#4

[rank1]

Passengers: Travis and Jack, and any warden who wishes for them to shut up, and Travis and Alice
Location: Solitary
Date: Feb 17th
Summary: Jailhouse chatter
Warnings: None yet

For Jack:

Travis is bored, as Travis is wont to be in these situations.

He peers out of the cell, face pressed up against it so that he can see as far as he can. It's not that far, but it's better than nothing. Can't see any cameras, anyway. Doesn't sound like anyone is around.



"Hey Jack," he calls, curious. "You still in here?"


For Alice:

It's been days.

In this time, Travis has discovered several things:

1. He has not been without high-speed internet for 72 hours since the dial-up days. Sure, there's been a few dodgy moments here or there, like the eighteen hours he spent in jail for that stupid fucking misdemeanor a few years back, or the four excruciating days where he only had one bar on his cracked cell phone, but this has been forever. Actually, has it been forever? How many days has it been?

2. William has a balding patch on the back of his head.

3. Most adults don't have hobbies. It's just work and family and work and family and work and family and endless reruns of the million cable TV procedurals while they get to level 7854 in Candy Crush. (Okay, maybe the last one is a hobby. But not one Travis respects.) Travis, on the other hand, has so many hobbies that being forced to sit on his hands for days feels like an existential crisis. Were the work + family people right to train themselves on a baseline level of daily boredom and drudgery? Who is he without his hobbies?

4. In December 2009, James Cameron released Avatar, a CG monstrosity that could be otherwise be titled Dances With Blue People, shattering box office records. Despite this, over a decade later, Travis cannot remember the name of a single character or line of dialogue from the movie, and trying to recall a single thing about it is starting to feel like the real torture of solitary. ("Sigourney Weaver" is not a character name, but it is a nice interlude to think about how good she looks in an half-way unbuttoned shirt and frustration on her voice.)

5. Following that last note on #4, it is surprisingly hard to jerk off in solitary, as he is simultaneously in what is essentially a private room, and also very very very observed. On the other hand, his imagination is practically a superpower.

6. He misses his cat so much it feels physically painful. Is it crazy to think you were a cat in another life, and that's why you love this little creature so much? Yeah, probably. But that's what it feels like.

7. He likes the name Alice, but in a bittersweet way. He thinks he's going to keep calling her AQ.

Anyway.

"Didn't get her, huh?" he says to her, through the bars. Disappointed but not surprised. "She's safe, though, yeah?"

The cat is foam, but a foam effigy of his cat is still his cat.

Comments

[n0ught]

"What, for good behavior?"

The joke is that it's impossible for her to behave good. She is bad behavior personified.

"If you're asking if I want to play Twenty Questions, I don't."

[rank1]

Okay, that stings a little: he was going to ask that.

"There's no way that playing Twenty Questions is worse than sitting here in fucking silence and counting how many screws are in the wall panels," Travis replies. 145, for the record. All of them those expensive-ass little Torx Security screws. Travis could price them out if he got even more bored than this. "You wanna play anyway?"

[n0ught]

This has got to be his first time in prison. Though to be honest, this isn't like any other prison she's been to---the last time she was in solitary, they put her in cryo sleep. She's not sure which is a worse punishment.

Jack sounds like she wants to kill herself and everyone in a 100 foot radius when she answers: "Fine. Are you a human."

[rank1]

"Yeah, I am," he replies, satisfied. If she tried to kill him, it would be the best damn moment of his time here: finally, a real fucking fight. "You?"

[n0ught]

Jack strangles a sound of disbelief in her throat: that is not how you play Twenty Questions, but she quickly realizes it would reflect even worse on her if she admits she knows that. Better to just go along with it than look like a fuckin' nerd.

However, this also makes it seem like she doesn't know what a human is. She looks stupid either way.

"Yeah," she says, annoyed for the above reasons. Poor Travis. "Not sure what else I'd be. You have aliens that look human?"

