(Untitled)

[steelartisan]

It's not just with Milliways -- and interdimensional portals, and time manipulators, and the astral plane, and alien technology, and so forth -- that time does strange things. Eight and a half months ago, they learned that Kate was pregnant

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[prydeful]

"Draw a sketch, it'll last longer. Well, not with the way our items last. But no one's blown this place up yet, anyway. I even have a photo of you, still, from when you were twenty." Beat. "I may have found it last week, when I dragged you away from the impromptu art class."

It's absent, not sharp, but it's too absent, as it is when she continues, "You were hot at twenty. Not that i mind you now. Actually, i think physically, we have less of an age gap now. But man, you were hot at twenty. I'm trying to remember if we dated when you were actually twenty. Did we?"

It is also becoming a rather faster ramble as she finishes.

[steelartisan]

Piotr has moved into the room as she rambled, and there's a small line between his brows.

"Katya," he says in Russian, "are you all right?"

Nine months.

And being an X-Man, like it or not, teaches you pretty quickly how every one of your loved ones deals with physical pain.

[prydeful]

"Um," she says, which is almost, if not quite, answer enough.

She does not wince.

But one of her hands is gripping his arm, now, and it's gripping it with as much strength as she can muster.

"I'm not sure. I don't know. You didn't answer my question. Are you still mad that I kinda tricked you into coming to Muir for us to basically laser your head? Because I meant to apologize more for that, except you broke Pete's back, and that pissed me off a lot, and then you were in a cell, and we had to keep you there, and I was crying a lot when I wasn't yelling at you. But you weren't supposed to know that so I couldn't let you see that. The whole thing sucked. Why didn't you come back sooner?"

It is an answer that she is talking directly about things they, pretty much, like to Not Talk or Think About At all.

Even she is realizing that as she freezes and looks up at him.

"...Something's different." That is not, Actually, I am starting to panic very badly and don't feel well at all, and I'm going to kill Hank for leaving when he

[steelartisan]

Right.

Piotr scoops her up. (Carefully! Very carefully. But when one is six and a half feet of muscle, one can be decisive about this kind of thing.)

Firmly: "I think it is time to go to Milliways."

Because Hank isn't here. And, at Milliways, Simon Tam is.

And the odds are, on the whole, against the interdimensional timeline-warping scenario -- and on the off chance they're not, well, sometimes it just makes sense to skip out of your universe for a while to a more restful one.