He isn't even hitching, this time - the car's about a mile down the highway, because sometimes you have to do the math and walking to the next store on the list is a better choice than punching someone in the fucking mouth, or getting in the car and committing voluntary homicide - but he must still read as "small and harmless" to a certain inexplicably inobservant segment of the population, because there's a car pulling over ahead of him anyway.
It's one of the stranger cars he's ever seen - the design calls to mind some sort of boxy, ultra-futuristic eco-car, but it's on the scale of a 1970s land yacht, and are those retractable wings? - but he's seen odder vehicles come through town on their way out West, so he swings the shopping bags off his shoulder and gets ready to give the "Thanks, but no thanks," to whoever's inside, however *interesting* they may be.
Interesting's the word for it. The woman who ducks out the door is wearing some sort of filmy wrap-skirt and nothing else, which means he's got an excellent view of some amazing and extensive tattoo work and her perky and rather fantastic tits. He has to remind himself rather firmly "down, boy, you fuck men," before he drags his gaze up - pretty smile, almost military buzz cut. Face that's doing strange things to the inside of his head.
"JD," she says, "I want you to guess where--" and then she stops. "Where's Daniel?"
"Do I know you?" he asks, slowly and as bored as he can manage, because the alternative is fucking losing it.
She frowns, and then steps forward and yanks the collar of his shirt down with one finger, just enough to see the start of his ink. The fact that he doesn't immediately have her writhing on the ground in pain is really all the answer he needs - the fact that his hindbrain is telling him that he trusts her implicitly.
And then she calls back into the car, "Woody, you fucking incompetent bastard cunt, you translated too far!"
And yes, apparently this is his life, because he knows the woman on the level where every cell in his body wants to get closer, but the man who crawls from somewhere to join her on the shoulder of the road, he knows on an entirely more intellectual basis: red hair, badly-tailored kilt with at least two knives in it, face to scare young children with and eyes that are several orders of magnitude older than the body he's wearing.
"I wasn't the one who insisted on taking a side trip several universes over, I said we should just wait at your place until they got home." He flicks a glance over - "You're the wrong JD, I take it?"
He rolls his eyes. "My Cameron Mitchell's a man. I have many years of extensive and intimate personal observation backing that up."
The woman - Cam - looks him up and down, thoroughly, and then grins. "Lucky bastard."
He doesn't say what he's thinking - doesn't say it, looking at her standing easy and free in whole bare feet by the side of the road - but she reads it anyway, and waves a hand over herself. "This is new - I was inching closer to full-time in the chair before I made them take me to the clinic on Tertius for a couple weeks. You think my Daniel and JD will like the surprise?"
She's smiling, but there's just enough of a bitter twist to it that he's fairly sure most of what he's feeling is burning jealousy rather than anything else.
"I take it you don't have a Daniel yet," she says, and narrows her eyes at him. "Well, c'mon, hop in: we can pick up your Cameron before we go back and get my boys."
"Wait a minute," says the redhead, "Did I say we had invited every Nielson and Mitchell in every possible universe when I invited your little clan?"
"That invitation was inherent in the fact that you fucked up the navigation," she answers. "Back me up!"
"I'm backing you up," answers the third person who has just exited the car: another topless redhead. "What am I backing up?"
"That we're picking up this universe's JD and his boyfriend Cam, since we're here anyway."
He offers her a handshake, politely. "Name's JD Nielson. Are you Libby or Deety?"
She laughs. "Libby - Deety's far too young and innocent to expose to you people. And you are welcome to come along, even though you weren't on the list. If I'm understanding right that you've got a male version of Cammie, I can't wait to see what the two of 'em together do to Lazarus."
"They're not on the list?"
"If this is the universe I think it is, they're not nearly as far along as you are, especially not in terms of what we need for Operation Galactic Overlord."
It takes him a second to call to mind what Galactic Overlord is code for. And then it hits him that he's standing by the side of a highway in Colorado, with an alternate-universe female version of his lover, two fictional characters and a goddam AI flying car, and he knows way more about their lives than he has any reasonable right to.
"I'm not surprised we're behind, we got distracted for awhile," he says, hoping they'll take that as 'having lots and lots of sex,' but knowing that Cammie, at least, will read him well enough to know better.
Not just Cammie - it's fairly obvious that they all know better - and he wonders for a second if somewhere they've already found his story written down, and how far into the past (and future) it was written - or if they really are all just that good at body language. Not just a fictional universe, he thinks, but a universe essentially populated entirely by Mitchells, bullshit optional. And he's almost seriously considering getting in that car.
Lazarus breaks the silence: he's been leaning up against Gay, listening, but now he says, "No offense meant - and since we're here, we could use the two of you if you're up for it. I know you've got the skills we need, and I'm sure you'd fit in with the family." He grins. "Hey, after we take care of Cameron, we could even give you your own body back."
It's only a decade of having Cam's southern politeness ground into him that keeps him from kicking the man's kneecaps out. Instead he turns to Cammie and says, "How did that man stay alive so long?" and "They haven't recruited Richard yet, have they?"
"It's one of life's great mysteries," says Cammie, "And no, but no spoilers. Though I'm fairly sure that one, at least, is incapable of learning from experience. So feel free to kick his kneecaps out anyway."
Lazarus looks from him to Cammie to Libby, and says, "I get the impression I'm not wanted here. I'm going to go in and talk to Gay; let me know when you've talked him into it."
"Set the damn coordinates right this time!" Cammie calls after him.
"How am I supposed to do that when he hasn't given me his address yet?"
It's a stupid decision in a lifetime of them, never say yes when the offer is "everything you ever wanted," there's no such thing as a free lunch, and he knows enough to know it isn't that, really, just a damn good try at it - but he and Cam can handle anything Lazarus starts, between the two of them. (The four of them. The five--?) And he'll be wondering, for the rest of his life, if he doesn't.
"Do come, JD," says Libby. "And pay no attention to the old man - none of the rest of us do."
"Okay," he says. "Fine. But I'm picking up the car at the Whole Foods first, because I've got groceries in the backseat and Cam'll have my backside if I go home without them again."
(Somewhere, in the file of various sorts of identity papers, he has a card - it looks a lot like a US military dependent's ID card, for reasons that are amusing to only a very small number of people, though it does grant access to quite a number of places - that identifies him as Jonathan Daniel Nielson O'Neill Mitchell Long. Cameron has a matching one. They've got a marriage certificate to go with them - only valid on a small number of jurisdictions a very long way away, but binding enough for all that - signed by all the participants who'd been on-planet at the time.
He'd brought it out to show Mama Mitchell the last time she asked him when he was going to let Cameron make an honest man out of him. He wasn't sure the reaction he'd been expecting, but he wasn't expecting her to look it over, raise an eyebrow, and say "He married the two of you in, but he still hasn't found the time to come by for Thanksgiving?"
Ever since he's been carefully not thinking about that one strangely-familiar afghan draped across one of the couches in the Long Family common room. Or that cookie recipe that he's fairly sure Tamara couldn't have gotten out of Cammie in only a couple of weeks. Or the fact that it was Lazarus himself who insisted JD put the Mitchell name before the Long.)