Team Building with Jack Landors (SPD, A Squad, #33, T)
characters: SPD’s A Squad (Jack, Kat)
prompt #33: light
word count: 2200
rating: T
summary: "Repeat: Commander Cruger, report to Ranger Care."
author's note: Too bad there wasn't a "sippy cup" prompt! I would have been all over it.
Team Building with Jack Landors (light)
by *Andrea
Jack was kind of annoyed. He was supposed to be off-duty right now, which you’d think would mean he could get some breakfast without being constantly interrupted. He wasn’t really annoyed, because Sky had agreed to marry him, which was pretty much the best thing ever. But it did make the breakfast thing worse, because today was the first day everyone who wasn’t at the party last night would see the ring on Sky’s hand, and he wanted to be around to watch.
Instead he had Cruger paging him the second he set foot in the mess hall, and then he had Kat’s voice over his morpher a few minutes later. He’d had a few moments of thinking they were actually trying to piss him off--until he got to the infirmary and found the commander there too. If they were working together, why was Cruger being run around too?
“Mara,” Jack said, not even waiting until he was through the door. “What could you possibly be doing to my teammates that requires isolation?”
The door to Ranger Care slid shut behind him, and he blinked at the scene on the other side. Kat was sitting on one of the patient beds--holding a sippy cup, of all things--while Mara sat on the bed opposite her in a distinctly non-medical professional way. Jack hadn’t had a lot of experience with doctors before joining SPD, but no one had ever sat down with him in the infirmary while he... drank from a sippy cup.
To top it all off, there was Isinia Cruger, sitting on a chair between the two beds. She looked vaguely regal compared to the other two women, and Jack wondered what exactly she was doing here. He supposed that explained what the commander was all upset about.
Except it didn’t at all.
“What’s going on?” Jack demanded. “Why do you have a sippy cup?” He had no idea why that was the first thing he wanted to know, but there it was. The second thing he wanted to know was, “Do you know Cruger’s standing right outside? Felix won’t let him in; it’s kind of funny.”
Isinia stood up, putting a hand on Kat’s shoulder before pushing her chair out of the way. “He probably heard that I was here, that’s all. I’ll go talk to him.”
“No--” Kat made a move to stop her. “It’s fine. He should come in; I don’t want to have to do this twice.”
“I’ll tell him,” Mara said, standing up.
“I got it,” Jack said. Something was obviously wrong with Kat, and that made him nervous, but if she didn’t want to say it twice then she didn’t want to say it twice. “I’ve always wanted to do this.”
Flipping his morpher open, he said, “Cruger to Ranger Care. Repeat: Commander Cruger, report to Ranger Care.”
He’d barely finished when the door slid open and Cruger shoved his way inside. “Thank you, Cadet,” he said tightly. “That will be quite enough. Isinia, what--Kat?”
Jack watched as all of the commander’s irritation and worry turned to fear. Kat’s sippy cup, whatever it else it was for, instantly marked her as the patient in the room, and Cruger didn’t like that at all. Jack didn’t know what had brought him to the infirmary, but he clearly hadn’t expected... this. Whatever this was.
“What on Earth is going on here?” Cruger demanded.
“This isn’t doing anyone any good,” Jack interrupted. “Ladies, we’re sorry to barge in on you like this. Anything that involves a sippy cup must be serious, and we’re not trying to make it worse. Commander, why don’t you and I sit down?”
“No, I will not sit down!” Cruger growled. “You're out of line, Cadet.”
“I’m actually not,” Jack pointed out, pulling out another chair. “Since I was called here and you weren’t.” He pointed at the chair. “Why don’t you have a seat, and Kat can tell us whatever she wants to tell us.”
He strolled over to Kat and hopped up on the bed beside her without waiting for an answer. “Hi Kat,” Jack said. “You don’t have anything contagious, do you?” He assumed not; the Power protected them from a wide variety of infectious diseases.
“No,” she said.
“Are you going to die?” Jack wanted to know.
Cruger, he noted, was sitting reluctantly in the chair.
“Not from this,” Kat said.
“Good.” Jack nodded at her hands. “So what’s with the sippy cup?”
Kat looked down at the cup, but that was her only hesitation. “Jack, you’re going to have to replace me. On A Squad,” she added, when she finally caught his eye. She didn’t look at anyone else. “I’m pregnant.”
