milliways_bar | (no subject)

Clint's about to reply with something facetious ("teleportation?") when she recognizes the shuttle; he slows the truck.

"You want to go back and get a look at it?"

Yeah, no, no way in hell hit the gas and get them out of here...

"... Yes." Because Oswin Oswald doesn't believe in ghosts, and she's not going to let this one best her.

Clint gives her a long look, then nods. He puts the truck in reverse, and rests his hand on the back of her seat so he can look over his shoulder as he backs up.

They end up stopped just next to the shuttle, though Clint puts the car in drive and just keeps his foot on the brake instead of parking it.

"Shouldn't be here. Not like this - the fire started in the shuttlebay."

After a moment of fiddling with buttons she's figured out which one unlocks the door, and she's managed to slither out of her seatbelt and out the door before she can think better of this plan. Her I'm-not-thinking-about-it momentum gets her to within touching distance before she wavers, distant memories of what should have been the worst trauma in her life conflicting with the smooth grey metal.

Then, chin up and faking fearlessness for all she's worth, she takes the two steps necessary to the airlock and taps in the crew code on the security pad.

And very nearly jumps out of her skin when it works.

With a comment like that preceding her departure, Clint can't do anything but put the truck in park and turn it off, leaving its emergency flashers on as he pockets the keys and gets out.

Oswin's approaching the security pad as he rounds corner of the truck; he's a couple steps behind and to the side of her when the airlock opens.

"That supposed to happen?" he asks. He's not comfortable with the state of Oswin's nerves. He doesn't expect danger, but his awareness of both the situation and her is keyed up.

"... Only if it's real." She scrunches her nose at the door, and at her own stupid nerves, there's nothing here to be afraid of, just a shuttle that should be burned to a crisp, or, alternately, smushed by non-powered crash into the planet. Cautiously she steps inside, and it's exactly like she remembers - this was a passenger shuttle, designed to get paying customers to the ship in style. She kneels, and rifles through one of the cabinets.

... Ah.

Clint leans against the frame of the airlock, facing out as she looks through the cabinet. He'd known Oswin was freaked out about something the first time they spoke, but not what.

Either something really creepy went down on her ship, Alien-style (or HAL), or the ship itself shouldn't exist anymore. The latter of which kind of implies Oswin herself might be on borrowed time, like that William kid talked about.

Least he can do is keep watch.

She manages to fumble out a handful of pins, picking out one from the clutter to study the design.
"Well. Right flight. Because that's not creepy at all. Here, catch." She tosses one in his direction. "Welcome on board the Alaska. At least there aren't any bodies..." She trails off at that, and frowns. Then eyes the door at the far side, the one she knows leads to the pilot's deck.

"Um. So. Last time. You mentioned something about not always being armed. This isn't one of those times, is it?" If the shuttle survived, which it shouldn't have, but if it did, if the pilots were inside for some reason or other...

Clint snags it out of the air, and glances at it, then to her.

"What's the threat?" he asks, shrugging off his blazer, so there's nothing covering his holster. He folds it over his arm; he'll put it down when he comes in. It's leavable, given the truck keys are in his pants pocket.

"The." She stops abruptly, because that was more of a squeak than a word and this is not the time for hysterics, hysterics can come later, upstairs, with All The Alcohols. And chocolate. All the chocolate. Possibly for days.

"Alaska came off-course and crashed into a planet. I... I checked for survivors. There weren't any, but I didn't check for what parts of the ship were left. Didn't think it was important. The shuttle... it should be burnt, should be in pieces, but if it wasn't, if this shuttle was there and there was anyone in the pilot's deck..." Hell, she can hear them again. They can't be real, Clint isn't looking for them, so they're just in her head. She hopes. Stars, she hopes.
"The planet had a defense mechanism, the nanocloud, micro-organisms designed to do a partial conversion on anyone, living or dead, who breached the planet's atmosphere. Land on the planet, and you become part of site security. If... if there's someone in there, if they wake up, they'll kill everyone. I've only seen one man kill Daleks, and he's not here."

Clint considers her.

"From what I hear, the Security team here is pretty efficient."

What's not being said: you don't have to take care of this. He's not sure if he has to take care of this. If she sets on it, he'll figure out what a Dalek is and its weaknesses, and if there's a chance the shuttle's contaminated.

And if the risks are too high, he'll get them out of there. It's kind of his responsibility, as the person here who's not a civilian.

Oswin grimaces (it's an attempt at a grin that comes out poorly) and stands on her tiptoes to reach into an overhead bin, bringing down... a fire extinguisher. She saw Him using one once, and thought it was a pretty clever trick.

She can't just... go. She wants to. She wants to run until she runs out of ground, but then she'll know that she knew what might be down here and didn't do anything about it. And she has a plan - open the door, look in, count them, possibly spray them in the face, and slam the door back down.

Easy. Totally.

And if she thinks about it, she will never scrape together enough courage to do it.

So she doesn't think, just lunges across the shuttle, slaps the release panel on the door and ducks in without so much as a word.

The relief of finding an empty cockpit unhinges her knees.

Clint doesn't catch on to what she's doing until it's too late to interfere. He doesn't swear, or yell, because under pressure he's generally silent -- he just follows, dropping his blazer and drawing his P30.

