damned_institute | Day 41: Sun Room

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Day 41: Sun Room

Haseo's steps were heavy with the weight of righteous anger as he was escorted into the Sun Room, his posture so sullen and reluctant you could almost hear the nostalgic cry of an electric guitar. He was seething, and though perhaps it was a bit harder to be intimidating while wearing the uniform of an insane asylum and flanked by a bored-looking orderly, it was not for lack of trying.

Unfortunately, his nurse seemed unaffected by the act, and even with the cloud of failing to keep "Kai" away from "Peyton" hanging over her, remained determinedly cheerful. She merely said something about receiving a lecture later on, ignored his retorts, and assured him that it would be alright even though his internet stalker was in the same building. For the most part, Haseo tuned her babbling out after that, dismissing it as hopeless.

"...and usually this would be the time children would be taking showers, but you don't have to worry about that right now. Now then, le--"

"Wait. What?"

"Oh, all the children seventeen or under are separated right now while the adults go to the courtyard..."

"Hey, I'm not a kid you old--!"

"Oh of course you aren't dear, but you're not eighteen yet either, now are you?"

Haseo resisted the urge to do something rash, literally biting his tongue to keep quiet. But upon having the bulletin board pointed out to him, he shrugged off his anger for the most part and headed that way, fully intending to get more answers than he'd had time to receive during breakfast.

Well... at least Endrance is in another shower group, he thought, Thank god.

[Closed to Tsukasa, for now!]

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Hanatarou came off as painfully shy, and Sam felt a little bad that the kid had ended up trapped here.

Actually, why were any of them here? He'd been too caught up with Dean's sudden...what. Reappearance? Resurrection? Something. But Dean had come back and it'd thrown him completely off his game, left him distracted with both keeping Dean from knowing he'd already died and working on the deal. It wasn't as simple as killing Lilith anymore, not when the Dean he knew was in hell, and this one apparently...wasn't. Either way, he hadn't given much thought to piecing what was going on here, specifically, with the institute.

He returned the smile, figured Hanatarou could use it.

"Something like that," he said, not really willing to raise the question of exactly what had gone down.

Actually, I ran into my brother.

Yeah, that wasn't happening.

He paused a moment. "You've seen something, too?"

There wasn't anything in particular he was looking for right now, but it was almost second-nature to dig around for possible hunts. He couldn't get his hands on any newspapers which pretty much left this as his only option. While he supposed bringing up monsters might not be conducive towards making Hanatarou feel less nervous, he...well, he needed to know, and the conversation had, for once, steered itself in this direction without him having to work for it.

Though it wouldn't appear Hanatarou had actually run into it given his lack of injuries, but maybe he'd seen or heard something over the past however many nights he'd been here. Sam remembered hearing the howls out in the field last night. He'd been too busy with Dean and Lelouch at the time, but now...They couldn't have been hell hounds or he wouldn't have been able to hear them, but...a black dog, maybe? On the other hand, it'd sounded like a pack. Black dogs tended to be solitary.

But they hadn't been hell hounds. They most definitely could not have been hell hounds.

Edited 2009-05-16 06:59 (UTC)

"Seen something?" Hanatarou echoed, with a blink. Oh, monsters. He shook his head slightly, then paused, involuntarily lifting his gaze toward the second-floor balcony above the Sun Room. It was light now, and looked absolutely nothing like it had the other night and not just because of the lack of a creepy scary hair ghost. "Oh. Um. J-just once, so far. I'm, um, not a very good fighter. At all."

If he could even be considered a fighter at all, which he definitely wasn't by any member of the 11th. And speaking of which, there was their captain right now, and Hanatarou shrank just a little more into his seat in order to keep Kenpachi from noticing him. Hopefully.

"I'm actually a, a healer," he continued, attention shifting down again as he cast a worried look at Sam's neck. "I don't really do much that's useful."

Sam followed Hanatarou's gaze. It didn't take much for things to click into place; it was pretty obvious from where Hanatarou was looking at. Either this was a coincidence or more people had run into the spirit than he'd expected. All in one night, though? He didn't know if the ghost haunted the hallway regularly or if she was only there on a certain date or during certain conditions.

"Was it a woman?" he asked. "There might've been a young boy shortly before she appeared."

ZEX hadn't seen the little boy, which broke the pattern, but Sam was hoping someone else might've because otherwise...what did it mean, that he saw the kid, but no one else did? The boy was almost certainly an omen and while most spirits had their own set of criteria as to who they attacked, omens were often tied in with the source of danger. That meant everyone who'd seen the ghost should've seen the boy, as well.

