torunn ⚡ (childofthor) wrote in valloic, @ 2021-10-28 20:24:00 |
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Entry tags: | !: action/thread/log, ~plot: timeslip, ₴ inactive: james rogers, ₴ inactive: torunn thorsdóttir |
It wasn’t until she opened her eyes that she noted anything suspicious.
Very suspicious. Standing beside their bed, staring up at them, was a blond haired blue eyed child. The door to their bedroom was still closed, the windows shut tight. But there was still a child.
Torunn sat up in bed, looking down at him with confusion, wondering if she was still dreaming. She looked down at James’ sleeping form, and then back to the kid, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. Still there. “Mummy!” she child said, raising his arms as if he was expecting her to pick him up.
“James.” Torunn said, still not looking away from the kid. She reached over to touch his shoulder and shake him away, “James, wake up, we have a situation.” When he started to stir, Torunn reached over the edge of their bed. This kid was standing far too close to an assortment of sharp weapons that was hidden within their mattress. With zero effort, she lifted the tiny child up off the floor and onto the bed, holding in steady.
If left to his own devices, James wouldn't have woken for awhile yet, so when the familiar warmth at his side was replaced with shaking, part of his brain recognized the statement wasn't coming with Disaster Level Alarm, and the rest grumpily resisted consciousness accordingly.
"There's always a situation," he grumbled, grasping for an extra pillow to pull over his face, "can't it wait?"
The extra pillow wasn't found, unsurprisingly, and judging the culprit to be Torunn deliberately moving them out of reach, James turned his head to aim a squinty-eyed glare in her general direction. Ideally, he was hoping for the glare to make her whack him with the pillow, which he could then take and hold over his face a few more minutes. Practically, he assumed she'd just roll her eyes and hold it further from reach. What he didn't picture, though, was Torunn holding a tiny child and not the missing pillow. The glare melted into confusion as he scrubbed at his eyes, then blinked, then fully stared at the scene before him.
"What- uh- did Vallo change the dogs into babies?" Because obviously that made more sense than the real answer - though, more likely, it was just an assumption to avoid the obvious but heavier truth about to be revealed.
“I don’t think so.” Torunn said with a shake of her head. She couldn’t be sure without opening the door and looking, but the dogs sounded like they were all outside. She wasn’t sure how old this child was. Capable of standing and walking on his own. Clearly he could talk. Torunn would say he was a bit younger than five. Definitely not older than that. Still, she kept her hands around his waist for now, unsure of how steady he would be on a bed. With the weapons around, it wasn’t worth the risk.
The child dropped down onto all fours, Torunn letting go but keeping her hands close. “Daddy, wake up!” the child said, crawling toward James with determination.
Torunn arched her eyebrows, watching the kid move closer to James. This was not their first encounter with anyone referring to them as their parents. They had met a version of Anthony before. Though they had been adult versions, and the younger versions had been securely with older versions of themselves. Torunn had never had a child look at her pointedly and refer to her as a mother, or James as a father. It was a weird thing to experience, she had no idea what to think.
“Something is going on.” She said, obviously. Reaching for her phone, Torunn opened the network to see what was going on.
James huffed out a breath. It couldn't have been dog-babies? Nevermind the fact that such a thing would have meant a pack of babies to deal with right now, that wasn't the point. The point-
All thoughts came screeching to a standstill the moment the kid said Daddy. Of course James hadn't forgotten that in another time and place, that second Blackpoint, there had been children to know as both adults and kids. He would never forget that, no matter how many universes they were dragged through. James might have even said he was used to it, even comfortable with it, before being abruptly yanked away from any version of Blackpoint at all, but a great deal of that hinged on the fact that there had been older versions of him and Torunn there that the kids belonged to in every way, just not biologically and similar-situationally. He and Torunn hadn't really been anyone's parents at the level that involved having small humans in their bedroom calling them by title like nothing was amiss in the world from their toddler perspective. They hadn't been ready for anything like that years ago.
Of course, as he absorbed the light impact of hands and knees to his torso, James sure as hell didn't feel ready on this day, at this hour. But when had unknown or unnamed forces ever cared about readiness for anything when it came to his and Torunn's lives? There was the flash of an urge to call for an adultier adult, but any decision to demand out loud that an A.I. call Mom right freaking now was quelled by a hand to James' throat as the blonde boy clambered atop James' upper body.
After shooting a look at Torunn, who now had the job James would have picked in the choice between Kid or Network, James returned his attention to the weight on his chest that was physically real and also entirely mental. All right. They were doing this.
