damned_institute | Day 68: Recreational Field (Second Shift)

Entry tags:

Day 68: Recreational Field (Second Shift)

Despite Zero's earlier fit of (mostly internal) anger, it felt good to get some food in his stomach after going without since yesterday's lunch. He felt even better about how he had managed to avoid a certain former blue robot's attention for an entire shift - though he figured his luck was bound to run out very quickly as far as that was concerned. There were only so many people in this place and it wasn't like he was allowed to roam anywhere he wanted. Still, he would continue trying to awkwardly avoid his friend for as long as possible. Maybe he wasn't ill anymore and maybe it wasn't the right thing to do, but...until he figured out how to start a conversation with someone he'd literally taken a chunk out of the night before... How to apologize, and how to scold him for blatantly ignoring Zero's warnings...

(Either way, he wouldn't let it keep him from checking the bulletin board...even if there didn't seem to be much on there this morning. Hmm. Unusual.)

Otherwise... It seemed he was expected to go outside today. 'Vent some frustrations', the head lunatic said. Hmph. Good job being completely unsubtle. There was that flash of anger again - but by now, his ability to control said anger was becoming strong enough to prevent it from bothering him for more than a few minutes. That was good; he didn't need to waste his energy being too easily upset over words. Words couldn't make him bleed like half of the things that happened at night did. What he should be doing was taking advantage of the situation he had. The field would give him space to flex his muscles, help him train himself physically, prepare for whatever tonight might throw at him... Yes, that was what he needed to do. Train. And all he truly needed to worry about while doing that was not stressing his bandaged right arm, which needed to heal quickly more than anything.

Right. Once he managed to separate himself from his nurse (who was still worrying and fussing over his continued silence toward her) and once he'd scanned his surroundings to make sure that one particular face was nowhere to be seen, Zero began to wander across the grass, contemplating how he should go about this training. Maybe start with a light run around the field, to test his stamina....that sounded good.

[Harpuia and X!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Guy watched as Lloyd switched it up with the ball, starting to run with it instead. He didn't know what he planned to do from there, but he decided to just go ahead ans watch him for now. The fact that Lloyd could keep up a conversation while doing that made it clear that he was a pretty active person. And if he was also someone who knew how to use a sword, then chances were he had an interesting story of his own.

"As far as I know, it's only been a set number of people who all got sick at the same time. It's not contagious, so you don't need to worry about anything like that." He set his hands on his hips and shook his head. If it was something that spread in any way, Guy definitely would have been sick by now, after spending so much time around Claude and Anise.

Something about that unsettled Lloyd, and it didn't take him long to pin it down. With normal sicknesses, people didn't all get sick at the same time. First some, then others, as people got sick and passed it around. Not contagious, though... Which meant they'd all been exposed at the same time, like if everyone had eaten something bad for dinner, only much, much worse.

Or if everyone had been given the same thing that made them sick by the doctors and nurses here. Lloyd's mouth formed a grim line at the evidence that seemed to support what he'd been told, and his next kick to the ball sent it farther than before. He had to pick up his pace to catch up. When he did, he kicked it hard to send it back to Guy. Probably with a little too much force.

"I don't understand this place!" he burst out. "They say they're trying to help us, and some of them act like they believe that, but then they make people sick at the same time! What do they even want?"

Despite the fact that Guy had been aiming to give Lloyd a way to unwind, it looked like they'd come back to the point of contention that had bothering him in the first place. Maybe it had been wrong of Guy to bring up the sickness. Well, he couldn't take it back now, so instead he focused on retrieving the ball. It bounced up against his shins, but it didn't hurt enough to bother him much, and he managed to trap it under his foot soon after.

Instead of sending it back, though, he nudged it off to the side for a moment. It didn't seem like the best idea to give Lloyd the ball back when he was clearly upset, and Guy didn't want to interrupt the more serious conversation with it.

He sighed and shook his head. "I know. It's hard to believe, but the nurses really don't know what's going on. They believe all our injuries are accidents, and that people got sick naturally. Landel has them wrapped around his finger. So everything that you get angry about? You should direct that at him." Or at the military force that was funding this place, but Guy didn't want to spend too much time explaining that now.

Lloyd had already been jogging to catch up with the ball he'd kicked to Guy, but when Guy stopped the ball, Lloyd's steps slowed, then stopped. A cold breeze did its best to cool him off from the flush of exertion, but he barely noticed it, caught up as he was with his emotions.

"They won't even listen, though. If they think we're crazy, how will they know when we're not crazy if they won't listen to anything we say?" It rankled him, not being believed, not even being given a chance. "What if there was something we needed to warn them about? What about all the things that aren't accidents?"

While Guy could certainly empathize with how Lloyd was so frustrated by everything, the fact was that it wouldn't do him much good to get worked up about it, not when they couldn't change it. If there was a way to get through to the nurses, someone definitely would have figured it out by now.

