Nightshift 60: M21-M30 Hallway

[toxicspiderman]

The Head Bastard was pissed off. That was nice. Made him more dangerous, but it was less dull than listening to military drones whine overhead.

S.T. looked at his kit again. Pipe, spray bottle, flashlight, radio, painkillers. Ring in the change pocket of his jeans. No beer. It had gotten fizzy but wasn't yet at an alcohol level worth drinking something that tasted like stale bread.

He looked at the newest addition. Additions, if you counted the clean copy of Notes from a Torture Chamber or whatever a pretentious French ex-cop would call it, but there wasn't any point in carting that along. He slipped the watch into his pocket, too.

He had no idea what the fuck they'd be walking into tonight. Pop quiz or cage match? They'd had two of the second one, so they were due for another brainiac mission, if Landel was feeling predictable. There hadn't been any scuttlebutt on the board. Censorship, either physical or brain-hacking, or no one had made it back alive. All very reassuring options.

He picked up his gear. Nice of Aguilar to leave the belts behind. Real leather did better than twisted duct tape.

[to here]

Comments

[norainu]

Renji rolled his eyes at what the Head Doctor said as he wolfed down the last few bites of his dinner. At this point, he really didn't care what the guy did any more. Because a shit cake was a shit cake whether it had two tiers or three. He took a moment to tuck some pens into his obi and sleeves, since it was back to the drawing board for him. After a moment of consideration he also took the radio. He'd always thought the radio guy was singularly useless, but you never knew. Things could change.

He tucked his flashlight into his obi as well, but didn't turn it on. He was used to navigating the hallways in darkness now, with just a light touch against the walls now and then. Having been dead for four weeks didn't make the memories any less present, because he felt like it was all just yesterday.

He stepped out of his room and broke into a run, feet almost silent in his waraji.

[norainu]

[To here]

[thesadist]

Daemon took a little longer to start tonight, taking his time to finish his dinner and giving him a short while to think over what the newly-returned Head Doctor had stated. He couldn't say he'd missed the man, although he was wishing he'd paid more attention to the female with Harrington now. Apparently her loss was an important one and he wondered who she was and why her loss was such an important one. Still, he didn't regret helping them the night before and he hoped, wherever they were, that they'd gotten there safely.

As the building went dark, he gathered his supplies and headed out, moving on silent feet towards the place where he was to meet Renji. The halls were much quieter tonight. And cleaner. There was no sign of the barrier from the night before, but of course, there was no sweet seductive call of his own Jewels either. His lips turned downwards in frustrated displeasure, but he shook that away, focusing on the task at hand instead. It was all he could do.

[thesadist]

[Going to here.]

[thesadist]

[Going to here.]

M25

[ryuuzaki]

Dinner had been hard to get through. L had picked at the meal itself, indifferent to it except for the sake of the nourishment it would provide and the fact that it represented a vast improvement on porridge. Only the pumpkin pie was appealing, cool and sweet and spicy against his tongue, but it made him want a cup of coffee, and coffee wasn't available. The food was mostly just a way of passing the time while he waited for Landel to cut the lights. It didn't distract from his considerable apprehension about Lunge's absence, or his dismay at the news about Javert, or his impatience to get started so that he could get a better idea of where he stood.

The first thing would be to find out whether or not Lunge had been "released." If he had been, that left only Jones, Taylor, and Figaro as people L thought he could trust. There were some other possibilities among his acquaintances: a few of the young women he'd spoken to recently, maybe Castiel... maybe the man from the library the morning after the surgery, but maybe not. All would require finessing, most appeared to have plans of their own, and it was impossible to say how long any of them would last here. Landel must know that it makes it harder to accomplish anything when any team you build is prone to so much attrition, L thought. Either way, Lunge would be hard to replace, and the possibility that he might be gone had created a low hum of anxiety that threatened to rise.

If L had to work with the scant team he had while he still had it, they couldn't afford to put off searching in the basement much longer. He hated it when the best decision available was one that struck him as a stupid one. In this case, it was beginning to feel more and more akin to walking into a trap just to find out what kind of trap it might be. Landel wasn't precisely trying to keep anyone away from the lower levels, Jones had "died" down there, and something about the place seemed to make people literally unable to speak about what they had seen. None of that suggested anything good.

