InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "the devils minion"

DCI Gene Hunt (asgenehunt) wrote in mirage_rpg,
@ 2009-01-14 21:04:00

Entry tags:

astor bennett, complete, day 28, gene hunt

Who: Gene and OTA
When: Day 28
What: Lounging around
Rating: G
Status: Incomplete

Settling down on a bench just outside the garage, Gene was, although he'd be hard pushed to admit it, finding that there was nothing he was left wanting for in this place, materially. It was uncanny, and more than just a little unnerving that he found everything he needed only seconds after he'd thought of it himself. Everything, except when it came to envisioning a nice big door that led out into Fleet Street. No such luck with that one. He was starting to think that maybe there really was truth in this 'planet being alive' notion.

It was the lack of incidents, of anything to react to, that he never thought he'd miss, but did. He hadn't heard of one murder or drug ring since arriving. There was no need to stay on a constant edge, or to always be ready to jump into action, and no Met to work for. God help him, he was even missing his team, although he'd shoved that sentiment so far down that even he hadn't realised it. Acknowledging it would mean that he was going to be stuck there for a long time, and that, above everything, was something he couldn't accept yet.

Without being fully aware that his hands sought out a cigarette from the pack of Embassy Filters in his pocket, it was only when he had to use both hands to light the tip that he found himself taking a satisfying drag. Well, so much for hanging onto that bolting wagon. Seemed that even here he was unreasonably stubborn at knowing when to let go.

He sat with his elbow propped up on the bench arm, chin in the palm of his hand with fingers against cheek, absently letting a cloud of smoke drift upward which only swelled thinly in the light of day. The day he returned back to London one way or the other would be the day he gave up again. Until then, it was a case of taking in any little comfort that he could.

(Post a new comment)

miami_angel97
2009-01-16 07:42 pm UTC (link)

After hot chocolate and changing into more weather-appropriate clothes, Astor had sat on her bed, looking over at the empty bed across the room and cried until she couldn't anymore. The room looked exactly like the one she shared at home with Cody, right down to his bed with the grubby teddy bear her mother had given to him when Astor herself had outgrown the need for it. The only thing, in fact, that the room was missing...was Cody.

She had hated the idea that she couldn't leave. She'd been confused, tried bargaining with the Planet to send her home because Cody needed her right now, gotten angry and kicked things around her room until it was a horrible mess, cried as she'd cleaned the mess, and finally, accepted that she wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. So, out of tears and for want of something to take her mind off her lonliness, Astor had gone out to play in the snow.

That had been fun and had successfully distracted her for a while, but then she'd grown cold again and decided she'd wanted to go inside. Only, she'd headed toward the ski lodge again and now she was lost. Astor had no idea how to find the resident buildings from where she was, so she wandered around, hoping to find someone who might be able to help her out.

Shivering and blowing hot air into her gloved hands before rubbing them together, Astor noticed a man sitting on a bench outside what looked like a garage, smoking a cigarette. He looked nice enough, if lost in his own thoughts, so Astor approached him slowly.

"Hey...mister?" she called out, teeth chattering in the way only a child could fail to notice. "Sorry to bother you, but...I'm a little lost..."

She stopped in front of him and hugged herself against the chill. It wasn't as cold as it had been that morning, but Astor was still freezing her butt off - for as long as she'd lived, she'd called Miami, Florida home and it had never been this cold there.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

asgenehunt
2009-01-17 04:50 am UTC (link)

To have said that Gene was not a people person would have been to underemphasise his situation, especially when it came to children. They were as much a different species to him as women, and his experience with either had hardly been a roaring success. He'd actually been advised to leave all the necessary cooperation with little nippers to his women colleagues, after that incident when he'd made that boy cry, which was an arrangement that suited him just fine.

So he supposed that as this juncture, one of them would have scooped down and hugged the girl who approached him, cooed with all the usual reassurances while sending him be nice looks that were sharp enough to scrape glass. Gene merely took a last drag, but to his credit, at least he shifted the hand idly fingering the cigarette so the smoke didn't end up in her face. He didn't see any need to patronise the pint-sizer by unnecessary fussing in any case.

He was only grateful that the others weren't around to see him when he said, "Yeah, don't I bl -" bloody, he almost swore, but, remembering one of the fundamentals about colourful language to kids (so he had learned something from that new-fangled personal relations class the Met had forced on him), he changed the word on the cusp of its second letter, "- bleedin' know how that feels. Where are you trying to get to?" He asked, working under the assumption that most lost people were actually trying to get somewhere. Unless it was the general kind of lost. The stuck on a strange planet far away from home kind of lost. Then she was as out of her depth as he was.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

miami_angel97
2009-01-17 07:29 am UTC (link)

Astor blinked. ...and smirked. This guy had a funny accent that she didn't recognize and stuttered. She forced herself to drop the smirk. Mom always said it wasn't nice to laugh at people just because they were different and, how would she like it, if they laughed at her? Astor thought about it and decided that she wouldn't like it very much at all, actually.

