In Reverse -- "Countdown," PG

Title: Countdown
Author: Ion Bond (merctionicht@yahoo.com)
Rating: PG
'Verse: Movies
Challenge: In Reverse
Words: 645
Summary: Pyro's been waiting all his life.
Notes: This is posted with the scenes in the other direction at my own journal.



5.

There’s so many of them, and they’re ready for anything. The trees here are grand and dark and immanently flammable and they’re all milling around, all these mutants, waiting for the boss. Pyro feels safe and impatient at the same time.

The chick with the studded lip and the hard-core tattoos walks over to him, getting right in his face. Pyro doesn’t know her. He stands his ground, hand in his pocket; he’s ready too.

“Do you have a light?” she asks.

“Dude,” says Pyro, grinning at her. “Do I ever.”

4.

Magneto’s out getting groceries, which is dumb, because it’s siesta or something; Pyro can’t hear any cars passing outside the cement wall. He bets the old man comes home empty-handed and pissed-off.

In the mean time, Pyro’s alone with Mystique in the compound, the one o’clock sun warming his black tee-shirt. There’s little kids screaming in the street, but she’s reading her book and sipping her beer at the white-painted filigreed-iron table in the middle of their private garden, pretending not to hear.

It’s easy to pretend to be somewhere else, here. He thinks that's why Magneto picked it.

“You mind if I smoke?” Pyro asks, pulling out his half-crushed pack.

Mystique lays the book in her scaly lap and narrows her Corona-colored eyes at him. “Knock yourself out. Do I look like your mom?”

No, she certainly does not, and he would take this as an invitation to stare at her breasts if she didn’t scare the crap out of him.

He flicks his lighter instead. “Thanks.”

3.

Bobby blows on his fingers, pinches out his cigarette, and throws it on the ground.

“Look at that,” says John, kicking at the dirt. “That is a long-ass cigarette butt. What a waste.”

“Maybe I don’t want to get lung cancer,” Bobby says defensively.

“You already gave him the cigarette, John. You’re not going to get it back,” says Marie. She shoves at Bobby playfully. “What do you care if he’s too much of a pussy to smoke the whole thing?”

John snaps open his zippo. “He's just doing it to make me mad.”

Marie sighs a breath of smoke. “It’s not all about you,” she says slowly, like he’s stupid. She stubs out her own cigarette on the low garden wall. “You probably have some kind of complex.”

“Thank you, Dr. Freud,” says John.

Bobby smiles at her. “Nah. Only rich kids have complexes -- right, Pyro?”

“Damn straight,” he says, thumb on the flint.

2.

John finally ditched that Drake kid and he’s sitting out behind the greenhouse alone, trying not to cough. He’s sorry for burning his bridges at home, now. He really doesn’t want to be here, either.

He sees Dr. Grey -- the hot teacher -- through the two layers of glass, heading in his direction and he quickly drops the cigarette he's smoking, but she’s turning back toward the mansion like she forgot something.

John guesses she must not have noticed him. He bends down to pick up the cigarette; it’s still burning.

Don’t make it a habit.

Shit, he’s hearing things.

Or he can pretend, that anyway.

1.

John’s mom smokes a pack a day and his clothes always smell like Camels. Not just his clothes; it must be everything he owns, but John never noticed until Keith Frye’s sleepover birthday party. He was lying on the floor on the clean white carpet in Keith’s living room, minding his own business, and Anthony Perry pushed him and told him to move over cause his sleeping bag smelled weird. But he couldn’t cause the coffee table was right there and there was nowhere to move to.

“I told him he smelled weird,” John tells his mom in the car on the way home.

“Good for you,” she says, putting her cigarette out in the ashtray. She looks like she feels kind of guilty.

The Toyota Tercel smells like smoke, too, even with the windows rolled all the way down. But it’s not the same kind of smoke the living room started to smell like after Anthony touched him, a stinky smell like burning plastic or something.

John was all ready to stop, drop and roll.

fin.