Honey, I'm Hooooome~ (Rup)

Things weren't settling down. They were supposed to: it was just one little incident. One mistake that had already been explained at length to those vultures in the press. They'd even released the video footage from the damn squad cars; what part of 'mutant burglar with wings' and 'resisting arrest' did the mutant community find so hard to swallow? If the description had been 'heavyset white guy in a grease-stained wife beater', the officers would have reacted the same. Damn minorities, always clamoring to be treated special.

Rupert sighed, and flipped the channel. What else was on?

"The Supreme Court is considering arguments against the Defense of Marriage Act—"

Well about damn time. Now there was a minority he could get behind. No stabbings, no explosions, no city-wide protests over one isolated incident of completely justified police force; just colorful parades, and good fashion sense. Rupert put down the remote, and got back to cleaning his gun. He'd been at the range earlier that morning; the world still smelled like gun power to him. The Glock was disassembled on the table in front of him on top of an old Flaming Lips T-shirt.

At his side, Flispy perked up her ears. Someone was running in the hallway. And dropping things, right outside his door. Well why not? It was a free country. Not like he was a man sitting alone with his poodle, cleaning his gun. He clicked the pieces back together, his hands working smoothly, with almost unconscious familiarity.

Flipsy started barking. Then she ran to the door, for all the world like she was expecting... well, excepting her owner to come in.

"Just who are you waiting for?" Rupert said. "I'm sitting right here."

The poodle yapped on, undeterred. It wasn't her tail that was wagging: that was just the final twitch in the full-body convulsion she had going. If she kept it up, her bones would be vibrating into jelly. The TV was still on, but he couldn't hear a word the news anchor was saying; he couldn't hear anything else, either.

"Flispy, quiet."

He was just getting up to go pick the poodle mutt up when the door opened. Instinctively, he reached for his gun; it wasn't loaded, but whoever was coming through that door didn't know that. Even a psychometrist would have to touch the damn thing to know for sure. He steadied it—

--and only then did he realized that he knew the face that was coming inside.

"Lori."

Rupert had a gun. Lori had a baby.

...He lowered the gun.

"I know that ain't mine," he said, after doing some very quick, very soul-searching math.

"Brad Pitt's? An angel of the lord's? Don't ask me where you've—whoa!" Some quick re-juggling was necessary; some items need to be prioritized, and fast. Rupert let the gun hit the floor as he got a solid two-handed grip on the baby. "Lori, you can't just throw these things! You were raised in a trailer park, not a god damn cave. You-- Lori?"

She was running into the kitchen. His kitchen. Why was she running into his kitchen? Even on the best days of their relationship, that had never been a harbinger of good. Like that time she'd tried to cook him breakfast. Scrapping burned eggs off his stove's burners hadn't screamed romance.

Burned. Something smelled burned—

...The baby?

"Sssh, sssh, it's okay," he cooed, rocking the... girl? Boy? Thing? "Lori, what the hell did you do to—?"

Oh. God. He knew what happened to the baby.

"My kitchen," he whispered; a half-choked noise.

He'd killed freaks for lesser crimes than this.

"...Bombed?" He repeated, dumbly. What, that noise earlier? To be honest, he'd heard it, but it hadn't registered; like taxi horns and screeching brakes, mid-day lightning crashes from a clear sky were just something a modern New Yorker learned to filter. "It's probably just protestors. Some mutant setting off their—"

--Electrical powers.

"Lori," Rupert said, unconsciously rocking the baby; it started settling down, reaching a hand up to his scowl. "Did you shoot cars at the city again?"

"2013," he answered, slowly.

His kitchen smelled like a blown circuit breaker. Sparks still arced over her skin; luminous snake tongues, flashing out erratically. They looked like bad special effects. His ruined kitchen could have been any B-rated set of a horror flick. Or the worst domestic comedy ever to play out on the big screen. This was a dream, right? It had been nearly seven years since she'd lived here. Why did she even still have the--?

The baby succeeded in reaching his face. Its chubby hand scrapped across his four o'clock shadow. Instantly, its mouth screwed up for another round of crying. Stubble: it makes babies cry.

"Sshh, sshh—" For the first time, he really looked down at the thing he was holding.

The phrase "****ing like rabbits" came to mind. Classy, Lori. Real classy.

