Quaranteam Ch. 50

"That was the three of you in the back, Nicolette, Jenny and Kate, yes?"

"We had all been told a bit about Andy before he arrived," Nicolette replied to Katie on screen, "and his answers to the questionnaire implied that he would eventually be willing to play into our tastes."

"Eventually?" Katie asked, a confused look on her face that Andy somehow suspected was probably genuine. He remembered this part of the interview, where it felt like Katie had wandered into a slice of life she fully hadn't expected to encounter. Nicolette's frankness often took a lot of people by surprise, and even Katie Couric wasn't immune to that.

"Well, sure," Nicolette giggled. "I know the first few times I called him Master, it rattled his cage a little bit, but he eventually realized I liked saying it, and nobody was making me do it. One of the things that we girls all figured out early on was that just because Andy was okay with something didn't mean he had any real experience with it, so we would need to hand hold him a bit through it. So while Andy said he was okay with bondage and discipline stuff in his questionnaire, he didn't have any real practical experience in it. So we've found ways to teach him about that kind of thing without it ever feeling like we were lecturing to him. He sort of set that expectation up front when he told us communication was everything, and he couldn't have been more right."

"And Kate? I hear that you and Jenny had a different experience," Katie asked. He hadn't noticed the look on her face at the time, but in retrospect, it seemed like Katie Couric had thought this might be a 'gotcha' moment.

"Damn, uh? Andy?" Kate (his Katie) asked him on screen. He was a little surprised they'd left this interchange in, but he supposed it just added to their credibility in the piece. It did make it extremely clear that they hadn't really discussed any of this beforehand, and that he was willing to air all their laundry. "How real you want us to get here?"

"We're not hiding anything, so fire away."

"So, uh, Katie," Kate coughed. The expression on her face, one he hadn't really been able to see during the interview itself, was one of worry, as if she might be getting herself or Andy into trouble with what she was saying. "I'm actually a lesbian. Not a bisexual who mostly identifies as a lesbian, I mean straight up, hardcore, one hundred percent, unrepentant fully committed lesbian. And Jenny here is my wife, but she's bisexual."

"Hi!" Jenny waved, as unflappable as ever.

"When we signed up for this, we, ah, we were planning on hiding that from Andy, and I was simply going to fake it, and go along with the ruse, so that we could stay together, and we could still get the treatment, which, as you already know, takes both a female and a male component to work. So I, er, we lied, and claimed we were both bisexual." The look on his Katie's face made him worry that she might take all of this harshly, but he looked over across the room and saw her smiling from her seat, Jenny in her lap. She even waved over in Andy's direction, as if to tell him it was all good. "Since we were married, wherever we went, we were going to go together, and we figured we could just keep up that lie as long as we needed and make it work."

"And what happened?" Katie asked.

"I started talking to Andy," Jenny said, part of the interview having been cut out. "And... and it all just came tumbling out, how we were a little unsure, how my Katie wasn't really into men, and, I just felt like I had to tell him everything before we were committed to anything."

"How did you react to that, Andy?"

"I could tell they were afraid that I was going to be angry, but I wasn't," the version of himself on television said calmly, in a way he desperately hoped didn't come across as patronizingly. "Why would I be? I simply wanted to talk with them about how they wanted to handle it, because at that point, I knew a bit more about the physiological effects of the treatment than they did, so I wanted to prepare them for it, if they wanted to move forward."

The shot cut to the one-on-one interview in his writing room again, as Katie asked him, "Would you really have been okay with Jenny and Kate leaving when you found out that Kate was a lesbian? Or were you just telling them that to make them feel better?"

"Of course I would've been okay with it, Katie," Andy told her. "That's part of the reason I make a point to talk to someone as much as I can before the whole imprinting thing, since that's currently irreversible. The last thing I want, the last thing any man should want is women paired up with him that don't want to be there. I want everyone who's at all involved with me to know as much as they can about what they're getting into before they get into it. I think that made Jenny and Kate feel a little bit more comfortable deciding to stay in the house."

