Fic: Of Life, A Dream and Giant Bananas
HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY TO rootesie !!!
*groans*
I've finally made it. Just let me tell you these things:
1. Don't try and travel just before, during, or right after Chinese New Year's while being in China
2. Don't break your laptop during Chinese New Year's while being in China (Happy Bunny Year to all of you guys by the way! May your bunny rabbits be rabid and fruitful)
and lastly: keeping Uni-internet access in China after a smallish move sure is complicated *groans some more*
Anyway, because I neglected you for so long I have a little gift for you guys. It's a story I began writing...let's just say a very long while ago and it's been dusting away between my files since then. Just be warned that it's an odd little story that has somehow managed to sneak it's way out of my dustbin:
Title: Of Life, A Dream and Giant Bananas
Characters: Jack, Ianto, Gwen, Tosh, Owen the whole works...plus Sunshine.
Genret: crack...I guess?
Rating: PG-13ish, me thinks ;P
Warnings: odd events, odd plot, even odder villain-- 1st person narration (shock!), traces of au...probably (shock-shock!), longer than what I usually produce (oh the horrors), unbeta'd (yes, yes I know) Also, you might find youself wasting away precious fractions of your lifespan on this little piece of fiction, sorry about that.
Spoilers: No spoiling here as far as I can see. Well, apart from the fact that Ianto kinda shags the Boss(whoops!)
Disclaimer: Torchwood doesn't belong to me but the BBC, I'm just borrowing.
A/N: Gods, I'm just not used to this anymore...or grammar, but I'm rambling again. Just ignore me and get on with the show. May you receive more from this fic than I expect.
Well, what can I say? There I was with my back to the wall, my life flashing before my eyes and me literally short off the shrieking like a girl part and--But I'm rushing things to much again. Maybe I should start with the beginning of the story.
It all began with a dream.
Or better: It all began on a night, a plain ordinary night after a plain ordinary day and two plain ordinary cases with two not so ordinary killings resulting in one almost successful rape of a Torchwood operative--Routine as always one might say.
With the small exception that it was 8 o'clock and that I was in my flat, because a fragile soul dressed as an annoying egomaniac with a really sharp set of scalpels decided it that would be a good idea to do the doctor-ly thing for once and send me home without reason. Not much at least.
It wasn't like I couldn't hold a teacup with those scratches if they could even be described as such.
There was no need to wrap me into cotton wool, especially with all the paperwork that was still waiting to be done, the paperwork that would still be waiting after the end of my involuntary little vacation.
Be it the adrenaline which was still rushing through my veins, the stinging pain on my back, the fact that Jack's order made Weevil cell cleaning sound like something kinky or just the anger about being sent to bed without dessert like a naughty boy, I was pretty much riled up and with nothing much to do I found myself dusting each moth infested inch of my flat.
That was kind of disgusting. You'd never suspect what crawls into your flat to die. Apart from that, it was completely unnecessary concerning my original objective so I put on one of Tosh's relaxation CDs which didn't work either. Neither did staring at that brown greasy looking stain on my perfect pristine white wall, staring at the ceiling...or the door, just so you know.
I guess it must have been sometime after my 'Scissor Sister's'-Dance-a-thon when I finally passed out from exhaustion, it's hard to say, there might have been more, there might have not. Brains are hellishly unreliable things. Never quite do what you want them to do; never work the way you think it should--- but maybe that's just me.
I was pretty much out of it, I guess, that -of course- was until this dream had to go and put a huge crack into my happy and rose scented life.
Just so we're clear, I've had my share of dreams up to that point. Some silly, some delusional and some with a horrid touch of reality to them to make the average nutcase envious of my fucked up brain. Then again, once you've almost been raped, processed and consequently nommed by a perverted worm man-thing-creep with more slimy appendages than I care to remember, your natural threshold for terror, horror and the other shiny likes gets a certain lift up to the higher realms of gruesome, or so they say.
Regarding that occurring dream where a giant floating banana tried to chew off my head... I was better off treating it as that what it was: Nothing. The therapy bill alone would have gorged my not so humble budget faster than I could say 'Bananarama' if I'd gone and try to interpret existential fears, oedipal aptitudes and deep rooting subliminal xenophobic tendencies into those brain burps.
Seriously, non-Welsh are not half as bad as some make them to be.
~*~
I woke up; sweat drenched and disoriented enough to involuntarily smash the lamp on the bedside table with my forehead. It took me a moment to gather enough wits to respond appropriately to the dull pain in previously mentioned forehead. The sensation of smoke, cold and pure unmasked panic was just vivid enough to send the blood cells racing and it took me a little bit longer to shake the irrational horror than it should have.
You see, I would have understood the tremble in my fingers if I had actually been able to remember the contents of my nightmare when I head-butted the lamp-- which was not intentional by the way, just in case you wondered-- but there was nothing except from the scratchy throat and the involuntary jazz hands.
I felt sick but that wasn't that much of a surprise with that freaking Lambada my heart was raving up in my ribcage. Anyone would have been sick in that situation and I tried not to bump into too many articles of my bedroom furniture when I stumbled my way to the loo. What did come as some kind of surprise to me at the time though was the massive boner I was sporting.
That was a new one, literally. I hadn't noticed it before which might seem odd to some of you but believe me, you'll get used to anything up to the point where you don't necessarily notice it anymore, in this case: my cock, as to which I will refer to as Bob for the duration of this little narrative.
So I found myself arms on the toilet seat and unavoidably faced with my crotch from where he practically waved me hello. Bob, you see is a tricky feller, bad sense of timing, always hits me unprepared. --Just like that kind of party pooper who crashes into a conversation uninvited to hijack it for no special reason at all.
Bob is someone to be cautious with. I wordlessly helloed back at him and was just in the process of deciding what to do with him when a new wave of nausea threw all my surprise about Bob's most inappropriate turn up overboard and had me sick once again.
It wasn't until much later, wobbling, knee bumping and swearing included, that I found my body back on my mattress ---well, at least most of it--- and that I found myself able to recover enough intact grey matter to ask the ceiling what the fuck was going on. Unfortunately my ceiling preferred to ignore me.
I threw a pillow.
I felt better, in a very gratifying kick-the-furniture-until-it-bleeds-kind of way. That was, of course, before gravity overcame the initial momentum and insisted on sending the pillow back into my face which in turn didn't make me happy at all. I tried venting my frustration into the pillow. That helped-- For approximately one minute and thirty-seven seconds after which I turned around and was harshly reminded of Bob's standing in this whole mess.
It wasn't the first time that I cursed his lack of decency.
I told him to go away, I think I might even have growled, he insisted on his position. I thought about thick black oily chest hair on a white, flabby chest-- even so Bob wouldn't waver, this in turn made me worry about the extent of Jack's influence in my sexual--whatever. Then I tried to think of granny without her third teeth which only made things worse and reminded me of Jack again and somehow I ended up wanking to a mental image of Jack and my granny on a banana boat... or rather, I ended up wanking despite the disturbing pictures which kept popping up in my head.
It wouldn't have been much of a problem if I've had a real Jack to block the ridiculously perfect imaginative one but Jack was in the hub and giving me time for myself because I might have involuntarily sent him to hell earlier that night Something for which I had cursed myself for the umpteenth time by that time.
And unless Jack didn't happen to have some kind of weird radar in his head which would go ping whenever I got horny---and God knows, sometimes I suspect him to have one of those-- I had to deal with my special but also very dumb friend on my own.
