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kittydesadeThis was originally going to be its own story, and then I realized that it might not make much sense, character behavior-wise, without reading the entirety of The Rainbow Connection or at least skimming it. So, we'll call it a deleted scene, even though it may stand on its own.
By now, Cassie had learned to keep her notebook close to her at all times. For several reasons, but there were two main ones. The first being that if she had a vision of strength and importance, she wanted to be able to write it down immediately. The second being that if someone else came across it, it'd be hard to figure out or understand without her there to explain what she could of the context. She was still a pretty crappy artist. And some things you just had to see for yourself.
So when she started dumping out her satchel to clean it out on their bed and couldn't find it, she started to worry. And was only a little surprised when Nick choked and caused a ripple in front of her eyes from all the way downstairs.
"Shit." Cassie scrubbed her hand over her face. "Nick!"
"Cass-ssie…" he called back up, with that long-drawn out sound of someone in trouble. She wasn't sure if it was her or him, though.
She waited until she heard his footsteps on the stairs and then outside their door, pushing the rainbow streamers of possibilities away from her eyes with an absentminded wave of her hand. "Hi. Um." Wry, sheepish grin. "Surprise?"
"Yeah, I think I am." He pointed at her drawing. "Really?"
Cassie shrugged, not sure how to answer that. "I don't know, Nick, you know that. I mean, yeah, it's a possibility." It was one they'd even talked about, albeit in terms of the next three or five years or some vague future like that. Not right now. "It might be a far off possibility. Mom can see a decade or more into the future, you know that."
Which meant that she might, too. Although the look of her in the picture, and even more so in the vision, it wasn't that far off. They were still at the school, for one thing.
It seemed to ease the panic; at the very least his shoulders relaxed a little, and the furrow in his brow started to fade. His mouth went from about to gape to wry twist of a non-smile, an expression that she didn't like for its own sake so much as how it made him look a little like a bad boy. She grinned back at him.
"You were thinking, next year sometime, weren't you."
"Well…" he shrugged. "Yeah?" Usually she didn't draw out the distant future ones, she wrote them down, because if they never appeared again they were less likely to happen. Or that was the theory, anyway. And in the time between they might get some more clues as to context. "You don't look that much older, anyway. Unless I'm wrong and it's really a bead."
She threw a wadded up receipt from her purse trash at him. "Shut up." He laughed.
And then they were at least relaxed enough for her to take the notebook from him and put it on herself with the others. He shrugged off his sweater and draped it over the back of the chair, she flopped down on the far side of the bed and waited for him to join her. It took him a second to stop fidgeting and sit, too, but he did. She stretched out against his side and burrowed under his arm.
"Do you want…" she started to ask after some amount of silence, but they'd already had that discussed. And they agreed that they both did, except for the part where things were too uncertain and they were both coming down from years and years of running and hiding and neither of them had the slightest idea how to go about being parents. And, though Cassie hadn't told him this, she was scared to death of being pregnant. Of her body changing that much. Change always made her powers go wacky and she didn't know what it would do to her. "I guess, were you thinking, anytime soon?"
His arm tightened around her shoulders, maybe just from the worry in her voice. "I wasn't thinking that, no. I mean…" He took a breath and let it out slow and raspy, and her fingers tightened in his shirt. She could almost feel his heart pounding. "If it does happen, however it happens… I'd want to take care of it."
It sounded as hard for him to say that as it was for her to hear. Three or four different, wildly different emotions tugged her in all kinds of directions. She knew he wanted that. Family, for him, meant something much different in some ways than it did for her. And she knew he was as scared as she was about what that would mean, a child, their child, for the future. What she might see change as a result, if Division saw. A child of two specials, they might want that, really badly. Especially when they'd had her mother, and they knew what her bloodline was capable of.
"We'll just have to be extra careful," she whispered aloud. Swallowing through a thick and sticky throat. Extra careful about everything, both the sex part and the child part, if a child happened. Hard to say and hard to see both.
