Day 57: Game Room (Third Shift)

[zack-fair.livejournal.com]

Having already met two new people today, Zack found that his mood was slowly starting to improve, if only out of necessity. While he didn't like dumping his problems on his friends, he was even less willing to do so with a stranger. More than that, Rose had been very personable and he'd felt good about himself for being to help her with a few things. It was remarkable how something as small as a good conversation could help so much.

And even better was the fact that he could now go wherever he wanted. It was probably the best part about Sunday. Better than that was that he hadn't been scheduled to see a visitor today. He had an idea of who might have come to see him, and while he missed her, he didn't need to see her the way she would probably be now.

So, the question remained: where to go? He would need to get outside at some point, but he figured he'd leave that until the end of the day. At the moment he just wanted to keep his mind busy, which led him to deciding on the Game Room. Even if he couldn't find someone to play with, enough of the stuff kept there was also usable for one person. Once he got bored of that, he could head out onto the recreational field and run some laps.

Those guys didn't even have to order him to do that. Still, Zack preferred that: to do something for himself rather than because he was told to.

The Game Room was completely empty when he entered, but Zack hoped that it would fill up before long. In the meantime, he grabbed a deck of cards and sat down to deal out a game of Solitaire.

[For Tifa.]

Comments

[doneinthree]

Kirk spent exactly four minutes in the Sun Room before deciding that he wasn't enough of a masochist right now to watch a film in which the prisoners of a POW camp were executed for trying to escape. Maybe earlier in the day, he'd been in the mood for motorcycle chases and against-all-odds heroism — hell, he'd spent a full ten years of his life trying to emulate twentieth-century hopeless rebels like Steve McQueen. But, as Kirk was learning with each passing day in this place, he wasn't that boy any more.

Or was he? Bones wasn't wrong about his recklessness. He hadn't exactly behaved maturely last shift either. If by pursuing this thing with the basement, he was leading his crew to pain and death... Bones might be right. Or he might be right, and this might get them some answers, finally. Or they both might be right. Who the hell knew.

He had his records to catch up on. Kirk tossed his journal onto an empty couch and flopped down with it, head leaning back over the arm rest. He balanced a ballpoint pen under his nose, and contemplated napping. Really, was there any point? Was anyone ever going to read his logs? No. Maybe. Hopefully. Dammit. "Captain's log," Kirk began, without dislodging the pen. "Stardate... I mean, day fifteen. My crew and I are still captives of Landel's Institute. We... still..."

He couldn't concentrate. Electronic beeps carried on ceaselessly behind him, more tinny and grating than the background noise of a starship. Kirk leaned his head back further to stare at a young man sitting in an armchair, fiddling with some sort of device.

[vstheworld]

The man with the journal wasn't the only one annoyed by outside noises. As the slow, slightly disjointed speech in the background filtered through the beeps and boops of Scott's pixellated adventure, the first words on the tip of Scott's tongue were: "Hey, cool it, Shatner. Some of us are trying to concentrate." Except he didn't actually say that. Thankfully, Scott's increasingly well-trained fourth wall alarm blared in his ear before he could, and his thick eyebrows shot up. Wait. Didn't someone say... That he was around...?

His thumb smacked down on the pause button. Ever so subtly (read: not very subtly), Scott peered up over the top of the Game Boy, gaze drifting toward the sound of the voice. However, he didn't see anyone familiar-looking. All he saw was another young man staring at him and giving him the standard "turn down the damn game" look. Nothing unusual there. But no sign of the owner of that signature voice. Huh.

"Hey, you didn't just hear someone say something about stardates, did you?" Scott asked the random stranger, who was probably from some dollar-bin horror movie of the week (seriously, man, could you get any more unfamiliar looking?).

[doneinthree]

Kirk's eyebrows raised in a silent question when the guy took notice of him, although with a pen moustache and his head upside-down, the request of Could you please turn it down? probably wasn't as obvious as it could've been. Reluctantly, he forced himself up into a sitting position, feeling the blood rush strangely in his head.

"What?" Kirk squinted at him, wondering why he was asking. He'd looked younger staring slack-jawed and wrapped up in his game; now Jim reassessed the other man's age to a couple of years older, maybe even the same age as him. His face wasn't familiar, but then, to be fair, Kirk hadn't exactly had time to get acquainted with all four-hundred-plus people serving on the Enterprise.

He'd thought it strange that the only person who'd come here with him were members of the bridge crew. By now, he'd given up on calling for others on the bulletin board. Was it possible that this man came from the twenty-third century?

Or was it... the other thing? "That was me," Kirk answered. Only one way to find out, and right now he was beyond the point of caring if someone felt like telling him he was from a television show. "Captain James T. Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise. You're familiar with the stardate system?"

