Day 62: Sun Room (4th Shift)

[dividedby]

What an unproductive day this was so far. Doing nothing but sitting on a couch, watching the bulletin board and thinking too much about things...if only his injuries weren't keeping him from getting some decent exercise. (If only he hadn't let himself get injured, period, but...)

This shift, Zero was left with nothing to do but sit around, without the promise of a useful conversation like last shift with Nigredo. It wasn't like his other option was any better, though. Showers, already being a waste of time as they were, just sounded very uncomfortable, if not impossible, to do while wearing a sling and a cast. So when his chatty nurse came up to him at shift change and tried to get him to follow her to the showers, the once-Reploid refused to budge. She seemed surprised at his refusal, tossed a few 'why not's and 'we can do this and this to protect your bandages so they won't get wet's at him, but he stubbornly shook his head at everything she said. There was no way he was going in there in this condition. Too much effort for no gain. Why did getting clean matter so much, anyway? It had only been a few days since the last time he'd bathed. It didn't matter.

Thankfully, the nurse took pity on him (only because of his injuries, he was guessing) and gave up trying to persuade him to move. She left him alone with his thoughts, and the once-Reploid carefully reclined on the couch and lay his uninjured arm across his stomach, staring up at the ceiling.

... He supposed some quiet time to think wasn't all bad. He was feeling much better emotionally than he was this morning, mainly because he'd had time to let recent events sink in. Zex and Ema's fates had hurt at first, but by now he'd managed to channel most of that hurt into more resolve to fight. His conversation with Nigredo had helped keep his mind off of things and was enough to leave him wondering for awhile, even though figuring out what to do about Landel was more important than that right now. And, he had a new self-assigned mission for tomorrow via the bulletin board - to assist Ema's sister Lana in any way he could. Not to mention he'd learned about the existence of a town outside of this place....

...Alright. On second thought, the day was not as unproductive as he'd been thinking it was. Didn't mean Zero wanted to spend the rest of this shift just lying here, but at least he could say the times he was doing so earlier in the day weren't a total waste.

[free!]

Comments

[fourstonewalls]

"It was when I was twelve. That obvious, is it?" She didn't have to specify what; if he'd asked before disturbing her because he thought she was engrossed in her book, he wouldn't have phrased it that way.

"If I'm not fooling anyone else, I'm certainly not going to fool myself." She closed the book, not bothering to mark her place. She looked over at the man, tucked birdlike into the corner of a sofa. He was barefoot, and his hands were empty. He looked almost like a puppet who's strings had been cut, dropping him into the room. She could sympathize. "Can I help you?"

[ryuuzaki]

"Yes, I'm afraid it was obvious." That wasn't the case; he doubted that many people would have picked up on it. But pointing that out would have been tantamount to a revelation about himself, one that he often shied away from making at this point in an acquaintance. If she was sharp enough, she might question his statement, at least in her own mind... if not, she would let it pass, accept as a given the idea that she had been clumsy.

"But when you say 'fooling yourself'... what do you mean?" He sounded, now, like his interest was more focused, but still benign. If she hadn't phrased her comment that way, he would have assumed that the pretense of reading was solely an attempt to discourage conversation. A book she'd liked when she was 12... she must have chosen it as a distraction.

[fourstonewalls]

Two years, and only Ema had suspected her façade was anything but. Well, Damon had known exactly how fake it was, but he'd merely pointed out the cracks in private and shored it up in public. Care was a habit, but she wasn't trying that hard, now, though. It was nice to know someone cared enough to ask, without knowing her at all.

That didn't mean she wanted to answer. Or that that question was anything other than disingenuous. She raised her eyebrows at him for a long moment -- no, she wasn't going to play this game. Not today. So she leaned forward, and forced emotion -- irritation, mostly -- into her voice.

"My sister was here yesterday. She isn't today. Any other personal questions you'd like to get out of the way, Mister...."

[ryuuzaki]

A beat, during which he frowned at her, looking about as empathetic as he was able to.

He'd never had siblings of his own; his only way of understanding what she must be feeling now was intellectual, which was his way of understanding most human ties, most emotional responses. If someone felt affection for a sibling, they wouldn't want to see them here, but once they had been here, it would be bad--difficult--if they went missing. The best-case scenario was that the vanished person wasn't themselves anymore. The worst was a terrible, messy death.

The sister was probably the girl from last week... there could be other possibilities, but if he searched his memory, she seemed like the best one. She had been very young. This wouldn't have been a place for her.

It was also interesting that the woman he was speaking to now seemed to be resisting the full spectrum of common emotional responses. She wanted to distract herself. Pride? Diligence? Repression? Hard to say. She seemed too composed, at any rate, to be grieving, although he couldn't be completely sure. She hadn't said her sister had died, but there was still a chance, shifting among the variables, that it was what had happened.

He did feel a twinge of pity for her, more than he would have expected. People were disappearing too often these days. He'd spent several afternoons in the past week feeling a species of bereavement that was more like a hollow, impersonal disappointment. His casual relationship to the dead and missing men precluded him taking it harder, but it hadn't been nothing to him. It felt like premonitions of disaster were, bit by bit, coming true.

How would he have experienced those losses if he had close ties to the people involved, maybe felt responsible for their well-being? He could only guess.

"I understand. I'm sorry." Not for intruding; it was the closest he usually came to any expression of sympathy. His tone was soft, almost chiming. "Please call me Ryuuzaki." He didn't offer his hand; even if it had been his habit, he was just far enough away from her, collapsed into the corner of the sofa as he was, for it to be inconvenient.

He could look at her more directly now, without hiding his interest. He guessed that she was somewhere around his own age, give or take a few years--it was always hard to be more accurate than that on sight, and sometimes a person's experiences might age them prematurely, or the context provided by their surroundings might be misleading.

He waited for her to introduce herself. There didn't seem to be much point in questionable reassurances that maybe, if they played their cards right, they'd be able to help her sister. He suspected that if he tried it, she'd throw the book at his head.

[fourstonewalls]

"Lana Skye." She hadn't hid her name on the bulletin; Ryuuzaki had been around long enough that he'd either seen it or his searching expressions had been gawking rather than observing. She didn't think so. Especially as he'd said to call him Ryuuzaki, not that it was his name. Neither his looks nor his accent were Japanese -- the latter was almost as much of a mess as Edgeworth's, years of travel making it bland and indeterminate. Still nice enough that she'd had to stop Ema from calling his number just to ask to be transferred to Lana. Edgeworth had been here twice, as had Wright; she had to take that as a hopeful sign.

Too much thinking. Ugh. This was definitely whatever was going around, rather than just emotional trauma and lack of sleep; she could fight exhaustion, even without coffee, for longer than this. Her wet hair was cold against her skin, and dampness was wicking down the back of her shirt. "I don't suppose you have any theories as to why Landel wants us to be ill, do you? It seems remarkably petty compared to his usual modus operandi." Nothing he did was kind, but Aguilar had been the one withholding normal food and playing dominance games.