Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, General, 077. What?
Title: Rheology
Fandom: Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
Characters: Pinky, Nameless Intern, Rawhide
Prompt: #77 What?
Word Count: 991
Rating: PG
Summary: Contrast and compare the time before with how it goes.
Author's Notes: This one sounds like it'll be a two or three parter...I have no idea if it will actually continue...
One of the nameless interns learned how to drive the bus so she's in the driver's seat and Pinky's in the passenger seat, you know, just in case. The voices behind them are a low mumble rumble, beyond that initial burst of energy from leaving the after show party. Nameless Intern is navigating the trickery of a big city downtown, neon and electric promise flickering over her face while Pinky contemplates the confoundry of Unknown Fact #1479.
She twists the wheel like - not like an expert - more like she's coaxing a navigation from the vehicle rather than taking control. Penny used to drive like that.
Back when she was Penny.
If he turned around, right now, Pinky would see Peggy curled in Buckaroo's arm, the gesture more protective than possessive - but the slant of her body and the curl of her legs; that said it all.
The nameless intern whispers something as she twirls the wheel once more. A little rocky, but they make it onto the on-ramp and she accelerates without much ado. She works in one of those side labs in a peripheral science, an addition to the program.
It used to be that the hard scientists, the true rebels of physics and chemistry and biology and the excavators of the minute flocked to the institute like it was the one true haven in the world. Then more and more oddballs rolled in, and before you knew it, the institute was a massive conglomeration of genius and sincere intellectual pursuit of anything that had ever existed. In one lab they worked on bacterial tattoos, in another, they were building another damn spaceship. They even had this thing they called the food lab. It was half lab, half kitchen, Pinky didn't know whether to call it a pitstop or verboten.
They'd come out every once in a while and feed people, you couldn't tear Perfect Tommy away unless there happened to be a massive attack of the sex-starved bimbo brigade. No, that was unjudicious of him.
So back to Unknown Fact #1479.
"Did you know, eating the tomato was once considered taboo?" he said.
Nameless Intern taps her fingers on the wheel before flipping the turn signal to pass a semi. "Yeah, they thought it was a lusty slutty fruit, something responsible for the expulsion of the original dynamic duo from the Garden of Eden," she says. Her voice has a matter of factness to it and he could remember hearing it say Only one per - don't make me smack you. Only one, jerkoff. And the glare on her face when Pecos had pointed out that she had just called Perfect Tommy a jerkoff, and her righteous anger when she replied that she had known who he was.
"That's not really common knowledge," Pinky says, smiling and half turning in his seat, as far as his seatbelt will allow. Penny had a thing about driving when the passenger wasn't buckled in. She said once, those yahoos in the back'll get rolled around if, when I hit something. You'll go flying through the windshield. She refused to move until he'd buckled up, thinking he was just humoring her.
"To a food scientist it is," she said. "Well, to me, anyway."
"Oh," he says. "So you're in the ...food lab."
"Yeah," she says, "Where the food is."
He isn't quite sure, but he thinks he could see the hint of a smile between the glare of a billboard and the rear lights ahead of them.
"What's your name?" he asks. Maybe she had told him earlier, and he winced internally. There were so many of them these days, all so interchangeable. The BBIs, too. When one fell, another half dozen rose up to take his or her place. Use to be, they could mourn some. Used to be they knew everyone's face by sight and name by sound of voice.
"Bug. Not my real name, obviously," she says, grinning wryly, "But they started calling me that when we were testing the brownie mix. I kept 'bugging' people to try the sample and fill out the survey. They couldn't call Theo that - he's my boss - because he already has a des."
"A what?"
"A designation. Theo is short for Theobromos."
"Oh." Pinky nodds to himself and sits back. The rear erupts with a bark of laughter, quickly hushed for some odd reason.
Used to be the halls weren't filled with running talking laughing shouting kids, either. So most of them were in their twenties or late twenties, but these days, Pinky felt like calling anyone under thirty a kid. With that realization he sank back feeling an age he had placed on himself.
"Pull over," Rawhide says. He appears between them, holding the stair rail for support, his eyes tight with worry. "I'm driving. We have a situation."
Used to be they would simply tell the driver where to go, when that driver had been Penny, and they knew they would get there. Sometime between Penny and this string of interchangeable well-meaning interns, they'd had a bad pick with an agent of Xan. Now they had this tight trust no one mentality which had unknowingly placed a sense of otherness between the Hong Kong Cavaliers and Everyone Else.
Bug dutifully pulls off at the next exit and goes to sit in the back. She doesn't say anything, the whole time, but pinches her mouth in what her brother, another scientist at the institute, would call a sign of impending doom. Pinky, at this time, does not know or does not care to know that she had a brother at the institute, a physicist and general pain-in-the-ass named Brrr. Perhaps they had finally run out of sensible designations.
Rawhide doesn't bother to buckle in before they are off into the night and Pinky, for just a moment, sinks back in his seat and wishes for a time before.
EDIT: Fixed the tense change issue.