Day 59: Sun Room

[witchdetective]

Erika stood back to survey her work, and she had no idea why no one seemed to care.

By 'no one', she was referring to the soldiers who were on guard, who should be looking particularly anxious due to the atmosphere of this place. It didn't make sense in her mind. Someone who just took up a large chunk of the middle of the Sun Room to build a

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[touchedgod]

Billy was running out of stock reactions. He tried to reach back, to roll away time to a period where he would have known how to engage Castiel, and would have done so passionately. He could remember, almost, but couldn't bring himself to do much about it. He acknowledged, though, that despite the rotting food and the strange behavior, it had been... neat. He'd remember that one time he was locked up and had a maggot-filled breakfast with the angel Castiel. It would become a regular in his cycle of entertaining stories to tell over a round of drinks.

He would probably leave out any accounts of the end of the world. He'd save them for people who needed to know. Billy briefly imagined himself a little like Dane's grandfather, telling half-remembered accounts of saving the world, fighting monsters made of paper, being carried on the ocean to rescue Dane from the clutches of nazis. They'd be great stories, and by then, he'd probably be able to tell them in a way that didn't suck the joy from the room.

They asked little of him here. He was shown to a wide, open space, full of sun and couches and chairs. He gratefully claimed one that hadn't been commandeered for the construction of a blanket fort some of the others were making, at the behest of a few children. He watched them work. No one interrupted their efforts.

[For Kirk.]

[doneinthree]

Kirk's stunned disbelief upon greeting the post-breakfast sight in the Sun Room quickly transformed into a grin. It was nice to see the Institute's kids (and, uh, Scott Pilgrim) get to act like kids for once. Reluctantly tearing his attention away from the organized chaos of blankets and chairs in front of him, Kirk went to check out the bulletin. Spock's incomparably neat script was easy enough to find, along with a few interesting notes about their Rec Field shooter and a mysterious "device." He skimmed these, added his own replies, and ten minutes later, found himself with little to do except twiddle his thumbs.

What did the rest of his crew do with all of their free time? Plan strategies. Analyze data. Have very serious conversations about serious topics. He had no idea. It was moments like these which highlighted how painfully ill-suited he was to being a Starfleet officer. Give him things to shoot at, or an enemy to outpace using wits and determination, or a galaxy-saving mission to accomplish, and he would rise to the occasion.

But monotony and Jim Kirk? Not a good combination. Bar fights across rural America would attest to that. Of course, he'd grown out of that, just as normal people grew out of... blanket forts... and being terrible commanding officers...

Kirk turned decisively back to the room. Scott's fortress, he saw, appeared to be in direct opposition to the one dominated by a blue-haired young woman. While chivalry would forbid two grown men to team up against a teenage girl, Kirk understood the Sun Room now operated under a more arcane set of laws: playground rules. Which meant boys versus girls. Which meant Jim was now pushing a large couch over to Scott's side of the room - or trying to, anyway. Usually one couch was no match for that Kirk physique, but his arm was still tender where the bullet had torn through it. He stopped his efforts after three feet and looked around.

Aha. "Billy!" The man from last night, unmistakable from his glasses and the snarl of his dark hair, was seated alone, and not too far from where Kirk stood. He grinned when he caught Billy's attention, and motioned to the couch in front of him. "Help me move this to the fort over there."

[touchedgod]

Billy had been staring, rather without shame, at Kirk. It was one of his childhood heroes, after all. This time not in gold, but he still recognized him from the glossy movie posters. Even standing right there, flesh and blood (maybe), he was distant. Removed. He was Kirk, but not Billy's Kirk. He was removed from him and all his nostalgia, although that didn't mean the whole thing wasn't dripping with it anyway. Even if Castiel wasn't really Castiel, he seemed to believe he was. This man probably believed he was Kirk, and who was Billy Harrow to tell him otherwise? How would it be fair at all to tell them they weren't themselves? Maybe they had lost their minds or this was some joke, but let someone else point it out.

Oh, he had been caught. That was his first thought when he heard Kirk call to him. He tried to be surreptitious about it, and looked up benignly at his name being called. It ended up being pointless, because if the maybe-captain noticed, he gave no indication. He did, however, need help. Help pushing a couch.