[vstheworld]

Scott didn't answer right away. Instead he squinted at the man across from him. Tilted his head. Let the words he had just heard slosh around in his brain a few times. Stared.

"...No you're not." That was all Scott said to start, blinking slowly.

He supposed the guy had a certain resemblance. And Scott never had been the biggest Trek fan. But he was pretty darn sure he would have heard if someone had been playing a young Kirk in one of the newer Star Trek series. All the geeks and nerds would have flipped their s***. Then again, there were people like Harvey in the Institute — clearly who they said they were, but totally unlike the versions Scott was familiar with. Was this one of those cases? Even if it was, though... How? When?

Finally, Scott's fourth wall filter caught up with him and smacked him across the back of the brain. He tensed suddenly, almost dropping the Game Boy. "UH. I mean! No I'm not!" he tried to cover (lamely). "I-I've heard of the stardate system, but I never really figured it out! Yeah, that's it!"

Nice save. That wasn't suspicious at all, he thought to himself.

[doneinthree]

Kirk stared back, eyes narrowing slightly as the young man finished talking. He didn't need to be a Grandmaster of Bullshit (a made-up-on-the-spot title Kirk claimed along with Handsomest Hero of the Federation and Total Patsy for Speeches about Destiny) to know that this guy was a terrible liar. In this moment, he felt a faint echo of that same bewilderment which had happened when, after an entire day of the most stressful and unbelievable life-altering craziness, an ancient Vulcan in an ice cave told him he was a) Spock from the future, and b) his friend (always and shall be).

Unlike then, he still had the option of getting up and walking away from this conversation. He could pretend he'd never met this person. His life would continue on same as before with... monsters and... gloating voices on the intercom and mind-numbingly repetitive days.

"Okay," Kirk sighed. "I don't know you... but apparently you know me. Or the other me, whatever." Was that it? Was it him this guy was expecting? Finally he'd gotten over being compared to his father, and now he was going to spend the rest of his life getting compared to himself... "For once, I would like someone to not spend five minutes being coy and cryptic with me, so... what is it? Who are you?"

[vstheworld]

All Scott had to hear was "the other me" to let his fourth wall alarm finally shut off. From the way Kirk was talking, it sounded like he was already well aware that he was widely known to be someone else. Thank goodness. He loved when people came in and ruined stuff before he could; then no one could give him crap for that stuff later on.

"Uh, Scott Pilgrim, for one. No special title," he answered, shifting in the chair and leaning on the arm rest a bit more. He would have used the "Mighty Bassist" title, but he had a feeling that he was going to have to start paying royalties to Guybrush and LucasArts if he used that one too many times more. "And yeah, sorry to disappoint, but it's totally another you that I'm thinking of, if you're who you say you are. And now that that's out of the way, I've gotta know: how did you find out about that? Who told you?" Who mercilessly shattered your fourth wall so I didn't have to?

[doneinthree]

"Scott Pilgrim," Kirk repeated. No special title meant a civilian, which eliminated Starfleet. The name was no more familiar than the face, but it — along with the guy's accent — pointed at a likely regional origin. Someone from Earth. American. But that didn't narrow things down quite as much as the way Scott suddenly seemed to relax around him.

Totally another you. Did they really look so different? Kirk thought back to the man he'd seen on the night his shadow came to life. The one who wore his uniform like he'd been born into it, who smirked like he knew his smile stopped most humanoids short. Small things, he'd picked out: hazel eyes, slicked back hair, some ten years and ten pounds on him, but his face...

Kirk opened his mouth to ask a question, but Scott beat him to it. Twice. His mouth held, then closed, then opened again to answer: "What?" This conversation, he realized, was going to have a lot of these moments. Kirk shut his eyes for a second, then decided to take it one at a time.

"If you're talking about who told me that I come from an offshoot timeline from the one where angry future Romulans didn't show up twenty-five years ago and ruin my life, then that's... classified information." And still more than he'd shared with anyone since promising Future Spock to keep his existence a secret, but there was something about Scott Pilgrim which made him want to take a chance. He doubted would mean anything to him, if the young man was more familiar with the other Kirk after all, but... maybe.

And anyway, it was only fair to share some answers himself, if he was going to demand them out of Scott. "If you're talking about whatever you're talking about, then... no one." Technically true, anyway. He raised his eyebrows. "What are you talking about?"

[vstheworld]

Wait, now Scott was confused. What does he mean, "What are you talking about?" Angry future Romulans don't have anything to do with the fourth wall, do they?

And then it hit him.

"...Oh."

