Chapter Text
There is a certain time of night, after the sun has gone down, and ‘the bad sort’ start milling around, when nice young women should not be caught walking through Central Park alone.
Or, at least, that’s what Stephanie’s been told by one of her stuffy, old-people neighbors back when she moved into her apartment. It’d been one of their first well-meaning warnings, since she’d never lived in New York before, and, well, you know, Dear, if you’re going to continue to be stepping out at all sorts of hours of the night the way you have been--
She’d tried her best, at least, to not laugh in their face. They were trying to be nice, even if they did come off as too nosy for their own good. Steph’s learned the hard way it’s not in her best interest to antagonize people who know where she lives. (Even if they are obviously, obviously human.)
She still finds it funny, though. The idea that anything or anyone in the park right now is more dangerous than her.
(If anything, it’d been good news. Less questions if someone wakes up in the Ramble the next morning suspiciously blood-covered, and woozy. They were walking through Central Park alone, late at night, what did they expect, huh?)
The Ladies Pavilion is empty right now, except for her. She hadn’t even seen anyone on her walk over. Even if she was in danger in the first place, tonight isn’t going to be a problem. It’s too lame for that.
She strikes a match off the bottom of her shoe so she can light up a cigarette, making an intentional effort to inhale and exhale evenly as she leans back into the metal railing of the gazebo. Behind her, somewhere, a duck is going absolute ape over something, but she can’t find it in herself to walk up over the rocks to check it out.
It’s been a slow night. The kind where she’s too bored to be fucked to find something to do. Not hungry enough for any sort of urgency, which is good, because she’s certainly not awake enough to pretend she’s a Seven Sisters coed to the doorman at one of those obnoxious Biltmore parties, so she can drain some Yalie asshole who’d deserve it.
Summers creeping up, which always makes her annoyingly lazy. The nights are too short for her to ever feel like she’s got enough time to do everything she wants to. So, then, she ends up doing nothing but laying in her apartment listening to the radio and flipping through The Daily Mirror for whatever scandals she’d missed out on earlier that day.
Last time she’d seen Pete and complained about it, he’d said she should move to Australia in the summers, since that’s when they, apparently, had their winter. He’d been joking, but she’s been sure as shit considering it, recently. That happens more than she’s actually willing to admit. Pete’s just too damn smart, even his fake suggestions are good ideas.
She takes another long drag off her cigarette, and listens to the duck continue to curse out whatever or whoever it’s bothered by in its rhythmic, angry quacks. Good for the duck. At least it’s something interesting to zone out to.
And then, her gut twists, an instinct more than anything. Oh. Oh, go to hell duck, this is way better.
The air crackles with the kind of metallic smell that Pete’s described as ozone (but really just smells to her like fucking blood) and twisting yellow light. All subtle and mesmerizing and perfectly on time for when she’s this goddamned bored.
As quickly as it began, the empty space in front of her snaps back into focus, back to smelling like lake and city and Pete. She grins around her cigarette, bringing it down to her side.
“Hey there, Spankoffski.”
Pete startles, whole body flinching as his gaze snaps up from his hands to her. But instead of the standard relief-surprise she normally gets off him when she’s there without him having to look for her, he just looks… scared. Eyes huge, fists clenched awkwardly into the chest of his sweater.
“How… how do you know my name?” He asks, voice high and frantic and almost as familiar as it should be. Something about it is off in a way she can’t actually place.
She’s never seen him look genuinely afraid of her before.
She doesn’t fucking like it.
Without really meaning to, her eyebrows raise, “You doing alright?”
“No?! I mean--” He stumbles back off the lip of the gazebo, stepping unsteadily into the grass, “I don’t… what is happening?”
Something clicks together, then, in the back of her head. She inhales a deep mouthful of smoke and lets herself stop breathing, so it burns a little, sitting in the back of her throat as she stands up to get a better look at him.
He’s not holding his stupid, refillable notebook, with its hundreds of pages marking where and when he’s been in his awful, tiny handwriting. He’s not wearing his too-big backpack full of snacks and changes of clothes and other smart-guy prep materials. He looks… young.
“How old are you?” She asks, maybe sharper than she should, because he flinches again. Or maybe that’s the wave of smoke that pours out of her mouth along with it. Either way she hates that she’s the reason it happened.
He tugs nervously at his sweater, “Nineteen?”
“Fuckin’ hell.”
That’s why he looks young. Because he is young. The youngest that Steph could possibly meet him like this. Damn. Damn, damn, damn. She stubs her cigarette out into the railing in front of her, letting it crush flat under her fingers.