Nick nodded, fingers combing through her hair. If he had or was developing strong opinions of his own as to which way they should go, he kept them to himself for now.
When she found out what it meant she half wished for it to be her getting pregnant by mistake. The vision came to her with a stabbing pain in the head, Trina, the woman, the hospital room, a big metal tub like some kind of medical hot tub or something. A screaming child.
Cassie didn't know what was going on but she was able to piece together enough to get a location, and a sense of urgency. Nick was out on a grocery run and wouldn't get back. Her instincts told her she couldn't wait, although she desperately wanted to. She compromised as much to send him a text message: Have to go out, urgent vision, back as soon as I can. Not that it would make him feel any better, she realized after she sent it, but at least he wouldn't think she'd been abducted.
With anyone else, that might have been a foolish paranoia. With them, it was a real possibility.
She took the back roads into town. Coming down the less patrolled alleys to where Tobias lived, now, with his adopted son.
"Cassie…" his exuberant greeting stopped at the gate when he caught sight of her expression. "What is it."
"I need you to get me to the Chicago Center," she told him. No questions, no explanations.
Years of habit locked his hand around hers, and they were gone.
They took it in stages. Two jumps to the Chicago Center, and another one up to the hallway when she looked through the streamers and saw that it was clear. The door was locked, of course. "Dammit." Cassie crouched down.
"What are you, twelve?" Tobias laid a hand on her shoulder and then she was crouching down by a hospital bed, the hiss and beep of ventilator machines and monitors suddenly much louder. So was the sound of the baby in the bassinet next to the bed.
Cassie spared one terrible look at the mother and then wished she hadn't. She shook her head, scooped up the baby all bundled in her blanket, and they were off again. In one jump down, and then one jump across, back to the house.
The baby started screaming the moment they set foot to gravel, sharp piercing cries of an infant whose world has been upset and wishes everyone to know it as soon as possible, and do something about it, dammit. She had the presence of mind to shove the baby at Tobias before the headache and the nausea and the stabbing pain from the baby screaming bent her over and had her heaving her breakfast into the grass by her tires. By the time she could stand again the door was swinging shut behind him. She tottered up the stairs, if only to get away from the smell she'd left.
"Why don't you go lie down," he murmured, clearly suffering from a headache himself. But he'd managed to get the infant girl quieted down, which was something. "I'll take the couch, you go nap in my room."
"You sure?" she called as quietly as she could from the bathroom. Rinsing out her mouth had to happen before anything, ew. And while she was leaning over the sink, something nudged her mind in her reflection. "Crap. Notebook. Hey, do you have a paper and…"
He did. He was rummaging through drawers by the time she'd gotten through paper and, passing her a few sheets of printer paper and some colored pencils. She sketched it out as best as she could remember, half aware of him moving through the kitchen and trying to improvise a bottle feed somehow, only to realize he didn't have anything to feed the baby. She noticed this because of the swearing.
"Toby, leave it. We'll get formula after we all nap, she's probably too sick to want to eat anyway." Cassie sure was.
He did leave it, after some more grumbling. Reached out and grabbed her by a shoulder. "Bedroom. That way." Turned her around and gave her a light shove between the shoulders. She left the sketches on his bedside table on top of the alarm clock and a copy of Gibran and planted her face into the pillow. Mission accomplished, sort of. For now.
Voices in the hall woke her, and it was dark outside. It was dark inside; there had still been daylight when she'd passed out and she hadn't turned on a light. And now it was dark.
The broad-shaped figure sitting at the edge of the bed resolved itself into a Nick-shaped figure as her eyes got used to the lack of light. He was sitting hunched over, brooding. She could tell he was brooding without any light to see his face.
"I'm sorry," she said first thing, sitting up and reaching a hand out to him. He looked over at her for a second, then took her hand. Until she sighed out that one explosive breath she hadn't realized how worried she'd been that he'd be upset.
