Took so long to think up what to do with this chapter but then I typed it all up in one night. Crazy.
Arual-san
It was a mindless repetitive task that any other teenager would've been accustomed to in fast food and Beast Boy kept at scrubbing in the same mindless way as was his task, much preferring superhero work. The stain seemed to be as much a part of the floor as the rest of it but he continued on, only half paying attention to Benji when he chattered away about anything and everything he could think of.
As higher-ups in the palace passed him by he tried to catch snippets of anything that could help. So often the aliens spoke in other languages but interplanetary grids on compact watches spoke for themselves. He kept his eye on them should someone ever dial for stats on Earth.
Beast Boy found his attention drifting back to the real world out of depression when the only person he could spy on in the hospice wing was a chubby old alien who snored much too loudly.
"So from what I've gathered," Benji continued, who knows how far into his ramblings no one listened to, "both the shipping and receiving ends of the teleportation devices are activated at the same time. It was why we were all sent in large groups as they shipped over new droids, because it didn't cost them any extra."
"Uh huh," Beast Boy said miserably, again cursing himself for falling for the allure of a pretty girl that was a trap. His eyes flicked to Brooke who was mixing the extracts of medicines with as much of a lack of interest as he.
Benji continued cheerily like he had a whole crowd of apt listeners, "The one true goal of that operation had to be just to start a takeover starting with one of the big-game cities. It had to be! I saw some of those shipments come in and wow, those droids just sprung to life out of little metal boxes! Put any contortionist I've seen to shame! I'll bet they're made in mass quantities on an assembly line and there was some sort of package deal. Can you imagine one of those annoying TV ad announcers advertising this stuff across the galaxy? Waste your enemies all for the low, low price of-!"
"$19.99, plus shipping and handling." Despite his bad mood, Beast Boy wouldn't be Beast Boy if he let a bad joke pass him by. "Company is not responsible for defective models that spring to life before activation and gut their owners."
Benji shut his mouth to hold back snickering but it came out anyway. As she cut strips of gauze, Brooke turned an eye on the boys in confusion, not recognizing that the bad joke was even a joke at all. She looked thoughtful as she continued her work but she was forced to drop the strip back to the table when she got caught up in a fit of coughing.
The fit lasted for more than two coughs and Beast Boy's slightly elated mood turned to worry. It was nowhere near life-threatening, the way it sounded, and though Brooke recovered just as quickly it still didn't sound good.
Though he could've done with a little less chatter on Benji's part, that Benji had brought up the subject got Beast Boy thinking about the specifics about all that had happened. He'd shown the droid that had defeated him his powers and if the operation's intent was to take down Earth from the inside with several armies of droids there had to have been a database of Earth's superheroes…even on minor ones like him. He hadn't been conscious when he'd been transported but from what he'd picked up in the separated quarters there were no new faces sent along with him. The students he'd been trying to protect had been spared in order for the fake to maintain its cover.
Beast Boy had been sent alone, his replacement had already been present, and that confused him. Simple slavery like the other students couldn't have been what a disreputable enterprise should have had planned for when they'd managed to snag a Super in their claws.
It was an incredible stroke of luck throughout all his bad luck but the only conclusion he could come to was that any specific transmission about him must have been lost along the airwaves when the two stations were millions of miles apart. However that luck couldn't possibly last for long when one of the higher ups employed of his own free will took the time to note how suspicious it was that he had been sent alone and recovered the misplaced transmission. He didn't know how long it would take for them to notice but that brought him to the other matter of the rings that were his cover. The batteries had hit their red zone and were dying on him quickly even after he'd taken the risk of shutting them off the rest of last night.
His cover wasn't going to last. The only question was in which way he would be exposed first.
Beast Boy's eyes narrowed, an uncommon storm of thinking pulsing in his irises. He was alone this time without his team and its strongest strategists and thinkers on his side and things could turn very ugly very fast when the cruel king learned of his identity.
Whatever else he wasn't, he was still a Titan and that meant looking out for himself until his team found him.
Benji continued on, never seeming to need to take a break, "So I guess we were just extras they needed to get rid of but at least these guys had some mercy when it would've been so much easier to just grind us into fertilizer, spread us over this planet's nutrient-starved soil and-"
There was no longer any humor when Beast Boy turned to him again, only dark suspicion, and Beast Boy picked up the nearest scalpel.
"You don't need to cut his finger too," Brooke said, heading off a possible scuffle. "Ben's not an android spying on us trying to get you to let your guard down by relaying a bunch of "secret" information. He just has no sense of tact."
