Beatrice R. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kinglearisstupid) wrote2013-04-27 11:50 pm
kinglearisstupid) wrote2013-04-27 11:50 pm
Beezus and Nate's Excellent Adventures
Just FYI, Nate belongs to amichevole and is sort of Beezus's male counterpart in another universe. One brilliant day, the planets align themselves, portals between various universes open, and Beezus and Nate end up in Criminal Minds Canon (circa Season 5?) at the same time.
Thus begin Beezus and Nate's Excellent Quantum-leaping Adventures
Once the initial shock wears off, Rossi realizes that they still have two kids to contend with.
The boy has managed to cover himself in dirt in the 30 minutes it took the lab to rush the DNA test --- god knows where the dirt came from, they've been inside a government facility the entire time --- and the girl is sitting in Emily's lap and letting Garcia clip a thousand sparkly things into her hair.
Reid goes on and on about parallel universes and quantum theory, Hotch is on the phone, probably calling his contacts in said other universes to fix whatever the hell has gone wrong, and Morgan mostly looks incredulous that there are at least two universes in existence where Rossi and Emily have procreated.
Speaking of whom.
Rossi still hasn't managed to make proper eye contact with Emily, which is ironic considering that, according to the FBI lab, they are the proud parents of two beautiful, healthy little hellraisers.
The boy is now spinning himself around in Reid's chair, then toddling off and crashing onto the floor like a kid having a drink too many at his first keg party.
"Boys are dumb," the girl assesses, with one hand on her hip and an eyeroll that is pure Prentiss.
Rossi has to agree with her. He thinks they might get along.
Emily, for the most part, seems to be taking the news in stride. She manages to stop the boy from breaking his neck pretending to be Spiderman and scaling the file cabinet in Morgan's room and the girl insists on being taken to the bathroom by nobody other than Emily.
It would probably be easier if they each took one kid, because the two of them together would either kill each other or destroy everything in the near vicinity. But JJ goes and says something about how kids shouldn't be split up, and Rossi ends up agreeing to take the rugrats back to his place, because he so happens to own a goddamn mansion with a huge yard that has all the dirt the boy wants to eat.
Emily sits shotgun, the alternative being sandwiched between the kids in the back. Rossi has barely pulled onto the highway when the girl whines, "Nate is poking me."
"I am not."
"I didn't see anything," Rossi says, hoping that would be the end of it.
"DADDY, NATE POKED ME AGAIN."
"I did not!"
Emily turns backwards to give the kids a practiced mom glare. Rossi is amazed by her learning curve. "Nathaniel, stop bothering your sister."
"I'm not bothering --- ow! BEEZUS JUST KICKED ME!"
"You poked me first!"
"I poked you by accident but you kicked me on purpose!"
It's mind-blowing, really, how two small children strapped down by seat belts can still manage to launch themselves into a full-blown fistfight. Rossi swears he hears the gnashing of teeth at one point. Prentiss is trying to get them to calm down to no avail and Rossi surprises himself by stomping on the brakes and snapping his head around to yell, "If you two don't stop fighting this minute, neither of you get ice cream for dessert!"
That does it.
There are ten minutes of blissful silence until the boy asks, "Can I have chocolate?"
"I like chocolate too," the girl comments. "And I want lots and lots of whipped cream."
"And sprinkles! The rainbow kind!"
"No nuts, 'cause nuts are yucky!"
Rossi forks over a small fortune to the apathetic teenager behind the counter of Baskin Robbins, which he decides is worth the price of his sanity.
Perhaps it's even worth the chocolate handprints on his favorite silk shirt and sugar-induced hyperactivity that ends with all four of them collapsing on the floor of his den in front of Dancing With the Stars, looking for all intents and purposes like a family.
*
The boy's sweet - a little slow, maybe, and hopelessly uncoordinated - and the girl is a budding sociopath.
Rossi supposes those are pretty harsh criticisms to make of his children - children in the genetic sense, not the biological sense, because according to Reid each of them was fathered by an alternate version of Rossi in an alternate universe.
The law doesn't care about Reid's quantum theories though. DNA says they are the genetic offspring of Dave and Emily Prentiss, which is a thought that makes him feel both turned on and a little sorry for his own pathetic self in this pathetic universe.
