tammaiya | For Jill.

Title: Change
Rating: PG
Fandom: Good Omens
Pairing: Adam/Pepper
Genre: ... just Romance, I think.
Notes: Okay, yes, gasp in shock. Celestina wrote het. This doesn't happen very often, especially not when unrelated to school, but there you go. My inspiration was for het. *shrug*
Summary: Pepper is fourteen, and the only thing she wants is to be eleven again.

Maybe life would have been easier if she’d had some female friends too, but that was Pepper for you. She never did things the way other people did.

As a child, Pepper had never liked being told that things changed. Why should they? They were perfectly good as they were, she thought. Pepper didn’t want to grow up.
You’re becoming a lady, her mother said. Pepper hated it when her mother said that. Being a lady seemed to mean endless problems, almost all of them coming right down to hormones. Worst of all was the fact that it was hard to stay one of the guys when there were obvious physical differences.
Growing up seemed to largely consist of having more problems. There was more schoolwork, more responsibilities, and more expectations. Sometimes it felt overwhelming, and Pepper wanted to cry even though she didn’t do things like that. People were disappointed when you weren’t interested in clothes or makeup or jewellery or boys, and then other people would over-react when you wore a dress. She could still remember the shell-shocked expressions on the Them’s faces the first time she’d worn makeup. Whatever you did, you couldn’t please anybody.
Pepper was fourteen, and she wanted nothing more than to go back to the days when she was eleven. She’d always had a feeling that something strange had happened back then, but she was privately of the opinion that anything was better than this.
The others had started treating her like a girl, and it was quite possibly one of the most horrible experiences she’d ever been through. Sometimes they’d stare at her when they thought she wasn’t looking, and it would make her blush, which really annoyed her. She hated herself for reacting so girlishly, she hated the way that blushing clashed with her hair, and then she hated the fact that she’d think of something so typically female. It was a never-ending cycle. It frustrated her even more when they acted like she was fragile and delicate, like somehow puberty had forced her to morph into some kind of fainting feminine desert lily or something.
She hated it most of all when they were right. Growing up’s like that, her mother said. Boys and girls change, become different. Girls become prettier, and boys become stronger.
Pepper really hated change.
Sometimes talking would get awkward, because really, what could teenage boys and girls talk to each other about? The guys had no interest in clothes or boys for some strange reason, and whenever Pepper tried to talk about girls with them they got all squeamish and embarrassed. The gulf between girl-things and boy-things seemed to widen, and she had subconsciously thought that that was one thing that wouldn’t change.
All things changed- she should have remembered that.
She did find some consolation in the fact that Adam was finding it just as difficult as she was, which was more difficult than either Brian or Wensleydale. It was a pleasant contrast, especially since Adam had always seemed to breeze through life up till now. He’d been special, in a way. Life didn’t seem to be as tough on him as it was on most kids. He somehow seemed to escape from all the teasing and all the incidents that temper the joy of childhood.
Not so, anymore. Adam was having a tough time of it. Out of the three boys, he was the only one whose voice literally broke rather than deepening gradually, and the Them never let him forget it. Pepper found it particularly amusing when his voice cracked in the middle of a sentence.
Teenage years had hit Adam very hard indeed, Pepper reflected. He had gone from being a relatively happy and agreeable child into a sometime surly, moody ball of typical teenage angst. He was fun when he was the old Adam, but his temperamental bouts of inexplicable sulkiness could get a bit wearing.
Adam had recently developed a strange tendency to stutter and blush occasionally when talking to Pepper, a phenomenon that she found both mystifying and amusing, but also mildly irritating. It was nice to know that she wasn’t the only one suffering from the urge to blush at times, but it was a very distracting thing to happen during conversations and made them even more awkward.
Maybe life would have been easier if she’d had some female friends too, but that was Pepper for you. She never did things the way other people did.

“Pep?”
Pepper decided firmly that she would never understand maths, and slammed the textbook closed with a bang. “Yeah, Adam?”
“If you could go back to being eleven… would you?”
It was the way Adam said it that gave her pause more than anything else. Something about his tone gave her the strange impression that maybe her answer was important, that maybe if she said yes Adam would make it happen. She didn’t know what frightened her more- the concept, or the look that Adam was giving her, intense, like he was seeing her the way she was and not the way she used to be.
Pepper was not used to being afraid. Once upon a time, she had been afraid of almost nothing.
For all her complaining… if she was offered the chance, would she really go back to being a child again? You can’t cross the same river twice, they said, and Pepper had always thought it was a stupid thing to say. Of course you could, what else were bridges for?
She was beginning to understand what that metaphor meant, which was possibly as much as sign of maturing as her growth spurt. The river moved on, and you were left behind. Maybe the river you crossed looked the same and was in the same place, but it was a different body of water. The old water had flowed away, and there was no way of recapturing it.
Pepper slowly began to imagine what it would feel like to be eleven forever, suspended in time at that one age and never able to move on. It would be terrible, she realised dimly. Pepper didn’t like change, but even she knew that things shouldn’t be left to stagnate. What would be the point of life, if there were never anything to aim for?
There would be no reason to talk about the future, because she’d be stuck at the same level of school forever. As much as she dreaded the idea of graduating, a part of her wanted to be an adult, be allowed to drink legally and to go to University.
There were some things she did like about being fourteen, anyway. She knew that she’d changed mentally as well as physically and emotionally, and when it came right down to it she liked being smarter and more mature. She didn’t really mind when the others stared at her, because sometimes it seemed like she was the special one, not Adam. She even liked being pretty, now that she thought about it. There were a lot of problems to being a teenager and it was fun to blame everything that went wrong on her age, but overall she did like being fourteen. She didn’t want to be eleven again.
Adam, sensing that Pepper was thinking it through, stayed considerately silent. If it was what she wanted, he’d turn back the clock and keep it there. He had gone out of his way not to use his powers over the last three years, but the temptation was always there. It would be so bad to turn back time, would it?
Pepper definitely understood the concept of consequences to one’s actions much better than Adam did, which was good. She could handle the maturity for both of them.
“Would you?” Adam repeated softly, seeing that she had apparently come to a conclusion.
“No,” Pepper replied gently, looking Adam straight in the eye. “I want to be fourteen. I want to grow up.”
Adam stared at her, surprised, and then he grinned. That grin… Pepper almost thought that it was the old Adam again, but then she realised she was wrong. Adam had changed, they had all changed, and it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Adam was a slightly different person now, and so was Pepper, but the Pepper she was liked changed Adam, so that was okay. If she had changed and he hadn’t, they wouldn’t have been able to continue being friends.
Adam continued to grin, and for some reason Pepper started blushing. Before she could ask what classes he had tomorrow to change the subject, he leaned over and kissed her, once on the lips, and sat back shyly to see her reaction. Pepper smiled.
To be completely honest… maybe she liked being a girl, too.