Sam looked at Hanatarou, and though he didn't openly react to it, he couldn't help wondering what had the kid so twitchy, whether it was Sam himself or someone else or just the situation in general. All three seemed possible, though he was leaning towards the latter considering Hanatarou had been that way even before he'd sat down.

It was the mention of healer, though, that caught his attention the most. He remembered Skuld had mentioned healers; he hadn't given it much thought at the time—too busy hacking up hairballs and trying not to freak Dean out—but it was a curious way to describe yourself. He wasn't sure whether he was meant to take it literally or not. Then again, healers weren't uncommon in lore and he had apparently met a Norn here, of all things. He wasn't ruling out a lot at this point, even less so than he usually did.

"Well, I don't know about that," he replied, glancing over. "I think a lot of people would find a healer useful."

But the way Hanatarou said it, it seemed almost as if he expected to be the odd one out, not knowing how to defend himself, which was—weird. Except when he thought about it, there had been Lelouch's friend last night who could hardly be considered an average kid, and everyone else he'd spoken to so far—Skuld, ZEX, their mistaken-identity demon—they might not have been hunters, but they weren't your run-of-the-mill civilian, either.

There had been several people so far who'd expressed interest on the bulletin board about the ghost-woman, but somehow it seemed like Sam wasn't just asking out of idle curiosity. (Or, like that one kind of creepy person, because he thought she was pretty.)

Hanatarou hesitated for a moment, then nodded slightly. "Um. Y-yes. The, um, ghost with, with all the hair...?" All the hair which he was still finding at the most inconvenient moments, even if he hadn't coughed any up today. That at least was something to be grateful for. "I didn't see any children, though. Just a, a c-cat."

The cat had been creepy enough, if only because it was a prelude to the arrival of the other ghost.

He blinked at Sam's observation, looking genuinely puzzled by that. "Well. Here, it's...ah, some people have told me that too." It was really strange, too. And not at all something he was used to hearing. "Back home it's, um, different. I can't use any offensive kidou or, or, um, useful powers."

Okay, the cat, that was definitely edging into weird, if only mostly because this ghost apparently had patterns without...actually having any patterns. One ghost, two different omens?

This was going to drive him insane. Sam was sure there was some way this fit together that would make sense, but with almost all of his resources being a little non-existent right now, there was no way to pull it together. And the ghost seemed almost too quiet for his liking. It'd come off like a vengeful spirit last night, but it wasn't anymore. Unless it was extremely slow to act for some reason which was, up to this point, something he'd never encountered before.

He should talk to Dean about this, though they were in the same boat, too, in terms of what they knew. And a part of him didn't quite want to be turning towards Dean for answers, either.

For a moment, he thought about asking more on the spirit, but Hanatarou put a stop to that with his casual mention of powers, and yeah, he'd been curious before, but now he was interested. He wasn't as surprised as he might've been yesterday—almost everyone he'd met boasted some ability or another—but that didn't mean he'd quit wanting to know what the hell was going on here. Not when half of the information he was getting barely added up.

Still, as much as he wanted to sort this out, grilling the kid outright probably wasn't a good idea. Sam didn't know what experience Hanatarou had at home, but he figured he could guess.

"Yeah, well. Home's not always the place where you fit in," he said wryly. He hesitated. "Uh. Can I ask—when exactly your powers might've started?"

Changing the topic away from the ghost-woman was completely to Hanatarou's liking; he tried not to think about the encounter with her as much as possible. It was easier when he didn't have reminders thereof, but he still tried.

This whole curse thing was very strange and confusing, though. There had to be some way to get rid of it, if only so he could eat a meal in peace. He hadn't eaten much in a couple of days now and was starting to really notice it - if this persisted too long it would be really bad.

Sam seemed a little...interested in his powers, though. Or surprised, maybe? It was hard to tell. All the shinigami had abilities of some kind, and so had Ichigo and his friends, and so did a lot of the people he'd met here. It seemed to be completely common, so he'd thought nothing of mentioning his. "Er - I've always...?" He blinked a couple of times, tilting his head to one side a little. "I mean, it's...I wouldn't be a shinigami if I didn't, er, couldn't do. Er. Something."