In other words, until they figure out a way to return the kids to their own planes of existence, Rossi is saddled with the responsibility of looking after them. He and Emily, together, have to keep them fed and clean and alive, which is harder than he anticipated. When these kids aren't actively trying to kill each other, they are trying to kill themselves on top of showing absolutely no interest in being bathed or fed proper meals.
"I'm not eating this." Beatrice crosses her arms and stares at Rossi as if he had just tried to feed her crushed glass with a side of arsenic.
Rossi rakes his hand through his hair - which seems thinner than it was a few days ago. Fucking shit. "What's wrong with this? You ate this yesterday. You said you liked it."
"You didn't make it right!"
"How did I not make it right? It's cereal. You pour it into a bowl and eat it with milk."
"You put the milk in first instead of the cereal and now it's all floaty and I don't like floaty cereal."
"Oh, for the love of Christ."
He dumps the cereal into the sink and fixes another bowl for his maybe-daughter, this time making sure she saw him pour the milk into the bowl after he did the cereal.
Meanwhile, Nate has decided to pour an entire bottle of ketchup on his fried eggs and eat it with his hands, and then wipe the table down with a slice of ham. He knocks over his glass of orange juice in the process and it's hard to tell whether Emily, armed with paper towels, is dabbing them at him or the table.
Rossi is tempted to tell her to give up. It's a lost cause; they should just burn the house down after, though he doesn't think his insurance covers damage caused by quantum-leaping children.
"Nate, do you want to take a bath?" Emily asks as she comes to the same conclusion.
"NO!"
"You're all ... sticky and covered in food. Wouldn't you feel better with a bath?"
"I feel great!" Nate yells. "I love being sticky."
To make his point, he lifts up his shirt and starts rubbing the mixture of ketchup-egg yolk-orange juice onto his stomach.
Emily looks defeated, while Beezus makes her contempt clear. "I don't want to sit beside him," she tells Rossi. "He's gross."
"YOU'RE GROSS!" Nate shouts and proceeds to smear ketchup into his hair.
"Hey, hey, no name-calling!" Emily says, even though name-calling is the least of their problems. Last time Rossi had to break up a fight, he got clocked in the jaw by Nate and Beezus accidentally bit him.
Before Beezus can launch into attack-mode, Rossi scoops her up and totes her into the den, thankful of his decision to go with hardwood floors instead of carpeting. "Let's eat here, all right? Then you don't have to look at Nate. And he can't look at you, which I know you view as a form of provocation."
Beezus is agreeable to the suggestion and curls up against him on the sofa. Rossi flips through the channels until he finds a cartoon of a pink starfish and an Brillo pad with eyes. He has nephews and he knows Spongebob is the drug of choice for most children, regardless of age.
It works like a charm and Beezus quiets down, leaning back against Rossi and resting her head against his side. Rossi has to admit: he's actually pretty fond of the kid when she isn't deliberately tormenting him.
"I know you're not my real daddy," Beezus says.
Rossi is first startled, then surprisingly relieved. "What tipped you off?"
"My daddy would know how to make cereal the right way. He's smart. You're not."
Rossi stares down at her and wonders about his alternate self, the one who is this little girl's father, who knows how to make cereal properly and whom Beezus snuggles against when they watch Spongebob together.
In another universe, the other Rossi is probably losing his mind over his missing daughter, and in yet another one, the third Rossi is no doubt doing all he can to search for his son.
He's not exactly envious of them, but it does make him wonder how different his life might have been if he and Carolyn had made it through, if he weren't so selfish and if being a perennial bachelor weren't his life's vocation.
"Does Nate know I'm not his dad?" Rossi asks Beezus, who bores of her Cinnamon Toast Crunch after five bites and tries to feed it to Mudgie instead.
Beezus shrugs. "I don't know. I can make him believe anything though. I told him you and the woman who looks like Mommy were aliens and that you guys murdered his real mommy and daddy and sucked out their souls. Now you're pretending to be his parents and at night you guys will crawl into his bed and try to suck his soul out of his feet bit by bit until he's empty so that Alien Nate can take over his body."
Well, that would explain the hysterical screaming last night when Emily went to check on the kids after they had gone to sleep.
"You're an only child, aren't you?"
"Yep." Beezus gives him a look that says, I prefer to keep it that way. "I'm not going to share my real mom and dad with anybody. But you're not my real dad so I can share you, I don't mind."
"Thanks for the endorsement, kid."
