Fabricated Chapter 7

[companionwolf]

It’s a bar. 

Pillow Central sits in a corner of a booth, phone out. According to Google, he’s somewhere in El Paso, which doesn’t make sense, can’t make any sense, but he’s growing too tired to care. 

He lifts his eyes to the TVs mounted on the walls- sports. He knows it’s baseball, and then on another monitor football, but doesn’t recognize the teams. It must be some kind of game day anyway; the bar is packed with younger folks who chatter loudly and occasionally break into shouting when the sports goes whatever way. 

No one really pays attention to the man in the corner on his phone, which is enough. He leans his head back against the seat, and sorely misses the sleeping area of the truck. What he would give for that now... 

“Why am I even tired?” he asks, the whining mostly to himself. “I don’t have powerhouse cells or whatever, I shouldn’t get tired...”

“That isn’t how that works,” says Alice quietly from his pocket.

He grunts, idly paws at his phone; nothing about aliens, plenty about the government, things he knows the owner cares about, would yell about if they saw. A server comes weaving through the crowd toward him, a man with brushed up blonde hair and a name tag reading ‘Davey’. 

“Can I get you anything?” the man asks.

Pillow Central looks up from the phone, hesitates. He tried to eat, once, back on the dorm. Espeon had laughed and laughed at his disappointment, while Kitty assured him he didn’t want to deal with human things like that anyway. 

“No, thank you,” he says finally. 

Davey hovers. “Alright,” he says when it’s clear Pillow Central isn’t rethinking his choice, “but I’ll be around if you change your mind.” He walks off to another table.

Pillow Central kicks at the underside of the booth. Maybe eating would make him feel better, if he could eat. Another thing just out of reach in this damn half existence. 

“At least we still have the body,” Espeon says when he’s been quiet for a moment too long. “That’s good, right?”

“Makes us a target,” Pillow Central mumbles. 

“But it makes us believable as well,” Alice says.

“Shoulda just let the actual people who’ve been trained to do this do this,” he says. “I’m just wasting time—“

“They know not of the Elders, and would not believe us if we told,” Alice says. “With this we have physical proof that would otherwise be subject to the slow process of  human research. We don’t have that kind of time. We need it to get to the top, and we need it to happen now.” 

She pauses. “Fret not, we will be fine.”

“You don’t sound so convinced of that yourself,” he says. 

“Maybe not, but I know that fretting will not get us anywhere.” He feels her wiggles from his pocket, and he helps her up onto the table. 

“What now?” he asks.

“We find somewhere to rest, and wait for magic,” she says.

“And after that?”

“We need to confirm those items were fragments, don’t we? We will do that, providing those individuals have not been taken in for questioning.”

“What if they have?” 

Her eyes meet his. “You have already gone ‘full XCOM’ once, I am sure you can do it again.”

He groans, and she laughs, and for a moment, everything is alright.