damned_institute | Day 62: Recreation Field (3rd Shift)

Entry tags:

sechs,
taura

Day 62: Recreation Field (3rd Shift)

Being predictable was a liability, at least in enemy territory. And there wasn't anywhere in the Institute that wasn't definitely Enemy Territory. But there was also only one place on the grounds Taura could really stretch her legs and get a workout in, at least during the day, and so she headed up the hall and out onto the field as soon as she'd collected her lunch.

She didn't bother getting out any of the equipment; instead, after a few laps of the field, she found a sunny, dry patch of grass and alternated stretches with bites of her sandwich.

She hadn't seen any evidence of illness, and the Head Doctor hadn't mentioned it after this morning. That was odd. He'd seemed so excited about it -- and, if it was the same thing he'd been whispering about as they'd fallen asleep, it was one of his Big Plans -- so why drop it? She was being predictable, out here in the still-chilly air, so why wasn't he? Come now, Landel, didn't anyone ever tell you it was rude to disappoint your guests? The corner of her mouth twitched, as she dropped into a backbend and ate the second half of her sandwich in two bites, upside-down.

[free!]

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The headache meant that Renji didn't feel all that interested in lunch, but he took a bag on the principle of the thing and then headed outside. Sometimes just getting some exercise helped him feel better, anyway.

There was only one other person outside, and it wasn't someone that Renji knew. He held back for the moment, since he hated poking his nose in on people that wanted to be left alone.

Taura waved as someone else joined her out on the field, still upside-down, and then flipped up into a handstand, and from there, walked her feet back over the other direction until she was standing up. Then she stretched -- not a stretch-stretch, but a lazy, full-bodied thing.

"Howdy. Surprised there aren't more people out here. I get a little tired of the same walls, myself." She was used to consistency -- the lab hadn't been much different, and living shipboard meant being comfortable with even more boring corridors, which had also been designed around a maximum height a good thirty centimeters shy of her own. But it didn't mean she didn't like variety, even if it was the same exercise field she'd been running laps on every chance she'd had.

Renji grinned. "Probably cause it's still cold as balls." He walked over to a comfortable talking distance.

He checked in his lunch bag, but none of it looked all that appetizing. He frowned and rolled the bag back up, then set it on the ground.

He started to stretch, just trying to get things warmed up enough that he wouldn't mess the gigai up by doing some exercise. "But hey, it's nice being able to run around without shit trying to eat us, right?"

"Right." She watched him as she stretched; he was a fighter, too, or at least an athlete. "Though it's nice to have an enemy that shows up to fight. Sometimes I think that's the real battle here -- ourselves against complacency."

All the food she could eat, now that the military had gone. A lifespan that would outlast how long she'd get lucky, running from the monsters. People who looked at her and saw a person, not a monster. She'd never understood it when people talked about cruelty through kindness; kindness was kindness, wasn't it? But now she had a definition, in brick and stone and earnest smiles.

"Don't worry," she added, and tacked a smile onto it. "I'm not going to go starting another riot. I'm just not very fond of waiting."

Renji snorted. "Yeah, maybe. I dunno. This ain't so different from my normal job. Just less fun on the down times." And a lot less booze. He really missed the booze. "Well, and I gotta make do with weapons, which is fucking annoying."

And not being able to walk through walls. That sucked, too.

But this lady had a good attitude. A better attitude than him, really, which was an example he should follow.

Renji laughed. "I think I must've been dead when the riot happened. Sucks that I missed it. Sounds like a good fucking time." He grinned. "So what's your name, troublemaker?"

Dead? She'd seen things on the bulletin, of course, and there'd been TK's story. And Landel himself had supposedly died the night they'd all been stranded in town, but it was still strange to hear it.

"Taura." She wiped dew and mud off her hand on the hip of her sweats and held out her hand. "It wasn't fun for very long. They had a lot more personnel than they'd let us see before it started."

Whether they had them now, with the military gone, was an interesting question. "Might work better now, with just medics, but I wouldn't put anything I valued on it."

Oh yeah. That hand shaking thing. Renji took her hand a little awkwardly, since he still wasn't used to doing that, and bowed as he shook. "Abarai Renji. Renji's my given name, so you can call me that if you want."

He snorted. "Yeah, well, we gotta try something at some point, right? I'd be up for another giant cluster fuck. Just to get on Landel's tits if nothing else."

"Renji," she repeated, making sure she had the pronunciation right. She did, although her accent flattened the vowels a bit. "I'll let you know when we find an opening." When. Not if. If she repeated it enough, it would come true.

"Or if I get too stir-crazy cooped up in here." She wouldn't; just because she wanted to didn't mean she'd pick a fight for no reward. Even doing so for one felt strange; this place really was getting to her. She shivered, and then threw herself back into a stretch to cover it. They'd been punished, in the labs, for disobedience, and they'd never questioned it.

