damned_institute | Day 64: Cafeteria (brunch)

Three weeks? Badd was either a poor excuse for a detective, or it really was that difficult to escape this place. Studying him now, Skulduggery decided on the latter; the man looked the very picture of a 1940's private eye, which meant he would at least have an eye for detail, and he wouldn't give up without a fight.

"I didn't really care about climbing any ladders," he said. What would he get promoted to? Head Prime Detective? That would just be silly. "I was trying to save the world at the time. You'd think you'd be shown a little leeway for that, but then again, the man I worked for has always been... interesting." Self-serving and prejudiced, really, but Skulduggery could forgive him for that. He briefly wondered how Thurid Guild would take the news of Skulduggery's disappearance, but there wasn't much mystery there. A much more intriguing mystery was who the replacement Prime Detective was going to be. Because if it was going to be Remus Crux, Skulduggery would have to find a way back just to punch Guild.

He cautiously tried another sip of the tea to stop himself from thinking about it. This time, when Skulduggery closed his eyes and pushed it to the back of his throat, the swallow was fairly automatic. He felt a mild flash of irritation - what went wrong last time?

"The entire world? That's a bit of a tall order. I had enough trouble with L.A." And he did a poor job of saving that. Badd politely watched Skulduggery (fine, fine, he'd worked for a man named Manfred von Karma, weird names were par for the course) make another attempt at swallowing, managing to keep it down this time. Good for him.

"So what kind of detective were you, back where you didn't have to swallow? I'm a bit new to the supernatural and bizarre and it's hard for an old dog to learn new tricks." Such as how to react when your companion turns into a monstrous bleeding sheep. No, Badd was not going to get over that anytime soon.

L.A. Los Angeles, in California. It matched the American accent, but Skulduggery was having a hard time believing everyone here spoke perfect English. "Perhaps," he responded evenly, "but I'd managed it several times before. I'm worried about how they'll get along without me. Not that they're not all fine people in their own right, but none of them handle responsibility particularly well."

Well, that wasn't exactly true, but Skulduggery didn't really feel like splitting hairs at the moment. One more sip of tea, which he also swallowed with a minimum of fuss, and then he tentatively picked up a fork.

"I was a skeleton," he answered after a moment. "Among other things, but if you're new to the supernatural, you might already be lost." People tended to get hung up on the whole 'living skeleton' bit. Because he mentioned L.A, Badd might come from the same reality as Skulduggery, which was another reason for the skeleton detective to tread carefully. Then again, a place like this probably kept you on your toes.

A single eyebrow slowly went up at the word 'skeleton', but Badd's face otherwise remained unchanged. "...sure." He gave a half-hearted shrug and stabbed a piece of egg. "Skeleton. Why not. You're probably not the only one."

He needed a lollipop right now, badly, because the sad part was that Badd believed him. Had to, by default.

"I don't mind dead people. Some of my best friends are dead people," he said, allowing himself to ramble. "Some of my worst enemies, too. So I won't hold it against you."

Make that a lollipop floating in a glass of whiskey. Next time he saw Dr. Cox he was knocking the man out and raiding his office for that flask Badd just knew he kept under his desk.

Badd was taking it well, compared to some. He was even taking it better than some sorcerers had. He wasn't fainting, wasn't staring, and wasn't leaping across the table to attack him, all of which had happened at various points in Skulduggery's life. But Badd also hadn't been faced with the stark reality of his skull, either, and that might account for some of the nonchalance.

He was right, though; Skulduggery might not be the only former skeleton here, and he still didn't know how he felt about that.

Skulduggery had also seen his fair share of death - though mainly from before he became a detective - so he didn't comment on Badd's ramble. He was, however, slightly curious about how far Badd would be willing to stretch his obviously reluctant belief. "I was also a sorcerer," he added. "Quite a powerful one, too. Not nearly as powerful here, unfortunately. Would that be more or less common than people who weren't human?" Meeting other Elementals, while unlikely, would certainly be beneficial.

Badd took the information with the same eyebrow and shrug as he had the skeleton revelation. Even if Skulduggery was crazy, would it matter? He wasn't a skeleton anymore, nor a sorcerer, and so whether he was one previously made no difference. "I wouldn't know, but I doubt it. Nobody else has claimed to be one to me and I've never seen any magic that wasn't Landel's garbage."