Billy rose from his chair and went to Kirk while giving the second fort a suspicious side-eye. He noticed that Wichita, the woman from the other night, was with a man he didn't know. He felt a rush of relief. He hadn't been lying after all when he said she'd be fine. It'd been real blood, not ink, and he hadn't really known what he was doing. Thank god that she was alright, and fuck him or fuck kraken that Dane wasn't.

"Hey, you're... here. Sorry, I have no idea what's going on," he laughed thinly. Billy braced his hands on the piece of furniture, and didn't find the effort of scooting it along the floor to be too daunting. "Your arm still hurts?"

[doneinthree]

"It's a blanket fort. What more do you need to know?" It occurred to Kirk that this whole display made them seem suspiciously like the mental patients they were supposed to be, which would be pretty distressing to a newcomer who'd just been kidnapped from his home and called by a different name. Or maybe Billy thought he was part of some... top secret military training exercise or... something. Kirk had no idea what the soldiers told people. Knowing them, probably nothing.

While Billy pushed, Kirk helped, guiding the couch around other obstacles. The soldiers clearly noticed what they were doing, and just as clearly didn't care. Interesting. Kirk had done his fair share of boundary pushing before Aguilar had taken over, and was pretty sure the nurses would've considered this whole chairs-balanced-on-chairs and blankets-hiding-mischief endeavour precarious, and stepped in long before now.

But he'd already known the military didn't care much about maintaining the illusion for them. Kirk glanced over to read the letters on Billy's dog tags, which jangled against the arm of the couch. Rank E. That definitely put him at only a few days here.

"My arm's fine. Don't worry, it's far from the worst scratch I've gotten, and won't last more than a couple of days, anyway. Whatever technology they use on us when we're not looking makes injuries heal fast." He smiled confidently, knowing this was a lot of random information he was throwing at Billy. "So what have you been told about 'Landel's Institute' so far?"

Landel's Institute, like it really was some benign clinic. Kirk uttered the name with no small amount of sarcasm.

[touchedgod]

"I was told that," he paused to give the sofa a final shove, "that it used to be some kind of a mental hospital. They told people they'd dreamed up their lives." Honestly, if Billy had experienced that, what would he have said to refute it? No one on the outside would have believed that the things he had seen were reasonable or sane. Not even Billy. He knew now, of course, that it all had rules and explanations, like anything else in his old world, that place of day jobs and paying rent and sliding small creatures into jars. There was no real world anymore, though. It was all real and dangerous, and now that Billy had crossed over, he'd never truly go back. The awareness alone seemed like it would make the lines blur, and allow the magic leak into his life.

"Ran by its namesake, I guess? But recently a General Aguilar has taken control, and is trying to groom soldiers." Without details, it was a bizarre plan. Mad scientist quality, but with a military spin. Kidnapped soldiers didn't seem terribly loyal, although Billy half-remembered hearing something about Roman armies made of prisoners of war, or slaves or... something. If only the criminal mastermind of this scheme had based their plan around mollusca.

Not that it had helped them much last time. Billy's knowledge of squid had amounted to nothing, at least up until the end. The first end, the smaller and squiddier end, not the big one. The unknown still gnawed at him, even if it was hard not to smile back at Kirk.

"And we've been abducted. I'm assuming, at least, although you're a little high profile to be kidnapping." The question was shamelessly fishing.

[doneinthree]

"That's... pretty much it, yeah," Kirk confirmed, in a lighter tone than their situation warranted, as his attention now was taken up by the arrangement of blankets on their side. He didn't bother to ask if Billy had been briefed on the weirder aspects. Patchwork monsters and resurrection and brain surgery, oh my. Running around in the dark and getting shot at by a fellow prisoner already covered the "mortal danger" and "experimentation" parts of their deal.

At Billy's last statement, he looked up from his stolen bedding, eyebrows raising curiously. The sentiment, he didn't disagree with - or at least, Kirk didn't disagree he was "a little high profile," although that seemed to him the perfect reason to be kidnapped. It wasn't as if anyone from his world could find him, even if the whole Federation launched a search-and-rescue for himself and the abducted members of his crew. Why not grab the awesome people you could find in any given universe?

But Billy had no reason to recognize that Kirk was a starship captain - he'd only given the man his surname last night, and the colour of his shirt and the number of stripes on his sleeve was only identifiable to people who already knew Starfleet. In all his time here, he hadn't yet run into a random cadet who'd lived in the Federation Jim had grown up in.

