trans_9 | Pockets [closed]

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Pockets [closed]

Caden really wishes that he had pockets. His desire for pockets right now is almost unbelievable. It is so strong that he allows his need to drive him to the Thinky Rooms that he has heard so much about, hoping that maybe he can think himself some pockets to aid him in his routine of frustrated pacing.

Yes, he is frustrated. And he is pacing. ~~Well, actually he is walking to the Sensoriums, but hush with the technicalities.~~ Just like every other newcomer to ever set foot on Stacy (except maybe a few of the calmer ones), Caden is completely lost as to what to do with himself anymore. Especially since there were things that had to be done at home, like, oh, looking for his best friend. It had been almost five months since she had disappeared - had simply been... not there - and even though he had teamed up with her asshole of a boss, they had still found nothing as far as an explanation of her disappearance. Kidnapping was their only guess, and it really hadn't done much for them, other than cause a level of nail-biting and snapping at each other that should have been impossible on a scale of one to stressed.

As if his life couldn't get worse, he's now stuck on a meatship without any pockets, without Hex (as he had taken to calling the aforementioned asshole of a boss as a way to simultaneously irritate and comfort him in Wyn's absence), and without any pockets.

Grumbling about creepy suits and a highly inconvenient lack of an article of clothing with (okay, the plantsuits have pockets, he just doesn't want to admit that because they're so... itty... and not big enough for shoving hands into unless you're willing to try really, really hard) pockets, he shoves his way into the Sensoriums, glaring at the white room at large for a long moment before blinking and asking for his favorite pair of jeans. It is quite obvious that his nervous habits are surfacing.

It's not his fault, though. If he wasn't so worried about her, he would blame the whole mess on Wyn. After all, she is the reason he's been so twitchy, and why he can't sleep, and why he's torturing himself by working with her boss. It's really not his fault that he misses his best friend.

"Wyn..." he mutters, raking a hand through his hair. A little pop of blonde makes him jump, and he looks up, nearly having a heart attack when he sees Wyn standing there, looking just as blithe and insane as always. Except that his Wyn isn't blithe anymore. She has embraced her insanity, her inner mad scientist, and her smiles have become a lot less common (unless you count the creepy triumphant ones she gets when her brain starts ticking like the time bomb it is). He sighs, ordering the room to get rid of her; seeing her grin like that is making his heart hurt.

God, why couldn't she just be here? After all, he's on a ship that frequently kidnaps people. He imagines the hole he must have left behind in his own world, the panic Hex must have been thrown into at the disappearance of not one, but two of his... acquaintances. It was just like what had happened to Wyn, only...

...

It was just like what had happened to Wyn.

Caden freezes, hands stilling in his pockets, eyes widening behind his glasses, legs stiffening in their mid-pace position. "Holy hell," he says blankly, allowing himself to blink once, twice, three times, and then he's gone from the room, door banging shut behind him.

"She's here, she's here, holy hell, why didn't I think of it before?" His muttering floats ahead of him down the halls, his feet stomping out this twist, that turn, his impatience rising with each step until he can't quite take it anymore, and something snaps.

"Wyn!" He is almost loud, almost. He clears his throat, tries again. "WYN!"

"GWYDION CALLAHAN!"

One hall, another hall, getting frantic, always calling her name, his voice cracking.

"Wyn, please! Please come here!" Now he's scared, scared that he was wrong, that he had missed some key point, that maybe she isn't here.

He steps into the Obs Deck, heart racing and sinking at the same time. He's the only person in the room now, so different from a few days ago when the crowd had been massive, when he had been continuously seeing blonde that wasn't there. Except that it may very well have been there.

"God dammit! Wyn! Get your scrawny Irish ass in here, or I will go panther and track you down, you creepy, creepy fucking mad scientist! I don't care if you're in the middle of building your stupid toaster or breaking my toaster, or some other inane thing that only you could make sense of! If you're here, COME HERE!" Yeah, he's gone insane. Quite thoroughly, too...