Even if it was just a tiny cut, Benji had backed himself into a wall in anxiety for even that small bit of blood for confirmation. With the feeling that he could trust the real Brooke after all of the lies of her copycats, Beast Boy shelved the scalpel and promptly apologized.
"Please don't ever say that aloud again," Beast Boy sighed to Benji in any case. He didn't need any more complications if there was ever any small chance of Benji's realization happening if the slave's quarters ever got too crowded.
He was only just asking Benji about his steel-trap memory when he noticed Brooke pausing again to clutch her forehead.
"Hey, are you okay?" he had to ask even when his own situation was bad.
Her surprise at the sudden question perked up her to resume her work with greater speed than she'd had previously. "It's…nothing," she said quickly but for her next words she was a little more hesitant. "I just…have an immune system…that's a little weaker than most people's."
He'd noticed before that she'd been a little pale but had just assumed that had been a combination of stress, fatigue and a lack of makeup. "But we're on a different planet here with lots of different sicknesses that Earth has never seen!" he said, insulted, and a few of the workers raised their heads. "If that's the case than the last place you should be is the frontlines where you could catch something!"
Again she was surprised for his concern but she quickly, quietly hissed, "Keep your voice down, Gar. You'll get us in trouble."
Beast Boy didn't resume raising his voice but he did toss his washcloth aside and started for her. He raised her level of surprise to near startling when he laid a palm over her forehead for a quick check of her temperature.
Looking away in shame, Brooke spoke first before he had the chance. "I get sick spells regularly so I can tell you this one isn't anything serious. It'll be a little harder without my meds but all I need to do is sleep this off and…"
He took in her slightly darkened under-eyes with suspicion. "How are you going to sleep it off if they're always assigning you the graveyard shift?"
Her lips pursed a small degree in that she'd been caught but she shook it off to uphold her pride. "I might not look like the strongest girl here but no stray breeze is going to just knock me over. I can take care of myself just fine." She huffed in a little ill humor. "Besides, it's not like we can just file a complaint with "Human Resources". I've got the skill set for this sort of business so this is where they'll keep me."
He was quiet for a time after her little speech, looking at her with continued scrutiny, but rather than cave in any way Brooke extended a hand and lightly pushed him back when he'd been a little too close and making her anxious with that look. "Please let me get back to my work. If I meet my quota today I'll get more hours for sleep tonight."
But Beast Boy didn't return to his post beside Benji. He took up a seat beside Brooke and grabbed up some of the medical utensils. "So teach me what you know and I'll trade jobs with you." He gave a mischievous grin. "They won't notice if you play hooky for just one day."
She snatched back the measuring spoons to divvy out a dose of prescription syrup. "I can't do that."
"Oh what? This isn't some kind of academy girl loyalty thing to the higher power, is it?"
"If you must know," Brooke said and throughout her dignified tone a little mischief came through as well, "it's because you have the stubby, undisciplined hands of boy who reads comic books all day."
Half of his face jerked back in the rapid analysis that was completely true and despite himself he fanned those hands out to see. When Beast Boy saw her continuing her work with a smug grin he came back, "No, I don't! How hard can some medicine stuff be?"
"Harder than you think."
"Yeah?" he said and not consenting to defeat he started on the gauze, ripping it into strips noticeably more ragged than her neat ones. "Then what kind of hands do you have that make you so qualified?"
"Piano player hands," she answered, pulling away one of her soft, long-fingered hands without a pause in her work. "Speedy, precise and with an innate sense of muscle memory. It would be great if we could switch hands but we can't so that's just how it is."
Beast Boy grumbled, "You can't go around gauging someone's entire performance just by that."
"I've found that a person's hands tell more about them than words can," she said, taking that comment when she could've left it alone. "Daddy's business partners all puff themselves up in the same way but I can always tell the difference between someone worthy of upholding a family name and a grown-up trust fund child that does nothing but sail the world in yachts. Am I wrong about you?"
His memory drifted back to the time when Cyborg had only been a disembodied head, the rest of him everywhere else, and he'd been trying to figure out what to do with the mechanical part that looked like a slice of pizza.
He sighed that she was right.
Brooke noticed that her analysis had made him a little down and so she asked him to pass her a bottle from the cabinet. Bold before in her convictions, her voice became shy, "Even if your hands are stubby, they're plenty worn in…so you must be good at something else."
