Foston Slacks - Time's Flies

26

Foston entered in haphazard fashion, banging his elbow upon the doorframe, bumping into the sink and almost walking into the stall with the skeleton. He had a hand over his eyes, using the other to attempt to navigate by touch alone and making a complete mess of it. She tapped him on the shoulder and he turned the wrong way, so she grabbed the simply exquisite material of his jacket, turning him around.

"Why," She sighed. "Are you covering your eyes?"

"Because it's the ladies' toilet and I didn't want to catch you doing, you know, 'Lady things'." He shook her hand away as she tried to move his hand from his eyes, still reaching out with his other hand, running it, none too gently, over her face. "One must retain a certain decorum, even in a post-nuclear apocalypse America."

"What kind of 'Lady things' do you think women do in toilets?" Even as she said it, she recounted several dozen occasions in ladies' toilets where actions occurred that would have blinded most men.

"I couldn't possibly imagine, because I don't go in ladies' toilets. Unless there's a Breach to go through, and then I keep my eyes closed. Like a gentleman." He didn't even peek. Steadfastly holding his hand over his eyes.

"But you've seen me naked, more than once. I've seen you naked! There is nothing about each others bodies that we haven't seen! Idiot." She ripped his hand down and, as if on a finely oiled spring, it bounced right back.

"But I've never seen you doing the loo thing and, ahem, 'Lady things'." She slapped him and that made him look, his eyes bulging in anticipatory horror, which fell away when he saw her fully dressed, pointing to the floor.

"Why is there a Breach in a hole in the toilet floor?" She raised her eyebrows. "It's yellow. At first I thought it was a disgusting, backed-up puddle, but, no, it's a Breach. Are we supposed to jump through that?"

"It would probably be a rather good idea, yes. The waitress' son has just returned with his gang. They're all mutates. Horrible, ugly, disfigured mutates with guns. Lots and lots of guns." He looked down into the Breach, held his nose and bent his knees. "I'll go first and make sure everything is hunky-dory on the other side."

Unbending his knees, he stepped forward and dropped into the Breach. So much for being a gentleman, Clara thought. The sounds of hooting and hollering rang out in the main diner area, with the waitress shouting that her son never came to visit anymore and wondering if she embarrassed him or something. Clara didn't wait to hear his answer as the sounds of automatic gunfire rang out. She stepped forward and dropped into the waiting Breach.

Landing on her ample, cushioned backside did nothing to cushion the jolt of hitting some kind of metallic floor. She just knew that would lead to bruising. Foston, of course, appeared to have landed in a far more dignified fashion, brushing down his trousers and proceeding to raise his hands in surrender. He nodded behind her.

Arching her head backwards, she looked up at two people aiming, what looked like, those multi-ink pens. The fat ones with slides around the top to express the colour required, even though nobody ever used anything but black, blue and, on very infrequent occasions, red.

"Get up, separatist scum!" Screamed one of them who, from this angle, had a head that seemed to be mostly nostril.

"You have, if you don't mind me saying, a huge nose. I mean, huge!" Clara made little effort to stand, but she did straighten up her head, looking at Foston who seemed to find this all so very much exciting. "We should have stayed at the beach party. No-one threatened us with pens at the beach party. Well, except Jeremy, but that turned out to be something quite different to a pen. Good times."

"Good times." Foston agreed.

"I said get up! Scum!" Clara felt the pen press into the back of her neck. That annoyed her, she'd been threatened by guns so large, the laws of physics threw up their collective hands and went to lunch instead. She wasn't going to be intimidated by a pen.

A thin red line passed by her face, burning a thin hole in the floor.

On the other hand, she hadn't been threatened by a weapon that could surgically lobotomise her and cauterise the wound at the same time. With little to no flexibility, Clara turned on to her knees and took her time pushing herself from the floor. Upon reaching her feet, she theatrically patted down her hair and adjusted the handbag strap.

"Bollocks!" She shouted, forgetting the two oddly dressed, aggressive people pointing death pens at her. She turned to Foston, punching him in the arm. "We've left Donkey-Oh-Tea! at the diner!"

Foston's arms dropped to his sides and his face held an expression of both shock and anger. He punched her arm in retaliation.

"How could you leave the single, most adorable toy pet in the entire universe in the hands of Americans!" He rubbed his arm where she'd punched him.

"How could I leave him! How could you leave him? He was right there, on the counter!" She slapped his arm, making sure she hit the exact same spot.

"How could I leave him! You were the one that said, and I quote, 'Touch him, you die!'. Exact quote." He slapped her arm. She slapped him again.

Soon, the argument dissolved into a brutal melée of slapping that Clara felt sure would end up with someone losing an eye. She didn't care. She loved Donkey-Oh-Tea!. Loved that badly made, scruffy, ugly, toy donkey more than she had loved anything, ever. She knew how sad that sounded, but people thinking that was sad had never met Donkey-Oh-Tea!. They weren't there when he ... when he ...

"Excuse me, scum! But you are aware that we have very powerful energy weapons pointed at you right now and we're not averse to using them, are we Daphne?" The man with the unfeasibly large nose nodded to the woman beside him.

"No, sir, we are not."

"And especially against separatist scum. Like you!" Clara did a double-take at that. She'd never known anybody make the words 'like you' into an exclamation. It seemed odd and out of place.

"And what, exactly, are we supposed to be separatisting from?" Clara knew that Foston knew that wasn't a word, even as he said it. Unless it was a future word. Clara thought it fitted the situation, so she filed it away for later use, even as she and Foston continued to tap each other with their hands, like naughty, battling schoolchildren.

"Ha! As if you don't know. Scum!"

"Oh! They know, sir. They know!"

"Porting onto this ship! Wearing that face! Oh, they know alright. Scum!" The man jiggled the death pen in the direction of Clara's face. She ducked, just in case.

"It's the only face I've got. What's wrong with it? Is my mascara running? Again! I've not even been bloody crying!" She dabbed at her eyes with a finger, looking at the tip for any sign of running mascara.

"Silence! Scum! It's the brig for you, you separatist scum! And for the Captain to decide what to do with you." The man shook the death pen to make them move in a certain direction, at which Clara and Foston failed to comply with the order.

"I say! Is it really necessary to keep calling us 'scum' like that? It's pretty insulting, you know." Foston almost put his hands in his pockets and stopped when Daphne growled and made an aggressive gesture with her death pen.

"Really?" The enormous nosed man stood up straight, drooping the death pen down a little. "Well, how else are we supposed to call you scum?"

"With, perhaps, a little less emphasis on the exclamation mark? It is exceedingly aggressive, don't you know?" Foston gave the man that look. A look so endearing and reasonable that anyone could be made a fool by it.

"Oh. Right. Alright. It's to the brig for you! Separatist scum." The man leaned in, whispering. "Is that better?"

"Oh, much."