Even out of the corner of his eye, Jack could see Cruger react. He managed not to say anything, though, so Jack didn’t look at him. “Congratulations,” he said, even as his mind refused to kick into gear. Damn it, there were a dozen things he should be asking and he couldn’t think of a single one. “That’s great.”
Kat smiled, but her sigh shook when she breathed out and he didn’t even think about it. Not the head of Base Tech, not even a new teammate under his nominal command. Just a friend. Just someone he had known... almost as long as he’d known Sky, now. Someone who had been there for him through this mad, crazy year, who had backed him up when he needed it and made fun of him when he didn’t.
He hugged Kat without a thought, and, somewhat to his surprise, she put her arms around him in return and squeezed. “Thank you,” she murmured in his ear. “It’s because of you, you know.”
He laughed without letting go. He didn’t believe that for a second. “I know you didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” he said. “But thanks for making sure that Cruger will hate me forever.”
The smile on her face was an honest one when she pulled away. “The Mexico base,” she said, holding his gaze for a moment before her eyes flicked over his shoulder. To Cruger, he knew. Jack held up one finger, pointing to the air, and Kat shook her head.
“They’re already off,” she said. Infirmary cameras were routinely shut down for purposes of confidentiality--it was at the discretion of the doctor, and Jack had been told Felix was more liberal in his definition of “confidentiality” than most. “Mara and Felix know. And Isinia.”
She’d come a long way from the woman who barely trusted her own sister, Jack thought.
“I’m not Krshk’teriian,” Kat said. She was talking to the base commander, now. “I’m Karmanian, and I’m from your future.”
“Like Sam,” Cruger rumbled. It seemed to be the only association he was capable of making right now. Jack didn’t totally blame him, although he thought the guy could show a little more sympathy. Kat obviously cared more about his opinion than any of theirs.
“Considerably farther in the future than Sam,” Kat said with another smile. It didn’t disguise her anxiety. “I was born during what would be Earth’s twenty-ninth century. I became Karmanian during the thirtieth, and they started hunting me soon afterwards. I eventually managed to escape to... this time.”
Jack sensed some heavy editing going on, and he wondered if maybe she wasn’t quite as trusting as he’d thought. Still, he decided, a big step forward. It occurred to him at almost the same time that Collins passed as human, and he had no idea how old she was. Now probably wasn’t the time to ask.
“So you’re a temporal refugee instead of a Troobian one,” Cruger was saying. “So what? What does this have to do with you being pregnant?”
Jack couldn’t decide whether he was taking the news particularly well or so badly that he could only focus on one thing at a time. He supposed it was possible that Cruger just didn’t care where Kat was from. He did seem to have a policy of “the past is past” when it came to cadets, at least. Whether that policy would extend to someone he was obviously in love with, Jack didn’t know.
“Karmanians are time travelers by nature,” Kat said. “My... children’s father was--is... he was Karmanian, and Karmanian children...” For all her scientific genius, she couldn’t seem to explain. Jack wished he could do it for her somehow, but he had no idea what she was talking about.
“Karmanian gametes require temporal fluctuation after fertilization to signal the beginning of cell division,” Mara said. “They exist in an essentially static state: zero growth and minimal consumption of resources, much like a plant seed, until conditions are favorable. Gestation doesn’t begin until the appropriate environmental factors are present.”
Jack stared at her, then glanced apologetically at Kat. “Sorry, what?”
“I wasn’t pregnant until we went to the Mexico base,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. That didn’t really answer his question.
Cruger seemed to be following better. “I assume, then, that this excursion to a non-existent base involved time travel in some way.”
Kat just nodded. Jack glanced at her, which might have been a mistake since she was going to so much trouble not to look at him. It only occurred to him then that, as she was deliberately not mentioning her sister, she might be leaving him out for the same reasons.
“So what did Jack have to do with it?” Cruger demanded.
“He was my backup,” Kat said smoothly. “SPD partner policy.”
Jack nudged her shoulder, and she finally looked at him again. You can tell him, he wanted to say, but if she didn’t think she should then maybe she shouldn’t. So he just said, “I trust you,” and hoped she got the message.
Her smile said she did. “I trust them,” she said quietly, indicating the rest of the room with her eyes. “But it’s easier for me to disappear than it is for you.”
Jack shrugged. He wouldn’t bet on that. Still. “I trust them too,” he said.
“We were rescuing Jack,” Kat said, not taking her eyes off of him. “At the ‘Mexico base.’ We went to the future to rescue Jack. When he was much younger. We sent him back to the beginning of this century to grow up.”