No. Wait. That time on the rec field, those children he had shot at...one of them had thrown something at him. A shadow that had knocked him flat on the ground. It wasn't a particularly pleasant memory but Badd had too many of those to only hang on to the good ones.

"Except once," Badd corrected himself, his stoic expression seeming to grow grimmer. "Some kid with silver hair. I didn't get a good look at what he did, but it wasn't natural. So yeah, maybe there's some of that around. Me, I'll just stick with steel and gunpowder."

"What's wrong with relying on both?" Skulduggery asked. Steel and gunpowder certainly had its uses. Skulduggery himself used a revolver, and he'd managed to arrest Baron Vengeous during the war by throwing a stick of dynamite at him. He still wasn't quite clear on why that resulting explosion hadn't killed the man, but since Skulduggery finally killed him a year ago, it was a moot point.

And now he'd confirmed that there were definitely people around here who could use magic. Whether Badd had witnessed an Adept discipline, or a different form of magic altogether, remained to be seen.

"So," said Skulduggery, the fork he'd picked up a few minutes ago still clutched in his hand, forgotten. "Now that you know my deep dark secret, would you mind doing me a favor? I haven't been able to find a mirror yet, and I don't think my face is doing what I tell it to. This is one of those rare opportunities where I could use some criticism."

Badd looked up. He scrutinized Skulduggery, scratching at his permastubble with his thumb. "Well, you're not hideous." He rattled off the man's vital statistics--approximate weight, height, eyes, all the things a cop learned to note at a glance so they could write them down later. "You've got this weird habit of deadpanning, plenty of emotion in your voice but none in your face. Guess that makes sense. You're not used to that whole facial muscle thing. Being a skeleton and all."

God, the things this place made him say. Badd nearly winced at the bizarre nature of his own statements. "I'd say you should practice so you don't freak people out, but honestly everyone who's been here more than a week has a raging case of PTSD anyway. On the freak scale you're still pretty low."

...Right. Yes. Good to know he wasn't hideous.

Badd's description - very much that of a thorough detective, Skulduggery was pleased to hear - reminded him of what he used to look like, back before he was killed. That was a strange coincidence. It couldn't be exactly the same because Skulduggery's own skull was stolen by goblins a couple of decades ago, but the fact that it sounded similar meant Skulduggery couldn't look that bad.

"Nevertheless, I will practice more once I find a mirror," he said absentmindedly, looking back down at the food. Part of him couldn't help but enjoy having this challenge, having to work at passing for normal, even though it would take time to master absolutely everything. Hell, it would probably take weeks just to master eating.

"Am I smiling now?" he asked, looking back up at Badd. Just like the smile he'd tried on Yomi the night before, his lips twitched up properly, but his eyes remained completely empty.

"Yyyyeah, but now you're just looking creepy." You get both eyebrows for this, Skulduggery. That's how creepy you are. "Your mouth's moving but it's about as fake as a wooden nickel, the rest of your face doesn't flinch." Badd mimed a smile, though on a face like his own it looked equally unnerving. He very, very rarely smiled, even when he had something to smile about.

"Gotta get your eyes into it," he continued, dropping the smile as soon as possible. "But like I said. You have bigger problems."

Skulduggery dropped his own smile as soon as Badd did - or he tried to, but it sprang almost instantly back up without his knowledge and stayed there.

"Oh, I'm sure I do. There are always bigger problems." Like stopping evil psychopaths from bringing back a race of dark gods who wouldn't hesitate to destroy most of humanity. It was almost amusing how often that had happened to Skulduggery in the past few years alone. "That doesn't mean you can't appreciate the little things in life." He rested his chin in one hand and studied Tyrell Badd. "You look like a man with hobbies. And if you're not, you should be." Smiling might not be one of those hobbies, but Skulduggery politely didn't point it out. He wasn't really one to talk, after all.

Badd waved his hand dismissively. "I got no time for hobbies. Even retired, there's too much work." And it was a little hard to get a hobby together when one had just been arrested. "I'll appreciate the little things in life when I'm dead. Given all the dead guys walking around here it might actually happen."

A hobby'd be nice, though. He'd planned on finding one if he survived to retirement, which was something he honestly hadn't expected to happen. Not until Byrne gave him a cause to both live and die for.

"That's not a very healthy attitude," Skulduggery pointed out with a frown in his voice that completely failed to take the place of the smile on his face - a smile which had grown lopsided. "I'll admit, I'm already dead, so you may have a point, but not everyone turns out as lucky as I did. Try playing a game of chess sometime. Or cards. Apparently, if you get a good enough poker face, you can even cheat death, so all your problems are solved right there."

