Fic: Unwoven 1/6 (Completed Fic)
Title: Unwoven 1/6 (Completed Fic)
Fandom: X: First Class
Rating: PG
Pairing: Azazel/Riptide
Summary: Azazel sleeps with Raven, and everything falls apart.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my own words.
Notes: 1. I decided to make Janos Puerto Rican, basically because I wanted to make my life easier. I'm Puerto Rican and it's the only place about which I know anything of what was going on in the 50's and 60's save the US. So...
2. I debated whether to translate all the foreign insults in the text, but I decided that Janos really needed to curse as he wished, and you will soon see why. To clarify: 'hijo de perra' = 'son of a bitch' and 'puta madre' = in this context is sort of an equivalent of 'fuck'.
“Don’t speak to me, hijo de perra. How could you do this to me?”
“Janos, I’m sorry! Can you please listen to me?”
Janos replied by throwing a tornado at Azazel, smacking him against the wall.
°°°°°°°
“Did you notice Raven has disappeared?” Janos asked one morning as he and Azazel had breakfast in the kitchen.
“Yeah…um,” Azazel muttered, not lifting his eyes from the newspaper he was reading. “I heard she went on a trip.”
“Heard she was pregnant, too.”
Janos nibbled on a piece of toast. Crumbs fell across his chest. Frowning, he swept them off as he leaned forward, grabbing his own newspaper, Le Monde. His French could use some brushing up. It’d been ages.
“Maybe she went to get rid of it,” he said.
He didn’t notice how Azazel’s tail stiffened. Not then.
“Maybe.” Azazel’s reply was so light that Janos barely heard it.
°°°°°°
“It was a mistake,” Azazel said.
“Puta madre. That’s your excuse? Do you even care enough to try? Stay away from me!”
The house shook with the force of the tornado encased inside it. Books and chairs smashed against the walls and ceiling, and a lamp broke on Azazel’s shoulder, sending him to the ground. He teleported around the room to avoid the projectiles, each time striving to appear close to Janos, but Janos wouldn’t let him. He threw the tornado at him, wishing that every time Azazel vanished, it would be the last.
°°°°°°°
“Why are we here?” Janos asked, squinting against the bright tropical sun that gleamed down on the stretch of white beach. His feet sank into the soft sand, his leather shoes suddenly superfluous and confining. The breeze flapped his shirt, the humidity making the fabric uncomfortable on his skin. There wasn’t another human being as far as Janos could see, nor any hint of civilization. Not a tourist beach or a private beach. Azazel was so good at finding secluded spots like this.
“You’ve been too stressed,” Azazel said, his shirt already off. He lost no time getting rid of the rest. “I’m treating you.”
Janos grinned, rushing to remove his clothes as well. So overrated, really. God, but Azazel looked gorgeous in this light, not that he looked bad in any light. Delicious red skin shone as he stretched out his naked body, taut muscles detailed by the sun. The wind defied the product in his hair and shook a strand loose. It brushed into his eyes, which glittered as he delighted himself watching Janos slip out of his clothes.
“You’re treating yourself,” Janos said, lust building inside him with the heat of Azazel’s regard.
Azazel reached for him, and in a moment they were chest deep in the water.
“Damn, this is cold!” Janos cried out, laughing as he spit out the water that splashed into his mouth from the teleportation displacement.
“You should be used to it, Caribbean boy.”
Azazel tugged him by the waist and kissed him. Soon, the water warmed up just fine.
°°°°°
“What bullshit are you going to say? You were drunk? She seduced you? You had a moment of weakness? You don’t have moments of weakness.”
“I did this time. Janos, I know there’s nothing I can say that can make this better, but please believe me. I’ve never regretted anything so much in my life. I’ll never-“
“Do it again?” Janos scoffed, swallowing against the knot in his throat. “That’s what all cheaters say. Just like my father. Well, I’m not going to turn into my mother and forgive you.”
°°°°°°°°°
Two weeks after Raven left, Emma pulled Janos into the study.
“There’s something you need to know,” she said, guiding him towards a chair.
“What? Why do you look so serious?”
“You should sit.”
Emma’s face was filled with so much concern for him that he felt as if a thunderstorm had dumped all its rain on him. He sank into the chair, limbs suddenly heavy and stiff. Fear nibbled at his stomach.
“Do you know where Azazel went two days ago?”
She really didn’t need to ask, telepath that she was. However, she promised those who joined the Hellfire Club, and now this new Brotherhood, that, for the sake of privacy, she wouldn’t read their minds unless she felt she must for safety reasons. Janos didn’t completely believe her, but she did stay out of their private business. Usually.
“He said--” Janos said, his tongue stuttering. Cold realization chilled his spine. “He lied.”
Lied with his head stuck in the closet, smoothing out clothes that had already been folded, jabbering about needing to de-stress somewhere new, then ducked out of the room and Janos’s sight for a midnight meal without even asking Janos if he wanted something.
“Where did he go?” Janos asked, dread sharpening his voice.
“Nova Scotia.”
Quite a ways from New Zealand, Azazel’s supposed destination.
“What’s in Nova Scotia?”
“Raven.”
Emma could transfer memories into your mind, including sight, sound, and even emotion. This is how Janos saw Azazel appear in some apartment Raven had holed up in to ask her about the baby. She sat at the kitchen table drinking a cup of tea. Always tea. Must have been Xavier’s Englishness that rubbed off on her. Dirty plates and cups were piled in the sink. A half eaten piece of toast lied on a plate on the counter, crumbs streaming off across the tiled surface. The hair at the top of Raven’s head stuck out at an odd angle, as if she’d been pulling it. She smoothed it out with a swipe of her hand when Azazel entered, but did nothing else.
“You can’t get rid of it,” Azazel said without preamble.
The look Raven flashed at him was so tired and enervated that Azazel mentally flinched, but he didn’t back down.
“I can if I want to,” Raven said. Grabbing her mug, she strode across the room to put it in the sink, turning her back to Azazel. It clinked into the pile.
“It’s my child, too,” Azazel said. “You can’t just decide this on your own.”
“This,” Raven pointed at her belly, which was already rounding out, “wasn’t supposed to happen. I don’t want children, Azazel. Don’t tell me you do.”
“Not before, but…” Azazel crossed his arms, squaring his shoulders. “It exists now.”
“It’s not even a fetus yet. Besides, I don’t want it.”
“I do. So you need to have it.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one throwing up every morning, whose feet are swollen, who has the sudden urge to eat mustard mixed with chocolate ice cream. You’re not the one who’s going to suffer the pain of nine hells to birth it. And I’m not raising this. It’s not like we can give it up for adoption. You know it’s likely going to look like us. Genetics still apply to mutants, remember? And it might not be able to shape shift like me. You really want to have a kid who’s going to suffer the way you did? I never looked this way as a kid for a reason.”
Azazel hunched his shoulders, fear and hope warring in his heart, but in the end, he couldn’t deny what his soul was screaming at him.
“I survived,” he said. “This child will, too. I won’t abandon it like my parents did me.”
Raven rolled her eyes at the implication of herself.
“Spare me the lecture. It’s the 20th century. Not all women are crazy to be mothers. You want to raise it? Fine. But how? In the Brotherhood? And what are you going to tell Janos? That you developed a new ability to reproduce asexually? He’s going to dump your ass. You really want to risk that for the sake of something that isn’t even a proper baby yet?”
“I’ll come up with something.”
Raven sighed, a breath as deep as the counter she leaned against.
“Azazel-“
“Raven, please. I want this child.”
Raven stared at Azazel, hard. She sucked in her lower lip, her jaw hardening.
“Fine,” she said after a long while. “But as soon as it comes out of me, it’s your responsibility. Don’t be coming to me to mother it for you.”
°°°°°°
“You’ll come up with something?” Janos shouted, glaring at Azazel, who cowered on the floor at his feet where the latest blast of wind had thrown him. “What were you going to come up with? That in a fit of deviousness you donated your sperm to a fertility clinic? That you found an abandoned child and wanted to raise it, and what a coincidence that his mutation is so like yours and Raven’s? You piece of shit.”
Someone knocked at the door, trying to open it. Janos sent the tornado at it to keep it shut, but it ripped off its hinges from the outside. Erik strode inside, or tried to, for the wind buffeted him back, practically tossing him out of the room. He only managed to stay upright by magnetizing himself to what was left of the hinges sticking to the wooden door frame.
“Janos!” he shouted to be heard above the wind. “Turn off that tornado! You’re shaking the whole house!”
Janos ground his teeth. He glared at Azazel, who continued to regard him with sickening, pleading eyes, but he did as he was told, cutting off the tornado by fisting his hand. The vortex faded, letting lamps and papers and pens crash down to the floor in a loud muddle. Pity none of them hit Azazel on the head.
“What the hell is going on here?” Erik asked, peering at Janos and Azazel, who got to his feet, careful to keep his distance from Janos, finally showing some common sense, though he clearly wanted to come closer, the bastard.
“Did Raven tell you about Azazel?” Janos asked Erik.
“Tell me what about Azazel?” Erik placed his hands on his hips, scowling as he surveyed the damage in the room. “What are you two fighting about? A little longer with that tornado and the roof would have popped off the house.”
He didn’t know. At least Erik hadn’t been lying to him, too.
“That baby Raven is carrying,” Jonas said. “Azazel put it there.”
“What?” Erik gaped at Azazel. “You did what?”
“It’s none of your business, Erik.” Azazel’s tail twitched like it always did when things didn’t go his way. As if he had any right.
“It is my business when you two nearly tear the house down and I lose one of my team for eight months. And she’s having a child.”
“You’re losing me, too,” Janos said. “And not just for eight months.”
“Janos, you can’t-“ Erik said.
“Janos, please,” Azazel said simultaneously.
“I can’t stay here with them,” Janos said, raising his voice to barrel over their protests. “Not with him. Not with her. Not with their damn child. I can’t. I’m sorry, Erik. I really am. But I can’t look at them anymore.”
°°°°°°°°
When she heard, Angel insisted on taking Janos on an all night bender, and, as drowning himself in alcohol was the only thing he wanted to do right now, he said, ‘Why not?’ and proceeded to get more wasted than he had ever been in his life. But the drinking didn’t work as he’d wished it would. Instead of numbing his pain, it enhanced it, stretching it out in a nauseating lethargy aching in his throat and prickling at his eyes as he poured out into the cold countertop of the bar every single thing that bugged him about Azazel, from how he constantly forgot to brush his teeth before going to bed to what a two-timing asshole he was.
“I should have known this was going to happen,” Janos moaned, downing another shot of rum, then grimacing as the quick influx of alcohol numbed his brain. “He was always staring at her. Always talking and getting all close, but why wouldn’t he? She’s the first person he’s met who’s physically different in their whole body. Why shouldn’t they be friends? But he couldn’t just stay friends, could he? He actually fucked her. I can’t…” His throat squeezed shut. “We’ve been so good together.”
He gazed up at Angel with blearing eyes. She rubbed his back, sadness and sympathy mixing on her face.
“Four years,” Janos said. “Is that too long? Did he get bored? Am I too normal-looking for him? A man like him. I didn’t think it would last at first. You know, when we first joined up with Shaw, I kept hoping that Shaw didn’t have any gay leanings. Sure, tornadoes are great, but what’s that compared to absorbing a whole bomb? Not that Azazel is that fickle, but we hadn’t been together that long. Sometimes, I thought he only stuck around for the sex and the company.”
“He’s an asshole, Janos,” Angel said. “He doesn’t deserve you.”
“But he’s not normally an asshole. Oh, what am I saying? He’s an asshole. Un hijo de puta. Cabron. Wanker. Mudak. Salopard. Connard. Canto de mierda.”
Janos continued until he exhausted every insult he could think of in every language he knew, and even in some he didn’t. Angel only understood half of them, but she chuckled and added some of her own.
“Just like my ex Jimmy,” she said, leaning back on her stool as she nursed her margarita. “We were together three years, then I found out he’d been cheating on me since at least the second year with some slut who lived across town.”
“Raven’s a slut,” Janos said, tossing back a fresh shot of rum. At least the burn down his throat numbed the pain for a bit. “A big, vomit-looking slut. I don’t care that vomit isn’t blue, she still is.”
Angel belted a full throated laugh this time.
“Honey, I heard that she and Hank McCoy had been all over each other the entire time they were training. Then, the night before the attack, she jumped into Erik’s bed, naked. Major slut with all capital letters.”
Angel had to drag him back to his hotel when the bar kicked them out at four in the morning. They insisted that they must close and no, he couldn’t have one for the road. Janos was barely conscious by that point. His head lolled on her shoulder, the ground rolling like a fishing boat in the midst of a nor’easter as he gaped at the street lights, fluorescent haze blurring his sight to a numb blue.
He spent most of the week this way, unwilling to face the world otherwise. Consciousness hurt. Waking up in an empty bed that didn’t smell of Azazel hurt. Imagining Azazel with that whore, kissing her, taking her... That ripped a hole inside him so deep that four bullet shots to the stomach would feel like a scratch. And the real Azazel wouldn’t leave him alone, either. He left piteous notes, sent bouquets of flowers as big as a table, appeared in random alleys while Janos walked down the street, and even popped into his hotel room once, insisting that he loved him. Janos punched Azazel in the face, burned the notes, and tore the petals from their stalks, not caring how he cut himself on the thorns or how his blood speckled his favorite lavender shirt. Azazel had given him that shirt last Christmas. Janos burned it, too.
He booked a flight to Madrid and spent the next few months wandering around Europe, scarcely noticing the splendor of the architecture or the gorgeous landscapes. He barely noticed anything at all. He swore he felt Azazel staring at him sometimes, but if the bastard was around, he’d grown a brain, for Janos never saw him.
Three months in, while loitering about the cobbled streets of Bruges, Janos ran across a man who lit his cigarette with his bare fingers. Hazel-nut hair, slim build, shy smile. He was nothing like Azazel. When he noticed Janos, he stuffed the hand that lit the cigarette in his jacket pocket, his back stiff and shoulders hunched, worried that Janos might have seen his little trick.
“Bonjour,” Janos said, strolling closer to the edge of the stone bridge the man was leaning against. Behind him stretched the curve of the river that surrounded the medieval city. It curled around the old houses in a loop peppered with floating water fowl. One of the ducks squawked and flew up to perch on the railing beside them. It was scarcely 7am, too early for the flock of tourists or most of the locals to be about, so they were alone in the quiet street. The man returned his greeting with a polite smile, eyes flicking to Janos’s for a moment before looking away. He sucked anxiously at his cigarette.
“It’s hot, isn’t it?” Janos continued in French, hoping his shoddy grasp of the language wasn’t too horrible.
“Yes,” the man said. “The last week has been unbearable.”
It really was most brutally hot. The man’s collar stuck to his neck, his skin shining with tiny beads of sweat in the clear morning sun.
“If you’ll allow me, I could lighten the temperature for you.”
Janos raised a small tornado in his right hand and lifted it close to the man’s face. The man jerked back, gawking at it with startled eyes, and took his hand out of his pocket, ready to strike if necessary, but Janos only smiled, holding the tornado close enough to produce a soothing breeze. Soon the man lowered his hand, his stance relaxing. He grinned back.
°°°°°°°°°
Janos felt Azazel the next morning when he opened his eyes. The man he met the day before lied behind him on the bed, his arm thrown over his torso, forehead pressed between Janos’s shoulder blades. Janos glanced at the window. A man’s shape hovered behind the curtains for a second, then a haze of red smoke wafted in the breeze.
It was the last Janos saw of Azazel for four years.
~~~~~~~~~
Note 3: Janos's insults as the bar are basically 'asshole' and 'bastard' in different languages, except 'canto de mierda', which means 'piece of shit' and 'hijo de puta', which means 'son of a bitch'.
Part 2
Fandom: X: First Class
Rating: PG
Pairing: Azazel/Riptide
Summary: Azazel sleeps with Raven, and everything falls apart.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my own words.
Notes: 1. I decided to make Janos Puerto Rican, basically because I wanted to make my life easier. I'm Puerto Rican and it's the only place about which I know anything of what was going on in the 50's and 60's save the US. So...
2. I debated whether to translate all the foreign insults in the text, but I decided that Janos really needed to curse as he wished, and you will soon see why. To clarify: 'hijo de perra' = 'son of a bitch' and 'puta madre' = in this context is sort of an equivalent of 'fuck'.
“Don’t speak to me, hijo de perra. How could you do this to me?”
“Janos, I’m sorry! Can you please listen to me?”
Janos replied by throwing a tornado at Azazel, smacking him against the wall.
°°°°°°°
“Did you notice Raven has disappeared?” Janos asked one morning as he and Azazel had breakfast in the kitchen.
“Yeah…um,” Azazel muttered, not lifting his eyes from the newspaper he was reading. “I heard she went on a trip.”
“Heard she was pregnant, too.”
Janos nibbled on a piece of toast. Crumbs fell across his chest. Frowning, he swept them off as he leaned forward, grabbing his own newspaper, Le Monde. His French could use some brushing up. It’d been ages.
“Maybe she went to get rid of it,” he said.
He didn’t notice how Azazel’s tail stiffened. Not then.
“Maybe.” Azazel’s reply was so light that Janos barely heard it.
°°°°°°
“It was a mistake,” Azazel said.
“Puta madre. That’s your excuse? Do you even care enough to try? Stay away from me!”
The house shook with the force of the tornado encased inside it. Books and chairs smashed against the walls and ceiling, and a lamp broke on Azazel’s shoulder, sending him to the ground. He teleported around the room to avoid the projectiles, each time striving to appear close to Janos, but Janos wouldn’t let him. He threw the tornado at him, wishing that every time Azazel vanished, it would be the last.
°°°°°°°
“Why are we here?” Janos asked, squinting against the bright tropical sun that gleamed down on the stretch of white beach. His feet sank into the soft sand, his leather shoes suddenly superfluous and confining. The breeze flapped his shirt, the humidity making the fabric uncomfortable on his skin. There wasn’t another human being as far as Janos could see, nor any hint of civilization. Not a tourist beach or a private beach. Azazel was so good at finding secluded spots like this.
“You’ve been too stressed,” Azazel said, his shirt already off. He lost no time getting rid of the rest. “I’m treating you.”
Janos grinned, rushing to remove his clothes as well. So overrated, really. God, but Azazel looked gorgeous in this light, not that he looked bad in any light. Delicious red skin shone as he stretched out his naked body, taut muscles detailed by the sun. The wind defied the product in his hair and shook a strand loose. It brushed into his eyes, which glittered as he delighted himself watching Janos slip out of his clothes.
“You’re treating yourself,” Janos said, lust building inside him with the heat of Azazel’s regard.
Azazel reached for him, and in a moment they were chest deep in the water.
“Damn, this is cold!” Janos cried out, laughing as he spit out the water that splashed into his mouth from the teleportation displacement.
“You should be used to it, Caribbean boy.”
Azazel tugged him by the waist and kissed him. Soon, the water warmed up just fine.
°°°°°
“What bullshit are you going to say? You were drunk? She seduced you? You had a moment of weakness? You don’t have moments of weakness.”
“I did this time. Janos, I know there’s nothing I can say that can make this better, but please believe me. I’ve never regretted anything so much in my life. I’ll never-“
“Do it again?” Janos scoffed, swallowing against the knot in his throat. “That’s what all cheaters say. Just like my father. Well, I’m not going to turn into my mother and forgive you.”
°°°°°°°°°
Two weeks after Raven left, Emma pulled Janos into the study.
“There’s something you need to know,” she said, guiding him towards a chair.
“What? Why do you look so serious?”
“You should sit.”
Emma’s face was filled with so much concern for him that he felt as if a thunderstorm had dumped all its rain on him. He sank into the chair, limbs suddenly heavy and stiff. Fear nibbled at his stomach.
“Do you know where Azazel went two days ago?”
She really didn’t need to ask, telepath that she was. However, she promised those who joined the Hellfire Club, and now this new Brotherhood, that, for the sake of privacy, she wouldn’t read their minds unless she felt she must for safety reasons. Janos didn’t completely believe her, but she did stay out of their private business. Usually.
“He said--” Janos said, his tongue stuttering. Cold realization chilled his spine. “He lied.”
Lied with his head stuck in the closet, smoothing out clothes that had already been folded, jabbering about needing to de-stress somewhere new, then ducked out of the room and Janos’s sight for a midnight meal without even asking Janos if he wanted something.
“Where did he go?” Janos asked, dread sharpening his voice.
“Nova Scotia.”
Quite a ways from New Zealand, Azazel’s supposed destination.
“What’s in Nova Scotia?”
“Raven.”
Emma could transfer memories into your mind, including sight, sound, and even emotion. This is how Janos saw Azazel appear in some apartment Raven had holed up in to ask her about the baby. She sat at the kitchen table drinking a cup of tea. Always tea. Must have been Xavier’s Englishness that rubbed off on her. Dirty plates and cups were piled in the sink. A half eaten piece of toast lied on a plate on the counter, crumbs streaming off across the tiled surface. The hair at the top of Raven’s head stuck out at an odd angle, as if she’d been pulling it. She smoothed it out with a swipe of her hand when Azazel entered, but did nothing else.
“You can’t get rid of it,” Azazel said without preamble.
The look Raven flashed at him was so tired and enervated that Azazel mentally flinched, but he didn’t back down.
“I can if I want to,” Raven said. Grabbing her mug, she strode across the room to put it in the sink, turning her back to Azazel. It clinked into the pile.
“It’s my child, too,” Azazel said. “You can’t just decide this on your own.”
“This,” Raven pointed at her belly, which was already rounding out, “wasn’t supposed to happen. I don’t want children, Azazel. Don’t tell me you do.”
“Not before, but…” Azazel crossed his arms, squaring his shoulders. “It exists now.”
“It’s not even a fetus yet. Besides, I don’t want it.”
“I do. So you need to have it.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one throwing up every morning, whose feet are swollen, who has the sudden urge to eat mustard mixed with chocolate ice cream. You’re not the one who’s going to suffer the pain of nine hells to birth it. And I’m not raising this. It’s not like we can give it up for adoption. You know it’s likely going to look like us. Genetics still apply to mutants, remember? And it might not be able to shape shift like me. You really want to have a kid who’s going to suffer the way you did? I never looked this way as a kid for a reason.”
Azazel hunched his shoulders, fear and hope warring in his heart, but in the end, he couldn’t deny what his soul was screaming at him.
“I survived,” he said. “This child will, too. I won’t abandon it like my parents did me.”
Raven rolled her eyes at the implication of herself.
“Spare me the lecture. It’s the 20th century. Not all women are crazy to be mothers. You want to raise it? Fine. But how? In the Brotherhood? And what are you going to tell Janos? That you developed a new ability to reproduce asexually? He’s going to dump your ass. You really want to risk that for the sake of something that isn’t even a proper baby yet?”
“I’ll come up with something.”
Raven sighed, a breath as deep as the counter she leaned against.
“Azazel-“
“Raven, please. I want this child.”
Raven stared at Azazel, hard. She sucked in her lower lip, her jaw hardening.
“Fine,” she said after a long while. “But as soon as it comes out of me, it’s your responsibility. Don’t be coming to me to mother it for you.”
°°°°°°
“You’ll come up with something?” Janos shouted, glaring at Azazel, who cowered on the floor at his feet where the latest blast of wind had thrown him. “What were you going to come up with? That in a fit of deviousness you donated your sperm to a fertility clinic? That you found an abandoned child and wanted to raise it, and what a coincidence that his mutation is so like yours and Raven’s? You piece of shit.”
Someone knocked at the door, trying to open it. Janos sent the tornado at it to keep it shut, but it ripped off its hinges from the outside. Erik strode inside, or tried to, for the wind buffeted him back, practically tossing him out of the room. He only managed to stay upright by magnetizing himself to what was left of the hinges sticking to the wooden door frame.
“Janos!” he shouted to be heard above the wind. “Turn off that tornado! You’re shaking the whole house!”
Janos ground his teeth. He glared at Azazel, who continued to regard him with sickening, pleading eyes, but he did as he was told, cutting off the tornado by fisting his hand. The vortex faded, letting lamps and papers and pens crash down to the floor in a loud muddle. Pity none of them hit Azazel on the head.
“What the hell is going on here?” Erik asked, peering at Janos and Azazel, who got to his feet, careful to keep his distance from Janos, finally showing some common sense, though he clearly wanted to come closer, the bastard.
“Did Raven tell you about Azazel?” Janos asked Erik.
“Tell me what about Azazel?” Erik placed his hands on his hips, scowling as he surveyed the damage in the room. “What are you two fighting about? A little longer with that tornado and the roof would have popped off the house.”
He didn’t know. At least Erik hadn’t been lying to him, too.
“That baby Raven is carrying,” Jonas said. “Azazel put it there.”
“What?” Erik gaped at Azazel. “You did what?”
“It’s none of your business, Erik.” Azazel’s tail twitched like it always did when things didn’t go his way. As if he had any right.
“It is my business when you two nearly tear the house down and I lose one of my team for eight months. And she’s having a child.”
“You’re losing me, too,” Janos said. “And not just for eight months.”
“Janos, you can’t-“ Erik said.
“Janos, please,” Azazel said simultaneously.
“I can’t stay here with them,” Janos said, raising his voice to barrel over their protests. “Not with him. Not with her. Not with their damn child. I can’t. I’m sorry, Erik. I really am. But I can’t look at them anymore.”
°°°°°°°°
When she heard, Angel insisted on taking Janos on an all night bender, and, as drowning himself in alcohol was the only thing he wanted to do right now, he said, ‘Why not?’ and proceeded to get more wasted than he had ever been in his life. But the drinking didn’t work as he’d wished it would. Instead of numbing his pain, it enhanced it, stretching it out in a nauseating lethargy aching in his throat and prickling at his eyes as he poured out into the cold countertop of the bar every single thing that bugged him about Azazel, from how he constantly forgot to brush his teeth before going to bed to what a two-timing asshole he was.
“I should have known this was going to happen,” Janos moaned, downing another shot of rum, then grimacing as the quick influx of alcohol numbed his brain. “He was always staring at her. Always talking and getting all close, but why wouldn’t he? She’s the first person he’s met who’s physically different in their whole body. Why shouldn’t they be friends? But he couldn’t just stay friends, could he? He actually fucked her. I can’t…” His throat squeezed shut. “We’ve been so good together.”
He gazed up at Angel with blearing eyes. She rubbed his back, sadness and sympathy mixing on her face.
“Four years,” Janos said. “Is that too long? Did he get bored? Am I too normal-looking for him? A man like him. I didn’t think it would last at first. You know, when we first joined up with Shaw, I kept hoping that Shaw didn’t have any gay leanings. Sure, tornadoes are great, but what’s that compared to absorbing a whole bomb? Not that Azazel is that fickle, but we hadn’t been together that long. Sometimes, I thought he only stuck around for the sex and the company.”
“He’s an asshole, Janos,” Angel said. “He doesn’t deserve you.”
“But he’s not normally an asshole. Oh, what am I saying? He’s an asshole. Un hijo de puta. Cabron. Wanker. Mudak. Salopard. Connard. Canto de mierda.”
Janos continued until he exhausted every insult he could think of in every language he knew, and even in some he didn’t. Angel only understood half of them, but she chuckled and added some of her own.