"It's... probably part of the brainwashing, that they don't pay us any mind. I think it's the same with the doctors, when patients are sent to therapy." He sighed and shook his head, finally nudging the ball back in Lloyd's direction. "It might be hard, but the best thing to do is just ignore them. Once they get used to you and decide you're well behaved, they'll stop bothering you as much." Guy refused to see it as getting complacent, because it wasn't like they had much of a choice.

The idea that some of their captors were being brainwashed didn't set well with Lloyd. It made it more difficult to think of them as true enemies, people he needed to fight against. "If we could just get them to realize that they're wrong, get them on our side..."

But that idea ran headfirst into the same problem he'd just stated, that the nurses and doctors were refusing to take any of their patients seriously. It was a problem that seemed to go in circles on itself, frustratingly unsolvable.

He caught the ball under his foot, but didn't immediately kick it one way or the other. Instead, he rolled it around underneath his foot as he tried to think through what this meant. "I just wish there was something we could do besides wait. We could get two hundred percent as much stuff done if we could do stuff during the day!"

This frustration Lloyd was feeling was the sort of thing that every patient went through, Guy included. Maybe it had been more internal in his case, but there were very few people who could be locked up somewhere away from home, on a completely different planet, and not be extremely bothered by it.

"I know that it's hard, but people have tried to throw riots during the day, and it's pretty much never ended well," Guy explained with a sigh, making sure to look around them and check that none of the nurses were close enough to hear.

"The daytime is when you should focus on what you'll be doing that night. And you can't be working all the time. There's nothing wrong with taking a shift or two to try and relax, too." Guy knew that might sound overly laidback, but seeing how he'd been here for so long, he'd had to figure out ways to cope.

"How can you relax when you know there's people suffering?" He kicked the ball back to Guy. The words were less accusation and more a struggle to reconcile the idea to himself.

As the ball rolled, his eyes tracked it, until it had closed half the distance to the other man. Guy would kick it back soon enough, but...

But it was starting to get a little boring just standing here waiting for it to come back. He jogged forward, angling a little to the side, giving Guy a moving target.

"I mean, I get that you can't do work all the time, but..." The worry from before that had started all this stirred to the surface again. He swallowed, trying to push it back and focus. "But what if we do nothing and that starts to... to feel right? What if it starts feeling like they're right? The doctors and nuses, I mean."

Guy did his best not to take that question as some sort of judgment. The thing was, maybe Lloyd was right and he'd become desensitized to a lot of the things that went on here. But he didn't think that was it. No, it was more that there was so much that went on that trying to deal with it all would honestly just be exhausting. Guy had to focus on the places where he could actually make a difference.

"I'm not saying you should get complacent," Guy said, watching as Lloyd ran ahead. He had to make sure to time it right, but he did what he could to kick the ball so that it would end up right where Lloyd was running.

"But you don't want to get so stressed and worked up that you can't function, or get sick." While it had already been proved that sickness could be forced on them, there was no reason to make it worse. "And believe me, I've been here a while and I've never for a second felt like they were right." That was something he didn't think Lloyd would have to worry about.

Back when Lloyd had lived near Iselia, before the Journey of Regeneration, before the Desians, before everything had started happening and life had been simple, he'd often made the argument to anyone who would listen (but especially his teachers and Dirk) that he needed to take plenty of breaks from school or work to keep his mind sharp and his stress levels relaxed. Dirk had let him get away with it to a degree, even approved with amusement sometimes. After all, he was the one who'd taught Lloyd the tenth vow.

Once things started becoming more dire, though, playful moments happened less frequently. He just hadn't had the time, or hadn't been in the mood. It was hard to think of doing much else when he was worried about his friends, about the two worlds, sometimes worried so much his stomach tied into knots...

Maybe Guy had a point.

"Dwarven vow number ten," Lloyd murmured, mostly to himself, but loud enough for Guy to hear if he was listening. "Play hard, play often." He intercepted the ball, maybe a little less gracefully than he would have liked, but tried to keep moving. It... felt odd, almost uncomfortable, to think about relaxing when they were all still prisoners, all still in danger every night. But...

Guy's words touched a chord in him. A thought occurred to him, and he crooked a wry smile before kicking the ball to where he thought Guy would be next. "You sound a lot like my Dad. So, you really don't think there might be anything true about what the doctors say?"

When Lloyd got the ball and then kept running, Guy jogged after him, though at a casual pace. He'd already managed to fight off the cold by engaging in some exercise, so he was glad that he and Lloyd had decided to do this.

What had Lloyd said about a vow, though? Maybe it was some proverb from his world. Either way, it looked like Guy had gotten through to him. The smile on Lloyd's face as he kicked the ball over confirmed that, and Guy smirked himself as he ran forward to get the ball under his control.

"Like your Dad?" Guy paused for a moment as he considered that, because he hadn't heard a comment like that in some time. He was still pretty young to be acting parental toward anyone, but seeing how he'd helped raise Luke, it made sense that he slipped into that kind of behavior sometimes. At least Lloyd didn't seem to mind.

