"Wake up, dammit! I'm not going to tell you again."
The body in the bed just rolled over, burying her face in the pillows with a tired groan and flailing one arm uselessly in the direction of the voice invading her dreamland.
"Mm…ngh, fuck you."
"I would, but then we'd both be late."
That had the desired effect. One brown eye popped open, peering around for the glowing red numbers that announced, as they so often did, that Jack was running late. She opened her mouth to shout about certain women and the way they were supposed to have woken her up, but the venomous look in Miranda's eyes silenced her. Even with a mouthful of toothpaste, her wife was nobody to be trifled with, especially not in the morning.
It had come as a surprise to Jack, considering the brutal efficiency with which the other woman worked at any time of the day or night, but Miranda was not a morning person at all. Oh, she looked put together and could pretend reasonably well that waking up didn't bother her, but in truth she was a grumpy bitch until at least her third cup of coffee. Still, Jack couldn't bring herself to dislike the startling trait – at times she actually felt privileged to be on the receiving end of Miranda's early-morning irritability. It meant that she knew something about her wife that nobody else in the galaxy did.
She watched two slim, dark eyebrows raise over familiar blue eyes, and realized that she was supposed to have been getting up.
"Fuck," she hissed as she flung herself out of their nice warm bed and onto the cold floor, dashing for the clothes that she always intended to lay out the night before and never did. Miranda handed her a wet, paste-dotted toothbrush – she was quite serious about using only as much as indicated by the instructions – and she frantically scrubbed at her teeth even as her eyes darted around the apartment, flagging the things she needed to grab before making her usual mad dash to the building where those coordinating reconstruction had set up shop. Spit, rinse, gargle – only because Miranda made her – and a quick minty kiss, and she was out the door.
Duty rosters had become her life. Duty rosters and the very occasional opportunity to participate in some reconstruction first-hand, although largely in a support capacity. Construction equipment had been at a premium ever since what was casually referred to as the end of the world, and anything that could be done without it had to be. So when a squad of talented biotics trained to work in teams presented themselves, they – and their instructor/cheerleader – were immediately put to work.
In a way it felt good, after all the things she'd destroyed in her life, to build things instead. It earned her a place, gratitude, smiles, and the knowledge that when she looked out across the no longer smoking ruins of London, she'd had a hand in that. She'd never seen London before the war, but she'd heard more than once that the place was beginning to look like its old self again.
It wasn't exciting, but it was oddly fulfilling.
Still, after a long morning of paperwork and organization and a last-minute swapping around of teams because two of her kids were too hungover to work, she was eager for a bit of a break. Her first stop was the apartment shared by Mr. and Ms. Hungover, and she took a morbid delight in taunting them mercilessly and in a very loud voice. By the time she left, she felt certain both that they'd learned their lesson and that she hadn't really changed that much. Construction was nice and all, but being a total bitch was even better.
Lunch with her wife, of course, was the best part of her day. She breezed through security at the temporary Alliance headquarters by rote, nobody looking twice at her after nearly two years of daily visits, and charged into Miranda's office as if she owned the place. Closing and locking the door behind her, she leaned against it with a wolfish grin. Across the small room, Miranda's eyebrows rose and she set aside the datapad she'd been reading, pushing her chair back from her desk. They were, as always, on the same wavelength at times like these.
And so another office quickie was born.
Jack was reluctant to return to work after an hour of sex and cuddling and delivery food left outside the office door by a well-trained assistant, but there was always more work to be done. Construction requests to be reviewed and scheduled, time off requests to be accommodated, lessons to plan. And it all had to be done before schools let out, because she was the star teacher of the afterschool program for talented young biotic kids.
She'd honestly been surprised both when the offer had been made and when no parents objected to her either as a person or as a teacher, but she relished the job. Her older 'kids' from Grissom were all adults now and no longer in need of daily training, although she made sure to check on them periodically just in case they thought about going soft. She found she enjoyed teaching, and there were no shortage of students anymore.
There were some kids as young as elementary school in her class, and it made her heart hurt to look at their open faces and their smiles as they mastered one technique or another. She couldn't help but think of herself at the same age, and it made her more determined than ever to ensure nothing like that ever happened to anyone again. The dismantling of Cerberus had made it unlikely, but wherever there was money there were assholes with big ideas.
She wasn't worried about her kids, though. The whole galaxy knew that fucking with Jack's students was a death sentence.
She returned home at dusk to an empty house – Miranda wouldn't be home for at least another hour. Normally she'd have ordered or picked up some dinner, but she was feeling oddly buoyant and decided to make use of her limited culinary skills – she'd had to pick up something after the end of the world, because there hadn't been a lot of restaurants and ration packs weren't high on anybody's list of food choices. Most people she knew had been utterly shocked at her newfound domestic skills, for which she'd had a lot of punches to deliver. Only Miranda had quirked one eyebrow and informed her, in that cool tone that always inflamed both Jack's irritation and her libido, that she'd simply assumed Jack capable of doing whatever she chose.
And what she chose this evening was to use the last of the tortillas and whip up some pizza quesadillas.
She never claimed to be a classy cook.
She was just piling the only-slightly-burned quesadillas onto plates when the door beeped and slid open to reveal the single most important person in her life. Plates in hand, Jack strode over to the door to plant a kiss on her wife – it turned out to be rather more lengthy than she planned, and in the end only the fact that her hands were full of dinner prevented them from going at it just inside the door. When she finally pulled back, she couldn't help the cocky grin that spread over her face.
"Geez babe, it's only been like…five hours. Sorry I'm so sexy, but don't you want dinner?"
"Ass," Miranda retorted in her best ice queen voice, kicking off her heels and bee-lining for the bedroom to change. Jack dumped the plates on the coffee table, snagged a beer for herself and a glass of wine for Miranda. She'd been the only one unsurprised by the speed with which society had gone back to brewing alcohol after the war – it wasn't the best quality, but it was a damn sight better than living through this bullshit purely sober.
As an afterthought, she also grabbed two pieces of cake from the fridge – Shepard's birthday had been the week before, and every one of her friends and former crew were still working through the massive piles of cake that had been presented to the official Saviour of the Galaxy.
When Miranda re-emerged, dressed down as nobody but Jack ever saw in sweats and a t-shirt, the ex-con was already leaning back on the couch, feet up and mouth full, flicking through their list of vids. She didn't even bother to comment on Jack's feet on the table – they'd reached an agreement on that a long time ago. Instead, she took up her plate and glass and settled in beside her mate for dinner and a move, Jack and Miranda style.
As Jack fluttered towards sleep later, wrapped up in a familiar set of curves, a bit of a line from an old song teased its way into her head and out of her lips, mumbled into the curtain of Miranda's hair.
"Just another day in paradise…"