool, said the normal expected response, but maladapted childhood and all that fun stuff. So instead, Victor blurted out, “LA?”
Paras nodded. “Yep. Figured I should finish that psychology degree now that us mutants don’t have a home anymore.”
Paras turned to press a kiss to Victor’s temple. Then, like a prince in shining purple psionic armor, he asked, “Do you want to join me?”
“I got a bartending job here,” Victor blurted out. His case of foot-in-mouth disease must be terminal.
Pause. Rewind. Reset. Reality was so much sadder than Victor’s fantasies.
“I get it,” Paras said, “It’s hard to get anything when we look…when we look like us. You take what you can get.”
He gave Victor another kiss, a chaste little thing tinged with beige regret. “Friends?” Paras whispered quietly, an apology and a promise rolled into one.
“Round four,” Victor said, “Then…friends.”
Paras smiled, grabbing Victor’s phone and punching in his number before pouncing on Victor to devour him whole. As he moaned under the weight of Paras, Victor knew how this was going to end: they were going to lose each other’s numbers, and the promise of friendship would fizzle like the dream that was Krakoa. Life just kinda worked that way.
But for now, Victor could sigh Paras’ name and pretend like this was forever.
Fired. What a stupid, incendiary word, somehow disrespectful to both the devastation of losing a job and the agony of roiling flames. Shit mouthfeel, too. To top it all off, it wasn’t even Victor’s fault that he was fired.
His boss hadn’t cared that he neither started or ended the fight. It only mattered that he was the target. He was too visibly mutant, too damn green (suck it, Kermit), too much of a liability, so he was let go. It was unfair, but life had never been fair to people like him, so Victor wasn’t going to waste his energy complaining.
Fuck. He liked that job too.
He thought of Laura and Sophie and David, mutants like him but not like him, able to blend into the human population because they had only been blessed with power and not cursed with a different appearance. He wondered if he would have kept his job if he had been like them.
Ugh. He hated doing shit like this. It was a useless exercise in self-pity.
Victor made it home, locked himself in his room before his sociology major roommates could bother him about his mutant experience, and decided to let himself wallow. As a treat. He deserves a treat after all that happened today.
“Fuck,” Victor muttered, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to block out the rest of the world.
His phone dinged with the Grindr notification sound. Like a dog that had learned to salivate at the sound of the dinner bell, his body perked up, but Victor wasn’t going to get excited. The dating scene was hard enough, but with the added…everything, Victor found that he had become a little jaded. The message waiting for him had a fifty percent chance of being a reportable hate crime and a fifty percent chance of being scalie fetishists. Might as well flip the coin. He opened his phone to find a message from a generic anonymous torso pic asking if his dick was as green and scaly as the rest of him.
Yes, it was, but Victor really didn’t want to deal with this right now.
“Fuck.”
He thought of Paras. He didn’t know why the fuck he was thinking of Paras, but maybe it had something to do with how their lives had always been adjacent but never intertwined. Paras would get it. Maybe Paras was going through the same thing down in Los Angeles. He wanted to call Paras, but the social norms of their last interaction dictated that they never speak to each other again. Victor was supposed to have lost Paras’ number.
He still had it. Buried in his contacts list, Paras was listed as Indra – Hellions; clinical, succinct, impartial. Named in an emergencies-only type of deal. Victor shouldn’t call. This wasn’t really an emergency.
He pressed call.
Fuck.
Paras picked up.
Fuck.
“Victor?”
He had to commit. “I got fired from my job.”
Good god, he wanted to crawl into a hole and die. He knew he was already coming in hot, but he didn’t mean to come in this hot.
“I’m sorry, Victor,” Paras said, “Was it…was it because…”
“Yeah,” Victor answered, not wanting Paras to have to go through the struggle of voicing the reason why. It gave the discrimination too much damn power, even though they should be talking about it. Victor supposed context mattered – and right now, Victor just wanted comfort.
“I heard about those…those Truthseekers in New York,” Paras said, “We don’t really have a lot of those types here, and they’re not as bold. I can’t begin to imagine how hard it is there for you.”
“I’m glad you don’t have to deal with this crap,” Victor said.
Paras shushed him. “Shhh. This isn’t about me. This is about you – is there anything I can do for you?”
Pound me into the mattress until my mind goes blank, his brain helpfully supplied, but Victor had developed enough of a brain to mouth filter to not blurt out something that crass. Instead, he just muttered, “I don’t know, Paras.”
“Let me reframe this,” Paras said, “How do you feel, Victor?”
“God, are you gonna use your therapy speak on me, Paras?”
“One, unethical, because we’ve done a lot of things that a therapist and a patient shouldn’t do to each other,” Paras said, “And two, don’t be avoidant.”
Ugh. Paras was right. Victor hated when his friends were right, especially when he still kinda-sorta-maybe carried a torch for those friends. “Fine, I’ll play your little game,” Victor said, I guess I…I guess this feels like Stryker and the Purifiers all over again. Well, because they’re kinda just rebranded Purifiers, but…I’m tired, Paras. Am I supposed to feel this tired at my age? I just…it feels like I’m watching the horrors unfold before me again, and I’m supposed to be old and strong enough to do something about it now but I…I still can’t.”
Victor sighed, letting the line go quiet as Paras collected his thoughts on the other end. Two and a half beats later, Paras said, “That’s a lot of responsibility you’re putting on yourself that’s not necessarily yours, Victor. That’s not fair.”
Victor scoffed. There was that word again – fair. Just like fired, it was another f-word to add to his shit list. “Nothing’s ever been fair to me, Paras. Nothing.”
