allthatgoes | I don't even want to touch it unless it's in the 119s

Emma wanted to know. Yaz and May, now.

It's been about a year, now, since Cassandra left. It's been a little over a year, now, since THEY went to shit and our leading pair managed to survive purely based on luck. ~~It's been well over a year, now, since Rue has tried to write in present tense.~~

But now isn't all that interesting. It's the beginning of it, the changes, that are interesting enough to tell a story.

The world they're in is Yaz's own, and they manage to hide out with his parents and sister in Devils Lake for about a month before choosing to check out Boston, and eventually settling in New York City (after going to a Sox game or two). May still finds it familiar; it's close enough to her home that it suits. Not exactly the same, but the tech level's similar and originally, too, they think the magic level is – but this NYC is sort of suspicious, filled with spaces that just don't feel right, and kind of, a little, the way certain things at Headquarters felt. They learn when they go talk to the NYPD, to see if they can do something, anything, with whatever skill level that they have, that there's quite a lot of decidedly other in the area and there really isn't anyone else to deal with it. Yet.

Now there's them.

(They also learn that it's the beginning of 2006, which Yaz had forgotten. They're confused, but not for long. They get used to it. Yaz is 38. May is 19. It's still the same.)

They're hired to help with all the weird, the other, the things they jokingly call Lost Information Experiences just to be able to say they work on LIEs. Soon enough, the department grows, and becomes the Lost Information Bureau. It's just about as innocent-sounding as "LIE," in the way where nobody really knows what "Lost Information" is besides something related to things nobody can understand. Yaz and May become the Administrative Department – eventually they're just referred to as ADLIB and people stop talking about what it stands for. Some don't even know. They think it's hilarious. Fantastic. Familiar.

(There's nothing really administrative about the Administrative Department. They're still some of the only people who do field work. Their entire department is rather small.)

May turns 20 in August (as she is wont to turn a year older in August, having been born then), and they buy a dog. A Jack Russell Terrier. They surpass naming him Gibson, Valdemar, Vichy, Finn and even Thacker (one that May never really knew the humor of, but she trusted Yaz enough) in exchange for the more personally neutral "Rutherford B." She takes her second exam, and can carry Class B firearms. He's proud.

By September, they've got their own lives again. They aren't clinging to each other just for the sake of feeling safe. They don't feel threatened anymore. They aren't running from anything. They're together because they live together, together because they're friends, because they need each other in different ways, like partners, friends, father and daughter, master and apprentice, boss and assistant, changing depending on the moment and the circumstances, but not together just because they're afraid to be around anyone else.

The cases get more and more interesting, but some are just plain unsolvable. The disappearance of a girl named Schubert in 2004, exactly a year later, the son of the French consulate Cormier – in the same location. Some kind of vortex, they determine. They can't get anything else, because that exact date has passed, and whatever dimensional vortex was there isn't there now. An unexpected sourceless virus, and that's when they meet the city epidemiologist Clint Abelard and his assistant Lexi Schuster. There's something familiar about her, too, and it takes them both a few days to place who she reminds them of, and when Yaz asks if she knows a Marcus, she says "Doesn't everybody?" and that answers that.

His parents come to visit when he turns thirty-nine in October, and May tells him he's on the top of the hill, now, so he'd better enjoy the view. He frames his favorite pictures – one of Cass, one of Juilliard and Lien, and one of him and Chris – in the new frames they buy him and put them on his desk at work. A million people ask about Cassandra. He tells them all she's his ex, and yes, he does still love her. This actually leads to him getting an office girlfriend, because obviously his pining for someone else means he's just that much more eligible.

They don't know about what's to come. They don't know when they go out to dinner with Captain Rafael and his children that his eldest is going to meet a man named Jerry who's really Lord of Newhaven. They don't know the lord's going to fall in love with her, and set off a chain of events that leads them to not only enter the world adjacent to, and connected to theirs, but lead to the solving of the Cormier and Schubert cases (aided by a Fire Master named Marcus, who isn't quite theirs, but he's close enough) and to Yaz's finding Cass again. They don't have a clue. They're not thinking about it.

December, and they aren't even thinking about their former lives anymore.

It's safe, here (or so they think).

It's better.

It's okay.

Endnote: Clint Abelard belongs to Robin Cook. I'm shameless. Every other character mentioned is either mine or someone's on my flist, though, I promise. Also, yes, Devils Lake is a real place. Yes, he is really from North Dakota, not Boston.