Can't hate a man for hoping, though, can you?

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Really, he had hoped the last one would do it.

Apparently Wyn does not want to answer him.

Or...

"Maybe she's not here," he mutters, his tense shoulders starting to droop the longer he waits. One can almost visualize little dog ears becoming limper and limper with time and fading expectation.

He sighs, tries very hard not to start crying with frustration as he sits down on the floor in the middle of the room. It would appear that he just made a complete fool of himself for nothing, and though it had seemed completely plausible at the time, he starts to realize that, really, Stacy wouldn't have much use for a mad scientist who has recently become hellbent on breaking the world. The Wyn of late was... well, insane, and if she refused to help him edit his book, the odds that she would help some sentient ship in her 'Greater Purpose' were very, very, very small. Then again, he wasn't even sure if Wyn liked him anymore, which he supposes could be a key to her not answering if she is on board. So maybe she just refuses to help him because she thinks he's annoying and inane for not having some completely epic plan to take over the world...

"Idiot..."

Wyn's got pockets. To be fair, it's more like one giant pocket in her giant plaid flannel shirt, and it's not much good for pacing purposes, but it is a pocket.

The Obs Deck and Special Weapons aren't that close, really, but Wyn heard someone yelling her full name outside the Medbay doors. No one on board knew her full name, she was sure of it (she didn't give out Callahan, as a general rule, and Gwydion Was Not Spoken Of), and the fact that someone was calling her by her true name was more than interesting enough to warrant investigation.

The voice was definitely, definitely coming from the Obs Deck, and was sounding more than a bit terrified. She had no idea why, but there would be time enough to ask about that after she told whoever-it-was that her full name, however he knew it, was so very Off Limits it wasn't even funny.

Having put his face in his hands, Caden doesn't see the short blonde enter the room. He does hear the footsteps, though, and assuming that it's some snide asshole coming to tell him that no, there isn't a short blonde by the name of Gwydion Callahan on board. When the person doesn't speak, though, he decides to not ignore them, and instead tell them to back off, he's mourning here.

Caden looks up, mouth open to tell whoever-it-is off, and Caden totally almost has another heart attack.

There she is.

A short, blonde mad scientist, looking peeved and insane, plaid flannel shirt and creepy suit and all, and she's short and she's blonde and she's Wyn, and Caden isn't a very huggy person, but when laying eyes on his best friend for the first time in four-and-a-half months of thinking that she was kidnapped or dead or something, Caden turns into a very, very huggy person.

When he is squeezing the life out of Wyn, Caden feels a little better, though he still feels like crying.

"Jesus Christ, Wyn, you scared the shit out of me, you know that?" His voice is muffled, strained, no those are not tears making his throat thick, he's just allergic to Stacy, and he is finding it very hard to breathe evenly.

"Um. What did I do, exactly?" Wyn asks, fighting for breath. She'd pat the guy on the shoulder or something, she really would, but all he's got on is the plantsuit and it's just not the same when his clothing's alive. "Sorry, please don't take this the wrong way, but who are you and how the hell do you know about Gwydion?"

Caden's six years older than her now, and he's not acting like himself at the moment. The question can be forgiven.

Well, she could give the shirt she's wearing to him. After all, it was his once upon a time (about... oh, eight years ago). He's not very concerned with that right now, though. He's more worried about the fact that... well, Wyn doesn't seem to recognize him. At all.

Very stiffly, Caden pulls away from her, looking confused and more than a little hurt. "Wyn, I'm your best friend. Remember me? Went to college together, shared an apartment, you broke about four of my toasters. And..." She's being nice. This suddenly registers to him, and his confusion doubles. "Why are you being nice? You're never nice. The last time you were nice was... well, I'm not sure, but it wasn't recent." The crease between his eyebrows stands a good chance of being chiseled into his face from the intensity of his frown.

