Chapter Text
"How d'you feel about moon names?" offers Jake, as he, Marc, and Steven focus on visualizing one of the beds from their sitcom-triplet bedroom. "Luna? Selene. Lena?"
"Cynthia. Diana," puts in Steven, remembering the deep dive he did into moon-related myths a while back. "Artemis. Chandra. Devana."
(He would add the Thracian goddess of the moon...except that Wade Wilson, for some bizarre reason he point-blank refuses to explain, thinks it's extremely funny when a Moon Knight says the name "Bendis.")
"Or how about Bunny?"
The girl, watching cross-legged on the edge of the extra-king-size mattress they already had, squinches up her face in confusion. "Like a rabbit?"
"Yeah. It's a Japanese thing -- instead of seeing a man in the moon, they think the craters look like a rabbit. Comes up in Sailor Moon, too. When she's not on the costumed-vigilante beat, her wallet name, it means Bunny."
...also, the two ends of the kid's white hair-ribbon are sort of doing a bunny-ears thing. Steven's not sure if it would be cute or embarrassing to point that out.
"You don't have to go with moon names," adds Marc. "It was just an idea."
They have a kid-friendly bed between them now...but it is really obviously made of sand. Probably collapse in a heap the moment you tried to sit on it.
Marc firmly reminds his inferiority complex that it's not a failure, or a proof that she'd be better off with Wanda after all. The kid is part of their team. There is, by definition, a way for them all to give each other what they need. It just...might take some trial and error to get there.
"You wanna annoy Khonshu, you could pick a sun name," says Jake, as he circles the new furniture and tries to picture it right. "Soledad? That's pretty. Sahar? Dawn."
"Or lean into the whole 'red' theme," says Steven. "Might still be confusing if you went by Scarlet, but what about Ruby? Garnet. Rose."
Jake smirks at him across the mattress. "You mean Rose Quartz, ay, cariño? Amethyst. Pearl. What's-her-face with the tiger stripes."
Steven blushes. "S-so what if I do? Gem names are nice, pretty, perfectly-normal--"
"Can I have a Sokovian name?" interrupts the inner child.
The three men exchange startled looks. Steven is the one who answers: "Don't see why not. I bet Wanda would like that. At least...as long as we take care it's not fake made-up Sokovian, she'd like it. What did you have in mind?"
"I--" She pulls back, tense and wary. "I don't know. Whatever."
Steven is all set to propose a deep dive on (reputable) baby-name websites, when Marc cuts back in.
"Wanda's mother was named Iryna," he says softly. "And her middle name is Marya. If she and her brother had both been girls, they were going to be Wanda and Ana."
Jake blinks at him. "How d'you know all that?"
"I asked. At some point in sitcom world. Must've been a scene you weren't in."
He isn't sure it ended up in the broadcast at all. Mom had gone on to say, if she and their uncle had both been boys, they were going to be Pietro and Tomaš...and once she got that close to Tommy's name, everything afterward was a weird staticky blur.
"What if her kids were girls?" asks the inner child, as if she's catching Marc's train of thought. "Do you know any girl names she liked?"
"Sabrina?" guesses Jake. It's the only sitcom girl he can think of off the top of his head.
"It's certainly on-theme," says Steven. Could they get any more on-theme? "The baby in Three Men And A Baby must've had a name, right? Or, ooh, who's the girl from the show where they make a synthezoid and then adopt her?"
Marc does remember an actual answer for the kid's question. (As far as he knows, it wasn't a sitcom name at all.) But all he says out loud is, "Maybe we better steer clear of those. You never know -- Wanda could still end up using them."
They have a bed! It looks real! The bedspread is all black, and patterned with the ominous carvings from the Original Wanda door/the Spinoff Wanda sarcophagus, but at least it looks warm!
"Come on, give this a test sit," says Steven, waving her over. "We will figure out how to change the covers! Unless you like these? In which case, that's great, some kids are goths, it's totally valid."