Again, the show returned back to the large group shot once more, as Katie continued interviewing his staff. "Do you still consider yourself a lesbian, Kate?" Katie asked.

"Absolutely. I don't feel any sexual attraction to Andy whatsoever," Kate replied. "Now, with that said, I can also admit that I have received biochemically induced orgasms from him regularly as part of the treatment process, and I don't think that affects my sexual identity in any way. But Andy and I haven't ever had direct sex. He's offered, but he's also never pressured. I might take him up on it some day, to see if the chemical and neurological changes the treatment have made to me might compensate for my lack of sexual attraction to him, but then again, I may not. That's my decision, well, our decision, to make," she said, taking Jenny's hand in hers on screen, both women smiling confidently towards the camera. "And nobody's going to tell me who and what I am. I get to decide that, and fuck anyone who says otherwise."

"So if you haven't had direct sex with him, how are you getting what you need from him to keep your treatment managed?"

"Well, to be frank about it, I don't ever actually fuck Andy, but that doesn't mean I don't swallow his semen. I do that around once a week, either directly from him, or second hand from my wife. I consider sucking his cock just to be another task around the house that needs doing now and again. No offense, Andy."

He laughed on screen, waving a hand in his air, as the room full of his friends and partners laughed with him. "None taken, but you already know that."

From across the room, he heard Katie's voice loudly say, "Monday: Prune the hedges. Tuesday: Mow the lawn. Wednesday: Suck the boss's cock..." which made everyone in the room bust up laughing, especially with the workaday tone she'd had listing all the activities off.

"Andy's partners range from 18 to 38, and they come all sorts of backgrounds and walks of life," the narration said as the video panned across all of them in the wide shot. "They include women of multiple ethnicities and nationalities."

The video cut back to Katie in the large room. "Do you remember what ages you put that you would be comfortable with?"

"The low end was set to 18," Andy said on screen, "and I didn't adjust it, and I set the high end to 35. I suspected no one younger than their mid twenties would be interested in me, so the low end didn't really matter."

"You can start to see how his mind works," Hannah teased, as a chyron identified her as 'Hannah Nakamura, 18,' before fading away, "and how he just misses things sometimes." All the girls in the room laughed and the camera cut away to an interview with just Hannah and Asha, something Andy hadn't even realized that Katie's crew had filmed.

"Does the age difference bother you two?" Katie asked them. "You're both quite a bit younger than he is."

"Nah," Asha said with a giggle. Her chyron identified her as 'Asha Varma, 18, daughter of Doctor Charlotte Varma,' which Andy thought was a little bit unnecessary, but mentally conceded did tie them all together a bit more obviously. "Boys our age are bloody useless in the sack, an' one thing Andy's not is useless. I'm more satisfied with him than I've ever been with anyone. He's willin' to learn what a lady wants and he works very hard to make sure nobody's unhappy with their seshes."

"Andy was the first guy who made me feel like what I was getting out of it was important, more important than what he was getting out of it," Hannah told Katie. "I sorta wanted to rush into it, wanted to get imprinted to him, wanted to get past the first time and just have it be like, NBD, but he made me stop and think about it, and the first time I was with him..." Hannah blew out a whistle, shaking her head. "Well, there's boys and there's men, and I don't think I'd ever really been with a man before."

"He's much more generous with his physical affection than I thought an older man might be," Asha said with a giggle, the two teenagers clearly trying to figure out how much they could get away with pushing the line. "And willing to put in the work. So I can't say I have any complaints."

"And if you put our ages together, then we're basically his age exactly," Hannah laughed.

"Is... is that something you do? The two of you playing together with him?"

"We haven't done it yet," Hannah said, "but we're totes gonna. Andy's not bothered by us playing with each other when he's busy or not around, so group play, that's just gonna be hella normal in the new world. Em and Sares are a couple, Lauren and Taylor are a couple. As long as we're being safe and smart about it, this is just the new normal."

The image froze on Hannah's big smile in freeze from a moment before the stopwatch appeared again, signaling another commercial break, as Linda suddenly organized an impromptu toast in the room. "Let's hear it for the new normal, women in charge and not bound by the old fucking ways of the Puritans!" she said, raising a half-full glass of champagne.

