"I wish Mom was driving me to school," a child's voice whines over the radio, and Kit thumbs PTT just so she can laugh about it.
"Yeah, George," she says. "You're embarrassing. Ugh."
"If dropping my kids off in a Forestwatch mech is somehow more embarrassing than a Volvo, you're right here in one too!"
"I'm the cool aunt," she says smugly.
"Yeah, Dad." Preteen scorn drips from every word. "It's not the same. Kit's cool."
In parental revenge, George not only hangs out of the cockpit hollering, "Do you have everything, sweetheart? Homework? Lunch?" but waves with the mech before pulling away, while Ruth's eldest determinedly pretends she's an orphan on the school steps.
"I hope you and Mads have kids so I get to gang up on you," George grumbles, on the way out to the watch station, and Kit nearly puts her mech's foot in an ankle-deep pothole. "Ha! Hit a nerve, fuckboy?"
She steadies the steering, lets it sit for a couple of seconds, then pitches her voice up. "Oh wow," she says sweetly. "Wow, I just saw my entire future flash before my eyes. We're gonna have six."
"You do not want six," George says wryly.
"Gotta be an even number so we can take turns carrying them," Kit says, exaggeratedly dreamy. "Put off the first one for a few years, so I'm pulling in senior pay. We're gonna love them so much, and Mads is gonna be—" she fakes choking up. "Just so good—"
"Does she get any input on your plans for a single-handed baby boom?"
"I told you, I saw my entire future," Kit says gleefully. "I ask her about it, and she has doubts whether I can shape up, and we have a fight about it, but the makeup sex is—"
"This is because I called you a fuckboy, isn't it," George says.
"—bent over the kitchen counter, until I cry—"
"All right, asshole, I'm sorry for calling you that."
"Yeah, you are, I can go all day," Kit cackles, and they swap familiar bullshit all the way up to the station.
She finds herself paused for a second, after killing the engine and unbuckling the seatbelt; takes out her phone, grips the cool plastic, thumbing its rounded corners, eyeing the one bar of signal.
If, she finds herself typing. If 1 day you were say with smone who wsnt immature fuckboy jock wld u want kids
Her phone pings when she's inside and making coffee while she skims the shift handover notes.
Ask me again without the negative self talk, Maddie replies, and Kit clutches the phone to her heart, feeling like she might spontaneously die of Too Much.