Of course I could always have called him, I suppose, but I'm saying that now and whether you believe me or not, I didn't even think about calling him for one second back then. Not that I was inclined to spare the pathetic touch of my actions any more thoughts than strictly necessary while I tried to wank this awkward, screaming and mind-crackling numbness out of my system by focusing on the imaginary sensation of Jack's slick hot perfect thighs flexing beneath my palms, the salt slick hot sensation of skin against my tongue and Jack's fingers in my hair--
Let's just say it didn't take me very long to get off. .
It took me even less time to notice Jack who was leaning against the doorframe.
That perverted bastard even dared to smirk. I didn't need to see the tent in his trousers to know that he'd been watching me for a while, 'cause like most of his smiles, this one was telling, even though he didn't seem very inclined to do anything about it in the nearer future. This in turn roused Bob again. This situation was calling for extreme measures: I licked my fingers. Slowly.
Jack was onto me before my tongue arrived at my index finger.
And, in contrast to my irrational fears, Jack was quite real, almost real enough to forget about the in-your-face blurb of panic bouncing through the back of my head. But then Jack had to go and gaze at me with that kind of look for just one moment too long and in an instant my throat drew tight, my spine turned to jelly, my lungs burned, my vision flashed red and screams blocked out any forms of audio input that might have done something to soothe that freaking panic attack--- but there was Jack, Jack's hands on my face, his eyes on mine and his warmth against my face and slowly the screams made way for sobs.
That certainly wasn't one of my most dignified moments.
Needless to say, the sex was off, which is probably a good thing considering that my nose was running, my eyes were puffy and I was just on the brink of choking on my own lachrymal fluids ---which would be quite a flashy way to go by the way--- but yeah, Jack was with me and I was so not sobbing into his big manly arms like a little girl, a little girl with pigtails, a little girl with pigtails which had just done a big bad boo-boo.
Even so, I have to say that, Jack hung onto me until the sobs, the tears and the snot, everything was gone and held me in a way that only confirmed instead of denying a status that hadn't been quo since that night where Jack was the one who chickened out during sex--The two of us made quite a right pair, don't we?-- it occurred to me that I couldn't recall the last time the two of us had been as intimate as we were in that moment or intimate at all for that matter.
And laying there, spilled, if you want to call it that, I couldn't help staring at the brand new crack in the wall. It wasn't supposed to be there. Then again, it wasn't the only thing that felt wrong. Jack, of course, turned out to be completely useless in comforting me this time.
Mostly because he was busy snoring. This again made me laugh.
Bless him.
~*~
As much as I'd like to tell you that my life took a drastic turn from there, I'm afraid that I can't. The rhythm of Tosh's typing set the pace for Jack's steps, underlain by the metallic clanks coming from the autopsy bay. It was accompanied by Myfanwy's croaks who hoped to get a chunky piece of the fishman on the autopsy table, while the moans of the three weird Weevils on sub-level 6 painfully reminded me of a less painful incident down there with Jack a couple of months ago.
Needless to say, Bob was thrilled which is more than I could have said about myself at that moment. Gwen tried her best not to take notice of the state of my trousers. An effort Tosh nullified with a knowing smirk, a pair of raised eyebrows and an inquisitive nod into Jack's direction.
I wasn't quite sure whether to be mortified or whether to laugh at the gobsmacked expression on Gwen's face in return and decided to go with a smirk and made a mental note to prepare Gwen's favourite biscuits for good effort and hot chocolate for Tosh who looked as if she hadn't slept in days.
Judging from the pile of folders on her desk and the rings below her eyes she clearly hadn't.
All in all it was an ordinary day. Tosh was so deeply buried in her work that she wouldn't have noticed Owen walking around topless--something he actually did at some point if I recall correctly. Owen still seemed to think that my spare tie made a good substitute for a napkin and accused me of having PMT for which I served him salted tea with milk--just for the sake of normality. Gwen moaned about Rhys' constant calls yet ended up calling him herself when he didn't call her for once and Jack...
Jack had already been gone when I woke up and if I hadn't known better I would have assumed that Jack was avoiding me. Fact was that he really was busy enough thanks to one delegation of aliens who claimed ownership over Earth, another delegation of aliens who apologized for the previous one and claimed ownership over Earth for themselves and three successive Weevil calls.
We got it sorted, eventually. And as so often, it involved heavy flirting and a dose of sweet, sweet love...by Owen.
Jack still was Jack and the stupid fairy-wairy daisy chain linking part of me --let's just call him Bob again -- insisted on falling in love with him all over again, simply because Jack is dashing enough to seduce rocks if he feels like it (which, according to one of his stories, he once also did by the way).
Whatever.
I hadn't changed much in that respect; I was hopeless as ever, as was Bob for all he was worth. Nothing felt different apart from this strange sensation bubbling through my guts but even that wasn't new, compared to the odd mood swings I'd been experiencing ever since that night and had eventually learned to live with both. This in turn was a little bit humbling, a great deal confusing, a little bit depressing and probably all right.
Even though it gave me the funny urge to bash my head against the next wall, kiss Jack or do probably both which might have, in two out of three cases, turned out to be rather painful but there was that and I did none of it in the end. Mostly because I was busy trying to make a lovesick pterodactyl less infatuated with an innocent ice cream truck top figurine.
I would lie if I said that was easy.
Let's just say that it involved lots of barbecue sauce, two lamb-halves, lots running and even more of whistling. Still, I think it must have pretty much the moment when I caught myself getting all teared up and weepy over a cone of pistachio and chocolate ice with a food colouring painted pterodactyl caricature on a disk of marzipan stuck on top, that I realized that I could really need a break from the self piteous whining routine.
~*~
The hub was quiet when I returned with a slightly batted plastic pterodactyl and the runaway Myfanwy in tow; it was silent enough to hear the ants in the vaults sneeze. Rift activity had been uncharacteristically low over the previous couple of days and the resulting silence did all but ease me out of my current predicament. With a half hearted shout that I was back, I tucked Myfanwy into her nest with her ice-cream sweetheart, stored the barbecue sauce in a trolley where I keep it along with Myfanwy's toys and other stuff connected to her well-being and went to see what the others were doing.
Gwen was nowhere to be seen or heard, Owen found perverse fun in dissecting a green hairy ball which might once have been a cup of yoghurt, Tosh was comaing out a week's worth of left out sleep on the couch and Jack was most likely sleep talking with open eyes. Again. Either that or he was bored enough to tell anecdotes to a non existing audience. Sadly enough that wouldn't have been a first either. All in all it was an ordinary day with the ordinary boredom that threatens to numb your brain while the next deadly peril takes its time to jump you when you least expect it.
I handed Owen my selected takeout phone list under the condition that he cleared out his junk from the morgue, tucked a duvet over Tosh and mused myself with listening to Jack's sleep-rambles about interstellar hitchhiking for a while before I put Jack into a more comfortable and a generally more horizontal position. I triple checked everything before I even allowed myself to think about heading out. I checked again, just to make sure and a fifth time to be absolutely sure that I didn't forget or overlook anything only to come back and check for a sixth time in order to convince my doubting feet.
I left when Owen started calling me 'Mommy Ianto'.
~*~
As reluctant as I was to leave the hub, my chest felt strangely light and I couldn't help a sigh when I stepped out into the open. The fresh air did a lot to soothe the odd burn in my throat and I took a couple of deep breaths while my eyes accustomed themselves to the light. And for one heavenly moment I allowed myself to think that things might just as half as bad as my sleep deprived mind made them to be.
