Two
The next house turned out to be more accommodating, though again, the door's speaker didn't seem to be working. A tired-eyed young woman carrying a crying baby and with a second small child holding the bottom of her pyjama pant leg finally answered the door. "Communications terminal?" she echoed, "You mean like a phone? Sure, just a sec. I'll grab it for you."
Cooing at the baby, she vanished briefly into the house and returned, holding a small, rectangular box. She held it out and Susan took it, turning it over in her hand sceptically. Her eyes met Marcus' and she shrugged helplessly. She'd never been any good at history in school, and all she could remember about telephones were that they were an early Earth communications device. "…operated by dialling the number of another phone in order to establish contact," she could practically hear her textbook droning on and on in her head, "Contact was established via satellites in the later years of their use, and by…" She cut her train of thought off before it got too irrelevant and looked back up at the woman. "Is this the only thing you have? What about a wall terminal?"
"A wall terminal?" the woman asked, "No, sorry. Not many of those around here—maybe in Japan and China and stuff. The phone's not enough?"
"The phone's fine," Marcus cut in smoothly, "It's just that we can't remember the number. Thank you, though. Sorry to wake you."
With a polite bow, he took Susan by the arm and pulled her away from the house, down the front path, and onto the sidewalk. "What the hell is wrong with this place?" she demanded, glaring up and down the street, hands on hips. "Automobiles—"
"Cars," he supplemented.
"—telephones," she continued, unperturbed, "weird buildings... and no normal technology to speak of! It's like we're in the Stone Age!"
"That's a bit of an exaggeration," he said. "It could be just a settlement of people who've refused to advance beyond the twentieth century."
"Maybe," she considered it, "but wouldn't we still see a lot more satellites? I mean, where's the orbital defence grid? Or spacedock?"
"I don't know," he said, but then frowned. "Another possibility is that we've gone back in time somehow."
She turned to stare at him. "You seriously believe that?"
"It was just a suggestion," he shrugged, "An idea."
She stayed silent, trying to think of other possible explanations. An alternate universe, maybe? But no, that was just as far-fetched as Marcus' time theory. A hallucination? That seemed reasonable enough to be mentioned.
"Perhaps," Marcus replied, seating himself on the edge of the concrete sidewalk. "It could have even included our expedition—we might be lying in medbay back on Babylon 5 right now." Susan nodded her agreement, sitting down beside him. "But," he continued ominously, "whose hallucination is it? Yours, or mine?"
She stared at him; that was a good point, but easily solved. It was obviously her hallucination, because she knew she was alive and she could think, just like normal.
"It's mine," they said in unison.
"No," said Susan, "it has to be mine. I'm… well, I'm me. I'm here."
"But so am I," Marcus pointed out. "And how do I know that you're really real?"
"How do I know that you're really real?" she returned.
He paused, and then said something entirely unintelligible. "There, see? You can't speak Minbari. So that couldn't have come from your imagination."
"Yes, it could've," she countered, "I could just have thought up some random nonsense and made Imaginary Marcus say it and claim it's Minbari."
"Good point," he conceded, looking down at his knees in thought. "I can't think of anything else, though."
"No, neither can I," she agreed. There was a brief pause. "Well, let's proceed on the basis that it's a hallucination. Eventually, Stephen will find a way to get us out of it—yes, us, for the sake of our sanity. We could just wait, couldn't we? Let the dream play itself out?"
"We could," Marcus agreed, and then his face lit up with a sudden idea. "Maybe if we went back to the start of the hallucination, we'd wake up. You know the whole 'recreating the circumstances' thing?"
"Good idea," she said, pointing a finger at him in enthusiasm as she seized a hold of it. "We can head back to the field."
"Exactly," he grinned, standing and offering her a hand up. She ignored it and pushed herself to her feet in true Ivanova fashion—independently—and they were off.
Susan made no complaints about the distance for the whole of their walk back to the hill, even though they had some trouble finding it and had to backtrack once or twice for fear of missing it, but when a certain thought occurred to her, she complained long and hard.