The inner child hops off the big bed, walks two feet forward, and climbs on to the smaller one. (It's a weird furniture arrangement, they know, they can drag it into a better one later.)
"Marc..." Steven swallows. "Do we know...perfectly all right if we don't, of course, and I'm not saying we should use this...but were you ever told..."
"Hm?" says Marc, distracted. He and Jake are both watching the inner child examine the bedspread.
"What was our name -- or your name -- going to be? If you were a girl."
Marc tenses...
Two bursts of red light fizz out of the inner child's hands, fisted in the blanket underneath her. Fully borrowing the visuals of Wanda's chaos magic, it's a blur of static and TV scanlines...but all it does is a simple headspace adjustment, flipping her goth-deluxe bedspread into a light red that matches her hair. (Speckled with a pattern of red hexagons, gold crescent moons, and white cartoon rabbits.)
"Aw, that's nice!" exclaims Jake, while Steven claps. "So, ah -- no pressure, don't wanna be pushy, but -- if it's that easy, you could fix up a little of the damage to the other stuff maybe?"
The girl frowns at him. "This is hard for you?"
"Wouldn't say hard," protests Jake. He's always had a little more of a handle on it than Marc and Steven, doesn't that count for something? "But it takes a little work, sure."
Their inner child gives him a solemn nod. "Okay. I'll fix it."
The ground starts shaking.
It revs up from zero to sixty in seconds. Steven falls on the bed. Marc falls on the floor. Jake falls on Marc.
All around them, huge blocks of sand rise up out of the beach -- then their haphazard walls start coming apart in blocks, floating ominously around them -- the whole floor starts to lift, rocking all the furniture, is it going to come apart while they're still on top of it--?
The girl is still kneeling on her bed, eyes aglow, red-gold light pouring from her chest. Jake is closest, he tries to get to her -- a fresh wall shoots up between them -- Marc hauls him back to join Steven on their bed, the only piece of furniture they can reach that's not dangerously close to tipping over --
Walls wrap around them on all four sides, slotting together brick by brick. A ceiling snaps closed over their heads. They hang on to each other as everything goes dark.
...The shaking stops.
A chunk of the roof slides open, letting the light back in. No, not open -- just morphed from plaster into a clear glass skylight.
"Huh," says Jake into the quiet, letting go of the others to touch the headboard. "Bed's fixed."
"Is that our stuff?" Steven wriggles out of Marc's arms, and crosses a new plush rug to inspect the shelves lining the walls. "Yeah, looks like...shelves got nicer, but it's our old imaginary stuff."
Marc pulls the chain on what looks like a new round floor lamp. He smiles when it lights up, revealing the crater patterns of a full moon. "Oh, that's pretty."
Jake raises an eyebrow. "Sure...but maybe we don't gotta keep it in the bedroom."
No windows. No closet. Just one door in the wall. As a group, they sidle over to it, listen for any danger signs outside, then crack it open and look through.
They're on the second level of a big airy house. The door opens onto a carpeted walkway bordered by a railing, and the railing overlooks a high-ceilinged living room, flooded with sunlight from the front windows. Heck, calling them windows undersells it -- the whole front wall is floor-to-ceiling panes of glass, set with sliding doors.
Outside the glass is their familiar headspace beach. Warm Egyptian sand leading down to a jet-black sea.
There's something familiar about the inside too, and Steven spots it first: "Oh my days, it's our house!"
Sure enough -- it's a version of their sitcom house. With an ocean view instead of the fourth wall. Also, with the second floor opened up, instead of being a one-story set where the walls and ceiling block the camera from seeing that the stairs don't go up to anything.
The layout Wanda designed for the original living room, it's been recreated with existing headspace furniture, plus some new items manifested to fill in the gaps: a flatscreen TV, vases of fake flowers, a moon-landscape painting hanging over the fireplace. The role of the sitcom front door is played by their headspace front door. The door to the basement steps, which they don't remember ever going down in-Hex, is their hospital-themed door to the lower levels.