On the other hand, random people who seen the Federation and Starfleet through other means... Kirk laughed at having once again encountered the totally bizarre scope of his fame. Given how anxious Scott and Peter had been over potentially destroying his sense of self by admitting they knew him as a fictional character, Kirk figured Billy was trying to be subtle.

Normally, this would be about when he decided to cut a young "Trekkie" a break and assure him that no such existential crises would happen, but this time Kirk just tossed Billy a blanket and went to retrieve an armchair. "I don't know, if I was trying to groom soldiers for some reason, I'd pick a few who already had the experience and training. Captain James T. Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise, by the way." Kirk grinned. "Since we didn't have time for a formal introduction earlier. Someone told you about me?"

[touchedgod]

Billy fought down a smile. It was a pointless, empty smile at the unbelievable and laughable direction his week had taken him in. From staring down the death of the universe and the burning of life as we know it, to trying to think of a subtle way to check if this was really Captain Kirk. Twists and turns didn't cover it. There was some metaphor in here about the snaking, coiling tentacles of a squid, but Billy lacked the energy to bring it to its full potential. Instead he just lingered on the memory of his specimen's undead arms, flopping and curling with unnatural, reeking life. It was no longer an apt description. He couldn't freely apply it to famous painters, or think about going back to his job and carefully arranging each tentacle. It wasn't beautiful.

Kirk obviously wasn't dragged down by such things, at least not now, not as far as Billy could see. He caught the blanket thrown his way, but kept his eyes on Kirk's easygoing swagger. Definitely the new Kirk, inside and out. "Billy Harrow," one full name traded for another. He felt a little like he needed a title as well, so added "Wayward scientist of the Darwin Center." in a less enthused voice. There was a time where he would have been happy to explain all the details of his work, show off his squid, the whole thing.

"Sort of," he admitted, and tried to search his brain for details about this Kirk. He would have felt a lot more confident bullshitting with his older, more Shatner counterpart. He still grinned a little, pleased that his knowledge of Star Trek had been practical not once, but twice. "Been interested in Starfleet since I was a kid. And you're kind of remarkable. You beat the Kobayashi Maru, right?"

[doneinthree]

"Since you were a kid? Oh. You're one of those people," Kirk realized, but goodnaturedly, his smile teasing. 'Those people' meaning his mother and father, who from the minute they took their first baby steps knew they wanted to be in Starfleet. Like Uhura and Spock - he could imagine their intense little five-year-old faces when they heard about Starfleet's stringent standards and thought yes, that could be me. Only a few years ago, he would've smirked at the cadets in their cute red outfits, all eager faces and destined to die in the cold of space.

Now the thought made him wince. This, he didn't show Billy, because it wasn't the most curious thing the man had said. The Kobayashi Maru? Kirk pushed the armchair in place alongside the couch while his mind turned this information over. Assuming Billy's knowledge of Starfleet didn't come from low-budget television shows, no one but a fellow Starfleet cadet would know about him and the Kobayashi Maru. Assuming it did... Jim had no idea. Did the other Kirk beat Spock's test too? The man he'd seen was all confidence and gravitas, with just a little cocky swagger, the very model of what a great Starfleet captain should be.

And Jim was... Jim. Cocky swagger to the hilt, and captain to a fracturing crew of four. He was surprised to find that the thought of that guy having once been a young man with the audacity to reprogram an unbeatable test warmed himself to, uh, himself a little. Maybe they really were the same person after all. He liked to think the other Kirk would've also been flattered by Billy Harrow's compliment, if not the repeated comparisons to his younger alternate reality self.

"And that's me. Third time's the charm. I think Spock would disagree with our definition of 'beat', though." Kirk straightened, hands on his hips as if surveying his handiwork so far, but the look he gave Billy then was searching. "You're not just a casual fan of Starfleet, are you? No civilian would know about the Kobayashi Maru scenario."

[touchedgod]

This was a poor idea. He knew it would be, at least abstractly speaking, but Castiel had made it much easier by refusing to engage Billy in his flirtation with inexplicable knowledge. Whereas Castiel had been suspicious, Kirk seemed pleased. Billy was treading dangerously close to getting tangled up in his own lies. Lies that weren't really lies. He had been a fan since childhood. He did know a decent amount about Starfleet, and Kirk as well, and the information had been obtained through completely benign and sincerely affectionate means. Kirk playing along with him was pleasant, because even the rebooted incarnation of Kirk was pleasant company (apparently from somewhat later in the film, considering his demeanor and lack of sullen bad boy undertones that Billy hadn't been a fan of). It was ultimately dangerous, however.

