damned_institute | Day 21

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Day 21 - Sun Room

Ichigo was only too eager to leave the cafeteria and its fresh memories behind when the softened chime of the intercome rang clear. What had begun as another ordinary meal, a rather agreeable one despite the lack of the proper utensils, quickly became somewhat unnerving. His conversation with...what was his name again?...took so many sharp turns, he should've felt dizzy. It was easy to feel a little sorry for the guy, though; surrounded by stangers in a very strange place, it was hard to blame him for being so alarmed.

The Sun Room occurred as a more enjoyable choice to spend the time; he had nothing against music, but something about being surrounded by some of the most unruly characters he'd ever met, each of them armed with cacophonous weaponry, didn't sound smart. Once his nurse departed, the young man picked out a cozy little spot near a flood of sunshine and settled in, cradling his head in the palms of his hands. There, he stared up almost bitterly at the ceiling with sharply focused eyes, still exuding the same unapproachable sense of being as ever.

The room was warm, even a little comforting, for any of the tired, weary masses found in Landel's halls, or even those who just craved a little peace and quiet. All he could hear, from end of the room, were soft footfalls and hushed voices. That sounded just fine to the 'berry head.

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Schuldig rolled his eyes. "Do I have to go through this explanation every time?" he asked the heavens, before turning his attention back to Hughes. "Not to overcomplicate matters, but I'm not in your head. You're in mine. I hear your thoughts as plainly as if you were speaking them out loud, and I have just as much control over whether or not I hear it. And if you think you've got it bad with me hearing your thoughts, consider that I have to listen to them whether I want to or not - yours and everyone else's, all the time." He grinned unpleasantly. "You'll just have to get over it."

Well, it made it a little different that the guy wasn't trying to do it. But Hughes didn't like the naked feeling it brought, that feeling of being stripped completely. It was... icky.

"You can't... choose just not to pay attention? Like tuning out a conversation?" He glanced over at Yohji, wondering how well the two knew each other. "I mean... the only private thing a person's got is what's in his head."

Sure, he felt badly for the guy, bombarded with thoughts. But those were his thoughts!

Does he have to attempt to alienate and insult every person he comes across? Yohji thought sourly. Yohji sometimes rose backs, but that wasn't (always) on purpose. And not with potential allies (except the rest of Weiss).

He thought he had a headache coming on.

He shrugged helplessly at Hughes. "I don't know a thing about what he can do except that it's damn annoying when you're trying to" kill him "talk with him."

"Privacy's never meant much to me," Schuldig replied with a mirthless grin. "Anyway, thoughts are a hell of a lot more insistent than spoken speech...not to mention that they come faster. Can you not read a word you see right in front of your eyes, or does it happen whether you want to or not? Before you even can decide if you want to or not?

"And yes, I do," he remarked as an aside to Yohji, repling to his thoughts rather than his words. "Bitter much?"

"Yeah, well, other people care about it a whole lot." And Hughes was doing all he could not to think about Roy or their relationship or the frustrations stemming from it. He'd known it was going to be impossible to hide, damnit!

"I can close my eyes. But I guess you're right, you still get a flash of it. still... that's gotta cause a lot of problems. I mean, for other people and you." But then again, it could be damn useful. Imagine being able to pick out a criminal just by being near him, just by hearing his thoughts. Knowing what they were going to do before they did it.....

"I take it you guys know each other pretty well?"

That was annoying as hell too. Yohji glared darkly at the telepath and then turned away slightly, a disdainful expression on his face. "What on earth would I be bitter about, Schwartz?"

He looked at Hughes, surprise showing on his features. He shook his head and then glanced at Schuldig, curling his lip scornfully. "I don't know much and even that is more than I want to."

"I've known about you and the colonel since the day at breakfast," Schuldig assured Hughes with a grin. "If it makes you feel any better, I doubt there's anyone here I could tell who would care...although I wonder what your wife would say, all the same."

He glanced at Yohji briefly before turning his scimitar smile back on Hughes. "Arch enemies, actually. But better the evil you know, hm?"

