no man is an island

This is not your actual fic, because your actual fic is already in the process of getting totally out of control and will probably no way be done before NaNo. Can you have timestamps for fics that are not done? This is that. Or something like that. It is also definitely not a digression, since we are still in sight of the original subject. Yes.

I should probably note that in the actual main fic the issue of co-parenting for the assignment is raised and everyone is basically told “hang out with your partner, if you have one, most of the time”.

—+— —+— —+—

“Your daddy is cheating on us,” Freya says confidingly to her flour baby. “Do you think if I tell him you’re going to end up coming from a broken home he’ll decide he should write a supplemental paper on the impacts of divorce on infants for extra credit?”

Rosie, unsurprisingly, doesn’t answer. They probably should have painted a face on her already, but Freya hadn’t liked the idea of a baby whose eyes could never close and Lancelot hadn’t liked the idea of a baby whose eyes could never open, so they just keep putting it off. She has a little knit hat, at least. That has to count for something.

“I think he probably would,” Freya says. She’s no good at baby talk; it’s quiet and even, the same way she talks to anyone else she doesn’t know well. You don’t really know babies, after all. “You should probably meet your future step…” She hesitates, squinting across the park. The flour baby Gwen is holding is wearing a little red onesie, which could mean anything.

“Brother,” Arthur says as he drops down to sit next to Freya. She jumps, and he immediately slides a few inches further away. “Thought you’d seen me,” he says, not quite an apology but definitely not anything else.

“No, it’s okay,” Freya says, shifting Rosie to her other arm to have something to do with her hands. Arthur is…a lot, even here in a quiet little park that used to have a working playground and doesn’t anymore, with Gwen and Lancelot the only other people around and both of them too busy talking to each other to be reflecting Arthur. Really she should have invited Merlin along too, to be a buffer, even though he would have had to have brought Gwaine with him and if Arthur is a lot Arthur plus Gwaine is worse, even when they aren’t arguing, which is a different kind of bad.

It’s possible Freya hasn’t thought any of this through very well.

I’d like to spend some time with Gwen, Lancelot had said, and Freya likes Lancelot and likes Gwen and likes being around the two of them when they’re together, so of course she’d said yes.

It’s not that she doesn’t like Arthur, it’s just—

He startles her out of her thoughts, again, by adding, “Thomas Tristan Pendragon-Smith.”

“What?”

“Lancelot’s future stepson. Thomas Tristan Pendragon-Smith.”

Freya just barely manages not to say I can’t believe you care about this because as safe as he seems now this is still Arthur Pendragon, star quarterback, student council president, heir to Pendragon-Dubois Industries, bad bad news. “Oh,” she says instead, which sounds stupid, but.

Arthur raises an eyebrow at her, clearly waiting.

“Oh,” Freya says again, feeling her face go hot and probably kind of blotchy. “Um. This is Rosie. Rose.”

“du Lake?” Arthur asks, grinning a little.

Freya says, “Ha,” because it’s that or actually laugh. “No, probably du Lac? I mean, I picked Rose, so. It’s only fair, and like you said it doesn’t really matter?”

“Pleased to meet you, Rose du Lac,” Arthur says gravely to the bag of flour Freya is holding, as if he is actually introduced to bags of flour on a regular basis.

It’s all sort of impossible.

—+—
(Later, she says to Merlin, glumly, “You were right, he is hot when he forgets to try to be important.”

“I know,” Merlin says, some weird blend of sympathetic and relieved. “Isn’t it awful?”

“You’re not even scared of him!”

“He’s probably straight!”

Which—Freya suddenly feels sick. “Would you break up with me if he weren’t?”

Merlin, at least, looks almost as horrified at the idea as she feels, which makes her feel better even before he finds words. “What? No, what the fuck, Freya, I—I like you, I really like you, I wouldn’t just—”

“Okay,” Freya says. “It’s okay.” She reaches out, curls her fingers around Merlin’s wrist. “I believe you.”

He pulls her into a hug, and she’s thinking, with his heartbeat steady if too-quick against her side: thinking about Arthur’s brightness, and his possibly life-ruining smile, and how Merlin really isn’t even a little bit scared of him, never has been; Merlin lights up just as bright around him. Which is frightening in itself, but she could probably get used to it. Could probably like it.)