milliways_bar | (no subject)

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baze malbus

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Dodger leaves the infirmary trying not to scratch her arm, and heads up to the bar. She isn't really sure what she wants, so she orders the first thing that comes to mind - an enormous ham sandwich with chips, and some chocolate milk. If she's going to get sick anyway, she might as well enjoy the moments leading up to it.

Along with her sandwich, she also asks for some literature on whatever it is Mark just gave her. She's presented with a series of pamphlets featuring happy, healthy families in stark juxtaposition to information on the effects of H1L1 and how it differs from the less-common, but just as awful strain H3L2.

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Having foregone his armor, Baze sits at the bar, etching designs into a conical forestock for his lightbow that he forged himself out of aluminum. A pitcher of ice water sweats near his left elbow, along with two glasses, only one of which is full.

"Dodger," Baze says coolly as she orders her sandwich and pamphlets.

Dodger looks up, surprised to see Baze for some reason. She kind of gets the feeling he doesn't like her, but since when has she ever let that stop her?

"Hi," she says cheerfully. She crunches into one of her chips. "What's that?"

"A construction project," Baze says, engraving a small spiral near a flourish.

"I'm reluctant to go into particulars. What are the pamphlets for?"

She tosses one she isn't reading yet over to Baze. It's advertising a vaccine for a variety of common strains of zombie virus.

"Mark just poked me full of holes. I'm not sure how much it'll work, since he got this stuff from another world."

But any amount of protection is better than none, so she went along with it.

"Oh, the vaccines from Wilford's world?" Baze says, perusing the pamphlet.

"Those made him really, really sick."

"Yeah, he did warn me about that."

She takes a big drink of her chocolate milk through the curly straw the bar put into the glass.

"But I'd rather be really, really sick than really, really dead. Ya know?"

"Good point," Baze says, returning to his engraving project.

"How long ago did he poke you?"

"About five minutes ago."

She finally bites into her sandwich. She'll never get over how good real food tastes.

"With four enormous needles. I thought he was trying to kill me."

"So you're going to get sick pretty soon, I imagine," Baze says, eyeing her sandwich.

"Don't eat that too quickly, soon you're going to want to puke it all back up."

"If I'm gonna get sick anyway, I might as well enjoy the lead-up."

She shrugs, and eats more chips.

"This could be my last meal, for all I know."

"Probably not," Baze says, shrugging.

"Don't be so dramatic."

"I just got loaded full of drugs from another world. Who knows what could happen."

She's not being dramatic. She's being realistic.

"For all I know, we could take this back home and it could mutate and cause another plague or something. I could be Patient Zero."

"Mark tested the vaccines on himself before he pricked you with them," Baze says, huffing as he etches a groove into the forestock.

"So it's highly unlikely anything but the expected will happen."

"Unlikely, but not impossible. It was unlikely to ever even run into a werewolf a few years ago."

She looks over at what Baze is doing while she crunches on some chips.

"That's pretty. Do you do that kind of thing a lot?"

"No," Baze says gruffly, carving a curving line into the soft metal.

"It's been a few decades since I've done it. I'm out of practice."

"It looks good."

Crunch crunch crunch.

"Knowing how to do something like that used to make someone a lot of money where I'm from."

"Really?" Baze says, blinking at her.

"We used to all do it. Anyone who wanted to build one of these learned how to embellish it."

"Oh, yeah. People like fancy stuff. Who doesn't? It's one of those things that you spend years learning how to do, because nobody else has the patience for it, I guess."

Some lettuce falls out of her sandwich. She never thought lettuce would sound like an amazing snack all on its own, but she immediately picks it up off her plate to devour it.

Lettuce is amazing, Baze thinks so. He's jealous; he doesn't get lettuce anymore. He can hear her crunching it between his teeth, and his mouth waters.

"Well. It was just part of my training."

"Sounds like some pretty cool training. All I really learned how to do was BS my way through reports."

It's not quite the same.

"Depends on what you were reporting on. You could have been standing guard over something great, and taking it for granted," Baze says, frowning even more.

Dodger shrugs. "Mostly books I didn't have time to read because I had seven other classes to write reports for."

"You... had to write reports on books?" Baze says, piecing that together.

"That's the dumbest idea."

"I know, right? Who wants to read a book, and then write a smaller book about it?"

Not Dodger, that's for sure.

