fandomtownies | The Boards, Saturday, All Day

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The Boards, Saturday, All Day

Jonothon was a bit tired when he made his way down the stairs for his office shift at the Boards. He'd been out late, after all, and arguing always left him a little out of sorts. But there was a coffee maker tucked under one arm, and a bag of grounds in his other hand, and together, the two of them were going to get him through the day.

Jono had never been a Boy Scout, but he had to admit that there was a certain sort of charm in their 'be prepared' motto.

[The Boards office is open!]

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It had been some time since Chamber's - or Decibel's, whichever name he was using at the time - return to Fandom, and Cable felt it was time to at least check in and see how he was getting along.

So he arrived at the Boards into the afternoon. "Jonothon," he greeted, partly to deal with the whole codename situation, partly because well, first name basis wouldn't be a bad thing, right?

... On first name basis with a towering, broad, scarred mutant with a reputation. Yes, many people would kill for that chance.

He was a towering, broad, scarred mutant with a reputation that Jono respected, and so a first-name basis suited Jonothon just fine. He glanced up from the paperwork he was filling out, blinked once, and then offered Cable a small, if wry, smile.

"Cable," he replied, nodding faintly as he pulled himself up to his feet. "To what do I owe the visit?"

"Just a social call," Cable offered. Was that a faint smile on his face? It probably was. "Asking you how you've settled in doesn't hold much weight when you haven't had time to settle..."

"I'm not really what anybody would consider a 'settling' sort, anyhow," Jonothon countered, not entirely lightly, but easily enough. "But I can think of worse places to be than here. That's a start, I suppose."

Ever the optimist, that Jono.

"Can I get you anything? Er... coffee?"

There was a lot of coffee. Could anyone blame Jono if he'd happened to brew an entire twelve-cup pot?

"Coffee would be fine," Cable agreed. "Mind if I pull up a chair...?"

Sitting: sometimes it happened.

Sitting was excellent. It had this funny way of making Jonothon not feel like he was pathetically tiny, even when he had a fair amount of size to him these days, himself.

"By all means," he replied, gesturing toward the other seat in the office as he rummaged around for a clean mug. "Make yourself comfortable."

Coffee and sitting down? This really was like some sort of social visit, now. Wild.

After a moment, Jono managed to locate a mug that was actually clean, no coffee stains in it or anything, and poured the coffee. "How do you take it?"

Somewhere over the years, apparently Jono had learned how to entertain a guest. Or at least how to get them coffee. This was also wild, yes.

"Two sugars," said Cable, because a real man wasn't scared of admitting he liked some sweetness in his coffee, and took the offered seat.

He sat back and crossed his legs. "It's good to see the theater up and running again," he said.

Jono allowed himself a momentary amused smile as he spooned the sugar into the mug and stirred, before setting it down in front of Cable and taking the seat nearby.

"Is it? I know it's good to be involved in something like this, but while I was here as a student, there was usually something going on in this place. It's difficult to picture a stage sitting idle with no plans to put anything on it."

Jono's inner showman refused to believe that such a thing existed, damn it.

"We went without a theater for some time until Geoffrey came and set this up," Cable noted. He took his coffee and took a long sip. "But I agree with the general idea - we should be promoting the arts, especially on this island. I think there are kids who can use this chance to express themselves."

"No shortage of them," Jono agreed. "Really, for this production we're putting on now, most of our auditions were for youths. And the Winter Showcase... entirely students. Not terribly surprising in a town built around a school, granted."

He shrugged a little.

"It's the sort of opportunity I probably should have taken advantage of more when I was their age."

... When he was their age. Good lord, it hadn't been that long, had it?

"Did you ever feel tempted?" he wondered. "There are some things we only learn to appreciate as we get older."

Jonothon's shoulders hitched slightly in a shrug.

"I wanted to be a musician, before I blew my face off," he admitted. "Spent entirely too much time playing pubs, looking for my big break. Gave up on it for a bit. It was difficult to picture myself ever making it anywhere... after. Couldn't sing, what was the point?"