As for the kitchen door, it just looks like the one they remember from the Hex...but when they check what's behind it, they find a charming little garage, where their internal car is parked. Along with the empty plastic mannequin, and some neatly-stacked storage crates.
When they come back out into the living room, the inner child is watching them warily from the second-floor walkway, elbows propped on the railing.
"So, hey, rojita, this is incredible," says Jake. "Way to show the rest of us up, ay?"
"He's teasing you," adds Marc helpfully. "He really likes it."
Steven points to the half-open door behind her. Not the bedroom they came out of, but the next door down. "Is that your room? You got all the furniture how you like now?"
Without quite meaning to, he appears on the walkway next to her -- he's not used to a headspace house so big it takes time to walk around, okay? -- and leans over her shoulder to see how she's got it set up...
"That's mine!" yells the girl, darting past him and slamming the door between them. "You can't come in!"
In another breath Jake and Marc are behind him. "You okay?" asks Jake, squeezing his arm.
"You deserve your own space, and we respect that!" calls Marc over his shoulder, loud enough to be heard through the door. Then he drops his voice and whispers in Steven's ear, "Anything in there we should worry about?"
"Worry? No. Absolutely not." Steven steers the two of them back toward their own bedroom. "Don't have to worry about a thing."
He shuts the door with them inside. All the rules of symbolism mean they ought to have privacy now.
"Also: think I've got a clue about what brought her out," he says, and pushes them a memory: the kid's bedroom wall, absolutely plastered with photos, posters, and enthusiastic fanart of Ms. Marvel.
☽
All four headmates have settled in a row on their new porch swing -- they do not technically have a porch, but the charming wooden bench hanging outside on the sand has the spirit of a porch swing -- when an upbeat musical flourish fills the air.
Ah. They're doing an end-of-episode couch scene, aren't they.
"...Jessica," says Marc out loud.
He's leaning on one arm of the bench, while Steven snuggles against his chest, and Jake has an arm slung over both their shoulders. Steven cranes his head up to look Marc in the eye, or at least in the chin. "Hm?"
"Dad told me, once," says Marc, gazing out across the water. "That was the plan. If I was a girl. And then again if Randall was a girl."
"Where'd they get that from?" asks Jake. "Doesn't sound Spanish or Hebrew. Was it just trendy?"
"It's, uh. Sort of a weirdly-anglicized version of someone from Genesis. So maybe it was supposed to be our Hebrew name?" Marc shrugs. "Yiskāh instead of Yaʿakov."
They all turn to the inner child.
She's up against the other end of the bench -- not touching them, but about as close as she could get without touching -- holding one of the pink It's A Girl! mylar balloons in her lap. Her fingertips idly run over the seam where the two sides of the material are crimped together.
She eyes them each in turn, finally frowning at Jake. "You don't like it."
"I don't like that it's their name idea," admits Jake. "But you're the one gettin' named. If you like it, you can have it."
"You could tell everyone it's Jessica as in Jones," offers Marc. "We think she's cool, right?"
Steven grins. "Or we could tell people it's Jessica as in Rabbit!"
Jake bops him on the forehead. "Surprised you're not anglin' to call her Au-gus-ta, cariño."
Marc, in turn, swats Jake on the arm. "Dammit, babe! Do not give him ideas."
☽
Whoever Has Marc's Phone
HiBucky 🦾🦾🦾
Hi there 👋Whoever Has Marc's Phone
Thank you for the movieBucky 🦾🦾🦾
Oh! Are you the one I saw it with?Whoever Has Marc's Phone
YesBucky 🦾🦾🦾
The others wanted to meet you. Have you talked to them?Whoever Has Marc's Phone
Yes. Marc says I'm allowed to text you if I want because you're coolBucky 🦾🦾🦾
🥲As long as Marc and the others are okay with it, you can text me any time
Sam too! 🇺🇸
Don't worry if we don't answer right away, sometimes we have work
Do you have a name?
Whoever Has Marc's Phone
I'm still thinking about itI think I like Ruby