Re: Carson M/Jake R
[Jake was tired of just about anything that looked like being organized away neat. He wasn't neat, he was just about every loose end there was and seeing his dead mother in the streets of Gotham just made it real clear that whatever unraveled had done so completely. He didn't look messy exactly, but he didn't look like he was staying anyplace that minded much about the occasional crease in the shirt, because the one he was wearing had plenty. It was a shirt, blue striped even if it was worn over a t-shirt and looked like it had come from Goodwill (because it had). But it was clean and it looked mostly smart, and that was better than most of what he'd looked like the last year and change.
He had his hands in his coat pockets, worn wool with the collar turned up high against New York cold that cut closer than the kind he'd grown up in, and his walk wasn't nothing but cheerful, because stopping at every bar and food joint on the street hadn't turned up nothing. He had a trial shift at a restaurant, out back, cleaning dirty dishes some and chopping things that no one else wanted to chop, and he figured he could get something in the days, fill in that time no one was thinking about pork chops with something else. No one had asked him about experience, Jake figured maybe no one wanted to wash pots if they had any experience, or maybe you just didn't need any. But he could find a place, any place, on two jobs' worth of money, and he didn't need to live off a single person to do it.
So he was cheerful and he was windswept, the overlong hair that fell into his eyes was all over the place, and he saw Carson and smiled right off until he saw the swell of her belly behind the diner table. And all that cheerful drained right the hell away.]
You're pregnant. [Loud enough to interrupt a waitress pouring coffee at some other table.]