She crawled over onto his lap and he wrapped his arms around her, and then the world was full of Nick's body and Nick's scent and the soft cotton of his t-shirt under her cheek.
"She couldn't take it," Cassie said, when she could face it again. "Couldn't… whatever it was they did to her, Trina got her in the last batch? Or maybe the one before that, I don't know, but after the baby was born she did… she went out, and she…"
"Shh…" Nick's fingers combed through her hair, twice, then stilled at the back of her head. "Don't worry about it. We'll figure it out. We'll figure something out."
Without speaking, and after another long silence, they got up from the bed and went into the next room hand in hand. Trina was there, as Cassie had seen, and Tobias and the baby. Trina and the baby were trying to outdo each other in distressed noises. Somehow, it hadn't seemed to register when they were in Toby's bedroom in the dark.
"I didn't mean to!" Trina wailed. Not the typical wail of a teenager, this was a truly panic-striken sound of guilt and grief. "I just thought, you know, that maybe… I mean, I heard about what… and I thought that maybe she'd want… you know, for the kid, for the baby… I didn't think she'd… um… I thought she'd want to, to…"
"To live?"
She nodded.
Nick hadn't meant that literally, although Cassie did wonder just what had been going through that woman's mind and how it would end for her. And in the next second she wondered as hard as she could how they got all blue-dyed candy to taste the same because her foresight was already providing the answer. And she didn't actually want to know. Sometimes she missed being normal, what fragmented memories she had of such a state.
"Well," Cassie took a breath, reached out and stepped away from Nick (which was the harder thing) and eased the baby out of Tobias's arms and into hers. "There, there you go, now the noise is dying down..."
She wasn't sure quite how it happened, whether it was instinct or seeing it in movies or seeing it in some future she'd forgotten she saw. However it was, she propped the baby up in her curled arm and a bit against her chest, starting to pace around the room. "That's better, isn't it? See, sometimes things get a little crazy around here, but it usually quiets down. We're not all that loud and wacky. Well. Maybe the wacky part is a little... we're not all that loud."
Tobias and Trina stared at Cassie as though she'd started growing snake heads out of her colored locks. Nick had paled, standing a little ways off from the others and watching her every movement.
She caught the look on his face for a second and then a second later it registered, and she looked back up at him. Not the bad or fearful or panicking kind of pale, then, but that good kind. His face had gone soft and wondering, a look he didn't get that often even now. She remembered it, she thought, from back when she'd given him that lotus flower.
The baby girl waved an arm feebly and made a little gurgling sound. Cassie looked back down, shifted her body a bit and planted a soft kiss on her forehead. "We'll take good care of you. I promise."
"This explains a lot," Nick mused, staring at the ceiling while Cassie got ready for bed. Next to him, Baby Girl (the house was still debating as to the name) made another wet sleepy noise and waggled a foot before quieting down again.
She looked over at him, pulling on a second layer of socks and crawling onto the bed, stretching out with her head against the lower edge of the pillow and her feet up against his calf, body bent into an L shape around the baby. "You mean the picture?"
He nodded, stretching an arm over to play with the ends of her hair. "And... well, a lot of things. Don't scare me like that, okay?"
His tone was joking, but the look in his eyes wasn't. "Sorry..." And she wanted to promise it wouldn't happen again, except, she couldn't. She didn't know if another vision would come, urgent, needing to be taken care of before he got back. She didn't know what would happen or where life would take them.
Cassie reached up and curled her fingers around his hand, one finger rolling the wide band with its colored stones.
He sighed. But it wasn't a tired or upset sound, and after a second his fingers caught and laced through hers and she looked up and over to see him grinning softly at her. Bright eyes and goofy, sticking-up short hair. She stuck her tongue out at him, because she could.
"What am I going to do with you?"
She laughed and kept it soft, but laughed all the same. "Well, you're stuck with me now, I refuse to be a single parent."
