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Cat Hero eyed up Normal Hero with the look of two individuals who had taken an immediate dislike to each other. Cat Hero was currently snuggled up beside Jude and looking as smug as cats did; she was inordinately fat, and -- well, that was discounting Jude Lawson's Craisglist truck. It appeared that Jude Lawson was a lonely teenage broncin' buck with a pink carnation and a pick-up truck, but Hero Barrett knew that she was, in fact, out of luck. She legged it into the cab, and she and the feline stared at each other.

"Lawson, this cat is overweight."

It was. It was a fat cat. It was much too comfortably cuddly to be a Hero Cat, though it had the same kind of glare.

"All right. Drive to the Southeast and get us to Pound Street -- there's a vet there that does late-nights." She was all pro now. "We are going to get this cat its shots. We are going to get this cat checked up -- it could have rabies, for God's sake, no, I know it's not feral -- and then I am going to list all the ways that it is a bad idea for you to have picked up this cat."

They were going to be numerous. She was buckling herself in, scarlet eyes laser-beaming him.

"Can't we give it to Mr. Gottschalk?"

Sue Gottschalk was the go-to guy regarding cats.

Jude was a manic pixie dream girl. Jude did what Jude wanted. It was probably time to strangle Jude nearly to the point of death, just to show him that he should listen to Hero Barrett more and not dance off to do whatever he -- was that cigarette smoke.

"So let me get this straight," she said. "You are using your Captain for cat babysitting."

The cat didn't look too happy about the entire thing. It really was a fat cat. It was sheltered up next to Jude's thigh and looking at peace with the world -- she was starting to get the wrong feeling about this cat, the cat did not like her. She and the cat were not allies in the remotest sense, even though she was trying to do what was best for it. "Or not. You will drop the cat and I off at the vet. Then you will go and -- are you going to go and hit other people again."

It was testament to how far they'd come that she just sounded resigned now. "I'll drop you off at bo -- yes, I am going to drive your car. Stop acting as though I am molesting you."

Jude Lawson had won this time.

She would have preferred to, sourly, stay in the truck. With the cat. Or go off with the cat, for God's sake. She was not the type of girl who carried around a cat -- that was Elke Arma, or Serenade, or Pierrette. Mackenzie O'Connell could have even carried around a cat with aplomb. But she was not a cat girl. The cat made a noise of discontent as she hauled it into her arms, where it remained there boneless and annoyed and made tiny mrrrr? noises that she translated as: "I hate you." She was bringing a cat into a boxing ring. This was utterly undignified.

God, what had she gotten herself into. She had gone utterly insane.

-- there were people greeting Jude as she went into the bare-walled gymnasium, most of them men, a few girlfriends hanging around. He was greeting people. She covered herself in staunch dignity.

" -- hey, is that a cat?"

She wanted to reply with something cutting, but then a couple of the male boxers turned their attention to Jude and turned their attention to the cat instead. They were rubbing under her chin and skritching her ears and she was purring like some kind of feline whore. Boxers. Male boxers. Muscle-laden. Tough men, with tattoos. Making 'aww, baby' noises as the cat suddenly got all goo-goo eyed and let them pat her. She gave a look to Jude that said: I will destroy you. I will pull you apart and use you to make furniture. Jude gave her back an expression that was as cutesy as the be-damned cat.

The next forty-five minutes would, obviously, be hell. And after that she would murder Lawson and put him in a dumpster.

"So when's it due?"

There was a tall black man who was chucking underneath the cat's chin now. She didn't quite get it, and blinked. "When's the little lady due," he repeated, kindly, as though she were slow.

Due.

THE CAT WASN'T FAT.

IT WAS PREGNANT.

Hero looked at the cat: You mistimed whore, her eyes said. The cat said nothing back.

"I don't -- ," trying to get her dignity, "It's not."

"Should be any day now."

JUDE WAS DEAD.

She was now regarded as part of the girlfriends. They were all different to her; they wore skinny jeans and had painted fingernails. She was in jeans and a sweater. She felt awkward. She was the captain of the Zodiacs; seeing Jude get into any kind of trouble, she immediately wanted to pass off the grotesquely pregnant cat and wade in and get him the hell out of there -- seeing him rolling around on the floor getting the s**t punched out of him pinged her every setting. You have a soldier down. He is in trouble. Go. Go. Go. She squeezed down a little too hard on the cat, in fact, and it meowed in distaste; she took it and she laid it down at their feet, where it sat and immediately flopped on its side. The girls petted it with their shoes.

