(Untitled)

[sign_seeker]

[OOM: Out of Milliways, and in a different part of Time: Weatherall Station gets a visitor.

Who turns out to have some unexpected relations hanging around.]The door opens not on a room or a field or a spaceship's interior cabin, but on a black field of vacuum shot through with the terrible flowerbursts of dying stars. It's the view from the

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[walksthebounds]

Jamie spends the first two or three seconds just trying not to look immensely relieved.

(And for once, the look of the observation window isn't something to absently avoid. It's not the same as real sky, of course, but it's nice to look out somewhere and feel there's space.)

"Well, hullo Milliways," he says, when those twoor three seconds are up, and then turns to take in his companion, with a cocked eyebrow.

"- and hullo Uncle Will! Seems Milliways agrees with you. "

[sign_seeker]

Will grins -- the same quick rueful grin Jamie's seen, and that same gesture of tucking his hands in his pockets, but the face is far younger, and the pockets are in jeans now.

(The narration apologizes for the fact that it's 1981 for Will now, and his fashion sense -- while fairly staid -- reflects that.)

"You could put it that way, I suppose."

[walksthebounds]

"It's a neat trick," Jamie says, mildly impressed.

He would ask which is real, but - if Will's as old as he thinks, it likely doesn't much matter one way or another.

(Fortunately, after a hundred years of wandering, Jamie's not likely to be put off too much by 80's fashions. Though they're not going among the list of his favorites, for sure.)

"Either way, it looks like I owe you one."

[sign_seeker]

It matters. But only in certain ways.

This is a very Old One sort of answer, which is why it's probably just as well Jamie doesn't bother to ask.

"Oh, well." His accent is pure Buckinghamshire now; the speech of this time and place, for this Will, and very old indeed for the Will Jamie met on the other side of the door. "It was rather in my interests too to see you back safe."

[toxic_perfume]

Well now. There's a familiar face. (The unfamiliar face has moved off by now.)

Cavilo slides out of her chair and saunters in Jamie's direction, with a smile like a sword blade.

[walksthebounds]

. . . why hello Lara.

Jamie's got an eye on the exits, and he shifts his seat enough so that he'll be able to dart for the door fast if necessary without bumping into the table - but he doesn't move yet.

"That," he says, when she's close enough to hear, "was a nasty trick." He projects injured innocence into his voice.

[toxic_perfume]

She gives a chuckle, and her tone is all sweet reason.

"Oh, don't think of it as a trick, Jamie. Think of it as a valuable learning experience."

[walksthebounds]

"There's not all that much to learn, when you're rotting in quarantine indefinitely," Jamie points out.

"It's not funny, Lara. I don't know what I did to get you off at me, but that could have been really serious! You don't even know -"

He cuts himself off; he's thought about what he would say here, there's no good in flying off the handle.

[theravenboy]

The year is nineteen-eighty-six.

A white-haired man leans against a door to open it. He's not old, despite his hair; perhaps he is twenty-five, his pale skin clear, his smile gentle.

In his arms, the man cradles a child, who has just begun to wail. "Hush, now," says Bran Davies to the infant Owen Arthur Davies. "It is only --" and he looks again, startled to see where he has come.

[sign_seeker]

This Will is from 1981 and university, when Bran Davies is dating a girl named Margaret and any thoughts of children are only in the future-maybe category; and, in another sense, he's from eight hundred years later, when Bran Davies's bones are dust in the soil of an Earth that's only one homeland among dozens.

And in yet another sense, perhaps, he's not quite from either of these times.

In any case -- that quiet Welsh voice catches his attention, and the baby's wail a second later, and Will's eyes snap over before he thinks twice.

Bran knows this face; Bran knows that momentary stillness, that blank no-reaction, too.

[theravenboy]

Bran, too, is still for an answering moment, before his face breaks into a grin. He walks -- gently, so as not to jolt the child -- towards the table where Will sits with a strange boy.

"Will bach!" Bran says, with a laugh. He would have shouted it across the room, but it might have disturbed Owen Arthur. "I had not been expecting to see you, today."

There are other things Bran could say: thank you for the baby gift, you look young, there is something the matter, isn't there? But the first and second could be dangerous, with a stranger about, and the third could be as well; and Bran knows perfectly well that something has put that look on Will's face.

In any case Bran Davies is the father of a newborn son, whose startled wail has now mellowed into a whimper, and Bran is finding it difficult to stay grim.

[walksthebounds]

Jamie glances, quick, from one man to another, and then to the baby, and tries not to grimace. He's got nothing against babies per se, but they can be awfully loud. Jamie's fond of his eardrums.

Jamie can be polite when he needs to; he tries to look inconsequential, and waits to be introduced.

(And wonders, quickly, if it's for this man's benefit that Will dropped the twenty years when he came in. That really would be a useful trick, he thinks again, wistfully.)

[friend_of_lucy]

It is only because the table he's writing at faces the door that Tumnus sees what they enter from and his hooves tap a nervous cadence as he watches them.

[sign_seeker]

From Will, the faun gets the mild, amiable glance that anyone might direct to a watching stranger; it's not quite a polite smile, but it's the same sort of thing.

(The fact that he's a faun is presumably the reason for the slightly bemused blink, barely there. Either this young man has been coming to Milliways for a good long while, or his world has this kind of thing too.)

[walksthebounds]

Jamie barely blinks at seeing a gentleman with fuzzy legs and hooves next to the bar; he has, after all, seen plenty stranger. It's more notable that he seems to be watching them (Jamie and Will are perfectly ordinary blokes to the naked eye, after all).

He ducks his head in a sort of friendly nod as they go by; why not? It never hurts to be polite.

[friend_of_lucy]

"Where did you come from?"

He's never seen a door open like that before and it makes him think of Lucy.

[penderwydd]

(OOC sorry I didn't see Will in the bar, mind a Tegid?)

[genarti]

[OOC: I'm sorry, but I'm not going to be reliably around to pick up slowtimes until Sunday. So another time might be better, if that works for you? He'll be in again!]