They didn't have anything to do with the fourth wall because Kirk's fourth wall was somehow pristine and intact in spite of his knowing about another Kirk. Correction: had been intact. Scott had just put the beginnings of a crack that was sure to send the whole thing crumbling at any moment.

Crapsticks on a crap sandwich.

Uuughhh. No sense in delaying the inevitable, Scott thought. Maybe he could at least make the whole thing sound less insane than it was, if offshoot timelines were involved. "Um. Well, the fact that there's more than one offshoot timeline, apparently," he started, sounding as though he were stumbling around on a pile of words and somehow avoiding the wrong ones by just a hair each time. "Like. One where the Captain Kirk people know is a famous TV star who's played by a guy who looks nothing like you?"

...Yeah, there wasn't really any way to make that sound less insane.

[doneinthree]

It should've been more comforting than it was to get confirmation that whatever utterly insane thing Landel had done to his head a week ago had some basis in... something. Because surely it was better that there existed an actual universe out there where James T. Kirk was a fictional character, instead of the Head Doctor simply having way too much on his time on his hands and inventing this story just for Bill's benefit.

Bill. Oh god. This whole thing was someone's idea of a joke, wasn't it? An elaborate, ridiculous, impossible-to-believe joke. As if it wasn't enough that he was technically a Jim Kirk from some messed up timeline, and somewhere out there in time and space was a Kirk who rose the ranks legitimately to become captain of the Enterprise. As if it wasn't enough that his CMO was apparently haunted by memories of a third Jim, a cruel and ruthless one.

"This 'famous TV star' of yours..." Kirk grabbed for the dog tags dangling from his neck, remembering a second too late that he was back in the grey uniform. Which didn't matter, but it would've helped illustrate his point. "He wouldn't happen to be named William Shatner, would he?"

[vstheworld]

If Scott had been confused before, now he was just befuddled (was there a difference? Scott wasn't sure, but "befuddled" sounded one step beyond, sort of). So this Kirk was from some offshoot timeline and knew about that, and he didn't know about the whole Star Trek thing... but he knew the name "William Shatner"? Just what kind of information had people been feeding this guy?

"Yeah, he would happen to be," Scott said carefully, eyeing "Kirk" with a wary eye. "How'd you figure?"

[doneinthree]

"Ah..." Kirk laughed and shook his head. Where would he even start?

Where else? He had his reasons for concealing this information from his crew, but he couldn't figure out much of a point to pretend otherwise with Scott, assuming the man really did know everything already. "It's the name the nurses call me. I wouldn't have twice about it, except that about—" He paused, quickly doing the math in his head. "—twelve days ago, there was this... mass brainwashing. A bunch of people made to think they were who our dog tags say we are. I was one of them."

He'd hardly spoken of this since then. A health check-up with Bones, a short conversation with Spock, then an entry in his captain's log and Kirk had closed the book on the whole episode. It had been easy to believe he'd mostly forgotten about this nonsense, but talking brought it all back.

"Bill's story was that he was named after the actor, I think. Huge fan. A 'Trekkie', I guess you'd call it. I still remember some of what he remembers." Kirk tapped the side of his head, then smiled wryly at Scott. "I wasn't lying when I said no one told me. I just thought it was... a joke."

[vstheworld]

It was really, really hard not to laugh. ...Reeeeaaally hard.

Somehow, though, Scott managed not to let more out than a stifled snerk through a nostril. For all he knew, his own "real name", Bryan Whatsisfaces, was the name of whatever schlub drew his comic series, or played him in the movie, or some other lame meta joke like that. He couldn't exactly pretend he was much better than Kirk here.

Besides that, the talk of brainwashing was definitely enough to sober him up, and fast. He hadn't experienced that personally, but he had been around some of the people he had, namely Bass/Forte. That... couldn't have been fun, he imagined.

"Okay, I think I get it now," Scott said with a nod, the urge to laugh thankfully dying down at this point and giving way to a more subdued respect. Offshoot timeline or not, Star Trek fan or not, this guy was still James Tiberius Kirk. Captain. He deserved as much respect as Indiana Jones in the frame of pop culture legends, maybe more, depending on who you asked. And yet he couldn't help certain remarks that were in his nature to make: "I'm sorry you had to go through that, man. I know the time you're talking about and it sounds like it was more trouble than Tribbles, seriously."

Now that was a joke, thought Scott proudly.

Somewhere in the universe, Kim Pine was groaning and she had no idea why.

Scott paused a moment, then asked a question that had just come to mind. "Someone I know said they saw McCoy in the greenhouse once." Something about arteries exploding? "How many of you guys are there around, anyway? I won't tell them anything, I'm just, like, wondering."