damned_institute | Day 40: Recreational Field

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Day 40: Recreational Field

Kio's breakfast ended on a much happier note than it had started. However, for once the announcement truly surprised him. He blinked as his nurse came to pick him up. Recreational Field? But.. but if they had a greenhouse, he wanted to go there. The prospect of gardening was a truly liberating one, an island of joy in this hellhole. He thought about going to the Sun Room and lying down, but it occurred to him that he hadn't had proper fresh air since being here. With a cheery goodbye wave to Honey, he followed his torturer outside.

It was much better than he had expected. The sun wasn't too hot (what time of the year were they in, anyway?), so he walked slowly along the walls, fascinated by the size of the field. He wondered if Sou-chan was alright. He hadn't even checked the board. Well, if Soubi wanted to apologize, Kio would be willing to listen. The place was so crisp and clean. He had to think if anyone had ever gone over the walls. What was out there? Freedom? Or a different sort of monster?

Leaning against one of the walls, Kio took as much advantage of the sun as he could. He desperately wanted a lollipop. One was quietly nestled in his pocket, but he would need to wait until the nurses were busy with other patients before he tried anything. Soubi had gone to some trouble to get them, the least he could do was make sure they didn't get confiscated. So with bated breath, Kio waited for a shift in the mood. He was, for once, content. Not happy, but not going crazy either.

[Sou-chan! Team Loveless deploy!]

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The idea that she had simply left hair on him from the night before was a theory Kira had come up with already, but dismissed fairly quickly. He'd run his hands through his hair, and it had come out, as if part of his own body. She hadn't shed on him. And he somehow doubted that she would have left that hair on him unless she meant it, in any case.

She was less of a monster, then ... but what else could he call her? 'Enemy' was too broad.

"She was a ghost, I think. Or a corpse." She certainly looked dead enough to serve as either, but corpses couldn't crawl out of the back of your skull. "She was basically on top of us - literally. I don't know how she did it, but she climbed out of ... me." It was difficult to explain, and Kira shook his head, letting the hairs fall again. "Out of the back of my head, almost. And then the entire hallway seemed like it was engulfed by her presence." But she hadn't done anything ... outright damaging, as far as he could tell. Hadn't she?

Kira coughed again, the scratching in his throat starting to hurt.

Peter's first reaction to the word "ghost" was disbelief, but he quickly stamped that out. Anything was possible, although he honestly hadn't known that there were spirits wandering around the institute. Monsters were a little easier to understand. Animals could be modified somehow - it didn't make much sense, but at least it made a little bit of sense.

Ghosts, though? That was supposed to be kid stuff, things that elementary school children talked about in dark closets while they held flashlights up to their faces.

Still, the guy was talking about this ghost with completely seriousness, and Peter had just seen that black hair with his own two eyes. If it was a ghost, then it was (sort of) understandable that she could be in him, since she wouldn't be solid, but...

Now Peter realized that his original impression when he'd first seen the other patient had actually been right. He'd seen a ghost.

"That's--" Although then Peter realized that the guy had been coughing a whole lot. "Hey, are you all right? Do you need some water or something?" He started to look around for a nearby nurse.

The recollection of the woman from last night was starting to consume him again, despite all his attempts, and he tried to shake it off again - but here, in the daytime, he didn't have as much to focus on. It was harder to get rid of something you didn't want to think about when you had nothing else to think about, and when that something was making itself prevalent, even in real life.

Kira coughed harder against his arm. It felt like he was choking, the scratching was getting so painful, but he still tried to wave off the other young man's question about water. He didn't want to impose --

Damn! There was something caught in his throat, he knew it at this point. He didn't dare try to swallow for fear of whatever it was getting into his stomach. Kira choked and coughed, and finally whatever it was managed to get into his mouth, and he reached in to yank it out. Too late he realized the sensation of it was familiar - thin and stringy and coarse.

He stared at the mess of dark hair he'd dragged out of his own throat with a numb sort of horror, barely able to comprehend what he was looking at.

When the man's coughing only got worse, Peter felt more and more compelled to look for someone who could help. But then the coughing sounds turned into choking sounds, and then he started going through the steps of the Heimlich maneuver in his head.