"Yeah," And he flexed his hands a little for himself, "yeah, I am good at something else."
She blushed a little when he took that praise of hers and her hand hesitated as if to move his chair away from her a little again to stave off some of that shyness. Though it was hard meeting someone new, Brooke let him help despite his less than perfect work.
Even though the cleaning crew wasn't very large they didn't stay in the hospice wing for long before it was off to the next place. Beast Boy followed Benji and the others like an obedient little servant when his mind was actually buzzing with anything but work.
"Hey Ben," Beast Boy hissed under his breath, interrupting the boy when he was always talking, "do you think you can turn on like a filter or something for all that information you pick up? Focus it on just one thing?"
"Umm…probably. What did you have in mind?"
Beast Boy looked over his shoulder for any ears that wouldn't wish him well and in the general direction of the communications room he'd marked. When it was clear, he continued, "I need you to pick up some of the print here and try to translate it. If I can find out where Earth is, find and reverse the route of the thing that sent me here, then I can get us home easy."
"Really?" Benji said naively, a little loudly and Beast Boy had to hush him. "You know where it is? You can get us through all the locked doors? Yeah, yeah, sure, I'll get started studying on that right away. I'll have to try to get Rory to trade shifts with me so I can get near the War Room so I can pick up some of the native language here and-"
"Please and thank you," Beast Boy said, wringing out his cloth.
The day progressed in pretty much the same manner, cleaning, pretending to care that everything was spotless when the boys were really doing all that they could to get information on the place. Though they were worked for hours on end without breaks to Beast Boy being a servant definitely beat being an academy student. Each boy was so focused that they didn't realize it was lunchtime until they were there in their seats.
"Is this mucus?" Beast Boy asked in disgust, face drooping when he couldn't separate his fork from the sticky mess on his plate. "Because I'm a vegan and that includes any uh…animal byproducts and…"
Beaming, Brooke slid into the empty seat across from them. "That…thing you said before, it was a joke right?"
"Uh…what thing?" Beast Boy wondered if he'd have to do the blood test again to see if she'd been replaced for a third time.
"That thing about the robot infomercial," she said as if she'd figured out something great. "You weren't just being weird; you were trying to be funny."
His look of disbelief warped further to include some degree of insult. "Yeah…that's kinda my thing."
"Well…well, I get it now," she continued excitedly. "It's funny because of the irony, because a company would always be liable for the unintended death of a client. Because it's bad business. Because that would never happen. I get it!"
Beast Boy continued gaping at her as if she was from Mars and she finally noticed.
"What?"
"I know high society sucks out the fun out of everything but I didn't think that it was this bad. Don't you academy girls have any sense of humor at all?"
"Wha- bu- I have a sense of humor!" The insult was hers now. "I read the comic sometimes in the Wall Street Journal and – and I thought it was really funny that one time our Physics professor said that this Doric column was Ionic because it was composed out of ions." When her point wasn't received she puffed in embarrassment. "Stop looking at me like that! You – your joke wasn't that funny anyway!"
But, when she'd gotten so riled when he'd said nothing, Beast Boy started snickering.
"Stop laughing at me!"
"Ah come on, laughing is good for you. Example," he said and he slapped his unappetizing snot meal right into Benji's face. The mucus was so thick that the tray oozed down his face without separating from it and his glasses were caked so that they couldn't see his eyes.
Brooke's eyes pinched shut in delight and she placed a couple fingers to her smile.
"What, that's it?" he asked and he turned to his new friend to sculpt the ooze coated to his face.
"No, no stop!" she half-pleaded trying to shield her eyes out of strict discipline. "It's not becoming of a lady for her laugh to rise any louder than a whisper or continue any longer than what's required. I…I can't!"
But despite her attempts to look away, the temptation was too great and she peeked between her fingers when the sculpture was reaching its end. Beast Boy finished his creation with a final swipe of snot and presented the slimy caricature of Richard Nixon. He jiggled Benji and the slime of the big-nosed face jiggled with him. He said very seriously, "I am not a nasal discharge."
This time it was far harder for Brooke to hold back and he grabbed her hands so that she couldn't force her mouth shut. When the dam broke her sudden shriek of laughter turned every head in the room and once she'd started she couldn't stop after it had been pent up for so long.
His work was done so Beast Boy let her go and smiled when nearly everyone threw them annoyed glares and demanded the girl to shut up. He went to bed a little bit happier that night but the same could not be said of the girl's quarters that had to tolerate Brooke's random bursts of giggles throughout.