damned_institute | Day 30: Cafeteria, Dinner

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Day 30: Cafeteria, Dinner

The cafeteria was all but empty when Zelnick got there. He was a little disappointed; he had gotten the impression that patients usually ate dinner in their rooms, so he hadn't arranged to meet anyone, and there really wasn't anyone to sit by and engage in conversation yet.

Quietly, he collected dinner and a big glass of orange juice, and chose a seat near the food-serving counters. Talking for so long had made him thirsty... and, well, fruit juice was a luxury he had missed.

[Stalk away, my dearest Admiral. <3 ]

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"Uh, hey," Jack said, trying to appear casual in the presence of this man. Fuck, fuck, fuck. "How have ya been? Been keeping busy?"

He glanced down at his food and tried to give the majority of his attention there so that Kikyo didn't weigh too heavily on his mind. And he'd been in such a good mood too. This really wasn't that big a deal, he knew, but it still irked him to no end.

The tea cup was lowered slowly to the saucer with a subtle clink. If John's behavior seemed odd at all, it didn't seem as though Kikyo noticed. His elbow came to rest on the table top as he tilted his chin casually against the back of his knuckles.

"Busy? Hardly.." he replied, surprisingly honestly. This place seemed to spew forth more and more of the same day after day. He was rather sorry to have missed the excitement from this morning, which he had heard about briefly from the nurse who'd come to fetch him to the showers. A rebellion in the cafeteria would have been an amusing break from the monotony.

He let his eyes rest on John for a moment, recalling that the last time he had seen him, he'd been bleeding his life out.

"You seem to be faring well," he added with a pale smile. "Though you are still here."

Jack returned the smile with a more sardonic one. "They can't kill me that easily. I mean, I know you'd be heartbroken if we couldn't keep meeting like this."

He could only vaguely remember the last time he'd seen Kikyo. He knew he had gotten badly hurt (not that it was the assassin's fault, just details he associated with their last meeting), but that was about the extent of it. Truthfully, he had assumed Kikyo had dropped off the face of the Earth. But that didn't appear to be the case. "And how are you faring?" he inquired, not really caring what the other had to say.

"Of course," Kikyo chuckled, not really minding the tone of voice he was getting from the other man. "And I am equally sure you would not be so cruel as to deprive me of your company."

He vaguely remembered something else John had said in his rather delirious, blood deprived state. That people loved him too much to let him die, or something like that. Though unlike now, Kikyo had a feeling John actually meant it when he'd said it before.

"And I am well enough, thank you for asking," he murmured. If John was willing to hold a conversation of false niceties, then he was in mood enough to return the courtesy. "Though a bit uninspired of late, I'm afraid. I'd hoped for a more amusing afterlife."

Jack snorted. "This is not the afterlife." He should know; he'd died before. Then again, he had been cursed, hadn't he, to wander the Earth never truly dying but mose certainly not alive? Minor details. Point was, he had been dead and it didn't work like this.

"Uninspired, though?" He stroked his chin. "What do you mean by that?"

"Not the afterlife, indeed? Puzzling, but not surprising.."

There was a brief pause as Kikyo contemplated his reply. He could answer in any number of ways, for his lack of inspiration ran in several directions. His hands after all, were capable of various forms of 'artistic' expression. He didn't just swing around a sword blindly and recklessly. There was fluid in his movements, resembling the graceful cut of a pair of scissors to an arrangement of flowers.

As Shion might say - the way of the sword and the way of the flower was the same.

Maybe it made sense then, in a twisted logic, that he should find a hobby in arranging body parts in a similar fashion as the flowers.

Though in truth, he knew that it was all bullshit. There was nothing artistic about his bloodlust.

"You could say that my hands have been too idle, lately." He glanced down at his palm, the callouses from the hilt of his sword smoothing down over time.

Jack arched an eyebrow. To be a pain in the ass or not...

Like the decision was a hard one. "You know," he smirked, tapping the table. "If your hands are getting to 'idle', I could lend you a stag mag. That man on the radio was ever so kind and gave me one last night..."

Oh, Kikyo must want to kill him, he thought with glee.