Thrown out of the bed by an alien incident which turned out to be a semi-professional hoax for promotional purposes I had failed to grab a proper breakfast and the ice cream flavoured sugar in my stomach made funny noises which I decided to bury under an extra large packet of Yum!Bums.
Even though the main ingredients of Yum!Bums are sugar, food colouring in various carcinogenic shades of red, roasted peanuts and wheat pops which are basically starch, even more sugar for the tired waistline but one tends to oversee these minor flaws with one of the few things which promised comfort during all those minor major calamities childhood tends to bring along.
I was right in the middle of the process of attempting and failing to determine how long it has been since my last sugar-coma tempered Yum!Bum orgy when I noticed that the shelf they were usually kept in is empty. That didn't alarm me at first because I was standing in a grocery and it has long been a suspicion of mine that grocery employees move stuff around from time to time just to watch and laugh at the confused customers who subsequently err through the neon light flashed corridors filled with edibles in all kinds and forms and from where I stood it might have just been one of those occasions after all.
It wasn't and judging from the troubled expression on her face, the nice elderly grocery lady who told me that there had never been a product with an atrocious name like Yum!Bum in their assortment of products probably thoughts that she was facing a mentally unstable person.
I have to admit that she might have not been that far off the truth considering that I approached the point where I wanted to shake some sense into the dotard woman and yell that I've been buying Yum!Bums at that place for almost three years with the proverbial speed of light.
Fortunately my body needed much longer to cope with the flood of commands my brain was sending off and I ended up gaping at her like a dumbstruck imbecile. Eventually I bought a chocolate bar to make her happy, me less suspicious and to keep the violence hungry looking Hun like security guard, whom I'll just call Eyebrow for the time being, far off my personal space.
She smiled, I smiled back, Eyebrow pretended to be the nice grocery boy from just around the corner. The world was good, even though Eyebrow still looked like the man who just ate the nice grocery boy from around the corner but I decided not to concern myself with mere matters like these and gave him a cheery nod when I walked past him.
I think Eyebrow looked a little bit disappointed.
I started on the chocolate bar on my way out, it obviously wasn't a packet of Yum!Bums but it did pretty well in soothing my stomach-roaring-ly low blood sugar level which in turn was comforting because at the moment I was not quite sure that all the sugar in the world would be enough to soothe the rest of me that easily.
~*~
Back at the docks I slumped into one of the few less dubious looking benches, which wasn't half as easy as it sounds considering that I had to defend it against a nosy seagull with a fetish for half rotten bench wood. Basically, I was done for. 'Tired' didn't even begin to make my current state of mind nearly enough justice. Then again my fatigue didn't make the setting around me justice.
Clusters of tourists strode past me, young couples holding hands, parents carrying their children on their shoulders, grunge teens were pulled on their shirts by annoyed mothers and somewhere, on the other far end of the pedestrian area, a Goth girl pushed an elderly lady around in a wheel-chair-- ordinary people on an ordinary day, enjoying the warm weather which was quite out of the ordinary at this time of the year.
The sky was blue enough to make Jack's favourite shirt jealous, the sea sparkled bright enough to render the imaginative "Bling!" of Jack's teeth jealous and still blinded by the sparkling sea, I couldn't help wondering when my brain would have enough mercy to shut the mental ramble down.
"Wonderful day, isn't it?"
I think that I blinked at the time, maybe I gaped. I really hope that I blinked. The only thing I can remember is that I couldn't decide whether the manic grin on his face was a reason to be annoyed or alarmed.
"Excuse me, Sir, do I know you?"
"I don't know. Maybe, probably not, hard to tell what people remember these days."
Right, strange man, strange grin, even stranger words and I didn't have my rape kit ready so I opted for a smooth retreat.
"Right, I think that's my cue."
Unfortunately the stranger didn't seem to agree with me.
"Ah, ah, ah! Sit down, young man."
"Excuse me?"
I think at that point I even might have blinked again. So much for the smoothness.
"Sit. Down."
Or the retreat. Too tired to argue I sat back down, wondering what it is about me that pulls the especially weird ones from their hiding places like a bloody big magnet.
"Much better. So...where were we? Right, weather, great weather, don't you think?"
"I would say it rather depends on the eye of the beholder."
Experience taught me to fare carefully with weird, rambly strangers so I avoided as much eye contact as possible and hoped that the rambly stranger with the dopey grin--I decided to call him Sunshine-- would content himself with this answer and go and harass random tourists instead.
Of course I was to be thoroughly disappointed in that respect.
"Absolutely! Take this banana for example--"
"You're holding an ice cream cone."
"Am I?"
Sunshine put on a funny frown and stared hard at the ice cream cone his hand for a couple minutes until his face suddenly lightened up from out of the blue and he exclaimed a happy "I am!", and proceeded to lap the melting ice cream from the cone.
Always me
"Vanilla! Oh I like vanilla, good flavour, good ice-- Well, almost, miss a bit of salt actually..."
Sunshine rambled on, ignoring the cone and me for a couple of moments only to have a comeback with a suddenness which startled me and the vanilla ice enough to make me forget all concerns about the expensive suit I was supposed to be concerned about while the obviously mad man kept on waving the ice cream cone about.
I'm sure we presented an interesting picture to the tourists.
"Salt! Salt in ice cream, sea salt ice, great flavour, big fan, brilliant colour, blue, well, not blue in fact, depending on how you look at it, that is-- gave my last one to Picasso to hold, he smeared it over a canvas to paint a horse, never doing that again--Why isn't anybody selling sea salt ice over here?"
Partly lost in my own thoughts about life, mortality and the overall transience of being I was somewhat startled by the sudden address into my direction so that the only response my brain was able to come up with was a stammered, "Uh...What?"
"Never mind."
Completely disregarding my dark suit and my concerns for the well-being of that well loved three piece ensemble, Sunshine kept on waving the ice cream cone about like some kind of royal sceptre while I found it increasingly difficult to ignore the lunatic man and his dripping vanilla ice.
"One day you will know or you won't and---What was I talking about again?"
"Weather, a banana, ice cream, sea salt ice, Picasso, sea sa--"
"Right! Ice cream, take this vanilla ice for example."
"Your vanilla ice?"
"Yeah. Brilliant vanilla ice, just the right amount of sugar to make the vanilla sparkle in this silly mix of frozen milk, cream, yolk, and sugar. You might not like it. You might hate it in fact for the very same reasons I love it because you can decide. Which is fantastic!--- This doesn't change much about the fact that despite this thing in my hand looking like an ice cream cone, smelling like an ice cream cone and--" At this point he gobbled up a big portion of the melting vanilla ice, probably to fortify his statement. "---Mmmh. Haaah. Cold!-- Tasting like vanilla ice cream in a cone, it could very well be a banana."
"In which case you would have spent more than the last couple of minutes licking a banana."
"Exactly but that is not the point because to you and me it looks like ice cream, smells like ice cream, tastes like ice cream, well, kind of, to you it doesn't because it's my ice cream and I have no intention to share --did that already, don't want to remember how that ended-- Anyway, you think it's ice cream, I think it's ice cream, ergo there's nothing wrong with it being ice cream as long as it makes me happy and you green with envy over my cone of super cool vanilla ice."
"Presuming that I want your vanilla ice."
