Day 37: Men's Showers

[pleading-ngri.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't really call this a locker room. More like a bathroom with lockers. The place was uncomfortably crowded, with almost every adult male patient being hustled into the showers at once, but Phoenix wasn't as annoyed by the claustrophobic, milling throng of bodies as he might have otherwise been. Every extra person was one more person who might end up standing between himself and Edgeworth.

He knew that the prosecutor would have a fit if he found out about this. He'd known since he'd tacked that first response up on the bulletin board. And in a way, he couldn't blame him. Phoenix knew that he jumped into things all-or-nothing more often than most people. At the same time, he had some kind of reality testing. He wasn't going to learn the basics of how to defend himself and suddenly decide that he was Rambo.

He found an unoccupied locker in the southwest corner and glanced around, trying to gauge how long he could possibly stall in a locker room, looking as if he was expecting something, before people started looking at him strangely. It would have been easier if he'd known something of the description of the man he was supposed to be meeting. As it was, all he had was handwriting and a military rank, neither of which guaranteed any particular appearance.

It's not as if there was a better way to plan this, though. "Yeah, meet me by the lockers. I'll be wearing gray and a smiley face, just like about a hundred other guys."

[for Hughes]

Comments

[gothamnight.livejournal.com]

“…sorry,” Bruce said, keeping his voice low. Catching the note of hurt in West’s voice, he found himself feeling genuinely contrite for having stepped away. Logically, he knew it wasn’t his fault that Wally fell; from Bruce’s perspective, they were merely acquaintances, while for Wally, they were trusted teammates and, apparently, close enough so as to feel comfortable with casual touches.

Bruce half-listened to the Flash’s flippant comments about the nurses, wondering to himself what sort of memories the Flash held of the Batman, and what experiences they had shared together. As Bruce thought and Wally talked, Bruce navigated the two of them slowly and surely out of the showers, stopping to grab Wally’s crutch and taking it with them as they walked. Luckily, most everyone in the showers was too preoccupied to pay them much attention, so Bruce felt comfortable guiding the Flash’s movements with short, stern commands like “turn,” “bend,” and “walk” in his normal voice.

Bruce’s mind was already conjuring up reasons for Bruce Wayne and Wally West to associate with each other on a regular basis and where they could find enough privacy to talk properly when its thoughts were disrupted by Wally’s comment about Bruce’s scars. Turning his head to look at Wally, Bruce noticed finally that the other man’s gaze had been studiously avoiding certain parts of their bodies while being focused on other parts—namely, the parts of Bruce’s body that were the most deeply scarred. Perhaps he should have said something in response, seeing as Wally was evidently feeling a bit embarrassed that he’d even mentioned the scars to begin with. The truth was, however…that Bruce honestly didn’t know what to say. Wally knew the truth behind Bruce Wayne’s regular injuries, so he couldn’t laugh them off as a joke or sporting accident. And as a topic of conversation, the scars’ gruesome origins meant too much for Bruce to trivialize. The last thing Bruce wanted was to make the Flash uncomfortable by delving into territory either too light or too dark: silence was safer. And so he said nothing, though he did shoot a strange, perhaps overly intense look at the man.

“…it’s fine,” he said, though it was unclear to which statement he was replying.

“Will you need help drying? Even if you don’t, it might be better if we stuck together. I’m new, remember?” His voice was a bit lighter then it was just a few sentences previous—in fact, by the time they’d arrived at the drying area, Bruce’s face was already schooled into a blandly good-natured expression.

“I need to change back, too,” he said with a smile. “So we might as well do it together, right?”

[scarletspeedstr.livejournal.com]

Well that had been the perfect way to amp the awkward factor of the situation all the way up to eleven. It was times like this that Wally wished that his power came with the ability to have something smack him upside the head before he said anything too stupid. But then that would probably have been happening almost every time he opened his mouth it seemed like.

And now Bats was giving him one of those intense, unreadable looks that he had sometimes. That had to be because this one hadn't known him long enough to have invented the 'Flash, stop being an idiot' look. But Bats being Bats, he'd pick it up in no time.

"What? Oh, no! Uh, I mean, I can handle it. Really," Wally insisted, all the while hoping desperately that the burning feeling on his cheeks wasn't from him blushing almost as bright a red as his hair. The last thing he needed right now was Batman giving him a hand drying himself and getting dressed. If that happened, he'd probably just drop dead on the spot from embarrassment, and the crazy head doctor wouldn't have to lift a finger.

Not wanting to prolong things any further than necessary, Wally pulled away from Bruce and took a couple of small, limping steps to the relative safety of a dry towel. Not that it offered much by way of actual 'protection', but it was the thought that mattered.

"If I need any help, I'll ask for a cute nurse," he tossed over his shoulder as he set to work carefully drying around his bandaged knee. "Besides, if anyone sees you helping me get dressed, they'll get the wrong idea or something, and I doubt Bruce Wayne is the type to, you know, play for the other team?"

