fandomtownies | The Perk, Thursday Evening

"Is it just me, or does the barista have mascara streaks on her face?"

Hello, April. Jono had missed whatever in the world you'd done to the poor woman that made the coffee, fortunately, and was looking vaguely bemused as he made his way over from the counter to say hello.

While wondering if maybe he was the only person in the world who didn't come with a laptop to this place.

"Yeah, she should really be more careful when applying her makeup, too," April said loudly, in a tone that might have implied that this wasn't the first nasty comment the barista had heard from her tonight. "Plus the coffee tastes like ass today." Debatable.

...

"Hey."

Jono glanced at the barista, and then back at April, and then shrugged. If the girl at the counter couldn't handle it, she'd learn. Probably.

"Hey," he echoed, raising his coffee, which didn't taste all that much like ass, but what did he know? "Back into life as we know it back on the island?"

She didn't look horribly traumatized, at least.

"Eh," April said with a less-than-expressive shrug. "That week wasn't too bad. Except your face might have scarred me forever."

That was a joke, Jono. A very dry joke, but.

"Yes, well, you should see the scars it left on me."

Protip: You didn't want to see that, April. It was messy.

"Can I?"

APRIL.

Jono twisted a wry little smile. Really, he should have seen that question coming, hm?

"They're gone now," because of course they were, "but I have photos. Don't ask me why I have photos, I don't know, my old classmates in Massachusetts liked taking pictures when they figured I wasn't looking."

... No, he hadn't been naked. Get your head out of the gutter.

Oh, April wasn't even thinking about the nudity. She was more intrigued by the prospect of the scars. "So," she said with a few expectant snaps of her fingers, "pony up. Come on."

Jonothon's eyebrow was going to just remain a fixture as high up on his forehead as he could make it go, for quite some time.

"I love this day and age. The era when people automatically assume that having a photograph of something means that it travels with you everywhere."

These photos had been taken in the 90s, April. The 90s.

... Still, he probably had something on his phone, which he'd gotten while he was a student here, all of a couple years ago. So he was pulling it out and flipping through to see.

Pfft. The '90s. April had been nine then, Jono. NINE.

In the meantime, she was leaning over his shoulder like the privacy-invading ass that she was. "So how gross, would you say?" she asked conversationally. "Is it just burns, or...?"

"If you want gross, I've got a newspaper article, actually..."

There wouldn't be any fire in the photo on it, of course. Jono had been the subject of the first of a series of articles about depowered mutants after M-Day, and the photograph showed him on life support, with his gaping chest wound wide open to the world. He flipped through the images on his phone until he came to that one, and hissed between his teeth a little.

"I try to avoid looking at this one, actually. Lord only knows why I've got this."

[Heads-up, the picture is a bit on the disturbing side. MY BOY IS MARVEL'S BUTTMONKEY.]

"Oh, gross," April said, her tone way more expressive than usual. She looked... well, kind of intrigued, actually, and she was scooting closer, but it was a kind of sympathetic fascination that only April could pull off. "Dude. That sucks."

"Probably would've sucked more if I'd been awake for more than a couple of months of that," Jono noted, glancing at the phone briefly and wrinkling his nose at it. "I had been fairly resigned to it, though. That isn't exactly the sort of injury that you expect to be able to eventually walk away from."

"Yeah, no, that sucker looks like a lifer," April agreed, still squinting at the picture. "Seriously gross. What's your chest look like now?"

Jono held his phone out for a moment more, and then shrugged, re-claiming it before glancing down at his chest.

"Grey," he intoned, tapping a finger against it. Rock-solid, too. Jubilee would have had his head if he'd let himself get flabby. "And decidedly less hollowed-out than before. No scars, though. I heal fairly cleanly, these days."

For reasons that he refused to think about, thank you.

He was not mentioning the giant red cult tattoo for love or money.

"Cool," April decided. "I mean, the scars would've been too. But healing factors, always badass."

"It's not so much a healing factor," Jono was pretty quick to leap in to say. "I'll do a good bit of bleeding if you rip me open. I'm no more difficult to kill than anybody else."

Denial was a wonderful thing.

"I just... You know. It's difficult to leave a mark."

Because he was an Apocalypse clone, essentially. And he was so not thinking about that la la la he couldn't hear you.

"Yeah, well, good," April said. "'Cause it looks like you get yourself pretty beat up like a habit or something, dude." Or firefaced! Couldn't forget the fireface. "Work on that."

"Will do," Jono replied, tempted for a moment to give her a half-assed salute. He managed to refrain, if only because he had a coffee in that hand, and a phone in the other. "I make no guarantees, mind. I'm not exactly in the safest of careers."

The theatre was a real killer. Yep.

"You get a lot of mayhem up at the theater?" April asked, sounding about as dry as it was possible to be. "Kids yanking the fire alarm, sticking dead squirrels in the popcorn machine...?"

"People from other realities taking 'break a leg' all too seriously."

How Jonothon managed to say that with a straight face was a mystery for the ages.

"I make a lot of trips to New York during the week. Haven't for a couple of weeks now, granted. The Broadway crowd, you understand."

"Tourist season," April said solemnly with a knowing nod. "And the part with being imprisoned by a hell-bitch in a dungeon for a while back. And it's supposed to be pretty humid there this time of year..."

"It's hideous," Jono intoned. "The air is thick enough to chew on it, if you have a mind to."

He didn't have a mind to.

"After the other week, my cohorts agreed that it would be best for me to take a bit of a break from there, and come back when I'm feeling a little more fit for it."

You know. To face down all of those tourists.

"If I were you, I'd go with a sun allergy excuse," April suggested. "And show back up when it's a temperature that doesn't make people cry."

"April, luv, I'm British. I could inform them that I'm not quite certain how I'll cope when there isn't water falling from the sky, and I'll happily return as soon as they do something about that pesky day-star."

He couldn't even complain that he was missing the Olympics, because they'd just reasonably point out that he'd get to watch them again in a few more years, once his reality caught up with where Fandom was now.

... At least it wasn't as intolerably hot back then as it was in the here and now?

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