“What?” Pete laughs, and it comes out reedy, tinging on hysterical. He’s not really looking at her anymore, eyes darting up over the trees out to the skyline, “And where am I? What’s-- am I in New York?!”
“You’ve never met me before, have you?”
“No?!” He chokes, desperate and pissed off. She can’t find it in herself to blame him. Christ, if this is his first time Traveling-- “Should… should I?”
There’s actually no way to say this well, is there? No matter how hard she tries to figure out the right words for it, it’s going to come out ominous as all hell and concerning, so she might as well just say something, “Not… yet, I don’t think.”
“Okay!” His whole body is tensed sharp-edged and shaking. He’s freaking out. Of course he’s freaking out, “What the fuck does that mean?”
“What do you remember, from before now?” It feels like a good question, overall. Even if it's secretly a little selfish. She just really wants to know if she is actually the first person he saw. Fuck. She’s being an asshole. She should be reassuring him, if he’s just come from where she thinks he has, but she has to know.
Pete hesitates, looking at her cautiously, “I… I was trying to find my brother, and there was this… this…” His gaze drifts as he’s talking, somewhere far away.
“Cube?” She offers. This is a story Pete’s told her several times before, she knows the general facts-- but his eyes snap over to meet hers, almost faster than they should be able to, colder than she’s used to seeing them.
“Box.” He doesn’t break eye contact, “It was a Box.”
“Right. Sorry.” She corrects, slowly, “Box. That all?”
“No… no, there was this light? And then I was, like--” He shakes his head and takes another step back, heels sinking slightly into the muck where the lawn starts to fall into the lake, “Wait, no, it’s none of your business!”
“Sure.” She rolls her eyes instead of informing him that, actually, it’s incredibly her business. Because he’s Pete, and he’s hers.
She doesn’t think it’d go over all that well with this jumpy, new version.
“Come on,” She hops down out of the gazebo in front of him, dusting the crushed tobacco residue off on the side of her jacket.
Honestly, Steph probably should have expected how he startles away from her at the sudden movement, even if she still hates it.
She shoots a hand out to grab his, as his foot slides in the muddy grass of the bank, before he can launch himself all the way into the lake. (She’s not looking to dive into gross garbage and bird shit water to save him tonight. She would. Obviously. She just really would rather not.) She yanks him close to her chest, only realizing after the fact that she probably should have tempered her strength better for a Pete who isn’t used to (and verbally enthusiastic) about her manhandling him around.
He squawks, whole face going pink inches from her own. Cute.
She smirks, gently depositing him to the side of her so he doesn’t panic his way back into the water anyway, “Careful, square.”
“Wh… where-- what?”
She shrugs, crossing back through the Pavilion towards the walkway, “Okay, come with me.”
“I-- no! Why would I go anywhere with you? I don’t know you!” He seems to finally come back to himself, clenching his fists tight by his side.
“Yeah, I know. I’m Stephanie, by the way. But I know you, so…”
“That’s weirder!”
Yeah, it probably is, actually. Oh well, “Your name is Peter James Spankoffski. You chose the first name off of some superhero named Spiderman, and the middle name is from some television space captain thing. You didn’t choose your last name, it’s Polish. You’re from Hatchetfield, Michigan. Your older brother’s name is Theodore Jakub Spankoffski, he went missing at work when you were seventeen--”
“How the fuck do you know that?”
His anger is still there, she’s familiar enough with all his weird, Spankoffski micro-mannerisms to know that, but all of the very temporary fire behind it seems to have been thoroughly doused by his confusion and that obnoxious, understandable, awful fear that’s been here since he appeared.
“I told you. I know you.” She tries to sound as gentle as she can, but it doesn’t seem to do jack, “So, c’mon. I don’t wanna explain it here, and your blood sugar is low.”
“Okay? And, like, this is-- again, how would you know that?” He launches into motion, hand slapping into his pockets yanking his strange, future, flat phone out, “How would you possibly know that?”
“That’s not gonna work.” She hums, crossing her arms and leaning into a pillar to watch as he tries to click it on anyway.
His mouth twists in dismay when nothing happens, “Fuck.”
“I already told you your blood sugar is low, you don’t need to check.” He looks at her, somehow still startled, and she scoffs, voice slipping teasing in a way that it’s probably not the time for, “Come on, don’t you trust me?”
“I mean? No?”
“That’s probably fair.” She nods, since it is, “But come with me anyway.”
