bigapplesauce | What to Expect [closed]

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Current Location: near Muhlenberg Library
Current Music: June 8, 2013

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What to Expect [closed]

Andrew's unease about his pregnancy has not abated despite James's best efforts to comfort him. Multiple scans have conclusively shown that he is not, in fact, falling apart on a cellular level, and furthermore that he does, in fact, possess the internal structures necessary to carrying a baby. On the other hand, he feels terrible all the time and a male, half-Time Lord pregnancy is -- much like a meta-crisis in general -- a medical mystery. He's been reading up on human pregnancy, which has mostly convinced him that he's in for nine months of pain and bloating. Lately, too, his trousers have started to feel tight, which can't be right at only five weeks in.

Getting out and walking seems to help with the sickness and the general malaise, so today he's set himself the goal of making it to and from the library without calling a cab despite the feeling that he'd really rather take a nap, eat some ice cream, and watch five hours of cartoons. The first half of the operation has been a resounding success thanks in part to automated check-out stands that don't ask questions or make comments about his stack of classic sci fi, trashy romance, and books on pregnancy.

Fruits of his labor in a canvas bag, Andrew slips out the library doors and points his nose toward home. He yawns and rubs his eyes as he goes, ready for a sit down but not sure he'll be willing to get back up once he does. His stomach is starting to act up, too, and less than half a block on his way he pauses and leans against a building, wrapping his free hand around his gut and willing it to pass. The wave of nausea only intensifies, though, and he grits his teeth and looks around for a trash can. He does hear the creak and crunch above him that signifies something more than a little important, but doesn't succeed in separating it from the general noise of the city.

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Jodie's also out for a walk, though hers is a hell of a lot more aimless than Andrew's. She's just getting a feel for the city and some comparatively fresh air, with no destination in mind and no expectation of running into someone she knows. So it's with a mutual jolt of surprise that echoes back and forth along their tether that she and Aiden spot a familiar face exiting a library and stepping out onto the sidewalk a mere ten yards away.

It takes her a moment to place him, but then she remembers a carousel and the taste of bubblegum ice cream. Aiden, is that…? Shit, what was his name? She follows him down the sidewalk, picking up her own pace so she won't lose him in the crowd. Aiden, unhindered by crowds, zooms ahead to get a closer look at the man. He remembers the dream, too, and the tether hums in confirmation. This is the man, the nice one, the one who brought them to Disneyworld. The one who didn't take it for granted that Aiden shouldn't have ice cream, too.

When Andrew pauses to lean against a building, Jodie's first reaction is to be grateful he's giving her the opportunity to catch up. She isn't even thinking about the relative weirdness of approaching someone she's only met in a dream (a dream in which she was a good fifteen years younger than she is now, no less), she just doesn't want to lose him now that she's actually stumbled across him in the waking world. Then a flicker of movement a couple stories up draws her gaze - someone's AC unit is tilting, slow and inexorable, and then sliding out of their window - and she realizes with a sick feeling of dread that it's going to land right on her dream buddy if he doesn't move fast.

And he's not moving at all. From his posture, she's not even sure he could get out of the way in time if he tried.

AIDEN! Jodie weaves through the last few pedestrians between her and Andrew and seizes his arm as the window unit starts to fall. The air around them ripples and distorts with a soap-bubble sheen, and there's a muffled thud as the unit bounces off of Aiden's protective barrier and crashes onto the sidewalk beside them. The barrier ripples as a few pieces of shrapnel strike it at ankle-level, then vanishes.

Jodie stares up at Andrew, still clinging to his arm, and his name finally comes to her. "Andrew," she says. Then, more awkwardly, "Hi."

It's the movement coming up behind him that Andrew sees first, not the movement above him. He starts as a woman he doesn't recognize weaves around someone a few yards away and makes a beeline for him, straightening and glancing around quickly for other -- what? Assailants? He registers that she doesn't seem armed, but he still straightens up and gives her a bit of a crazed look that almost -- but fortunately doesn't -- come along with an attempt to bolt. Bolting would probably end in vomit everywhere, really.