That didn't quite answer Cable's question. At least directly. So he added, "Around here? I did what I could with my guitar from time to time. I did stop by the theatre once when I heard there were auditions, but I didn't get on too well with the director, so I turned heel and walked back out again. Never bothered."

"Geoffrey was..."

Struggling for a decent word to put it...

"...a little quirky," Cable settled on. "I didn't know, but I'm not quite surprised." He took another sip of his coffee. "So have you broken your guitar out for a performance yet, down here?"

Geoffrey, Genesis. One of those G-names, at any rate. Jono hadn't been paying too much attention to the details, and it had been years ago. He shrugged again.

"I played at the showcase," he replied, toying idly at the handle of his mug. "And I'll be playing accompaniment in Petey Sci-Fi. But I'm not really terribly keen to take the spotlight, these days."

It involved people looking at him.

Possibly all the G-names were starting to jumble in Cable's mind, too. It was... slightly harder to forget the man with the razorblades in his mouth, though.

Cable nodded, and set his cup down for a moment. "Why did you start playing?" he asked, changing tacks a little.

"What, back when I was a kid?" Jono blinked, and then grinned faintly, shaking his head. "Girls. Of course. I was young and stupid, and the world began and ended with them. Maybe there was a touch of rebellion in there, too. My parents had no use for a son who wanted to be a rockstar, and I had no use for them. It worked out nicely."

None of those reasons really seemed to hold true these days. He didn't want the attention, not really, and his parents hadn't even bothered to check up on him when he'd been making international headlines as one of the worst off of the victims of M-Day.

"Why does any teenager pick up a guitar, really? Attention."

Cable's mouth formed another one of those faint smiles. "And why does an adult keep it up?" he asked.

He filed away the information, which rang very true - it also told him everything he needed to know about Jono's decision not to take central stage.

Jonothon couldn't help but smile a little at the question, no.

"Familiarity, perhaps. Even when I didn't have a mouth, I had my guitar. And... not much else has really remained a constant, since."

It felt like a little piece of him that hadn't been ripped away. He couldn't say that about very much.

"I didn't follow your exploits between leaving school and... well, shortly before we met again, all that closely," Cable admitted. "But I know that it was rough. Though, in the light of all that, it seems all the more fitting that you ended up here."

Here, as in the theater.

"I... don't mind it here," Jono replied. Which was about as close as he'd get to admitting that he somewhat enjoyed it. "And you really weren't missing out on anything. I wasn't much of an X-Man."

In fairness, he hadn't really been given much of an opportunity to be.

Cable gave that a shrug of his own. "I'm interested in listening if you're interested in talking about it," he offered.

"Not really much to say," Jono noted. "The only one who ever took me the least bit seriously was Logan. I wasn't one of the team. I was a Generation X kid turned junior mascot. Had I known that was what Xavier was in the market for, I would have turned him down outright and let Jubilee go back to them."

Instead of sticking around long enough to blow a few things up here and there, get the overall impression that he was a freak even around mutants who had tentacles where their legs went, and just... generally make things worse, overall.

"You were benched?"

Cable sounded somewhat sympathetic.

"I always felt the whole point of young recruits was making sure they got experience under their belt..."

Because X-Force had always been such a beacon of functional.

"Let's just say that I got a very good feel for all the little intricacies of the dashboard of the Blackbird."

No, he hadn't been allowed to pilot it. But there was probably still a Jono-shaped ass indent in the passenger seat.

"After a while, I said 'to hell with it,' and just opted into playing TA at the school, instead. It seemed to me as though I was actually accomplishing something that way, even if all that something amounted to was introducing a few of the braver students to the prospect of thinking for themselves."

That, at least, had felt like progress.

"At Xavier's, that's not always an easy task," Cable noted. "One of the reasons I went part-time after Providence was formed..."

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