Day 43: Intercom, Evening

[damned-intercom.livejournal.com]

Hello! I.R.I.S. here once more to announce to you, our honored guests, that you have officially made it through a day of our typical Landel's treatment. Of course, it isn't quite over: we will now have you retire to our designated patient quarters with one of your agency partners to inspect their sleeping area and the tools that we provide them with for the true bulk of our behavioral testing. On an added note, we would like you to notice once again that the meals we provide to our subjects are of the highest quality.

For those of you feeling apprehensive about taking part in our more intensive methods, please be aware that we would never imagine putting all of you in any danger whatsoever. This last shift will be your last at our Institute; afterward, we will escort you to our Head Doctor's personal observation station to survey some of our test Next-Wave participants in the rigorous trials we put them through – all for their betterment, of course.

Once again, we hope that you are satisfied with what you find, and as always, direct any questions you may have to your console.

The nurses began to escort the patients to their rooms. They didn't even seem to be brought to awareness by words such as "testing" and "subjects."

[ All room threads go in response to this post; please post your character's room number as the subject line of the initial post. (Find all of the newly changed room assignments and shift introductions here.) If you are introducing your character during this shift, you may either choose for them character to wake up before their roommate gets back, or after. ]

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M24

[human-sponge.livejournal.com]

Peter wasn't one-hundred percent sure if he'd made Roland's time in the Sun Room any easier, but he figured that when someone was suffering like that they probably wanted some company. At the same time, he knew what it was like when you were feeling so crappy that you just wanted people to leave you the hell alone. Still, Roland hadn't really given off that impression, so it was probably all right.

He wasn't sure how to feel about Heat, though. While he felt bad for Roland on an empathetic level, he also was relieved that the cannibal's presence wouldn't be such a point of tension between them anymore. Even if Heat had had some sort of uncontrollable anger, that didn't necessarily excuse going after an innocent girl and biting a piece out of her.

Right now he had more pressing things to consider, though. He wanted to see for himself how Sam was doing, eat his dinner, and then get ready to meet up with Nathan tonight. It would be nice to have a more "normal" night with his brother, though Peter wasn't ready to believe that everything was fine just yet, especially with that weird computerized system still making the announcements.

Even though he'd slept in some, it had still been a long day, what with seeing his mother and all, and so Peter found himself releasing a sigh once he made it back to his room. Sam wasn't there yet, so he took his time moving over to his desk and collapsing into the chair. The steak looked surprisingly good, he had to admit, and so Peter grabbed for his knife and fork and started to cut the piece of meat into bite-sized pieces.

[boyking]

Leaving the waiting room, Sam realized that he still knew nothing about this Michael, this guy who showed up out of nowhere and seemed to know him in a way that he couldn't ignore. It was...unsettling. Which was probably the point, but.

And that whole thing about Dean being resurrected two weeks earlier than expected? That didn't really help, either.

At least he had a warning. For whatever that was worth. Though he knew he should check it out, as well. Confirm it, somehow, because taking Michael at his word wasn't something Sam was inclined to do, despite the fact that instinct told him Michael wasn't lying. That no matter how much he wanted to deny everything the man had said, he couldn't quite shake the feeling that there was something he was missing. Something Michael knew that Sam didn't.

He rubbed the corner of his eye with one hand and pushed the door open with the other. Peter was there already. Sam couldn't decide if this was a blessing of a distraction or something he just didn't want to deal with at the moment. He'd figured out by now that though polite, Peter also had a tendency to question, and it was actually his politeness that was the problem. There was no way for Sam to just shoot him down without looking like a jackass. Especially not after last night, which made Sam feel like he owed his roommate more than just answers. Answers that were probably long overdue at this point.

But being alone with his thoughts might not be the best plan, either. If they talked about last night, he wouldn't mind. Right now, zombies were preferable to—well, everything. So long as the bite on his arm didn't start turning him, anyway. That would seriously be a real last straw there.

He slid into his seat. "Hey," he said, deciding that segueing directly into, Thanks for the rescue or, How'd you find your brother, right away might be a little awkward.