“I get it.”
“I know.”
Silence again. Then Paras said, “I wish I was there. You…I know you’re a strong guy, Victor, but I also want to just…be there. To protect you. Um, I hope that wasn’t out of line.”
An old, familiar fantasy of Paras as Victor’s prince in shining armor made Victor’s chest seize. “You’re not out of line,” Victor said, “But I…I can’t tear you away from your fancy degree, Paras.”
“Well, maybe this fancy degree isn’t all it's cracked up to be,” Paras said. There was something a little distant in his voice, and it made Victor want to reach across the continent to give Paras a hug.
“People giving you trouble?” Victor asked.
“People being people,” Paras replied.
Yeah, that tracked. “I can hop on a plane to LA and beat them up for you,” Victor said.
“No violence unless absolutely necessary.”
“Exactly,” Victor drawled, “That’s why I’m the one who’s gonna get his hands dirty. You just sit back and look pretty.”
Maybe Victor shouldn’t have said the last part, but Paras was laughing on the other end of the line and the world narrowed down into a single, sharp focus. Victor wished he could stay here forever.
“Paras? Can I ask you something stupid?”
“Sure.”
“Can you stay on the phone until I fall asleep?”
He swore he could hear Paras smile. “Of course.”
Fuck. Mojo and his…everything, really. This was the worst beating Victor had taken in awhile, and he could fucking feel it. His body felt like a walking bruise, but it was nothing a few painkillers and eight hours of sleep wouldn’t cure. Healing factor, or something close to it, yay. At least he got the stupid seed Professor Xavier, the jerk, wanted. World saved, woop-dee-doo, time for Victor to crawl back into the shadows where mutants like him belonged.
God, he was gonna need so much therapy, wasn’t he?
He groaned, then groaned again when the slight shift opened a wound he thought had closed three minutes ago. Victor was never doing Professor Xavier another favor again.
His phone rang. He thought about letting it go to voicemail, because just the idea of moving was painful right now, but Mr. and Mrs. Borkowski had raised him to be a very polite young man. He decided to endure the ordeal of reaching for his phone and picking up the call. This better not be a spam call.
“Victor? Oh my god, Victor, are you okay?”
Paras. Everything was right with the world again.
“I’m okay,” Victor said.
There was a beat. He was pretty sure Paras was calling his bluff.
“No, I’m not okay,” Victor admitted, “Everything hurts, everything sucks, and I kind of just want to curl up into a ball and cry. So that’s fun.”
“Curling up into a ball and crying is valid,” Paras said, “I…I just…I wish I was there. I wish I could help you.”
Victor liked that Paras was still the wishing type. Victor had given up that exercise in self-inflicted heartbreak years ago. “Don’t worry about me,” Victor said.
“How can I not? Victor, I care about you,” Paras said.
Not enough to stay. Not enough to remember my number. Not enough to love me. Stupid, selfish thoughts regurgitated by a brain softened with violence. Victor didn’t believe them. Victor didn’t believe them.
“Victor?”
He must have been too silent. He opened his mouth to reassure Paras, but the sound that escaped was a choked little sob.
“Oh, Victor. I…I…”
There was nothing Paras could say that wouldn’t be a lie, and both of them knew that. So Paras fell silent, but he stayed on the phone and listened as Victor sobbed until he couldn’t cry anymore.
Later, much later, when Victor finally found his voice again, he muttered to Paras, “I’m so lonely.”
Silence. Then, “Me too.”
“You make me feel less lonely.”
“Same here.”
“Why are we so far apart?” Victor asked. There were reasons, sure, but all of that seemed so superficial now. What the fuck was a job when it wasn’t a guarantee of security he had hoped it would be? If Victor had to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder, then he’d want Paras to watch his six – for old times’ sake.
“I don’t know.”
Maybe that was something Victor and Paras could change.
Los Angeles was really fucking hot, but Victor figured he could manage. The dryness might get to him eventually, but moisturizer should delay that inevitability by a few decades. Besides, maybe then he would’ve moved somewhere else.
LAX was a nightmare to navigate. Victor was supposed to meet Paras at one of the gates, but he had taken a wrong turn at one of the tunnels and ended up in the staging zone for the pet carriers going on an international flight – very loud, very stinky. He was already ten minutes late, and the trek to where he was supposed to meet Paras doubled that. God, Victor was gonna have to really make it up to Paras later.
There he was now, in all his purple glory, red hair glinting in the Los Angeles light. Apologies were already on the tip of Victor’s tongue, but Paras beamed when he saw Victor and Victor’s mind went blank. Pretty. Too pretty. It should be a crime for someone to be this pretty.
“Hey, you finally made it,” Paras said, “LAX got you – oof!”
Victor pulled Paras into a hug. “I missed you,” he whispered.
“I did too,” Paras replied.
People were staring. Fuck them. Victor did not live through Limbo and Krakoa and Mojo and all the other little traumas he’d picked up to be cowed by a few gawkers. Gay mutants, whoop-dee-doo, move the fuck on. If only the world was that simple. But it wasn’t, so Victor was going to cling onto Paras a little tighter than before.
“I should’ve stayed with you,” they both said, near simultaneously, then they both laughed.
Paras let Victor go first. “So…friends?”
“More,” Victor declared, “We both know the friends thing was bullshit anyways. I like you too much.”
“I like you too much, too,” Paras said. Then he pressed their foreheads together and asked, “So. Round five?”
Victor grinned. “You didn’t even have to ask.”