"Presuming tha--what's wrong with my vanilla ice?"
"It might be a banana after all."
"Good thinking! But why bother? Do you bother? I'm not bothered as long as my decision to perceive this hypothetical banana as vanilla ice won't hurt anybody."
"So you say you'd rather lick a banana, thinking it is ice cream than just throw it away and buy yourself some real ice cream."
"Oh, bollocks! Ice cream's out, only bananas left-- You want ice cream?"
"Well, not yours, now that it's barely more than cream now."
"So you'd rather have the banana even though you'd prefer the ice cream."
"I never wanted the banana."
"Suppose you're stuck with it."
"I'd ignore it, alright? I can't stand bananas, never could stand them. Would you please stop talking about bananas now?"
"Bananas? I wasn't talking about bananas. Well-- I was, that's true, but I wasn't mainly talking about bananas. You would know if I really started talking about bananas, I could tell you stories about bananas..."
"Let's please not go there, I think I've heard enough about bananas for today."
"See, I think there has by far not been said enough about bananas today and that my friend is perception!"
Sunshine finished by tossing the ice cream cone over his shoulder and using his now vacant hands to clamp my head in a clammy, vice like grip and stared at me in a manner which began to make me quite uncomfortable in a waking-up-naked-in-school-kind of manner as an undefined time span between milliseconds and aeons passed. Then this noise burst through the air.
"And now..." The enigmatic stranger concluded after a quick gaze at his watch, "My vanilla despising friend, you might want to keep the mental image of utterly harmless and not scary bananas in mind and run to save your friends' lives. ...NOW!"
And I ran, not quite sure whom the rambling lunatic reminded me of or why I was following the instructions of the rambling nutter in the first place and if it hadn't been for the supposed impending threat to my friends and my stitching sides, I might have stopped the inner mantra of 'Bananabananabananabanana' for just long enough to seriously doubt my actions-- thankfully he didn't because I was running and all he was supposed to think about were 'Bananasbananasbananasbanana--'
The bizarre sight of what expected me back in the tourist office definitely defied most of my wildest imaginations, well clearly not all of my wildest imaginations because it looked pretty much the same way it looked like in my dreams.
It also defied all rules of gravitation and experience.
~*~
To be fair, it has to be said that I never expected to be confronted with a real giant floating banana, ever. A giant floating banana laughing -not literally of course, because that would be absurd- right into my face in the way it gloated and...floated about on top of it.
But apart from the fact that it simply existed it didn't do anything spectacular and I began to suspect some kind of sick joke when I threw a pen at it and it still wouldn't do anything vicious in particular.
I blinked at it. It floated.
I walked around it it. It floated.
I scratched it with my finger and it sstill insisted on floating.
Ultimately I sighed, tied the floating fruit to my counter like a stray balloon and continued to walk into the direction of the elevator. At least it didn't try and chew off my head. I'm still not quite sure how well I would have handled a confrontation with a razor teethed banana.
~*~
It's one thing to see terror, blank and unmasked terror on the face of my friends. It's a completely different thing to see blank and unmasked terror in Jack's face while he tried to shield an unconscious Owen and Tosh from three giant and floating bananas with his best come-and-get-me-suckas-look and something that looked like a slashed cardboard folder. I wouldn't have been alarmed if all three hadn't happened to sport rather hefty wounds. Not to mention the three giant bananas whose sad remains lay scattered across the ground. I just barely resisted a laugh.
"Jack?"
I have to say that even despite the absurdity of the situation, Jack still managed to look kind of heroic even though his heroism felt a bit ill directed to me.
"Scratch marks from our three guests. Don't tell me you can't see them." Jack replied, his eyes still firmly set on the three floating pieces of fruit.
"Scratch marks?"
I stared, I stared hard, I stared very hard, I might have even blinked but no matter how long I stared at the bananas with my best frowny face I failed to detect anything that could have caused the wounds so I stepped closer after making sure that there really was nothing which might have an threatening effect on my life in any way.
"Stay where you are!" Jack shouted with nothing short of real panic in his voice just as I was about to pass Myfanwy's trolley. "Where are your self preservation instincts, goddamnit!"
I stopped in my tracks to humour him. Apart from that,
"Somewhere without bananas I guess..."
"Are you out of your mind?" Gwen barked, tackling the biggest banana with a courageous leap from one of the railings and a big spear of which I couldn't clearly tell where she got it from.
"Never mind me. What do you see?"
And as I admired her Valkyrie-like and completely unnecessary stunt, I couldn't help noticing the wounds on her body as well as the fact that she didn't manage to hit the banana even though she should have.
"Oh, just the usual, razor sharp claws, fa--"
And just as the words tumbled out of Jack's mouth the bananas suddenly began to grow thin, hideous insect-like stick arms with long sabre-like claws attached to them. I panicked.
"Stop!"
Jack froze for a moment, as did the bananas which by then had as much in common with common bananas as I in a yellow, frilly dress and black silk stockings do. If I happen to look like a blurred, grey spot right out of an artist’s finest nightmare that is. And while both of us kept our silence and I returned to my mental mantra about bananas, I noticed that their arms were shrinking.
Unfortunately, Jack, who really doesn't like to be interrupted, decided to conclude his sentence with "--angs." and as soon as the notion left his brain, I was faced with the shiniest set of giant razor teeth one would have the fortune to come across in a giant floating banana. I think
And to my horror I noticed that the bananas had begun to approach me, in what must be the most menacing manner in which flying, fanged bananas with razor sharp claws can approach somebody.
Needless to say, I wasn't amused. Neither was Mr. Banana whose fanged mouth got stuffed with a big, squeaking rubber bone out of Myfanwy's toy stash which did that interesting burst-y-thing not a minute later.
"Stop thinking!"
I shouted at Gwen and Jack who had gone over to throwing office stationery at the bananas to lure their attention away from me, approaching the state of panic with increasing speed myself while I rummaged in the cart for the pterodactyl net. But in their terrified state they understandably preferred to ignore me while the bananas began to twist and shape themselves more and more into something right out of a nightmare. And there I was, most figuratively with my back to the wall, my life flashing before my eyes and me literally short off the shrieking like a girl part and there it came to me.
Not just one nightmare but mine.
I grabbed the bottle with Myfanwy's barbecue sauce, splashed each of the bananas with a good helping of sauce and blew into my whistle.
~*~
There's not much to say about the aftermath, I'm afraid to say.
By the time Myfanwy had gulped down the last one of the flying bananas, or whatever it was they really were, Owen had done a pretty good job in stitching everyone together, including himself. Despite Jack's protests that he soon would be just as new, he also got a couple of stitches to cover the bigger flesh wounds of which the biggest one mysteriously bore an uncanny resemblance to the word "wanker".
Over the following couple of days, more of these reality bending creatures would appear throughout the city and we would deal with them in some more-and some less creative ways while, to my grief, neither Yum!Bum’s nor Sunshine were anywhere to be seen or heard of even.
Jack pulled a funny face when I told him about both though.
As to me and Jack? I am happy enough to report that I stopped dreaming of flying bananas which might have to do with the fact that Jack and I can barely keep our hands off each other.
Who can help falling for the dashing hero of a tale so strange that it leaves one wondering whether he's the dim-witted yet pretty damsel in distress or the clue-clutching sidekick with barely a clue at all in this story after all? Obviously, not me, and where do we go from here? I honestly don't know and maybe I don't want to know.
