damned_institute | Day 28: Bus 2

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Day 28: Bus 2

Momo tugged on the collar of the light blue sweater she was wearing as she followed her nurse to wherever these buses were, winding her hair up into its customary bun as she went. It was an odd feeling, knowing she was about to go outside of the institute's borders. Maybe the Head Doctor was about to make an error and the shinigami, as well as everyone else, would no longer be limited and they could finish what they started several nights back.

That was probably too much to hope for. She was feeling better this morning, even with the blood moon, and was mildly looking forward to the bus ride. Captain Jack said he was going to be here this morning and even if it wasn't customary breakfast in the cafeteria, she's be satisfied with him sitting next to her on the bus.

The nurse handed her a muffin, some napkins, and a small box with a straw. She stared at this box for a moment before shaking it. From the sound it contained liquid. How odd... Momo wasn't sure why they would but liquid inside a small paper box - it didn't make any sense to her and she wasn't sure how one was supposed to get it out of the box.

Clambering onto an empty bus, Momo chose to sit in the very back near the emergency exit. Maybe she could force her way out of it as they were moving and escape the limiter enough to come back and level the institute, freeing everyone. Or maybe she just wanted to be able to see everyone that was on the same bus as her. Wishful thinking versus reality.

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"I think that was made common knowledge as soon as Orwell published 1984," Sam noted, a touch dryly. The idea that anyone reasonably literate and existing in modern times might not have read the book seemed not to have crossed his mind. "Makes me wish it seemed that easy."

"Oh, it was common knowledge long before that," M snorts, with a slight shake of her head at the vast sums of knowledge of the young. "Orwell lived through the same war as the rest of us, he just was one of the people capable of seeing past the propaganda."

(Admittedly, a young Barbara Mawdsley had been all of seven years' old at the time of Germany's surrender, and far more keenly interested in the possibility of her school being bombed than the reasons behind it.)

"Of course, Orwell's mistake was that he gave people too much credit. No need to be nearly as heavy-handed with history and the news as the government of Oceania was when you've got a Page Three girl in the Sun and a football match on."

Sam's quiet snort in reply could perhaps be taken as agreement, if of an amused sort. "Even with that history to draw on, how many people look past the obvious now?" he asked, apparently idly. Nothing to see here, just Joe College philosophizing at an old woman.

"I don't know if it was a mistake on Orwell's part - if it wasn't glaringly obvious, half the readers would have probably missed the point."

Hands still steady despite raised veins and the occasional liver spot twitched idly on M's lap, finding the paper of her lunch bag (And wasn't that a nice little bit of psychology, parcelling them all off like five year olds to nursery school.) and pleating the top of it over itself.

Just an old woman amusing herself with the philosophizing of the young, you see.

"Mm, perhaps," she admitted. "Of course, it now breeds a new crop of insulated young idiots -- yourself excluded, dear," she nodded to him, "Who operate on the principle that because they can have plenty of food and a great deal of sex, the world is nothing like Orwell's."

Sam's slightly raised eyebrow was the only sign of his faint skepticism over whether he was truly excluded from that group - though, while one might argue 'idiot' depending on where one was coming from, 'insulated' certainly didn't fit him. "To be fair," he replied, in tones of faint humour, "it seems a lot closer to Huxley's."

And even as he chatted, all youthful philosophy without true direction, he mulled over how to divert the discussion's track, turn it towards the insanities of the night previous.

After all, knowledge is power.

M aceded to that with a small snort, and a rueful glance down at the rose-spattered clothing she'd been stuffed into. "Heaven only knows what caste would have been assigned floral print, of course."

But, at last growing weary of philosophy, however pleasant a cover, she allowed her side of the conversation to taper away into a look past Sam and out the window, eyes narrowed in an attept at analysis of the trees and the hills and the odd bird.

"I don't suppose you have any botany to go with your philosophy courses, young Sam."

"I know pine trees are coniferous," Sam replied, a touch ruefully as he too glanced outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of some species of flora or fauna that would, if not conjure up some long-forgotten lesson, at least tweak his memory. What use being well traveled if one cannot piece together one's location? "But nothing much beyond that. I can find my way in a forest well enough, but tell what tree grows where? Wish I'd taken more interest."

