Day 44: breakfast

[thatdamnedninja.livejournal.com]

Yuffie had died.

No, really. Seriously. She had actually died. Bleeding all over the place, making a horrid, sticky mess and scaring the hell out of Suzaku; she remembered it clearly. Kind of. Sort of. Through the blood loss, the pain, and the visions. Through Aerith's voice whispering in her ear, Cloud's stricken eyes, and her own panic. As bad nights went, it had been Bad, capital B and all the trimmings, and oh, god. She sat, trembling on the edge of her bed, eyes closed and hands pressed hard over her racing heart. The by-play between Landel—Landel!—and Lydia barely even sunk in. There was nothing in the whole world, any world, that could prepare you for something like…

Had it all been some kind of hallucination?

Had she imagined the whole thing?

No… She didn't think so. Nightmarish or not, Yuffie knew reality. But if it had been real, how was she alive now? That kind of pain wasn't something you could just cook up, was it? She thought about it all the way to the cafeteria, drifting behind her nurse without focus or intent. Maybe if she tried to stay clinical, tried to step back… But she'd never been good at that when things got personal. And every time she closed her eyes or blinked, she swore that the scenes played back to her, like an overused commercial on a crappy channel on a crappy TV, in a run-down dump of an inn that smelled like mothballs and yesterday's breakfast.

The scent of blood and damp, rotted wood clogged her nose. Disgusted, Yuffie shoved her bowl of cereal—handed to her by a clucking Plucky—off to the side so that she could melt into her chair, palm heels scrubbing against her eyes. Too much. This was… Too much. She couldn't even paste a plastic smile on her face to make herself feel better. Her usual shield, the white noise of inane babble that could filter out almost any crisis, was in tatters all around her. Five minutes, she gave herself.

Five minutes (not) to think, five minutes to get her act together, because there was no way she could let herself shatter here. No way…

[Closed to Sheena]

Comments

[tightsofmight]

[ \:D/ ILU Harvey Dent! ]

"Take a wild guess," Peter muttered darkly. "Starts with an L, ends with andel's."

Somehow, hearing the same bitterness in the man's voice was a welcome change. Peter was angry. He wanted to be angry, and this was a guy who would have no issues with that.

Although he had to wonder what had got to this guy, too. He'd had the bandages for a couple of days at least, so while the injury was recent it wasn't exactly fresh. Maybe something had happened to him last night too. Brainwashing? Or was it...

Peter paused. No one had ever mentioned dying during Special Counseling before. And the whole thing was just insane. That he would die the same way Harry did (they were never letting him move past this, were they? With him coming back and dying and being a fricking zombie), like he was being beaten to death by Norman's ghost. It made no sense. If he was back home, it would have been easy to say that it only happened to him. Because that was his story, that was how comic books worked. But this place was different. The plot seemed to blanket the entire population. Everybody was posting secret notes and losing people they loved and generally suffering under the total madness.

And Peter had already been brainwashed. That was his selected torture for the evening. Why would you add a fake death on top of that? It was too confusing to stick all together.

So maybe he wasn't the only one it happened to.

The thought was perturbing, and as of yet completely unfounded, but that was easily solved. If the night in Doyleton was any indication, the bulletin would be flooding with notes over any and all new developments. Mass death via memory lane would be weird enough to make the headlines, right? And there was this guy, too. It was possible he had died last night too, or had watched someone else die. It would take some careful fishing to not sound like a nutjob if that wasn't the case, but the guy had made the first move. He was curious about something, so maybe getting him talking wouldn't be too difficult after all.

"I don't know about you, but I'm dead sick of running the rat maze. What does Landel think he's getting with all these mind games, anyway?" Peter blew the bangs out of his eyes. "And I thought he was supposed to be dead."

[dualistic]

That had been much easier than expected. Harvey didn't know all that much about kids, seeing how he had none of his own and had only interacted with them on superficial levels when it came to campaigning. Most of the thugs he'd worked to get behind bars had been way past their juvenile delinquent years, too. Despite all that, he could guess that most kids who found themselves in a place like this might try to act like they could handle it, but probably needed someone to talk things over with.

Harvey still wasn't going to offer much in the way of comfort, but if the kid wanted to talk, then Harvey was willing to offer that distraction, provided they discussed something interesting.

It looked like both of them were at their breaking point, but when Harvey broke, he just got pissed. He didn't put himself in the sort of position to be hurt anymore -- at least not in any way that really counted. He got the feeling that this kid, on the other hand, took every blow and took it hard. Still, if he wanted to play tough, then Harvey would let him.

There was that rat maze analogy again. It reminded Harvey of his old roommate, but he quickly forgot about it; Godot was gone, and that was that. He wasn't going to get caught up in it.

"Did you really think he'd die that easy?" Harvey asked with something that could be either a smirk or a scowl. "The bad guys never just lay down and die like that." He still had to wonder, though -- was Landel really the one who was behind all of it this time? The I.R.I.S. thing may have just been a way to get them to shove the blame onto something else, but Landel had never been afraid of being the object of their hate before now.

"He seemed pretty off this morning," he pointed out, his brow furrowing. "Maybe it wasn't his mind game this time."

[tightsofmight]

"Course they don't," Peter agreed. "Things just aren't entertaining if they do."

He chewed thoughtfully on a piece of toast. Landel was back, and Jack was not quite dead, and then there was I.R.I.S. What were they supposed to do with this? There was all the garbage the robot threw out about armies and training and 'graduates' coming to visit, then when night came it spazzed out and went crazy. The brainwashing had made him completely ignore the sound of the intercom at the time, like there was nothing but silence all around. Peter could remember the screams now, and how the machine had been loading something, lines of binary. General creepiness. And he'd died after the final (or what had been final to him) broadcast. 100% complete, and with a voice Peter could only assume to be Jack's on the line.

So...daytime, the idea was military training, and nighttime was supernatural mayhem. How did the two tie together? Unless the night was meant to be part of the training, but the whole thing had been hijacked. Manual override.

"That's it, though. Whose mind game was it? From the sound of things, it had to be Jack. But he only came back to kill Landel with the...that time in Doyleton, right? Because he was dead. So how come, when all the other zombies were a no show last night, he was still sticking around? And did he even kill Landel in the first place? Did he just hold him off somewhere or what?"

This was getting a little off topic, but any info was useful info. It was all related somehow, wasn't it? They just had to figure out how, and if this guy had any theories on that, Peter was all ears.

[dualistic]

Up until this point, Harvey hadn't gotten too involved with the talk of Landel and his old colleague. In fact, that was really all the man knew about this "Jack" - or was it "Doyle"? He was a previous co-worker of Landel's, and he'd ended up dead somehow. Harvey just hadn't cared about whatever drama was playing out over their heads. He'd been far more focused on finding the Bat and then getting out of here so that he could move on to Gordon, but things had become far more personal now.

They had touched at Rachel's death, and that was one thing that he couldn't just let slide. So, while he would really rather not get caught up in a ton of analysis and chasing ideas in circles, he wanted to know who had caused him to see what he'd seen and hear what he'd heard last night.

"So, what, this guy somehow came back from the dead with all the other zombies last night, didn't he?" For the moment, he was just going to have to forget that coming back to life shouldn't have been possible. He had already seen it happen, and yet it did seem odd that this Jack guy would have had his higher mental function when all of the others had been mindless. "And we're assuming that Landel was gone yesterday because Jack grabbed him, right? In that case, yeah, it makes sense that Jack was behind the computer malfunction."

Whether that meant that he had also caused them to have those hallucinations and gave some of those people those sudden wounds that he'd heard so much about remained to be seen, though. The discrepancy in his own case was still puzzling him, but he had to wonder if it was because when it came down to it, he more or less already had Rachel's wounds. Not as severe, obviously, but...

"I don't know much about this guy, but I'd say he's a step above all those other... zombies," he said, still finding it difficult to get that word out. "I'm guessing he just held Landel hostage for a while so he could do whatever he was doing with I.R.I.S., though."

On the other hand, it could have all been some sort of ploy or act orchestrated by Landel to get them to focus all their attentions on Jack instead, but Harvey didn't want to get caught up in conspiracy theories. Then again, even what he was piecing together was pretty weak, and he knew it.