And whether that is going to be enough fo me... us, well, that's obviously for coming days to decide.
*groans*
I've finally made it. Just let me tell you these things:
1. Don't try and travel just before, during, or right after Chinese New Year's while being in China
2. Don't break your laptop during Chinese New Year's while being in China (Happy Bunny Year to all of you guys by the way! May your bunny rabbits be rabid and fruitful)
and lastly: keeping Uni-internet access in China after a smallish move sure is complicated *groans some more*
Anyway, because I neglected you for so long I have a little gift for you guys. It's a story I began writing...let's just say a very long while ago and it's been dusting away between my files since then. Just be warned that it's an odd little story that has somehow managed to sneak it's way out of my dustbin:
Title: Of Life, A Dream and Giant Bananas
Characters: Jack, Ianto, Gwen, Tosh, Owen the whole works...plus Sunshine.
Genret: crack...I guess?
Rating: PG-13ish, me thinks ;P
Warnings: odd events, odd plot, even odder villain-- 1st person narration (shock!), traces of au...probably (shock-shock!), longer than what I usually produce (oh the horrors), unbeta'd (yes, yes I know) Also, you might find youself wasting away precious fractions of your lifespan on this little piece of fiction, sorry about that.
Spoilers: No spoiling here as far as I can see. Well, apart from the fact that Ianto kinda shags the Boss(whoops!)
Disclaimer: Torchwood doesn't belong to me but the BBC, I'm just borrowing.
A/N: Gods, I'm just not used to this anymore...or grammar, but I'm rambling again. Just ignore me and get on with the show. May you receive more from this fic than I expect.
Well, what can I say? There I was with my back to the wall, my life flashing before my eyes and me literally short off the shrieking like a girl part and--But I'm rushing things to much again. Maybe I should start with the beginning of the story.
It all began with a dream.
Or better: It all began on a night, a plain ordinary night after a plain ordinary day and two plain ordinary cases with two not so ordinary killings resulting in one almost successful rape of a Torchwood operative--Routine as always one might say.
With the small exception that it was 8 o'clock and that I was in my flat, because a fragile soul dressed as an annoying egomaniac with a really sharp set of scalpels decided it that would be a good idea to do the doctor-ly thing for once and send me home without reason. Not much at least.
It wasn't like I couldn't hold a teacup with those scratches if they could even be described as such.
There was no need to wrap me into cotton wool, especially with all the paperwork that was still waiting to be done, the paperwork that would still be waiting after the end of my involuntary little vacation.
Be it the adrenaline which was still rushing through my veins, the stinging pain on my back, the fact that Jack's order made Weevil cell cleaning sound like something kinky or just the anger about being sent to bed without dessert like a naughty boy, I was pretty much riled up and with nothing much to do I found myself dusting each moth infested inch of my flat.
That was kind of disgusting. You'd never suspect what crawls into your flat to die. Apart from that, it was completely unnecessary concerning my original objective so I put on one of Tosh's relaxation CDs which didn't work either. Neither did staring at that brown greasy looking stain on my perfect pristine white wall, staring at the ceiling...or the door, just so you know.
I guess it must have been sometime after my 'Scissor Sister's'-Dance-a-thon when I finally passed out from exhaustion, it's hard to say, there might have been more, there might have not. Brains are hellishly unreliable things. Never quite do what you want them to do; never work the way you think it should--- but maybe that's just me.
I was pretty much out of it, I guess, that -of course- was until this dream had to go and put a huge crack into my happy and rose scented life.
Just so we're clear, I've had my share of dreams up to that point. Some silly, some delusional and some with a horrid touch of reality to them to make the average nutcase envious of my fucked up brain. Then again, once you've almost been raped, processed and consequently nommed by a perverted worm man-thing-creep with more slimy appendages than I care to remember, your natural threshold for terror, horror and the other shiny likes gets a certain lift up to the higher realms of gruesome, or so they say.
Regarding that occurring dream where a giant floating banana tried to chew off my head... I was better off treating it as that what it was: Nothing. The therapy bill alone would have gorged my not so humble budget faster than I could say 'Bananarama' if I'd gone and try to interpret existential fears, oedipal aptitudes and deep rooting subliminal xenophobic tendencies into those brain burps.
Seriously, non-Welsh are not half as bad as some make them to be.
~*~
I woke up; sweat drenched and disoriented enough to involuntarily smash the lamp on the bedside table with my forehead. It took me a moment to gather enough wits to respond appropriately to the dull pain in previously mentioned forehead. The sensation of smoke, cold and pure unmasked panic was just vivid enough to send the blood cells racing and it took me a little bit longer to shake the irrational horror than it should have.
You see, I would have understood the tremble in my fingers if I had actually been able to remember the contents of my nightmare when I head-butted the lamp-- which was not intentional by the way, just in case you wondered-- but there was nothing except from the scratchy throat and the involuntary jazz hands.
I felt sick but that wasn't that much of a surprise with that freaking Lambada my heart was raving up in my ribcage. Anyone would have been sick in that situation and I tried not to bump into too many articles of my bedroom furniture when I stumbled my way to the loo. What did come as some kind of surprise to me at the time though was the massive boner I was sporting.
That was a new one, literally. I hadn't noticed it before which might seem odd to some of you but believe me, you'll get used to anything up to the point where you don't necessarily notice it anymore, in this case: my cock, as to which I will refer to as Bob for the duration of this little narrative.
So I found myself arms on the toilet seat and unavoidably faced with my crotch from where he practically waved me hello. Bob, you see is a tricky feller, bad sense of timing, always hits me unprepared. --Just like that kind of party pooper who crashes into a conversation uninvited to hijack it for no special reason at all.
Bob is someone to be cautious with. I wordlessly helloed back at him and was just in the process of deciding what to do with him when a new wave of nausea threw all my surprise about Bob's most inappropriate turn up overboard and had me sick once again.
It wasn't until much later, wobbling, knee bumping and swearing included, that I found my body back on my mattress ---well, at least most of it--- and that I found myself able to recover enough intact grey matter to ask the ceiling what the fuck was going on. Unfortunately my ceiling preferred to ignore me.
I threw a pillow.
I felt better, in a very gratifying kick-the-furniture-until-it-bleeds-kind of way. That was, of course, before gravity overcame the initial momentum and insisted on sending the pillow back into my face which in turn didn't make me happy at all. I tried venting my frustration into the pillow. That helped-- For approximately one minute and thirty-seven seconds after which I turned around and was harshly reminded of Bob's standing in this whole mess.
It wasn't the first time that I cursed his lack of decency.
I told him to go away, I think I might even have growled, he insisted on his position. I thought about thick black oily chest hair on a white, flabby chest-- even so Bob wouldn't waver, this in turn made me worry about the extent of Jack's influence in my sexual--whatever. Then I tried to think of granny without her third teeth which only made things worse and reminded me of Jack again and somehow I ended up wanking to a mental image of Jack and my granny on a banana boat... or rather, I ended up wanking despite the disturbing pictures which kept popping up in my head.
It wouldn't have been much of a problem if I've had a real Jack to block the ridiculously perfect imaginative one but Jack was in the hub and giving me time for myself because I might have involuntarily sent him to hell earlier that night Something for which I had cursed myself for the umpteenth time by that time.
And unless Jack didn't happen to have some kind of weird radar in his head which would go ping whenever I got horny---and God knows, sometimes I suspect him to have one of those-- I had to deal with my special but also very dumb friend on my own.