Before he can get as far as to wonder if she's with ROMAC or if she's an acquaintance of the Doctor, speculation is cut short by a shimmer and a thud as something big and heavy does not land on his head. He startles and ducks anyway, eyes flicking from the air conditioning unit on the sidewalk beside them, then upward whence it came, then at the face of this mystery woman. "What?" he asks.

He looks down at her without a trace of recognition, and she hurriedly releases his arm. Shit, what if he's forgotten the dream entirely? "It's… um." Her face heats up, and it occurs to her to just retreat now that she's stopped him from getting brained by an air conditioner. But then Aiden gives her a nudge - he doesn't want to lose Andrew so quickly. "I'm Jodie," she says. "Do you… do you remember me? I was…" she holds a hand out a little above her own waist to indicate her height as a child.

Andrew's mouth starts to form another question -- probably another 'what,' though her introduction -- and the fact that she called him by his own name rather than the Doctor's title -- makes him feel as though he really ought to know what's going on here. Before he can start questioning his own memory, though, his guts give a very insistent lurch and he abandons the conversation for the moment in order to dash to the trash can he spotted earlier and empty his stomach into it.

Edited 2014-04-22 00:32 (UTC)

Jodie's not sure if that's a response to his near death experience or if he's just ill, but she winces as he bends over the trash can. She and Aiden both hover awkwardly behind Andrew - Jodie metaphorically, Aiden literally - and wait while he recovers himself. She wants to put her hand on his back so Aiden can take a closer look at him, but she holds off because she doesn't want to freak him out any more than she has already.

"Are you okay?" she asks, cautiously leaning around to look at him.

"Hang on." Whoever she is, Andrew sincerely hopes she doesn't run off in order to avoid dealing with the strange vomiting man. He wants answers -- who is she? What did she just do? He coughs and spits and drags a tissue out of a pocket to try to clean himself up with a shaking hand before turning his face to look at her again, brow knitting as he searches for something he'll recognize.

"I don't," he admits after a moment, straightening up. "Recognize you, that is -- but I feel like I should. Why do I feel like I should recognize you?"

Meanwhile, people are gathering around them, drawn by the signs of nearly averted catastrophe. Some of them probably even saw what happened, though even they might not have believed it. One steps up near them. 'Hey, are you guys okay?'

She can feel Aiden's irritation at the well-meaning intrusion, and she hurriedly says, "We're fine," to the concerned citizen. "Close call, but it missed us." Hey, it's technically true.

To Andrew, she adds, "Maybe we should get going." She doesn't really want to hang around the scene of the near-catastrophe any longer than they have to.

"Just startled, that's all," agrees Andrew, forcing a smile and forcing himself to shift his concentration off -- Jodie? Off of Jodie. He gives a little nod. "I'd like to go sit down somewhere," he says to give them an excuse to move off immediately. Stooping, he shoves books back into the bag he dropped and grabs up its handles. "Come on," he says, taking Jodie by the elbow and steering her away down the sidewalk, probably needlessly.

She doesn't object to the steering. At this point, any sign that he doesn't think she's a total head case is reassuring - and if he thought she was nuts, she doubts he'd want her to accompany him anywhere.

As they hustle through the crowd, she tries to explain herself without being overheard. "A few weeks ago, I had a dream. Nightmare, really, like I was a little kid again. But you were in it. You…" she furrows her brow, "you made it stop, somehow. You made it Disneyworld." She smiles, faint and perplexed, then looks up at him. "Do you remember any of that?"

Andrew takes in a sharp breath. He does remember that dream -- like a lot of his other too-real dreams with other people, he had wondered the next morning if he'd really met a little girl or if his mind had just been overactive. It can be hard to tell the difference, though his lucidity toward the end and the oddly consistent details made it stick in his mind.