She was pretty sure he asked where she was trying to get, but the accent was thick, so she wasn't completely sure. Since it made sense, given what she'd said to him, she decided that that probably was what he'd asked. Astor opened her mouth to reply when she felt her stomach growl. There's a rumbly in your tumbly, Astor, Cody would've giggled if he was here. The thought made her frown again and she set her jaw against the lump rising in her throat.

"Um, well, I was trying to get back to my room, but I think maybe I should eat...all I've had today was hot chocolate and marshmallows. I skipped breakfast back home and then when the weird guy took me and Cody, I don't think he cared that we were hungry," she muttered, pulling a face. Cody had asked for a snack and the weird guy had just looked back at him and said nothing. Jerk.

"So, um," she faltered, shifting her weight from one foot to another and letting out a shaky breath that came out in a puff of fog against the cold air. "Like...somewhere I can eat? And then, if it's not too big a bother, maybe you can tell me how to get back to my room from there?" Her words had started slow and unsure, but by the end of the sentence she was talking rapidly, as if perhaps she thought if she said it fast enough, he could pretend not to have heard it if he wasn't as nice a guy as he looked. There'd probably be people eating somewhere, right? At least, at some point. If he was too busy to help her, she could ask somebody else if he could get her that far.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

asgenehunt
2009-01-21 06:18 pm UTC (link)

Just about managing to catch the tail end of the girl's sentence, albeit with a bit of effort on his part, Gene slowly twisted the cig between his forefingers, considering. Helping out a kid in such a way was barely a step up from rescuing kittens out of trees in terms of policing, but it was the weird guy she mentioned that anchored the brunt of his attention. Around his area, they didn't look lightly on men who went around snatching kids, if that's what had happened to her.

Making up his mind, he snubbed out the cigarette on the bench arm, mildly disgruntled when one of those little creatures who seemed to inhibit the place peeked out from around a corner of the garage, and appeared eager to clean it up. Standing and shoving his hands deep into his pockets, he indicated a 'Let's go then' gesture with his head, and started striding away from the building.

"Was that weird bloke taking you the reason why you're not with your parents here?" At least, that was what he assumed by the fact that she hadn't mentioned them being there. He wasn't very good at refraining himself from jumping to conclusions. It was that kind of gut-reaction that had gotten him the DCI spot. Well, that, and the occasional backhander and strategically-placed bribe.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

miami_angel97
2009-01-21 07:27 pm UTC (link)

Astor watched the man and fidgeted when he didn't answer right away. Maybe she was interrupting him or maybe he was waiting for someone. Maybe he just wasn't such a nice guy. She watched as he twisted the cigarette between his fingers and made a conscious effort not to wrinkle her nose at it, reflexively.

She'd started to open her mouth and tell him to never mind, when he'd crushed out the cigarette and stood. A movement caught in Astor's peripheral vision and she looked past the man, jumping and gasping a little in surprise, stepping back. "What's that thing? That wasn't there before!" she breathed. She was, in fact, so distracted by it, that she only just noticed the man's head movement.

"Bloke?" she asked, furrowing her brow in confusion. "You mean the weird guy? I don't know...he took me and Cody because he wanted Dex to come...and we were waiting for Dexter...and..." she paused and swallowed thickly. "And I closed my eyes and wished us away...and when I opened them, I was out in the cold, all by myself," she replied. She didn't think that the weird guy had anything to do with her being here...otherwise, wouldn't Cody be here, as well?

Astor followed him toward away from the building, casting wary glances over her shoulder until she realized that the creature was gone. She shivered, partly from the cold and partly out of nervous discomfort.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

asgenehunt
2009-01-25 03:15 am UTC (link)

Peering in the direction where the creature had clearly, and quite politely, waited for them to leave before lumbering out from behind the building, he raised one of his shoulders in the smallest of shrugs.

"I don't know what it's called, but there're more like it everywhere around here. They're harmless as far as I can tell. Haven't seen anything that ugly since the last time I cleaned the underside of my boots, though." Personally, he reckoned that someone had made them, like those robots that went berserk in the awful films his team were always wasting their time - more importantly, his time - watching. It was an idea, anyway, and more plausible to him than the frankly ridiculous notion that they'd been fashioned from the mountains themselves.

He'd even given one of the creatures a firm kick to see how it reacted, and he assumed that somewhere in the valley of its stony face, there was a rocky crevasse that crumbled into an unhappy frown. He couldn't place why, but it had given him a feeling in the back of his mind that he probably shouldn't try it again.