Of course I could always have called him, I suppose, but I'm saying that now and whether you believe me or not, I didn't even think about calling him for one second back then. Not that I was inclined to spare the pathetic touch of my actions any more thoughts than strictly necessary while I tried to wank this awkward, screaming and mind-crackling numbness out of my system by focusing on the imaginary sensation of Jack's slick hot perfect thighs flexing beneath my palms, the salt slick hot sensation of skin against my tongue and Jack's fingers in my hair--
Let's just say it didn't take me very long to get off. .
It took me even less time to notice Jack who was leaning against the doorframe.
That perverted bastard even dared to smirk. I didn't need to see the tent in his trousers to know that he'd been watching me for a while, 'cause like most of his smiles, this one was telling, even though he didn't seem very inclined to do anything about it in the nearer future. This in turn roused Bob again. This situation was calling for extreme measures: I licked my fingers. Slowly.
Jack was onto me before my tongue arrived at my index finger.
And, in contrast to my irrational fears, Jack was quite real, almost real enough to forget about the in-your-face blurb of panic bouncing through the back of my head. But then Jack had to go and gaze at me with that kind of look for just one moment too long and in an instant my throat drew tight, my spine turned to jelly, my lungs burned, my vision flashed red and screams blocked out any forms of audio input that might have done something to soothe that freaking panic attack--- but there was Jack, Jack's hands on my face, his eyes on mine and his warmth against my face and slowly the screams made way for sobs.
That certainly wasn't one of my most dignified moments.
Needless to say, the sex was off, which is probably a good thing considering that my nose was running, my eyes were puffy and I was just on the brink of choking on my own lachrymal fluids ---which would be quite a flashy way to go by the way--- but yeah, Jack was with me and I was so not sobbing into his big manly arms like a little girl, a little girl with pigtails, a little girl with pigtails which had just done a big bad boo-boo.
Even so, I have to say that, Jack hung onto me until the sobs, the tears and the snot, everything was gone and held me in a way that only confirmed instead of denying a status that hadn't been quo since that night where Jack was the one who chickened out during sex--The two of us made quite a right pair, don't we?-- it occurred to me that I couldn't recall the last time the two of us had been as intimate as we were in that moment or intimate at all for that matter.
And laying there, spilled, if you want to call it that, I couldn't help staring at the brand new crack in the wall. It wasn't supposed to be there. Then again, it wasn't the only thing that felt wrong. Jack, of course, turned out to be completely useless in comforting me this time.
Mostly because he was busy snoring. This again made me laugh.
Bless him.
~*~
As much as I'd like to tell you that my life took a drastic turn from there, I'm afraid that I can't. The rhythm of Tosh's typing set the pace for Jack's steps, underlain by the metallic clanks coming from the autopsy bay. It was accompanied by Myfanwy's croaks who hoped to get a chunky piece of the fishman on the autopsy table, while the moans of the three weird Weevils on sub-level 6 painfully reminded me of a less painful incident down there with Jack a couple of months ago.
Needless to say, Bob was thrilled which is more than I could have said about myself at that moment. Gwen tried her best not to take notice of the state of my trousers. An effort Tosh nullified with a knowing smirk, a pair of raised eyebrows and an inquisitive nod into Jack's direction.
I wasn't quite sure whether to be mortified or whether to laugh at the gobsmacked expression on Gwen's face in return and decided to go with a smirk and made a mental note to prepare Gwen's favourite biscuits for good effort and hot chocolate for Tosh who looked as if she hadn't slept in days.
Judging from the pile of folders on her desk and the rings below her eyes she clearly hadn't.
All in all it was an ordinary day. Tosh was so deeply buried in her work that she wouldn't have noticed Owen walking around topless--something he actually did at some point if I recall correctly. Owen still seemed to think that my spare tie made a good substitute for a napkin and accused me of having PMT for which I served him salted tea with milk--just for the sake of normality. Gwen moaned about Rhys' constant calls yet ended up calling him herself when he didn't call her for once and Jack...
Jack had already been gone when I woke up and if I hadn't known better I would have assumed that Jack was avoiding me. Fact was that he really was busy enough thanks to one delegation of aliens who claimed ownership over Earth, another delegation of aliens who apologized for the previous one and claimed ownership over Earth for themselves and three successive Weevil calls.
We got it sorted, eventually. And as so often, it involved heavy flirting and a dose of sweet, sweet love...by Owen.
Jack still was Jack and the stupid fairy-wairy daisy chain linking part of me --let's just call him Bob again -- insisted on falling in love with him all over again, simply because Jack is dashing enough to seduce rocks if he feels like it (which, according to one of his stories, he once also did by the way).
Whatever.
I hadn't changed much in that respect; I was hopeless as ever, as was Bob for all he was worth. Nothing felt different apart from this strange sensation bubbling through my guts but even that wasn't new, compared to the odd mood swings I'd been experiencing ever since that night and had eventually learned to live with both. This in turn was a little bit humbling, a great deal confusing, a little bit depressing and probably all right.
Even though it gave me the funny urge to bash my head against the next wall, kiss Jack or do probably both which might have, in two out of three cases, turned out to be rather painful but there was that and I did none of it in the end. Mostly because I was busy trying to make a lovesick pterodactyl less infatuated with an innocent ice cream truck top figurine.
I would lie if I said that was easy.
Let's just say that it involved lots of barbecue sauce, two lamb-halves, lots running and even more of whistling. Still, I think it must have pretty much the moment when I caught myself getting all teared up and weepy over a cone of pistachio and chocolate ice with a food colouring painted pterodactyl caricature on a disk of marzipan stuck on top, that I realized that I could really need a break from the self piteous whining routine.
~*~
The hub was quiet when I returned with a slightly batted plastic pterodactyl and the runaway Myfanwy in tow; it was silent enough to hear the ants in the vaults sneeze. Rift activity had been uncharacteristically low over the previous couple of days and the resulting silence did all but ease me out of my current predicament. With a half hearted shout that I was back, I tucked Myfanwy into her nest with her ice-cream sweetheart, stored the barbecue sauce in a trolley where I keep it along with Myfanwy's toys and other stuff connected to her well-being and went to see what the others were doing.
Gwen was nowhere to be seen or heard, Owen found perverse fun in dissecting a green hairy ball which might once have been a cup of yoghurt, Tosh was comaing out a week's worth of left out sleep on the couch and Jack was most likely sleep talking with open eyes. Again. Either that or he was bored enough to tell anecdotes to a non existing audience. Sadly enough that wouldn't have been a first either. All in all it was an ordinary day with the ordinary boredom that threatens to numb your brain while the next deadly peril takes its time to jump you when you least expect it.
I handed Owen my selected takeout phone list under the condition that he cleared out his junk from the morgue, tucked a duvet over Tosh and mused myself with listening to Jack's sleep-rambles about interstellar hitchhiking for a while before I put Jack into a more comfortable and a generally more horizontal position. I triple checked everything before I even allowed myself to think about heading out. I checked again, just to make sure and a fifth time to be absolutely sure that I didn't forget or overlook anything only to come back and check for a sixth time in order to convince my doubting feet.
I left when Owen started calling me 'Mommy Ianto'.
~*~
As reluctant as I was to leave the hub, my chest felt strangely light and I couldn't help a sigh when I stepped out into the open. The fresh air did a lot to soothe the odd burn in my throat and I took a couple of deep breaths while my eyes accustomed themselves to the light. And for one heavenly moment I allowed myself to think that things might just as half as bad as my sleep deprived mind made them to be.