Maybe it would be best to just take all of his frustration and let it out on Batman when he finally got to be face-to-face with him again.

[tightsofmight]

"That's what I heard. It still doesn't explain what the point of the whole thing was. The override and the screaming on the intercoms," Peter shook his head. "Petty revenge? Why would Jack punish us for what Landel did?"

Of course, it was all too tempting to just blame it on the writers and be done with it. But Peter knew that he had to play the game to finish it. The story may already be scripted, but there was a path of sorts they all had to follow to get to the end. Infuriating it may be, but he had to take the zombies and the visions and the brainwashing and the freaking cast of Star Trek all in stride. There was a point to it. There was.

He refused to believe that Harry died for nothing.

Peter swirled the toast around in the puddle of syrup on his plate, suddenly finding it too repulsive to eat. This was a bad start. He could catch up at lunch, he supposed, even if his nurse was already fuming at him. At least he wasn't throwing his food at people today. He had to get credit for that.

"Did you...see anything weird last night?" he ventured. So much for subtlety. "Like a flicker out of the corner of your eye?"

[dualistic]

It wasn't that the kid was asking bad questions; it was just that Harvey didn't have much of a desire to answer them. He was still annoyed that he was getting caught up in the institute's politics when he had wanted to remain above all of that. He still refused to consider himself just another insignificant part of the patient population.

"Beats me, kid," he said with a shake of his head. Dammit, he hated the muffled feel of the bandages on one side of his mouth whenever he talked. He usually tried to forget about it, but he had little tolerance this morning. "I wasn't even around when the guy was alive, so you'd probably have to ask someone else." Someone who actually cared.

Things got more interesting when the stranger mentioned that topic that everyone was tiptoeing around. Harvey was quite willing to talk about it over the bulletin, where his face couldn't be matched with his handwriting, but he was going to have to be more careful when it came to a face-to-face chat. On the other hand, it was also preferable to get this kind of information straight from someone's mouth. It was harder to filter things when it wasn't through writing -- for most people, at least. Being the DA had taught Harvey to watch his mouth.

"More than that," he said grimly. His food remained untouched, but it didn't seem like the kid was too eager to chow down, either. "You first, though. I have seniority." He passed it off as a joke, but he'd really rather hear what the kid had to say before he started on his own account. That would allow him to determine which facts he should leave out.

[tightsofmight]

"Neither was I."

The guy didn't seem that interested in the radio drama. It was sort of irksome; this stuff was important. Could be that he didn't know anything about it, or that he just plain didn't care. Peter could sympathize, it was a lot to keep track of, but still. They weren't tossing the clues out for nothing. Ignoring them altogether was just plain dumb.

Worse, the guy had already taken to calling him 'kid'. Why was...? Ugh. He was fifteen, for cripe's sake. He wasn't a baby.

But there. That was the reaction he was looking for. Peter would be lying if he said he wasn't miffed about being pushed to go first (seniority his ass), because that doubled the potential for coming off as a total loon. Nonetheless, the man knew something, and that was looking like the only way to get more than two cents out of him. And stranger things had happened here, right? Sort of?

If they have, I wouldn't want to know about it. The last few days had been enough. Peter wasn't sure how they could top that.

He gnawed his lip a bit, studying the other man. He had the look of a skeptic, through and through, but this place could change anybody's mind. "I saw my friend. Harry. He died a couple days ago."

It wasn't the same Harry that had been at the institute, but that was a whole different thing and he did not want to get into it right now. They were the same person on the inside. Didn't matter which body he was in, he was still Harry. Slick teenager or twenty and scarred. To his surprise, he almost chuckled as he realized who he was talking to. Bandages, splitting his face in half. "You might have seen him - he had a burn," Peter circled a finger around one cheek, "All down the one side. I don't know what from, he didn't have it back home, but you know." He shrugged and continued. "Then he disappeared and I started to hear things. Not off the intercom, but like ghosts, almost. Right in your ear."

[dualistic]

So here was someone else who had been put through that insanity last night. Harvey's first response was mild shock that someone so young had been exposed to death, though it sounded like the kid's friend might have died here at the institute.