“Jack is from your time.” It was impossible to tell whether Cruger believed this or not.
“Yes.” It was Kat’s turn to put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently. It was weirdly comforting. “Not Karmanian. From Earth, just... a genetic mutation. Like the rest of B Squad.”
Jack passed a hand through the bed in idle demonstration.
“We come from a less tolerant time,” Kat said. “I thought, if I found a home here--he could too.”
Yeah, she was definitely leaving Collins out on purpose. He hadn’t heard her say the words “Time Force” yet, either. Maybe, if Sky was right and everyone had heard the name before, confirming that it was real would automatically link Collins to their crazy story.
“And I did,” Jack said aloud. “Here’s the thing, though.” He held out a hand. “If you’re carrying around baby kittens inside you, I’m gonna need your morpher.”
She frowned at him, but he thought it was more a frown of relief than anything else. “They’re not kittens, Jack. They’re regular babies.”
“Uh-huh. Regular, time-traveling, cat-eared babies,” Jack agreed. “Until some crazy person kicks you in the stomach. I don’t want that on my conscience. Base duty for you, my friend.”
Kat sighed. Since she was the one who’d said she had to be replaced, though, he was pretty sure it was a token protest. “I can keep working in the lab,” she said. “As long as we keep the experimental synthetics to a minimum, and--”
“As long as everyone in that lab knows you’re pregnant,” Jack interrupted. “Sorry, Kat. You can either take some time off, or you can spread the word. I don’t want Boom testing rocket packs in there with you watching. I don’t want out-of-control robot arms or tranquilizing mist or wacky cadet experiments sneaking up on you.”
“How long?” Isinia had been so quiet that Jack had almost forgotten she was there. What was she doing here, anyway? When they looked at her curiously, she added, “How long is a typical Karmanian pregnancy?”
They all looked at Kat. Even Mara, who had rattled off a lot of medical stuff earlier. Maybe Kat had told her something before the rest of them showed up.
“April,” Kat said. She sounded as confident as she always did, which Jack figured meant that she wouldn’t tell them anything different until and unless she was obviously wrong. “Probably April.”
“Aw,” he teased, bumping her shoulder again. “Spring kittens. That’s nice.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “They’re not kittens.”
Jack just grinned. “Four months until you can prove it by me.”
prompt #33: light
word count: 2200
rating: T
summary: "Repeat: Commander Cruger, report to Ranger Care."
author's note: Too bad there wasn't a "sippy cup" prompt! I would have been all over it.
Team Building with Jack Landors (light)
by *Andrea
Jack was kind of annoyed. He was supposed to be off-duty right now, which you’d think would mean he could get some breakfast without being constantly interrupted. He wasn’t really annoyed, because Sky had agreed to marry him, which was pretty much the best thing ever. But it did make the breakfast thing worse, because today was the first day everyone who wasn’t at the party last night would see the ring on Sky’s hand, and he wanted to be around to watch.
Instead he had Cruger paging him the second he set foot in the mess hall, and then he had Kat’s voice over his morpher a few minutes later. He’d had a few moments of thinking they were actually trying to piss him off--until he got to the infirmary and found the commander there too. If they were working together, why was Cruger being run around too?
“Mara,” Jack said, not even waiting until he was through the door. “What could you possibly be doing to my teammates that requires isolation?”
The door to Ranger Care slid shut behind him, and he blinked at the scene on the other side. Kat was sitting on one of the patient beds--holding a sippy cup, of all things--while Mara sat on the bed opposite her in a distinctly non-medical professional way. Jack hadn’t had a lot of experience with doctors before joining SPD, but no one had ever sat down with him in the infirmary while he... drank from a sippy cup.
To top it all off, there was Isinia Cruger, sitting on a chair between the two beds. She looked vaguely regal compared to the other two women, and Jack wondered what exactly she was doing here. He supposed that explained what the commander was all upset about.
Except it didn’t at all.
“What’s going on?” Jack demanded. “Why do you have a sippy cup?” He had no idea why that was the first thing he wanted to know, but there it was. The second thing he wanted to know was, “Do you know Cruger’s standing right outside? Felix won’t let him in; it’s kind of funny.”
Isinia stood up, putting a hand on Kat’s shoulder before pushing her chair out of the way. “He probably heard that I was here, that’s all. I’ll go talk to him.”
“No--” Kat made a move to stop her. “It’s fine. He should come in; I don’t want to have to do this twice.”
