"I walked away from the X's. My... mom--" He never called Ghost that, though he'd been adopted it still rubbed him wrong. But for here and now, it was right. It was just too difficult to explain their mutually beneficial arrangement. "My mom is on the team. So it was a hard decision because she obviously believes in what they do, but in the end, I think it was the best choice for all of us."

At least it had been his choice in the end. Sam had held his full membership to the team over his head for their entire Canadian trip.

Jude shrugged all the bad away. "I'm actually turning 18 in a couple days. Shh. Please don't tell them that I fudged my papers? I just really needed out." Or, rather, he'd really, really needed into a place that wasn't Chief's apartment. The giant lobster lady was awesome and he had all the respect in the world for her, but zero respect for her couch. It was somehow worse than sleeping on the streets.

> "What?"

His eyes widened in faux innocence. "What?" Frick. He'd been caught! "I mean." He cough snickered again. "You're- uh. I mean look at it." He waved at the leg. It was, still, a leg. "You're massaging your meat." With the oily hands and the... yeah. How embarrassing. He shouldn't have snickered.

"Yeah, yeah. I'm a kid. I get it." Ugh. He was never going to be seen as an adult at this rate.

Instead of wallowing, he went for the potato chunks. Jude was proud that they were mostly even and so they would cook at about the same rate. He often strove to do a good job and earn praise. Too bad he never got it.

"String beans are the green ones, yes? Haricot vert?" 9 out of 10 ties he knew the vocab and the slang and the lingo. He'd technically been in America as long as he'd spent growing up in France at this point, but every now and again something threw him unexpectedly. "Put the mushrooms and that onion that tried to escape together and that's a real dish."

Now Derek was curious. Jude's mom was an X-Man? That must've been interesting. He went over to the sink to wash his hands. "...that you no longer be apart of it or..?" Derek knew that it was none of his business, but he was just so intrigued by Jude's situation. Out of respect for his privacy, Derek shook his head. "Never mind. You don' have to answer that."

When Jude told him that he had lied on his papers, Derek smirked. "Trust me, I'm not gonna tell on ya. You're fine around me." He smiled a bit at Jude before turning back and drying off his hands.

Derek was confused for a bit before he finally got it. He couldn't help, but groan and roll his eyes. "Oh, my God." Derek laughed and shook his head. "It is a lot of meat." Derek blushed a bit and turned to look back at Jude. "It's fine. I'm kind of a child too. Don't worry about it."

Derek could use some dirty humor in his laugh right now.

"Yep!" He sniffed and turned around to look at Jude as he put the potatoes in. "Those look really good. Nice job." He nodded his head at his cooking mate, "Oh, that actually sounds good," Derek searched for the onion before finding it and walking over to grab the onion. "There should be a can of mushrooms around here somewhere."

"Maybe another time." Jude muttered. Airing out the team laundry to an outsider seemed tacky. Jude wasn't above doing it, he just didn't want to waste his first impression on it.

Derek, as it turned out, seemed pretty cool. He wasn't a snitch, which was pretty convenient considering that Jude had just told him something incriminating. As far as Jude's offenses to this world, he figured that fibbing about his age was pretty harmless.

> "It is a lot of meat."

Jude snickered over his task, still tickled. Finally! Someone who didn't just shut him down for being a dweeb.

"A can?" Jude scoffed in mock offense. "No, no, friend. If you don't have fresh, that's at least one thing I can help you with."

He rinsed his hands one more time and jogged up the stairs to the fridge on his level. They had tried to denote quadrants, one for each resident on this floor, but Jude and Astrid so often shared dinner that his and hers had sort of bled together. The copycat nabbed a half flat of mushrooms, already washed but not yet cut, and let the door fall closed while he hustled back down to Derek.

"Ta-da!" Fresh was always better. "You want me to cook zis one or stay on chopping duty?" He'd learned to love chopping onions simply because they were so, so delicious.

Derek nodded his head once. He understood that some things should be kept to themselves. Derek wasn't the one to pry anyway since he knew that most things were best kept private.

"Well do you have somethin' better?" He asked with a sly smile on his face. He watched Jude go from the kitchen to the stairs. He must've had fresh mushrooms in his kitchenette. Derek smiled more and turned his attention down to the soaking leg of lamb.