[gothamnight.livejournal.com]

Wal—West practically fled, blushing almost as red as his hair. His sudden change in attitude surprised Bruce until he realized that most people would be uncomfortable with a near-stranger offering to help them with a usually-solitary activity like drying or bathing. Bruce himself had never been particularly self-conscious of his body—perhaps a product of his upbringing. Even when he was little there’d always been Alfred to draw him baths, help dress him, and—in the past few years—stitch up his wounds and bandage them. Were the very scars the Flash’d been staring at minutes ago not so damning, Bruce Wayne wouldn’t be nearly so reluctant to undress in front of others—though, admittedly, he too would have to draw the line at a stranger touching him extensively without a significant enough reason. As such, he didn’t press his point and instead grabbed a towel, drying himself off with a careless expression while in fact wondering whether West’s reference to homosexuality was strictly necessary.
“Point taken,” he said with a chuckle, wiping his leg off with firm, quick strokes before drying the wounded areas more gingerly. He’d have to get them disinfected again later on, but not now. No matter how “cute” the nurse was, there were things he needed to ask Wally.

“Too bad the nurses aren’t as fun as the ones in Gotham General. They get all weird and stiff when I start asking them about Institute stuff. I’m starting to get the sense that the flirting works better when they don’t think you’re crazy.”

[scarletspeedstr.livejournal.com]

Wally relaxed and even laughed lightly at the talk about the nurses. Actually being naked in the same room as others, even if it was Bats, didn't bother him so much - he wore bright red, skintight spandex for crying out loud, that kind of thing didn't leave much to the imagination - but touching put things in a whole different ballpark.

"Yeah, you try making some kind of joke or something with some of the nurses, and they look like they've been snacking on lemons in their spare time. Think they practice that look?" Sure, it was weird hearing Bats sound all upbeat and happy, but it made sense that he would try and keep his identity hidden. Wally was just going to have to get used to hearing Bruce talking as Bruce Wayne, rather than Batman.

"So anyway, this is your first day, right? Anything you need extra info on or something?" he offered. The more information Bats had, the better the chance he'd have a plan to get them out of here. One that would probably work a lot better than Wally's last attempt anyway. He finished drying off with no major problems, noticing that the dragonfly bites on his back and ankle seemed to be almost completely healed. About time, really. Normally his powers would have accelerated the healing and they'd have been gone days ago. His knee would have been healed by this too, but it looked as though he was going to have to put up with the crutch a little longer.

With a sigh, Wally awkwardly bent to retrieve his clothing and set about trying to figure out the mechanics of dressing himself without putting too much weight on or bending his leg more than necessary as he waited for Bruce's answer.

[gothamnight.livejournal.com]

“I think I’ve got the basics down,” he said as casually if he were learning to play a new card game. Bruce reached for his own clothes and pulled the underwear and pants on while watching Wally deal with his own situation. The other man still hadn’t finished when Bruce was fully dressed, and as he waited Bruce couldn’t help but try to identify the Flash’s injuries. The bite marks had an unusual shape—made by some kind of insect, and judging from their locations, it was a flying insect. The insect was probably not venomous, or else the wounds would’ve been much more serious; on the other hand, they were large and vicious. The source of the Flash’s leg injury was the extensive damage around the knee area: torn but healing flesh. Bruce made a mental note to see if there was any sort of information regarding the types of monsters at the Institute—perhaps the bats last night had not been so much as an ironical coincidence as he’d thought.

There was one more thing bothering Bruce. The wounds on the Flash looked old—like they’d been healing for about a day or two already. If Bruce could recall correctly, one of the side-benefits of the Flash’s super-speed was the accelerated rates of all cellular functions, including regeneration and repair. In that case...why was Wally injured at all? While the wounds looked nasty, they seemed to be flesh wounds—not so serious that the Flash couldn’t have them healed already.

Perhaps there was some sort of venom involved then—either that, or something was affecting the Flash’s super-abilities. Now that Bruce thought of it, he doubted the Institute would admit superpowered individuals without some sort of guarantee that those individuals wouldn’t just use their powers to destroy the place and its people. The chances that whoever was in charge had some sort of method to tamper with or alter powers was...highly probable, though Bruce couldn’t even begin to imagine the technology he or she’d have to possess in order to affect so many people in such a large range.

“Stuck in a mental institute, people from parallel universes, experiments, monsters trying to eat me. Still shaky on the actual mechanics and locations in this place and what kind of stuff people’ve tried to get out.”

He paused, then thought of what he’d seen on the Bulletin board.

“Knowing a little bit more about the people here’d help too, I think. I mean, all the club business and who’s in charge and knows this or whatever. Anything you could tell me would help, basically.”

Bruce disguised the urgency behind his words with a nonchalant tone, but the insincere look of apathy on his face stole away when Wally finished and looked up again. A more genuine look of dryness replaced it, and as Bruce offered the crutch back to Wally and the two started to move towards the Sun Room, he surprised himself by how much more comfortable he felt now as opposed to before.

[to here (http://community.livejournal.com/damned/510510.html?thread=41519406#t41519406)]