"Shut up!" Hughes snapped, before he even thought about. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, looking for calm. No need to get worked up, done is done and all that. "Look, my personal life is my personal life and I'd appreciate it if you stayed out of it. You don't know me." The jibe about Gracia didn't bother Hughes in the least. He intended to tell her about anything that happened between him and Roy as soon as he was home. He knew she'd understand.

"Well, you know, you work with what you've got in here," he mumbled. He had Scar and Roy in his corner, and the two of them would probably rather stay in the institute than make any attempt at friendship with each other. But they worked together.

And again. He'd thought that his memories of how obnoxious Schuldig was were pretty accurate and those had been bad enough. Apparently time had softened his memories. Great. Just. Fucking. Great.

"If you kept out of people's lives, then maybe there wouldn't be so many people who want you dead," he said flatly to Schuldig.

A pained sigh escaped him. "That's what I meant to say." He looked Schuldig in the eyes, trying to make it clear that this wasn't some declaration of trust or anything. "I'll work with you for now. But the first sign of you messing with my head and you're dead, Schwartz."

Schuldig arched an eyebrow at Hughes in definite amusement. "On the contrary, I probably know you better than your wife and the colonel put together. But since there's not much I can do about it, much less whether or not you're comfortable with that, I don't see why I ought to lose any sleep over it."

His gaze flickered over to Yohji, and his next comment was meant for both men. "Wiser men tend to find that my usefulness vastly outweighs any discomfort they might be put to." Unfortunately, this required labeling Crawford as 'wiser', but hell, it wasn't like he'd ever hear about it. ~~Schuldig didn't think he could survive that level of smugness, at least from someone who wasn't him.~~

And Kudoh was still twitchy about the possibility of a mindfuck. Damn it, Schuldig was going to have to tell the truth - or at least a heavily edited version of it - if he was going to get anything resembling trust from the man, and that could prove critical. He hadn't seen Ling around in awhile, and Greed - well, Greed would make a hell of a bodyguard but they never seemed to get anything done. "If it makes you feel any better," he said, somewhat testily, "my ability to mess with your head is a bit limited right now." He could tell them about the Power Inhibitor the doctors had mentioned, but decided to keep that tidbit to himself; it wasn't like they had any powers of their own to be inhibited, and he damned well wasn't going to acknowledge a semi-permanent weakness that they didn't equally share. Besides, he could play a sympathy card here. "They dragged me off the night after last and cut into my head. My powers aren't working like they should." That was close enough to the truth to almost sound believable, too.

Schuldig became aware his hand, unbidden, was reaching for a pocket he didn't have. An idle self-inquiry as to what he'd been reaching for unexpectedly riveted all his attention, making Hughes and Yohji suddenly and extremely unimportant.

He'd been reaching for a wallet he didn't have because his photographs of Elysia were inside.

Never mind the photographs, he'd never even had a wallet.

Maybe that bit about his telepathy not working right wasn't as much of a lie as he'd thought it to be.

"Not now," he hissed under his breath, not even aware he'd spoken aloud - the line between speech and thought was rather thin for telepaths in any case. He'd done so well! The thought of finally losing his sanity while actually in an asylum was too ironic, too infuriating to accept.

"You're really not making this whole thing any easier," Hughes said, groaning. His mind was his own. "You don't have to tell me this stuff. Ignorance is bliss, and all, you know?" Was it that hard to just not make a big deal out of it.

But when Shuldig mentioned that he was limited, and the experiments, Hughes just nodded. "Everybody who's got something special has found it weak here," he explained. "And they like to screw around with everybody. They make up names for it - testing, physicals, whatever they feel like calling it - but it's pretty much just a nice way of saying 'we're gonna experiment on you against your will!'." He still had some scars, from when they'd taken him two nights ago.

"Uh... you okay?" Hughes asked, glancing over at Yohji. Maybe he knew what was wrong with Shuldig - the guy was certainly acting weird all of a sudden.

Hughes' comment of 'ignorance is bliss' made him want to laugh, a self-depreciating smile touching his lips for just a second. Hadn't that been what had led to all of this? To regain blissful ignorance and be reborn, even at the price of his friends... his family.