He squirmed over until he could kiss the top of her head. "Never happen.
By now, Cassie had learned to keep her notebook close to her at all times. For several reasons, but there were two main ones. The first being that if she had a vision of strength and importance, she wanted to be able to write it down immediately. The second being that if someone else came across it, it'd be hard to figure out or understand without her there to explain what she could of the context. She was still a pretty crappy artist. And some things you just had to see for yourself.
So when she started dumping out her satchel to clean it out on their bed and couldn't find it, she started to worry. And was only a little surprised when Nick choked and caused a ripple in front of her eyes from all the way downstairs.
"Shit." Cassie scrubbed her hand over her face. "Nick!"
"Cass-ssie…" he called back up, with that long-drawn out sound of someone in trouble. She wasn't sure if it was her or him, though.
She waited until she heard his footsteps on the stairs and then outside their door, pushing the rainbow streamers of possibilities away from her eyes with an absentminded wave of her hand. "Hi. Um." Wry, sheepish grin. "Surprise?"
"Yeah, I think I am." He pointed at her drawing. "Really?"
Cassie shrugged, not sure how to answer that. "I don't know, Nick, you know that. I mean, yeah, it's a possibility." It was one they'd even talked about, albeit in terms of the next three or five years or some vague future like that. Not right now. "It might be a far off possibility. Mom can see a decade or more into the future, you know that."
Which meant that she might, too. Although the look of her in the picture, and even more so in the vision, it wasn't that far off. They were still at the school, for one thing.
It seemed to ease the panic; at the very least his shoulders relaxed a little, and the furrow in his brow started to fade. His mouth went from about to gape to wry twist of a non-smile, an expression that she didn't like for its own sake so much as how it made him look a little like a bad boy. She grinned back at him.
"You were thinking, next year sometime, weren't you."
"Well…" he shrugged. "Yeah?" Usually she didn't draw out the distant future ones, she wrote them down, because if they never appeared again they were less likely to happen. Or that was the theory, anyway. And in the time between they might get some more clues as to context. "You don't look that much older, anyway. Unless I'm wrong and it's really a bead."
She threw a wadded up receipt from her purse trash at him. "Shut up." He laughed.
And then they were at least relaxed enough for her to take the notebook from him and put it on herself with the others. He shrugged off his sweater and draped it over the back of the chair, she flopped down on the far side of the bed and waited for him to join her. It took him a second to stop fidgeting and sit, too, but he did. She stretched out against his side and burrowed under his arm.
"Do you want…" she started to ask after some amount of silence, but they'd already had that discussed. And they agreed that they both did, except for the part where things were too uncertain and they were both coming down from years and years of running and hiding and neither of them had the slightest idea how to go about being parents. And, though Cassie hadn't told him this, she was scared to death of being pregnant. Of her body changing that much. Change always made her powers go wacky and she didn't know what it would do to her. "I guess, were you thinking, anytime soon?"
His arm tightened around her shoulders, maybe just from the worry in her voice. "I wasn't thinking that, no. I mean…" He took a breath and let it out slow and raspy, and her fingers tightened in his shirt. She could almost feel his heart pounding. "If it does happen, however it happens… I'd want to take care of it."
It sounded as hard for him to say that as it was for her to hear. Three or four different, wildly different emotions tugged her in all kinds of directions. She knew he wanted that. Family, for him, meant something much different in some ways than it did for her. And she knew he was as scared as she was about what that would mean, a child, their child, for the future. What she might see change as a result, if Division saw. A child of two specials, they might want that, really badly. Especially when they'd had her mother, and they knew what her bloodline was capable of.
"We'll just have to be extra careful," she whispered aloud. Swallowing through a thick and sticky throat. Extra careful about everything, both the sex part and the child part, if a child happened. Hard to say and hard to see both.
