Monday late afternoon, Terry and Pietro

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As arranged, Pietro drops by Terry's suite for help with his cramps. They end up arguing about comics.



The knock on Terry's door was quite a bit more diffident than was Pietro's usual wont, and he had to forcibly restrain himself from looking furtively up and down the hall. The quickest way to make people suspicious was, after all, to act as if there was something to be suspicious about.

"Come in!" Terry's voice was startlingly deep by comparison. Clearly she wouldn't be launching into any of her arias for the next week. The young man who opened the door however had the same bright blue eyes and mischievous grin even if the owner of said features was several inches taller than usual.

Pietro just sighed. "Am I the only one who doesn't think this is carnival time? You look entirely too cheerful. Where's this tea, and did I beat Clarice here?"

Because he sensed that it would only annoy Pietro, Terry didn't exclaim "Look at how cute you are!" but it was a near thing. Instead he just grinned more broadly and swept his visitor a bow, "My good Mr. Maximoff, sure and there are worse things to be than a lass or lad for a few days. Come in. Tea's about to boil. Clarice isn't due for another hour or so."

The bow was still enough to earn Terry a dose of the evil eye. "Let's see you take a couple shots to the groin and say that. Bad enough you girls got the better end of the deal without crowing about it." Pietro followed Terry into the suite. "The tea, please? I'd like to stop fantasizing about hysterectomies."

"Have a seat." Terry covered the distance to the suite kitchen in a few ground-eating strides and clicked the heat under the kettle off, pouring it into a tea pot and carried the tray back to the coffee table. "It'll just be a few minutes. I don't know, though. I like being able to reach things and sure being a guy has given me more muscle but...it doesn't quite feel like me still, you know? I'll be glad when the week is over."

"About the only thing I'm glad about being a woman is that I still don't need a bra. And I can still wear my own clothes, even if I have to roll things up and use previously untouched belt notches." Pietro paused. "And that it's only for a week. No offense, but the female body is a lot more interesting when you're not looking out of one." He all but pounced on the teapot as soon as Terry brought it within reach.

"That's not steeped yet," Terry scolded drawing it away from Pietro. "You have to wait or it's just going to be hot, slightly pink water. Five minutes. I'll get you some Advil in the meantime." He got up and wandered into the bathroom, listening to be sure that Pietro wasn't messing with the teapot in the meantime. "Personally I'm more a fan of guys. It is vain to say that I think I'm really fit like this?"

"Yes. Not that that's likely to stop you." Pietro drummed his fingers on the tabletop. "You do realize what five minutes is like to my subjective time-sense, don't you?"

"Same as five minutes always is I'd imagine given that the time-sense isn't a new feature." Terry tossed him the bottle of Advil. "Take at least four. The bottle lies to you." He checked the time, gave it a few more minutes. "I am though. I make a good guy. You're a cute girl too, I mean. It's not like anyone ended up any less attractive."

"Yes. Five minutes of anything uncomfortable is always a great deal more annoying to me than to anyone else." Pietro caught the bottle and dry-swallowed six just to be sure. Not that the Advil would last very long with his metabolism, but the time-sense worked both ways. "I haven't really noticed. That hasn't changed, at least."

"What's it like to reproduce asexually?" Terry pondered outloud, not actually suggesting that Pietro was but caught by the idea. His attention span apparently had suffered from the increased testosterone. Or perhaps he just didn't care.

"Funny. It's just unnecessary distraction, sex. Fine for those of you who can get away with it, but I wasn't one of those people for long enough I lost the knack." Pietro half-shrugged and glared at the teapot again. "And at least that stays simple even when everything else goes insane."

"Jamie did it. Kinda. He was like an amoeba. Two minutes." Terry grinned, "How do you lose the knack, exactly? Do you forget? Isn't it like riding a bicycle...I'd think it would be. It's part of the instinct of the human animal after all. Part of the biological imperative and all that."

"Unhealthy amounts of repression. Which gets easier with practice." A flickering grin did much to soften the sharp edges of Pietro's new face. "And I'm still ahead of half the team in the sanity sweepstakes, isn't that nice."

"I think sanity is overrated. You have to be a bit messed up to pursue any career where you voluntarily put yourself in harm's way not just once but many many times. This is why you should never trust a firefighter." Terry flopped into a chair, arms and legs sprawled in every direction, "You can drink the tea now."

"Sage advice, eh?" Pietro visibly considered just pouring the tea down his throat straight from the pot, but settled for a cup instead, which he drained immediately. "Tastes all right." He closed his eyes, trying to figure out if it was having any effect. "I think the Advil did more, though."

"So it will. The Advil is an actual painkiller. Get yourself a hot pad, that will help too." Terry nodded. "I always tried to sleep through the worst of it. Pill's the best invention since sliced bread for that alone."

"Hot pad and naps," Pietro murmured around his third cup of tea. "Right." He grimaced. "I barely sleep as it is, but I'll give it my best shot. Any other advice?"

"Get birth control? Have sex? You'd be amazed how much that helps." Terry sighed. He really really missed his husband right now.

Pietro's eyebrows shot up. "I don't have the vocabulary to express how much that's not going to happen. I don't care if it cures cancer."

"It probably won't cure cancer but I have it on good authority that the hairy palms are totally a lie." Terry laughed and hung his head back. "Sorry, that's not helpful. Heat's the best honestly. Lie down and stay there, use a heating pad where the pain is worst. If you feel nauseous or dizzy, don't worry, you're not going to throw up."

Pietro shook his head, chuckling. "You and Wanda. I swear, that's the first thing she would've thought to do when she had a minute to herself." He froze suddenly. "Oh, no. A whole week. .. I'm going to have to figure out some way to distract her before she decides to try matchmaking again. Maybe she won't think of it. That's possible."

"Tell her you reproduce by budding. You're having a very fulfilling relationship with yourself." He lifted his head. "It could be plausible. You could go so fast you vibrate apart."

"I'm not actually immune to the effects of friction, you know. Just highly resistant." Pietro tipped the last of the tea into his cup. "And not at all fond of the idea of using myself as a firebow, thank you."

Terry made a face. "So not what I meant. I was talking about Impulse."

"The comic book character?" It was Pietro's turn to make a face. "Didn't I already tell you that those things are written by idiots? Half the things they attribute to super-speed they made up on the spot to fit the needs of the, and I use the term loosely, story."

Terry made a scornful noise, "You're just jealous because they're all faster than you are. They can tap into the Speed Force and travel through time. All you can do is break the sound barrier a few times over."

Pietro's scornful noise had a lot more practice behind it than Terry's. "Jealous? There's nothing to be jealous of. It's just the result of systematic powers inflation by a series of small-minded writers who all want to ratchet up the stakes by ratcheting up the villains. And time travel is a crock."

Terry decided scorn sounded better in female tones. "You only say that because you don't know anyone who has done it. Lots of people think demons are a crock or the Fair Folk. But they'd be wrong."

Pietro rolled his eyes. "All right then, time travel by accelerating on foot past the speed of light is a crock. I could maybe see a teleporter doing it, they bend space into odd shapes already. A speedster? No. I don't care how fancy their treadmill is, special relativity still applies."

"This is why you're always going to see the glass as half-full, Mr. Maximoff. Because you don't believe in time travelling speedsters." Terry grinned.

"I champion logic in an unreasoning world. It's a thankless job, but it has its compensations." Pietro made a wry face. "Just not this week."

"Can't logic away unexpected body parts," Terry agreed cheerfully.