"I'd forgot your name," he admits as they clear the worst of the gaggle of onlookers, brushing off questions of what happened. He looks at her with new recognition, finally seeing the resemblance between the scared little girl and the young woman now before him. "But that means --" He squints and squishes up his face a moment as he thinks. "Aiden! Was that Aiden back there?"

"Yeah." Jodie's smile widens, and the tether thrums with pleasure. "That was him. We've both grown up."

Aiden curls in close, and there's a faint murmur that resolves itself into, Hello Andrew. The man's hair ruffles in a breeze that seems specific to him. Hello hello hello.

For Aiden, this is almost embarrassingly effusive, and Jodie looks sheepish. "He's glad you remember him. Us." They're both glad; this could have been awkward as hell.

"I'll say you have!" Andrew grins and tilts his head back to enjoy his personal breeze, getting the general message if not the words (or word, singular). "Was that an air conditioner that nearly fell on me? I didn't even see it coming! I'd've --"

He falters as he thinks just what he would have done. Would he have split? He split when the car hit him, but would he if something big and heavy hit him on the head? He might not have time to do it even on reflex...and even if he did, he might just be a lot of little squished Andrews instead of one big one. "Thank you," he says to both of them, voice full of the gravity he suddenly recognizes in what just happened.

"Yeah," she says, sobering. "It just slid right out." Ignorant as she is of Andrew's abilities, there's no doubt in her mind that it would have ended badly for him if she hadn't been there. He never would have seen it coming, and even if he had, he didn't exactly look capable of doing any quick dodges.

So she doesn't wave off his thanks. "You're welcome," she says. "I mean, we couldn't…" let that happen to the guy who took them to Disneyworld, even if it was only in a dream.

Not that the falling AC unit seemed to be Andrew's only problem, and she looks at him in some concern. "Are you okay? I mean, if you're sick or something… Aiden might be able to help."

"Really?" Andrew's surprised enough by that information to forget for a second that he ought to wave that offer right off. "He can do that as well? You did grow up powerful, didn't you, Aiden?" Again addressing the empty air, probably in the wrong direction. He thinks better of talking like he wants a demonstration, though -- he's not human for one thing, and he's pregnant for another. While he's quite disposed to like the pair of them after having his life saved (having seen Jodie as a bitty little thing doesn't hurt, either), he's not sure he's ready to have Aiden poke around in his gastrointestinal tract. He might find things...and he might do something wrong by accident from not being familiar with Andrew's odd plumbing.

"I'm alright," he says, changing tack accordingly. "I ate something I shouldn't have earlier," which is true but not the real cause, "and it sort of got startled back out of me. I'm alright now."

It hardly matters that Andrew's not really looking the right way. Aiden's used to that - it's how Cole always talked to him - and there's something reassuring about being acknowledged without the disconcerting addition of being looked at directly, the way Johnny and Gabriel always do. Have another hair-ruffle, Andrew.

"He can do some," Jodie says. "I mean, he couldn't reattach your leg or anything huge like that, but he can help with smaller stuff - like if you pulled a muscle or cut yourself or had a fever." She shrugs. If Andrew just ate something unfortunate, there might not be much Aiden could do, anyway, so she doesn't push the issue.

By this point, they've reached Madison Square Park, and Jodie nods toward the greenery. "Still want to sit down?"

"Very much so," admits Andrew, relieved she didn't think he was saying that only as a cover story. The issue of how willing he will be to get back up and finish walking home later remains, but right now he's starting to feel shaky from the adrenaline letdown. Fortunately there's a respectable stretch of unoccupied grass, and he picks a spot far enough from the sidewalk to avoid being overheard by default before lowering himself to the ground.

"I'm guessing you two aren't from around here," he comments once he's settled. "S'pose you could be, but I can't remember ever meeting any locals in my dreams."

Jodie sits down and plucks a blade of grass, twirling it between her fingertips for a few moments until Aiden tugs it free and commences playing with it, tumbling it around and curling it into weird shapes. It's the sort of thing he would have done in the backyard when they were still living with her parents - the sort of thing she would have scolded him for, worried someone like her father would see. She doesn't scold him, now. He's keeping it low enough to the ground that she doubts anyone besides Andrew will notice a single misbehaving blade of grass.