–--
“Go order yourself an egg cream at the counter,” She shoves a quarter into Pete’s hand and nudges him through the entrance of the luncheonette, pivoting as soon as he’s through to mess with the cigarette machine by the door. Part of her feels bad for sending him off on his own, but he’s the one who distracted her into wasting well over half of the last one in her pack so he can deal with it.
“A what?” He snaps, looking a little more himself than he had on the whole walk over. All shell-shocked, and pukey as he took in what she’s assuming is a very different New York City than he’d been expecting. (Along with, like, his increasingly very low blood sugar.)
“An egg cream.” She waves a hand back at him, jostling the janky lever for the Lucky Strikes, “Don’t worry, you’ll like it, it’s chocolate-y.”
“That’s not-- I don’t-- how do you--?”
“Know that?” She rolls her eyes and finishes for him, because he’s asked it twelve hundred times already just while getting here, “Just go. I’d rather you don’t pass out before we can talk and I can, y’know, actually explain it..”
“Fine.” His whole face screws up in annoyance, but he gives in actually embarrassingly quickly, puffing a pissed off little breath through his nose, “Do you… do you want anything?”
Aw.
“No.” She gestures towards the machine in lieu of an actual explanation, “But thanks.”
She eventually manages to force two cigarettes out, tucking the backup behind her ear and finding them a cramped little booth in the corner. She tilts her head to the side, watching Pete’s back as he gesticulates more than anyone ordering a single soft drink could possibly need to at the man behind the counter.
This place is kind of a shithole.
It’s a familiar shithole, though, so she feels okay-ish about this being the setting for whatever nightmare of a talk she’s about to initiate, and, like, that Pete won’t get food poisoning. But it’s still enough of a dive-y little hash house that no one is going to pay attention when their conversation turns weird, or look terribly offended when Pete starts swearing every other goddamn word.
(Not that she minds it, usually it’s just kind of funny. People staring at them all aghast like he’d just taken out a gun and shot Eisenhower through the head because he said ‘shit’ too loudly. But Pete tends to get embarrassed when his future-boy scandalous-ness draws too much attention.)
(Really, though, it just gives her some sort of hope for the future. Maybe someday as a society they’ll be able to remove the collective stick from their collective asses and curse each other out with the same absent-minded instinctiveness as Peter Spankoffski says almost anything. Wouldn’t that be beautiful?)
God. Steph’s just really not sure what the hell she’s supposed to do here.
She feels stupid for not having prepared for this. She’d known, at least generally, that this was going to have had to happen eventually. But Pete either hadn’t totally remembered whatever year this happened or she’d forgotten to ask; knowing herself, and him, though, it was almost definitely on her.
It’s just never occurred to her that she was the one who had to break this news to him. It makes sense, sure, she’s pretty sure Pete doesn’t have other immortal friends, but he’d just never mentioned it. Probably because it’s one of those overly complicated paradox-butterfly-effect things he’s always stressed about and she hasn’t put much effort in trying to understand because it gave her a headache.
She’d have appreciated some sort of heads up, though, Pete. Because, god, Steph is unbelievably not the person for this job.
She’s too dumb to understand how half his bullshit works, and not gentle enough to deliver information so devastating, and not… not ready to look this young, naive, entirely unprepared Peter in the eyes and tell him his life as he knew it is over.
She lights her new cigarette and takes another long, contained drag, so she can stop breathing again.
Pete wanders back to the table, eyeing the egg cream dubiously as he sits down, “What is this?”
She swallows the smoke this time, before nodding at his cup, “Just drink it.”
His lips thin together, eyes squeeze shut (which… dramatic), and he takes a sip.
He stares wide-eyed into the foam across the top, teeth still half closed around his straw, “Holy cow, that's weird.”
But he keeps drinking it. Because she knows what he likes. Obviously.
“Okay. So, you know what time travel is, right?” Good job, Stephanie. Excellent work. Yeah, sure, that’s the right way to start this.
He looks up from his egg cream, eyebrows screwed together in a very specific Pete way that means he thinks whatever she asked is dumb, but he’s too nice to say so, “... yes?”
“Good. That makes this easier, then.” No, it really doesn’t, “You’re a Time Traveler.”
He snorts, but it’s desperate sounding and awkward, shoulders up by his ears, “I think I’d fucking know if I discovered how to Time Travel--”
“No, no, it’s not like those sci-fi novels. You’re…” She rubs her thumb against the end of her cigarette, smudging half a fingerprint into her lipstick around the paper, before taking a too-fast hit. Fuck. She really doesn't want to do this. “You’re a part of the timestream, now? That’s how you’ve explained it, ‘least. It just, sort of…” She makes a loose grabbing motion with her free hand, and Pete’s eyes follow it, all massive and uncomprehending, “Snatches you up, and spits you out in a random space and time.”
