A Short Shower
by Mel
Disclaimer: All characters herein belong to Marvel, and this was not written to make money.
Note: Very very short vignette. :) Mostly for Alicia.
There were some things that a toughened mercenary just shouldn't have to deal with. And one of those things was the bathroom after Tabitha. Cable winced, but saw Roberto approaching rapidly, nearly as intent on a shower as he was and dove in, slamming the door. Everyone knew how long Roberto took in the bathroom, even if no one really wanted to speculate what it was he did in there.
This was, Cable mused as he pulled off his shirt, ignoring the loud thumps and swearing from the other side of the door, one of the downsides of leading a team of teenagers. They had no sense of moderation when it came to cleanliness. They'd spend hours a day in the bathroom, but the second you suggested that ~maybe~ it was unhygienic to have free-range rats breeding under their beds, they'd act as though you'd suggested ritual suicide.
Which, he added thoughtfully as he nudged discarded clothing to one side with his foot, wouldn't be entirely a bad idea, if it meant less people sharing the bathroom.
He stripped off, carefully leaping about so as not to let any of his clothes touch the floor and its puddles of water, before hanging them over rails which had been abandoned by the towels, now lying in sodden heaps on the floor, steaming slightly. He stepped into the shower, long practice making him check first for discarded razors and the presence of soap and shampoo.
Finally, he sighed and leaned against the wall in the shower and relaxed. The warmth extended into his bones, letting out tensions that he'd held there for hours, gradually loosening just a little the knot between his shoulders that was an ever-present reminder of his body's uneven weight balance. He turned his face to the warmth, more in front than above him, and closed his eyes.
Just as the hot water dropped and a blast of cold slammed almost physically into him and he staggered back, reaching blindly for the taps and the shower head. His right hand wretched at the cold tap, turning it the wrong way, and blasting him with higher pressure cold, just as his left neatly knocked the shower head off, making him think for one panicked second that he was under an icy waterfall.
Barely repressing something that would have been too high-pitched to pass off as a masculine howl, he staggered out of the shower and staggered over a towel, knocking his right knee heavily on the shower door. He staggered out, slamming hard into the bathroom wall, then clung there taking deep breaths as water sprayed all over the room.
**
Domino curled around her coffee in the kitchen, smacking away any teenaged hands that looked like they might be trying to steal her Italian shortbread, which were her treat, and hers alone. She'd defend that particular treat to the death. She looked up from the newspaper when she heard the door slam open with even more energy than it usually was.
Cable stood there. His hair was plastered to his skull, making his head look extremely skull-like a vein throbbing at his temple and his lips were tinged with blue. His clothes, the same as he'd worn to training earlier, had big patches of wet, one just managing to look obscene at his crotch, and were sticking to him as well. He glared around the room, his eyes slitted and his teeth clenched.
"Dom?"
Domino inclined her head in inquiry.
"Get in a plumber and a builder, we're getting another flonqing bathroom and a better flonqing hot-water system." Seeming unable to say anything more, he visibly ground his teeth and strode off with the slightly waddling walk of someone in wet underwear.
There was a deathly silence in the kitchen for a long moment, the Domino flipped over another page of her paper.
"I told you guys to trust me when it came to getting a new bathroom, didn't I?"
The end.