[human-sponge.livejournal.com]

Peter had gotten most of the way through cutting up his steak by the time Sam made it back, and he silently let out a sigh of relief when he saw the other man enter the room. Even though they had spoken over the bulletin, seeing his roommate with his own eyes made him feel a lot better.

He turned away from his meal to give his roommate a closer look, and was glad to see that Sam looked just fine... except for some bandages wrapped around his forearm. Peter frowned and his hands twitched against the edge of his desk for a moment.

"That happened after we split up last night, didn't it?" he said with a nod to the arm. He didn't remember his roommate bleeding from that spot, and he was pretty sure he would have noticed even among all of the chaos. His medical experience had trained him not to miss any injuries.

He knew that his own wounds were always taken very good care of by morning, so he wasn't too worried, but-- well, maybe it would have been better if he hadn't left Sam and Brian on their own last night. He realized there wasn't much point in dwelling on it, but he still wanted to know what had happened.

[boyking]

Sam glanced down briefly at the injury when Peter nodded to it "Yeah. The, uh. The house wasn't as empty as it looked. I ran into a couple of them."

Dean had been, fortunately, tucked away in the basement. Sam was only glad that their attackers hadn't been in the basement, as well. And that they at least hadn't been adults. Strategically speaking, anyway. When he thought back on it, two kids trying to eat him alive still disturbed him a little. There was a reason changelings were never a favourite.

He didn't know why the kids had been the way they were, either. If they'd been reanimated due to an attack from the other zombies, then they should've had some bite wound, a mark somewhere, but there hadn't been anything. Hadn't been any blood trails in the house, no signs of a struggle. And what about the parents? There was one explanation, but—

Curses that turned the living into the dead come nightfall weren't completely unheard of, but that didn't always mean anything. Sometimes it just meant someone had told a bedtime story. Sam had always filed that one away as one of those legends. There'd never been any evidence to suggest otherwise, in the same way that there'd never been any evidence to support the popular image of a zombie. The contrary, in fact. Until now.

"I'm glad you made it out all right." He picked up a fry, hesitating. "How's your brother?"

Which...he wasn't quite asking about the man's physical well-being because he'd already seen Peter's brother and he'd told Peter as much. But he didn't want to corner Peter about how he'd found his brother or what'd happened with that, so he figured Peter could opt out with a generic answer this way if he wanted.

[human-sponge.livejournal.com]

When Sam said "a couple," Peter hoped that was really what he meant. Two zombies wouldn't be so bad if they were as slow as the bus driver, for instance. It obviously hadn't stopped Sam from getting injured, but he could have ended up with a lot more than a bite on the arm if he hadn't gotten to that house. Peter was relieved that he'd been lucky enough to stumble on his roommate when he had.

"Sorry about that," he said with a tinge of guilt. "I wasn't even able to do all that much before night ended, so I really should have just stuck with you." Peter knew that he acted irrationally sometimes, and he was always willing to admit to his mistakes, especially if they resulted in some sort of harm.

He couldn't help wondering if Sam had the infection that everyone kept talking about. The whole thing still sounded so far-fetched, like it was really out of a movie, and yet he wasn't going to assume that people were making any of it up. He was pretty sure that if Sam was infected, he would have at least had the decency to tell Peter about it, seeing how they were roommates. For that reason, he wasn't going to offend the other man by asking.

When Sam brought up Nathan, Peter was quick to nod. "Oh, he's fine!" It was only after the words came out of his mouth that he realized that he'd never actually told Sam the man with him was his brother, but he knew how easy it must have been to assume.

"Yeah, we found each other yesterday in town. I can barely believe he's back still, actually." He still felt uncertain about the whole thing since now he knew that Landel could take his brother whenever he wanted to, but he was going to focus on the positive aspects of it rather than getting caught up in what might go wrong.

Peter took a bite of his steak and then eyed Sam. "Is Brian doing okay?"

[boyking]

In all honesty, Sam didn't know how things could've turned out even if Peter and his brother had stuck with him given how distracted he'd been with Dean and the two zombies left in the house. No one had gotten seriously hurt, so he doubted they could've asked for more than that.

He shook his head. "It all worked out. Anyway, you tried."