Actually, perhaps 'swore' was a better word.
"What?" asked Marcus, startled by the sudden outburst of profanity as he lay peacefully in the grass.
"Remember how we thought that maybe the hallucination started while we were still in the shuttle?" she asked with a tight, angry smile. Marcus' face fell. "Yeah."
"Bugger," he muttered. "How are we supposed to recreate that? Build a shuttle and drive it to the location of the possibly non-existent Babylon 5?"
"I really don't want to say it," she groaned, "but yes, that's what it looks like."
"Do you even know how to build a shuttle?" he asked miserably, "Because the only ones I have the faintest idea about are Minbari flyers, and that's hardly what we were in."
"I think I could figure it out," Susan replied, "but it's finding the materials that I'm worried about. Plus, to top it all off, we have to walk all the way back to that stupid town. What was it called?"
"Renfrew," he supplied.
"Wait," she held up a hand, "We're still operating under that idea that this is all in our minds. So, maybe we can imagine ourselves a shuttle. Heck, why not imagine ourselves back on Babylon 5?"
"Sounds good to me," he agree, and shut his eyes, brow furrowing in concentration. She did the same, focussing her mind on standing in C&C, willing herself to be there.
Nothing happened.
"Maybe we both have to imagine being in the same place," Marcus suggested.
"Where were you?" she asked.
"The docking bay," he answered. "What about you?"
"C&C," she told him. "It makes more sense to be in C&C because that's where I got the assignment."
"But I wasn't in C&C this morning," he reminded her, "For all we know, this whole day could be a hallucination, so maybe we should imagine ourselves in our quarters."
"But we decided we had to imagine ourselves in the same place," she reminded him.
"Your place or mine?" he asked jokingly and received a glare for his trouble. "Okay. I can't picture your quarters—have I ever been there?"
"Yes," she replied, "when you showed me that model-thing of the command structure."
"Oh, right," the remembrance dawning on him was audible in his voice. "Sorry."
"It's fine," she replied absently.
"Still don't remember what they look like, though."
"Never mind my quarters," she said, growing impatient, "I can picture yours. We'll focus on there, just inside the door."
"Alright," he agreed, shutting his eyes again.
She focussed as hard as she could on the memory of being in his room, picturing herself there again and begging whatever deities might happen to be listening to put her there.
They didn't, and her eyes opened to the now-sunny sky with a groan. "Come on," she cried, slamming a fist into the ground by her side, "You had your fun with us, now let us go home!" She was stuck either in a hallucination, an alternate universe, or she had been sucked two and a half centuries back in time and she was with Marcus for company! It was kind of made her want to cry.
She didn't, of course. She ruthlessly shut down her self-pity and the sudden surge of homesickness that had washed over her and set her face into a stonily determined calm.
"Don't give up!" Marcus was insisting, "Try some place else! Maybe it didn't work because you weren't in my quarters today. Try yours! I'll try mine again!" He squeezed his eyes shut and hummed in concentration. Susan spared him a sad look as she slowly got to her feet.
"Let's go, Marcus," she said quietly, walking away towards the road, "It's not going to work."
He scrambled to his feet and chased after her like a puppy that had spent too long sniffing a tree and had fallen behind its master. "What are we doing, then?" he asked once he'd caught up. "Are we going to build a shuttle?"
"I don't see that we have a lot of choice," she replied.
"But if it's a hallucination—"
"I don't care," she said. "It doesn't make any difference. We can either go on hoping to just wake up eventually, or we can try to find a way back home, even if it means believing some… pretty crazy things, like that we're two hundred and some years in the past. I'm not going to sit around doing nothing, and…" She glanced away, hating to admit it, "I need you to be with me on this. Will you help me build the shuttle?"
Trying to convince herself that under normal circumstances, she would've kicked his ass right down to Epsilon 3, she let him turn her face back to him with three gentle fingers. He was smiling faintly as he nodded and told her 'yes'.
