Jennie and Nathan - Saturday Afternoon

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Jennie's back from the Carribean and Nate's all doom and gloom. She refuses to have her parade rained on.




Nathan was sitting in one of the more comfortable chairs in the library, an armchair set over by the window and perfectly placed to catch the best of the afternoon sun. He had a very large dictionary open on his lap, and a grammar book in one hand, and was murmuring under his breath to him, quietly enough to be inaudible from more than a few feet away. The lack of students in the library, not unexpected on a mid-July afternoon, was the only reason he hadn't brought his work back down to the equally quiet boathouse.

The sound of sniffling broke the silence in the library, followed by a phlegmy-sounding cough. Jennie had been able to keep hale and hearty during her trip to the Islands, but the instant she'd arrived back in New York she'd been felled by a strange sort of death virus. She wasn't one for reading usually, but her psychotic English professor had already mailed out a list of books to his reading group, that he wanted to have read by the start of the semester. Why she had decided to sign on to his advanced reading group, she had no idea. But seeing as she was about to have oodles of time on her hands, she might as well attempt to make a dent into it...

#Cover your mouth when you cough,# Nathan directed idly back at the familiar mind behind him.

"No," came Jennie's petulant reply. "If I'm going down then everyone else is going down with me." She had to quash the kneejerk feeling of discomfort at someone talking to her brain.

Nathan made a face at her - that she couldn't see, of course, and continued to leaf through the grammar book. He was going to improve his Hausa to fluent if it was the last thing he did.

"So what's got you hiding and being my stealth Mommy?" Jennie said, perusing through the shelves and coughing and bit more, not bothering to cover it up.

"I'm not hiding. Just working in the semi-empty library," Nathan said. "Occasionally I do need some air that's not shared by all my many well-paid minions." It was nice not to be having to hide to give his shields a break anymore, even if he really, really would have liked to know precisely why they were just 'all better now'. It seemed too much of a stretch that his assailant had paused and fixed his shields prior to wiping his memory.

"You mean your crack team of nannies?" Jennie teased, pulling down a novel from a high shelf. "I'm amazed some of them don't have apoplexy when you leave their sight."

"Don't give them any ideas," Nathan said, not quite in amusement. He laid the grammar book down, slouching in the chair with a sigh. "I envy you your vacation," he said after a moment. "Working or not."

"It was nice," Jennie sighed, coming around to perch on the opposing armchair. "It was like, the rest of the world didn't exist outside us. I mean, it got a little tense at the end when we were sick of each other and we were at each other's throats. But it was like, me? You know? I could just be me and not worry about who I was pissing off or trying to watch what I was saying," she shook her head. And most of all, no best friend to make things awkward. Having discussed things with Marnie and Natalie the cheese goddess early on, they forced her to take her own advice and go cold turkey. No texts, no emails, no nothing. It had been ...nice.

"Mm. Moira's talking about packing up the munchkin and dragging me by the ear off to the plane and to Santorini for a few weeks sometime soon." Nathan actually managed to look somewhat wistful at the thought. Vacation. Just him and his redheads. "I wish I could actually believe it's going to happen," he added wryly.

"Say hi to Yaya and Bapi for me when you do," Jennie said. "You know they like you."

"I find your positivity painful. Something will come up," Nathan said with a deadpan look, closing the dictionary. "Something always does. I am not meant to have a break." In the bright light from the window, the dark circles under his eyes were quite noticeable, even if the look in his eyes was almost serene.

"And you know I refuse to listen to you when you get all doom and gloomy like this. You get unnecessary emo and you seriously start sounding like a Charlie Brown cartoon, you know? Waah waah waah waah waah waah..." Jennie mimicked with her hand. "Like, even if the universe decided to make you it's buttmonkey again, it's inevitable right? No use angsting over it." Jennie coughed again. "Look at me, all philosophical and stuff, I really must get high on cold meds more often."

"Hey, while you were off on your working vacation, the universe made me its buttmonkey repeatedly," Nathan said. "I'm allowed to be a little emo." The odd thing was, he wasn't. He was just tired, and feeling even more detached from things than he had been even before the incident at Arlington.

"So? That's like, normal for you." Jennie twirled the book between her fingers. "In case you haven't noticed, other people are also buttmonkeys around here. This is a place of universal buttmonkeyness. But, I am one who also emos, so who am I to judge, really?"

"You're you," Nathan said, and the look he gave her, while not harsh, was also not particularly benevolent. "So you judge."

"Tis true," Jennie said with an impish smile. "You're you and I'm me. Asking you not to bemoan fate is like asking me to be nice to people I don't like. It's not going to happen," she giggled.

Nathan tilted his head, regarding her for a moment. "Remember the cupcake?" he asked, almost absently.

"Yeah, the night before the riot," and what was very nearly the worst birthday ever...

"Seems like forever ago, doesn't it?" Nathan said, still in that same absent tone. "Lots and lots of water under the bridge since then."

"Okay, you're doing the scary zoning thing, and I've lived here long enough to be slightly frightened by that. Seriously," Jennie looked over her shoulder and then peered out the window, in case there were robot dinosaurs fast encroaching.

Nathan made a 'pftt'ing noise. "Now you're just being paranoid," he said, and the dictionary levitated off his lap, opening to a different page. He slid his reading glasses out of his pocket and put them on, casting a look sideways at Jennie that dared her to say anything.

"Fine, be that way. But I get to say 'I told you so' when we are attacked by Martians," Jennie sniffed, tossing her curly black hair over her shoulder.