[rank1]

"Don't you, asking shit like that?" he shoots back, unbothered. Hell, he even grins. "We don't have aliens at all, but in movies and comics and stuff they usually look human. Maybe they have green skin or tentacles growing out of their heads. Cheaper, less prosthetics. Which tattoo is your favourite?"

[n0ught]

Don't have aliens at all--- Jack is more interested in this than talking about herself, so she gives him a bullshit answer.

"The one where I'm banging your mom. What year is it?"

[rank1]

"Fuck you," he replies, and there's a smidge of heat there, but credit where credit is due: it was a smooth retort. "2015. Did you do your tattoos yourself?"

[n0ught]

Why so many tattoo questions... oh, well. She can't really blame him; it's not like she doesn't have them for this very reason.

"Some. Hard to do your own back, though."

2015 is... so long ago, she can't even fathom it. Humans weren't biotics then. Hell, humans didn't even live anywhere but Earth.

"Where are you from?"

[rank1]

They're novel, okay. And she wears so little that it's hard not to be curious.

"Earth," he replies. Duh. "Santa Destroy, California. How about you? You miss it?"

That's two questions, Travis.

[n0ught]

She pauses briefly. Her demeanor switches a little at the question: less passively annoyed, and more plaintive.

"I don't know where I'm from. My earliest memory is in a cell." It goes without saying that she doesn't miss that.

She maybe doesn't want to continue this line of questioning, so she goes for something that she hopes will make him stop the game:

"How did you die?"

[rank1]

That takes the wind from Travis's sails, too. He frowns, fingers winding around the bars of his cell's window.

"Shit, that's fucked up," he says. Poor gal. Extra fucked up to be here now, then. Her question for him wounds his pride, but what does he have that compares to being raised in a cell? "I was living in the woods and had some dumb accident. Choked to death. Why were you in a cell as a kid?"

[n0ught]

There are a lot of choice jokes in being choked to death, but then Travis has to go and pity her. The kid in the cell was weak and stupid. Nothing to be pitied. Just something to be angry about.

"Because they experimented on me," she says bitterly; the anger isn't directed at Travis, but it's forceful and dangerous all the same. She sits up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed.

"They did stuff to my brain and made me kill other kids to see how strong I was. And... I guess they experimented on the other kids, too." This is a new revelation, something she's still trying to figure out how to fit into her self-identity. "Whatever. I don't want to play anymore."

[rank1]

"Fuck the game," Travis replies, with earnest disgust –– who can think about a game when something like that is on the table? "This is real. I'm fucking concerned now! No kid should ever have to go through something like that. How'd you get out?"

[n0ught]

"There was... something happened." She doesn't know anymore. She knows what she remembers, but that's not really the truth. And she doesn't really feel like telling Travis she killed a bunch of kids on her way out of the facility.

"Something distracted the guards and I made it to a shuttle. Stole a shuttle," she says, correcting herself, as if that makes it more badass. "It's fine. Went back later and planted a big fucking bomb. Blew it up."

[rank1]

Travis leans a shoulder against the door, his gazed unfocused. Jeez. His stomach twists. He tries to imagine what he'd do if his kids were in that kind of situation and decides to cut that mindscape short. It doesn't go anywhere good, and the last thing he wants is to spend more days in solitary choking down a thought like that.

"That must've felt good," he says. "Seeing everything that hurt you go up in flames... wipe it all away. You ever find out why they did it?"

[n0ught]

"'cause they're fucking evil," she says instantly, angrily; there is nothing kind about anything Cerberus does, no matter how many times Miranda tries to bullshit her that these experiments were unsanctioned.

But she realizes after the initial rage subsides that Travis probably meant something else, and she exhales a bitter laugh. "And to make me a weapon. That backfired big time, right?"

[rank1]

"Huge," Travis says. He isn't sure if it's supposed to be assurance or a compliment, but it's something: "You're a total badass, taking the people who hurt you out like that. Kind of poetic that you became the thing that destroyed them."