Planting seed
“Georgie, I need to ask you for a serious favor.” Jon sat on her couch while the Admiral gave the Marshal a bath on his lap.
“There are two ways this can go. So I can make no promises, but I’ll hear you out.” Jon was either about to ask her something so terribly mundane like a glass of water, or to help him kill a man.
“I need your help picking out a ring. For Martin.”
“Shit yes. Completely yes! Gosh I can’t believe you are finally going to. I’m so proud of you. You going to do a wedding?”
“I don’t even know if he will say yes-”
“You brought your child here for a play date and own a house together. If he doesn’t say yes then I’ll give you full custody over the Admiral.”
Jon choked a laugh. “If that is all it would take for my son to come home.”
“Oh shush. Point is, do you want to do anything fancy or small thing?”
“I haven’t even thought that far. Or talked with Martin about it to be honest. I just figure he’s been getting better at Knowing things, so I want to be able to do it while it can still be a surprise. I Know what size it’ll need to be so that wont be a problem either.”
“Oooh do you have plans on how you are going to ask?” Georgie got comfortable on the couch next to him without disturbing the children.
“I do have something in mind. Our anniversary is sort of coming up if you ignore the year. So I was sort of thinking it would be funny to ask him on the day of, so we could be engaged before we started dating.” Jon gave off the air that it was way funnier in his mind than it was in reality.
“Oh wow. That is cheesy, and dramatic. I support it 100%. Let me grab my laptop and we can figure out which shops to check out.”
---
Martin was having a rough time. He’d been looking at the timeline of things Jon and he had put together to try and save some people. The date Helen would run into Michael was coming up, and Jon had pointed out he wasn’t sure if there would be anything they could really do about it.
Martin wanted to stop it, one last favor to the Helen he grew to know after the world ended. But the distortion was into long games, so it would probably just wait until neither were paying attention. Not to mention he’d noticed Jon being slightly more spacy than normal, so it was most likely on his mind.
Jon had brought up one tactic a while ago which was that he do something to claim her so the other entities wouldn’t be interested, but it wasn’t something he wanted to do. Just that it would get Michael’s attention off of her potentially. It never came up again, and with Jon being fairly hands-off after his encounter with Elias, they stopped talking about it all together with the future becoming something unknown to discover rather than something they needed to work to change.
Martin enjoyed that. They could start planning for their future, rather than planning to prevent the future.
It was an interesting shift that Martin wasn’t going to complain about, but he couldn’t help but worry just a little.
---
Elias sat in his home office watching several places at once. He was getting used to having less of a reach, of losing his favor with the Beholding he had held for 200 years. He knows he had created Jon to be the perfect Archive, one that would be favored enough for a successful ritual, even if he couldn’t remember the details.
He needed to figure out how to gain his favor back before it was too late. The only thing he could think to do that would be to watch for now. So he shifted his viewing from just his employees to try to follow fear throughout the city.
---
Tim had a date. A friend of his from research had set it up, said that they thought the fellow would be Tim’s type and he didn’t have any other plans.
He got there a little early to get the table, and sent the person, whose name was Graham, a text to let him know and also to point out that Tim was wearing a red button-up. Graham had texted back pretty quickly with an emoji and pointed out he was only a stop away.
It’d been a while since Tim went on a date. After Danny, well Tim kinda stopped looking for relationships. Too much going on emotionally to deal with much more. There was a small point in time where he might have considered asking Sasha out, but after one night of getting drunk and complaining about life, she pointed out how annoyed she was that people think anyone not interested in dating just need to find the right person to fix that, he agreed with her. It was a very annoying pressure he’d gotten from his parents multiple times.
Tim had taken comfort in that he really didn’t need to date either, and thus he went years without bothering. Not that he hadn’t been interested in dating, but just not then. Almost not even now, but with how things were going, what could it hurt. Worse comes to worse, he would waste a Friday night.
A man walked into the restaurant and looked over to Tim with a bright smile, all while Tim felt a slight dread. The other, he was assuming Graham, was marked by several entities that Tim could see. Poor dude almost looked as bad as Jon through Tim’s eyes, lacking all the physical traits.
“Hey, You Tim?” Graham offered his hand with a smile. Tim took it with a smile. After looking away from the marks, Graham was pretty nice looking.
“Yeah, Pleasure to meet you.”