Kikyo glanced up at him, eyes narrowing coldly. It should come to no surprise, to hear such an obnoxious reply from the urban ninja.

He chuckled coldly, looking down his nose at him as he answered briefly - "That is very kind for you to offer, but happily for you, it won't be necessary. I wouldn't wish to deprive you, after all, of your source of amusement."

Jack openly laughed at Kikyo's reaction. It was exactly as he imagined it would be. "It's ok. There weren't enough blondes for my liking. I can certainly part with it for a night or two. And if I need to, I can always borrow the midget's copy."

He added, poking at his food, "But I suppose it's not your thing. It's only women."

The idea of touching a thing that had been in John's hands whilst the man was doing god-knows-what was thoroughly repulsive, and it was all he could do not to grimace from the thought. If Kikyo lacked appetite before, it certainly was not going to come back anytime soon.

It was rather disconcerting that Kikyo should find himself as fodder for the amusement of the likes of John. It probably didn't get much worse than this. He mused silently that should have just killed him when he had the chance.

And curious too, was John's rather fixed view of Kikyo's sexual preference. Kikyo slept with men as well as women, and probably too many of either to count, but why did it matter to this man?

"You seem to think you know me so well," he replied with a snort.

Jack shrugged. "I never said I knew you. I was only musing."

Yes, he had hit a nerve with the other man. Messing with Kikyo was almost as amusing as the thought of his partners tonight, although to torment the man in front of him was far crueler than to imagine funny titles for his future companions. As far as Jack was concerned, though, Kikyo had no love for him and hadn't been particularly nice. There was no guilt in having fun at his expense.

"Why? Am I in the ballpark?"

Kikyo was sure John would like to think he was, just to put him off even more. It was amazing that after days of indifference and utter lack of emotion, Kikyo could manage to get riled up over something this petty. He suppressed a sigh and set his eyes on the other with a mirthless smile.

"What do you think? Perhaps you would be, if you have been sharpening your wits, as I suggested before."

"What do I think?" Jack parroted back. "What do I think...what do I think..." He tapped his chin, as if considering. "You know, I actually don't care if I'm right or wrong about you. Either way doesn't affect me in the slightest."

With that, he casually went back to eating, looking every way but at Kikyo.

Kikyo laughed softly, surprisingly amused by John's reply. Maybe it was almost refreshing that he could tell him how it was without any fear of consequence.

Who needed niceties, really? They were useless, but Kikyo stubbornly stuck to them nevertheless, if for no other reason then because he was raised that way.

He lifted the cup to his lips to take a sip before he said- "And that, I think, is the smartest thing I have ever heard you speak."

"And that," The Fable said, still not looking at Kikyo and shoveling food into his mouth, "Goes to show that you don't know me so well either. If you did, you'd know I'm a chronic liar."

He turned his gaze back to the assassin. "But then you get into that whole paradoxical bullshit about if that was a lie and so forth. I've never really been into the overanalysis of anything, though I guess if you wanna look 'smart' by the academic standards, you have to ape it."

"Ah..." Strangely enough, this man's words made some sense. Kikyo never really believed that Shion's idealisitc words were anything but lofty bullshit disguised as philosophy. Someone who had lived in the world as much as Shion had should have known better.

There was analytical smart, and then there was street smart. John, he suspected, had the latter.

"No need to over-analyze at all. The problem with chronic lies is that you forget which was which," Kikyo said, arching an eyebrow. "It's always possible to speak what is true and still reveal nothing."

"I do plenty of that as well," Jack grinned, thinking of that silly Fabletown law that forbid him to say much of anything. He was a traitor to them now anyhow, so why did he continue to follow their rules? Some habits were hard to break, though he had never followed it too closely to begin with.

"You got a confession to make?" He arched an eyebrow at Kikyo suggestively.

"Me, a confession?" The expression that had been rather annoyed turned slightly more toward amusement.

It was a preposterous notion that Kikyo would reveal anything of his heart to anybody. And even if he could, there was nothing to be gained from confessing a thing. Usually guilt or shame went hand in hand with any sort of confession, and neither word was part of his vocabulary.

"What an unlikely thing to ask. What could you mean by it?" he grinned.

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Day 30: Cafeteria, Dinner

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