hackthis_archive | Well, fuck me.

Eating late at night not only gives you indigestion, it also gives you insomnia. If you had told me last week I’d be writing this I’d’ve died laughing. I weep for the state of my brain.

X2 - St. John/Bobby (remember them?)
This is How the Story Ends (A God Among Insects)

St John is a pragmatist. He has never believed in redemption for the fallen. He's never believed in happily ever after. He's believed in living together until you got sick of each other and someone left. He's believed in fucking for comfort because someone couldn’t have the person they really wanted, and it was all you could get in the end.

John has believed in getting out when it was clear that all you were going to get was fucked over. Yeah, he's definitely believed in that. Bobby made him believe in that a long time ago when he only had one name, and Pyro was just some random figment of his imagination. St John remembers when he and Bobby were just friends who fucked on occasion, because that was how their story went.

And then Johnny went off with Magneto, and Bobby went back home with Rogue and that was the end of their tale.

St. John has never read a story that ended that way, but people never tell stories about how things really are, they tell stories about how they want things to go, and almost every night for two years St. John has dreamt about how things could've gone differently in Alkali Lake. He only occasionally regrets the decision he made to leave, but he's dreamt about a lot of things in the interim. Rogue's death. Bobby's death. Magneto's death. His own funeral.

After the first time St. John saw anti-mutant rioting in Zurich, he dreamt a lot about his own death. It would be bloody and painful or instantaneous and regrettable. He would go down in a blaze of pyrotechnical glory. Or he would suffocate in ice.

John's seen an unmarked plot on a dirty hillside in Marseilles and a tree growing above his headstone in Devon. He's walked among the gravediggers and lack of mourners in Prague. He has felt the insects crawling on his skin as he rotted away six feet underground in a coffin he couldn't ignite in flames. In one dream he even saw Bobby searching for his grave on the wrong side of the Drake's backyard.

He thinks the story has always ended when he dies.

He's always felt that someone would have to die for there to be any closure for him with regards to Bobby Drake. It's always been about Bobby. It will probably always be about Iceman. Not that John's ever really cared about closure, because you can't care too hard about anything with Mystique and Magneto on your back twenty-five hours of the day, but still.

In his dreams, in his reality, St. John has always known that this story has lasted far longer than it should. He's always known that this ending has been a long time coming for everyone involved. There has to be an end to the fairytale.

There was never supposed to be another start.

No story should ever begin all over again at the end.

Except that St. John's never read a story where Good picks Evil up off the battlefield and takes him home to tend his wounds and give him a second chance.

He's never read a story where the protagonist takes the antagonist back home after two years and stays by his side. But Bobby did. And the mansion hasn't changed at all while St John was away. He's not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, he's pretty sure it just is what it is, like most of the stories that people never talk about in the middle of the night.

After all, life isn't a story or a fairytale -- it's just a bunch of people scurrying around like insects and trying to survive.

-end-