But was he still dead? Was that still something you could say when you'd been thrust into a living body? For the sake of sanity, Skulduggery decided that it was.

He did need food, though. That strange feeling in the pit of his stomach was only growing. Skulduggery stabbed a piece of egg with the fork, just like he'd seen Badd do earlier, and slid it into his mouth before he could change his mind.

"Or be a prosecutor. They can argue their way out of most anything." Now there was a funny image, von Karma arguing death to a stand-still in court. And weren't at least two of their would-be-dead inmates prosecutors? Badd could almost find it likely.

"Don't forget to chew," Badd put in as Skulduggery attempted the next level in food consumption. "You've got better ways to die than choking."

Right. Chewing. Just the jaw, moving up and down, because his exposed set of teeth wasn't quite so exposed anymore. When Skulduggery had just become a skeleton and was still getting used to the skull, he'd done nothing but chew, because it felt like his jaw was going to fall off otherwise. He was glad to see that he had indeed grown into the well-adjusted skeleton he always thought he was.

Slowly and carefully, Skulduggery mashed his teeth together, pressing his lips closed and generally giving off the air of someone under great concentration, albeit without a facial expression to match. Swallowing food was very different from swallowing tea, but Skulduggery managed it in the end. He was vaguely perplexed to find that he had been concentrating so hard that he forgot what the egg actually tasted like.

"So, Detective Badd, if you've been here for three weeks, what have you discovered? I take it no one's properly escaped, but has anyone gotten close? Is anyone trying anything at the moment?"

"Oh, everyone's trying. The problem is even if someone's escaped none of them have ever come back to tell us about it." Kay had escaped. Badd had to hang on to that thought or he wouldn't be able to make it through the day. "We reappear in our beds the next morning, or we disappear completely. Sometimes we get 'cured' patients as visitors." He did the fingerquotes to emphasize how it was just another one of Landel's massive lies. "Either brainwashed to parrot the institute's party line or some kind of...fakes, I don't know. Clones, robots, make up your own bullshit. Whatever it is, it's not really them."

If Kay ever showed up here he didn't know what he'd do. It'd hurt. God, he was so sick of this place stabbing him in the heart when the rest of his body was so adept at taking blows and bullet wounds.

It sounded like the facade of a mental hospital during the day went much further than just nurses escorting them all around the building to their hearts' content. Skulduggery should have expected as much. But how far did that facade go? If he asked a nurse, would they have an entire file on the man he was supposed to be?

"You sound like you've had personal experience," he commented, sliding another morsel of egg onto the fork. He left it up to Badd to decide whether or not to tell him. Skulduggery understood exactly how it felt being betrayed by someone you used to trust, even if you knew the whole thing was a trick, or an illusion, or... clones and robots.

"Not me, thankfully. I've heard of it happening to others." The man was being polite, and at least attempting to keep his weirdness under control. It put Badd in a charitable mood with his information. "Though I did get a letter from my ex-wife telling me how much she missed me and that she hoped I'd get better soon. Even got a picture with it of our wedding so I'd remember a little better."

He raised his glass, mouth twisting up in the barest fragment of a bitter smirk. "Funny part is, I've never been married and the woman in the photograph was a convicted murderer I got put away right before I retired."

"Hm." Landel had a sense of humor, it seemed. There were a lot of convicted murderers Skulduggery had gotten put away over the years. If he ever received a letter and photograph from any one of them claiming to be a friend, regardless of the circumstances, he'd probably just laugh and throw the whole thing away. Or burn it, depending on how angry he was. "What did the letter tell you? Was there an address on the envelope, or a stamp?"

He was slowly becoming an expert in eating egg. It had a taste, which Skulduggery still considered a luxury. It wasn't a half-bad taste, either. He was halfway through chewing his next mouthful when a small commotion elsewhere in the cafeteria made him look up.

"That would be a doctor, then?" he asked as he watched a man in a white coat storm over to one of the nearby patients. Skulduggery's face almost seemed to fall a moment later. "Please tell me the pretense ends at mandatory therapy."

"You could get lucky. Doctor Cox just sits around watching football and mocking everyone." Badd had actually found the man's company enjoyable. Cox gave no fucks and neither did Badd, so they'd found some common ground to bond over.