Here all she had were questions, but it was a still an improvement. "I'm still hoping I can track down the guy on the radio. Maybe he'll have an idea or two." Or she'd confirm he'd been a traitor from the beginning, and they'd still have more information than when they started.

"Sounds awesome. I'm kind of out of the loop, so I'm tryin' to get back in." Being dead for weeks on end really hadn't done him any favors. It just meant he had less of an idea about what was going on than ever, and he'd lost his best weapon. Both of those things really annoyed him.

"Never managed to track down the old radio guy, but maybe it'll be better luck with this one. It'd be nice if one of 'em would give some straight fuckin' answers for once. But at least this one's claimin' to know Claude and Lydia, so it makes him sound like slightly less of a jerk off."

"Knows Landel, too." That conversation would have had her in stitches if the stakes weren't so high; as it was, her eyes still crinkled with the memory. "I'd like to know how he got out of that alive, though, if he's not working with the enemy."

"What were the ones before him like? I've heard stories, but I didn't hear them." There was so much here she didn't know, and they couldn't trust anyone, but they had to. It really was a clever set-up, as little as she liked admiring them for it.

"The only one I really paid attention to was... shit, I think maybe Alec? Something like that, Landel did a lot of screaming about him. But he was a right asshole. Spent all of his time not giving us shit to go on and then bitched constantly about how we weren't getting anywhere with his shitty-ass clues." Renji shrugged.

"The new guy more helpful then that at least?"

"Marc -- well, the first time we heard him he was injured. It wasn't a trap, after all -- he really was out there hurt. And Leela met him." Taura had looked, in the mountains to the north, but all they'd found was a snowstorm, a mine, and an empty shack.

"Then General Aguilar threw Landel out and he went and stayed with him. Don't know what that was about, but apparently they both managed to survive the experience." Or didn't, but she was still resolutely trying to ignore the idea that death wasn't always permanent.

Renji's eyebrows went up with that. "Wow. If he's like letting Landel crash with him and not slitting that asshole's throat, I'm a lot less interested in getting to know him."

He didn't have a lot of respect for people who had enemies at hand and not the balls to do justice. Maybe there was bullshit strategy or politics, and as far as he was concerned that didn't matter either. There was right, and there was wrong, and some people just needed to be stabbed in the goddamn face.

"I'm still interested in hearing what he has to say," Taura countered, her grin going sharp. "I just wouldn't take it as truth."

They had so few sources of information; talking to traitors wasn't always a bad idea, and Taura had never quite brought herself around to trusting the stories about Marc like others had. "Leaving Aguilar in might have been worse. I don't know. They're playing some sort of game, and they're doing it in plain sight."

That was the biggest question, really -- why let the prisoners know what was going on at all? It could be just that all of them liked to hear themselves talk, but, if it were, none of them were very smart. And they'd done too well for themselves to be that dumb.

Renji laughed. "Yeah, I guess that's probably the smart way to look at it. Doesn't hurt to listen. Not like he's around for me to punch in the throat anyway."

Another laugh. "Well, if you're the spider in the outhouse, it doesn't matter too much who's shitting on you. But the radio guy ain't in here with us."

Taura's brow crinkled as she parsed through that one -- what a spider would be doing in a lavatory she wasn't quite sure, but the gist made it through. "Still, he's stuck around for some reason. Enemy of my enemy and all that."

The intercom blared on, the speakers carrying across the field well enough. Someone sounded a little rattled, though it could be just another act. Taura climbed to her feet and brushed off her sweats. "Good meeting you," she added.

"Yeah, I just don't trust that too much. Cause then when all is said and done, they'll probably be our enemy too." Renji shrugged. "Nice meetin' ya."

It began when Sechs spent time at the bulletin board after breakfast; an unpleasant ache that sent mild tremors up and down his limbs along with fatigue akin to experiencing low power after a strenuous battle. Sechs managed to finish writing a note before his weakened legs forced him to drop down onto a couch, panting slightly with his hands just barely quivering on his knees. He didn't like this feeling, not at all. It didn't help that the daily chill he received from his M-U effects was bothering him as well. Was the poison in his spine behind all this? Or did this have to do with that "nasty bug" Landel mentioned earlier...?

Resting in the Sun Room didn't do much for the lack of energy or the slight aches that had suddenly taken over his body. So when the next shift arrived, Sechs shuffled his way outside to the Recreational Field. He hated to admit it to himself, but maybe Landel's suggestion of getting some sun might help? For all he knew, this could have just been a mild episode from all the stress...