Plants useful in warding off malevolent entities likely weren't the sort of information she was looking for, he imagined.

Not unless Algerian terrorists could be warded off by waving a sprig of mistletoe at them.

"It's all the wrong continent for me," admitted the very obviously British old woman, lips compressed as if the Americans surrounding her had done this on purpose.

"I'd wondered," Sam admitted. He'd noticed the accent, of course - difficult not to, if one happened to have functioning ears. But those things could linger for years after a person emigrated - and could be faked, as well. "Too bad there probably isn't an embassy in town."

M snorted in wry agreement. "It seems that the only sort of daydreams likely to come true around here are more properly nightmares," she summed up.

"On the other hand, if there's a church or two, one might perhaps be able to claim sanctuary. There are a few cases every year of someone holing up to avoid deportation."

"Holing up in a church doesn't sound like a bad idea," Sam replied, a dark note creeping into his tone. His gaze slid upward, towards the sky as he searched for any lingering traces of bloody red, brow furrowing and eyes darkening. "Does sanctuary count against mental institutions?" It was an honest, if idle, question - while he had been concerned now and then about dodging demonic or otherwise evil creatures, the possibility of being committed had always been at most an abstract, something not likely to happen unless he was very, very foolish.

Or, apparently, woke up in the wrong place.

"I'd imagine it depends on whether one can convincingly demonstrate one's sanity," was M's opinion, delivered with measured thought and a slight thinning of her lips in thought.

"I -do- believe they usually contain such things as telephones, however, and likely without too much security around them, if things are done over here as they are at home. Houses of God, sanctity for security and all that."

From her tone, it could be inferred that M preferred to do as much as possible for security via terrestrial means before seeking outside, upside, assistance.

"That would be the difficult part, wouldn't it? Proving sanity." Sam grimaced slightly, tearing his gaze from the sky with some difficulty. He knew he would look askance at someone claiming to have been trapped in a demonic mental asylum under a false name and with no recollection of how they'd gotten there, and he knew damned well that monsters were very much real. "Not having any identification wouldn't help, either. --And they aren't that secure. Not the churches I've been in, anyway. At most, they might lock up at night in a bad part of town."

Alec Trevelyan would never, ever, ever admit this in a million years, but the whatever-it-was in the Sun Room the previous night had scared him. Horribly. He barely caught a glimpse of it, but a very strong hunch told him that it was Bad News, capitals and all. For the first time, he was actually thankful to be waking up in bed. They hadn't made much progress, which irritated him to no end, but they hadn't had to tangle with that...that thing either.

He'd argued with the nurse for a bit about the clothes he'd been given to wear. Due to the scar, he was sensitive about what he chose to wear. Nobody looked good in Landel's grey, so he had to live with it. But damned if he was going to put on a ratty tartan overshirt of his own free will. When the threat of sedation was brought into play, he'd capitulated. Either way, he was going to end up in that shirt. He chose the path of least resistance.

I've got to find Javert, he thought, inspecting the inhabitants of bus two. There was no luck on the first one, so he was either on this one or the third.

"I -do- believe they usually contain such things as telephones, however, and likely without too much security around them, if things are done over here as they are at home. Houses of God, sanctity for security and all that."

Trevelyan froze. It isn't.

A quick glance told him that yes, it was - M, the bloody head of bloody MI-6 (or SIS, or whatever the hell they were calling it today) was on the bloody bus, which meant she was in the bloody Institute. Which meant that this had to be one hell of a British mind trick if they went to such lengths to bring her here, too.

Holy fuck, they really want me to crack, he thought with a sort of demented euphoria, and ducked behind one of the seats.

There! Thursday! She wasn't Javert, but she was someone to talk to. And damn, did he need to talk to someone. Now.

"As far as backstories go, the one they're attempting to force-feed me isn't a bad one," M mused, with judicious professional approval that pursed her lips and canted the white haired head to one side. "I imagine yours is similar in its utter normalcy."

"Leave out the mental institution, and one might well be a stranded tourist, with one's wallet either mislaid or mugged--"

But at that juncture, a surreptitious sort of scramble from just ahead snapped at M's attention, and a sharp look upwards framed the hanging face of Alec Trevelyan in her minds' eye and left it blazoned there even as the man himself escaped to safer seating.