“Just like my ex Jimmy,” she said, leaning back on her stool as she nursed her margarita. “We were together three years, then I found out he’d been cheating on me since at least the second year with some slut who lived across town.”
“Raven’s a slut,” Janos said, tossing back a fresh shot of rum. At least the burn down his throat numbed the pain for a bit. “A big, vomit-looking slut. I don’t care that vomit isn’t blue, she still is.”
Angel belted a full throated laugh this time.
“Honey, I heard that she and Hank McCoy had been all over each other the entire time they were training. Then, the night before the attack, she jumped into Erik’s bed, naked. Major slut with all capital letters.”
Angel had to drag him back to his hotel when the bar kicked them out at four in the morning. They insisted that they must close and no, he couldn’t have one for the road. Janos was barely conscious by that point. His head lolled on her shoulder, the ground rolling like a fishing boat in the midst of a nor’easter as he gaped at the street lights, fluorescent haze blurring his sight to a numb blue.
He spent most of the week this way, unwilling to face the world otherwise. Consciousness hurt. Waking up in an empty bed that didn’t smell of Azazel hurt. Imagining Azazel with that whore, kissing her, taking her... That ripped a hole inside him so deep that four bullet shots to the stomach would feel like a scratch. And the real Azazel wouldn’t leave him alone, either. He left piteous notes, sent bouquets of flowers as big as a table, appeared in random alleys while Janos walked down the street, and even popped into his hotel room once, insisting that he loved him. Janos punched Azazel in the face, burned the notes, and tore the petals from their stalks, not caring how he cut himself on the thorns or how his blood speckled his favorite lavender shirt. Azazel had given him that shirt last Christmas. Janos burned it, too.
He booked a flight to Madrid and spent the next few months wandering around Europe, scarcely noticing the splendor of the architecture or the gorgeous landscapes. He barely noticed anything at all. He swore he felt Azazel staring at him sometimes, but if the bastard was around, he’d grown a brain, for Janos never saw him.
Three months in, while loitering about the cobbled streets of Bruges, Janos ran across a man who lit his cigarette with his bare fingers. Hazel-nut hair, slim build, shy smile. He was nothing like Azazel. When he noticed Janos, he stuffed the hand that lit the cigarette in his jacket pocket, his back stiff and shoulders hunched, worried that Janos might have seen his little trick.
“Bonjour,” Janos said, strolling closer to the edge of the stone bridge the man was leaning against. Behind him stretched the curve of the river that surrounded the medieval city. It curled around the old houses in a loop peppered with floating water fowl. One of the ducks squawked and flew up to perch on the railing beside them. It was scarcely 7am, too early for the flock of tourists or most of the locals to be about, so they were alone in the quiet street. The man returned his greeting with a polite smile, eyes flicking to Janos’s for a moment before looking away. He sucked anxiously at his cigarette.
“It’s hot, isn’t it?” Janos continued in French, hoping his shoddy grasp of the language wasn’t too horrible.
“Yes,” the man said. “The last week has been unbearable.”
It really was most brutally hot. The man’s collar stuck to his neck, his skin shining with tiny beads of sweat in the clear morning sun.
“If you’ll allow me, I could lighten the temperature for you.”
Janos raised a small tornado in his right hand and lifted it close to the man’s face. The man jerked back, gawking at it with startled eyes, and took his hand out of his pocket, ready to strike if necessary, but Janos only smiled, holding the tornado close enough to produce a soothing breeze. Soon the man lowered his hand, his stance relaxing. He grinned back.
°°°°°°°°°
Janos felt Azazel the next morning when he opened his eyes. The man he met the day before lied behind him on the bed, his arm thrown over his torso, forehead pressed between Janos’s shoulder blades. Janos glanced at the window. A man’s shape hovered behind the curtains for a second, then a haze of red smoke wafted in the breeze.
It was the last Janos saw of Azazel for four years.
~~~~~~~~~
Note 3: Janos's insults as the bar are basically 'asshole' and 'bastard' in different languages, except 'canto de mierda', which means 'piece of shit' and 'hijo de puta', which means 'son of a bitch'.
Part 2