Chapter Text
Bobby was ready to be done with this week, and it was only Tuesday. He had spent the entire morning trying to track down draft versions of five different bills and a slew of white papers his boss wanted to read before his committee meeting next week. And then the whole afternoon had been wasted running down staffers from the rest of the Kentucky delegation, trying to get them to sign on to some Dear Colleague letter that Representative Creed was pushing on behalf of the Friends of Humanity. Except that Graydon Creed, newest member of the Kentucky delegation to the House of Representatives, was not well-liked among his peers.
After getting the cold shoulder from two comms staffers, a legislative aide, a legislative director, and even one Member himself (rumor had it he spent Congressional recesses here specifically because his wife preferred Louisville), he was done with trying to advance the notion that smoking while pregnant caused mutant babies, and ergo must be made illegal. Not a popular talking point in the fine, tobacco-producing state of Kentucky, never mind that smoking while pregnant was already ill-advised for other reasons and generally taboo in the 90s, this new and progressive age of science-based anti-smoking policy. It was the mutant issue Creed wanted to harp on, and this was his latest vehicle for that.
He quietly shredded his un-distributed copies of the Dear Colleague letter, ready to tell his boss that everything had gone swimmingly and his fellow staffers were definitely giving this measure due consideration on behalf of their Members. But he wasn’t done with the day yet. It was 4:45, and he was supposed to give a constituent tour.
Giving tours of the Capitol was part of his job. Well, it was part of Drake Roberts’ job, as a Legislative Aide. He’d been undercover in the office of Graydon Creed since the man was sworn in, and as the member of staff with the least experience, he had the pleasure of taking the tours that nobody else wanted to handle. Mostly weekends, but sometimes also at the tail end of the day. The other staff were already sneaking out for happy hour, ready to take advantage of the Memorial day recess to enjoy the lighter schedule. He straightened his tie and went to meet a family from Paducah at the security desk.
Of course, the family making the visit was late, and by the time he finished the tour, and helped them take a photo, and apologized that the Representative’s signature “I’m a Friend of Humanity, are YOU?” buttons were nowhere to be found as a token souvenir (he had been hiding the extras in random office cabinets when nobody was looking), it was well past the end of happy hour.
By the time he rifled through his colleagues’ desks to check for any interesting memos or letters and made his way back to his apartment, it was well past dinner time.
By the time he fired up his fancy computer terminal the Professor had borrowed from the Shi’ar so he could hook right into the X-Men’s network to send his notes for the day, it was past his bedtime.
But he’d been at this for nearly five months, and if he didn’t make time for himself, he would have gone insane by now. He did his job well—the snooping around for the X-Men bit, to be clear. He deserved a night off.
The thing about taking an assignment that would put him far from the mansion and low-contact with the team is that he could choose where he socialized without judgement from his friends who were also his co-workers and housemates. And the thing about Washington, DC was that it was a very, very gay city, if you knew where to look.
He probably didn’t need to be so furtive about the whole gay thing. It had been a couple of years since he’d been honest with himself about it. College had certainly been an awakening, perhaps because he was able to broaden his horizons beyond the same handful of people he’d known since the Professor had saved him from that angry mob. After Opal dumped him in New York, he had resisted efforts to set him up with another girlfriend and Jean told him that she wasn’t going to say it, but that she wasn’t going to be mad if he ever did. She even implied, in classic telepath form, that she knew he was far from the only person in their orbit who didn’t fit the all-American heterosexual brief. Figures, for a superhero squad made up of people the world already hated and feared.
But he couldn’t tell people that sort of thing, especially not your co-workers who, incidentally, have known you since you were 14. And it’s not like he had time to do much about it when he was on duty with the X-Men, anyway.
But in DC? He couldn’t speak for the rest of the city, but there were enough men on the Hill—undoubtedly women, too—who kept their private lives very private, whether that was because they were married to the job or not the marrying kind at all; people knew not to ask. Heck, they even had a few openly gay members of Congress these days (though not on Graydon Creed’s side of the aisle). Given his position in the office of a southern conservative, Drake Roberts had to get by with just the occasional outing to a gay bar and the presence of an oft-discussed, never-seen long-distance girlfriend, but it was still a gayer life than he’d had opportunity to enjoy at the Xavier Mansion.