“Like… like the fucking Time Traveler’s Wife?”
“Probably,” She shrugs, “But, I do not know what that is.”
“Oh. Right. What…” He looks around the luncheonette, and down to his glass, and back up to her, voice going into that high, worried Pete range again, “What year is it?”
“1957.”
“Good. Cool. Okay. That’s why you don’t know it, then. The book doesn't come out until, like, the sixties or seventies I think,” Pete leans his head forward, roughly sucking up a full mouthful of egg cream into his cheeks like the strange, strange man he is. All in all, he’s taking this pretty well.
Really, actually, too well.
He swallows, and then nods, “Right, so. This isn’t real.”
Yeah, okay. There it is.
“Sorry, man,” She sucks a sympathetic breath between her teeth, involuntarily, “But it’s very real.”
“Nope.”
“Nope?”
“Yeah. I’m pretty sure I’m hallucinating.” He makes eye contact, explaining himself in the same clear way he walks Steph through things about the future, or the physics of things she couldn’t care less about. God, he’s cute. This is genuinely terrible, and stressful, but still. This is infuriatingly cute behavior, “I’ve heard it’s a thing that can happen to some people when their blood sugar gets low. Never happened to me before, but hey. First time for everything, right?”
“Oh… Pete.”
“Because, obviously that’s what’s going on here. Because if that wasn’t what was going on here then that--” He cuts himself off with a nervous laugh, “That would be crazy!”
“Yeah, would,” She admits, so thoroughly unsure of her footing that she kind of wants to scream. But she’s got to help him understand this before he leaves. She isn’t sure when the next time he Travels to her is going to be and he can’t just not know, “But, also. It is. You still don’t really know why, but you think it had something to do with one of the experiments happening in the basement of your brother’s office? ”
“I’m hallucinating. This is all just a result of impaired neurological function, due to low glucose levels,” He screws his eyes shut so hard that it looks like it should hurt, reaching up to rub at his eyelids under his glasses with so much force she wants to reach out and pull his hand away. She doesn’t.
He opens his eyes, expression crumpling when he sees her still sitting there.
“If it was real, though, and I’m… I’m not saying it is, then that would mean, what? I’m just… stuck like this?” He says, sounding and looking so much smaller than he should. This Pete is killing her.
And, yes, sure, this is her Pete. She knows it’s weird to think about him like he’s not, but still.
There’s always been… levels of Pete, and she never really knows how she’s supposed to interact with him until she can figure out which ones showed up.
There’s level one Peters: newer Petes, freshly out of time and still more or less a wreck about it. Because fucking obviously. They’re kind of Pete’s that recognize her and relax, a little, not enough, because at least she’s some sort of a familiar face.
Then, there’s level two Peters: the middle Petes, who, overall, are probably the most complicated. The ones who are used to Traveling by now, and used to Steph in varying ways. That all really depends on where they fall in terms of, like, B.B.D.C and A.B.D.C (Before Blood Drinking Conversation, and After Blood Drinking Conversation). But it’s always just friendly. A little let-me-suck-your-blood between buddies. A know-how-to-calm-Pete-down-from-a-panic-attack sort of camaraderie.
Finally, of course, there’s level three Peters: the Petes she can fuck.
(And, like, kiss, and get all personal with, and spend more time with than they normally could. But, also, still, incredibly importantly, have just like, so much sex with.)
This Pete, though, is newer than the new Petes. He’s so unbelievably green she doesn’t know what to do with him. This is, like, baby Pete. Which is both cute and fucking terrifying. She is not the one who should be explaining all of this.
“I’m really sorry.”
“And…” He presses his eyes closed, “Did I-- so, um, like, is Ted…?”
“I don’t know,” She does. Sort of. Either way, that’s a lie. She’s lying to his fucking face-- “You… you haven’t told me anything, at least.”
It’s messed up, and she knows that. But still. It’s enough to have to tell him about the Traveling, about the whole life-as-you-know-it-is-done-forever shit. She’s not doing the brother stuff too. She’s not.
“Right.” He rubs a hard hard over his mouth, like he’s going to cry. It makes her feel a little like she’s going to vomit, or scream, something, that she can’t just reach out and take his hand and tell him it’ll be fine. He doesn’t know her well enough for that kind of thing to make anything better. And, also, it’s not. At least, not in the way where she thinks this version of Pete would agree with her.