"Hey, who do you think you are, dude, just taking up space like you own the place?" Playful felt like the way to go, and James hoped it worked to make things seem normal to this kid and get some information out of the newest arrival.
The boy promptly blew a raspberry at him and then smacked himself on his small chest. "Anthony." Small lips and tongue formed around the name with toddler charm and enunciation, and it was backed by a healthy amount of what James could only compare to Torunn-style exasperation with him.
Huh. What were the odds that maybe this was Blackpoint 2.0 Anthony Rogers?
Anthony. Yeah, that sounded right. That was something they would name their kid if they ever had one. Not just because they had already had run ins with an Anthony Rogers. That name meant something to them both.
Torunn got the network up on her phone and immediately zeroed in on a post. She held her breath as she read through the contents, scanned some of the comments, and then breathed out slowly. This was happening.
Rubbing her eyes again, Torunn looked up to the small child on James’ chest, then past him to James himself. “Confirmed. Some people are waking up at the wrong age, and future kids of all ages have landed in Vallo.” Waking up the wrong age had happened to them both before. But never had a child travelled back to drop in on their child-free lives.
Torunn glanced around their bedroom. While she made sure it stayed relatively neat, because she could not function in the same messy chaos that James could, the room was very much not child friendly. Even if the child was technically a demi-god. They were not equipped to deal with a child, which meant they had some work to do very, very quickly.
Tossing her phone to the edge of the bed, Torunn carefully moved back up to the top, sitting herself down beside James so she was facing the both of them. “Anthony, how old are you?” she asked, leaning forward over her legs with a smile.
She could see it. She could see both herself and James in his little face when he turned his face to her and she really stopped to look at him. “I’m gonna be four.” he answered, holding up four fingers on his hand. So three, almost four. Okay. Young.
Suddenly the weight on James' chest felt like the crush of being trapped, even before he'd really let Torunn's words sink in about the chaos happening beyond their door. That feeling had nothing to do with the idea of their kid as a general concept, though, as Torunn was it for him. He wanted to keep building a life with her, and sure, he had imagined that including a kid or two someday. It wasn't that.
The pressure was that of an unwanted future location now made inevitable (in at least one potential future of Vallo) by the realness of arrivals like Anthony, because James honestly didn't want to be in Vallo forever, and hadn't expected to be here forever. What he wanted was to take Torunn and go home, to the original Blackpoint, even if it was by way of other forced layovers in other realities. Vallo wasn't supposed to be permanent, not for them.
This was a terrible time for that level of existential crisis, however, and he wasn't about to leave Torunn alone in the role of having it together. At least outwardly.
"Four? You're too big for four, are you sure you aren't ten?" James asked, his expression deadpan, but couldn't hold back the snort of amusement at the face Anthony made. Like Torunn, he was already picking out the little things that gave away this kid's parentage, from facial features to the contrast between a small frame and a heavy weight. Definitely visually built like James had been as a child, but there was half-Asgardian density there. James was used to it, but he imagined it would be surprising to almost anyone who attempted to pick this kid up.
He swung his gaze to Torunn, about to get out a what now? in some way - maybe spelled - when Anthony's attention shifted from James and Torunn to the walls. The not-childproofed walls.
"Shit." Probably not a great idea to be sweating in front of a three year old, but it warranted it now that James was thinking about the dangerous potential murderfest of an apartment they lived in that hadn't been a problem until now.
"Now we've got a bigger problem," he muttered to Torunn, and just barely caught Anthony as he attempted to tumble over James and the side of the bed. The knives on the outside of the mattress alone were already a full-alarm scenario.
When he swore, Torunn automatically reached out and swatted him on the arm. “Language. They probably absorb things like sponges.” Including curse words. The last thing she wanted to do was send a version of their son back to the future with new swear words in his arsenal.
He was probably thinking the same thing she was about how very not child friendly their apartment was. “We can either clean this place up. Or take turns while the other watches him. Or we head to the Avengers Mansion.” The place had already had kids living with it, and they didn’t keep swords stitched into mattresses. There was enough space there that they probably wouldn’t be in Tony and Pepper’s way if they chose that path.
One of the dogs yipped at the door, they were very aware that James and Torunn were awake, and they could probably smell someone else too. They were also going to have to take the dogs out. It was morning now so they were due to head outside. “We have to take them out too.” she muttered, glancing at the door, and then back to James and Anthony again.