So Schuldig couldn't use his powers to their full capacity. That reassured him a little. This place blocked Schuldig's powers enough to stop him messing with people's heads to the same extent.

He tried to push away the dull feeling of disappointment that flared for a moment at that knowledge.

He broke himself out of his thoughts and glanced over at Schuldig. It was possibly the first time he'd seen the telepath not under complete control, even considering the fight in the Esstet compound. Automatically he reached out, brushing the telepath's knee. "Schuldig?"

Being a telepath - or, rather, being one as successful and powerful as Schuldig - was a balancing act. In one hand, he clutched who he was; with the other, he held back the avalanche of thoughts from others just enough that he could sift through them without there being too great a risk of them getting confused with his own identity. As exceptional as he was, there really wasn't that much of an obvious difference between his thoughts and the thoughts he heard around him - not enough that, if they got mixed together, he'd be able to find his own without extreme difficulty.

But the delicate equilibrium had just been shattered. He needed a moment, just a moment of silence to sort out what had happened, where he was, but that was the special hell for telepaths. Thoughts never, ever stopped coming, and as his grip faltered they hit him with the force of a tsunami.

Stop, he breathed, not knowing or caring if he'd spoken aloud or not. A flash of lucidity, like a shooting star in the dark, whispered that this was what River felt like, and then terror followed in its wake as the possibility of ending up like her arose. It had been years since he'd made such an entreaty; he hadn't begged for a cease-fire since Rosenkreuz had brutally displayed that there would never be one, that he would have to beat the odds because they would never be adjusted for him.

On some level, there was pain; it wasn't even through his own awareness that he realized the pain was his, but rather through a glimpse from Yohji's eyes of him hunched over himself, fingers digging into his scalp with, he suspected, enough force to draw blood - he'd done that before, but again, not since he'd been a child. Not since before Rosenkreuz had explained that his screaming fits were caused by something they called a gift.

After some time, he realized he'd been asked if he was okay, and that was worse because he wasn't sure whether he'd heard it and recognized it as stimuli coming through his own ears or whether he'd picked up on Hughes' memory of asking it, or Yohji's having heard it. He was unraveling; this was the kind of horror story every telepath heard about those who couldn't keep up, this was the express lane to insanity. The canary in the mine had just exploded and Hughes wanted to know if he was all right.

As lost as he was, Schuldig at least recognized the hysterical laugh as his own, and clutched it to him like a child. Make it stop.

The hell....? One minute Shuldig had seemed fine, then he went... well, into whatever he was slipping into now. It was like watching a train wreck.

"Hey, hey, come on, calm down...." Hughes wet his lips, not sure if he should try to stabilize Shuldig through physical contact or if that would make things worse. "Come on, talk to us. What's wrong? What's going on?"

He had no idea what had just happened. There were stilted words coming out of the man and he was laughing like he was mad and something was seriously wrong/. What had triggered it? What had happened?

"This ever happened before?" he asked Yohji, glancing over at the other man, wishing he knew what the hell to do. Or that at least they'd figure something out before one of the staff noticed what was going on. "Come on Shuldig, just calm down!" It was the only thing he could think of to say.

If one of the staff noticed, Shuldig would probably get a tranquilizer and carted away.

Yohji could only stare for a moment, fear coursing through his veins. What was happening? Schuldig...

His attention snapped to Hughes for a moment before turning back to the telepath. "I don't know! Only times we've ever met before we were trying to kill each other!"

He stared for a moment longer. What did he do? Sure, he didn't like the man, but Schuldig was someone from home, someone familiar and in an odd way, that was comforting. He pushed himself to his knees, leaning closer to Schuldig. He could hear the other man muttering words, nonsense words, panicked and hurt. Half forgotten memories flashed to the surface. They'd been fighting in the Esstet compound, Schuldig had said things then, he could remember that. Telepathy wasn't a gift it was a curse. And what he was saying echoed within Yohji's own head. Reset, do-over, start again, empty slate. wipe it clean and start again.

Make it stop.