"To the new normal!" the whole room toasted.

As everyone was drinking, he took note that Phil and Eric had moved to the back of the room, so Andy took the moment to slip from the couch and head back to join them, where Phil looked like he was about to go out of his fucking mind.

"I just don't understand how that's fucking possible, Eric!" Phil whispered loudly at him.

"Well, it happened, and it happened about two weeks ago, and that's all I know right now," Eric said to him. "I shouldn't even be telling you that, but at this point, fuck it, we're all looking out for each other first and foremost."

"What did I miss?" Andy asked.

"You're not cleared for it," Eric said to him.

"At this point you're gonna give me that shit?" Andy laughed. "C'mon. Fellas. If you can't trust me at this point, who can you trust?"

Eric looked at Phil, who nodded, then Eric nodded back at him, before Phil spoke. "You remember how I told you that we had a guy taken from us by the Russians?"

"Sure," Andy said. "McArthur or something."

"McCallister," Phil corrected. "He was one of the most influential people in developing the Quaranteam serum, as much as I disliked the prick. He defected to the Russians in April, only a couple of weeks after we had the functioning prototype of the Quaranteam serum up and running."

"They also tried to kidnap you too, Phil," Eric added.

"Bah, minor shit," Phil said. "Anyway, Eric's reporting that McCallister's been taken from the Russians, by parties unknown, and that he's no longer in Russia."

Andy looked at the two men, entirely unsure what to make of the information, although it had worked up the other two quite a bit. "Is that good or bad?"

"Fuck, Andy, neither of us really know," Eric said. "But the Russians should've had a fully functioning version of the Quaranteam serum for themselves by now, and yet the male fatality rate in Russia is way higher than expected. We think it was a manufacturing and distribution problem, but they're looking at like 92-94% male fatality rates."

"And Adam McCallister, who's responsible for the imprinting part of the serum that he snuck in without any of us fucking noticing," Phil hissed, "is in the possession of person or persons unknown, in an unknown location, doing who the fuck knows what?"

"He was extracted a couple of weeks ago, but I just heard from one of our field contacts about it, since the Russians have been trying to keep his kidnapping quiet," Eric told them. "But even with their two week head start, the Russians don't know shit about who's got him or where he is."

"Couldn't they have done me the fucking courtesy of keeping their stolen supervillain under lock and key, instead of letting him go out on fucking strolls in the goddamn park?" Phil grumbled. "Anyway, keep this shit under your hat, gentlemen. Need to know, James Bond type stuff. The last thing we need is anyone freaking out about it."

"Anyone else you mean," Eric corrected.

"Yeah, well, I'm allowed to freak out," Phil said as the three of them split and headed back towards their couches.

As Andy slid onto the couch, Niko leaned in to whisper to him, "Everything okay?"

"More shit for Phil to worry about," he told her. "I'm sure you'll hear about it soon enough, but it's not immediate. No need to worry about it tonight."

On screen, the stopwatch reappeared and began to tick once more. The video cut back to the shot of all of them in the group interview. "By show of hands, how many of you would say you identify as bisexual?" Katie asked them.

Aisling, Niko, Emily, Sarah, Lauren, Taylor, Sheridan, Tala, Hannah, Asha, Nicolette and Jenny raised their hands.

"So the rest you, with the exception of Kate, are straight?" That left just Piper and Jade.

"For now," Piper said. "A couple of the girls who are still on their way are also strictly heterosexual. And our opinions on the matter might change given enough time. It's never smart to rule something out completely."

"Here's another face you might recognize - Piper Brown, an Olympic gold medal winning volleyball player," the narration said as the camera lingered on Piper for a moment, a chyron identifying her, her profession and her age for the audience. "Her journey to join Team Rook had a few bumps along the way."

Andy tensed up, terrified they were about to witness a trainwreck, half-expecting a segment about Piper's treatment at the hands of Covington to interrupt, but instead, the segment continued with something he fully remembered happening on the day of the interviews.