Thrown out of the bed by an alien incident which turned out to be a semi-professional hoax for promotional purposes I had failed to grab a proper breakfast and the ice cream flavoured sugar in my stomach made funny noises which I decided to bury under an extra large packet of Yum!Bums.
Even though the main ingredients of Yum!Bums are sugar, food colouring in various carcinogenic shades of red, roasted peanuts and wheat pops which are basically starch, even more sugar for the tired waistline but one tends to oversee these minor flaws with one of the few things which promised comfort during all those minor major calamities childhood tends to bring along.
I was right in the middle of the process of attempting and failing to determine how long it has been since my last sugar-coma tempered Yum!Bum orgy when I noticed that the shelf they were usually kept in is empty. That didn't alarm me at first because I was standing in a grocery and it has long been a suspicion of mine that grocery employees move stuff around from time to time just to watch and laugh at the confused customers who subsequently err through the neon light flashed corridors filled with edibles in all kinds and forms and from where I stood it might have just been one of those occasions after all.
It wasn't and judging from the troubled expression on her face, the nice elderly grocery lady who told me that there had never been a product with an atrocious name like Yum!Bum in their assortment of products probably thoughts that she was facing a mentally unstable person.
I have to admit that she might have not been that far off the truth considering that I approached the point where I wanted to shake some sense into the dotard woman and yell that I've been buying Yum!Bums at that place for almost three years with the proverbial speed of light.
Fortunately my body needed much longer to cope with the flood of commands my brain was sending off and I ended up gaping at her like a dumbstruck imbecile. Eventually I bought a chocolate bar to make her happy, me less suspicious and to keep the violence hungry looking Hun like security guard, whom I'll just call Eyebrow for the time being, far off my personal space.
She smiled, I smiled back, Eyebrow pretended to be the nice grocery boy from just around the corner. The world was good, even though Eyebrow still looked like the man who just ate the nice grocery boy from around the corner but I decided not to concern myself with mere matters like these and gave him a cheery nod when I walked past him.
I think Eyebrow looked a little bit disappointed.
I started on the chocolate bar on my way out, it obviously wasn't a packet of Yum!Bums but it did pretty well in soothing my stomach-roaring-ly low blood sugar level which in turn was comforting because at the moment I was not quite sure that all the sugar in the world would be enough to soothe the rest of me that easily.
~*~
Back at the docks I slumped into one of the few less dubious looking benches, which wasn't half as easy as it sounds considering that I had to defend it against a nosy seagull with a fetish for half rotten bench wood. Basically, I was done for. 'Tired' didn't even begin to make my current state of mind nearly enough justice. Then again my fatigue didn't make the setting around me justice.
Clusters of tourists strode past me, young couples holding hands, parents carrying their children on their shoulders, grunge teens were pulled on their shirts by annoyed mothers and somewhere, on the other far end of the pedestrian area, a Goth girl pushed an elderly lady around in a wheel-chair-- ordinary people on an ordinary day, enjoying the warm weather which was quite out of the ordinary at this time of the year.
The sky was blue enough to make Jack's favourite shirt jealous, the sea sparkled bright enough to render the imaginative "Bling!" of Jack's teeth jealous and still blinded by the sparkling sea, I couldn't help wondering when my brain would have enough mercy to shut the mental ramble down.
"Wonderful day, isn't it?"
I think that I blinked at the time, maybe I gaped. I really hope that I blinked. The only thing I can remember is that I couldn't decide whether the manic grin on his face was a reason to be annoyed or alarmed.
"Excuse me, Sir, do I know you?"
"I don't know. Maybe, probably not, hard to tell what people remember these days."
Right, strange man, strange grin, even stranger words and I didn't have my rape kit ready so I opted for a smooth retreat.
"Right, I think that's my cue."
Unfortunately the stranger didn't seem to agree with me.
"Ah, ah, ah! Sit down, young man."
"Excuse me?"
I think at that point I even might have blinked again. So much for the smoothness.
"Sit. Down."
Or the retreat. Too tired to argue I sat back down, wondering what it is about me that pulls the especially weird ones from their hiding places like a bloody big magnet.
"Much better. So...where were we? Right, weather, great weather, don't you think?"
"I would say it rather depends on the eye of the beholder."
Experience taught me to fare carefully with weird, rambly strangers so I avoided as much eye contact as possible and hoped that the rambly stranger with the dopey grin--I decided to call him Sunshine-- would content himself with this answer and go and harass random tourists instead.
Of course I was to be thoroughly disappointed in that respect.
"Absolutely! Take this banana for example--"
"You're holding an ice cream cone."
"Am I?"
Sunshine put on a funny frown and stared hard at the ice cream cone his hand for a couple minutes until his face suddenly lightened up from out of the blue and he exclaimed a happy "I am!", and proceeded to lap the melting ice cream from the cone.
Always me
"Vanilla! Oh I like vanilla, good flavour, good ice-- Well, almost, miss a bit of salt actually..."
Sunshine rambled on, ignoring the cone and me for a couple of moments only to have a comeback with a suddenness which startled me and the vanilla ice enough to make me forget all concerns about the expensive suit I was supposed to be concerned about while the obviously mad man kept on waving the ice cream cone about.
I'm sure we presented an interesting picture to the tourists.
"Salt! Salt in ice cream, sea salt ice, great flavour, big fan, brilliant colour, blue, well, not blue in fact, depending on how you look at it, that is-- gave my last one to Picasso to hold, he smeared it over a canvas to paint a horse, never doing that again--Why isn't anybody selling sea salt ice over here?"
Partly lost in my own thoughts about life, mortality and the overall transience of being I was somewhat startled by the sudden address into my direction so that the only response my brain was able to come up with was a stammered, "Uh...What?"
"Never mind."
Completely disregarding my dark suit and my concerns for the well-being of that well loved three piece ensemble, Sunshine kept on waving the ice cream cone about like some kind of royal sceptre while I found it increasingly difficult to ignore the lunatic man and his dripping vanilla ice.
"One day you will know or you won't and---What was I talking about again?"
"Weather, a banana, ice cream, sea salt ice, Picasso, sea sa--"
"Right! Ice cream, take this vanilla ice for example."
"Your vanilla ice?"
"Yeah. Brilliant vanilla ice, just the right amount of sugar to make the vanilla sparkle in this silly mix of frozen milk, cream, yolk, and sugar. You might not like it. You might hate it in fact for the very same reasons I love it because you can decide. Which is fantastic!--- This doesn't change much about the fact that despite this thing in my hand looking like an ice cream cone, smelling like an ice cream cone and--" At this point he gobbled up a big portion of the melting vanilla ice, probably to fortify his statement. "---Mmmh. Haaah. Cold!-- Tasting like vanilla ice cream in a cone, it could very well be a banana."
"In which case you would have spent more than the last couple of minutes licking a banana."
"Exactly but that is not the point because to you and me it looks like ice cream, smells like ice cream, tastes like ice cream, well, kind of, to you it doesn't because it's my ice cream and I have no intention to share --did that already, don't want to remember how that ended-- Anyway, you think it's ice cream, I think it's ice cream, ergo there's nothing wrong with it being ice cream as long as it makes me happy and you green with envy over my cone of super cool vanilla ice."
"Presuming that I want your vanilla ice."
"Presuming tha--what's wrong with my vanilla ice?"