"What the devil...?" escaped her, mildly querulous at the world once again not revolving to her orders, and the sharp look dissolved into the sort of rapid thought processes and analysis-patterns that had given the Evil Queen of Numbers her subordinate-bestowed nickname in the first place.

Trevelyan, it had to be. She'd never particularly met the man -- he'd existed more as photographs and dossiers, his tenure as a double-0 having begun before her own tenure as M. But it behooves spies both past, present and promoted to retain a memory for faces.

A flurry of plots and counterplots began to spin themselves behind those dark and aged eyes. One hand lifted delicately to pinch at the bridge of her nose, and she wondered of Sam whether "I don't suppose you know who that fellow is?"

"They haven't shared much," Sam admitted. And he had been far too preoccupied with the discrepancy between his and his brother's memories, with the mystery of how they'd arrived there, with figuring out just what was going on to hunt down the information on his own initiative.

He grimaced as he realised the lapse - something he'd never do on a normal job, he knew - and resolved to repair it when next he had a chance.

However, he was not left much time to self-chastise. The man ahead caught the hunter's attention, and Sam's gaze stayed fixed bemusedly on the back of the obscuring bus seat for a moment. At Emma's question, he shook his head. "I've never met him," he replied, a touch apologetic. "Seemed spooked by something."

It was not, quite, a question.

"Quite," agreed M, still looking, apparently idly, after the departed Trevelyan.

Absently, she wondered "Do you meet any people you've met before?"

It was not, quite, an answer.

Not quite an answer though it may have been, it was enough of one for Sam. He filed it away in the back of his mind, in the space devoted to trying to comprehend some of the insanity that he seemed to have been sucked into. As the bus started into motion, his gaze shifted away from the seat, tracing over the scenery as it spooled past. Momentarily, he wished that he had the capacity for self-delusion that would be required to convince himself, even for an instant, that this was just another road trip.

"My brother's here," he replied at length, a thin thread of worry winding its way into his voice, though it would take one quite adept at observation to catch it. "So I'd say it happens."

Just such an observer happened to be sitting across from Sam, and there was a slight thread of sympathy woven into the brief nod M gave him in return. Someone younger and more expressive would have said Ouch.

Instead, M thinned her lips, and admitted that "The stakes are always higher when there's family involved."

She, too, then studied the scenery, bemused as to what it represented other than a pleasant country trip, potentially to Hell.

Sam shook his head briefly, not tearing his gaze away from the window. There were - no, wait. Still just trees. Damn it all.

"We work better as a team. It's just..." he trailed off then, with an internal grimace as he realised that he was falling into the same sort of trap he himself was inclined to use. It was hard, sometimes, not to talk to someone who seemed to actually be able to listen, rather than just wait for their own turn. "Complicated," he finished, a touch lamely.

A soft snort escaped M, with that same thread of sympathy as earlier.

"All of the best teams are," quoth she, turning briefly from counting telephone poles to give the young man beside her a dark-eyed look at once secretive and open. Secrets shared, perhaps.

An olive branch was offered then, a judiciously measured offer of private glimpse for private glimpse.

"I had a much older brother than myself. He was one of the ones who went up in a Spitfire, and never quite came back down."

(M's player has no idea about siblings or not in canon, but it seems more likely than not.)

Sam winced as he looked back at her, hazel eyes darkening with a brief flicker of deeply rooted fear only very recently dragged back to the surface. "I'm sorry," he said quietly. It was genuine, carrying the air of one who was still young and idealistic enough to wish that others never had to experience loss, though not quite enough of either to cling to protestations that it wasn't fair.

"It was the war," M replied, mingling a small nod of gratitude with a swift and practiced gloss over memories now six decades old and personal besides.

The wince was noted and stored ruthlessly away for potential use or investigation later, but in some small attempt at kindness, or simply good sense, she offered a change of subject back to earlier philosophy.

"They fought for a better world. What they won... well, it seems to be the chance to go on fighting for it."

Sam nodded understanding. That, at least, was a principle he knew well enough. It showed, the comprehension out of place on the boy-next-door features. "It seems like that's the way it always is. But it has to be better to have that chance than to lose it. Or give it up..."

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Day 28: Bus 2

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