dissonance

[isthisart]

Dr. Cheung's at a funeral all day, so Linya decides to go up to London and see if Miles is out of his Mood.

Security has decided to be deeply unhelpful today. She is currently showing them various forms of ID and repeating in a slow, patient voice that she has been here before, there is not more than one of her, and she promises she is not there to assassinate her husband or whatever fool thing has them skittish today. Perhaps she shouldn't drop in while the captain's missing; it seems to make them worse. But she got in before while he was missing...

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[thisvorlunatic]

The guards plonk Linya's chair down between the benches, shove Miles into the room, and close the door.

He paces. He rants. He weeps and howls, sometimes carried by the emotions of the play, sometimes by his own. He falls over Linya's lap and sobs iambic pentameter into her knees, then jumps up again and onto his bench to declaim the next lines.

At last:

"So, thanks to all at once and to each one, whom we invite to see us crown'd at Scone," Miles sighs, sinking to the floor in front of Linya's chair and curling up there.

[isthisart]

Linya finishes at the same time and falls silent. She is still tied to a chair and supposedly on fast-penta so her possible courses of action are very limited.

"What was that?" asks Galeni.

"Macbeth," she answers.

[thisvorlunatic]

"Fast-penta," clarifies Miles.

[isthisart]

"You're joking," says Galeni.

"I'm on synergine, too," volunteers Linya dreamily.

[thisvorlunatic]

"I have a lot of weird drug reactions. Apparently my screwy metabolism and the memory-aiding effects of poetic meter are an explosive combination. My face hurts."

[isthisart]

There is not a prompt for a reply from Linya there. She silently continues to be tied to a chair. Galeni hesitantly approaches the knots as though expecting one or the other of his cellmates to object to him touching her.

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles stays flopped.

[isthisart]

Galeni unpicks her hands. She lets them dangle by her sides. He detaches her ankles from the chair and she stays sat, but shifts her feet. "How long till it wears off you?" he wonders of her.

"A few minutes, probably," Linya pretends to guess. "Fast metabolism, generous ancestors..."

[thisvorlunatic]

"No kidding," mutters Miles.

[isthisart]

"Oh, no," she agrees. She flops her head onto her shoulder.

[thisvorlunatic]

"I," says Miles, "am going to go throw up."

He crawls into the bathroom and does that, thankfully into the appropriate receptacle, then passes out halfway back into the main area of the cell.

[isthisart]

When Miles wakes up he is on a bench with one of Linya's less essential articles of clothing balled up under his head and about half a meal's worth of food left to get cold at the end of the bench. Linya's napping, on the floor with a similar pillow arrangement and a sleeve of the jacket she's using flung over her eyes. She has even loaned Galeni a scarf-wrap for the same purpose. Linya's person remains decent, if underlayered.

[thisvorlunatic]

"Urgh," says Miles. He looks at the food, then shifts the plate under his bench and flops his face into his improvised pillow to attempt real sleep.

[isthisart]

In the morning, the guards come to take Galeni away. Linya eyes the guards who collect him assessingly but doesn't attack them - one has a stunner aimed at her from sufficient range that he could likely beat her reflexes.

There are sounds of an ineffectual struggle from Galeni, and then they're gone and it's just Linya and Miles, alone with the light fixture's all-seeing eye in the cell.

[thisvorlunatic]

"The light fixture is watching us," Miles mentions.

[isthisart]

"I have been thinking of likely ways for it to be doing that and wondering what tools I'd need to improvise explosives out of its parts," she agrees. "I don't have any."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Damn. There goes that escape plan."

[isthisart]

"The much-abused secondary products of your genome," Linya remarks, "are extremely inconsistent in their reactions to being picked up."

[thisvorlunatic]

"...um?"

[isthisart]

"How many of you are there, and which one are you?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Two," he says. "I'm the one who married you. Also the one who is Admiral Naismith. They know, so why shouldn't you? Fuck it all. The one who stunned you is an actual clone-duplicate created for an actual substitution plot. By Komarrans. What did he do when you picked him up...?"

[isthisart]

"Flinched."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Oh. Maybe he's not quite an utter soulless bastard after all," says Miles. "I'm not sure whether I find that heartening, or the opposite."

[isthisart]

"He probably could have salvaged it. I was thinking to myself, 'Naismith seemed very personable and not like he wanted to impersonate my Miles at all, and there probably aren't two of them even if the project originally called for several, or that would certainly have come up, wouldn't it'. But he didn't, he just - sort of apologized and shot me."

[thisvorlunatic]

"How polite."