ooc: all other characters used with love, not binding to any other pups.Friday afternoons mean candy runs into Salem Center - packing into Mr. Summers' car with pennies and shopping lists from the younger kids, and merrily ignoring all of the Professor's warnings to keep a low profile. Apart from Mr. Summers' red glasses, they're the very definition of a low profile - Doug and Bobby and Kitty and John and Jubilee. Peter would normally have come too, but he'd chivalrously given up his seat so two smaller students could go in his stead.
American and well-groomed and with a complete lack of blue fur or claws, no one really looks at them twice, even if John glares at everyone on sheer principle. Mutants? You couldn't find anyone more normal. Give John a haircut and persuade Kitty to wear some makeup, and they could model for the Gap.
"Look," says Kitty when they're gathered around the checkout aisle, arms filled with gumballs and cookies and root beer and sour strings.
They all look at
The National Inquirer, on the cover right alongside Elvis sightings and Batboy. "The mutant menace," Doug says, slowly.
Bobby leans in. "Is that...?"
"Dr. McCoy," Kitty says, hushed. "Some of him, anyway. It's just security cam footage."
Jubilee wrinkles her nose. "That sucks. Always thought
I'd be the first mutant cover girl."
John clicks his lighter open. Closed. Open again.
So Doug goes to speak to the sales clerk in Hungarian. And Swahili. And Navajo.
The fire alarms go off, but the sprinkler system seems oddly to have frozen up.
And some of the clerks could have
sworn they saw fireworks just before one girl, rolling her eyes, had pulled another right through a wall.
They don't quite get the candy back to the school, and the Professor has another stern chat with all of them, Mr. Summers nodding all the way through his speech.
But Doug could
swear that, at the end of all of it, when Mr. Summers was checking his watch, there was a tiny smile on the Professor's lips.
And that was better than candy, any day of the week.