Why did you run?
Who: Kaylee, River, and Billy
What: Kaylee is confused
When: January 16
Where: Starting at the hangar, continuing to wherever Billy is
Rating: PG to start? No idea!
( Kaylee had been worried for weeks... )
What: Kaylee is confused
When: January 16
Where: Starting at the hangar, continuing to wherever Billy is
Rating: PG to start? No idea!
( Kaylee had been worried for weeks... )
Dr. Horrible was hard at work.
He'd found this warehouse early on, and staked his claim right away. Abandoned warehouses were classic villain territory, and it made an perfect place to store and work on projects that were too large or volatile to keep in his main lab. The very first thing had been to make sure nobody took it into their heads to rent it, or even wander inside to investigate. He'd accomplished this by setting up a subtle electrical field around the outer shell of the building, so that anyone who approached the walls or doors would start to feel an uncomfortable, quivery sort of tingling under their skin, nothing strong enough to pinpoint or necessarily even realize was unnatural, just enough to irritate. Whether they thought they were getting sick or that a storm was coming or that the building had fleas, he didn't care, as long as it got them to leave. It had worked well enough so far - most people didn't venture out this far from town anyway - but recently he'd backed it up with the beta version of his new Thought Manipulator. All that was doing for the moment was 'suggesting' that a person didn't want to come in here anyway, that they'd much rather go anywhere else.
The combined barriers only covered a few feet around the outside of the building; he couldn't have the annoyances extending inside, after all, it would drive him crazy. But it would take an extraordinary determination to walk past both those dissuaders. And then there was the 'CONDEMNED' sign he'd put up. He could work in peace.
And work he was, on the project that had taken most of his concentration for months. The machine's central core was in the precise center of the building, hulking nearly fifteen feet tall and almost as wide. A forest of thick cables criss-crossed the floor, linking sections of the machine that ran all around the outside walls and up them, the device climbing the walls like a living organism. Still more cables emerged from those, some twenty feet up the walls, draping across the intervening space to connect to the smaller hub set in the center of the ceiling.
It was chilly in the warehouse. Though setting up a heating system had been simplicity itself, it had to be kept fairly cold, to keep the enormous machine from overheating. Lights blinked and generators hummed from all directions, but the hulking central core was dark and silent. Goggles down over his eyes, Dr. Horrible stood on scaffolding beside the core, sparks flying as he welded together a connection inside the machine with a small oxy-acetelyne torch.
Oh yes. He was fine!
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Inside, River looked up at the mechanical creation, complex and tangled in wires, and her breath caught in her throat. Gloves removed, River's half-moon nails bit worriedly into her skin, leaving sickles of pink and red against the white of her. The machine's nerves laced up and around, all laid out in a cold, cerebral map into the brain of the thing.
brain. but no heart. brain without a mind.
There was the artificer -- standing high on his pedestal of creation and raining lightning down on his subjects.
River was speechless.
How did one approach a god?
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And, of all people, her. He could only think of one prospect that would be worse. (Though having the Doctor turn up might be equally bad. He didn't completely have the Doctor's measure yet.)
"You," he spat. Turning on his heel, he climbed down from the scaffold and stalked over to confront her. "How did you get in here? No, never mind, just get out!"
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River staggered a small step back before remembering his mortality. Surprisingly because she realized she knew that gods weren't real, just a preacher's bedtime stories. But for a moment, only a second, there was a glazed look of fear behind her eyes.
Breathe out, breathe in: lift your chin to show them you aren't afraid and shake your head to demonstrate your defiance.
"No. I won't." Swaying a little, she looked around his shoulder and at the enormous mass, looming like something out of a horror movie. Her hand moved to rest lightly against his arm as River slid around, intending to approach the enormous machine. "It's a -- it's..."
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"I should kill you just for walking through that door. For having seen all this. Is that what you want?" he demanded, black anger edging every word. He should, and he knew it. He should at least wipe her mind. The Thought Manipulator wasn't perfected, but she'd make a perfect test subject. And yet all he really wanted was for her to leave, before he found a dark enough place in himself to actually follow through.
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The bad doctor still stood in the way.
And he was talking, his lips moving in threatening-like motions, making empty words law like he was the artificer River at first thought he was. She looked up, tearing her eyes away from the machine to stare through his goggles and into him.
"What would Kaylee think?"
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Hate hate hate.
How dared she? How dared she invoke the name of the Girl now, when he'd almost forgotten, almost crushed that part of himself so far down that despair could not distract him. He was still furious at himself - at all of himself - for having let things get so far out of hand. When he'd come here, Billy had been barely a whisper in his thoughts, a flicker in a candle ready to go out completely. He hadn't intended for that to change so much. For Billy to have made friends, to have established the trappings of a life of his own again - at first it had just been to keep his cover, but he should have known it wouldn't stop there.
He should have killed this fascination with Kaylee weeks ago, but Billy had shown unexpected strength of will. He couldn't let it go. And then something had happened, something which no brain scan or blood test could nail down, something that had changed him.
Just long enough to really louse everything up.
When they'd come to their senses, Billy had recognized as well as he had the severity of the situation. He'd run from Kaylee and he'd run from himself, back down into the dark hole he'd inhabited after Penny's death. Being turned back into a child had pulled him out, but when his memories had returned the pain had come back, all the sharper for having been forgotten.