He hears her hit the floor a moment before he sees her, puts his right hand on her left shoulder as he scans the room himself (longer than she did -- the shuttle cockpit is unfamiliar to him). He eases up on the pressure on her shoulder once he's determined it's probably clear, so it won't be as dangerous if she makes any sudden movements. He drops his left hand to his side, but he doesn't holster his weapon.

"You okay?"

"S..sorry, Sorry." She knows, she knows that wasn't the brightest move of all time but she doesn't see a way around it, not even now. "Couldn't... couldn't walk away. Couldn't. Turn around. And walk away." She chatters, adrenaline shaking her down to her bones. Meaning she would have done that alone, if he hadn't been there. That there was no possible way in hell she could have turned her back to that door, knowing what could be beyond it.

"Yeah," Clint agrees. He's concerned, but he's also angry -- at the situation, at civilians as a group, more than her as an individual. It makes his voice more even than it would be, otherwise. He bends just enough to get his hand under her elbow, and helps her up. He keeps it there for balance support.

"If there'd been a threat, though, you would've cut our survival chances in half. If we got lucky. This is my job, Oswin."

There's a flicker of brightly furious 'and somehow, this is my life' before it goes under the flood of regret. She knows very well she shouldn't have done that. The what-could-have-happened's leave her feeling hollow and quite useless.

It isn't a feeling she enjoys, particularly.

"I... if there had been. Daleks. Or, rather, dalek-puppets, it's too small for proper Daleks, and... I watched. For a year. The ones that didn't die outright died of starvation, because they forgot to eat. They were already dead, when..." She's self-editing as she goes, like someone stumbling through a mine field. "But sometimes they'd move. Patrol, when something disturbed the system. Usually me. Nothing else to do, you see. How... how could I watch again?"

She looks down, awkward and wearily defeated.

Clint forcibly makes his body language soften, holsters his gun. He's not really tracking with her on the details, but he can recognize defeat when he hears it, and that's worse than impulsiveness for survival. No one should have to deal with it.

"Hey," he says, quietly. "We're okay. Next time, just take the help being offered, okay?

"Are you going to be able to walk to the truck?"

Edited 2013-02-27 00:50 (UTC)

"Yeah." She'll get the fire back, the bit that lets her flirt and run at the mouth and be reckless because she can be here without threat of imminent death, but here, with all these reminders, and the ghost-remnants of Dalek screams still rattling around in her skull, it's hard to pretend. "You can have the next round. Aim for the eyestalks, the rest is too armored or too dead."

"I can do that," he says, still quiet. "Oswin," he says, and waits for her to make eye contact. "Tell me about the book you found. The biting one."

He puts slight pressure on her shoulder, in a come on, let's go back towards the truck indicator, but he's not going to move her or start walking before she's ready.

Edited 2013-02-27 03:50 (UTC)

Oswin is the reigning queen of mental restarts and shuffling away events that just can't be survived or dealt with in a limited amount of time. She isn't so good at re-integrating the information later, but... well. There's always something to aspire to, right?

She turns, a bit mechanically but under her own power, and walks out of the shuttle, her fingers trailing along the fixtures as she passes. Her her life was, once.

"Autor is an idiot, and has re-organized the entire card catalog for the library into some bizarre system he dreamed up that makes no sense. So I was trying to figure it out when I found a book that was labeled 'bitey'." It's a little bit monotone, a little bit rote, but give her a few minutes and she'll bury her lapse as if it didn't happen.

"Well," Clint says, snagging his blazer as they pass it. "You can't fault the guy's accuracy."

He offers the blazer to her. Sometimes extra layers are nice after you've freaked out, at least for him.

"Can." She slides the thin coat over her shoulders without really thinking about it, the scents of an unfamiliar cologne and something smoky disconnecting her a little further from the panic - it's entirely different than the cold, dank smell her brain tries to supply instead. "But that's later. I decided to go look for the book, because how often do you find a bitey book? It sounded like some sort of kid's joke textbook - the Monster Book of Monsters."

Yes, Clint. Her sense of self-preservation is just that worn down.

"... Huh." He opens the passenger door for her, just in case her balance is still off. He leans against the edge of it; while he's watching her, stance and voice calm, his eyes flick regularly to their surroundings. "Do you think people actually read it? Give it a steak for a chapter, that sort of thing."

She side-eyes him, her expression very 'I see what you're doing there and if I didn't feel like I just took every single patch of Energy available on the New New York market all at once and am now going through the crash afterwards I'd give you grief for it', but the effect is somewhat ruined when she starts at the truck's cooling engine ticking at her unexpectedly.

"Someone must read it, it has actual pages, and writing... I'm pretty sure there was writing, it was kind of blurry. What with the biting. You know, it could be some sort of bizarre exercise routine manual." Open it up, and if you aren't ending up with puncture holes, you're doing it right.

It has to be said, though - there's also a little 'thanks for not leaving me there' too, to her expression - she's become accustomed to doing the mental reboot and defrag process on her own and under attack. Not having to deal with either of those two stressors is... nice.

He grins at her side-eye, completely unrepentant.

"Could be," he agrees. "Or maybe it's just to see how stubborn some people can get in trying to read something new." He doesn't close the door, but he lets go so that gravity can bring it close enough for Oswin to do so herself.

When he gets into the driver's side: "You want me to go park this thing, or should we drive around for a bit?"

Milliways is pretty loud, and he doesn't have a good idea about what her stressors are.