"Caden? Oh my god, oh fucking hell, a bhidse, CADEN!" And now it's Caden's turn to get hugtackled, Wyn's arms clinging to his ribcage regardless of the plantsuit. "... we're still in college together. Second year at St. Andrews? You were Cherry Darling for Halloween a couple of months ago and I made you a machine-gun prosthetic leg?" Baffled Wyn is very baffled indeed. (Her voice might be a bit muffled by the fact that she's currently trying to bury her head in his chest, but she's still more than understandable.)

At the comment about her not being nice, she draws back. It's just a party of confusion and hurt today, isn't it? "Wh-- what do you mean, I'm never nice?"

He's totally fine with the burrowing into his chest; it's the look on her face when she pulls back that makes him not completely elated with the situation. "What do you mean 'what do you mean'? You haven't been nice since you took your vow to - wait, second year at St. Andrews? Cherry Darling?" Confused. Caden is very, very confused. "That was six years ago, what are you talking about?"

"No, it was definitely-- this time-and-space-travel thing, tha grain agam air, I finally have a friend onboard, my best friend even, and he's from the future too." It's not hard to tell when Wyn's been really rattled; she starts flipping rapidly from English to Gaelic. "You were just at my twentieth birthday party, laughing at me for getting old, stalcaire, which makes you... how old now?"

She didn't forget about that vow comment, either, Caden, but that comes later. After she's finished hugging the daylights out of you and being both gleeful and very confused about the fact you're here.

He blinks. "What?" Really, this is too ridiculous. "Wait, wait, so you're telling me that you're... you're twenty. You were twenty six years ago. I remember that party. It was hilarious." Again with the no pockets. Again with the really, really wanting pockets so that he can pace.

A few minutes of incoherent grumbling later, he decides to answer her question, a hand running through his hair again, making it stick up like all getout. "I'm twenty-six." He decided not to mention that she missed the party, and that it would have been a two-person affair if she had showed up. That was when he had realized she was missing; not even mean mad scientist Wyn would miss his birthday dinner, so he knew something was up, and when she didn't call or show up at his apartment after the forty messages he left her, by the end of the week, he had internally declared her missing. Of course, he had gone looking for her, but Wyn not being in her apartment was nothing new.

You don't get the shirt back, Caden, even for pacing. "This is so weird. You're from my future, I'm from your past... I wonder if this is how the superheroes feel? I mean, hopefully with less power-limiter collars and catastrophic infighting and fighting to save the universe and whatever else. ... unless the world turned into a complete dystopia six years into the future, in which case I'm so glad you're here and not there. Not that I'm not glad you're here anyway, but seriously, keeping Fluffy out of dystopias is always a good plan." Wyn says, her train of thought getting slightly derailed (as usual). Also, she really really wants to ask about future-her, but that's probably not the best plan right now.

Caden is only half-listening to her rant, as familiar with the confusing, babble-filled her as he is, though he's cataloguing it in the part of his mind that he isn't using for making himself not freak out. Here stands a Wyn, but not his Wyn. Not that he isn't happy to see her; hell, having the bubbly her back is on about the same level of wonderful as Stacy letting them all free. Still, he can't help the seemingly omnipresent worry in his gut. Where is she if she's not here?

He pauses in his pacing at hearing his old nickname, and it clicks in his head that he hasn't been called Fluffy for at least a year. Thinking back on her rant while simultaneously following her words to the end, Caden starts laughing, moving forward and squeezing the life out of her again. "God, I've missed you," he mutters, though there's a definite dichotomy to his words.

And this isn't her Caden, either, but at this point she'll take anyone she knows over being here alone. She's made friends, she thinks, it's just... she's missed really knowing someone on Stacy. "I missed you too!" she says, returning the hug.

"... what happened? I mean, people change and everything, but you're hugging me. Of your own free will. I'm thinking I died or something, which... technically kidnapping by living Lovecraftian sentient transuniversal spaceship is a timeline-changing event, so I might not be dead when we get back." Wyn asks, trying to look on the bright side. (It's a rather morbid bright side, but still.)