Tonight, he was too tired to go someplace out of the way, or purposefully discreet. It was late, and a weeknight; very few people would be out anyway. He wandered over to 17th Street and went to the first bar that looked appealing.
There were a lot of gay bars on 17th, but he chose this one because even on a Tuesday night it was busy enough that you could find someone worth talking to (or someone to do more interesting things than talking with). He wasn’t aiming for either tonight, to be honest. He just wanted to unwind after a long day in a place where at least a part of himself didn’t have to pretend.
He was at the bar and scoping out the room when he spotted a man in the corner. Holding down a high top on his own, and glaring into his empty glass. Tall, dark and handsome might be Bobby’s type, but lonely and angry wasn’t, so he wouldn’t normally have lingered. Except this guy looked familiar. A little older, not much. Wearing a black button-down shirt that stood out in the sea of government white collar and neutral ties. Yes, it was late and most people (other than Bobby) had managed to change after work by now, but still. He didn’t look like another Hill staffer or anonymous civil servant. Didn’t look like a high-priced lobbyist or lost tourist for that matter, either.
He ran his hands through his dark hair and Bobby caught sight of something unusual. A pointed ear. He let his hair fall over it again, but Bobby finally figured out what he was looking at. It wasn’t someone he knew from the Hill. It was Northstar. Like, Alpha Flight Northstar.
Well, shit.
He wasn’t going to leave a mutant to drink on his own, not in this town. He leaned over and caught the bartender’s attention.
“He been here long?” Bobby asked, nodding in Northstar’s direction.
“About an hour.”
“Two of whatever he’s having.”
The bartender set up two rocks glasses and poured. Jean-Paul Beaubier was having some sort of expensive whiskey, and Bobby was glad he had the X-Men secret mission expense account to cover what his staffer’s salary didn’t. Glasses in hand, he made his way over.
They had only met in passing before. Bobby had never really been part of negotiations at the team leadership level, so he mostly saw him from a distance when they had crossed paths in the past. X-Men on the left flank, Alpha Flight on the right, everyone gets the Hulk back under control and they all shake hands and go about their business.
But of course he knew Northstar. And he and his sister made a point of acknowledging the X-Men because for better or for worse, mutants needed to stick together. Which he hoped meant that Northstar would recognize him, because otherwise this was going to get very awkward, very fast.
“You look like you’re going to murder someone if they try to talk to you. Which is bad form for this kind of place.” Jean-Paul looked up in surprise, then confusion as he tried to remember where he knew Bobby from. Bobby made sure he was positioned to avoid prying eyes and made a single cube of ice in his drink. The other man put the pieces together.
“What are you doing here?” It wasn’t a question about being in DC. Bobby took a deep breath and just said it.
“The same thing as you.” The other man raised an eyebrow, his gaze turning from confused to appraising. Bobby let him look, bracing for some sort of cutting remark; he had a reputation for his acerbic tongue and Bobby was not sure what kind of reaction this was going to elicit.
None, apparently. Jean-Paul’s face shifted to something Bobby couldn’t quite interpret, and so he filled the silence with a joke. “If you need me to say it in French, you’re going to be waiting a good long time. The Professor wasn’t too big on foreign languages. Took away from time in the danger room.”
Jean-Paul finally took the offered whiskey, but did not thank Bobby. And they said Canadians were nice.
“Does your professor know?” he finally asked.
“Pretty sure he knows everything about everyone. But we haven’t talked about it.”
“And you are here undercover.”
“Got a job as an aide to a member of Congress, yeah. But there are plenty of discreet Hill staffers. Didn't feel like I needed to hide that bit of myself.” Jean-Paul mulled that statement and Bobby gave up and just sat on the high-top’s other stool. “So, what brings you to Washington? Are things that bad in Canada that you’ve come to request asylum? Because I have news for you, buddy. They don’t like people like us down here. And I’m not just talking about the other clientele of this bar.”
“Alpha Flight is participating in cross-training with X-Factor this week,” he said. “Diplomatic mission.”
“I thought you all were independent?”
“And yet, somehow, the Prime Minister still asks us for favors. We said yes to this one, because perhaps it is good to get out of Canada on occasion.”
“Well, I won’t ask for details unless you’re at liberty to tell. Did my project make it into your briefing?” He knew Alex and Lorna wouldn’t disclose that kind of thing to the government, but he was surprised that they had to Alpha Flight.