Some kind of spiritual power was what separated the shinigami from the rest of Soul Society, after all. If he couldn't use kidou or anything he'd just be another resident of Rukongai. But normal people didn't know that, he reminded himself with a mental sigh. It was different here.

Wait, what?

Sam couldn't stop the flicker of surprise that crossed over his features and it wasn't even just that he was apparently face to face with a reaper. Yeah, there was that, there was definitely that, but also—honestly, Hanatarou didn't come off like a reaper to him. Not that he'd ever met a reaper before. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that he possibly had and simply didn't remember considering he had been dead for awhile and all. Dean hadn't recalled seeing a reaper or anything he'd done while he was a spirit after he'd woken from his coma, either.

In any case, this was—it was. Unexpected. Especially since the living weren't technically supposed to be able to see a reaper, period, except those rules seemed to be bent here judging by what ZEX had said. He'd mentioned that one of the ones who'd run into the spirit was a shinigami. He must've been talking about Hanatarou.

But what Hanatarou was saying didn't make a whole lot of sense. Reapers were strictly there to, well, reap souls. That was their only function, their only power.

That...That and they could exchange one soul's, what. Path? Destination? It didn't matter what it was technically called, he supposed, but he'd seen it happen, exchanging one life for another, essentially. It'd worked for Dean once. And yeah, someone had died in his place at the time, though even then, Sam couldn't say he'd have done anything different if he'd known. But it didn't have to be the same if he—

He bit his lip. Shit, he wasn't even sure if. How much this was a shot in the dark and how much...besides, reapers weren't demons. The only time he'd seen a reaper exchange lives like that was when it'd been coerced into it.

"I thought you just...harvested souls?" he hedged carefully.

That was certainly unexpected: Sam seemed to be startled by what Hanatarou had said. Was it because of the fact that he had powers? It hadn't surprised anyone else in this place, at least not that he recalled. He hastily thought back over the interactions he'd had with various people since arriving here and couldn't recall a single one who'd been anything other than interested or perhaps curious.

Of course, the fact that he couldn't recall a single openly disdainful reaction to the fact that he was a healer was the odd part here. And as long as he avoided Zaraki that might just continue, too.

He shrank back a little, almost automatically withdrawing as he tried to decide if he'd said something wrong or strange or had inexplicably offended his new acquaintance. When Sam spoke up again, though, he froze in place for a second, trying to decide if there was some kind of hidden question within that question, but gave that up quickly and just gave a hesitant shake of his head.

"That's part of it," he replied, wondering if he was going to say something else strange without realizing it. "But, um, if a soul doesn't move on then it becomes...corrupted. And it can turn into a, well, we call them Hollows. And Hollows will fight back."

This kid was so easily spooked. It opened the question of whether or not he really was a reaper like he said he was, but Sam couldn't see any reason why he wasn't. It seemed a weird thing to go around lying about. It was just odd, though, because if there was one thing Sam figured didn't have much to be afraid of at all, it was a reaper. You couldn't really kill death.

"It's not—" He smiled a little. "I just didn't think we'd be able to see you," he explained, and why was he finding himself trying to make an effort to get a reaper to feel better?

He had no idea what the hell was going on anymore.

But the so-called Hollows Hanatarou was describing, they sounded exactly like vengeful spirits and he'd never—that wasn't a term he'd ever heard before. Huh. He couldn't recall seeing it when he'd been researching reapers that time after the accident, though maybe he'd missed something. He'd been more focused on trying to fix Dean.

And he hadn't really managed to do that then, either, had he?

Besides, spirits attacked people, they couldn't technically harm a reaper, he was sure. He was fairly certain that in the end, it was the soul that could choose to stay or go with a reaper. If things were happening naturally, that was.

But then, none of that made a difference. There was only one thing he needed to know.

He paused a moment, wondering if there was a tactful way to bring it up, but he couldn't think of one, and suddenly, he didn't even care about tact anymore. He had to know.

"What if another soul wants to move on in its place?"

"Oh." Was that all? Although it was kind of surprising that Sam was reacting that way; most humans just didn't believe in shinigami at all, but somehow he seemed to know something about it. Well, then, maybe he was a human with powers, then, but just not used to knowing other people in the same situation?

It probably wasn't Hanatarou's business anyway, so he wasn't too concerned. He relaxed a little and just went on to explain, "Well, um, normally you shouldn't be able to. But somehow we ended up trapped here in mortal bodies." Ones that didn't work very well, either, considering the way they were damaged when he tried to use any of his powers.