Having his hugging verbally acknowledged, Caden lets go of her rather quickly, looking awkward. "Well, uhm... you kind of..." He has to think about this for a minute, and just as he opens his mouth again to give her all the gritty details, he pauses, staring down at twenty-year-old Wyn, absorbing the overly interested look on her face, the expression of a Wyn that he doesn't want to change into the even more insane, dedicated mad scientist that she has become. More than that, knowing that your future self has inexplicable disappeared could potentially be horrifying, and he doesn't much want to horrify her, either. Unless it involves practical jokes on Tristan. That's the okay kind of horrifying.

"Ah, well, it's nothing, really. I've just... become more... affec..tio....nate?" Very convincing, Caden. You get a slow clap for that one.

Pranking Tristan most certainly is not the okay kind of horrifying. "Uh-huh. Clearly you don't learn to lie well in the future." Wyn says, crossing her arms and raising her eyebrows expectantly. If you thought you could get off easily with that incredibly pathetic attempt to lie, Caden, you're very much mistaken. "I kind of what?"

"Oh, screw it, easier question. Got a boyfriend yet? Or girlfriend, I don't care which."

So says Wyn. Caden cares to disagree. That kid makes the funniest faces when he's freaked out...

Expectant Wyn is a little scary, though. "Seriously, it's nothing. You go a little wonky is all," he mutters, not looking at her, his arms folded across his chest. Typical defiant-Caden posture.

The change of subject doesn't make him feel much better. Actually, the change of subject makes him feel worse. "Why are all the gay men bitches? And girls don't like me!" That sums it up pretty nicely...

Wyn promises to use her powers of terrorizing Caden for good and not evil. (Well... mostly good. Possibly a little evil.) "Is this the conquer-the-world kind of wonky?" Wyn asks, a bit sadly. She almost expected it, after the way Caden reacted. "At least tell me I get to do it in an awesome, awesome way, like giant robots or something."

"Girls don't like you because you're a self-absorbed wanker, and you are just as bitchy as any gay man when you want to be." ... were you expecting Wyn to make you feel better? Pfft. Wyn's just glad to have you on the meatship, Caden, and she'll express that by being as gleefully honest with you as she can.

He clears his throat, glancing at her hesitantly. "No, of course not. Uhm... you do have an asshole of a boss, though. Really. For future reference, don't ever let him near you. Ever." Good, he's found a diversion. A very handy, very true diversion.

Now, however, he sounds highly exasperated. "Well, I wouldn't have to be a wanker if they would give me a chance! And I'm only a bitch because they're bitches." Yeah, expecting her to be totally nice was rather silly, especially when she takes such joy in making him squirm.

"... his name isn't Spellman, is it?" Wyn asks anxiously. "Because I got a random message from some earl with the last name of Spellman, and he came across as a bit of a prat on the Nexus, so I can only imagine what he'd be like in reality, but that would be a really weird coincidence and it's probably not true. ... right?"

"Oh, don't give me that self-perpetuating cycle nonsense. Half the time, you start being bitchy before they can even introduce themselves." It's nice to know that some things won't change, and giving Caden grief about his love life (or lack thereof) is one of them. "And I think it's the hair. The hair and the fact that you glare evilly at everyone you meet, regardless of gender or sexual orientation."

Surprised Caden is surprised. He's also highly irritated. "That bastard! He was contacting you that far back? Oh, I'm going to strangle him when I get back..." He doesn't mention that he's going to wait until he helps him find Wyn to do the strangling. He's a valuable resource in that department. "But yeah. Hector Spellman is the biggest prat to set food in the Gaeltacht Quarter. Don't go near him, don't talk to him, don't even think about talking to him. It'll save you a whole hell of a lot of trouble. Seriously." Seriously. Also, past-tense-him wouldn't have to put up with him, which would be very, very good.

He groans here, throws his head back with his hands over his face. "It's not my fault that I don't like people! Blame it on my abusive childhood." A few grumbles follow that before the comment about his hair registers, and he proceeds to make a highly amusing face as he puts his hand on his hair. "What about the hair? Is it weird?" Ignoring the 'evil glare' part. That's just a personality quirk.

