damned_institute | Day 28; Bus 3

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Day 28; Bus 3

There was, Naomi decided, some sort of cosmic irony in all of this. Not that she was trapped in a deranged and possibly other-worldly asylum with a man she'd idolized for years and a boy who was being investigated for - among other things - the murder of her fiance. No, at this point, those were perfectly normal occurrences. Rather it was the soft, pretty, feminine pink sweater dress she'd been stuffed into in the morning. A chance to wear normal clothes, and she looked like a soccer mom. The white blazer and white boots only made her look like a soccer mom who maybe hadn't given up gogo boots.

It was humiliating. Why couldn't she have jeans and a sweater? And sneakers? Something she would conceivably wear? Not this damned pink monstrosity. And her nurse kept saying how pretty she was.

She didn't care if she looked pretty.

Grumbling to herself, and taking it out on her muffin, Naomi was shoved onto an empty bus and told to 'sit tight'. Oh, she'd sit tight alright....

At least she was relatively certain L was alright. She'd spent the whole night with him, and other than falling on his ass, nothing had happened to him. And hopefully nothing would happen to him in town, either....

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Dairine had been looking forward to the trip to Doyleton. Maybe she could find some sort of computer there and forge a connection to Tom, Carl, Nita, Kit, Sker', the Powers, somebody. Of course, she'd also made arrangements with that Thursday person via the bulletin board for breakfast - with luck the description she'd been given could narrow the crowd down enough.

Someone was having an argument with a nurse about the bus. Dairine stopped to observe long enough to notice that the arguer was anachronistic and had sideburns. Oh, crap. It's Javert, she thought, suddenly nervous. She hadn't meant to write what she'd written, really. It had just...come out. She'd crossed it out and everything, but obviously not well enough.

Nothing for it but to apologize. Wizards did their best to make amends. She tiptoed around the nurse in her "new" sneakers - in actuality they were quite old - and tapped Javert on the arm shyly. He hadn't fared too badly out of the whole clothing debacle, and neither had she. Dairine's standard attire was a too-large t-shirt and a pair of jeans, and, luckily, the Institute had provided her with that. And a windbreaker. Good thing, too. The weather seemed to be autumnal, although it had been spring when she'd gone to bed those few nights ago in Hempstead.

Javert glanced, annoyed, at the small girl who had tapped his arm. She didn't look at all familiar - he was quite certain he would have remembered that red hair if he'd met her before - but then again, he had hardly known everyone in Paris. Perhaps she'd seen him from a distance? He only hoped it was that and not another patient who'd read the blasted book.

"Yes, mademoiselle?" he said shortly.

Unfortunately, his nurse leaped on the opportunity to get him on the bus at once. "Look, Mr. Hunt, Bridget isn't scared to go on the bus at all! Isn't that right, Bridget?"

"Uh...right," Dairine said to the too-chipper nurse. "Yeah. I love buses," she said, trying to keep a hold on her wizardly persuasiveness. "I used to really adore field trips at school." Mostly because we ended up somewhere interesting half the time. Besides, my field trips now usually don't involve something so mundane as a bus...

"Listen, I wanted to apologize," Dairine said bluntly, wary of using real names while the nurse was around. "I didn't mean...to write what I wrote. It was callous of me, and I shouldn't have said anything of the sort."

This was uncomfortable. She couldn't say much around the nurse, at least, not much that wouldn't mark her as 'fruity as a nutcake' as Captain Kirk had said once. She jerked her head towards the nurse once the hovering presence glanced away, mouthing, "Let's ditch her," to Javert. They needed to talk, and she needed to apologize more fully.

Javert stared at Dairine, utterly baffled for a moment, before what she'd said sank in at last.

Oh. Her.

Well, this was a dilemma and no mistake. Get into a moving deathtrap with a tactless brat of a girl, or stay behind and be forced to listen to the patronizing blather of his nurse? Neither prospect was appealing in the least.

Still, the idea that his nurse thought he was scared of all things was slightly more than he could bear. Without looking at either female, he marched stiffly onto the bus and took a seat near a door in the side of the bus marked 'Emergency Exit,' which did absolutely nothing for his state of mind. No doubt something like that saw frequent use. Forty miles an hour indeed!

He raised an eyebrow at the girl (what was her name again? It started with a D, he was certain), his face otherwise expressionless.

Dairine smiled winningly at the nurse and walked onto the bus after Javert. Judging by the way he'd walked, he was not happy at all. Oh well. They all had to live with their mistakes, as she knew well.

To try and appease him, she didn't sit next to him, but rather across the aisle in an empty seat. "Like I said," she began, "I'm sorry. You've obviously guessed I know your story, which is right on the nose. I do." She stopped, vaguely embarrassed by having to apologize to someone she'd only ever thought of as fictional. Some of my best friends are aliens, but I have trouble talking to a fellow human being? "I'm Dairine, by the way. Don't know if you knew that."

This stay at Landel's was just becoming one embarrassing moment after another, wasn't it? Javert had nearly forgotten how irritating children were. He'd initially thought that 'Dairine Callahan' was an adult when he'd read her message on the bulletin board, which was bad enough; finding out she looked about ten was infinitely worse.

He shook his head sharply, almost dismissively, at her apology, as if shrugging off an irksome fly. "Tell me, mademoiselle, does every damned schoolchild in - " he hazarded a guess based on her accent - "America know the damned story as well, or is it just you?"

A book and an opera. In, apparently, French and English. He could only hope neither were particularly popular - though judging from the people to whom he'd spoken, that was unlikely.

