firstofitskind | MHA #6, Early Saturday Morning

MHA #6, Early Saturday Morning

Verity had been out patrolling in Baltimore last night, late enough that Liam had fallen asleep on the couch waiting. It wasn't the first time that had happened, and wasn't likely to be the last, except that normally what happened is he'd either wake up when she came in through the ~~door~~ window, or if he'd been really tired, after his usual couple hours of sleep and make his way to the bedroom to find her there. This time... not so much. Maybe whatever Fandom magic was in the air was responsible for making sure he actually slept through the entire night, because the Liam who woke up was not the Liam who'd gone to sleep.

The Liam who woke up was about six years old, and very, very confused. Gone were the familiar purple walls of the Mothership and the hum of her engines. Instead he was on some sort of- squishy but also lumpy surface?

He looked around, eyes wide. The only thing he recognized was a completed Taelon puzzle on a shelf just out of reach. A cursory examination of the space revealed another room with a table and chairs, and he dragged one of the chairs over to the shelf and clambered up on it to bring the puzzle down.

Prize acquired, he made his way back to the couch, clinging to the one bit of familiarity in this strange place he'd found himself in.

[ooc: mostly establishy, but open if you live here!]

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"Liam?" Verity asked, yawning and rubbing at her eyes as she wandered out from their bedroom. Perhaps it was more of that Fandom luck that had her wearing one of his shirts, long enough to almost brush her knees. "What's all that noise?"

The t-shirt and sweats the older Liam had fallen asleep in last night had also thankfully shrunk with him - a point of minor contention for this Liam, as the fabric was just as unfamiliar as everything else.

But wherever he was, there was someone here who knew his name. He looked up at the sound of it, not replying just yet, grey eyes meeting hers with a slightly wary expression on his face.

"I - Liam?"

Ooookay then. There was a solemn-looking little boy staring up at her. This was unexpected. To say the least.

"Hi there," she said, trying not to sound as flabbergasted as she felt. "You're Liam, right?" That was how he looked when they were both kids. Which Verity was not. Just saying. "You okay?"

“You know my name,” Liam observed. “I do not know who you are. Or where I am.”

"I'm Verity," she answered, "and this is my apartment."

Wow. Okay, saying that hurt, even if she still thought of it as hers by reflex sometimes. But that was different than deliberately erasing Liam from it.

"You're here for the weekend?" Please just let it be for a weekend. "I'm your...companion."

She figured that was an okay term, considering the Companion-Protectors.

Liam couldn’t explain it, but he felt some sort of connection to Verity. Her presence was somehow reassuring, even as he was certain they had never met.

“You are human,” he observed. No visible implant, so she wasn’t a drone or a Volunteer, then. “I do not know how I came to be here. I have never been permitted to go down to the planet before.” He didn’t know how long he would be allowed to remain, before someone found him and brought him back, so her guess was as good as his as to whether it would be ‘the weekend’ or not.

Edited 2019-04-01 00:20 (UTC)

"Perhaps...it was decided that you should, uhh, travel to Earth for the experience?" Verity suggested, not wanting to scare tiny Liam. This was so much easier when they were both little. "As a lesson? Before going back to where you...usually...stay?"

...'Normal' tiny!Liam (and boy was that weird to say, too), never mentioned not being on the planet.

This tiny Liam had followed a much more human path of development, one that hadn't involved being conceived, born, and growing to adulthood within the span of a single day.

"The Mothership," Liam supplied helpfully, hands tracing the curves of the puzzle carefully as he considered this information.

"Ah, yes," Verity said, nodding like she'd been aware of this all along. "That makes sense."

In no way did that make sense. Even a little bit. Or at all.

"I'm going to make myself some coffee." Because boy was this a three-coffee day already. "Would you like breakfast?"

Sure it did! If you knew that Siobhan Beckett, after her encounter with the alien Ha'gel, had returned to work thinking everything was normal, and it wasn't until weeks later that she realized she was pregnant, at which point the Taelon healers had kept her under close and careful observation. And then had taken Liam once he'd been born, and kept him under close and careful observation.

But, of course, there was no way for Verity to know any of that.

"Yes," he nodded. "I would, please."

Yeah, see even if she had known any of that, it still wouldn't have made any sense to anyone who knew about Liam's real life had gone.