So this was one hell of a morning, and not at all one they were prepared for. So they had some choices to make and they had to make them quickly.
"Right, okay, time to juggle," James muttered, then coughed. "Not literally, I mean. I'm not gonna juggle a baby." Not even if the baby in question, who was not a baby, perked up significantly at the sound of the word.
He reached out to grab his phone, other hand on Anthony, and looked at Torunn. Either of them could walk the entire pack of dogs alone if they needed to, but if every dog left this apartment at the same time, they weren't coming back quickly. It just didn't happen with a pack that included enormous animals eager to lick anyone and smaller ones that did cute tricks.
And they'd added a baby to this?
"Before the dogs start chewing the doors off the hinges, why don't you grab half and get them outside. I'll watch him," he flexed his chest to jiggle the toddler, eliciting giggles from him, and continued, "and check out the network. If there's kids showing up, someone's going to start organizing supplies or food or a playground trip or something, right?"
He glanced at the time and then back to Torunn. "Then we can switch, I'll take the other half, and by then we'll have gotten an idea where at least some of the family is right now." Family being a broad term after this many years, but even when used specifically, it was still a lot of people, and that was before Vallo started coughing out kids.
Torunn shook her head at his joke and smiled, because the thought had never crossed her eyes. But he was right, they had a lot of things they had to get done, having a baby in the area was making their morning routine very complicated.
“Yeah, alright, I’ll take my two monsters.” Thori and Magnus were easily the two largest, and Thori especially who she only just started to trust among the other dogs. She rolled out of bed and duked into their closet to pull on pants and a sweater. “You sure you’re going to be okay with him?” Looking after babies was not exactly in either of their skill sets. For some reason she felt anxious leaving him alone, and leaving in general. But he wasn’t wrong, they did have to divide and concur.
“I’ve got my phone if you need anything.” She said as she grabbed it off the bed and shoved it into the pocket of her sweater. Torunn pulled open the door just enough to get through, blocking the dogs from rushing in. “Go.” Tor said, pointing back to the living room, “Go on.” Her eyes fell directly on Thori, before he could say anything about an intruder in the apartment and murder. Honestly, they were lucky he didn’t break their door down. “No, you’re not going in. There is no one to kill. I’ll introduce you later but no murder. I’m taking you and Magnus outside first.” Torunn didn’t leave any room for argument. Once introduced though, she didn’t think it would be an issue. “I’ll take you out to the forest to chase whatever you want later today, go wait by the door.”
With the doorway clear, Torunn opened it up a little more and then looked back at James and Anthony. “You sure you’re okay?”
After giving Torunn a semi-distracted assurance that they'd be fine - it's not like it was going to be that long, and James could play one-on-one with someone a fraction of his size - he turned his attention to sitting up and criss-crossing his legs, getting Anthony securely in his blanketed lap within that leg box containment, and balancing his phone to read the network between glances at Anthony. He hadn't yet thought to put the phone in front of both him and the child by the time Torunn was making her way out of the room.
A whine outside the door, after Torunn's instruction for the others to go wait, was easily recognizable as Voc, who was just as likely to be protesting not being able to get in the room and not getting to leave the apartment. James could only imagine four eyes were turned on Torunn as the closest human to give an absolutely soulful puppy-eyed gaze to, but there was too much bulk to the still-growing big dog to shoulder past Torunn. Stark, however, was extremely agile when it came to skinny spaces, like a cracked door.
"Stark, навахте, stay." He didn't think Stark coming in would be a problem at all as far as interacting with a new human was concerned, but if Stark made it inside, then Voc would cry at being left out, and Magnus and Thori would see Stark getting away with what they wanted to do, and it was just a pack issue they didn't need.
Torunn's departure wasn't exactly fully welcomed by the newest arrival to the full human-animal pack, though James was relieved to see that, despite a physical protest in the form of moderate wiggling and outreached arms, Anthony wasn't demanding Torunn to stay or for Anthony to get to go. Not that he'd have blamed their kid from the future if he had wanted Torunn and made it known loudly. James definitely got that.
"Hey, I could handle Pym when I was still a kid, this is fine," he said, wrapping his arm more securely around Anthony's middle, and putting the phone in front of the toddler now. "It's not like he can shrink and hide."
James' ears caught up to his brain and he resisted the urge to check Anthony for signs of wings. There could be a lot that he could chalk up to the idea of jinxing, but spontaneous changes in toddlers weren't one of them.