damned_institute | Day 30: Cafeteria, Breakfast

Hitsugaya woke with a start.

His entire body ached, but the pain was nowhere near as bad as it had been the night before. His injuries had been tended two with clean gauze and bandages, and he found every movement wasn't agony. He wasn't in the best of shape, but thanks to the miracle of landel's strange time distortion, he had mostly recovered from the vile poison without having to waste anyone else's talents.

And in his hand, still...there was the key.

He dressed quickly, sliding the key onto the key ring from his desk drawer and stuck it into his pocket. Whether the key stood to gain them anything or not, it stood as a vital reminder that they could succeed in this place. There was hope, as insignificant as it often seemed. They could beat this place.

That small shred of hope made getting up worth it.

The nurse who escorted him to breakfast was cheerful, and commented idly about how wonderful it was to see young Tommy Winters up and about again after his unfortunate run-in with a bad case of food poisoning. He smirked slightly, knowing that any lies the institute forced into their heads were only that: lies. He wouldn't buy it for a second. And on top of that, the concept of muffins sounded almost appetizing. While he still preferred his authentic Japanese cuisine, the food here was slowly becoming more and more bearable. He would have preferred a warm bowl of sweet nattou over rice over the mufffins, but they would do. The plain yogurt and fruit, on the other hand, was excellent. He piled his plate high with fruit as usual, and got several small bowls of yogurt as well.

Finding the most convenient table to the end of the food line, he took a seat and scanned for the new arrivals. New arrivals meant people who would be lost and confused. Renji did a good job of making a bulliten post last time...he should recommend abarai-fukutaicho do the same again this time.

[Waiting for Angel]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I see." Well, at least that had been wrestled out on both sides. With them alone here, the odds of his alternate identity being a secret to the individuals actually running this place were slim to none, and in privacy, he could test out exactly how badly he'd been weakened.

In a way, it was infuriating. Unlike the boy, who seemed to have come into his powers with nothing more than an awkward bout, he'd suffered before gaining the power he needed to balance out the scales again. Some days, he had to admit he thought of himself more as Vlad Plasmius than as Masters altogether.

But there was no time for having fits. He gave Daniel his best benign, parental smile. "I suppose that, in circumstances such as this, it's for the best that we've called a truce, hm? At least we can keep an eye out for each other." Granted, that applied in all senses of the phrase.

Danny didn't like the look of that smile. And that smile combined with that sentence made him feel all the more awkward. It was moments like these that really made Vlad creep him out more than anything else. It was also moments like these that justified his suggestion that Vlad should simply get a cat.

He had to wonder if Vlad would've been at least a bit less of a creep with a cat.

"Yeeeaaah," he said slowly, inching away slightly again. The last time he saw that face was when he asked Clockwork to change the future so that Vlad didn't get ghost powers, and that didn't even count since that wasn't part of the real timeline. "Right..."

All in all, that had gone very well, Vlad thought. True, Daniel looked a bit intimidated, but that was understandable. After all, given the circumstances, Daniel had just been informed he was probably not in reality he knew as home and both of them were weakened.

And even after the clones, Daniel was still apparently willing to make efforts at bonding... well, not bonding, but mutual non-killing. He granted circumstances were forcing them together, but even with his powers taken against his will and faced with a Daniel that by all rights another timeline of himself ought to have killed Vlad couldn't help feeling a bit cheered.

He'd simply not ask what had driven him to decide the boy was better off dead. It was just as likely Daniel had no idea himself, the poor dear boy did tend to be a bit insensitive that way. No, this odd prison was a second chance for them both. He finished his glass of milk with satisfaction, feeling nothing needed to be added.

It was getting more and more awkward by the second now. With nothing to talk about, sitting next to the man who had a vendetta against his own father and an obsession with his mother felt just plain wrong. Well, being within fifty feet of him was always wrong because of the reasons he usually breached the fifty-foot-range. This time, Vlad was being fatherly again. Sometimes, he thought he preferred the Vlad who was hellbent on killing him and his family (except for his mom, of course).

It was just his luck that there was a distraction at that moment. Turning his head around, he expected to see the same guy who was shouting about the moon earlier to be causing some more commotion. No, instead, it seemed to be a full-scale fight. "Whoa," he said simply, stunned into silence by the sheer amount of patients and staff getting involved. Danny decided he was going to stay far, far away from that group--he could spot some of the nurses with needles. The last thing he wanted was to have a nurse inject him with something. Especially since he couldn't be sure what those were--maybe sedatives, but there was a chance that it was something else entirely.

There he'd been in a wonderful mood and then some idiots had to go and start a riot. A perfect example of how people, left to their own devices, tended to follow whatever moronic impulses were suggested to them without a second thought. Particularly if they were in large groups.

It was possible that they could use the riot to their advantage, but he certainly couldn't transform in such a public space, and without ghost powers neither of them stood a chance against the small army of nurses and orderlies running into the room bearing needles. Judging from the way those injected behaved afterward, they were being sedated, and Vlad had no intention of spending part of the day drooling on himself in drugged oblivion.

Other people were screaming, telling everyone to join in, one girl was singing something... It was loud enough to be offensive on that front alone. His posture slumped a bit as he scowled around him at the crowd. "I don't suppose you've seen this happen before," he asked Daniel half-rhetorically, considering that the boy's gawking 'whoa' had already answered that question.

He shook his head, simply staring at the mass chaos, not even trying to sort it through his brain. "Nope. Never seen it happen during the day at all." Unless that moon-guy had really started something up. He had no idea how it happened, but that was the only reason he could think for it. How did a question about the moon break out into this fight?

Man, he certainly hoped the nurses wouldn't come this way with needles. They didn't look like they were going to fight, but with all the commotion, it was possible that they would just come around drugging the first people they saw--this place looked pretty professional, but he wasn't trusting anything that sent enormous birds to eat chunks of his back out.

Maybe the nurses had suddenly turned on them and decided to make it like nighttime, except twenty-four hours? Then again, they probably would've just let everyone continue fighting straight through breakfast.

"So it's a welcome party, fantastic," Vlad muttered not quite inaudibly, before raising his voice a bit to add, "If they start throwing things, I'm going under the table."

It might not be a bad idea anyway. People technically were throwing things, they were just throwing other people and not very far. Trying to weave a path in human form out of the crowd might have worked, if the entrances weren't already stuffed with nurses and orderlies either entering to help in the fight or glaring out as though daring any patients to try and escape. He might look mature and dignified enough to argue his way past, but Daniel was young and rather scruffy looking. For now, he'd simply be grateful Daniel wasn't giving into his ridiculous "superhero" urges and jumping into the fray to try and beat up some "villains" or anything like that. Truce or not, he wouldn't go wading in this mess to pull Daniel out if the boy tried.

Day 30: Cafeteria, Breakfast

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject