In Space, No One Can Hear You Laugh, for jinxed_wood

[amand_r]

Title: In Space, No One Can Hear You Laugh
Author: amand_r
Written for: jinxed_wood
Characters: Methos, Jenny, aliens, OC (Dalek Sen)
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 4,426
Author's Notes: I never get tired of Jenny. AND Dalek Sen. Absolutely no plot at all. Just sort of hijinx.
Summary: Sometimes, Methos didn't understand Jenny's logic, but he really liked it.



GRSTAXX 9:

"I really rather think you'd better do something."

"Doesn't that ship of yours have a universal translator?"

"That's Dad's thing."

One of the creatures poked him with the sharpened tip of a spear. "What do they want?"

Jenny flipped a few more pages in the guidebook (with the DON'T PANIC logo in it) and shrugged. "It says here that they're particularly vulnerable to music and dance." She glanced down at him from her vantage point in the tree twenty-feet above.

One of the creatures, a different one this time, poked him from the other side, and he backed into another spear. "So what do I do?"

Jenny pretended to think. "Do you know any musical theatre?"

This was getting ridiculous. And his chances of acquiring a few extra orifices continued to beat the spread, so he wracked his brain, brought his palms together, and swayed back and forth from the ball of one foot to the other. After this, he was definitely re-evaluating his travel decisions.

"It says here that they're offended by extended silences," Jenny said helpfully.

Right then. Methos closed his eyes, cursed the universe, the Doctor, his daughter, Daleks, addled or otherwise, then put one hand on his hip, waved the other in the air above his head, and sang the first thing that came into his brain.

"Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but here's my number, so call me maybe!"

EARTH, TWO WEEKS/CENTURIES/BOXES OF CHOCOLATE HOB NOBS AGO:

The lack of snow was both unbearable and amazingly blessed, Methos mused as he shuffled through the arcade. These days, the only reason to cut through the arcade was to escape the wet misty cold wind that seemed to be availing itself of the Cardiff landscape, regardless of how many tall buildings there were. Weren't tall buildings supposed to cut down on wind shear? Perhaps it was time to check a few books out of the library so that he could remember how science worked.

He shrugged and stared at the window of a cheese shop as he passed by. Cheese went with wine, but not beer, the clinking bottles in the brown paper bag he cradled in his arm reminded him. It was his first night in Wales again, and despite the cold, Methos was going to drink his way through every brewery he found, starting with this six pack of Brains' Jack Black, billed as 'a deliciously dark oatmeal stout.' Methos had had many oatmeal stouts in his lifetime, so he was pretty sure that he would be an excellent judge.

The sun was going down, and that just made everything colder, really. Not that it was super cold in South Wales, but he only had his light overcoat, and he didn't have a sword, not that it mattered. Cardiff was an excellent place to avoid fighting. If one ever got into a jam, they merely dove into an alley and took a crooked street, jumped into a river, or ran into a pub and insisted that an Arsenal fan was following him. Worked every time.

He didn't notice when the number of people on the streets dwindled until someone passed him, and he dragged himself out of his reverie enough to look about-no one anywhere. It was dark, yeah, and all the shops around him were closed, so it came as no surprise there. But still, one would have thought there'd be someone around…

That thought was stopped in its tracks when he saw someone barreling down the street towards him, a bunch of plastic bags in hir arm. Even farther behind her-it was a her-were several men running. Their heads were high and domed, and when they ran under a lamppost, Methos could see the blue Bobby helmet. Did Bobbies these days even wear those things?

"Stop!" one of them shouted. "Or I'll say stop again!" It paused in its run, opened its mouth impossibly wide, and spat a wide blue light beam from an impossibly large mouth.

Methos jumped back to hug the wall of the shop he was passing.

The woman dodged the beam (laser beam?) and kept in running. By now she was very close, and her eyes alit on him. It was a split second of thought, he could see, when her face broke into a grin and she waved an arm. "You!"

Oh no, this never ended well. Why did he ever come to Cardiff? Of the last three times he'd been here in the last hundred years, he'd been kidnapped in just the same manner. Albeit it was the Doctor, but still…

The Bobbies were closing in, and he could see their teeth now. Nothing that far away should have visible teeth like that.

"You!" the woman screeched, pointing at him right before she passed him, one of her hands reaching out to snag his bicep and drag him along with her. Methos resisted for a second, but another look at the Bobbies in the hats and with the teeth, and well, he wasn't staying around here to see what that was all about. Besides, there wasn't an alleyway, river, or pub in sight.

"You're a temporal anomaly, right?" The girl stuttered out as she ran. Methos yanked his arm from her grasp and pounded along beside her, dimly aware that he was still clutching his six-pack. The girl trucked down the empty street next to him, one of her arms laden with the handles of plastic shopping bags.

"What?" he panted.

"Temporal anomaly," she repeated. "Circular infinite life span, yeah?"

Methos opened his mouth to say something, but a shadow stepped into the road in front of them, and Methos could see the rounded dome of the old-timey Bobby hat. A pinprick of light started to grow brighter and the woman tugged his arm again, pulling hi to the left just before another beam shot out of the Bobby's mouth and sizzled the air where he'd been seconds before.

"You-" was all he got out when the woman slapped a leather strap against his wrist.

"Just enough temporal energy to-"

Methos felt like he was going to vomit, and he shut his eyes when he saw the blue light coming from behind them reflected in a shop window, and then-

"-make it back to the Seraph," the woman finished, letting go of him with a rustle. Methos lost his balance, choked back a bit of vomit and fell to his knees. "Safe as houses."

The blue light never came, and when Methos looked down under him, he saw metal grating instead of concrete.

"Wh-" was all he got out before the woman hauled him to his feet.

"Sorry about that," she burbled. "Saved my skin, you did." She waved the leather strap, which was attached to a small device with a digital readout. "I was out of juice, and what you have is more then enough to get me back onboard."

Methos leant against a wall, a metal wall, and looked about. The room was dim, and the woman had said it was a ship. "Where are we?"

The woman lifted a shade on a round portal next to her, and Methos could see out the small window, a sheet of gray and white stretching to a black, star-studded horizon. "The Moon," she told him. "Had to stash the ship here you know. Your government gets so uppity about things in its airspace."

Methos sighed. The part of him that had been terrified was calming down and the part of him that was amused was warring with the part of him that was quite annoyed. Just beyond the horizon was the Earth, a haze of white and blue and green. The Moon.

"I'm Jenny," the woman said, pulling her hat from her head and tossing it into a bin by the airlock door.

"Methos," he replied, not offering his hand.

"Oh look," Jenny said, pointing out the portal. "There they go." There was a bright orange spark of light as something broke the atmosphere and shot out into space proper. "I'll give them this: they're persistent." She shook her head and pulled her hair from its tail, tucking the stay in her pocket and rubbing her scalp with her other hand.

"Are they going to find us?" Methos asked, wondering why he was bothering to whisper. The ship got closer before curving its flight, but they were still close enough that Methos could see the paint on its hull. It was blue. He'd only been on a submarine once, but the consensus there had been that talking in enemy waters could lead to discovery. A spaceship was pretty much the same thing, right? Best to keep ones voice down just in case.

He really needed those library books on how science worked.

"Meh, they'll search for us for a while, and then they'll get tired," Jenny said, watching the spaceship shoot from the atmosphere and zoom right past them. They'll be to the edge of the solar system before they realise that we're not here."

"They bother you often?" Methos asked.

Jenny shrugged. "Only when I steal money from them."

"I have a friend on Earth like you," Methos told her as she pressed the button on the cockpit door, and the heavy sheet metal cranked open. "Now, if you cold just pop me back in Wales…"

"Do you know my dad?" Jenny turned to look at him then, her eyes bright and inquisitive. "You have that kind of time traveler look about you, you know."

Methos clutched his beer, still not willing to let go of the one thing that felt familiar. "I don't think-"

"Rides around in a big blue box," she told him. "Bigger on the inside, or so I've been told."

He felt the blood drain from his cheeks. It wasn't a response that he would have picked, but it was what his body did, and once it was done he couldn't argue with its appropriateness. "The Doctor?"

"Yeah, Dad." Jenny slammed the button to the doors again when they got stuck midway. "Come on you piece of-ah, there."

Methos followed Jenny into the cockpit, his eyes riveted to the back of her head, and then to the cockpit itself. It wasn't big, not like the TARDIS console room, and certainly nothing like the bridge of the Enterprise, but more like a bigger version of the Millennium Falcon.

And here he was comparing a real space ship to fictional ones.

There were two seats, but they had a good distance between them. It was large enough behind them to fit several beds, and everywhere there wasn't a view screen or window was covered in buttons and switches. Wires dangled from the ceiling in places. A taller man could accidentally strangle himself easily. All in all, the place looked very cobbled together, as if its owner had made quite a few modifications.

"I can't take you back just now, anyway," Jenny said conversationally, eyes already scanning the instruments in the room. "I'd have to send the transmatter with you, and I really need it." She pressed a button and turned about the room, looking at the ceiling. "If you wear it for a while I can charge it from you and then you can be on your merry way."

"Isn't think a little like kidnapping?" Methos asked, reaching out with one hand to trace the numbers on the door: 1442342.

Jenny blinked at him. "You're a child?" She looked him up and down. "You seem fully grown to me-"

"No, no," Methos sighed. "It's a-"

"Oh, good. Say," she interrupted. "Maybe you can tell me about Dad. You said you knew him, right?"

Methos fully entered the cockpit then, deciding that the doorway was just too risky. Jenny didn't seem like the kind of person to shut him in an airlock, but one never knew. "Don't you know your dad?"

Jenny shrugged. "It's complicated. But hey! Adventure, right? You like adventure?"

Not really, not ever, he wanted to say, but Jenny cut him off. "Like I said, you'll be back before you know it. I could give you a holiday, and you can tell me about Dad, and Bob's your uncle."

Methos could sense that he wasn't going anywhere near Earth for a little while, and besides, he's been dying to see Barcelona. The planet, not the city. It had been decades. He shifted towards the co-pilot seat when something in that vicinity moved and he found himself face to face with a blue light and a too-familiar eyestalk.

"Oh Jesus Fucking Christ! It's a Dalek!" Methos didn't know whether he was more comforted or upset by the feel of the door at his back.

Jenny started the controls to the ship leaning over the back of the pilot seat. "Oh ze's harmless. Buckle in." She managed to slide into her seat in a snake-like maneuver that defied logic, her hands never leaving the keyboard in front of her.

The Dalek was punching things with its blaster, its other stick-hand-thingy pushing a series of switches up from a down position.

"He's a Dalek."

Jenny hit a big red button and Methos felt a little jolt. The viewscreen in front of the console showed them lifting off, though it didn't feel like it. Moon gravity, really.

"Well, I can't take you back now," Jenny said conversationally. "I need both hands."

Methos slid along the wall until he bumped into the seat whose back was bolted to the metal. He felt for something, anything loose, so that he could-what? Hit the Dalek in the eyestalk with a monkey wrench.

It wasn't that he was usually terrified, but Daleks had a nasty habit of coming to earth every once in a while, and he had the unfortunate habit of being shot running or resisting. And sure, The Doctor usually took care of them, wall, always took care of them, but Methos didn't like the running and the shooting, and the falling down. A lot could happen to a body while it was lying dead in the middle of the pavement.

The Dalek rolled its eyestalk in a small circle. Did it just roll its eyes at him? Methos changed directions to slide the other way around the cockpit, towards Jenny. She patted the edge of the chair bolted to the wall next to her, and he slumped down, still clutching his brown bag wrapped six-pack of Brains. He pried his fingers from the paper wrapped box and set it on the floor under his seat. Drinking right now, no matter how much he needed alcohol, wouldn't be wise.

"IN ANOTHER 4.5 SECONDS WE WOULD HAVE ESTABLISHED CONTACT WITH THE COMMAND CRUCIBLE, AND YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN EXTERMINATED," Dalek Sen offered. Dear god, just the sound of that voice was enough to make Methos want to freefall out of the ship.

"Of course, of course, how lucky of us," Jenny replied, reaching out in front of the Dalek and snagging a portable red rectangle. She shook it vigorously and then replaced it on front of the Dalek's workspace. "Good one, Sen. Try again."

"What's it doing?" Methos whispered.

Jenny pushed her chair back and the springs under her arse squeaked. She clasped her hands behind her neck and grinned. "Contacting Crucible Command."

Methos watched Sen use the plunger to turn the impossibly small dial on the Etch-A-Sketch. "Ah."

"Precisely." Jenny reached down beside her and grabbed the handles of the shopping bag she'd been toting like precious cargo the whole time they'd been running. "And now, the froo-its of our labour." She upended the bag on the console, despite the many buttons it depressed, and dumped out a staggering amount of canisters of chocolate HobNobs.

"HobNobs?" Methos asked, jaw twitching. It wanted to hang open in shock, but he was about four thousand years too old for that. He had expected a

"The chocolate kind," Jenny answered firmly. "You can only get them here." She ripped the packaging off a tube and extracted a biscuit, popping the whole thing into her mouth in one go. "Ah murf if murf ah murrf."

"They sell them all over the world," Methos told her, reaching into the tube and pulling out a biscuit.

"No, I mean, on this planet," Jenny corrected, pulling out another biscuit. "No where in the universe." She shoved it in her mouth and rolled her eyes up in the back of her head.

"You have obviously never had Jaffa Cakes," Methos muttered.

Jenny chewed with her eyes closed, then dusted her hands, ignored him, and turned to the front of her seat. "Now, Methos, where shall we go?"

Methos looked out the viewscreen at the Earth, spinning away from them and becoming impossibly small. It was an interesting proposition.

It wasn't the first time he'd ever left the Earth. Or the solar system for that matter. But this was the first time in something that wasn't a blue police box. Aside from Sen, who was considerably terrifying and yet not, he wasn't about to turn down a free ride for a little while. Especially not with this girl, who reminded him of said police box owner.

"Oh, perhaps some place warm?"

Jenny pulled out a large book and slammed it on the console in front of her. The cover said, DON"T PANIC. "I think I know just the place."

Methos stuffed a HobNob in his mouth and leaned forward.

BACK TO THE PRESENT-FUTURE-PRESENT:

"Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad, I missed you so so bad!" Jenny sang as she skipped ahead of Methos up the loading ramp towards the cockpit.

Behind him the net filled with fresh fruit dragged along the ground. It was going to get a lot of money or them five planets over, actually, and Methos was looking forward to having some credits in his pocket. He had a craving for a banana daiquiri, and certainly one needed credits to obtain one in this system.

That he even knew that was proof that his two weeks with Jenny had been well spent.

"This had better been worth it," Methos muttered. "With my luck you recorded that and it'll be on YouTube in a week."

Jenny flopped down in the pilot chair next to Sen and frowned. "Why would someone want to record something? You were there when it happened."

Sometimes, Methos didn't understand Jenny's logic, but he really liked it.

"Sen, do something about those portside thrusters," Jenny mumbled, hitting the dash.

"PORTSIDE THRUSTERS ENGAGED UPON THREAT-"

"Yes, I am sure it's all well and terrified," Methos said, flipping the gravity clamps down on the back leg well.

Sen's eyestalk turned to stare at him. "BEFORE YOUR ARRIVAL, I WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL PRE-FLIGHT MEASURES."

Methos watched Sen's blaster twitch, and even though he knew that was all the Dalek could do, it still didn't prevent him from shuddering. "Understood. Thanks for letting me take over."

The eyestalk turned back to the front and examined the array in front of it. "YOUR FINGERS ARE MORE SUITED TO THE TASK."

The liftoff was terrifying in that way that Methos imagined all space travel was going to be. Thousands of years ago he'd been trapped on the Irish sea with a bunch of monks in a rowboat, where the only possible ways to die were dysentery, starvation, drowning, sharks, hypothermia, cannibalism, and overindulgence in monastic prayer. Now that the planet and its gravity had been removed from the equation, the ways to die became less plentiful, but the certainty of it had quadrupled. Sure he's revive, but who's to say how long it would take to be rescued?

He'd been buried alive for five months once. Years of suffocating and reviving would probably drive him insane.

The past two weeks had been multiple adventures in insanity, smuggling, running, and biscuits. Lots of biscuits. Methos found that he didn't even mind that they hadn't gotten to Barcelona, and he was enjoying remembering how science worked these days, from Jenny's encyclopedic, if random, mind to Sen's occasional moments of non-murderous lucidity. He'd be back someday, and it wasn't as if he was getting any older.

And he hadn't died in the vacuum of space, so, plus.

"Okay, so here's what I'm thinking," Jenny said suddenly turning to him and leaning back in her chair to see around Sen. "I heard there's this asteroid in like a fold of nothing, outside of the universe, and it's just chock-o-block with TARDIS parts."

Methos spun in his chair. He'd only discovered that they spun yesterday, and he was keen on spinning. Plus, his nerves were bothering him. "I was thinking that you might want to swing by Earth and get me home," he told her. "It was just supposed to be the one trip."

Jenny laughed. "You said that five trips ago."

Methos gave the matter some thought. "I have friends on Earth..."

Jenny shrugged. "How about I get you home sometime soon? The temporal thing I cobbled together isn't super accurate."