Maybe that question should worry her, but no one else who crashed her nightmare is from this universe. Maybe the shared dreams only apply to new arrivals - which means Andrew's one, too. "No," she says quietly. "We've only been here a few weeks. What about you?"

"Months," he sighs, voice similarly soft. He reaches out to the twirling piece of grass, but doesn't try to take it. He stops short of touching it, even, and just watches. He'd like to know what Aiden is, but a little background info on who these two are is in order first. "Have you found somewhere to live?"

That's a gentle way of asking whether she's signed up with one of the groups snapping up rifties. He hopes not ROMAC, though in all honesty he's unlikely to advise her to turn herself in to the Rebels, either.

The blade of grass twists in the air, appears to tie itself into a neat little bow, and then drops gently into Andrew's outstretched palm. Jodie rolls her eyes, though she can't help smiling a little at the display. She's never seen Aiden go out of his way to be likable. It's kind of cute, but she keeps that thought to herself.

Andrew's next question is harder to answer. She's not on the street, but only just, and she doesn't want to go crawling back to Gabriel after the way she stormed out of the bowling alley. "Sort of," she hedges. She wants to ask what people do when they don't want to throw their hat in with some faceless organization, but that would involve admitting she doesn't trust either group to a guy who might very well work for one of them.

The non-answer means she's as wary of his answer as he is of hers, which doesn't actually tell Andrew anything. Both groups have at least individual members aware of where he and James live (or so he thinks, assuming as he does that Topher still works for ROMAC), but he still doesn't like to volunteer their information to the shadowy government whatsit.

He grins, though, at the present from Aiden, and lifts it up to look more closely at it. "The first few weeks are hard," he comments. "Well, I'd be lying if I said it got easy, but...you work things out. Or we did. I came here with my, ah...boyfriend."

The pause isn't because he's uncomfortable admitting he's in a relationship with another man, but because he still doesn't know what to call that relationship. If James has him knocked up, though, they ought to at least be boyfriends.

How, though? Maybe it would be safe to admit that she's not with either group. Even if he does work for one of them, what is he going to do? Take her in? She likes him, and Aiden likes him, but he'd still have a job and a half trying to get her to do a damn thing she didn't want to. She wouldn't mind help, but she's done being pushed around.

"That's lucky," she says, because she's learned enough - even keeping such a low profile - to know that it usually doesn't work out that way. "Aiden came with me, but…" she shrugs. "He's always with me."

Through high tech thievery, of course. They've moved on from robbing ATMs, but they're still subsisting on the same basic principle. "I guessed so," he says, deciding that's opening enough to ask. "You're connected, aren't you? Is that how it is for people where you're from?"

The question startles her for a moment, and then she thinks: stupid. Just because Andrew's friendly and had a good long look at her past's Worst Hits doesn't mean he knows everything about her. She's been talking to him as if he's Cole, or Nathan, when she ought to be more careful about what she tells him.

She's not sure she should lie about this, though (or not sure she can, convincingly). It's tempting to try and pass off her universe as one where she's normal, not because she's like everyone else, but because everyone else is like her. But she can't imagine that universe, let alone pretend it's home. She plucks another blade of grass, but Aiden only gives it a halfhearted tumble before letting it drop. "It's how it is for us," she admits.

"Ah." It could have gone either way, really. There are worlds like that, though he can't recall any where the linked people are humans and invisible whatevers. He's burning up with curiosity now, but that last question didn't seem to go over so well. "Human, then?" he asks lightly, partly to establish that he really is working from a broad, broad range of 'normal.'

Jodie blinks. Which one of them is he asking about? She'd think her own humanity was evident - and that Aiden's… not humanity… was obvious, too.

"I'm human. Aiden's… in my universe, he's called an entity." Safe enough, basic enough, to share without much worry. Especially because to anyone not involved with her universe's DPA, 'entity' doesn't mean a damn thing.

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