Foston Slacks - Time's Flies

23

Foston was almost running, stopping every now and then to wait impatiently for Clara to catch up as she tried, in confused desperation, to catch up. She held up a finger, dragging her feet as her brain tried to work out exactly what Foston meant. She began to speak, stopped, thought a little bit longer, then tried to speak again. She still didn't get it.

"Wait. So, I 'insulted' him, by having a ... Hang on a minute!" Clara looked around. This all seemed far too familiar to her. "Weren't we just blown up?"

"It's Time! That bastard!" Foston looked up to the ceiling, for some reason, shaking his fist. "You can't do this to us, Time! Stop being a child!"

"Why are you shouting at the ceiling? He's right over there, laughing at us." Clara pointed to the clock face of Time, poking out of his ageing doorway, rubbing his hands together in an evil mastermind fashion. His actual hands. Not his clock face hands. He still hadn't put his willy away.

Foston harrumphed and turned his back on Time, straightening his back and walking in an awkward, stiff fashion. As if he was trying to make Time think he wasn't bothered by him, Foston had failed miserably.

"We didn't die! That's brilliant! Isn't it?" Clara turned back to time, placed her little finger down near her crotch and wriggled it towards the rapidly reddening face of Time. "Suck it, you big baby!"

"Don't keep antagonising the manifestation of a primal universal law, Clara!" He didn't turn around, still struggling with giving the impression of dignity. "We're in enough trouble as it is."

"Well, I've already 'insulted' him. A little more fun can't hurt. I mean ..."

"Don't say it!"

"... what's the worst that could happen?" Foston slapped his forehead, giving up any semblance of dignity. Clara shrugged. "If not being dead is his idea of torturing us, I'll have that over actually being, you know, dead any day of the week."

"You had to say it. Of course, now, the very worst thing that could happen is, more than likely, going to happen." As always, Foston's first thought was to start attacking his watch, searching for something that could help them. "This could get very messy."

"Hey, Babe, look who we've found." The voice sounded familiar. So familiar, yet Clara just couldn't place it.

"Oh, balls!"

-+-

Foston was almost running, stopping every now and then to wait impatiently for Clara to catch up as she tried, in confused desperation, to catch up. She held up a finger, dragging her feet as her brain tried to work out exactly what Foston meant. She began to speak, stopped, thought a little bit longer, then tried to speak again. She still didn't get it.

"Wait. So, I 'insulted' ... Hey! It just happened again!" Clara turned to see Time, poking his head out of his ageing door, rubbing his hands together like a B-grade super villain. "He really is a dick."

"Okay. Right. Fine. He's not allowing us to die. This is both a good, or a bad thing. I'm going for 'bad thing', but I'm willing to be proven wrong." Foston immediately turned to examining his watch.

"I'm thinking 'good thing'. We are immortal, Foston! We can't die!" She stopped looking at Time, and also stopped making fun of his small penis. Looking around, she found exactly what she sought. Über-Clara and Faux-ston, less than a hundred yards away. She ran towards them. "Hey! Arseholes! I've seen better looking diarrhoea than you!"

-+-

Foston was almost running, stopping every now and then to wait impatiently for Clara to catch up as she tried, in confused desperation, to catch up. She held up a finger, dragging her feet as her brain tried to work out exactly what Foston meant. She began to speak, stopped, thought a little bit longer, then tried to speak again. She still didn't get it.

"Wait ... Yes!" Clara laughed heartily, jumped in the air and raised her arms in triumph. "Immortal! I'm going to do that again!"

"Stop!" Foston grabbed her before she could run towards Über-Clara and Faux-ston. "Just stop! You know he's playing with you, right? He could end this time loop at any time. The next time you die, he could leave you leaking bodily fluids until you die an agonising death. You understand that, don't you?"

"Yeah, but until then, I can ..."

"No! No! No 'until'! He could stop it right now. No immortality. No 'fun'. Nothing." He grabbed her arm, guiding her towards a nearby shop window. "For now, until I can get a better idea of what to do, just look in the shop window. The death-dealing doppelgängers of ours will just walk right by and I can take time to think."

"That won't work! I've tried it, people notice people looking in shop windows. I lost a pretty good boyfriend, that I didn't trust, because he caught me following him like that." She tried to look over her shoulder to find Über-Clara and Faux-ston, but Foston turned her head back to the window.

"Well, it's either that, or we pretend to kiss until they pass by and, quite frankly, you're really pretty ugly and I don't want to use mouthwash after we kiss." Clara couldn't believe he actually said what she was going to say.

"Well, you're not exactly pin-up material, yourself, Mister Lemur." She examined herself in the shine of the shop window. She thought she was pretty foxy. Sod what the walking carpet thought.

"Hey, Babe!" That familiar voice rang from across the corridor's street. "What say we go find someone in the Sixties section to kill. I've always wanted to gun down a hippie. Peace lovers, my arse."

Clara suddenly found the contents of the shop utterly fascinating. Greetings cards for every occasion could be seen displayed within. And, when Clara thought 'everything', she meant everything. One card declared 'Sorry your cat crapped on the floor', with a picture of a fat old ginger cat glaring from the cover. She knew that feeling well.

"Right. Two deaths ago ..." He paused, counting with his fingers, his lips moving silently. "No, three deaths ago, I found the very weak signal of a Breach. If I could just have a little time without getting murdered, I think I can get a better fix on the location."

"Oh, look! There's a card that says 'Sorry you got murdered horribly'. Isn't that thoughtful?" She dug into her handbag, looking for her purse, then paused. "Do they take English money?"

"No."

Clara gazed into the greeting card shop and sighed when she saw a card that read 'There are a million different people I would rather travel with and you are not one of them'. She had the distinct feeling this card shop was the story of her life in mildly amusing anecdotes printed on cheap card. She tried to find the 'I wish I had never had kids' card with her mother's face on it. Perhaps it was somewhere inside, alongside 'You are such a disappointment' and 'Ask your father, I do not care'.

"Got it!" Foston punched the air then held up his hand to apologise to the innocent particles of air now sporting black eyes. "Aaaaand crap."

"What's wrong now?" She tried to stop Foston banging his head against the shop window. "Does it lead somewhere dangerous?"

"No, it's not that." Foston stopped banging his head against the glass and simply resorted to leaning against it, his arms drooping. "Not just that. There's a Breach alright. Only, this Breach is a very, very long way away. A very long way. It could take us weeks, months to get there and we could become submerged into The Corridor's narrative at any moment."

"But, we're going to try, aren't we? We're not just giving up?" Clara patted him awkwardly on the shoulder trying to show empathy she simply did not have. "There, there."

"It's worse than that, Clara." Foston spun to face her, giving her his absolute, most intense and serious face she had seen him use. It almost seemed genuine. "The journey is going to be so dangerous. The number of sections of corridor we have to go through, pass through doors with the most evil, the most vile, the most murderous creatures a fifteen year old's imagination can conjure up. We'll have to pass through some of the most dangerous places in the entire multi-verse. In short, this is some serious shit we're going to suffer. Are you ready for that?"

"Yeah. I'm sure we'll be fine."