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The Perk | Saturday Afternoon

The weird time differential between his world and Fandom always had John running for coffee after a portal. Today was no different and he happily grabbed a table in the warm shop to drink up while he left a voicemail message because he'd promised to call when he got to town.

It was really too bad that message wasn't going to be as helpful as he'd hoped.

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"You know what I'm thinking," Ben replied, sounding very young. "So tell me I'm wrong and that the two of you aren't stringing each other along for years at a time."

"Ben, there aren't a lot of options here," John said, shaking his head. "What would you have me do? Break it off and stay away?"

Ben shrugged, looking uncomfortable. "This isn't exactly my area of expertise," he demurred.

"Yeah, well, you act like you have some idea of how this should go, so clue me in if you do and I'll make it work, but this is the best I've got right now." And it was about to get worse, but no one really needed to know that part, even if it was probably right there in John's emotions if someone was looking.

"I think people change a lot even in a few months," Ben said to the table, "and that if you do it over years, you end up staring at a stranger and wondering what you are supposed to talk about."

Hello, years of only seeing his father occasionally. How nice to see your issues.

Cue John feeling a hell of a lot like a stranger. "Thanks for the vote of confidence, kid. You realize it's been nine years, right? And maybe I've noticed that part, and I'm pretty sure Jaina's figured that out, what with my age change and the part where I stopped all contact with her because I had this problem where there was no getting her out of my head while I was married to someone else. This was all followed by over a year of her spending her days in Fandom and her afternoons in my world so we could spend as much time together as time allowed." He took a sip of coffee to let some of that sink in and because there was no way he was letting decent coffee get cold.

"Oh and then I fucked it all up, but when don't I? So should I be the one to tell her that it was a waste of time spent sending pictures of ice and snow and hearing all about the stupid things that were happening on our continents so we'd still know each other when I got back here, or did you want to do that?"

Ben wanted to slide under the table and hide there forever.

"This is what happens when you ask a fifteen year old about this stuff," he mumbled. "I stick my foot so far into my mouth that I can taste my pants. I can't keep track of Jaina: she's never here and I thought you were married so I assumed she was off home like she's been most of the year." He finally looked up. "All I'm saying is that from my perspective, it seems like a lot of effort and missing someone for not that much time together."

And he sat there hoping desperately that he wouldn't get blamed for a break-up or something.

"You sure sounded like you thought you knew what you were talking about five minutes ago," John reminded him, voice going kind and less annoyed than before. "Don't think I've forgotten your story, you're less of a kid than I am. But maybe you haven't learned yet that when you care about someone, every second you get with them counts, no matter the effort."

Ben's slightly confused stare confirmed that no, he hadn't learned that lesson. "Okay. So is that why you're back and leaving me weird messages that were meant for a different member of my family?"

John was surprised by the blankness, being as he himself had learned that lesson when he'd lost his mom. "Yep," he signed. "Back from Antarctica and stopping in before my next assignment."

"Where are you going next?" Ben asked, more than a little eager to shift the topic.

Relationships of all types were giving him a headache this week.

"Colorado, that's one of the states again. Doing some interesting new work with deep space telemetry." John would never not find that funny.

"You're going to stare at things really, really far away?" Ben replied, blinking. "And you're no longer being punished?"

There was an unspoken "really?" in there.

"We can call it a new form of punishment if that sounds better to you," John decided, ~~totally having missed the notif here~~.

"It just seems a little quiet," Ben replied with a tiny smile. "I didn't know that you wanted to spend time staring at things that are very far away."

"Seems I'm a lot better at staring into space than I thought," John replied, wishing the project cover story was cooler.

"All that practice in class?" Ben teased.

"Only Ethics," John grinned. "I got a degree in math and literature somewhere during your summer months."

"Literature?" Ben looked surprised. "Really?"

"I had a lot of free time to read," he shrugged. "Also, it was kind of a joke with me and Jaina. She thinks I don't actually read so much as sleep, but then I managed the degree and it makes her do that staring thing."

Ben flashed him a grin. "I don't get her to do that much," he admitted. "I mostly get her to do that glaring thing, depending on which Jaina we're talking about."

"She's got a good glare," John grinned. "I'm on the receiving end of it more than you'd think with all the stuff I've gotten up to over the years." Of course, he was really good at making the glare go away. It was part of his charm.

"And here I thought she'd just brush off you getting married," he teased.

"That was an interesting conversation," John replied. "I'm probably lucky it happened over the phone, no matter how many years it had been since we broke up."

Ben nodded. "Why'd you get married?" he asked finally.

The Perk | Saturday Afternoon

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