damned_institute | Dayshift 42: Bus 2

Before anyone could come to any decisions for their next move, the room suddenly filled with a thick fog. Faster than he could realize what was happening, it had filled up the entire room and swallowed every single one of his friends. Then there was that undeniable stench of iron, blood and... he last remembered taking a step back and feeling that slippery skid and the realization of what that was. By the time he yelled, he was sitting straight up in his bed like he'd bolted awake. Like it'd been nothing more than a bad dream. ...What the hell just happened?!

"Oh! Good morning!" The nearby voice made him yelp with a half squeak-like noise. Oh, for hell's sake. It was one of those freaking nurses again. She was beaming at him like nothing had happened at all. Before he could so much as ask one question, the hag started blathering real fast about some field trip and buses and getting changed and hurrying up before everyone left without him and... OH MY GOD, WHAT WAS SHE DOING?! She was grabbing at his shirt like she was about to start helping him get dressed (or undressed in this case).

He flailed in a desperate attempt to get away from her and yelled his consent to go along if she would get out and let him change HIMSELF. What was the matter with her?! Thankfully, she left but told him to hurry. Hell if he knew what she'd do if he took too long. So for the sake of not getting freaking stripped, he quickly changed into the clothes she'd left on the bed. Clothes being the ugliest looking white-and-black track pants he'd ever seen and a bright blue sweatshirt with a cute little penguin design on the front. This was some kind of joke, right? ...Not to say the penguin wasn't cute or anything but there was no way, no way, he was wearing something like this in public.

But the nurse had burst right in again, and before Kanji could offer much protest, he was being pulled down the hallways and through the doors of the bus. He'd yelled some things her way, but she totally wasn't listening at all. By the time they stopped, he was standing at the front of the bus with a paper bag and the nurse had run off to cart another poor sap along. Frickin' PERFECT. For the sake of not standing up there like some kind of zoo animal for everyone to stare at, he plopped himself into one of the seats by the front and sighed in complete exasperation.

[Free. No limit.]

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Crawford dropped his smirk. "You know that would never have happened outside of here," he said.

Now was as good a time for the conversation he'd intended to have with Schuldig last night, so he continued without waiting for a response: "There are things you can't control here." He paused and added, "Things that I can't control. You can't control when you leave, or if you come back." The next part was important, and he couldn't allow it to slide off Schuldig and go unconsidered. He shifted completely so that he was facing Schuldig even if Schuldig wasn't facing him, and reached for his tie and gave it a light tug in his direction. "Look at me."

Schuldig looked good, he suddenly noticed: the most obvious thing was missing, and that was Schuldig's devil-may-care attitude, but for once both of them looked normal. Crawford understood that it was purely cosmetic, an illusion, but he appreciated it anyway.

"None of this would ever have happened anywhere else," Schuldig muttered, opening his eyes if only so that he could glare out the window. "You would have rescued me weeks ago, to say nothing of not letting them cut into my head. I would never have allowed them to take you or Farfarello away from me without making anyone who tried forget their own names. There wouldn't be anything out of our control anywhere else under the sun!"

As angry as he was, however, the fury wasn't directed at Crawford - and he never disobeyed the Oracle when he took that tone of voice. So when the man grabbed his tie, Schuldig turned in his seat to meet his gaze, expression dark and ever so slightly guarded.

"You have a future," Crawford said. He let go of Schuldig's tie but held his gaze. "Weiss isn't in it. Artemis isn't in it." He paused, irritatingly aware that he was about to imply a complete reversal from what he'd said earlier. "Here it doesn't matter how you deal with things as long as you do it, but when we get back, they're victims of the death of society, and we're holding the gun--you and I," he clarified. "I need you to be a demon. Don't forget that."

He had needed to end it on a harsh tone, because saying it was fine for Schuldig to do what he would with Artemis and Kudou and whoever else, even if "what he would" was unusually not sadistic or cruel or manipulative, left a bitter taste in his mouth.

"Artemis isn't even from our world," Schuldig observed, watching Crawford closely. "He won't be involved in whatever we do. As for Balinese..." There actually wasn't anything to say in regards to Yohji, unfortunately. No matter what the assassin might feel for him, Schuldig couldn't convince himself that Yohji would stand idly by while they burned the world to the ground. The only reason any affection at all had risen between them here was because they had a common enemy, their own goals put on hold. Back in Tokyo, there was only one way things could possibly play out.

That bothered him. And the fact that it bothered him managed, somehow, to bother him even more.

"I've always been your demon," Schuldig replied in German, glancing back out the window. "I always will be. But that's the only future I can see, or be sure of. You weren't here a week ago, and you may not be here a week from now, and I used to think that was a sure thing. And I wouldn't be the first person with a future to die in this place, so I wouldn't call that a certainty, either." He glanced sidelong at Crawford. "And how much do I have to deal with here, before I do get back? How much more can I be expected to endure? Months? Years? Not even the patients who have been here the longest are any closer to getting out, and I'm becoming one of them."

"You're contradicting yourself," said Crawford, switching to German as well, "no one who has a future can die." A theory that had occurred to him earlier came rushing back to the forefront of his mind. "Unless what happens here doesn't affect you in Tokyo," he added, "in which case it's unlikely that you'll remember any of this. Either way, you're in the future. Nothing permanent can happen to you." He thought of the scars on Schuldig's stomach with grim satisfaction--scars didn't appear out of nowhere in the real world; in the real world, as far as he could guess, they were not there.

In some ways, he knew it was a dangerous thing to say, because if he was right, he was admitting that Schuldig had no obligation to listen to him, and in some ways, he didn't trust Schuldig farther than he could throw him--but with the exception of his power, there was nothing he relied on more than Schuldig's loyalty, and believing that this could cause a major shift in his attitude was not, after so many years, an option.

His left hand found the closest one of Schuldig's, and he dropped his gaze from Schuldig's reflection in the window to his long fingers, moving them individually, running his thumb along them, as if fascinated by the bones, and changed the subject. "What are your plans for today?"

"It's already happened here," Schuldig snapped back. "People have died here, even when they had friends from different times who remembered their surviving beyond the time they arrived here. I know both of us - all of Schwarz - are still alive well into the future Balinese is from, but that apparently means nothing here." He turned to glare at Crawford. "And knowing that somewhere I'll still be alive and wreaking havoc does nothing for me in here, Crawford. In here I'm still being trapped and tortured...but I suppose that since it doesn't affect anything, that doesn't matter. You could snap my neck right now and it wouldn't change anything; I'd still be alive in the future somehow, and I wouldn't remember it. So why don't you try it?"

For all his aggravation, Schuldig found himself relaxing at Crawford's hand on his, fingers curling idly around the older man's own. "I don't know," he said finally, wearily. "I'm tired. I probably haven't made up for the blood I lost yet. And what does doing anything here matter? No one else has ever accomplished anything, and even if I did..."

Somehow Crawford's reassurances had done anything but make him feel better. They'd simply underlined just how pointless an exercise all of this was.

Dayshift 42: Bus 2

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