#11

[rank1]

Passengers: Travis Touchdown and Rhys Strongfork and Lucifer Morningstar
Location: An elevator
Date: mid March
Summary: Lucifer is like "wow I got the two most annoying inmates, let's lock them in a room together to sort things out!!" and ideally Travis will not fucking kill Rhys
Warnings: ideally Travis will not fucking kill Rhys but i'll let u knowwww



Noon at the gym. Travis is in his designated gym t-shirt, the sacrificial lamb from his collection that is navy blue and declares him to be WORLD FAMOUS. He does not own gym shorts, either here or at home, but here he cannot work out in the nude without being called a pervert or something. Maybe next month when the commissary opens he'll buy a pair. For now: jeans.

He waits at the gym door, head back, humming to himself, drumming his fingers on his thigh. He wonders if Rhys will pussy out of anything heavier than 10lbs. Probably. That guy looks like he was made for pushing papers, not work. Lucifer might do a little better, but he doesn't look like the kind of guy to tolerate gym shit very long. Short session, Travis bets.

Smash cut to getting in an elevator with the two guys. No gym after all. What a fucking bait-and-switch.

"The fuck is the point of this," Travis says, mostly to himself. The doors start to slide closed behind him, and he pivots on a heel, confused: Lucifer has not boarded the elevator, and Travis finds himself looking at an ever-narrowing slice of Lucifer's face. He calls back, wary: "Dude, what's the deal?"

Comments

[smugreport]

[ His mind immediately goes to William at that, and he inwardly cringes. ]

A weapon against cybersecurity, yeah.

[ Is that stretching the definition? Rhys doesn't think so. Totally a weapon, just more esoteric. ]

Dude you had better be texting the helpdesk and not playing pong or something.

[rank1]

Texting with Satan.

[It's just so fun to say it like that.]

He says he's not a maintenance guy.

[smugreport]

[ If only that casualness of saying that landed with Rhys. ]

Yeah, obviously. What? He can't let the helpdesk know and get things moving?

[rank1]

Fuck if I know. He'd probably look like an asshole if we suffocated or starved out here.

[smugreport]

Well tell him there's an emergency- oh! Tell him you're having an allergic reaction.

[ His brain? Huge. ]

[rank1]

To what? [A vague gesture around them.] Space? The stars? You?

[smugreport]

I don't know!

[ He throws his hands up in return, the universal gesture of exasperation. ]

You suddenly developed a reaction to your copious amounts of hair gel and your head is swelling by the minute. Something. I can't be the one doing all the work here.

[rank1]

[Travis rolls his eyes and settles into his seat. Please imagine him manspreading as he does this.]

I am not faking shit, bro. Do I look like an actor or something? You do it.

[smugreport]

Oh my god, all you have to do is type it. Have you never lied on the internet before?

[ He narrows his eyes at Travis getting comfortable before going back to the panel, booting up his eye again in some futile attempt to be the competent one in all this. ]

Fine. I'll be the one to save the day here, and then I'll get to tell everyone I saved the day while you sat around scratching your nuts. If I can just get this stupid-

[ He jams on a few of the buttons again ]

Thing to respond!

[ Followed by a final, harder mash with the heel of his palm. It's probably just coincidence (please just be coincidence...) but at that moment the lights go out. ]

[rank1]

Lying on the internet is for people who don't have real shit to talk about.

[When the lights go out, he's looking at his CommLink, the glow of the screen illuminating his face. His gaze flicks to Rhys. Dryly:]

Keep it up, bro, you're doing a great job.

[smugreport]

[ Rhys rests his head against the cool wall of the elevator right above the panel, before tipping it back and hitting it against the cool steel a couple of times. ]

I can't believe that "lying on the internet" is where a guy like you draws the line.

[ He turns sharply at Travis's next remark, the evidence that he's glaring barely visible by the way his left eye casts light on his face. ]

I don't see you coming in with any bright ideas.

[rank1]

No honour in lying.

[But the dark is peaceful, Rhys using his head as a drum aside. Truthfully, he could consider a nap.]

If this happened in the showers, and the place was flooding and we’d drown, I could probably fix it. I’m good with plumbing. Electrical, though? You gotta go to school for that shit.

[smugreport]

Great, okay. I can't wait for you to be useful when that happens but we need to deal with the current problem first.

[ He pushes back from the wall finally, goes to sit down on the chairs opposite Travis. ]

And I also can't believe the second time I die could while I'm stuck here with you. Survived a malicious virus, death planet, and a space station crash just to go down to the butt of a gun and suffocation. Cool.

[rank1]

[Sounds like a pretty exciting life to Travis. Shit death, but sometimes that's how it goes, doesn't it? At least he had something.]

Why the hell do you think we're going to die here? The elevator's stopped. It's not like it's got a bomb strapped to it.

[smugreport]

[ Exciting isn't always a good thing. ]

You'd be surprised how many elevator incidents we had on Helios. A sudden drop in oxygen, or just the whole thing detaching from the hull of the station. Just cause this place is state of the art doesn't mean they didn't cut corners here and there.

[ He takes a nervous glance out of the glass wall into the the vast emptiness of space. It's a wonder that up until now he hasn't felt any of the lingering damage that being on Helios when it went down left him with. ]

[rank1]

[A raised eyebrow.]