The name Harry was common enough that Harvey had brushed it off at first, but when the kid went on to describe what his friend looked like, the man had to pause and reconsider. That was right -- on his second day here, he had run into someone with both that name and that description. It had to be the same guy, and Harvey realized at a delay that according to this kid, that Harry guy had died.

He had only spoken to him that one time, and all they'd really done was talk about monsters and avoid pointing out their matching scars (Harvey's was far worse), but it was still odd to realize that someone he'd been talking to less than a week ago had gone and gotten himself killed. Sure, Harvey had heard that people died here, but this was the first time it had happened to someone he'd encountered personally.

"I met him once," he admitted, seeing no reason to keep that a secret. It seemed kind of odd that this kid and Harry had been friends, considering the age difference, but Harvey wasn't about to question it.

"But the same thing happened to me, more or less," he explained. "I saw... a friend. She was covered in wounds, but she was only there for a second. After that, I also heard things." The kid hadn't elaborated on what those "things" were, so Harvey wasn't going to either. In a way, it had been a good thing that the man had been surrounded by people while he'd been forced to hear all of that. It had caused him to repress his reaction, and he didn't want to have to feel all of that over again.

[tightsofmight]

Okay. Peter hadn't been expecting that.

He was more mentioning the scar out of unfortunate coincidence, and the new found freedom of talking about Harry without turning into a geyser every five minutes. As horrible as that sounded. He wanted to be able to remember him with some coherency. Get his act together, so he could handle what the institute dished out and mourn Harry on his own time. Not let it destroy him, basically, even if patting himself on the back for moving on seemed like some huge betrayal.

Oy vey.

It was obscenely tempting to jump all over that little statement. Ask what they said, how he'd been doing, was he hurt at the time, did he mention me, was the other Peter here. But that was ridiculous. And desperate. He'd be grasping at straws, because there was no way 'I met him once,' meant 'I had a deep connection with your friend and am truly sorry for your loss.'

The guy didn't seem like the sympathetic type in the first place. It was difficult to read him with only part of his face exposed, but he was too hard for that. Beyond pity.

Yet Peter couldn't help himself. "Really?" He hoped he didn't sound as desperate as he felt. "When did did that happen?"

All right. Death. Creepy non-death. He wasn't the only one hallucinating, then. The man was still being vague enough to drive him batty, but 'things' could definitely be taken as the sounds of their death. Or just their screams. But they'd mentioned the screaming, so that was already out there and safe to talk about, and therefore he wouldn't have to be playing all secretive about it. He would have just said that she was screaming (Who was she? Did she die in the institute? He really shouldn't pry, but he couldn't help but wonder.)

That still left out the most important detail, however. He guessed it was up to him to take the leap, since the guy was intent on being stingy.

"And that's it? Nothing...you didn't feel anything?" he ventured. His gut twisted - he resisted the urge to pat the back of his head, because he was suddenly living deja vu and could almost feel the bone cracking again. "You didn't get hurt?"

[dualistic]

It wasn't surprising that the kid perked up at that. Harvey hadn't meant to tear open a wound that had probably already been carved into last night (his wounds certainly had been), but now it looked like the kid was turning to him for... well, for something. For any information he could get about his friend, as if that would bring him back in some small way. It wasn't as if Harvey could judge, although he had the tendency to shove away anything that made him think of Rachel.

"Let's see, it was about..." Harvey rocked back in his chair for a moment, tapping his fingers against the table as he thought about it. "Four days ago?" Jesus, it felt like a lot longer than that. It made him wonder when Harry had died, and how. He'd said that he hadn't had to deal too closely with monsters, but maybe that had changed.

He would have asked for details, but he knew that he wouldn't be willing to answer any questions that the kid had about his experience -- not questions like that, at least.

The next question took him by surprise. Get hurt? What was that supposed to mean? He narrowed his eye at the kid as he tried to find some kind of response. Still, in this case the truth was really all he had to work with. "No," he said firmly. "I just kept hearing things until the night ended and I woke up, back to the grindstone."

He was so sick of this daytime facade. He would have been more open about his frustration if he didn't know that that would just cause the nurses to put him in la-la land again. He might be angry, but he wasn't stupid, and he didn't want any drugs in his system. Not when there was a chance that they were being doped up on something already.