“I’ll tell him,” Mara said, standing up.
“I got it,” Jack said. Something was obviously wrong with Kat, and that made him nervous, but if she didn’t want to say it twice then she didn’t want to say it twice. “I’ve always wanted to do this.”
Flipping his morpher open, he said, “Cruger to Ranger Care. Repeat: Commander Cruger, report to Ranger Care.”
He’d barely finished when the door slid open and Cruger shoved his way inside. “Thank you, Cadet,” he said tightly. “That will be quite enough. Isinia, what--Kat?”
Jack watched as all of the commander’s irritation and worry turned to fear. Kat’s sippy cup, whatever it else it was for, instantly marked her as the patient in the room, and Cruger didn’t like that at all. Jack didn’t know what had brought him to the infirmary, but he clearly hadn’t expected... this. Whatever this was.
“What on Earth is going on here?” Cruger demanded.
“This isn’t doing anyone any good,” Jack interrupted. “Ladies, we’re sorry to barge in on you like this. Anything that involves a sippy cup must be serious, and we’re not trying to make it worse. Commander, why don’t you and I sit down?”
“No, I will not sit down!” Cruger growled. “You're out of line, Cadet.”
“I’m actually not,” Jack pointed out, pulling out another chair. “Since I was called here and you weren’t.” He pointed at the chair. “Why don’t you have a seat, and Kat can tell us whatever she wants to tell us.”
He strolled over to Kat and hopped up on the bed beside her without waiting for an answer. “Hi Kat,” Jack said. “You don’t have anything contagious, do you?” He assumed not; the Power protected them from a wide variety of infectious diseases.
“No,” she said.
“Are you going to die?” Jack wanted to know.
Cruger, he noted, was sitting reluctantly in the chair.
“Not from this,” Kat said.
“Good.” Jack nodded at her hands. “So what’s with the sippy cup?”
Kat looked down at the cup, but that was her only hesitation. “Jack, you’re going to have to replace me. On A Squad,” she added, when she finally caught his eye. She didn’t look at anyone else. “I’m pregnant.”
Even out of the corner of his eye, Jack could see Cruger react. He managed not to say anything, though, so Jack didn’t look at him. “Congratulations,” he said, even as his mind refused to kick into gear. Damn it, there were a dozen things he should be asking and he couldn’t think of a single one. “That’s great.”
Kat smiled, but her sigh shook when she breathed out and he didn’t even think about it. Not the head of Base Tech, not even a new teammate under his nominal command. Just a friend. Just someone he had known... almost as long as he’d known Sky, now. Someone who had been there for him through this mad, crazy year, who had backed him up when he needed it and made fun of him when he didn’t.
He hugged Kat without a thought, and, somewhat to his surprise, she put her arms around him in return and squeezed. “Thank you,” she murmured in his ear. “It’s because of you, you know.”
He laughed without letting go. He didn’t believe that for a second. “I know you didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” he said. “But thanks for making sure that Cruger will hate me forever.”
The smile on her face was an honest one when she pulled away. “The Mexico base,” she said, holding his gaze for a moment before her eyes flicked over his shoulder. To Cruger, he knew. Jack held up one finger, pointing to the air, and Kat shook her head.
“They’re already off,” she said. Infirmary cameras were routinely shut down for purposes of confidentiality--it was at the discretion of the doctor, and Jack had been told Felix was more liberal in his definition of “confidentiality” than most. “Mara and Felix know. And Isinia.”
She’d come a long way from the woman who barely trusted her own sister, Jack thought.
“I’m not Krshk’teriian,” Kat said. She was talking to the base commander, now. “I’m Karmanian, and I’m from your future.”
“Like Sam,” Cruger rumbled. It seemed to be the only association he was capable of making right now. Jack didn’t totally blame him, although he thought the guy could show a little more sympathy. Kat obviously cared more about his opinion than any of theirs.
“Considerably farther in the future than Sam,” Kat said with another smile. It didn’t disguise her anxiety. “I was born during what would be Earth’s twenty-ninth century. I became Karmanian during the thirtieth, and they started hunting me soon afterwards. I eventually managed to escape to... this time.”
Jack sensed some heavy editing going on, and he wondered if maybe she wasn’t quite as trusting as he’d thought. Still, he decided, a big step forward. It occurred to him at almost the same time that Collins passed as human, and he had no idea how old she was. Now probably wasn’t the time to ask.