"It was just a method to deal with a test that was really designed mostly as a test of character," to demonstrate Kirk's tenacity to the audience. "It says a great deal about your qualifications as a captain, and I think that's really all they can ask out of it, from anyone. Uh, that Spock person included." Smooth, Harrow. Very smooth.

Billy shook his head abruptly, a physical manifestation of reminding himself not to dig any deeper down into this hole. Eventually, flattery would morph into disconcerting obsession. "Sorry. I'm not enrolled, if that's what you're asking. It just wasn't an option for me, and now I'm... my life's kind of a mess, actually. A real fucking mess. But before that I was pretty settled in working at a museum."

[doneinthree]

"The Darwin Center, right? You mentioned that earlier." Kirk had never heard of the place before, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. His aimless motorcycle travels rarely took him out of the country, much less the continent, and he couldn't say he was much of a scientist either, as Billy appeared to be. The only scientific establishment he really knew was Starfleet. That name seemed to point to Earth, at least. But what century? What was it like, this world which would imagine Jim Kirk as a fictional hero?

He'd been prepared at the start to keep teasing Billy, just to see how far the man would go to keep up the illusion that he knew Kirk through totally innocent, non-dimensional-paradox-causing means. He was doing better than anyone else so far (not hard, considering the competition) but Billy's unexpected swearing guiltily reminded Kirk of what he'd written to Peter just yesterday. It wasn't their fault they knew intimate details about his life, and it wasn't completely fair for him to poke at them about it.

It was Landel's fault. Aguilar. This place. They could get their kicks out of building blanket forts or teasing fans of their fictionalized exploits, but at the end of the day, they were all still here. Prisoners away from home. Kirk had been here so long that he'd almost forgotten what it was like, experiencing Landel's Institute in the first few days. How bewildering and troubling and exhausting it was to be ripped from your life and trapped as a lab rat in an inexplicable science experiment.

Although he got the feeling Billy was talking about something more than just Landel's. "Are you doing okay?" Kirk asked. He stepped closer and made as if he just wanted to grab a corner of the blanket in his arms, but his attention was on Billy's face. "I know it's rough getting used to this... especially when you already weren't having the best day before waking up here."

[touchedgod]

"Sorry, right," he muttered dismissively. He was repeating himself already. He couldn't keep track of what he had said, who he had told what. One free hand tangled in his hair as he tried to rub his skull, scratch the fog out of it and get back to a place where he could think. Not that he really wanted to think, because it meant combing over problems that were supposed to have been solved by now. And they were, in a way. Whatever would have happened, it wasn't up to Billy anymore.

He wished he could let go. Billy thought that with time, he probably could get to that point and sincerely not care if the world burned. He had cared enough, and it had gotten him nothing. It had robbed him of a lot. On the other hand, that place seemed as bad as this heartsick worry, even if it was making him more nauseous than the food ever could.

Kirk was talking again, and reaching out. Just for the blanket, of course, but the proximity startled Billy. He looked at Kirk as a real person for the first time. Whoever he was, whatever this meant, he was paving the way for some human connection, and it made Billy into a shut-in confused and frightened by the offer. He let Kirk take the blanket, but was locked in eye contact that would have been uncomfortable no matter what Billy's week had been like. Kirk didn't know the floodgate he was messing with. Billy was too tired to lie, too done with it all to put on some strong act. He wasn't the knight standing strong at the front (he had died), and Billy couldn't recall enough to say if as a christ, saint or prophet he ought to be unfailingly serene. Without Dane's presence silently insisting on Billy's divinity, the idea of being any of the three seemed increasingly abstract and infuriating.

"No," he answered, bland and apologetic despite his internal assertion that he deserved to feel hurt without shame. The wind died in his sails, collapsing like so many dead limbs, sluggishly reaching for something they lacked the energy to grasp. "I'm not okay. I'm not going to be. It isn't like I can't deal with this place, and I think I've earned the right to say I've handled a lot worse. I just don't want to have to do it again. Does that make sense?"