Listening to the girl, she was spinning off names without explanation, and he expected that they meant something to her, because they could have been the names of the seven rings of Saturn for all he knew. "They not here either?" He asked, because he'd observed that some people appeared to have known each other previously, the ones who'd been lucky (or unlucky) enough to not be brought there alone. He had a very real interest as to whether there was any pattern, or if it had just been sheer bad luck that he'd ended up there.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

miami_angel97
2009-01-25 09:44 am UTC (link)

Astor cracked a small smile. "Yeah, they are pretty ugly," she agreed. Staring at the thing, she tried to think of what it reminded her of. Gargoyles? Was that the name for them? She thought so...they'd talked about gargoyles briefly in school during some class or another. It hadn't been anything she'd been interested in paying much attention to at the time. Now she wished she had. Either way, that was what she was thinking of calling them from now on, for lack of anything else to use to refer to them.

She watched with slightly amused interest as he kicked it but the amusement melted away as she realized that somewhere in the back of her mind, she got the feeling he might have just gotten himself into trouble for doing it. Astor made a mental note not to do the same - ever.

The man asked whether Cody and Dexter were here too, and Astor swallowed thickly against the renewed lump in her throat. "I don't know," she admitted, putting on her best strong face. It was the one she'd put on for Cody when she wanted to cry, but knew that if she did, he would, too. "I don't think so. I don't even know where Dexter was, anyway, but Cody was right next to me one minute and gone the next one," she added.

Astor pulled her coat more tightly around herself. She certainly hoped the weather was going to warm up sometime, because it was going to take her a long while to get used to this horrible new climate. It made her miss the beach even more and with the thought of the beach, came the thought of building sand castles with Cody. She looked away from the man, sniffled, and swallowed against the lump in her throat again. No more crying. Not today. She'd done enough already.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

asgenehunt
2009-02-05 05:14 am UTC (link)

If there were kids there, it hadn't occurred to him until then that they were brought there completely alone, expected to look after themselves, or at the very least have others do so for them. There was definitely something wrong about that.

Hearing the sniffle, he rather hoped she wasn't going to start crying. Just because others accused him of lacking the necessary sensitivity at the right moments, didn't mean that he wasn't aware of when it was needed. In fact, if she'd been a few years older, he might have offered her a cigarette in way of comfort, but even he had his limits of letting young ones go down the route of vice. Besides, one day the planet might decide to stop providing them for him on demand, and then what would he do. End up tobaccoless with an irritation span the length of London Bridge, that's what.

"Cheer up, kid. This isn't the worst place to end up in," trying not to sound too hypocritical, when he'd be elated to blink and find himself back home, where normality wasn't just the distant thing that flitted across his mind in those seconds where he could put this - all this - down to a whisky-induced dream, just before he woke and reality crashed in. "Where are you from anyway?" Because it didn't take his many years in the service and detective title to notice that her accent wasn't from his territory.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

miami_angel97
2009-02-05 10:51 am UTC (link)

Astor took a deep breath and tried to relax, letting the breath out slowly. She could hear her father's voice in her head: "Stop crying before I give you something to cry about!" Well, on the plus side, she'd never see him again if she was stuck here.

The man spoke again and Astor looked down. "Astor," she said. He called her 'kid' and she didn't like it, she was almost twelve, after all. "My name is Astor."

She pondered what he'd said for a moment. There were worse places to end up than this place, because at least this place had grown ups that were helpful and who worried about her a little. If she was back where she came from, well, that was worse. The weird guy hadn't cared about her or Cody. And, Astor wondered if, worse than being with Moloch and the weird guy, would she have been worse off at Dad's? He never hit her or Cody, always just Mom, but Astor knew Dexter always said, "there's a first time for everything..."

"Yeah, I know," she finally said to the man, snapping out of her thoughts. "It's not so bad here, I just miss my family," she admitted.

He asked where she was from and she gave him a small smile. "Miami," she said, quickly adding, "in Florida...in the United States," just in case he'd never heard of Miami. Considering the funny way he talked, he might not have. "What about you, mister?"

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

asgenehunt
2009-02-05 11:43 am UTC (link)

For a second, Gene thought that the girl was going off on a tangent by offering her name, before he realised her mild offence to the term he'd given her. He took the point.

"Manchester," he replied to her question. "I was in London when I came here," but nothing on Earth, or any planet, was going to get him to claim that murky pisshole as his home. Fair enough, the bars there weren't so bad. At least, the ones that weren't caked in glitter and filled with the kind of vagrants who looked like they'd been vomited out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And the music. God help the world if that was where it was going. The incessant thump-thump-thump-thump of instruments he couldn't rightly name were enough to give him a headache. If he wanted the same effect, all he needed was to get sloshed on some of Jack Daniels' finest.

