milliways_bar | (no subject)

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autor

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Clara would really like to be home now. She's a bit on edge, being stuck in a time that isn't hers, with a man she barely knows (and trusts a bit too much to be healthy, she knows).

So it's fairly easy to explain her exasperation when she walks through the doors.

"Really? Really? We're going to do this nonsense now?"

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"Does need a hero to start a revolution?" Autor muses, lifting his cup again.

"Does in the books." She shrugs, not knowing much about revolutions in general, or furniture ones in specific.

"Interesting," he says. "And... that wasn't a pick-up line. Promise."

The boy sips his tea. "Are you still being guarded by your monk cum absent-minded professor alien?"

"Guarded by, being dragged around Soviet Russia by, take your pick." She sighs, shaking her head. "I just wanted to see Sinatra sing in Vegas."

"What on earth are you doing in Soviet Russia?" he asks. "Are you still traveling by, um"--he rubs a hand on the back of his neck--"'Snog box'?"

"Well, we would be, if he hadn't accidentally sent it to the wrong side of the planet." Clara grumbles - at first it had been fun, kinda - but there's only so many untrusting, not-at-all-looking-at-her-face stares she can put up with.

"How," Autor says, blinking, "does that even work?"

He shakes his head, refills his cup, and offers to top off hers. "What is the thing, anyway?"

"Because he's sometimes an idiot, and it's a time machine. I think." She replies, holding out her cup. "I don't think it likes me."

He fills her cup and sets the kettle down on a coaster so as not to char the sentient countertop.

"No wonder you're up in arms about sentient furniture," he says carefully. "Why don't you think it likes you?"

"It just... doesn't, I don't know." She shrugs, "How do you know anyone doesn't like you?"

"I have no idea. I tend to enter into conversations with that as a baseline assumption," Autor admits, "nor do I consider liking me a requirement for the conversation to proceed."

He smiles, a bit crookedly. "Which is markedly unhelpful to you," he says. "Actually, I was wondering if you could do me a favor."

He pulls a leather book out of his pocket and whispers to it in Greek. Out of that book pops another, smaller book, which he flips through.

"Do you recognize this thing?" he asks, showing her a page.

"Nope. Did you just talk to your book?" Clara replies quizzically.

"Yes," Autor says, talking back to it to return the treasured second book. "Wait, doesn't everyone?"

"No, I'm thinking that's a fairly rare habit." Clara scrunches her nose. "Considering they aren't much in the way of conversationalists."

"'I certainly have not the talent which some people possess,' said Darcy, 'of conversing easily with those I have never seen before'," Autor says lightly, lip lifting.

"I find books are easier to speak to than most people, and I'm know most people think the same of me," he says. "Thank you for the favor. More tea?"

"Um?" Clara blinks, trying to sort that one out. "Not much of a comparison unless your books are talking back."

"Sorry," he says, capitulating by waving a hand. "Books don't talk back. But I've learned so much from them--I can't imagine my life without reading, though I know what life is like without people. It wasn't overly terrible?"

He shakes his head. "I'm not making any sense to you, am I? Feel free to mention Ms. Bar again."

"I'm afraid to, you might make her uncomfortable referring to situations she had no control over." Clara replies, wide-eyed. "No people? Like... solitary confinement?"

...

Maybe the jokes about molestation were too close to home.

"What? No, there were plenty of people around," he says, completely ignoring her comments about Bar. "I just... preferred books. Now I talk to people all the time; some of them are too easy to speak with. Like you."

Edited 2013-11-15 09:00 (UTC)

"You have been practicing in the mirror, good on you." She praises, because last time he didn't even know what a pickup line was.

"Wha! No, no, I hav--okay, fine, I've been practicing, now keep it down," he says, color exploding on his face. "But only, 'how are you?', okay? No pickup lines!"

She snickers into her tea, trying to keep up a 'totally believing you' face, but failing somewhat miserably.

"Well, it's coming off fairly well."

Autor snorts, but her merriment is catching. "Wait, really? Do you think I should I ask like this: 'how are you?'" he says. "Or 'how are you?'"

Overall, he does wonder how Clara is--and how she's related to Oswin.

"Really, though, how are you?" he finally asks, raising his cup in a salute. "Hello, again."

"Well, beside the point that I don't think I'll be able to look at Mars the same way ever again and if anyone has another conversation with my breasts I may have to smack them across the face, I'm fine. I want to go home, but fine." She sighs, and gulps her tea.

If Clara was trying to make Autor choke on his tea, she succeeded.

"Converstion wi--Who does that! They're like books!" he cries, and then hastily adds, "In the sense that they don't talk back, of course, not because of the--oh, hell."

He cradles his head in his hands, heedless to the possibility of burning his fingers with the heat radiating off of his face.