The baby was white-haired. Not blonde: white, like snow. He could deal with that. The ears, though? The ears were a little much. They were white, too, until their black tips. And lopy: they flopped back and forth every time the infant turned its head, unable to stay upright. She always had a thing for winking rabbit ears.

To be fair, so had he: he'd just preferred them on her head.

Once the crying was under control again, he looked back over at Lori. She looked like crap. There was something in the way she pulled herself up, like she was ready to dish that crap right back out at whoever had dumped it on her, that suited her better than any heels and fancy dress ever could. This wasn't the urban sophisticate mutie he'd crossed paths with on that bridge; this was the girl from the trailer park.

Rupert swallowed.

"You kept the key."

But then, he'd kept the apartment, and the flask, and the poodle.

>> "We broke up."

He'd taken a step towards her before he could stop himself. It was how she said it; the thin layer of inevitability flatly painted over her disbelief. She remembered banana pancakes seven years ago; then she'd come home to this. He remembered the years that filled that gap, but looking at her, it didn't make any sense to him either.

"It wasn't like that," he didn't know where the words came from, and he didn't know how to make them stop. "It wasn't like we—it was just... stupid. I said some damn stupid things to you, and I never figured out how to say sorry. And you never came back to hear it." He'd kept the same college grad's apartment and he'd kept the same decade old lock, but his key was the only one that ever turned it.

"You know how bad I am with apologies, Lori," he said.

That was an apology. From the tips of his sock-clad toes to his hazel eyes, that was an apology.

"Do you... need somewhere to stay? Until you, ah..." He bounced her rabbit-eared baby, and didn't even know what he was offering.

We’re still friends, aren’t we?

She asked it so simply, like it had to be true. She had always been cute like that: she grew up like she did, she dated men like him, she even got herself into the big city and went to college, but she still had a naive streak wide enough to swallow Flipsy whole. Did she really believe that either of them was the sort to stay friends?

Fortunately, his eyes settled quickly on another topic, before he had to deal with that one.

“The trailer key, Lori? Really? God, don’t tell me that sack of s*** is still alive. What did he do, buy a liver on the black market?”

...Not that she would know much more about her daddy than he did, right now.

“Anyway, give me those.” He grabbed the keys out of her hand. “You aren’t going anywhere until we figure out what happened to you.” And who’d wanted it done, and why. Last he’d heard, she was some fancy business woman. Now here she was on her ex’s doorstep, carting in a baby whose daddy she didn’t know, just like she was...

‘Trailer trash’ seemed too harsh, no matter how hereditarily apt.

The baby had grabbed a keychain between two pudgy fists, and began gumming at it, its ears swiveling with the same abstract attention that its eyes were watching them..

“...You two can have the bed, I guess.” The couch would be fine for him. It wouldn’t be the first night he’d spent on the thing. It would actually feel roomy, compared to some other evenings.

Her body language was clear as day; so were the little leaps of lightning following her fingers down her arms. He looked at her—the old Lori, the one he'd known years ago—and he wanted to tell her that it was all okay; that they'd work through this, like they had a hundred other little things that came with living together. He wanted to hold her.

He didn't want to get electrocuted.

Rupert stayed were he was, awkwardly bouncing a baby who was starting to fuss, his arms growing more and more tired. The kid couldn't even be a year old, yet; how was it so heavy?

"The company you worked for was working on a cure," he said. "I saw it. On the news. They just... aren't quite there yet."

He didn't know what position she'd held in the company. Researcher? Public relations? Designated pretty face to the media? All he knew was he'd turned on the TV one day, and there she was, promising that a vaccine was in the works. He'd been too caught up in seeing her to think beyond that; to think of why she was involved with that kind of project at all.

Seven years. Seven years of being a freak, and she'd never lost sight of what was best for the world: removing mutations from humanity's gene pool.

Good, she was sexy. Even when she was crackling with power.

"Why don't you go... freshen up," he said. "You know where the towels are." Never mind the extra t-shirts, and sweats. Things hadn't changed much back in the bedroom; his clothes had sprawled across into her half of the closet, but that was all.

"I'll make a list, and we can go shopping for little, ah," she didn't know. If it was a boy or a girl. Well; there was an easy way to fix that. The rabbit giggled as Rupert ran a quick check.

"For little Roger," he finished.

Until she volunteered a better name, that was the first that came to mind when he looked at the kid's charming face.