(Her Pete had found his brother once. During one of his annoying, infuriating, fucked up Travels where he didn’t end up where Steph could see him, he’d ended up somewhere he either couldn’t or hadn’t wanted to explain.
All she knows is that Ted had been there. And Ted hadn’t been himself enough anymore to recognize him. That’s all she got out of that miserable, bloodshot eyed Pete that entire visit. Mostly he’d cried, and cursed a lot unspecifically, and clung to her until he disappeared.)
“Good.” He laughs all hollow again. Pete does that when he’s mad or upset a lot. Laughs when it’s incredibly inappropriate. It’s not the kind of familiarity that would be at all comforting, “Good, okay. So… I didn’t actually fix anything. I didn’t find Ted. I just made everything worse.”
And… yeah. Sort of. But she doesn’t think it’ll help to say so. She takes a steady drag off her cigarette, feigning casual so he can’t freak himself out more than he definitely has, “I mean, it’s not all bad? Apparently, in a couple years we get to watch people land on the moon, which you’re really excited about.”
“Oh. I guess that is kind of cool.” He says it all reluctantly, but there is a familiar sort of brightness in his eyes that he’s doing a shit job of hiding. Because he’s a total square like that.
“And, anyway, you’re already dressed to fit in around here.” She reaches across the table to flick a sugar packet at him, “It’s like you were made for it.”
Pete sniffs, wetly, but it gets the first actual semblance of smile from him she’s seen all night, which is something, “Fuck off.”
“No, man. That’s your job.” She snorts, ignoring the confused look that it gets her. She guesses that’s a joke that calls for more context than she gave him. She doesn’t explain herself. He’ll figure out his whole random disappearing act thing fast enough without it being another piece of bad news she has to really delve into.
He swirls his straw through his drink, cutting a flurry of frothy bubbles crawling up the walls of the cup like it’s trying to overflow. She sort of wishes it was full enough for it to actually. A messy distraction from all the sad shit that Pete’s clearly doing a bad job of processing is still a distraction.
“Are you a Time Traveler, too?”
“What?” She looks up, realizing a second too late he’s been staring at her while she stared at his cup, like some sort of dippy weirdo, “Ah, no.”
“No?” He seems more thrown off by that than she’d expected,“Then, how..?”
Right, yeah. She probably could have guessed that this part called for an explanation.
She tilts her head a little to the side, not enough to draw attention, but enough that unless they’re looking very quickly, no one else in the restaurant will see it. (And, well, even if they do. She picked this place especially for discretion and they’re in New York City. Who the hell's gonna care?)
Extending her fangs is easy, she really just has to think kind of hard about biting something and they do the work for her. But it’s also intimidating, so she sticks her tongue out at him between the two of them, to try and soften the effect a little. Normally she doesn’t mind intimidating, but something about Pete has this infuriating way of making her all gentle and sappy. This Pete, like, ten fold.
It probably doesn’t actually matter, though, considering this is the Pete who almost threw himself into Central Park Lake at her walking near him earlier. True to form, he scrambles backwards, flatting himself against the booth, “Oh fuck!”
She snorts, retracting them back to their standard just sort of pointy.
“Are you trying to tell me that…” He leans across the table, head on a swivel, and voice lowered to a hissy whisper, “That vampires are real too?”
“Got it in one, Spankoffski.”
“No! No, this isn’t even in the same… like, genre of existence! This is insane!” He flops his face down onto the table, and then immediately sits up, pulling a face, “Ew, it’s sticky.”
He folds his arms on top of each other, and proceeds to re-flop his face back down on top of them in almost the exact same place.
“You okay?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know. I’m still like 70/30 on this all being some sort of hypoglycemic hallucination taking over all my senses as I slowly slip into a life threatening diabetic coma.” He grumbles into his sleeve.
“Would that be better?” She laughs without meaning to, feeling a little bit about how visibly distraught he still looks.
“The coma?” He glances up just as long as it takes her to nod, before he’s dropped his face back down, “Yeah. I think it’d be less complicated.”
“Probably.”
“Unhelpful.”
“Sorry.” She says, sounding more unapologetic than she actually is.
“You aren’t gonna, like, eat me right?” He hesitantly tilts his chin up over his arm so he can look at her, mouth twisting small and annoyed, “Sorry, I don’t know if that’s offensive, I’ve never talked to a fucking vampire before.”