So you live in a state of constant paranoia that you're going to die in space?

[smugreport]

[ DO NOT CUT HIM TO THE BONE LIKE THAT PLEASE

There's visible shock for a moment on Rhys's face before he masks it with one of his patented scowls, crossing his arms as he looks away from Travis altogether and figures out how to redirect. ]

No- well, I mean everyone on Helios was afraid of getting airlocked to some extent, it was the third most popular way to take someone out up there. But I'm not paranoid, I have a healthy amount of caution. I know you won't get that.

[rank1]

I really don't, because I don't fear shit like that. It sounds pretty sick to airlock someone, though. Is it true the air gets sucked from their lungs so they suffocate as they spin in space?

[smugreport]

[ "It sounds pretty sick to airlock someone" WOOF- it's not like Rhys was above it or anything but he didn't try to cool-factor it that much. Just another unfortunate part of office life. ]

...Yeah, I guess so. And freeze.

[ His mind immediately goes to Henderson's lifeless body floating past the window of his office with timing so good it was like a bad joke. Then his mind goes to other bodies, co workers who didn't make it off the station, Yvette....ejected into space, their corpses left to orbit Pandora like a frozen graveyeard.

He's glad he's not facing Travis right now, with the way he can feel his brows pinching. There's still some strain in his voice. ]

Can we- ....If you're gonna talk, talk about something else. Like your berry girls or whatever.

[rank1]

[Travis raises an eyebrow. Though he'd usually relish the chance to talk about something that matters to him, it's Rhys. He's not gonna set himself up to be called a pervert or whatever.

Skeptically:]

What, you want to hear about Bizarre Jelly?

[smugreport]

[ Rhys crosses one of his legs over so it sits high on his thigh, crosses his arms a little tighter. ]

Yeah, that. I've already forgotten most of what you said on Meodriotope so it'll be like brand new information.

[ Literally- well, almost literally anything would be better to think about than where his mind's going right now, even Travis's weird interests. Some kind of background noise to drown out the bad thought spiral he's begun to enter. ]

[rank1]

Hey bro, great idea. I love just chatting away at someone who doesn’t actually give a shit about what I’m saying.

[Travis rolls his eyes.]

You know not all of us talk just to hear our own voices, right?

[smugreport]

[ Rhys does turn his head to face Travis at that. ]

Who said I don't give a shit? I totally care about.. Bizzare...

[ He's already forgotten. ]

Look, we're stuck in here for the next however long. I don't like it, you don't like it, but I'm at least trying to make some conversation to pass the time. I thought you were into things like twenty questions.

[rank1]

Uh huh.

[He’s not buying it.]

There’s a reason I played it with Jack and not you, and it wasn’t that she’s hot.

[smugreport]

[ Jack truly has the most unfortunate name, it makes him near wince every time he hears it despite how common it is. ]

What, you only play with bald people?

[rank1]

[Travis isn’t sure if he’s met someone with a dumber sense of humour in his whole life, but if he has, they sure aren’t coming to mind.]

Nah, but give it time. You’ll figure it out.

[smugreport]

[ Any humor in his expression from his attempt to redirect vanishes and is replaced by a scowl instead. ]

Fine, I'll go first. What's with you trying to fight everyone?

[rank1]

There’s nothing in life as thrilling as a good fight.

[He doesn’t want to play shit, but he’s here and stuck, so:]

What’s with you picking fights all the time? You know you’ll lose.

[smugreport]

[ Inwardly he is stupidly satisfied that Travis is playing along. ]

Seriously? Nothing?

[ Rhys can think of at least a handful things that give a better rush then a smackdown. Landing a good deal or promotion, watching someone you hate suffer, rolling a nat 20, the entirety of Pandora (in a bad way.) ]

Physically, maybe [ definitely. ] but physical isn't how I play.

[ He taps his right temple with the port in it. What does that even mean? Don't worry about it. ]

[rank1]

[Travis genuinely isn't sure if Rhys means his brain or the hunk of metal, but either way, he's skeptical of anything interesting going on upstairs. His expression in the dim glow of the CommLink is notably dubious. "Sure."]

Absolutely nothing.

[smugreport]

[ HE MEANS BATTLE OF THE MINDS TRAVIS. He means dueling with wit and intelligence!! ]

You'd fit right in on Pandora, that place was all violence all the time. Well- mostly.

[ It had it's moments, overshadowed as they were. The biodome, the....uh. Okay it had one moment, and it didn't really count. ]

[rank1]

[Given Travis has no reason to believe Rhys has any idea whatsoever what his inner life is like, he's similarly dubious of a claim like that. You don't fucking know where I'd fit in, bro, and all.]

Why is it all violence?

[smugreport]

[ He shrugs. ]

I dunno, it's like their culture down there or something, every other week there'd be some kind of turf war between clans. And if you didn't get get caught in their crossfire you'd be running from getting ripped apart by the wildlife instead.

[ Hyperion was supposedly helping with that, "bring order." But from all Rhys had seen down there they didn't accomplish much in the way of that. And the people, they really thought Hyperion had made it worse.

Regardless of what Rhys thought about most Pandorans, he could only deny the reality of it all so much after living down there for months. ]