"Why don't you stay here and continue playing," she said, trying to sound chipper in the face of all this as well as the ridiculousness of the time - she had not gotten a whole lot of sleep between the time she'd gotten home and now. "I'll make you something to eat, okay? There something you usually eat?"

Causality was funny that way. His presence; or rather, the lack of his adult-self's presence, had caused a number of changes in the timeline.

"Fruit?"

... Yeah, that probably wasn't happening, not in this apartment.

"Can I come with you instead?" He still didn't know what to make of this place, and her presence was... reassuring.

Dammit. She'd planned on staring blankly at the coffee while it percolated and question everything about this island, but what? Was she gonna tell Tiny!Liam no?

"Of course," she said, smiling gamely. While also trying to figure out where she was gonna get fruit from. "Though if you get bored watching me cook and wanna come back out here and watch TV, I'll understand."

"All right." He didn't think that likely, but he wasn't going to argue. He scrambled off the couch, puzzle still in his hands, and padded over to her. His gaze flickered over to the chair he'd left by the shelf. Maybe he ought to offer to bring it back to its proper place?

"Don't worry about it," Verity said, seeing him glance over at the chair. "We can put it back later, okay? After breakfast."

She escorted him into the kitchen, sitting him down at the rickety table and put of a pot of coffee. Sorry but that was her first priority right now; she couldn't be a good 'companion' without a heavy hit of caffeine in her system.

And then she opened that wasteland that was their fridge. Unsurprisingly, there was no fruit, but there were some muffins on the counter. And jam on the door. With a heavy, purely internal sigh, she reached for that. "Muffins with jam work for you?"

Liam, you so owed her.

Yeah, once he was back to his normal self, Liam was absolutely going to snicker about the lows Verity had been forced to stoop to.

... Once he got over how weird being an actual child for a weekend had been.

"That would be acceptable," Liam agreed. Because 'acceptable' was absolutely a word that someone Liam's age would use on the regular.

"Well thank goodness for that," Verity mumbled, kind of awkwardly staring at the coffee machine as it percolated. It refused to hurry, which was incredibly rude of it.

Yeah, okay, get it together, Price.

She grabbed the muffin and cut it open, glad for all the mornings spent bickering about how to properly make muffins (because SOMEONE was too good to heat them up in the microwave like NORMAL PEOPLE) so she could make it right for Tiny!Liam now.

"Want some tea to go along with it?" she asked.

Wait. Was tea a kids drink? Coffee definitely wasn't, but was tea?

HOW DID SHE NOT KNOW THESE THINGS?

Listen. The microwave was fine in a pinch, but toasting made it satisfyingly crispy on the outside, okay?

Verity should've seen the Taelon healers in the days leading up to Liam's birth, when it had finally occurred to them that they had no idea what human (or mostly human) infants needed as far as nourishment went.

This Liam had never had tea, but he knew what it was, at least. Thanks, genetic memories! So that question got a nod of assent.

"Or how about milk?" Verity asked, since milk was unquestionably a kid drink. Calcium and bones and stuff. "Or tea with milk if you really want tea?"

And since Liam was here, she could be certain that the milk in the fridge was not well on its way to becoming cheese.

And milk was something that was also a little more familiar.

"I would prefer the milk, if it is all the same to you," he admitted.

"Sure, kid," she said, shaking her head slightly at the formality. "One muffin with jam and a cup of milk coming up."

She resolved to make sure he had something more substantial for them for lunch. Probably ordered in because of who she was as a person, but still.

Dinosaur nuggets maybe. He looked like a kid who needed dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets in his life.

"So tell me about living on the Mothership," she said as she doctored her coffee. "What do you normally do?"

"I play, and Si'al gives me lessons, and the healers examine me," Liam informed her. "Sometimes Da'an comes to speak to me." Not terribly often, but enough that it wasn't unusual.

"Why do the healers examine you?" Verity asked, setting his plate down in front of him. "Are you sick?"

She had absolutely no idea how to handle a sick Liam, nope. At least, not the kind of sickness he'd probably have, living on the Mothership.

"No," Liam shook his head. In fact, it was more or less the opposite. He took a few bites of the muffin before elaborating: "They wish to know more about why I am able to survive."

"Why shouldn't you?" Verity said. "If you're not sick, I don't see the issue."

Not before her second cup of coffee, anyway.

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