Back in town, they assessed the shops for potential building materials. There were two that seemed alright: a large store with a red sign that read "Home Hardware", and another, smaller store labelled "Canadian Tire". They poked around both, receiving many odd looks for their out-of-the-apparent-norm appearances and found several things that could be useful. It certainly was not an easy task that lay before them, especially being as they had no money.
Standing outside Home Hardware with her hands on her hips, Susan surveyed the area. "We need jobs," she declared.
"I think I saw a sign awhile ago that said 'Now Hiring'," said Marcus.
"Where?" she asked, turning to him.
"On this road," he said, "back closer to the main part of town."
"Let's go," she said, starting off briskly despite how tired her legs were. They'd been walking all day without rest, from the field and back and then around to all the different stores, but Marcus wasn't showing any signs of fatigue, and so neither was she.
She let him lead the way to wherever he'd seen that sign, glad of the fact that he couldn't see her while she walked behind him. She allowed her face to relax into a grimace and her shoulders to sag.
"It's not too far," Marcus said cheerfully, turning half around to look at her. She straightened immediately, smoothing her features out. Once he was turned away again, she glared venomously at the back of his head. Suddenly, he turned back, "I—what's that look for?"
"Hm?" she strained her mouth into a smile. "What look?"
"You were glaring at me as if I were Londo," he informed her, unconvinced and undeterred.
"Nah," she dismissed it with a wave of her hand. "I was just squinting a little; the sun's right in my eyes."
He raised his eyebrows but nodded, casting a glance over her shoulder at the setting sun and then opened his mouth to comment but she beat him to it. "Oh, look!" she pointed to a small building across a parking lot from them "There's that sign you were talking about." and breathed a short sigh of relief as he ceased paying attention to her.
The building with the sign was tiny in comparison to Home Hardware and had a jarringly red roof bearing a large, vaguely oval-shaped sign with 'DQ' written in large, plasticky letters.
"Nice place," Susan muttered sarcastically, looking disdainfully at the grimy concrete picnic tables that stood empty outside the door.
Marcus pulled on the door handle to no avail. "What day do you suppose it is?" he asked.
"What?" she frowned, joining him where he stood and peering over his shoulder at another sign posted in the window. "Why?"
He scrolled a finger down the sign. "Look. I think these are the store's hours. If today's a weekday (odds are, of course, that it is), it opened at eight o'clock and closed at… hm. Well, it's certainly not eleven at night, so I suppose it's not a weekday. Let's see… Saturdays are seven to midnight, so it must be Sunday—ten to seven."
"Seven?" Susan echoed, feigning surprise. It had been a long day. "Wow. Already."
"Actually," said Marcus, lining a fist up with the horizon to measure, "Judging by the position of the sun, I'd say it's closer to eight." He eased himself down onto one of the picnic tables, his breath leaving him in a prolonged sigh. "Feels like later, though, doesn't it?"
She felt her eyes soften. Whether he was faking his fatigue or not, she was thankful. Sitting next to him, she agreed quietly. "Yes, it does." They sat in silence for a long moment until she forced herself to get her mind back in working gear. "We need to find someplace to sleep," she realized aloud.
"Yes," he agreed, "but all the hotels will certainly cost money." She resisted the urge to make a sarcastic comment. "We could ask around, see if anyone has any beds to spare. Oh, what about that nice woman with the… the phone?"
"With the two screaming kids?" He nodded. "Marcus, somehow I don't think she's about to let us sleep in her house. I mean, for starters, you look…" she trailed off, eyeballing him, "Well, you look like a lurker!"
"Oh, thank you," he sniffed, "You look just lovely yourself."
She shook her head in annoyance. "Never mind. We can at least ask her if she knows any place we could stay."
"That we could," he agreed, "And it's not too far from here."
She grinned and pushed herself tiredly to her feet. "What are we waiting for, then?"
This one goes out to CapitanCatherine. ;)