Nick nodded, fingers combing through her hair. If he had or was developing strong opinions of his own as to which way they should go, he kept them to himself for now.
When she found out what it meant she half wished for it to be her getting pregnant by mistake. The vision came to her with a stabbing pain in the head, Trina, the woman, the hospital room, a big metal tub like some kind of medical hot tub or something. A screaming child.
Cassie didn't know what was going on but she was able to piece together enough to get a location, and a sense of urgency. Nick was out on a grocery run and wouldn't get back. Her instincts told her she couldn't wait, although she desperately wanted to. She compromised as much to send him a text message: Have to go out, urgent vision, back as soon as I can. Not that it would make him feel any better, she realized after she sent it, but at least he wouldn't think she'd been abducted.
With anyone else, that might have been a foolish paranoia. With them, it was a real possibility.
She took the back roads into town. Coming down the less patrolled alleys to where Tobias lived, now, with his adopted son.
"Cassie…" his exuberant greeting stopped at the gate when he caught sight of her expression. "What is it."
"I need you to get me to the Chicago Center," she told him. No questions, no explanations.
Years of habit locked his hand around hers, and they were gone.
They took it in stages. Two jumps to the Chicago Center, and another one up to the hallway when she looked through the streamers and saw that it was clear. The door was locked, of course. "Dammit." Cassie crouched down.
"What are you, twelve?" Tobias laid a hand on her shoulder and then she was crouching down by a hospital bed, the hiss and beep of ventilator machines and monitors suddenly much louder. So was the sound of the baby in the bassinet next to the bed.
Cassie spared one terrible look at the mother and then wished she hadn't. She shook her head, scooped up the baby all bundled in her blanket, and they were off again. In one jump down, and then one jump across, back to the house.
The baby started screaming the moment they set foot to gravel, sharp piercing cries of an infant whose world has been upset and wishes everyone to know it as soon as possible, and do something about it, dammit. She had the presence of mind to shove the baby at Tobias before the headache and the nausea and the stabbing pain from the baby screaming bent her over and had her heaving her breakfast into the grass by her tires. By the time she could stand again the door was swinging shut behind him. She tottered up the stairs, if only to get away from the smell she'd left.
"Why don't you go lie down," he murmured, clearly suffering from a headache himself. But he'd managed to get the infant girl quieted down, which was something. "I'll take the couch, you go nap in my room."
"You sure?" she called as quietly as she could from the bathroom. Rinsing out her mouth had to happen before anything, ew. And while she was leaning over the sink, something nudged her mind in her reflection. "Crap. Notebook. Hey, do you have a paper and…"
He did. He was rummaging through drawers by the time she'd gotten through paper and, passing her a few sheets of printer paper and some colored pencils. She sketched it out as best as she could remember, half aware of him moving through the kitchen and trying to improvise a bottle feed somehow, only to realize he didn't have anything to feed the baby. She noticed this because of the swearing.
"Toby, leave it. We'll get formula after we all nap, she's probably too sick to want to eat anyway." Cassie sure was.
He did leave it, after some more grumbling. Reached out and grabbed her by a shoulder. "Bedroom. That way." Turned her around and gave her a light shove between the shoulders. She left the sketches on his bedside table on top of the alarm clock and a copy of Gibran and planted her face into the pillow. Mission accomplished, sort of. For now.
Voices in the hall woke her, and it was dark outside. It was dark inside; there had still been daylight when she'd passed out and she hadn't turned on a light. And now it was dark.
The broad-shaped figure sitting at the edge of the bed resolved itself into a Nick-shaped figure as her eyes got used to the lack of light. He was sitting hunched over, brooding. She could tell he was brooding without any light to see his face.
"I'm sorry," she said first thing, sitting up and reaching a hand out to him. He looked over at her for a second, then took her hand. Until she sighed out that one explosive breath she hadn't realized how worried she'd been that he'd be upset.