(She’d always wondered what Pete’s reaction to the whole vampire thing was.
He’d always known about it already. Even earlier Petes, who were clearly less familiar with any of the actual nuances or implications of her being undead, knew enough to not be surprised by the blood and teeth of it all.
But this, so frustrated and confused he’s a little pissed off, and immediately too exhausted to actually care, is actually, probably, exactly what she should have expected.)
She scoffs, “No, Pete. I’m not gonna eat you.”
He makes an unspecific noise of disbelief, that almost comes out like a laugh of his own, “Exactly what someone who was going to eat me would say.”
She’s really glad he can’t tell how good he smells right now. It wouldn’t really do much for her argument. But she isn’t going to drink from him either way. He’s not comfortable with it right now, so she’d feel weird about it. Usually Pete is the one who offers in the first place.
(It feels wrong to miss her Pete, or, at least, a Pete who knows her. But she does. This is so much easier when they’re on even playing fields, instead of her being the one who is somehow in charge here.)
She crosses her arms over her chest, doing a bad job of hiding her smirk on purpose, “Y’know, if that was the plan, I probably wouldn’t have taken you away from the isolated, empty, badly lit park, to a busy location with a ton of witnesses.”
“Ugh. Fine. I guess.”
Pete’s eyes follow her hands as she stubs the barely-there butt of her old cigarette out in the ash tray at the back of their table and pulls out a match for the one behind her ear.
“You really… you really shouldn’t smoke.” He comments, endearingly awkward, “I know they haven’t done the research, yet, I don’t think? But it’s really bad for you.”
“What’s it going to do, kill me?” She rolls her eyes, saying her half of the bit without thinking. Only realizing after it comes out of her mouth that he shouldn’t know the set up to it yet.
“I mean, it might-- oh. Right. Ha.”
It’s a running joke between the two of them. Pete pretends that her invulnerable, immortal, nonfunctioning lungs might somehow get ruined by nicotine, and she pretends to take his pretending at all seriously.
It’d never actually occurred to her that her first time hearing it wasn’t Pete’s, too. Huh.
“... how do we know each other?” He’s not looking at her directly, staring hard at his own sleeve cuff, stretched out over his thumb, “I keep-- you said it just spit me out anywhere, so then how… how did I even get a chance to know you?”
“Right, well, ” She’s done such a bad job explaining this. And what’s the most annoying about it, is she’s going to continue to do just as bad of a job, “The time line keeps spitting you out near me.”
He squints at her, “But, why?”
“Just does,” She shrugs, feeling useless, “Also, you’ve got a notebook. So, sometimes, if the times line up, you can let me know where I should head for the next time. I don’t really get it, but it seems to work.”
There's something more to the chance of it all than either of them really understand. But, somehow it’d feel too much like jinxing it, tempting the universe, to talk about it out loud. She’s not willing to risk it stopping to bother trying to figure it out, and she doesn’t think Pete is either.
She just doesn't think that’s something this Peter will care about, though. He’s finally looked up at her, something desperate and bewildered in his expression. He doesn’t want her sentimental superstition bullshit, right now. She knows him too well for that. And when Pete looks like this he wants answers. He wants to know some complicated, science-y detail that will help him figure everything out so he can fix it.
This just doesn't work like that.
She sets her shoulders back, trying as hard as she can to look comforting, “Look, Pete, it’s going to be--”
And then the air around the booth takes on that blood-ozone smell, and Pete makes a choked-off startled noise, and he’s gone.
She shouldn’t be disappointed, or surprised. If anything, he’d been able to stick around longer than she’d expected. Older Pete’s have more control over their Traveling, for smart-person, complicated reasons that Steph isn’t nearly smart enough to understand. But newer Pete’s always disappeared quickly.
Guilt still whirls uncomfortably in Steph’s stomach. She definitely hadn’t prepared him for what he was in for as much as she could have; hell, she wasn't even able to convince him that he wasn’t just having some sort of medical event.
(He’ll figure it out eventually by himself, though. Unless he ends up with another future Steph, who's somehow better at explanations. She knows that. But, still. He’d been so scared.)
She waves a bus boy down as he passes, nodding towards Pete’s half empty egg cream, “Hey, you can grab that.”
“Friend had to run?” He reaches past her, balancing the glass on his tray full of dirty plates.
“He did. But it’s okay,” She huffs, poking her tongue against the point of her fang and doing her best not to stare at the empty Pete-shaped space in the booth across from her, “I’ll catch up with him later.”