Hardly thinking about what he was doing, he reached out and grabbed one of Schuldig's hands, grabbing his chin with his free hand. "You'd better fucking get back to normal you bastard," he hissed lowly, wanting to shake the telepath. He pushed Schuldig's head up, forcing him to meet Yohji's eyes. Like hell he would let Schuldig fall into insanity when Yohji had to suffer this fucking place and endure the outskirts.

And there, like the flash of a lighthouse in the distance, was something calling him back. The contact between himself and Yohji - there was nothing whatsoever romantic in the fact that it allowed him to stabilize, just a little bit; all that mattered was that, in the touch, there was someone else feeling the exact same contact he was. That narrowed the thoughts that could be his down to two minds, his own and Yohji's, and as he dragged himself back into his own head something like awareness returned to his eyes.

Shame. It was intense, and loathsome as it was it was another identifier of his own thoughts - he hadn't broken down since Rosenkreuz, never in front of an enemy, and the thought of being seen like this, of having it made so inescapably clear how precariously he balanced on the edge of the catastrophe curve, burned like a sun.

It was the first time he'd actually felt shame of any sort in a long while, and he dropped his eyes. He wasn't sure what was worse, losing his sense of self or being pitied - it would help if one didn't tend to lead to the other.

He was hardly stable yet - he was still swimming against the tide - but he'd managed to find a few threads to cling to. Provided none of them broke, he might still be able to claw his way back to balance ~~if not dignity~~.

"Asuka," he tried, then swore colorfully. No. He kept a tighter grip on himself this time, refused to be thrown - given how damned much Yohji brooded over her there was no shame in saying her name when he meant another. "Crawford," he tried again, more emphatically.

For perhaps the hundredth time, Schuldig wondered where the hell the bastard was. He'd always been there before when the German needed him, if only because Crawford always knew when exactly he would be needed.

Then, as if to welcome him back, the headache hit, so powerful that Schuldig shuddered and retched before groaning and trying to curl up on himself. "No fair," he muttered. Then, with an effort, managed, "Get one of those vapid cunts to bring me aspirin."

Given the situation, he damned well thought crudity was appropriate. Then, with considerable relief, embraced the fact that he thought.

What the hell had just happened? Whatever it was, Yohji seemed to be snapping the man out of it.

"I'll get you an aspirin," Hughes said, nodding. It was the very least he could do. Since he sure as hell didn't know what else he could possibly do. It looked like Yohji could handle... whatever. It wouldn't take long to get a simple painkiller from a nurse. They liked him, for the most part.

"You just hang tight, okay?" And Hughes was standing, looking for a nurse that didn't look busy - there was some commotion - or angry. Their attention seemed focused on whatever was going on on the other side of the room. He found a young one and managed to procure the pill, some generic mild painkiller. Just one, but it was something. He headed back and sat down, holding out the pill.

"Here. This is what she gave me." Hopefully that would help.

Asuka. Yohji took a sharp breath at the mention of her name, bile rising in his throat for a second. He looked around wildly for a moment, half expecting to see her there, watching him like she sometimes did. But nothing. He turned his attention back to Schuldig. The telepath was looking a little better, not so vacant although more than a little sick looking.

He smiled gratefully at Hughes when the other man returned with the painkiller. "Thanks." Why the hell was he helping Schuldig anyway? If anything, he should have enjoyed the sight of the man in pain after everything he'd done. But he just fell dull and empty and kind of... sad?

Yohji still hadn't let go of him. He started to pull away, almost reluctantly (although that was something he refused to acknowledge) when Hughes held out the pill.

Schuldig laughed again, but this laugh was far less frantic and manic than the last - mostly it was pained and exasperated. "Thanks." He forced himself to remove his hands from his head (it wasn't like they were actually doing anything to ease the headache anyway) and took the pill from Hughes with fingers that were bloodstained around the nails. Noting this, Schuldig grimaced inwardly. Showering's going to sting for a couple days.

He snapped the pill in half and swallowed it dry before glancing over at Yohji. "You can't be that lonely," he remarked drily.

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Day 21 - Sun Room

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