Boy was it not ever, Methos mused. It looked like something from a Back to the Future film had made dastardly sexual love to a leather wriststrap nailed to a piece of plywood. Jenny called it 'steampunk'. He called it 'messing with the natural order of things'. Sen didn't call it anything, but Methos was sure that ze probably thought it far inferior to all things Dalek. Ze probably wasn't wrong on that count.

"Do you know Dr. Song?" Jenny asked, cocking her head.

Methos thought back. He absently reached over to take Sen's Etch-A-Sketch and give it a good shake. "Doesn't she have a thing for the Doctor?"

Jenny shrugged. "Well. Maybe." She ducked her head and hid her face. "She's not my mother," she grumbled, hands on the controls.

Methos drew a box with the Etch-A-Sketch. This was a lot harder than it looked. Sen's eyestalk swiveled as ze followed Methos's every line in the gray dust. Sometimes he liked to draw little fake schematics on it for Sen to study. One of these days he was going to draw something the Dalek would fashion into a death ray by accident, but until then, it was amusing.

He did not have a soft spot for Sen. Not. Never.

"What is with your TARDIS obsession?" he asked suddenly. "I mean, there's only one left, and that's not yours." He regretted saying it as soon as the words left his mouth. Jenny was sensitive abut her father (father, seriously, what the fresh hell, Doctor?), and he didn't like to pry, but she was going to be taking them outside of the universe, in their bastardized time machine, and he wasn't even sure if that was going to happen. They might as well have made the ship out of a cardboard box like some sort of Calvin and Hobbes comic.

"I'm just saying that it's unlikely that the three of us can make anything out of what might be there. Nothing usable." When Jenny was silent, he set the Etch-A-Sketch back onto Sen's console and folded his hands. "Jenny, does your dad know you're out here?"

He'd never asked her about where she'd come from. In fact, except for a few seconds of familiarity, he wasn't even sure she was the Doctor's daughter. How could she prove it? She'd said something about only one of her hearts working, but that didn't prove anything except that she had one working heart, like any old human.

Though she certainly wasn't any old human, and she didn't look like the Doctor.

What did the Doctor look like these days? Did he still have that celery boutonniere? Or the scarf? It was hard to say. Maybe he had the 3D glasses. He did like the 3D glasses.

"He's never going to..." she drifted off. "They might be part of...there's something of him there," she finished. "You know, if I made a TARDIS, he'd be interested," she finished, looking every bit like a child. Methos wondered how old she was.

"All right then, do you have a theory on how to get there?" he asked her. Behind him, he heard Sen's dome swivel, probably staring at the back of his head and contemplating his extermination.

Jenny opened the DON"T PANIC guide. "I have a theory. But we need parts." She flipped a few pages and then slammed the book shut again without even looking at it. "Say, we could swing by Barcelona, get parts and foodstuffs, and go for it."

Methos opened his mouth to speak when she held up a hand. "Wait! Look what I found," she said, reaching under her seat and pulling out a brown paper bag. "Your alcohol!"

Methos watched her pull the six-pack out of the paper bag and slam it on the console, right on top of the thruster ignition button. The ship lurched forward for a second. She was the worst driver ever. He wondered if that was genetic.

"Look at that," he said, spinning another turn in his chair. "That takes me back two weeks."

Jenny pulled one of the bottles out and read the label before smiling at him. "Let's get squiffy and let Sen drive," she suggested, pulling her hair from its tail and shaking it out. "Or do Daleks drink beer?

The Dalek's eyestalk swiveled around and regarded them with dull blue light. "INEBRIATION IS THE MARK OF INFERIORITY."

The lights on the consoles flickered merrily, and that soft beeping that came from under the dash and which Jenny had assured him was 'perfectly normal' chirruped in its steady rhythm. Methos stared out the thick transparasteel window at the stars flashing by and wondered how old he was when a linear five thousand-year-old man was five thousand years into the future.

That sounded like a question that beer would answer.

Jenny slammed one of the bottle rims on the edge of the console, showing off her sheer willingness to damage the one thing keeping them alive, and the bottlecap flipped off into the back of the cockpit with a tinkling plink. Perhaps behind the wall-fridge.

Well then," she said, handing him the bottle. "Cheers."

Methos lifted the bottle to his lips, stared at the spinning panoply outside the window and wondered what the outside of the universe looked like.

Only one way to find out.

END