To some of Sechs' relief, the warm temperature outside did sedate the squirming, cold parasite in his spine, but all the other problems persisted. Why were his arms still shaking so subtly like that? What happened to his energy? This didn't feel right...

The Replica took a few wary steps onto the grass, his eyes centered on the lone equipment shed farther out in the field. At first Sechs thought of sitting there to hide his current weakness from others, but the sight of that little shack brought back painful memories: the night he was a brainwashed guard, and the first morning after Sechs barely survived that torturous experiment... That was enough to change his mind.

Yet even if he did want to sit by the shed, he suddenly found himself succumbing to another episode of weak knees, forcing him to tiredly shuffle away from the door and wearily sit down on the grass with his back against the institute's wall. Repressing a groan, Sechs leaned his head back and gazed up at the sky with heavy-lidded eyes.

Crap! What was wrong with him...?

[Free~]

Something was wrong.

He'd felt it when he first woke up that day, a strange, sort of... grating feeling in the back of his throat and the back of his head that was wholly unfamiliar. Strange, but they were in a place full of strange things so he could dismiss it easily enough for now and hope that it went away.

What he couldn't dismiss quite so easily was the ache in his muscles and the tiredness that went along with it, as though he'd just battled for hours straight when he knew that he had done nothing last night except check his supplies and make a few more smoke bombs, just in case. That... that worried him. he was sure that the people who were normally taken for experiments remembered everything, so he doubted it could be that. Could it?

He checked the bulletin anyway, feeling ice drip down his spine at one of the messages, and then headed outside. Fresh air would help, he hoped, as would the cold. He was feeling a little flushed.

[Badou!]

Badou was in a pretty shitty mood by the time the nurse dragged him out of bed, and considering his track record for having a gun in his possession and a cigarette out of his hands, he thought he did pretty well at this self control bullshit by giving her a polite fuck off and kill yourself when she asked him how he felt today.

Being thrust outside to 'cool off' wasn't exactly his picture of an ideal wake up, but he contented himself by making rude gestures at her back and promising to piss in her shoes at the earliest opportunity. His beef wasn't really with the nurse, but they hated each other and she was within reach and he hadn't had a goddamn cigarette since he'd woken up in this shitty hellhole all over again.

And now he was sleeping too much. Fuck it all.

He would have gone off to sulk on his own, but he spotted Alle right away, and since he'd clearly cornered the market on brooding prettily Badou decided not to compete. He shuffled over, digging the brownie out of his bag, and held it up to Alle like a peace offering. "You look like someone forgot your birthday, man. What's up?"

He began his usual run around the field, starting slowly and building up to a jog, only to find himself becoming winded after only a few laps when he shouldn't even have broken a sweat from such an easy pace. What was wrong with him? He sat down on a rise of grass near the wall, trying to force his breathing to slow, to stop the pounding of his heart.

He didn't like this. he didn't like it at all.

He looked up sharply when someone approached, only relaxing when he recognised Badou walking towards him.

"I think that something is wrong," he said honestly when Badou asked. "And I don't know what."

He knew what the logical answer was, except, it wasn't logical for him. Supersoldiers did not get sick.

Badou plopped down in the grass next to him and picked at the wrapper of his brownie. "'We're stuck in a hellhole and life generally sucks' wrong or 'I have these feelings in my pants and I don't know what to do' wrong..? Help me out here."

He gave Badou a wry smile for that particular comment. "I think the first is the general background feeling of everyone who is stuck here," he pointed out. "And the second one is probably just you."

He leaned back on the damp grass, closing his eyes tiredly. "No, it's something else. I don't... I feel warm, I'm aching everywhere and I got tiredjust running around the field. This isn't normal. It isn't right."

"Excuse you, I know exactly what goes on in my pants at all times." Badou grumbled, drawing his knees up to his chest. He let his chin rest on them, eye flickering back to Alle as he spoke.

He couldn't help it, he huffed out a quiet laugh. "Are you telling me... you're coming down with something? Of all the shit that happens here you're catching a fever?"

"I'd hope so. They're your pants and you're wearing them." Why was he having this sort of conversation? Sometimes Badou made his head hurt and he had enough of that with Hallelujah who had... been remarkably quiet recently come to think of it.

He blinked at Badou and then looked away, miserable. "I don't know. I've never had one before. Never been sick before for that matter."

In his usual stunning display of maturity, Badou stuck his tongue out at Alle and let that be the end of the conversation. He wasn't sure if he was a bad influence or just underestimating Alle all this time.

"What, serious -- yeah, I guess you wouldn't be. Huh. I wonder if something's goin around." He was a little more bemused than sympathetic, but Alle was doing that kicked puppy face, and come to think of it he hadn't seen any messages about mundane things like fevers all this time. He'd assumed they were just too normal for most people to mention, but there were a lot of people like Alle here - people who didn't normally get sick.