Sam seemed nice enough, though, enough that Hanatarou grew visibly less nervous - right now the only thing making him uncomfortable was the continued presence of Zaraki nearby, but fortunately the captain hadn't seemed to notice he was there. (Not surprising.) He just blinked a little at the question, looking mildly puzzled.

"You mean...someone else dies, and the spirit returns to life? I don't...umm." That certainly wasn't anything that he'd ever dealt with before; though he'd healed serious wounds (at home, of course, not here with his powers decreased) once someone had died there was nothing he could do about it. Even his captain probably couldn't manage it, and she could do just about anything. "We don't decide who dies, or when, or...we just, um, send the spirits on, after they do."

Hanatarou frowned a little as he replied, a little worried that the answer wasn't going to be good enough. It had seemed like an important question, somehow, and he wished that Unohana-taichou (okay, or the less-intimidating Kotetsu-fukutaichou) had been there to ask.

Of course they didn't. If there was ever a neutral figure out there, it was a reaper. No, they didn't decide who died, but they could still—they still had the power to change it. If a deal was struck, anyone's life could be exchanged for another. Because he'd looked. He'd looked everywhere and that was the only loophole. Or it couldn't really even be called a loophole since he technically wasn't cheating anything. As long as someone's soul was claimed when it should've been, it would work.

Or it should. Apparently, hell didn't even want his soul and even now, Sam didn't know why. Maybe it was because that was where it was heading, anyway. It was possible. Hell, the more he thought about it, it seemed more than just possible.

But reapers weren't demons. They had nothing to do with demons. He wasn't sure, but there was a chance that meant that the contract that held Dean's soul, it could be overridden. Though even then—as much as Sam wouldn't have thought twice, he knew that if Dean ever found out what he was thinking right now...

"Right," Sam replied, unsure of how much he should say. He didn't want to say much at all, but if he was too vague, he'd never get the answers he wanted. Answers were more important at the moment. "But if—they haven't died yet, could you...would you ever be able to take another soul, if someone were willing?"

Yeah, he'd probably said too much. He was casual enough, but—

Never mind. It was too late to back out now.

Now this conversation was starting to veer into territory where Hanatarou was not only uncertain, but getting a little uncomfortable as well. The idea of someone else taking the place of a person whose time had come - well, that seemed just plain wrong. There was a proper time and a proper place for everything and going against the natural order of things was basically how Hollows came to be in the first place.

And anyway, he didn't know of anyone who'd ever attempted a Soul Burial on someone who was still alive. It was a completely bizarre and ridiculous idea to begin with, after all, which meant it was very likely something the 12th Division had tried, and he'd rather not think about how they spent their time.

Still, though, he gave the question due consideration, even though he shifted a little in his seat, looking awkward. "I don't...I don't know. I wouldn't think so, but we don't really have, ah, anything to do with that." Him especially; his job was to patch up the shinigami who did the real work, not to deal with the spirits himself. "But even if, um, it would...I can't do much here." He couldn't even think about trying something like that without Hisagomaru, so fortunately it wouldn't be an issue anyway.

Sam watched Hanatarou for another second or two before he looked away, seemingly dropping the topic with ease.

"I was just curious. Don't worry about it."

It wasn't the most reassuring thing to say, but he doubted Hanatarou would question it further on his own. Didn't seem the type, and that was just as well. Given what he knew to be true about reapers' abilities to exchange souls, though, logic said that Hanatarou was lying about not being able to do it. But the thing was, Sam really didn't think so. Which meant—what did that mean? There was no way Hanatarou was somehow a different kind of reaper, was there? That wasn't possible. Reapers weren't a species the way shapeshifters or werewolves might've been.

Damn it.

Anyway, he should've known he'd hit another dead end. They were all he kept hitting these days, all he kept hitting for over a year, and half the time, he wasn't even sure why he was...and it was just stupid because of course you would think he'd be able to strike a deal with the crossroads. That was what the demon existed for in the first place, for Chrissake, but apparently, he couldn't even mange to accomplish something as simple as that for Dean.

He frowned down at his hands for a moment. He knew his silence was going to come off as a bit weird, but he didn't know what else to say, too tired to play up the civilities the way he normally would've. It'd been awhile, on top of that. He'd gone through a few witnesses over the last couple of months, but mostly, there wasn't a lot of socializing going on. Ruby hardly counted.

He used to be better at this. He used to be better at a lot of things.

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Day 41: Sun Room

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