"Yeah, I really think that," he said as he moved the ball between his feet. "If anyone starts acting like their fake self, it's because this place brainwashes them to. That's all." Which wasn't a very encouraging thought, but it did prove that it was a huge hoax.

"Yeah," Lloyd said, still smiling, this time at the memories that played through his head. Dirk sitting down and trying to walk him through homework, hours spent teaching Lloyd what he could of his craft, meal times when Lloyd tried to recite Dwarven Vows - they all held a similar thread. "Whenever I got too frustrated with something, Dad would make me take a break. I still had to do it, so it's not like he was going easy on me." And of course with the case of meals, that break meant that he stayed hungry even longer. A break didn't mean Dirk was backing down from making Lloyd practice his Dwarven Vows. "But he said if I was too stuck to think something through, then I needed to stop until I could get unstuck. I guess... I guess I just never thought about it like that for stuff besides homework or things I'd do at home." Things he'd do with Dirk.

Dad, I hope you're all right. He swallowed and tried to shove the worry aside. He still didn't know what Yuan had meant with that comment he'd made about his father. Maybe he hadn't been threatening Dirk. Maybe it had just been a bluff. Either way, there wasn't anything Lloyd could do about it yet, not until he found a way back to his world. Which he couldn't work on until tonight. And until then...

Guy was right. Dirk was right. Maybe the best thing he could do right now was work on staying unstuck.

Unstuck and unbrainwashed. Lloyd winced at the sobering thought. Winced, then took a breath and tried not to be phased by it, tried not to get stuck again. "If that happens..." If that happened, what would he do? "If that happens, we'll just have to do what we can to remind people about who they are." None of his friends from his world were here, but he had made other friends. Friends who knew him as Lloyd, not Nigel. If he forgot, they could remind him. And... he also had Kratos. He might not be friends with the man, but surely Kratos wouldn't put up with the Institute doing something like that. Surely he wouldn't let Lloyd just forget.

Surely... This wasn't the same as Colette. Shaking his head, Lloyd tried to push that uneasy thought away as well. Too many worries, too many what-ifs. He needed to focus on the here and now, and worry about what might happen when it did.

"So... Think you can get that ball past me?" He let the corners of his mouth slide up. Here and now. He could do this.

Besides, he could definitely do with some fun.

So that's how it was. Guy smiled as Lloyd explained, because it turned out that whoever his dad was, he had a good head on his shoulders. It was true that stepping away from a problem for a little while often helped to give a new perspective on things, and that was no different here at Landel's. With all the stress put on them during the nights, they almost needed the days to regroup and catch their breath. So while sometimes it felt like a drag, Guy tried to make the best of it. Like this whole conversation, for instance.

"Exactly. Even if you take breaks every now and then here, you're always going to turn around and go right back to trying to get out, right? So it's fine." He shrugged his shoulders, because it seemed like common sense to him. They weren't robots that could keep at things twenty-four seven.

As for the brainwashing, it was a problem that Guy thought about pretty often, because he was pretty sure that Jade, Natalia, Tear, and possibly even Ion had become victim to that fate. He wasn't about to give up on them. He nodded to Lloyd, because it looked like they were on the same page there.

When Lloyd gave him a challenging look and dared him to try and get the ball past him, Guy just smirked right back. Might as well, right? He didn't have any concerns about his footwork, and while this whole soccer thing was new to him, it was worth a try. So he started to dribble the ball toward Lloyd, already trying to plan out in his head how he could slip past him with it.

Lloyd shifted his footing to prepare himself to intercept Guy when he came, but it's one thing to chase a ball that's been kicked straight toward him, another entirely to try steal a ball out from under someone's feet, especially if you're trying not to trip him. The result is something less than graceful.

But that's not the point, now is it?

By the time the nurses came out to retrieve their wards, Lloyd was a little breathless, but he was smiling, a smile he tossed at Guy even as his nurse led him away.

"Did you have fun, Mr. Clarke?" His nurse beamed at him.

Mr. Clarke. That still wasn't his name. It still bothered him, but maybe not so much. "Yeah," he said. "I guess I did." Raising his voice, he lifted a hand to wave. "See you later, Guy!"

Guy was able to easily work his way around Lloyd, but instead of rubbing it in or even laughing at the other patient, Guy only smiled. They'd had fun in the end, despite the heavy subject matter, so he was pretty sure that was all that mattered. And Lloyd looked to be in better spirits as compared to how he'd seemed at the start of the shift, so he was going to consider it a job well done.

He stepped away from the ball, allowing a nurse to collect it from him, and then waved back to Lloyd as he was led off. "Sure thing! With some practice you'll be running circles around me, I bet."

Maybe not quite, but Guy didn't mind being modest. Having said his goodbyes, he went with his nurse to the next shift.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Day 68: Recreational Field (Second Shift)

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Should we start wrapping this up?

Yeah, I think we're at a good point.

no subject

no subject

no subject