"It might be a banana after all."
"Good thinking! But why bother? Do you bother? I'm not bothered as long as my decision to perceive this hypothetical banana as vanilla ice won't hurt anybody."
"So you say you'd rather lick a banana, thinking it is ice cream than just throw it away and buy yourself some real ice cream."
"Oh, bollocks! Ice cream's out, only bananas left-- You want ice cream?"
"Well, not yours, now that it's barely more than cream now."
"So you'd rather have the banana even though you'd prefer the ice cream."
"I never wanted the banana."
"Suppose you're stuck with it."
"I'd ignore it, alright? I can't stand bananas, never could stand them. Would you please stop talking about bananas now?"
"Bananas? I wasn't talking about bananas. Well-- I was, that's true, but I wasn't mainly talking about bananas. You would know if I really started talking about bananas, I could tell you stories about bananas..."
"Let's please not go there, I think I've heard enough about bananas for today."
"See, I think there has by far not been said enough about bananas today and that my friend is perception!"
Sunshine finished by tossing the ice cream cone over his shoulder and using his now vacant hands to clamp my head in a clammy, vice like grip and stared at me in a manner which began to make me quite uncomfortable in a waking-up-naked-in-school-kind of manner as an undefined time span between milliseconds and aeons passed. Then this noise burst through the air.
"And now..." The enigmatic stranger concluded after a quick gaze at his watch, "My vanilla despising friend, you might want to keep the mental image of utterly harmless and not scary bananas in mind and run to save your friends' lives. ...NOW!"
And I ran, not quite sure whom the rambling lunatic reminded me of or why I was following the instructions of the rambling nutter in the first place and if it hadn't been for the supposed impending threat to my friends and my stitching sides, I might have stopped the inner mantra of 'Bananabananabananabanana' for just long enough to seriously doubt my actions-- thankfully he didn't because I was running and all he was supposed to think about were 'Bananasbananasbananasbanana--'
The bizarre sight of what expected me back in the tourist office definitely defied most of my wildest imaginations, well clearly not all of my wildest imaginations because it looked pretty much the same way it looked like in my dreams.
It also defied all rules of gravitation and experience.
~*~
To be fair, it has to be said that I never expected to be confronted with a real giant floating banana, ever. A giant floating banana laughing -not literally of course, because that would be absurd- right into my face in the way it gloated and...floated about on top of it.
But apart from the fact that it simply existed it didn't do anything spectacular and I began to suspect some kind of sick joke when I threw a pen at it and it still wouldn't do anything vicious in particular.
I blinked at it. It floated.
I walked around it it. It floated.
I scratched it with my finger and it sstill insisted on floating.
Ultimately I sighed, tied the floating fruit to my counter like a stray balloon and continued to walk into the direction of the elevator. At least it didn't try and chew off my head. I'm still not quite sure how well I would have handled a confrontation with a razor teethed banana.
~*~
It's one thing to see terror, blank and unmasked terror on the face of my friends. It's a completely different thing to see blank and unmasked terror in Jack's face while he tried to shield an unconscious Owen and Tosh from three giant and floating bananas with his best come-and-get-me-suckas-look and something that looked like a slashed cardboard folder. I wouldn't have been alarmed if all three hadn't happened to sport rather hefty wounds. Not to mention the three giant bananas whose sad remains lay scattered across the ground. I just barely resisted a laugh.
"Jack?"
I have to say that even despite the absurdity of the situation, Jack still managed to look kind of heroic even though his heroism felt a bit ill directed to me.
"Scratch marks from our three guests. Don't tell me you can't see them." Jack replied, his eyes still firmly set on the three floating pieces of fruit.
"Scratch marks?"
I stared, I stared hard, I stared very hard, I might have even blinked but no matter how long I stared at the bananas with my best frowny face I failed to detect anything that could have caused the wounds so I stepped closer after making sure that there really was nothing which might have an threatening effect on my life in any way.
"Stay where you are!" Jack shouted with nothing short of real panic in his voice just as I was about to pass Myfanwy's trolley. "Where are your self preservation instincts, goddamnit!"
I stopped in my tracks to humour him. Apart from that,
"Somewhere without bananas I guess..."
"Are you out of your mind?" Gwen barked, tackling the biggest banana with a courageous leap from one of the railings and a big spear of which I couldn't clearly tell where she got it from.
"Never mind me. What do you see?"
And as I admired her Valkyrie-like and completely unnecessary stunt, I couldn't help noticing the wounds on her body as well as the fact that she didn't manage to hit the banana even though she should have.
"Oh, just the usual, razor sharp claws, fa--"
And just as the words tumbled out of Jack's mouth the bananas suddenly began to grow thin, hideous insect-like stick arms with long sabre-like claws attached to them. I panicked.
"Stop!"
Jack froze for a moment, as did the bananas which by then had as much in common with common bananas as I in a yellow, frilly dress and black silk stockings do. If I happen to look like a blurred, grey spot right out of an artist’s finest nightmare that is. And while both of us kept our silence and I returned to my mental mantra about bananas, I noticed that their arms were shrinking.
Unfortunately, Jack, who really doesn't like to be interrupted, decided to conclude his sentence with "--angs." and as soon as the notion left his brain, I was faced with the shiniest set of giant razor teeth one would have the fortune to come across in a giant floating banana. I think
And to my horror I noticed that the bananas had begun to approach me, in what must be the most menacing manner in which flying, fanged bananas with razor sharp claws can approach somebody.
Needless to say, I wasn't amused. Neither was Mr. Banana whose fanged mouth got stuffed with a big, squeaking rubber bone out of Myfanwy's toy stash which did that interesting burst-y-thing not a minute later.
"Stop thinking!"
I shouted at Gwen and Jack who had gone over to throwing office stationery at the bananas to lure their attention away from me, approaching the state of panic with increasing speed myself while I rummaged in the cart for the pterodactyl net. But in their terrified state they understandably preferred to ignore me while the bananas began to twist and shape themselves more and more into something right out of a nightmare. And there I was, most figuratively with my back to the wall, my life flashing before my eyes and me literally short off the shrieking like a girl part and there it came to me.
Not just one nightmare but mine.
I grabbed the bottle with Myfanwy's barbecue sauce, splashed each of the bananas with a good helping of sauce and blew into my whistle.
~*~
There's not much to say about the aftermath, I'm afraid to say.
By the time Myfanwy had gulped down the last one of the flying bananas, or whatever it was they really were, Owen had done a pretty good job in stitching everyone together, including himself. Despite Jack's protests that he soon would be just as new, he also got a couple of stitches to cover the bigger flesh wounds of which the biggest one mysteriously bore an uncanny resemblance to the word "wanker".
Over the following couple of days, more of these reality bending creatures would appear throughout the city and we would deal with them in some more-and some less creative ways while, to my grief, neither Yum!Bum’s nor Sunshine were anywhere to be seen or heard of even.
Jack pulled a funny face when I told him about both though.
As to me and Jack? I am happy enough to report that I stopped dreaming of flying bananas which might have to do with the fact that Jack and I can barely keep our hands off each other.
Who can help falling for the dashing hero of a tale so strange that it leaves one wondering whether he's the dim-witted yet pretty damsel in distress or the clue-clutching sidekick with barely a clue at all in this story after all? Obviously, not me, and where do we go from here? I honestly don't know and maybe I don't want to know.
And whether that is going to be enough fo me... us, well, that's obviously for coming days to decide.