Warning: Contains slash

Pairing: Ford/Arthur

Words: 665

Disclaimer: Not Douglas Adams.

Oh there is so much I could say to introduce this fic, but I don't want to give it all away just yet. Y'all will have to work for it.

XP


Part 10


Arthur had just woken up, and without even opening his eyes he was already very disconcerted.

Despite it being impossible (as far as he knew), he felt very much as though he was floating unsupported in mid-air. He waited a moment, hoping the feeling would go away.

It didn't.

Very slowly, he cracked an eye open and saw – nothing. He tried opening the other eye as well. It didn't make a bit of difference. The only thing he could discern about his current surroundings was that they were utterly devoid of light. He whimpered, closed his eyes again, and waited another moment in the hope that this time the bizarre sense of being utterly alone would go away.

It still didn't.

Don't panic, he told himself. That's what Ford would say, right? Right. Okay. I wonder where Ford is… No, I have to figure out where I am first. All right then. What's the last thing I remember?


Part 1


The Heart of Gold was parked in the shadow of a small moon that orbited a star that occupied a small and unimportant niche in the Galaxy. It had been parked there for some time.

There were several problems with this.

Firstly, they were running out of alcohol.

Secondly, someone had smashed the Nutri-Matic Drinks Dispenser on the very sensible grounds that it clearly wasn't helping things.

Thirdly, Trillian was sick to death of playing Scrabble.

"Why don't we play cards instead?" she asked Arthur.

"We don't have any cards."

She rolled her eyes. "Seeing as how I actually had the foresight to pack before I left Earth, I happened to bring some along."

Ford ambled past, holding a half-empty bottle by the neck and singing tipsily. Arthur forgot to take offense at Trillian's comment and watched his friend's progress with the vague idea that if Ford fell over or something, that would at least give him something to do, even if it was only helping the alien find his feet again.

They were all beginning to get bored, and it spoke a great deal about the availability of drinks that Ford was nowhere near a state in which he would actually be drunk enough to fall over. He had begun conserving what was left of the stash under his bed, so the song he was singing was a rather gloomy one.

Arthur sighed as Ford made it across the room without incident, then turned back to Trillian. "I don't know how to play any card games," he said. "Well, except for Happy Families, but I don't think that really counts."

"I can teach you," she replied determinedly, and left to retrieve the deck of cards from her room.


Part 11


Well, thought Arthur in his isolated bubble of floating blackness, that's hardly informative. How did I get from learning to play a card game to… wherever this is? And why was there nothing else to do? I thought the guiding philosophy was Excitement, Adventure, and Really Wild Things…

But none of the answers to these questions seemed to be forthcoming, so he decided to have another go at sorting out his immediate circumstances.

He experimented with moving his left hand. It moved, but stiffly. Not the kind of stiffly that warns of premature arthritis, which he had always been a bit paranoid of developing, but as if he'd been lying on it for quite some time and the blood flow had gone a bit squiffy. This seemed very peculiar, because it didn't feel as though he was lying on anything. He moved his left leg and felt the same sort of stiffness.

His right hand and leg, conversely, felt perfectly fine.

Worried now, Arthur tried to sit up. He couldn't. There was something directly above him that he kept encountering with his face, but he couldn't tell what it was. Relieved to discover that at least he wasn't floating in a completely empty void, he brought his right hand up and felt the thing.

It was a pillow.