She crawled over onto his lap and he wrapped his arms around her, and then the world was full of Nick's body and Nick's scent and the soft cotton of his t-shirt under her cheek.
"She couldn't take it," Cassie said, when she could face it again. "Couldn't… whatever it was they did to her, Trina got her in the last batch? Or maybe the one before that, I don't know, but after the baby was born she did… she went out, and she…"
"Shh…" Nick's fingers combed through her hair, twice, then stilled at the back of her head. "Don't worry about it. We'll figure it out. We'll figure something out."
Without speaking, and after another long silence, they got up from the bed and went into the next room hand in hand. Trina was there, as Cassie had seen, and Tobias and the baby. Trina and the baby were trying to outdo each other in distressed noises. Somehow, it hadn't seemed to register when they were in Toby's bedroom in the dark.
"I didn't mean to!" Trina wailed. Not the typical wail of a teenager, this was a truly panic-striken sound of guilt and grief. "I just thought, you know, that maybe… I mean, I heard about what… and I thought that maybe she'd want… you know, for the kid, for the baby… I didn't think she'd… um… I thought she'd want to, to…"
"To live?"
She nodded.
Nick hadn't meant that literally, although Cassie did wonder just what had been going through that woman's mind and how it would end for her. And in the next second she wondered as hard as she could how they got all blue-dyed candy to taste the same because her foresight was already providing the answer. And she didn't actually want to know. Sometimes she missed being normal, what fragmented memories she had of such a state.
"Well," Cassie took a breath, reached out and stepped away from Nick (which was the harder thing) and eased the baby out of Tobias's arms and into hers. "There, there you go, now the noise is dying down..."
She wasn't sure quite how it happened, whether it was instinct or seeing it in movies or seeing it in some future she'd forgotten she saw. However it was, she propped the baby up in her curled arm and a bit against her chest, starting to pace around the room. "That's better, isn't it? See, sometimes things get a little crazy around here, but it usually quiets down. We're not all that loud and wacky. Well. Maybe the wacky part is a little... we're not all that loud."
Tobias and Trina stared at Cassie as though she'd started growing snake heads out of her colored locks. Nick had paled, standing a little ways off from the others and watching her every movement.
She caught the look on his face for a second and then a second later it registered, and she looked back up at him. Not the bad or fearful or panicking kind of pale, then, but that good kind. His face had gone soft and wondering, a look he didn't get that often even now. She remembered it, she thought, from back when she'd given him that lotus flower.
The baby girl waved an arm feebly and made a little gurgling sound. Cassie looked back down, shifted her body a bit and planted a soft kiss on her forehead. "We'll take good care of you. I promise."
"This explains a lot," Nick mused, staring at the ceiling while Cassie got ready for bed. Next to him, Baby Girl (the house was still debating as to the name) made another wet sleepy noise and waggled a foot before quieting down again.
She looked over at him, pulling on a second layer of socks and crawling onto the bed, stretching out with her head against the lower edge of the pillow and her feet up against his calf, body bent into an L shape around the baby. "You mean the picture?"
He nodded, stretching an arm over to play with the ends of her hair. "And... well, a lot of things. Don't scare me like that, okay?"
His tone was joking, but the look in his eyes wasn't. "Sorry..." And she wanted to promise it wouldn't happen again, except, she couldn't. She didn't know if another vision would come, urgent, needing to be taken care of before he got back. She didn't know what would happen or where life would take them.
Cassie reached up and curled her fingers around his hand, one finger rolling the wide band with its colored stones.
He sighed. But it wasn't a tired or upset sound, and after a second his fingers caught and laced through hers and she looked up and over to see him grinning softly at her. Bright eyes and goofy, sticking-up short hair. She stuck her tongue out at him, because she could.
"What am I going to do with you?"
She laughed and kept it soft, but laughed all the same. "Well, you're stuck with me now, I refuse to be a single parent."
He squirmed over until he could kiss the top of her head. "Never happen.