"England," he added, in case that was needed. He hadn't meet many people from overseas, and the ones he did tended to know which country they were in. It was only during his time in National Service and the occasional holiday with his missus that he'd been abroad, neither of which had been good situations to socialise in. "1980's," as yet another afterthought. He'd stayed away from most of the residents, but by then he'd realised that he wasn't from the same time as those he'd overheard talking.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

miami_angel97
2009-02-05 01:55 pm UTC (link)

Manchester didn't ring a bell, but London did. Big Ben was in London; she'd learned about that in some class or another. It was that big clock. The Empire State Building of London, her teacher said and whether or not it was true, Astor didn't know.

She went on walking with him and kept quiet because it looked to her like now it was his turn to go off into thought. He added 'England' and she nodded. Once he'd said London, she'd known that, but she was also one of the more excelled students in her history class and she knew most of her classmates probably still wouldn't know what he'd been talking about. And then he said 1980. "1980?!" she asked, eyes wide. "That's like a million years ago!"

He must be really old...

"I came from 2007," she added, blushing by way of apology for her outburst. Some grown ups didn't like being told they were old. Like...they already knew and they didn't need or want Astor rubbing it in.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

asgenehunt
2009-02-05 04:45 pm UTC (link)

"Hey, it might be a bit behind in your time, but we know how things are done there," he pointed out firmly, but not aggressively. Which meant, that was the world he knew and liked. There wasn't all the newfangled junk that seemed to be here. He hadn't even attempted to use the computer in his room, which looked far more complicated than the one he'd brought in for the office. Except, perhaps, to experimentally press a key and have the thing singsong at him in some metallic tune. Almost as bad as the London bar music. It was difficult to get his mind around the idea that apparently what had been a fantastic piece of technology in his time was little more than a relic now. Story of his life, that.

"2007," he mused. Hell. All right. Credit to the girl, that did sound a long way off, even if he was seeing it from a past perspective, and she from a future one. A few decades was a lot to catch up on, and frankly, he wasn't sure what he wanted to find out about. It was impossible not to be curious, though. And if he was going to be stuck there, it would help to know something of where everyone else was from.

"Well, how's that time working out for you? Anything worth a mention happen in the last ten years?"

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

miami_angel97
2009-02-05 05:00 pm UTC (link)

Astor smirked a little. "If you say so, mister," she giggled. She wondered what they did for fun back then...it was practically the middle ages, wasn't it? Did they even have TVs and video games? Oh, my God, how the heck did kids to their homework without computers and the internet? Did they have that back then??

"Pretty good, I guess," she replied to his question with a shrug. It was all she knew. "Um. Well, there was...oh! There was the Challenger crash in 1986. We went to this place in New York last year on a field trip where we went in a simulator. That was kinda fun... The Challenger...it was a rocket. You know, the ones that go in space?" She paused. "There's wars. And terrorists...they blew up the Pentagon and the World Trade Centers when I was five...I just learned about that in school..."

"What about back then? What kinda stuff happens then?" she asked.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

asgenehunt
2009-02-12 06:00 am UTC (link)

Gene wasn't going to pretend that half of that made sense to him, in case Astor decided to follow him up on any of it, and then he'd be forced to admit that actually, no, it didn't. And he'd rather take another knock to the head than acknowledge he'd been bested by a kid.

"Events, well. First woman prime minister," he muttered, but begrudgingly on a matter of principle. "Upheaval in the Polish government, the pope was shot, and a whole lot of claptrap about who shot JR." Even he realised how that paled in comparison with Astor's recital of world events. Mulling over the Challenger crash she mentioned, he could remember watching the news about the very first launch of a space shuttle. Columbia, or something that sounded just as American. Gene would have liked to think that people would have gained back the common sense to not fire anything else into space - wasn't cheap, and sure as hell wasn't smart - which was possibly because he didn't understand the science of it, except that it involved ridiculous space suits, a rocket, and some bastard big engines.

"Terrorists and blowing up buildings. Now I know the world's going to hell. Or at least is heading that way," since it had apparently made it to 2007.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

miami_angel97
2009-02-12 12:53 pm UTC (link)

"Prime minister is like president, right?" Astor asked, raising her eyebrows. "And...who's JR?"

When the man said that the world was heading toward hell, Astor shurgged. "That's what my grandma says, sometimes," she told him. She didn't really know the difference. To Astor, most of it didn't really make much sense, anyway.

Astor noticed that the building toward which they were headed was much closer, now, and she smiled up at him. "Thanks for helping me, mister," she said sincerely. She paused. "What's your name, anyway?"

(Reply to this) (Parent)