"Depends on how well-read you are," Dairine said, an impish glint in her eyes. "Most people find M. Hugo's style a bit thick, heavy, and rambly. But no, luckily for you, many people only know the basics, if anything. It's considered a classic, but most people probably just read the SparkNotes and forget everything as soon as they're finished." Her tone had turned cynical. "But I'm kind of a special case. Again, I'm really sorry. I need to work on my tact; I've known that for quite a while." Sometimes her temper got the best of her, and she said and did things she regretted later.

Skipping class really hadn't ever been a good idea. Neither had trying to stay in bed all day. Nita had rigged that so she would be automatically teleported to school if she tried to lie down in the house. Thinking of her sister made her eyes sting, so she banished the thought angrily. She'd get out of here, she had to. Then she could find Roshaun and bring him back from wherever he'd gone.

Oh, wonderful. A precocious child. Worse than your average gamin, really. You could box a gamin's ears for breaking streetlamps, but you couldn't do anything about a precocious child.

"For heaven's sake stop apologizing," Javert said shortly. "I hear enough of that already; you ought to know."

He was rapidly tiring of this conversation; somehow everyone he talked to managed to turn the conversation to him. "You can, however, make up for it somewhat if you tell me how the hell this thing works." A brief gesture indicated the bus around them. He supposed that, as the fact that he was a century and a half behind was no longer a secret between them, he needn't bother being embarrassed about it.

Dairine almost - almost - apologized, then caught herself. "Right," she said, turning slightly crimson. "Of course."

She perked up considerably when Javert asked her about how the bus worked. This was more her sort of area. Not the mechanical stuff per se, it was Kit who specialized in talking to televisions and chatting with cars, but she had at least a passing knowledge of how these things worked. "Okay, so there's an engine up front that runs by combustion of the fuel inside. In this case, it's a petroleum derivative reacting with...well, probably oxygen, I think," she began.

...Combustion.

This day just kept getting better, didn't it? Had there been some sort of worldwide catastrophe fifty years in his future? Had humankind somehow lost its senses?

"You are saying," he said slowly, careful not to look at the emergency exit, "that this bus goes at forty miles an hour. On explosions."

Well, when he put it that way..."Yeah," she admitted, mostly because she couldn't lie to make him feel any better about this. "It does. But the driver's a trained professional, there's really nothing to worry about. And if it helps, the explosions are very, very...stable."

Javert crossed his arms. "Nothing to worry about? We are sitting in a metal box powered, if I understood your explanation, solely by explosives, and driven by one man with as much capacity for error as any other human being - which, in my experience, is quite a large one. What's more, the entire contraption appears to require the presence of no less than three emergency exits - " a hand waved irritably at his surroundings - "though I doubt there would be many survivors should this thing crash."

Part of him was considering letting the matter drop - he was speaking to a twelve-year-old girl, after all - but the thought of forty miles an hour and the nauseating scent of whatever-it-was these buses burned simply couldn't leave him that easily. And he had no intention of dying again.

Something struck Dairine as funny about Javert's incredible dislike of the bus, and she grinned. "Really," she said, folding her hands in her lap and looking at him, "do you really think we could get out of this hell that easily? The bus isn't going to crash. Whatever's brought us here seems to have a vested interest in keeping us here, in one piece or not. Having us get torn to pieces by monsters is much more entertaining than crashing us into a tree," she said cynically. "I've spent enough time with certain entities to know what sort of games They like to play with human beings."

"On second thought," grumbled Javert, apparently not quite listening, "dying sounds like a decidedly more pleasant option. Or, at the very least, crashing. If we could overpower what nurses are here and perhaps distract the driver - "

He lapsed into half-audible muttering directed at a nonexistent cravat, his posture relaxing somewhat from ramrod-straight to imperceptibly less ramrod-straight. It seemed he had, for the moment, accepted the inevitability of the bus ride.

Of course, that was because the bus hadn't actually begun to move yet.

"Listen to you," she murmured, looking past him at the Institute. "'Live free or die'. Overpowering the authority. You sound like a revolutionary." She didn't say it disapprovingly, though - there was an impish sparkle in those grey eyes, and she was definitely grinning. She made sure to look at him, though, to prove that she wasn't accusing him of anything, especially not disloyalty to the state, merely amused by his choice of words.

"I like your ideas, but putting them into action's not going to be any picnic. And I'd rather not crash, if it's all the same to you. Too much margin for error, and it's too early for me to work out the required physics. Maybe I can try something on the way back." It was hard to tell if she was joking or not.

Javert snorted, glancing sharply at Dairine. "What the Institute is doing is hardly legal," he said dryly. "Nor are they the authority in this case. I rather think my conscience will still be clean." But is it? -Don't think about that.

He settled back slightly. "I can't be the only one onboard who's considered it. Perhaps the other patients will formulate a plan during the day."

"Who knows? Here, in this place, it might be. One thing's for certain, though, this isn't any reality I know."

The bus's engine roared to life, and she braced herself. She had faith that Javert would be able to not have a freak-out fit about the bus. At least, she hoped so...

Javert opened his mouth to answer, but was forestalled as the bus began to move. His jaw clicked shut and his knuckles whitened noticeably against the sides of the seat, but his face remained relatively impassive, if somewhat paler than usual.

"Are all buses as insufferably loud as this one?" he managed, his voice nearly lost amidst the noise. When - if he got back to Paris, he'd never complain about the fiacres again.

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Day 28; Bus 3

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