“Non. Just the grapevine. I stopped in Westchester on the way down.”
Bobby sipped the whiskey. OK, it was better than his usual rail drink fare (it had better be, at that price).
“Well, make sure you’ve got your story straight. Drake Roberts,” he said, as if he were introducing himself for the first time. “I moved here in January to take a job on the Hill.” He even passed Jean-Paul one of his fancy business cards, embossed with the Congressional seal.
“Oh good. You are still Drake.”
“Absolutely, though do not drop by my office. Congressman Creed will have to find out you’re in town when he gets a national security briefing.”
“As I am here as a foreign agent, I will steer clear. But tell me, are these Friends of Humanity as dangerous as people say they are? They look like a silly club, not the next big threat.”
“I…” He sighed. “I was kind of hoping to not have to deal with that tonight. Any chance we could talk about something else?”
Jean-Paul shrugged. “I will ask tomorrow, then. See what the official line is.”
“It’s not good, whatever they say. But I would love to talk about something slightly more interesting. Please, tell me. If you stopped at the mansion on the way down, what the hell is going on with Remy and Rogue?”
He rolled his eyes and muttered something in French.
“In English for us dumb Americans, Captain Quebec?”
“I merely said that the Cajun is obviously in love with Rogue. She should stop dithering and fuck him in whatever way she needs to, because she is into him and he would go to the end of the earth to make it work for her.” Bobby laughed and he looked a little sheepish. “Forgive me. I am too vulgar.”
“Doesn’t make it less true.”
He cracked a smile, finally. A little lopsided smirk that Bobby couldn’t help but find cute. They sipped their whiskey and Bobby tried to come up with more to say. But Jean-Paul got to a question first.
“So, is this a new thing for you, coming to a gay bar? Or should I now doubt my ability to seek out like-minded individuals after all these years?”
The smile was teasing, Bobby now realized. Possibly flirtatious. He was flattered, to be honest. Not that he’d never had a guy look at him that way, but Northstar? Well. That would be nice, except Bobby was pretty sure he wasn’t going to like the answer to his question.
“Not too new. Just…quiet.” He took another sip of whiskey and tried to calm his nerves because he hated talking about this stuff. He always said the wrong thing. “I’m not out, and I’d appreciate it if you kept it that way.”
“But if your telepaths know—” Bobby bristled at the implication and also at the mention of mutant powers. They might be tucked away in the corner of a noisy bar, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t be careful. He tried to wave it off.
“Explaining it would just make a big deal of it and if it got out in public, who knows what would happen.”
“Yes. There is no earthly way a person could look at past incidents of a public mutant stating clearly that he is a homosexual and know how it would work out,” he shot back.
Jean-Paul’s possibly flirtatious look had turned back to a glower, his judgement simmering just below the surface. The exhaustion from this week, from everything, came piling back on Bobby and he gave up trying to be polite about it.
“You might be fine with the way they treated you, but it’s different on the…” he caught himself. “It’s different when the whole point of your team is to prove that we’re just normal people. To add the gay thing in will complicate the message.”
In truth, the idea of the press dissecting his sex life gave him the willies, and even though Northstar got some sympathetic press when he flew out of the closet a few years back, he also got a lot of really gross commentary about it and Bobby didn’t want that to be plastered across the New York Times. Publications far less respectable than that, too. And it was different for him. Alpha Flight was a Canadian team, not a famously all-mutant one. It was hard enough to get regular humans to listen to Xavier's call for peaceful coexistence before you added in other notions that made them squirm.
Jean-Paul shrugged and leaned back in his chair, resigned. “I did not come here to fight,” he said with a sigh. “If you want to know why I think your choice is idiotic, you will have to find me another night.”
“Well, let’s just say, personal preferences aside, being straight is an important part of my job.” He tapped the business card on the table again. Northstar nodded, accepting the ruse that his undercover mission was the only reason they weren’t talking about it. “And now you can tell me why you actually came here, of all places. Surely you could brood in your hotel room.”
“But like you, sometimes I need a break from being respectable, and I enjoy people-watching.” He was, in fact, ogling a man a few yards away wearing cut-off jeans and a mesh shirt that met the definition of the word only in the most basic sense. Bobby ogled, too.
“I think I am going to have another drink. Can I get you anything, Drake?”