Judith "General" Cheddar [District Ten]

[WT]

Judith "General" Cheddar -- twenty-eight -- agender -- Ten

"Oh, fu—Commander!"

You grab for the Commander as she scrambles off the table, howling like the candle caught her on the way down. For a moment you hold more chaos than cat, a thrashing bundle of fur and claws and noise, until the security of your hold registers and she sinks into your chest, still lashing her tail and trembling but blessedly quiet. A little more anxiously than you would admit if anyone asked, you adjust your hold to lift her around the middle, turning her back and forth to check for scorching in her fur or on the pads of her feet.

Nothing. With a sigh of mixed relief and exasperation, you lower her to your eye level, where she looks back at you with her whiskers twitching and her back legs dangling. "How am I supposed to run anything under these conditions," you say flatly.

Commander Cheese Sticks swivels her ears, blinks slowly, and meows in your face.

You roll your eyes but obligingly bring her down to your shoulder, where she hooks her front claws into your jacket and begins to purr. "Worse than the kids," you grumble as you survey the damage. It's not actually that bad—nothing is broken, nothing is on fire that isn't supposed to be, and one of the flames survived falling over—but you're not about to say so. "Guess we're only remembering Shabbat this week. What do you have to say for yourself about that, huh?" She swivels her ears again and begins kneading at your jacket. "Yeah, that's about what I thought. Asshole. Explain to me again why I don't let you fend for yourself." Shifting her weight onto one arm so you can right the candles gets you another meow. "Fine, half the cheese crew would gut me if I put you ou—okay, okay, down you go, shit." You lean over and a now-squirming Commander pours herself out of your arms to the floor, where she washes one ear daintily. "I'm actually demoting you this time, I swear. What rank are you even at? What's below ensign? Jack!" you add, raising your voice to carry out of the room. "We're demoting the Commander again!"

It doesn't, you consider ruefully as she finishes with her ear and trots out of the dining room like nothing untoward ever happened, actually matter. It's not like she's ever going to believe anyone but her is in charge here, and it's not like you're ever going to be entirely sure she's wrong.

"Serves her right darlin'," Jack's voice returns, muffled by walls but clear enough—the living room. "Need help with the carnage?"

"'S'fine, nothing's on fire." Cheese Sticks out to the living room, where you prop your shoulder against the entryway and snort at her loud meow to Jack. Thirty seconds and she's talking like she's never gotten attention in her life, really? "Thanks for offering."

"What're you up to, hm?" he answers the meow. "Sooner than later we're gonna have to dishonorably discharge you."

"She knows too much. Can't risk her going to the other side." You mean to say it gruffly, but you can't help smiling softly, the way you only really catch yourself doing when it's just the two (or three) of you: easy as breathing and far more gentle, a smile that even when you aren't sure how to string the words together says you'd rather be here in this mundane moment than anywhere else in the world.

---

"Give me one good reason," Sabine says with an entirely uncalled for put-upon tone, "not to fire you this month."

You need this job. The two of you and the Commander would do fine on Jack's ranch income if need be, but not the two of you, the Commander, and whoever finds their ways in and out of your spare room. And while you've been at this one a respectable while, you've also lost or left too many other jobs: fired from this diner when your boss decided you holidays were unpredictable no matter how far in advance you said you'd need off, fired from that ranch for not being enough of a doormat, quit at the feed store because you felt like your brain was going to atrophy from boredom and fall out your nose four months in, walked out of three interviews in a week because you have a zero tolerance policy on misgendering, lost one perfectly good gig at a bar when the place went under—your record is spotty and you've pissed off half your potential employers in the area, is the point. You don't relish the idea of starting a new search from scratch.

On the other hand, Sabine needs you, too. She may not like it, but you both know how many of the younger staff only stick around because they feel safe with you on the floor. So you don't bother to sound apologetic when you say, "Kostya asked for help. I helped."

"You poured her tea in her lap."

"Yes."

"It was still hot."

You raise your eyebrows. "Kostya," you say again, more emphatically, "asked for help." It's not like you got involved for fun. You never exactly want to get involved. But somewhere along the way someone figured out you're a soft touch, and now you get eighteen-year-olds pulling you to the side in the kitchen to say someone at table four is being pushy and they don't want to risk the tip by complaining but they're too anxious to go back alone so will you please help them carry the food out, and what the fuck are you supposed to do with that, tell them to figure it out themself? Absolutely not.

Shit, you're going to have to remember to spot Kostya the tip. You'd better not be getting fired right now.

"We have procedures, Judith."

She could give you a little credit, here: you tried glowering and threatening first. One or the other usually does the trick nicely, just not this time. "I wasn't waiting around for her to escalate the situation first."

"That's not how battery charges work," Sabine says, but she says it more to the ceiling than to you, which experience in variations on this conversation tells you means you're in the clear. You're already bracing to push your chair back when she goes on. "If Peacekeepers show up, you're explaining this to them. Get back to the counter."

"Ma'am," you say, and you book it out of the office before she can change her mind.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to get you in trouble," Kostya says on the other side of the office door.

"Holy shit," you say, because Kostya is categorically incapable of picking a fight and holds himself like it but he also walks about as loudly as the Commander and you hadn't realized he'd been waiting for you. Then the actual words process and you add, "Wait, what? I got me in trouble."