After a bit of time, Jude came down the stairs with fresh mushrooms. "Oh, that looks great! Why better than canned mushrooms. You can cook those while I chop the onions." Derek looked around the kitchen. "I just need to put the lamb in something so it can go straight into the oven when it's finished."

Ah. Jude's turn to cook! Excellent. The kid grabbed a fresh pan and some oil and got to heating.

"Actually, I like to cook the crap out of my onions. Caramelize them a bit, you know? So I'll wait for you to chop. You can leave them long for this like the beans."[/color]

Jude set the mushrooms next to Derek's chopping queue and went to break off the stems from the beans. With fresh, it was just easier to do it by hand than it was to chop. The task was one he'd often done in the orphanage. He was runty and had been too young to trust with the knives. They'd had a garden that they were all partly responsible for. Maybe knowing hunger was part of the reason why vegetables didn't bother him...

"My mom would be proud that we're making veggies." Again, weird as **** to call Ghost "mom," but the shoe still fit.

Instead of making Derek move, Jude pulled the pan over so they could slide the onions in. They sizzled and popped, but the teen had already whisked the entire set up back over to the range. He stole some of the garlic from the lamb's spice set up and would add salt later. Nothing much was needed when the ingredients were good to start with.

"So what's up with you, Derek? You've got that Southern gentleman's aura. Tell me something about you." He turned the temperature down a bit to hear better. It seemed that whoever was cooking got to ask the questions. Now it was Jude's turn!

Derek moaned, "caramelizar onions smell the best! I love it so much!"He could feel his mouth start to water. After raining off the onion and grabbing a second cutting board, Derek took a snide and started to cut the onion. Rinsing it off first helped with his eyes tearing up. He made sure to make long strips like Jude instructed him to do.

Cooking was certainly therapeutic to most people and that included Derek. It was just something about bringing different ingredients together to make something tasty. A smile graced Derek's face as he made his way to cutting up the mushrooms.

"Oh? Well, I'm glad! I like cooking and vegetables make great side dishes." Derek shrugged his shoulders cutely and went back to cutting.

When the conversation turned to him, Derek was a bit taken off guard. He blushed a bit at Jude's compliment. "Well I was born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina. I'm twenty years old and, ah, a mutant." When Derek's mind, there wasn't much to him, "I guess that's it."

"Oh. We're only 2-ish years apart." That surprised Jude for some reason. He expected Derek to be older for some reason, and as usual Jude felt far, far older than he actually was. He stirred the onions happily.

"What brought you to New York from Raleigh?" Raw-lee? Rouwly? Jude tried to form the same sounds as Derek had for his home town, but without practice his accent was sadly lacking. He sorta liked it, though.

"I'm from Saint-Fargeau in France. Astrid on my floor is from a villa not too far, actually. You might hear us carrying on in French at meals sometimes." He volunteered some info since he was asking some. It was only fair. "As for how I got to be here, my parents saw me in a dream and came to find me. Kind of silly romantic when you hear it like that."

He would gloss over the mutant part for now. Jude had already known it and they'd already seen the pigeon. He didn't consider the boy's power all that interesting. Not a bad one to copy, though, provided it didn't come with bad sensory extras.

"Well, a lot of thin's." Derek answered, "most of them bein' that I wanted to be who I really was. Understand my powers as well as...date who I want to date." He sniffed and started to look around for a pot to leg of lamb in. Apparently skillets didn't exist up north. Once he found it, he placed it on the counter top. Derek then placed the lamb inside and made his way over to the oven. He balanced the pot in one hand and opened the oven door with the other. After sliding the lamb in, he closed the door and set the timer.

Derek turned to look at Jude and smiled widely. "You're Franch?! That's awesome! I've never been the France, but I've heard great things about it." If Derek ever had to move out of the country, France was at the top of his list. When he heard about how his parents found him, Derek smiled even more. "That's...that is kind of romantic in a parental kind of way."

He walked over to Jude, stopping a good foot away from him. "So, what do you do for fun?"

"Ah." Jude hmmed thoughtfully. "I know a thing or two about that."

A thing or two named Svetlana who was something like 10 years older than he was. A thing or two about having lived ten or so extra years that never happened. Yeah. He was definitely not getting to be the person he'd wanted to be at the Mansion.

Jude tossed the mushrooms in and leaned his lower body out of the way to make room for Derek while stubbornly leaning forward with his upper body to still reach the onions. No one and nothing got burned, so they made it work.

> "...Franch..."