He looked across the field, gaze unfocused and thoughtful. "Well, you're suppressed here, right? Could be it's messing with your immune system. It sounds like a fever, so if it's that you should stay inside where it's warm and try to sleep it off. Drink lots of fluids, don't push yourself. Maybe stay in tonight." He returned his gaze to Alle and nodded once. "I'll look into it, just in case."

Allelujah snorted softly at Badou's response, but it made him smile at least. There was something fun about Badou and being around him brought that out. It was satisfying.

"Seriously," Allelujah replied. "I don't think they wanted their super soldiers getting sick and tere aren't all that many chances to catch things when you spend most of your time in space." Even when they'd gone down to Earth, he hadn't got sick. The closest he'd come was a small hangover that was entirely Sumeragi's fault.

He looked sceptical at the suggestion, but that seemed to be the most logical conclusion. It just seemed strange to have it happen now. "I suppose so," he said reluctantly. "I don't want to waste another night though. I slept last night." Maybe that had been the problem.

"Yeah, I imagine not." It made sense, but it was still a little strange sometimes to realize that Alle did spend most of his time in space. He'd heard rumors about space travel and communication back home, but ultimately the recession had grounded those kinds of programs, so he couldn't say he knew much more about it. Maybe he'd give in and grill Alle about space when he was feeling better.

"I know, but if you're sick rest will make it go away quicker. And besides that, if it gets worse you may end up being a danger to yourself and anyone you travel with." He shrugged. "Seriously, just take it easy, alright? I'd come by and keep you entertained but I gotta... do a thing."

"There has to be some other way," Allelujah muttered, not finding that answer in any way satisfactory. He didn't want to be cooped up all night with nothing to do. He'd just be thinking about what was happening out there to the people he knew. He grabbed his lunch bag and fished the brownie out of it, starting to eat it determinedly.

"What kind of a thing?" he asked, giving badou a curious look. He was being uncommonly reticent today.

"Not that I know of. Though, who knows, you might shake it off in a few hours with your super soldier stuff." To be honest, he hated being stuck in his room too, especially when he was actually awake enough to have a choice in the matter.

He hadn't really expected Alle to be curious about his night shift plans, and after a moment's thought he shrugged. "Nothing too exciting. I've got a date with a foxy lady." In the basement. Which he was sure as hell not telling Alle right now.

"I can hope," Allelujah said, although he sounded a bit sceptical. "Nothing works right here so it's difficult to tell." He still wasn't entirely certain that he was fixed after what had happened a few nights ago. He hadn't heard Hallelujah in... he didn't know. He was trying not to think about it.

He smirked a little at badou's confession. "Should I be jealous?" he asked teasingly. "First the glitter and now an attractive woman."

"Yeah, I know. I'm trying not to be a dick here, but you might just have to suck it up and take the night. In fact, Alle?" Badou grinned cheerfully, all teeth. "If you go out and get mauled for no reason, I swear to god I'll find you and beat the shit out what's left of you."

He laughed outright. "Oh yeah, I'm a hot commodity. It's that skinny ginger allure. You're not gonna write your name on my ass, are you?"

Allelujah just stared for a moment at the somewhat savage expression on Badou's face. "Uh..." Had badou just threatened him? Yes, yes he had. "You'd beat up an injured man? ...not that I'm injured yet but potentially and..." Badou did realise that Allelujah was probably going to ignore him and go out anyway, right?

"I would but the nurses confiscated the markers and I'm not sure ball point would do the job."

"Well, let's face it, that's about the only time I could actually beat you up. Maybe. Kinda." Yeah, he was going to leave that train of thought before the weeping remains of his awesome and threatening masculinity were completely drowned out by reality. He could handle himself just fine, but he was no super soldier. Still... Badou raised his eyebrows, totally unimpressed with Alle's ability to lie through his teeth. "Just think of it as incentive to not get injured when you ignore me and go out tonight anyway. What do you have to accomplish so bad?"

He rolled his eye, and maybe shuffled a little to the right, because having someone write on your ass in ballpoint pen was one of those experiences you only needed to have once. Preferably negative once.

Allelujah thought about that and then nodded. "True." He wasn't attempting to be cruel or dismissive of Badou's abilities, but they'd both know that he was lying if he tried to insist otherwise. To be fair, his teammates probably wouldn't be able to stand up to him in a physical fight.

He smiled awkwardly, trying for innocent but somehow failing. They both knew that he wasn't planning on staying put. "Anything," he said, a touch of bitterness entering his voice. He'd be happy to accomplish anything right now.

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Day 62: Recreation Field (3rd Shift)

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