"Because of me, though."

"For you. 'S'different." He walks with you as you weave through storage, so you go ahead and pull out your wallet to rifle through for a few bills to shove at him. "The tip from table four," you clarify when he takes it on reflex but makes a puzzled noise. "Look. This job isn't worth acting like some kind of martyr. Someone gives you shit, you speak up and you don't apologize about it."

"Okay." He sounds hesitant enough that you stop to frown at him, but he meets it with a smile, so you snort and keep moving. "But hey, you should keep the—"

"Aren't you at work?" you say over him, pointedly ignoring the money he's trying to push back in your face.

"I'm on break."

"Then go smoke out back or whatever the kids are doing these days, I'm at work," you say, and if he responds it's lost in the creak of the swinging door as you escape back out to the counter.

---

Nothing happens for anyone, your mother liked to tell you as you were growing up, without their setting a goal and working for it. All things considered, you're a little more convinced by your other parent's counter-argument: shit happens.

You haven't meant for most of your twenties to shake out the way they did. Everything just kept snowballing on you—hopping from job to job; letting the couple of days that one coworker crashed on your couch turn into a pattern of your couch being a bed more often than it was a couch; offering one acquaintance self-defense tips, which turned into sparring sessions with them and a couple of their friends and one of their cousins, which turned into what apparently counted as some kind of fight club, since the lot of you somehow managed to establish yourselves as another group's rivals before you noticed that you were establishing any sort of reputation at all; tripping your way into courting the other group's leader like you're some kind of old-timey theater troupe character. Which at this point you're happy to call the best change of plans you've ever made, but honestly—one day you barely know who Jack is and you've got your hackles up for a meeting you're fully prepared to have end in fisticuffs, then another day you're at a fucking florist for the first time in your life, and now you wake up in the mornings and make sleepy, half-coherent, fond conversation in the kitchen and feed the cat before you both head off to work? If you'd planned that you would've at least gotten him a nicer bouquet than panic roses.

You didn't even plan the cat. She just walked in your front door one day and you didn't have the heart to chase her out.

Not that you're complaining, or at least not in a way that anyone who's known you for longer than about two minutes will believe is actual complaint. You love having a corner of Ten that feels like it built you as much as you built it, and you love that you get to share it with Jack; you even love the noise and activity when you have other people staying with you, the sense of community you never really got as an only child. But there's something to be said for the simplicity of coming back to your parents' place, too.

"Hey, Pare." Your hands are too full to return their hug, but you lean into it as you kick your shoes into the doorway rack and nod to your mother over their shoulder. "Brought y'all apple turnovers."

"You bake now?" your mother asks, sounding delighted; she doesn't even wait to have the tray completely out of your hands before she folds back the cheesecloth on top to smell the turnovers.

You snort. "Traded one of my coworkers a shift for 'em."

"You'll get them in the kitchen one of these days," your pare tells her, ruffling your hair despite your token mumble of wordless disapproval. In a stage whisper, they add, "Lie next time, Juju."

"And get dragged into the kitchen and yelled at when she realizes I still know fuck all?"

Your mother laughs, passes the tray off to your pare, and steps forward to drop a kiss onto your temple. "You're the light of my life and I would never yell at you."

"Bullshit you wouldn't," you say amiably as you hug her. "Where'd'ya think I learned how to yell at people?"

"You were born yelling at people."

"Pretty sure that's just how being born is," Pare offers, returning empty-handed from wherever they left the turnovers. "You gonna actually let them in, Tali?"

Time with them is a different sort of comfortable from time at home. They adore Jack and know a vague outline of how you met him, largely because you couldn't think of any better story, and you tell them a little about the others here and there—Pare's the one who got you saying cheese crew, even though you made faces about it for a year. Still, actually a gang or not—and the answer is not, thank you—you feel better keeping them out of it, for the most part. There's nothing much they can do if you manage to get in over your head one of these days and no reason to worry them—or start them fussing at you in well-meaning disapproval—in the meantime. You omit a chunk of your life, they politely don't press whenever you swerve the topic, and all of you feel a little weird about it but all of you deal with it.

Any home they live in, though, is familiar in a way that you doubt any other place in Ten will ever be. These are the people who taught you how to read and when to say prayers and the importance of having someone's back, the people you spend the most important days of every year with even in years when you're all so busy you barely seem to see each other at all, the people who no matter what will always have known you the longest. You've found yourself an unwitting temporary sibling-of-sorts to enough people to know how lucky you are, in that—how lucky you are in a lot of ways.

Even when you spend time apart and even when you grouse at them, you don't let yourself forget that. And you hope they know, around what you don't say out of caution or tetchiness or both or simply not knowing what to say, how much you're working to carry everything they've passed down to you into the world yourself.



:cheese:

shoutout to Shrimp for the Jack dialogue <3

[WT]

did it take four months? sure did! did I finally write this like I said I would? sure did [hellmo]

gonna give cheese crew dibs on this one <3

[shrimp]

"You've found yourself an unwitting temporary sibling-of-sorts to enough people to know how lucky you are, in that—how lucky you are in a lot of ways."

accepted <333