"Discussing your opinion on a book is fun, but writing it, augh," Baze says, sticking out his tongue. He refuses to bond with her over this one tiny thing. Still. Book reports. Ew.

"It wasn't even opinion. It was dissection. As if the teacher even knew what the author intended in the first place."

She finishes off the chips, leaving nothing but the sandwich left.

"I guess that's one good thing about the apocalypse. No more homework."

"Seems like a steep price to pay for no more homework," Baze says, rolling his unarmored shoulders in a rather expressive shrug.

"But I understand you were just trying to find the bright side of it."

“Heh. Yeah, I guess. But it’s not like everything’s completely awful. Just, you know. Kind of awful.”

She knows she’s just grown used to the way things are now. It is pretty awful, but if she kept thinking about it, she’d never make it through the day.

It's amazing the kind of awful you can get used to.

"Whatever you say," Baze says, etching a groove into the soft metal.

"I used to say the same about my own situation. I was lying."

“What situation was that?” Dodger asks, rather impolitely talking around her mouthful of sandwich while watching Baze work.

"Nooope. I was in a good mood before, and I'm not about to shoot it all to heck just because you're curious. Suffice it to say that the situation was crap," Baze says, engraving a spiral off the main flourish.

Dodger considers this. “That sounds pretty bad. But it’s better now, right?”

"Definitely. As long as I'm not eating macaroni and cheese of the Kraft variety," Baze says, calmly working on his engraving project.

“I’m pretty sure that was like, a hundred and ten percent salt,” Dodger says.

Kind of like someone she knows, she doesn’t say.

"Probably," Baze says, trying not to gag.

"I can still taste it."

“Canned cat food will get rid of that for you.”

This sandwich is so much better than cat food.

“I don’t really recommend it though.”

Baze is about to ask her why she would eat cat food when she has things like sandwiches available here, but he recalls asking that question of her earlier and not getting a very satisfying response. He can't remember what she said, exactly, but it must have been something ridiculous.

He grunts instead, scraping a curved line into the aluminum.

"I still don't get why you don't just move in here. I remember you had some reasons for it earlier, but I can't recall what those were."

Dodger shrugs, like some of the energy has been sapped out of her.

“I don’t want to be stuck somewhere. Especially not somewhere so small. We live on a fricking yacht right now. I mean, how cool is that?”

"Is that not some place small itself?" Baze says, knowing nothing about watercraft.

“We’re not stuck there. If I get sick of the boys trying to act like they’re ignoring one another, I can go live in some five-star hotel, or some fancy beach house.”

She picks at her sandwich a little bit.

“I’m gonna be stuck here for the next week or something. Just looking at the same walls. If you go outside, there’s only so far you can go before you wind up back here again. Back home, I can go pretty much anywhere if I feel like walking far enough.”

Baze frowns, continuing to engrave curving and angular lines on the forestock.

"But there's so much you can do here. Pick a hobby. Learn a language. Do some gardening. Cook a meal. Engrave some metal, or wood. Climb mountains. Build robots that fight each other. Fish. Bake, which is entirely different than cooking. Embroider. Whittle. Or... there's all sorts of things you can do."

“It’s a just gilded cage,” Dodger points out. “You can distract yourself from how stuck you are, but that doesn’t change that you’re stuck somewhere.”

"I happen to like it here," Baze says, bristling.

"I don't have a choice, being dead and all, but I'm making the best of it."

“That’s fine. I don’t!”

She’s suddenly very acutely aware of how big Baze is. Her bat is upstairs in Mark’s rented room, and he’s... nowhere she can see in her immediate field of vision. Crap.

"Then why do you come here?" Baze says, settling even further on his stool.

“Because the flipping door opens and won’t let me leave, or my stupid friend drags me here. And now he’s told me I’m about to get sick, so I’m stuck here again!”

Uh-uh. She is not liking where this has gone. She tries to find a way to quickly escape without looking like that’s what she’s trying to do, but if this guy gets angry enough to chase her down, he’s probably a lot faster than she is.

"Calm down," Baze says, setting his project aside and holding his hands out, palms up.

The sudden movement is sudden and unexpected. Dodger doesn’t even wait to see what’s going to come next, or listen to what he says. Things are scary, so she gets up as quickly as possible, knocking her empty glass to the floor with a shatter, and runs in the first convenient direction, as fast as she can.

Welp. That was awkward as heck. Baze shakes his head and directs a rat to pick up the shattered glass before returning to his project.

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