"My daddy's going to come back for me, you know."
"Oh, I have no doubt about it."
He might, he just might, be a little sorry to see her go.
amichevole and is sort of Beezus's male counterpart in another universe. One brilliant day, the planets align themselves, portals between various universes open, and Beezus and Nate end up in Criminal Minds Canon (circa Season 5?) at the same time. Thus begin Beezus and Nate's Excellent Quantum-leaping Adventures
Once the initial shock wears off, Rossi realizes that they still have two kids to contend with.
The boy has managed to cover himself in dirt in the 30 minutes it took the lab to rush the DNA test --- god knows where the dirt came from, they've been inside a government facility the entire time --- and the girl is sitting in Emily's lap and letting Garcia clip a thousand sparkly things into her hair.
Reid goes on and on about parallel universes and quantum theory, Hotch is on the phone, probably calling his contacts in said other universes to fix whatever the hell has gone wrong, and Morgan mostly looks incredulous that there are at least two universes in existence where Rossi and Emily have procreated.
Speaking of whom.
Rossi still hasn't managed to make proper eye contact with Emily, which is ironic considering that, according to the FBI lab, they are the proud parents of two beautiful, healthy little hellraisers.
The boy is now spinning himself around in Reid's chair, then toddling off and crashing onto the floor like a kid having a drink too many at his first keg party.
"Boys are dumb," the girl assesses, with one hand on her hip and an eyeroll that is pure Prentiss.
Rossi has to agree with her. He thinks they might get along.
Emily, for the most part, seems to be taking the news in stride. She manages to stop the boy from breaking his neck pretending to be Spiderman and scaling the file cabinet in Morgan's room and the girl insists on being taken to the bathroom by nobody other than Emily.
It would probably be easier if they each took one kid, because the two of them together would either kill each other or destroy everything in the near vicinity. But JJ goes and says something about how kids shouldn't be split up, and Rossi ends up agreeing to take the rugrats back to his place, because he so happens to own a goddamn mansion with a huge yard that has all the dirt the boy wants to eat.
Emily sits shotgun, the alternative being sandwiched between the kids in the back. Rossi has barely pulled onto the highway when the girl whines, "Nate is poking me."
"I am not."
"I didn't see anything," Rossi says, hoping that would be the end of it.
"DADDY, NATE POKED ME AGAIN."
"I did not!"
Emily turns backwards to give the kids a practiced mom glare. Rossi is amazed by her learning curve. "Nathaniel, stop bothering your sister."
"I'm not bothering --- ow! BEEZUS JUST KICKED ME!"
"You poked me first!"
"I poked you by accident but you kicked me on purpose!"
It's mind-blowing, really, how two small children strapped down by seat belts can still manage to launch themselves into a full-blown fistfight. Rossi swears he hears the gnashing of teeth at one point. Prentiss is trying to get them to calm down to no avail and Rossi surprises himself by stomping on the brakes and snapping his head around to yell, "If you two don't stop fighting this minute, neither of you get ice cream for dessert!"
That does it.
There are ten minutes of blissful silence until the boy asks, "Can I have chocolate?"
"I like chocolate too," the girl comments. "And I want lots and lots of whipped cream."
"And sprinkles! The rainbow kind!"
"No nuts, 'cause nuts are yucky!"
Rossi forks over a small fortune to the apathetic teenager behind the counter of Baskin Robbins, which he decides is worth the price of his sanity.
Perhaps it's even worth the chocolate handprints on his favorite silk shirt and sugar-induced hyperactivity that ends with all four of them collapsing on the floor of his den in front of Dancing With the Stars, looking for all intents and purposes like a family.
*
The boy's sweet - a little slow, maybe, and hopelessly uncoordinated - and the girl is a budding sociopath.
Rossi supposes those are pretty harsh criticisms to make of his children - children in the genetic sense, not the biological sense, because according to Reid each of them was fathered by an alternate version of Rossi in an alternate universe.
The law doesn't care about Reid's quantum theories though. DNA says they are the genetic offspring of Dave and Emily Prentiss, which is a thought that makes him feel both turned on and a little sorry for his own pathetic self in this pathetic universe.
In other words, until they figure out a way to return the kids to their own planes of existence, Rossi is saddled with the responsibility of looking after them. He and Emily, together, have to keep them fed and clean and alive, which is harder than he anticipated. When these kids aren't actively trying to kill each other, they are trying to kill themselves on top of showing absolutely no interest in being bathed or fed proper meals.