The only way he knew to deal with it was to retreat. And Dr. Horrible preferred it that way. It gave him the freedom to work without all that distracting angst getting in the way.
But River was speaking to that other part of him. And what right did she have?
"What that girl would think isn't really of any concern to me," he ground out through clenched teeth. "I hardly need her approval, or yours."
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What River found to be her savior happened to be exactly what the bad doctor saw as his downfall. Friendship. Love. All of these things grounded her, keeping her from falling upwards.
Shaking her head, River spoke with a curious expression, doubtful of her own words but knowing that they meant exactly the correct thing. "I don't care." A strong hand grabbed his arm as River moved beside him to look fully at the machine, but she came no closer to it. "I don't care about this." In an intellectual way, she did. She was fascinated by the mystery of it. But that wasn't the point.
"She -- loved -- my brother." River kept a tight grip on his arm, and then his wrist, eyes vacantly staring at the machine. "He was doctor-type as well. She...wasn't happy. Smiled, but grew sad when I spoke his name. Always tears following Simon...until you." River looked up at him, then, lifting a hand slowly towards his goggles.
"...her name is Kaylee."
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He did not want to hear this. Did not want to hear about Kaylee's feelings, did not want to think about her as a person, about how he'd hurt her - about how he could fix it. He had goals, he had dreams, he had a purpose, and she would only distract him. He couldn't afford to care about a person the way he - the way Billy - wanted to care for her.
She would suffer. Couldn't River see that? She would only suffer more.
"Where do you think she has a place here?" he asked harshly, fingers tightening on her thin wrist. Why wouldn't she see? "If you don't want to see her sad, why won't you let me keep her far away from this? From all of this?" His voice was rising in spite of his efforts to keep it steady, raw emotion fracturing his control. "It doesn't matter what I-- what she feels! Do you honestly think that if she walked in here right now it wouldn't break her heart?!"
And that was probably the best possible outcome. If he broke her heart, and she went away hating him, and eventually found someone else to love with her brilliant, generous heart. That was what he was trying to do now, wasn't it? Because if she didn't leave now...
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"The layers are separated like I am. Me. But you have a choice and I can't -- " Her eyes flickered again to the machine and River bit down hard on her bottom lip. Why couldn't she understand what it was? Everything was becoming blurry around the edges, harsh lines of metal and wire smoothing and coagulating into a singular, gray mass. River could not help but feel his emotions. She could not help but nearly collapse in light of the powerful, visceral taste of them in her mouth like blood.
"It matters. It matters so much." She didn't want it to be him. Why did it have to be him? Why couldn't Kaylee find someone right? And at the same time, River knew. Like she knew everything else, that it had to be Billy and everything that came with him.
"She's outside."
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"She can't."
Releasing her, pulling his own arm free, he yanked the goggles off his eyes to sit askew on his forehead. In the eyes that stared wildly at her was only fear. Only Billy. "She can't be - you have to get her away, tell her there's nothing here, just keep her away! If she sees all this--"
Anything but that. Anything but her. Anything but seeing the look on her face when she realized...
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"She has to." A crumpled bit of something was pulled from River's pocket as she took him firmly by the hand. Something about this was familiar. The little, smiling girl with dark braids and dark eyes who took control and shoved unsuspecting future scientists into photo booths.
"You used to be one person. She likes both. Kaylee likes both." So maybe River didn't exactly like him, but there was something there, somewhere in the feelings of muddled fear, suspicion and arrogance. Because Kaylee loved and trusted him. The effect was contagious.
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Penny was everywhere. Standing before him with an accusing stare in her dark eyes, hovering over his shoulder, filling his thoughts. Her life ebbing away as he watched helplessly; her body dangling limply from his arms, too light and empty; her blood staining his white coat red. Changing all the rules. Changing everything in one last faltering heartbeat.
"I can't have both," he whispered hoarsely. "I can't have both."
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The first few moments hadn't been too bad, but the longer River was in the building, the more worried Kaylee became.
And then the shouting started.
She couldn't really make out words- the wind picked them up and carried them away. She could tell it was Billy doing all the yelling, though there was something different in his voice-besides the obvious anger- that Kaylee couldn't quite place.
Finally, it all just became too much. The cold, the yelling, the not knowing. Timidly, she slipped in the same door River had disappeared through, a momentary sense of happiness as she got out of the cold. It soon passed, though, when she saw the sight in front of her.
"B- Billy?" Kaylee stammered, her voice quiet and unsure. If what she was seeing was correct, it meant he had lied to her, lied from that very first moment in the hardware store. "River?"
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But he couldn't. Suppose she did forgive him. Suppose, god help him, that she still liked him.
Better by far if she ran away now, far away, and avoided him as assiduously as he'd been avoiding her. Then she'd be safe.
He should never have come to this town.
He stared back at her bleakly, unwilling to say a single word in his own defense. "You shouldn't be here," he informed her, voice cold and echoing hollowly off the walls. Well... it was at least a small step more civil than the 'get out!' he'd snapped at River.
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Wait, no. Not just Billy.
Dr. Horrible
But Kaylee, for all her initial timidness, could be right stubborn when she got riled up, and she was more than a little upset at the moment.
"I wanted to talk to you," she said, trying to keep her voice steady. "I wanted to make sure you were alright."
She bit her lip, though, as the predominant thought in her head forced it's way out of her mouth.
"Why didn't you tell me?!?"
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