"I," she said, in distaste, "can see."

Jude. Jude.

"They always do this?"

"Each and everrrry time," said one of the other girls, who was staring. She was also popping gum. This was not Hero Barrett's kind of place. "Like I say to Jason. 'You're an idiot. Why do you let Jude Lawson get to you. You're an idiot, idiot.'"

It took her a while to realise that this was, in fact, Herald's girlfriend, her opposite number. She watched Jude rise, wipe his mouth of blood, look as though he felt like spitting it out at Herald's back. Disgusted, he simply turned his back and stalked away, giving the guy an emphatic middle finger.

Hero Barrett was a fighter.

Hero immediately wanted to get in there.

The cat was pregnant. This was making her feel awkward. It was making her feel small, which she'd never felt before. She kept giving it glares, but it really wasn't going anywhere (and if it decided to have kittens right there and then, she was going to be responsible for cat murder). "Jude doesn't listen to anyone."

"How long you been his girlfriend," said another gum-popper.

She hesitated for a moment, and said what was true: "A few weeks."

All of them sighed, sympathetically. It was strange to think that she had reached some bizarre feminine simpatico with these women. Jude was giving Jason the middle finger again.

The girls had all been nodding and making noises of agreement. And Hero had discovered that she was no longer able to control her flush; it started up from her neck and went somewhere into her hairline, making her look like a strawberry all over, and the other girls giggled as Jude came over. He was sweating through his shirt. His eyes were bright -- manically bright as his eyes ever were -- and it was Jason's girlfriend who said, "You only bring your girlfriend in here now, huh, you never brought in a girlfriend before. You changed, Jude Lawson."

The cat meowed, and dragged itself up to wind itself around his legs. Then it flopped down again, at Hero's feet. She was still flushing. Why was she flushing. "Your cat is pregnant," she accused.

Jude didn't seem to worry; he dropped to his haunches, rubbing over its distended belly. That cat was a slut, that much was obvious. It had probably just gone with the first tomcat who yowled at it appropriately. Especially if the tomcat had made some noise about missing her, baby. She was suddenly, acutely, outside-noise-dyingly aware that neither Jude nor she had considered the role of birth control ever at all.

She was a cat.

"You're going to have bruises tomorrow."

She had new friends. There was a chorus of "Bye, Hero!"s, and a lot of tittering -- they were older than she was -- and she picked up the cat. It was pregnant. It was fat. He was acting as though he had fathered the kittens himself -- now that was a horrible, grotesque thought. Ugh. Why did she have to have it. After a lot of goodbye petting from some of the boxers the cat was dead weight in her arms as she followed Jude out of the small gymnasium, back to his canary-yellow pick-up truck, and deposited the damned creature on his seat.

It just clambered into his lap when he got himself in. What a suck-up.

Hero pulled herself into shotgun, buckled up. Reached over and buckled Jude up for him, though he said "Yeah, yeah," and acted a little injured as though she was pretending to be his mom. She drove the thing in with a little more annoyance than was necessary to buckle up anybody into a seat, which he noticed -- he raised his hand up to her cheek, and Hero discovered yet again that Jude had the unfortunate ability to bring her up short.

She cradled her cheek into his hand, and said: "We should stop off at the drugstore first."

Now that was a bizarre demand.

"Can't go to the drugstore?" Her eyebrows had shot up directly into her forehead. There were a couple of reasons a man would not be willing to go to the drugstore; he had done an armed robbery at every drugstore in the city, he had some allergy to drugstores, he was manfully unwilling to go into a drugstore with a girl and buy a pregnancy test. The last one seemed hurtfully at the top in her mind -- she was a captain, she couldn't be hurt, she wouldn't be hurt. She could not be hurt. She was iron. "For God's sake, you can just park outside and I can go in. I won't make you leave your little pineapple truck."

It was more primrose than pineapple, but it still looked like something Spongebob would live in under the sea.

"I'll just go in by myself," she said tersely, and she looked out the side of the window. Now they were both doing it.