milliways_bar | (no subject)

(no subject)

It's late afternoon when someone who really looks like he doesn't belong here saunters in from the front door. (It's probably the uniform.) There's surprise on his face at first - who isn't surprised when a bar you've never been to before shows up where your closet should be? - but the expression is soon replaced with a big smile.

There's a blue flash and he's at the bar ordering a cup of coffee, black, and then another flash and he's seated in one of the comfy armchairs by the window. Legs crossed ankle over knee, he sits back and watches the display with an odd curiosity.

This has to be it. The place the workers at the Commission only whisper about.

Number Five has finally arrived at Milliways.

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"Stop!" Wilford says, snapping his fingers loudly. "What's that?"

Not the eye. He's pointing at Five's wrist.

Five looks at him for a minute. Is this guy an idiot, too?

"It's a tattoo."

The eye can wait for now. He'll get back to why that's weird in a moment.

"Why that tattoo?" he asks.

Never mind that it's on a child. He's well familiar with cults and trafficking and all the nefarious reasons a kid would be branded like that.

"It's an umbrella." It kind of matches the umbrella on his jacket badge. "Dad made us all get one."

Well, isn't that odd. He's begun collecting this man's strange children, it seems.

"Huh. You only do that zipping about shit?" he asks. "Nothing else?"

He reaches forward, motioning for Five to hand him the eye. He already doesn't like it, but he wants to get a closer look at it.

Don't be taking his eye! Five takes his hand back, protecting it from strangers' hands.

"Spatial jumping. That and I time travel." Sometimes. "We were also trained in combat and martial arts."

"Why is it round?" Wilford asks, since he doesn't get to have a closer look.

Glass eyes aren't round.

"What am I, the prosthetics police? How the fuck should I know?" All he knows is that it's his and he's going to find out who it belongs to.

"It's not a prosthetic," Wilford says. "If you wore that, it would roll around in your head like you were some kind of possessed demon. Whoever it belongs to is lying about something.

"Prosthetic eyes are triangle."

Fuck.

"Well, thanks for being a peach and telling me that. I'll get an explanation from the company that made it." Now he's curious, but he really only wants the person at the other end, not the eye itself.

Now, Wilford has a question of his own.

"So what's the age range between all of you? The other one was about twice your age."

Five tilts his head slowly. "The other one?"

"The junkie that washes my dishes," Wilford says, without a single hint of irony. "Brother of yours, I assume. He has the same ink."

"Klaus." This is said lowly, mostly to himself. "You know him? Where is he?"

Wilford shrugs. "I don't know. He washes my dishes; I'm not his babysitter. If he shows up he gets paid. If not, tough shit."

"You know him from here?" Five is just going to ignore the rest of it. Washing dishes.

"Initially," Wilford says. "But I didn't hire him here."

He hired him in one of the most disliked worlds Milliways has ever seen.

"You took him to your world." Timeline. Universe. Whatever. He'll figure it out when the world isn't ending.

"People do it all the time. No rule against it."

Well. There might be now, after some of the shit Wilford's pulled. He hasn't bothered to check though.

"Right." He takes in a deep breath and straightens his shoulders. "Well, he's an adult. He can make his own decisions." Stupid as they may be.

"He's a good kid," Wilford says, completely genuine. "A little fucked up, but who isn't?"

"You should ask him to show you around some time."

Wilford would offer, but there's the whole... actual child thing. Which is just icky for so many reasons.

"If I find him." Five keeps his tone neutral. He's not going to get his hopes up of meeting his brother here.

"What about our age range? We were all born on the same day. I'm just older now."

Wilford looks at the kid.

"Older," he says. "You sure about that?"

He doesn't reset, and last he checked, time travel doesn't work like this.

"Positive. I spent forty years roaming the post-apocalyptic world, then five working. Makes me fifty-eight." He puts the eye back in his pocket. "Had a glitch when jumping back. Made my body thirteen again."

Wilford laughs. That sounds all too familiar, in a very ironic way.

"That fucking sucks, doesn't it?" he says.

He may not have gone back that far, but he sure didn't enjoy being 22 again either.