Oh. Way less cute now. Jude let that one slide. Everybody got one.

"Oui. Je viens de France." He confirmed his French-ness with his mother tongue, a vastly superior language, in Jude's opinion.

> "So, what do you do for fun?"

Aw heck. Did Jude have fun anymore? He added the green beans. Or string beans? He'd already forgotten if those were different things.

"I don't know. Heh. Sort of still figuring stuff out, you know? At the Mansion I used to host a poker night? Not really that into poker, but it was a good excuse to get a bunch of people together and break some rules."

Derek smiled when Jude started speaking French. It was such a beautiful langauge. He watched Jude cook before turning his attention down to the kitchen floor. Derek was learning Spanish and always wanted to learn German. However, he doubt that he would get the chance to use the latter.

"What about cookin'? You seemed to really enjoy doin' that."Derek accidentally bit the inside of his cheek, but was smart enough to cover it. "Or at least helpin' klutz like me pick up bulb veggies."He teased with a grin.

The meat in the oven started to scent the kitchen. God, it seemed good. Better than what he had anticipated .

"There's something about cooking that's just... good for the soul." And that was something Jude believed in, despite the fact that he was often too lazy to cook for himself. Really, it was the planning that made it terrible. Jude was not a great planner.

"You're not a klutz, Derek." Jude didn't know that for sure, but he hadn't seemed a mess int eh kitchen. "You were overburdened. It's easy to take on too much all at once."

Finally satisfied, Jude flipped off the heat and set the pan aside off the heated range.

"And you? What do you do for fun?" Probably something with animals, he guessed. Which was a non-transferrable hobby as far as Jude was concerned. Animals took work. He was ready to just skate through his responsibilities for a while.

Jude had a point. There was something about cooking that made some people feel good. It was therapeutic to some while being a hobbie for others. For Derek, it was a little bit of both.

"Don't I know it," Derek had overburdened himself when it came to his jobs, Haven, friends, dates, and everything else in between. Not to mention there was a possibility that he was starting school in the Fall. The cinnamon roll mutant just had a lot going on. At least it kept him out of trouble for the most part.

"Uh, mostly go to Central Park, X-Genes, hang out with friends, watch Netflix. I'm startin' to get into herbology." Derek chewed on his lip and looked at Jude from the kitchen floor. "That's about it. Oh, and watch Binge on my day off."

"I guess I like to walk." Jude conceded. "I like to watch people. They're... weird. Heh."

He was reluctant to leave the kitchen for whatever reason. They had a good thing going on. Jude leaned his elbows on the counter behind him and filched a bean from the pan while they waited on the lamb. Whatever dumb kind of bean it was, it was effing delicious.

"Wait. Is 'X-Genes' a place or are you saying you like mutation shop talk?"

And Jude noticed one thing was glaringly missing. "Or, are you not doing the college thing?"

"I can attest to that too," Derek laughed a bit and took in deep breath through his nose and just to take in the scent of the food that was cooking. Humans were interesting to watch, no wonder animals did it so often.

When Jude asked what X-Genes was. Derek was a little apprehensive about telling Jude because he didn't know what his stance was on the LGBT+ community. Being raised in the south, being gay was still has taboo as being a mutant. But since Jude didn't grow up in the US south, he took a leap to explain it to him. "...X-Gene is basically a gay bar."

"Oh, I am! I'm hopin' I am. I sent my application in, but I'm not sure I'm gettin' in." Derek really wished that he would be at NYU in the fall, but sometimes things didn't go as planned.

Oh. It was a place. Jude's brain cogs skipped a gear and then it all fell into place.

Being who he really was? Dating who he wanted to date? Hanging out at a gay bar?

"Oh. You like other men." Huh. Or maybe 'no duh' would have been more appropriate. Everything made total sense now, the camaraderie between them had been chill, but Jude had felt a sense of extra care on Derek's part. He was... what? Nervous? Or just not used to living in one of the biggest, most diverse cities in the world?

"Do you lure them in with promises of food?" Jude pulled another bean from the pan and nibbled delicately, a smirk building. What? Was he not allowed to tease now? "Maybe drop an onion so you can bend over strategically?"

He grinned. "Nah. You're cool. It'd be hella hypocritical if I made you feel bad. You dating anyone?"

Jude also filed the NYU applicant information away for later. He was undecided if college was for him. Actually, he was really in flux with his whole 'figuring out his life' thing.