Just as he was starting to circle around the man so that he could properly perform it, the choking stopped and the blond was staring down at what he'd pulled out.

Had he really just hacked up a hairball? Ignoring the fact that it was gross, Peter didn't miss that the strands looked the same as what the man had found in his own hair. Maybe it being mixed in with his hair could be explained away, but this was ten times worse.

Maybe the ghost literally had been inside him. That was a disturbing thought, though, and Peter definitely wasn't going to say it out loud.

"I think you'd better sit down," he said with a frown, moving to the man's side despite the fact that it meant getting closer to the clump of hair he'd just coughed up. "Want me to get a nurse?"

Rarely in his life had Kira been so fundamentally and biologically disturbed. He knew she'd climbed out of him, somehow, but this was not what he'd ever thought. Was this the extent of her influence? Did she leave people with this kind of mess every time she touched them? In that case ... all the other people she ran into. Did they suffer the same sort of things?

He dropped the hair, unwilling to hold onto it any longer, and hurriedly rubbed his palm on the side of his shirt. The man with him was concerned - and who wouldn't be?

"I'm all right," he said, but his voice was a little shaky. There was still a light scratching in his throat, but it wasn't as bad as before. "I don't think it'll happen again." If it did, he would probably puke; as long as he didn't look a the discarded thing on the ground, he could probably avoid it. "Thank you, though, ah ... "

He hadn't ever caught the man's name, had he? Too caught up in the frankly disturbing business of someone else's hair appearing on and in his body.

It seemed wrong to act like that hadn't just happened, but maybe the blond would rather think about it as little as possible. Peter could understand that. If it had been him, he would have been trying his hardest to block it out too.

Keeping his eyes off the ground and instead on the other patient's face, he saw that the man was searching for a name and quickly helped him out. "Oh, I'm Peter. Sorry for not mentioning it earlier," he said as he extended his hand.

It as only after he'd made the gesture that he remembered that the blond had just been holding the hairball with one of his hands. Peter had to resist jerking his hand back. It wasn't like the guy was diseased...

Right?

"Oh, and I promise I'll stop asking you about it after this, but... what did this ghost look like? Just so I can stay as far away as possible." He was pretty sure the guy would understand that he didn't want to follow in his footsteps when it came to the coughing up ghost hair.

"Kira Izuru," Kira was quick to respond, realizing his own impoliteness pretty quickly. He saw Peter extend his hand and hesitated for a moment before wiping his hand off against the side of his shirt one more time and tentatively returning the gesture. A very Western greeting, but it wouldn't do to just ... ignore it. It was quick, anyway. And awkward.

As for the ghost ... Kira thought about her, keeping his eyes trained on the wall just beyond Peter's head.

"It was on the second floor, in the main hallway - near the banister over the sun room." The banister he had nearly been forced off of. "The ghost was female. She's very pale, with bloodshot eyes and very long, dark hair." Very long was almost an understatement. It seemed like it had been everywhere - curling around his body like a cocoon, stopped only when he tried to slice off her head. And hadn't Hanatarou been stopped by it, too? He couldn't recall - he'd been too busy trying to keep her off him at the time. "If you hear a rattling noise, that's probably an indication that she's coming."

Kira reached up to touch his throat, remembering the feel of that sound, like it had been coming from his own mouth. It was going to haunt his nightmares as much as her eyes.

So far, Peter had only been to the second floor once, but that one time had been under the pretense of following a very ominous trail of blood. Hearing that the creepy ghost who left some nasty after-effects on those who met her (it?) was also up there made him even less inclined to go return any time soon.

He got the feeling it would be necessary at some point, though. If that time came, he would just have to keep his ears open.

"All right, thanks for the information, Kira," he said with a nod. It was kind of difficult trying to steer the conversation to something else when Peter was pretty sure the ghost was the only thing on both of their minds, but he tried nonetheless.

"So, have you had therapy yet?" he asked. He was pretty sure that was far enough away from the previous topic, and it was also something he was genuinely curious about. He wanted to know if anyone else had gone through an experience similar to the one he'd had with Mohinder.

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Day 40: Recreational Field

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