L wondered if the mechanism that kept anyone from talking was similar, in a technical way, to the one that had been forced on him in the sleep study, the one that enabled him to identify lies so well and so uncomfortably... but no one who had been in the basement seemed to wake up the next day with their head wound around with bandages (barring, he supposed, those who had suffered actual head injuries). What was beyond his understanding, and what would he be able to grasp if he was only allowed to look at it closely enough?

His train of thought was interrupted when the intercom crackled to life. He listened to Landel until the doctor's voice fell silent again and the doors unlocked.

The return to what could be called the status quo—This will never count as normalcy, he thought—would have been more relaxing if there weren't still so many questions about it. Landel wasn't hiding what had happened, but he wasn't giving a point-by-point account of it, either. It was possible to work out the basic outlines from what he said and from the comments that had been made on the bulletin board. A meeting with the man Daemon might fill in the blanks. The knowledge probably wouldn't be useful now, but it might be important in the future.

Meanwhile, L could only assume that the woman in question in the announcement was Jill... Lydia. Could it have been anyone else? Why her? What's special about her, why does Landel care about her above all others? The personal link with Doyle? A sexual relationship... with one of them? Both of them? And how did he lose her? A simple escape? If she'd gotten out from under someone's nose, it was Aguilar's, while Landel was otherwise occupied.

Those references to future changes were certainly ominous.

He moved to change into his own clothes, or the clothes that were a reasonable simulacrum of them, and when he looked in the closet, he found the large metal box on its floor again. He regarded it with suspicion: it was another intimation, after the new bracelets, that Landel hadn't completely scoured away Aguilar's influence. Lifting its lid for just a moment showed him that it held the gun and holster. If he hadn't known, he would have assumed they were in the desk drawer.

Under normal circumstances, he would have preferred to maintain complete, consistent control over that kind of weapon, allowing access only to himself or to Watari, but that wasn't feasible in the Institute; no drawer was locked to the staff. It was hard to trust them not to give him blanks, one day, instead of real bullets... but the people in charge of the Institute seemed to value their captives' lives at least enough to refrain from wasting them that way. Not out of concern for our well-being, he thought, Ilia Silvestri and her young friend in his mind, but because they want to get more use out of us. The project itself must have been costing someone or other a fortune. Taxpayers, maybe. As he zipped his jeans and slipped the leather belt through the loops at his waist, he found a kind of savage childish pleasure in his desire to bankrupt anyone whose investment was more personal.

If Lunge was still here, what would they do? Stay indoors, look for options. Try to stay alive. L chose the tennis shoes out of necessity, then got the gun and its holster from the box in the closet.

It was what was under the Walther that gave him pause: a leatherbound book. Old. It had presence and weight. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. He set it on the desk, then frowned at it for a long moment, then lifted his flashlight and rifled through the pages closer to the end, pausing on the first passage to catch his eye.

He found that he was a coward. He conceived a horror of himself.

Javert's ideal, was not to be human, to be grand, to be sublime; it was to be irreproachable.

Now, he had just failed in this.

The creeping dismay he'd been feeling for most of the day began to expand and well up in a way that was both unpleasant and losing any claim to subtlety. L closed the book with an abrupt snap, biting his lower lip.

He unlocked the desk drawer, and put the extra bullets, the book, and his own journal in it before locking it again. Shutting it away was best, for now. The book itself had implications, but they were mostly philosophical—he had found Javert's delusions useful and, as such, hadn't seen fit to challenge them. What had Javert's true identity been? The ones assigned to the patients seemed just as fictional as the inspector in the book, although the props supporting them were good... Laurier's passport would even work as the basis of an alias for travel, as long as no one looked at the dates.

Still, military involvement or not, why try to convince someone who thought he was one fictional character that he was, in fact, a different one?

Under other circumstances, the question might have occupied his mind for hours, until he had teased out what he thought was the best answer to it... but for now, he had other things to worry about. He checked the gun, found that it was clear, loaded the clip, and holstered it. The ring was on his finger. If he didn't take the backpack, the radio was out, since the brush axe and flashlight were better uses of his hands. The axe itself seemed clean of the squirrel's blood from the previous night, and when L scraped it along the side wall of his closet, it left a mark, making him wonder again how the rosy pink protective barrier actually worked. What he had seen and what Landel had said both led him to the conclusion that any potential escape route that involved overpowering the Head Doctor would involve both the return of other patients' powers, as had happened the night before, and some way to sabotage the steps that had been taken to protect the Institute in a physical sense.

When he was sure he had everything he needed, the keys went into his pocket, and he left the room.

[Skipping to here.]