“So you’re a temporal refugee instead of a Troobian one,” Cruger was saying. “So what? What does this have to do with you being pregnant?”
Jack couldn’t decide whether he was taking the news particularly well or so badly that he could only focus on one thing at a time. He supposed it was possible that Cruger just didn’t care where Kat was from. He did seem to have a policy of “the past is past” when it came to cadets, at least. Whether that policy would extend to someone he was obviously in love with, Jack didn’t know.
“Karmanians are time travelers by nature,” Kat said. “My... children’s father was--is... he was Karmanian, and Karmanian children...” For all her scientific genius, she couldn’t seem to explain. Jack wished he could do it for her somehow, but he had no idea what she was talking about.
“Karmanian gametes require temporal fluctuation after fertilization to signal the beginning of cell division,” Mara said. “They exist in an essentially static state: zero growth and minimal consumption of resources, much like a plant seed, until conditions are favorable. Gestation doesn’t begin until the appropriate environmental factors are present.”
Jack stared at her, then glanced apologetically at Kat. “Sorry, what?”
“I wasn’t pregnant until we went to the Mexico base,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. That didn’t really answer his question.
Cruger seemed to be following better. “I assume, then, that this excursion to a non-existent base involved time travel in some way.”
Kat just nodded. Jack glanced at her, which might have been a mistake since she was going to so much trouble not to look at him. It only occurred to him then that, as she was deliberately not mentioning her sister, she might be leaving him out for the same reasons.
“So what did Jack have to do with it?” Cruger demanded.
“He was my backup,” Kat said smoothly. “SPD partner policy.”
Jack nudged her shoulder, and she finally looked at him again. You can tell him, he wanted to say, but if she didn’t think she should then maybe she shouldn’t. So he just said, “I trust you,” and hoped she got the message.
Her smile said she did. “I trust them,” she said quietly, indicating the rest of the room with her eyes. “But it’s easier for me to disappear than it is for you.”
Jack shrugged. He wouldn’t bet on that. Still. “I trust them too,” he said.
“We were rescuing Jack,” Kat said, not taking her eyes off of him. “At the ‘Mexico base.’ We went to the future to rescue Jack. When he was much younger. We sent him back to the beginning of this century to grow up.”
“Jack is from your time.” It was impossible to tell whether Cruger believed this or not.
“Yes.” It was Kat’s turn to put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently. It was weirdly comforting. “Not Karmanian. From Earth, just... a genetic mutation. Like the rest of B Squad.”
Jack passed a hand through the bed in idle demonstration.
“We come from a less tolerant time,” Kat said. “I thought, if I found a home here--he could too.”
Yeah, she was definitely leaving Collins out on purpose. He hadn’t heard her say the words “Time Force” yet, either. Maybe, if Sky was right and everyone had heard the name before, confirming that it was real would automatically link Collins to their crazy story.
“And I did,” Jack said aloud. “Here’s the thing, though.” He held out a hand. “If you’re carrying around baby kittens inside you, I’m gonna need your morpher.”
She frowned at him, but he thought it was more a frown of relief than anything else. “They’re not kittens, Jack. They’re regular babies.”
“Uh-huh. Regular, time-traveling, cat-eared babies,” Jack agreed. “Until some crazy person kicks you in the stomach. I don’t want that on my conscience. Base duty for you, my friend.”
Kat sighed. Since she was the one who’d said she had to be replaced, though, he was pretty sure it was a token protest. “I can keep working in the lab,” she said. “As long as we keep the experimental synthetics to a minimum, and--”
“As long as everyone in that lab knows you’re pregnant,” Jack interrupted. “Sorry, Kat. You can either take some time off, or you can spread the word. I don’t want Boom testing rocket packs in there with you watching. I don’t want out-of-control robot arms or tranquilizing mist or wacky cadet experiments sneaking up on you.”
“How long?” Isinia had been so quiet that Jack had almost forgotten she was there. What was she doing here, anyway? When they looked at her curiously, she added, “How long is a typical Karmanian pregnancy?”
They all looked at Kat. Even Mara, who had rattled off a lot of medical stuff earlier. Maybe Kat had told her something before the rest of them showed up.
“April,” Kat said. She sounded as confident as she always did, which Jack figured meant that she wouldn’t tell them anything different until and unless she was obviously wrong. “Probably April.”
“Aw,” he teased, bumping her shoulder again. “Spring kittens. That’s nice.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “They’re not kittens.”
Jack just grinned. “Four months until you can prove it by me.”