"I'm not eating this." Beatrice crosses her arms and stares at Rossi as if he had just tried to feed her crushed glass with a side of arsenic.
Rossi rakes his hand through his hair - which seems thinner than it was a few days ago. Fucking shit. "What's wrong with this? You ate this yesterday. You said you liked it."
"You didn't make it right!"
"How did I not make it right? It's cereal. You pour it into a bowl and eat it with milk."
"You put the milk in first instead of the cereal and now it's all floaty and I don't like floaty cereal."
"Oh, for the love of Christ."
He dumps the cereal into the sink and fixes another bowl for his maybe-daughter, this time making sure she saw him pour the milk into the bowl after he did the cereal.
Meanwhile, Nate has decided to pour an entire bottle of ketchup on his fried eggs and eat it with his hands, and then wipe the table down with a slice of ham. He knocks over his glass of orange juice in the process and it's hard to tell whether Emily, armed with paper towels, is dabbing them at him or the table.
Rossi is tempted to tell her to give up. It's a lost cause; they should just burn the house down after, though he doesn't think his insurance covers damage caused by quantum-leaping children.
"Nate, do you want to take a bath?" Emily asks as she comes to the same conclusion.
"NO!"
"You're all ... sticky and covered in food. Wouldn't you feel better with a bath?"
"I feel great!" Nate yells. "I love being sticky."
To make his point, he lifts up his shirt and starts rubbing the mixture of ketchup-egg yolk-orange juice onto his stomach.
Emily looks defeated, while Beezus makes her contempt clear. "I don't want to sit beside him," she tells Rossi. "He's gross."
"YOU'RE GROSS!" Nate shouts and proceeds to smear ketchup into his hair.
"Hey, hey, no name-calling!" Emily says, even though name-calling is the least of their problems. Last time Rossi had to break up a fight, he got clocked in the jaw by Nate and Beezus accidentally bit him.
Before Beezus can launch into attack-mode, Rossi scoops her up and totes her into the den, thankful of his decision to go with hardwood floors instead of carpeting. "Let's eat here, all right? Then you don't have to look at Nate. And he can't look at you, which I know you view as a form of provocation."
Beezus is agreeable to the suggestion and curls up against him on the sofa. Rossi flips through the channels until he finds a cartoon of a pink starfish and an Brillo pad with eyes. He has nephews and he knows Spongebob is the drug of choice for most children, regardless of age.
It works like a charm and Beezus quiets down, leaning back against Rossi and resting her head against his side. Rossi has to admit: he's actually pretty fond of the kid when she isn't deliberately tormenting him.
"I know you're not my real daddy," Beezus says.
Rossi is first startled, then surprisingly relieved. "What tipped you off?"
"My daddy would know how to make cereal the right way. He's smart. You're not."
Rossi stares down at her and wonders about his alternate self, the one who is this little girl's father, who knows how to make cereal properly and whom Beezus snuggles against when they watch Spongebob together.
In another universe, the other Rossi is probably losing his mind over his missing daughter, and in yet another one, the third Rossi is no doubt doing all he can to search for his son.
He's not exactly envious of them, but it does make him wonder how different his life might have been if he and Carolyn had made it through, if he weren't so selfish and if being a perennial bachelor weren't his life's vocation.
"Does Nate know I'm not his dad?" Rossi asks Beezus, who bores of her Cinnamon Toast Crunch after five bites and tries to feed it to Mudgie instead.
Beezus shrugs. "I don't know. I can make him believe anything though. I told him you and the woman who looks like Mommy were aliens and that you guys murdered his real mommy and daddy and sucked out their souls. Now you're pretending to be his parents and at night you guys will crawl into his bed and try to suck his soul out of his feet bit by bit until he's empty so that Alien Nate can take over his body."
Well, that would explain the hysterical screaming last night when Emily went to check on the kids after they had gone to sleep.
"You're an only child, aren't you?"
"Yep." Beezus gives him a look that says, I prefer to keep it that way. "I'm not going to share my real mom and dad with anybody. But you're not my real dad so I can share you, I don't mind."
"Thanks for the endorsement, kid."
"My daddy's going to come back for me, you know."
"Oh, I have no doubt about it."
He might, he just might, be a little sorry to see her go.
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