"Piper, you were actually supposed to have competed in the Olympics again by now. How does that feel, knowing that when it starts up again next year, the US basically doesn't have almost any of their male athletes to compete?"

"At this point, it's impossible for it to even make sense in my head any more, Katie," Piper sighed. He could see that she was still trying to make sense of all her grief at that point in the interview, as it bubbled up again. "Most of the people I trained with have died over the last several months. A lot of my trainers died. I've lost colleagues, friends and family members. I don't even know where to start mourning, because there's so damn many people to mourn. I consider myself lucky that my sister's husband took everything seriously, and completely refused to leave the house this year since the word of the plague got out."

"It's something we've talked about in here a bunch," Andy said on screen. "And we sort of keep coming back to that famous Stalin quote. 'A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.' It's so many dead men that the mind can't even make sense of it. It's like 9/11, but if each of the Twin Towers was holding exclusively almost every man each of us knew and loved. My own brother died a few weeks back, and he was one of the kindest and most careful souls I know, but he ran out to help someone get their storm shutters up before a particularly bad thunderstorm rolled through, and a few weeks later, he was just gone, almost overnight. It happened so fast, I didn't even hear about it until after he was already gone."

A bit of the conversation had been removed in the edit, as the camera cut over to Emily, looking solemn. "Normally, when a friend or loved one dies, there is typically a funeral or a wake, a gathering of all that person's surviving circle coming together, to celebrate their passing and remember them, but we have been denied that, and it has made all their passings that much harder to process, somehow transformed them all into seeming less real, because our normal emotional milestones haven't happened along the way. We are adrift in our emotional morass."

"That's true," Katie said to the group of them gathered in his little ballroom for the interview. "We, as Americans, haven't had to confront all the deaths simply because we aren't allowed to go out and do so, and that somehow makes it feel less concrete."

"It hits you every day," Jade said, "little by little. Lauren described it to me a few weeks ago as a slow motion car crash that we're all stuck in, and nobody can get out of."

The camera lingered on Jade for a moment, as the narration explained who she was. "Jade Dillon is the newest member of Team Rook. She's a 26-year-old kindergarten teacher, as well as being a cheerleader for the San Francisco 49ers football team. When we went to interview Team Rook, she had just arrived only the previous day and their relationship hadn't been cemented yet."

"So, Jade, I understand you're one of the newest arrivals here," Katie said. "Have you gone through the imprinting process yet?"

"Not yet," she said. "Tala and I arrived yesterday, but we wanted to wait a little bit, to spend some time with Andy and his family, to makes sure that we would be happy getting melted into their pot. I'm happy to say we're both going to do it, but it's the kind of commitment you gotta be certain of, you know?"

The video cut to a one-on-one interview Tala had done with Katie, something the journalist had told him was mostly just to set the context of the footage of her being imprinted for later. "So I understand you've agreed to let us film your face during the imprinting process," Katie Couric told Tala on Andy's giant screen. "Thank you very much for that. We feel like it's important people see that moment, and I know what a huge ask it is to reveal something of yourself so private so publicly for all of eternity."

"Nah, it's not really that big a deal," his Persian partner said with confident swagger up on screen. "It's just sex, Katie."

"How did you come to join Team Rook?"

"My friend Sheridan was assigned to him around Halloween, and when all the girls pitched their friends for consideration, Sheridan pitched me," Tala said, miming a little curtsy. "We've been friends since high school, and I think Sheridan just wanted someone she knew she could always share a beer with. Plus, the dude's chill and seems like a gas."

"Have you seen someone being imprinted?" Katie asked.

Tala nodded with a sinful smile. "Another member of the house, Nicolette's friend Whitney, who's also going to be staff, arrived with me and Jade last night, and she wanted the entire house to see her getting imprinted, so we all got a front row seat to witness what it looks like and how it happens. It's intense as hell, but you'll see for yourselves soon enough, I guess."

The video stayed lingering on Tala for a moment as the narrator set up the next section. "What you're about to see was taken with the permission of both Tala and the rest of Team Rook. It is explicit without being overly so, but we felt it was important for everyone to see this moment."