Badd again stirred his breakfast. Thinking back on the letter made him a little queasy. It was lies, sure, but it was lies very close to home...almost designed to be the most painful concept for a false life.

"The letter..." He drew out his words slowly, reluctantly. "Well. Any identifying information was censored out, but it pointed me out as some cop who went insane and confused a serial killer and child kidnapper for an old partner while trying to kill his wife because he thought she'd murdered said partner. They give everyone here a fake life, but god knows why they go to the trouble." Badd licked his lips and stared down at his food, trying not to let the bad thoughts show on his face. Just another reason to kill them all once he had the chance.

"I see." Doctor Cox did sound like a man Skulduggery would get along with. Then again, he also sounded like Professor Grouse - minus the football - and Kenspeckle Grouse had made it very clear that he did not approve of anything Skulduggery so much as tolerated. Apart from Valkyrie, for some reason. "I've never trusted psychiatrists. Trying to put the human experience into words defeats the purpose of having that experience in the first place, and yet they keep trying. He'd be the first exception I've come across."

Censoring letters made a frustrating kind of sense, both as a mental hospital and as a prison. Just knowing where they were supposed to be would have been helpful, though. Everyone he'd spoken to so far had an American accent, and Badd had mentioned L.A, but that didn't necessarily mean they were in California. Skulduggery was no expert, but the rain outside wasn't exactly L.A.-type weather, was it?

Skulduggery looked at Badd, his face still completely blank. "Interesting," he murmured. "Has anything like that ever happened to you in your real life?"

Badd liked his thoughts on shrinks, they were quite aligned with Badd's own. Shrinks were like the kids who took things apart to see how they work, often breaking them in the process. Though with Landel that was probably the point.

He gave a short, jerky nod to Skulduggery's question. "The woman in the photograph was the woman who murdered my partner," he said, his voice slightly lowered. Even with Byrne alive again the wound was still open and festering. "And made a few attempts on a kid who's practically family to me. There's a few people in the world I'd like to beat to death more than her but it's a very short list." And Landel knew that. The choice was not random. Somehow he knew their histories intimately enough to know how best to twist the knife on each and every one of them.

The idea that this was hell became more viable the more one picked the place apart.

He and Badd had more in common than Skulduggery initially thought. Both detectives, both with partners murdered, both with kids they considered family, and a strong desire to protect them. Even though Skulduggery wouldn't quite call Valkyrie a kid anymore, he knew that anyone trying to kill her would meet with a slow and painful death at his hand. Several people already had.

Instead of mentioning the similarities between them, however, Skulduggery just dipped his head lower. "I know the feeling."

He didn't want to talk about Valkyrie, or anyone else from back home. Even thinking about them left a dull ache in his chest, an ache underlying and feeding the ever-present anger seething at the bottom of his mind. Even if Skulduggery managed to escape from here, he would never see them again. It was a fact he needed to understand and accept, because if Landel was going to try and use them against Skulduggery here, he needed to know right away that it wasn't real.

Badd couldn't read Skulduggery's face, but he could read his tone and his posture quite easily. The skeleton man had lost more than his internal organs. When you put all that magical garbage aside a detective was still a detective, wasn't he? And being a detective hurt. It meant seeing your friends die or fall victim to corruption. It meant failing repeatedly because the crooks found some little loophole that let them run free. And it meant after all that you picked up and kept going, because when you were a detective there wasn't much else you could do. It was in the blood.

Or the bone, as the case might be.

"I'm sorry," Badd said quietly, politely averting his eyes.

A few moments dragged themselves by, and Skulduggery gave a small shrug of his shoulders. "As you said, bigger problems. There's an old Irish proverb in Gaelic. It roughly translates to 'The power fellow will have another day.' It's basically a very pretentious way of saying the more you live through, the stronger you become, and the greater your chances of survival in the future." He paused, and tilted his head. "Not quite as comforting as I remember it."

He needed to find Yomi. She'd left a lot of things out of her explanation the night before. Not that Skulduggery could particularly blame her; she'd had a lot on her plate. But now that he was on more even ground knowledge-wise, maybe she'd be a bit more willing to talk. She was the closest thing to another mage Skulduggery had encountered so far, and he needed to know more about how power was limited here. He needed to know how dangerous he would be if something managed to break through his careful control of his emotions, and how far people should run if that happened.

Day 64: Cafeteria (brunch)

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