He didn't blame Peter for wanting to go off. He would've done the same, too. Had Peter gotten to whoever it was they'd heard last night? Peter didn't quite elaborate, so it sounded like nothing much had happened at all after Peter had left. Which...did seem a bit odd. He'd have thought something should've gone down if Peter and his brother had run into the middle of zombie town like that. It was possible Peter just didn't want to say, but it didn't seem like there was much his roommate was completely unwilling to talk about.

"It's good he's back," he said. "Though I guess yesterday must've been pretty crazy for you."

He hoped Peter had at least found his brother before the dead had started to rise. There was the question, too, of whether the man's memory had been fixed or altered somehow; something must've happened after the brainwashing Peter had mentioned for his brother to remember him again. But Sam wasn't so sure Peter wanted to talk about that right now, so he kept quiet.

It took a split second for Sam to realize that Peter meant Dean. He really needed to keep Dean's aliases in order. And Dean really needed to stop using a different one on every other person.

"He's fine. I think he's just annoyed he missed out on the action."

[human-sponge.livejournal.com]

Peter didn't think "trying" counted as good enough, but it was already over with so there wasn't much point in getting any more caught up in it. It was obvious that Sam didn't have any hard feelings, so Peter left it at that.

It was true that yesterday had practically flown by, what with running into Nathan and then wandering around the town as he attempted to dump as much information on his brother as he could. After that, it had been the zombie attack, which Peter was surprised Nathan had been able to handle with such grace, now that he thought about it. His brother was the realist, so the fact that he'd been able to accept that dead bodies were coming out of the ground to attack them was pretty remarkable. Then again, it was pretty hard to deny something that was right before your eyes.

"I think it was crazier for Nathan than it was for me," he pointed out. "But yeah, it was a lot to deal with all at once, but I think I'm getting used to that." Both Landel's and the whole blowing up New York thing he'd had to deal with before all this had made Peter's threshold for stress pretty high.

He was a little bemused that Brian thought he'd missed out, although Peter most likely would have felt guilty about being dead weight if he'd been in the man's shoes last night. Maybe that was just his way of expressing that?

"Did you tell him that he should feel lucky he doesn't remember any of it?" he half-joked as he took another bite of the steak.

[boyking]

All at once seemed to be the theme for this place. Sam was no stranger to having life throw a bunch of crap at him, but he couldn't deny that it was getting harder and harder to juggle everything in a way that he hadn't before. He wasn't even sure what it was. Maybe just the fact that he was so cut off from any resources at all. It wasn't about the sheer lack of answers, it was the sheer lack of a way to look for any answers in the first place.

"Well." Sam returned to his dinner. "It sounded like you weren't exactly new to...odd occurrences."

From what Peter had told him, anyway. The abilities, messages from the future, apparently. Sam didn't know enough to really put together too much about Peter. He knew the guy wasn't a hunter, by all accounts. Someone who got caught up in something bigger, more like. He was curious, but he didn't want to pry even if he did get the occasional urge to just ask Peter to spill everything.

He smiled a little. "I'll pass that along to him tonight."

If there was any part of Dean that actually was glad for that, Sam knew it was probably overridden by him feeling guilty over it. Despite not having anything to have to feel guilty for. But that wasn't something he could shake out of his brother, that stupid sense of responsibility Dean had, the one that'd made him sell his soul.

[human-sponge.livejournal.com]

"Believe me, my life was pretty normal until a few months before I arrived here," Peter explained. Well, fairly normal. With the kind of family he had grown up under, things had never been picture perfect, but Peter was pretty sure he'd come to terms with that. Sure, he was still angry at his dad for a lot of things, but he'd forced himself to work past a lot of that after the man's death. Sometimes he wished he'd repaired things with the man earlier, but he also knew that if Arthur was still around, they would still be just as much at odds as ever.

His mother? She was a whole other story.

"I guess I adapt pretty quickly, but... it's sort of like, what else can you do, y'know?" He hadn't been willing to admit that he wasn't developing powers -- he wasn't like Nathan, who probably would have been content to hide it for as long as he could have gotten away with it. Instead, he'd completely accepted them and things had just snowballed from there.

Peter nodded at Sam's next comment and was about to jokingly ask him if had any messages for Nathan, but that was when the intercom went off...