littletonoidea | IC Inbox

Neal, you can't just abruptly turn off the burner on half-cooked food; it'll turn out bad! Shaw promptly switches it right back on, plopping a pad of butter on each cooking waffle for good measure. She'll babysit the stove; it's fine.

"Eiffel."

She pauses.

"If I need to go to your world and kick some alien ass, I will."

He sits where he's told, a little baffled but willing to accept it, but when Shaw talks he gives a hollow snort.

"You sure about that, Rock'em Shawk'em? One to ten how hard you can punch me in the face."

Without any hesitation:

"Actual you, mind-controlled you, or weird lookalike clone you?"

And without missing a beat:

"Doppelganger that may or may not have stolen my genetic material but definitely stole my brainwave patterns to finish learning English after I broke it by blasting Urban Dictionary on the loudspeakers."

"Pfft," she scoffs. "Easy answer; I'd go at that sucker with an eleven."

"Well, I am both flattered and concerned, but- yeah, basically when I got there, I found myself looking in a good old fashioned double trouble situation. Me and my alien radio shadow."

Shaw grunts, tethered by the stove (these waffles are almost griddled to crispy golden perfection) and so unable to shove him in the side with her foot the way she wants to.

"Dumbass. Just because I could easily punch any version of you in the face doesn't mean I'll punch you you. They have nefarious intentions, or was this some 'If we make ourselves look like you, we think that'll make you feel reassured' crap?"

"Alternatively, I could see it being a 'we have no idea what you're supposed to look like, generally, so we assume this is all of you, and our communication faculties are wildly different because we're aliens.'" Neal comes back with a slender, long adolescent black cat balanced on his shoulder and a bundle of something deep green in his arms.

"Sameen, Sameen. I'm delighted to finally introduce you both."

The cat wobbles slightly and gives a soft peep of protest as he opens up his bundle into a half-folded blanket, and gently drapes it around Eiffel's shoulders. The blanket is about ten pounds.

"Had to guess on the weight. People can vary on their preferences."

Eiffel gives a small oof of surprise when the blanket is draped on him, because he wasn't expecting it to have that much weight to it.

"Well, I'm not going anywhere any time soon," he jokes lightly. "But I think the copying me thing was... well, that's how they study other alien species." He shrugs. "They make clones and send them back to the homeworld with all their memories intact, full inception. Use them as one-way radios. Two way for emergencies only."

Shaw finally switches off the burner, walking over to inspect the cat face to face.

"Did you just put an emergency blanket on him?" she asks, sparing Eiffel a confused glance.

"I put a weighted blanket on him, yours is in the living room, and I'm sorry, were they going to try and replace you, because I might need to have a fucking word."

The first part for the Shaw, the second for Eiffel.

Turn ur locations on aliens he just wants to talk.

"Me? Nah, they need me, apparently. But they did it to other people. Our captain Lovelace - we learned that the hard way. She was the one we were holding the funeral for, last time I came back from home - only right as I got back, she came back to life in her freaking body bag, and started healing." He tugs the blanket a little tighter around himself, trying to keep his voice even. "The contact event, which mostly means the Dear Listeners trying to use their open channel to send us information we had a really hard time translating again, also turned out to be able to heal Lovelace. Cos she is one of their little speaker systems."

"Eiffel," says Shaw, who is busy having a staring contest with the cat, and is not investigating the offered blankets, "you know that none of this makes any sense, right?"

Neal resists pointing out they're in his Florida kitchen while on a barge in liminal space, for things that don't make sense. Both because he doesn't want to agitate Shaw and because he's amused by the staring contest.

Shoulder-Sameen balances carefully, slowly lies down across Neal's shoulders, and keeps steady fascinated eyes on her namesake.

Neal leans forward enough to kiss Eiffel's curls before turning his attention to the food again. Sam C peeps in outrage at the shift and hops to the floor.

"Wait, like I'm explaining it badly or it actually doesn't make sense?" he asks, leaning to give Sammy Claw a brush with his fingertips as she passes. "Because it honestly only makes sense to me 'cos I lived through it, you know?"

He uses both hands together to gesture with little swishing motions. "The star turned blue because the Dear Listeners were trying to establish communications. They remixed my voice to use English, and they left us with very mixed signals. They kept trying to suck us into the star so they could communicate with us in person, and they don't understand the concept of death or how sucking an entire spaceship would kill us all."

He lifts a hand to run through his hair, unhooking some longer curls by accident. "And it doesn't get less weird saying it out loud!"

"I just don't get the Lovelace stuff," Shaw says, turning back to the stove once the cat walks off. Don't mind her if she just starts plating this food, boys. "Is she okay or not?"

"Well, the original Lovelace is dead," he explains steadily. "Because her shuttle flew into the freaking Wolf. But apparently the Listeners got enough of her DNA and brain waves and her goddamn shuttle to make perfect one-to-one replicas and shoot them back to the Hephaestus to be our captain again a few years later."

"That's awful," Neal says quietly, a little ill at the thought, even as he puts together breakfast plates according to his siblings known preferences and vices.

"I can't imagine how it felt for her to find out."

That's not even touching the tragedy of the first woman's death, the strange horror of being recreated and replaced with no one to mourn her.

Once Neal comes over to help, Shaw scoots to the side, giving him free rein. She'll snag one more piece of bacon, then head back over to the couch, picking up the blanket that's supposedly hers and looking at it skeptically.

"Unless she already knew from the start. Caffrey, why does this thing weigh fifty pounds?"

Give or take.

"It does not weigh fifty pounds," he says dryly. "I'm not going to give you a weighted blanket that's heavier than you are."

"I could flip you over with one hand," Shaw says, conversationally.

"If you do I'll spill your breakfast."

"Please don't waste the breakfast, I'm goddamn starving," he points out lightly, leaning back in his chair to make grabby hands for his plate. "But yeah, the Listeners didn't exactly see fit to give the captain instructions on what the hell she actually was, so she was surprised as the rest of us when she popped back up like a daisy."

"Oh."

Shaw holds the blanket in her outstretched arms, then drops it down onto the couch, mostly just to see if it makes a big whomping thud when it hits the cushions.

"That sucks."

Eloquent as always.

The plate Neal puts in front of Eiffel has waffles laced with a cinnamon-sugar blend that tastes like nothing so much as Cinnamon Toast Crunch, particularly when as perfectly crisp as they are. He's also got bacon, two biscuits, and there's an assortment of biscuit topping options already on the table.

Shaw gets a similarly loaded plate, and they both get fresh pour-overs.

He sits opposite Eiffel with his own coffee.

"From what I remember, your employers must have been..." He presses his lips into a tight line while he finds a word. "Intrigued, when that came out."

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littletonoidea - 2024-05-15 00:33 (UTC) - Expand

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