"Oh, don't worry. I told him he could fuck right off." Wyn says brightly. "... wait, does that mean he doesn't listen? And why would he go into the Gaeltacht Quarter, I just told you he was an earl. Earl of... Winchester, I think it was? Anyway, yeah. Don't talk to him again, huge giant prat, trouble on wheels, got it." Wyn says with a decisive nod. She won't have a choice in the future, but she'll keep this in mind. (Blackmail doesn't give people much choice, really.)

"You did not have an abusive childhood. Your parents forcing you to socialize with actual people isn't child abuse or cruel and unusual punishment, we've been over this before." Wyn says, rolling her eyes. "And the hair is... well, you've still got emo hair in the past. I swear, it takes you longer to do your hair than it does for me, and our hair's about the same length. What did you do to it, anyway?"

"Oh, hell. Screw my geographical skills, you know I fuck stuff like that up all the time. But yes: Huge giant prat, trouble on wheels. Do not go near him. He will ruin your life." And get you kidnapped. And blackmail you! (Not that he knows specifically about the blackmail part. He just suspects it.)

"That's not what I meant! I meant the number of bigger, meaner kids who beat the crap out of me. The socializing was painful, yeah, but the beatings were worse. Especially that time when I was twelve when I was just trying to get away and then suddenly I was a panther. Talk about emotionally scarring." He shudders, staring at his hands, remembering how they had abruptly become all black and claw-ified way back when. Really, that had been freaky. "I... well, I kind of killed it. I dunno." He grumbles about it for a minute, a few barely audible statements of the fact that he won't have anything to make his hair look nice with now that he's suck on Stacy, because he severely doubts that she'll hand him product. Unless it's that snot that was in his pod. In which case he'll gracefully (really? No.) decline.

"Oh, right, them. You and your lack of older siblings." Wyn says, shaking her head mockingly. She's always been the youngest, and has happily exploited that fact ever since. "And the panther thing, I dunno, I would have been kind of excited to turn into a panther once I figured out how to change back into myself. But then again, I've been thinking that robots are a good solution to any problem since I was about six, so what the hell do I know."

"Fluffy, you don't even get shampoo on Stacy. Nothing is gonna make your hair look nice." Wyn says, grinning at Caden. "I'd offer to cut it for you, but I can't find scissors and all I've got is a laser pen and burnt hair smells absolutely disgusting and lasers probably do something absolutely horrific to your scalp, which is why my hair's still growing out."

"If I'd had older siblings, I would have ended up killing them, so I think I'm okay." No, he doesn't have older siblings confused with younger siblings. He tends to want to kill most people, especially those related to him. "Hey, you wouldn't have liked it in that situation. It was too freaky to be cool. Seriously." He chooses not to comment on the robots; it isn't exactly news to him.

That wins a groan from Caden. "Really? No shampoo? Not that I'm looking forward to walking back into that shower situation." He's not going to mention that he had walked into it as a cat, which made the whole experience that much more unpleasant. "Anyway, I wouldn't let you near my head, sharp implements or no. The laser is... well, that's just worse. Just no. No." Really. No.

"... what showers? That's what the suit is for." Wyn says impishly. Clearly Caden didn't ask questions when he was in the Meet and Greet, or if he did they weren't the right ones. "And I'm perfectly safe with sharp instruments! I've been cutting my own hair for a while now, I just need scissors!"

... clearly that depends on your definition of 'perfectly safe'.

"Oh... wait, what?" Yeah, the not asking questions in the Meet and Greet is a go. The sharp instruments, however...

"Wyn. I've known you for eight years, and I have not once been compelled to trust you with anything sharper than a butter knife. No. Thank you." He's not being mean, Wyn, he's being truthful. The half-smile on his face is also evidence of this, as well as the way he ruffles the rather shaggy white-blonde hair.

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