A/N: Well I couldn't very well leave a cliffie for too long…
Part 13- Brainwashing Physicists
Rodney's face was a mix of confusion and curiosity as he looked at Lennon with the Care Bear towel by her head. "What are you doing?"
"Shh!" Madison hissed.
"Don't shush me!"
Madison leaned over and slapped him in the arm, "Shh!"
"Ow!" He instantly rubbed his arm, "What'd you do that for?"
"Because I was busy." Lennon played with the towel so she was holding the bunny directly and let the fabric fall down so its little head was revealed.
"I still don't want it." Rodney stood defiantly, "What is wrong with you all of a sudden anyway? And where did you get that thing?" He pointed to the fur ball.
"This isn't all of a sudden, something's been wrong with me practically since I got here."
The room suddenly got very oppressive as he looked at the two women, "I uh…I don't think I'm gonna like where this is leading…" Two women in his quarters should be a good thing!
"You won't remember anyway." Lennon moved closer to him.
"Stop with the cryptic crap!... oh god you are going to kill me, aren't you? And you got your friend to help!"
"For the last time, you're not dying!" At least as far as Lennon knew… you never know with writers. They do like to knock off minor characters all the time.
"Then why are you two blocking the door, hmm? And what is with that damned rabbit? Kill me with rabies or something?"
"Do plot bunnies even carry rabies?" Madison asked Lennon quietly.
Lennon shrugged, "Could be possible. Not very likely though."
Rodney was inching around the edge of the room around the Busters, on route to the door. And security. If the women weren't going to answer his questions, then security could pry it out of them.
Madison saw and stepped in front of him rather menacingly given the fact she wasn't that big of a person.
"Just touch the bunny, Rodney."
"Not unless you tell me why."
Lennon looked to Madison for some help, she shrugged.
"You really wouldn't believe it if I told you…"
"Try me."
Lennon sighed exasperatedly, "I'm about ready to do this the hard way."
"What's the hard way? A zat blast would cause trouble, ya know. With the time it takes to recover and everything."
"Thanks for pointing that out, Madge."
Rodney's face dropped at the mention of zatting, "I was right! This is all part of some plan… maybe not to kill me… but brainwash me or something. I can't believe I liked you, and you let me, that was not fair. So who do you work for? The Trust? Some new secret organization?"
Lennon rolled her eyes, "Yes, Rodney. Seducing you was part of some larger plan to get you to go work for my boss on a diabolical plan to take over the world using science rather than military force."
"I knew it!"
"And this bunny has been biologically altered to produce a substance to make it oh-so-easier to brainwash you."
Madison giggled in the background.
"So if you'd just let it bite you, we can all be on our way."
"No thanks, though it is flattering. I'll pretend this never happened and I'll just head back to-"
Madison placed herself firmly in front of the door so he couldn't get out. "Do you really have to do this, Lenny?"
"You've seen him! He's paranoid! He'll dig into this, and he's smart enough to figure some stuff out, if that happens, Charlie will really kill me!"
Rodney stammered, "No, I won't. Promise. Really. Cross my heart and hope to di- … well, not die… but uh…"
"Relax, Rodney. Take deep breaths. It isn't bad, honestly."
---Off to see the wizard…err… CO---
Charlotte had calmed down from her earlier state of anger. Anger at herself for being so bloody stupid as getting shot by a ship bunny and letting herself get shipped.
And no, not by a nice fluffy bunny, but smut. Not that she didn't like smut once in a while, but that's a different story.
She resolved that it wasn't completely her fault, Marcus… no… Lorne did inadvertently make first contact handing her a clip, therefore establishing the ship.
She didn't have to kiss him.
Yet she did.
The whole thing was breaking exactly 8 regulations, and she should know being a CO.
But Charlotte Walker wasn't one to not finish a mission if completion was in sight, and she was a grown woman, she could avoid Lorne. No big deal.
The floor she was currently on was sparse of traffic, and when she did run into someone, it was awkward to say the least.
Of course it wasn't helping that sleep-deprivation was weirdly catching up to her despite the couple hours of sleep earlier, and she was starting to get a little loopy.
At one point she could've sworn she saw General Hammond walk by arm-in-arm with a young woman. Then there was Gabriel and Xena in a rather compromising position in one of the corners, only to disappear when Charlie actually looked over there. The next corner contained Aragorn and Arwen in a situation Tolkien definitely didn't write about.
She banged her head against the wall, "I'm hallucinating… great." It had to be a side effect of the smut ship. It had to be.
Sliding down against the wall, Charlie dug out The Patented Anti Plot Bunny Agency's Bunny Handbook and flipped to the section about ship bunnies. Maybe she missed something, not that she'd admit it to anyone. Ever.
After reading the passage about smut bunnies again, and again, she knocked her head back out of frustration.
Then she noticed tiny print at the bottom of the page.
A footnote.
Squinting, she still couldn't read it, so she had to dig out her magnifying glass. It was of the typical large black-metal kind.
– In rare cases, it has been reported affected OC's developed vivid and progressively... steamy hallucinations. –
"Great." She muttered.
- These symptoms faded after time and distance from the other member of the ship, ranging from days to weeks and miles and universes. Or, one could take the easy way out and have a quickie. (With the other shippee) But that's against regulations… 14 of them. -
Charlotte groaned and shut the book. They really should make that in bigger print. Apparently Head Quarters had a sense of humor. What she needed was a viable cure because now there was Kirk and one of those green alien chicks getting hot and heavy out of the corner of her eye.
She shut her eyes to block out the sight.
It was like a Twilight Zone episode… no the Outer Limits. The new Outer Limits.
Huh. Lorne looked like that one guy who was eaten mid-performance by the alien-possessed chick… the alien was from the asteroid… and the chick looked strangely like Phoebe Halliwell…
Weird.
Yep, this was definitely Outer Limits territory.
She opened her eyes again cautiously, but closed them quickly. "That is just wrong!" Two munchkins straight out of The Wizard of Oz were… well… you get the idea.
"Someone just put me out of my misery already!"
---Cue scene change---
"You could be arrested for this! No, thrown in military prison! You don't want to go there." Rodney backed up and avoided tripping on anything as Lennon followed him around the room with the bunny in hand.
Lennon wasn't so lucky. She hit her leg on the little table, lost her balance and the bunny went flying.
But, it went straight at Rodney, somehow gripped on to his ugly plaid-like shirt and ended up on his shoulder.
He pawed at it, "Get it off!" It clawed to his other shoulder, and the two of them went back and forth in a sort of dance. Panicked on Rodney's side, rather calm on the baby bunny's.
Madison gaped wide-eyed from her place at the door.
Lennon hopped (no pun intended, honestly) to her feet just as the bunny leaped to the floor and started cleaning itself.
Rodney lifted a hand to his neck and looked rather blank.
"You should sit down…" Madison guided him to sit on the edge of the bed. She turned to Lennon, "Did it work?"
"Looks like it." She pulled out the zat from the waistband of her pants, "I've never actually purposely erased someone's memories before..." She looked at Rodney, feeling relief but somewhat sad about the situation. She blamed it on the ship.
Madison patted the eerily quiet Rodney's shoulder, "Are you sure you told the bunny what you wanted it to do?"
"Yeah." Lennon's sights laid on said bunny and she zatted it until it disintegrated. "We should go."
"And just leave him like this?"
"We can't have him snap back into it and find us here! We'll wait outside until he comes out."
Rodney shook his head with closed eyes, as if trying to clear his head, which was rather ironic.
"Come on, Madge." With her zillion-ton pack clutched in one hand, she dragged Madison out of the guest quarters with the other.
A few moments of silence passed out in the corridor.
Madison popped a piece of Bubblicious in her mouth and offered the pack to Lennon, "Want one?"
"Sure." With a little bit of effort, she got a square of gum out of the main packaging without looking at the flavor, unwrapped it, and started chewing. "Radical Red, huh? I thought they got rid of it."
"Nope." Madison blew a bubble and subsequently popped it. "You okay?"
"What? Yeah. I'm peachy. Dandy. Great. Excellent. Groovy even." She snarked as she chewed.
"So then why are you tapping your foot so much?"
"I can tap it if I want to. Lay off."
"I'm just trying to help."
Lennon sighed and softened her voice, "You have already. Thanks, okay? Don't make me say it again."
"Aww, you're so sweet." Madison smiled, "I won't tell anyone that either."
She huffed, "Good."
Madison asked innocently, "Want a hug?"
"I'll pass." Lennon kept tapping her foot and was about to lean up against the wall when Madison barreled into her. "I said I didn't… fine." She let herself be hugged for exactly two seconds.
"See, that wasn't so bad," Madison teased. "Hugging is good, it says you care."
"I wasn't the one doing the hugging."
"But you let me hug you. That means something too."
"Whatever."
The door calmly opened and Lennon held her breath.
Rodney walked out carrying a folder. The mug of coffee he brought with him, now quite cold, was held in his other hand. "Why are you standing outside my door? Something I should know about? The C-17 didn't crash did it? That would be soo typical."
Lennon shrugged, "How would I know?"
"Why else would you be standing outside my quarters at," he checked his watch, "two-thirty in the morning?"
"You tell me."
"How would I possibly know? I don't know you."
Madison kept shifting her gaze between the two of them.
"That's right. You don't."
Rodney shook his head mumbling something about women and walked off. Lennon looked after him.
"It worked. He seems to remember other stuff about the day." Madison commented.
"One mission accomplished." Lennon snarked and walked off too. She turned her head to her teammate, "Are you coming? I can't baby-sit myself."
A/N: That's a sign this is going to wrap up soon. As in one chapter. Maybe two. We'll see.
I'm kinda feeling sorry for Lenny and Rodney... huh. That's unexpected.
Sorry if this was a little more of a downer, I really didn't have a good day, then I wrote this... the art imitating life thing may have attacked a tad.
G'night everyone!