[meme] i love these so much
Get me to write, for you, a drabble detailing how one character of mine and one character of yours hook up and produce spawn. You choose both characters, and maybe throw in a prompt/additional request, and I will spin you SUCH A TALE. You can ask for up to three drabbles, go crazy.
She hugs him and promises to call, encouraging him to keep up quitting smoking ("I really should do that too"), and he sees her out the door while crushing the urge to ask her to stay one more day like a cherry ember.
An hour later, she's back: "So you know what I realized? You've got nobody to run this place now, and since it belongs to you you can put just about anybody you want in charge, and you're gonna have to sooner or later because otherwise you'll have to sell the whole place on account of not being to maintain it, and then where the hell will you live? And it just so happens that I don't really have anywhere in particular to go, so we seem to have problems that solve each other--"
Beeman's personal effects needed to be cleared out anyway, and Cat's first act as his new bowling alley manager is helping him clear his apartment out. She remodels nine months in and apologies constantly for the smell of new paint and cigarette smoke, but despite how much he complains about it he doesn't mind that much. Cat's presence defies ghosts; when Hennessy decides to make his first incorporeal appearance Cat's the one who talks him into leaving, her pale, insubstantial hands curled around his bleeding palm, and it's not the last time she does something like that for him.
This time, his girlfriend likes having her around--Cat, Angela says, is a good influence, and besides, they're friends. The night they slept together never comes up, and Cat never puts him through having a Conversation about it, which he appreciates: Conversations tend to go badly when your first language is sarcasm. What happens with Angela isn't her fault, and the truth is she's probably what kept them limping along another week - she knocks on his door after Angela comes back to get her toothbrush and change of clothes, and when he refuses to answer at first she just sits there, talking anyway.
The routine they settle into is comfortable and demands committment on neither of their parts; John certainly isn't monogamous, and while Cat might be for all he can tell he's fairly sure she's not, and this suits both of them. They're friends who fuck on a semi-regular basis, sleeping interchangeably in each other's beds, and the domestic convenience of it all would have sent him running when he was in his twenties. But he's older, and so is she, and when he wakes up in the morning and she's already made coffee it all seems to work.
He's never actually done a spit-take before, although he's induced them in other people, but this is exactly what happens when she sits down next to him and says, "I'm pregnant."
That's the funniest part of the conversation that follows, where they agree what the only intelligent option is. It's a sin, he's checked, but it's one you can be absolved for, and he tries to convince himself that she'll start looking at him again as soon as it's over. Two psychics and two lifetimes full of exposure to the world that shouldn't be, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out what that spells in the future of a child that's barely a handful of cells and potential. And there are other reasons, hundreds of them; his suitability as a parent, the grey at his temples, how busy she is already, the danger any child of theirs would be in every minute of the day.
He sits next to her in the clinic, somehow glad he came just to get her through a loose picket line outside, and he still hates hospitals and everything that comes with them, so when she finally lifts her head to look him in the eye he doesn't even let her finish her sentence.
"We'll make it work," she promises, on the bus ride back. "We can make this work."
"No, we're fucked."
She laughs: "Well, yeah, essentially."
Reply
Leave a comment