damned_institute | Day 44: breakfast

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Day 44: breakfast

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]

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"I'll come to you. Walking the halls without a light or a weapon probably isn't a good idea." He finally made himself stop torturing his breakfast to death and eat a bite, listening to Edgeworth in observant silence. When he finished, he shook his head, answer already on his tongue.

"I wanted to," he replied simply. "Even- even last night. I mean, don't get me wrong. I never want to do that again. But-" His voice dropped appreciably, but he still forced himself to look over, to make eye contact and hold it. He didn't want to leave a shadow of a doubt that he was telling the truth. "-I didn't want you to be alone." He hoped he was imagining how much that statement revealed: the long almost-silence, just him and the body and the screaming on the intercom; how impossible it had been to finally stop clinging to the heavy shape wrapped in blood-soaked cloth; the way he'd kept whispering, even knowing he wasn't going to get an answer. He hoped it came out simpler and more genuine than that - the way it really was at the heart of things, and had been since he'd seen that newspaper photograph, years and years ago, that had struck him as nothing but indescribably lonely.

"That's fair," Miles answered, nodding once. He really didn't feel like eating anything, but there were still things he had to do that day, and getting through it all would be hard enough without trying to do it without something in his stomach. He settled on eating some of the fruit first, figuring it would be easier.

"Thank you," he said, after a moment. Sometimes that was all that need to be said; Miles could imagine how much that really meant. It wasn't just being there then, but...all of this. From the beginning, from that one case which seemed like an eternity ago, until now. "I still don't think I'm worth the trouble, but...thank you."

He let out a laugh - the kind that would have been tears if not for the fact that he felt as if he couldn't produce anymore. "I...well. I think I still have your jacket. I had it this morning, at least..."

"My-? Oh, yeah." Right. That jacket. The jacket that needed no commentary, since it wasn't too difficult to figure out what it had been doing on Edgeworth's person at the end of the night. The jacket that, if considered too closely, could send them right back into morbid brooding until the end of the shift.

Accordingly, Phoenix seized onto the first change of topic he could. "Did you want to try to get anything done tonight? I'd like to find out if there's anything that explains last night, even though . . ." He let out a deep breath, running his hand through his hair. Last night was inexplicable. He knew better than to assume that the dead were permanently out of the picture, but that didn't change the fact that they were dead. Miles had- well, he wasn't going to think about that too vividly, because he needed to finish at least half of this plate and avoid his nurse hounding him about food until the end of time, but there'd been no mistaking it. There was no way he should have been walking around today in one solid piece and with an apparently normal blood volume. The fact that he was even accepting this fact and moving on with life was something that Phoenix could only credit to his uncanny ability to suspend disbelief for the sake of problem-solving.

"It all comes back to the bigger perception issue. The time lapses, the auto-translation, the sudden visual shifts like in Doyleton, and now whatever happened last night." He munched on a piece of bacon, frowning. "I don't know how to start in on it. No matter how misleading any evidence I found was, at home I at least knew that I could trust my own senses."

"Yes, that one. But, well, it had actually been comforting to find it this morning. I can't explain it and don't really think either of us wants to think too deeply about it, but..." Miles decided he had said enough then, and set himself to thoroughly chewing a piece of the french toast before saying anything else. He followed that up with another sip of juice, and then decided it was safe to talk without stepping on any of the possible land mines this conversation was still riddled with.

"I'd also like to find out if there's anything at all that explains last night. Fortunately, there's been some investigative work already begun; at least one person is working on mapping out where everyone was when they experienced the...turn of events, and another is working on putting together patient accounts. My own story overlaps with others', and I'm hoping that correlation continues to hold out," he said, nodding once. He wished he'd remembered to take his journal with him when he had left the room, but under the current circumstances, forgetting it was the least of his worries.

"I'll get what I can from the board, but I think that you're right. This is one piece of what's been a steadily evolving puzzle. If it was just one subset of the patient population, we could narrow it down further, but this has affected too many people to be an effect of either the sleep studies or the brainwashing. It's something bigger, but that's not the only thing I'm curious about. The last normal voice on the intercom last night, before the...incident, was that of a man I thought was dead - one Alec Doyle."

"That was Doyle?" Phoenix had suspected, but the confirmation was appreciated. "That's good to know. What I'd like to know now is who wants us to hear the two of them fighting, and why."

It wasn't a new theory, but Phoenix still elaborated, arms crossed on the table. "There's too much control over what we do and don't sense here to even start to explain the old 'accidentally left the intercom running' trick they keep pulling. Never mind that everyone gets a radio as soon as they get here, even though, as far as I can tell, the only use it ever finds is as an alternate intercom for these supposed enemies of Landel's."

"It was," Miles nodded. "I must say, though, his was the last voice I ever expected to hear again. His death was confirmed over the intercom. The message left little room for doubt, which leads to a new set of questions. Who, exactly, are the men on the intercom and the radio? It's possible that one, or even both of them, have been lying about their identities. The second: who is this 'Jill' that took over on the radio, what's happened to her, and what's her role in all of this?"

He was thinking out loud at this point, letting the ideas roll off his tongue as fast as they formed in his head, but thinking about theories and thoughts behind this place was as much a coping mechanism than it was anything else. It was actually easier to think rapid-fire thoughts about the powers that be than it was to think about last night in direct terms.

"There's the possibility that 'Jill' doesn't actually exist, per se. We know they have access to some extremely high-level technology in this place; it's entirely possible she's a computer program, like that 'IRIS' last night was. That could explain her periodic absence and the fact that not all of her clues have been accurate." A moment's pause for a sip of juice, then he continued.

"And, of course, you're right. They have too much control over what we perceive for this to be a simple trick of leaving the intercom running. The question, then, is why do it in the first place? I could understand it easily enough when the intercom messages served only to taunt us and the radio messages were accurate clues, but it's grown into something more than that. The problem is that we can't see the forest because we're stuck inside a grove of tall trees. There's some bigger puzzle, but I can't make it out clearly."

"Once you start questioning who is and isn't real, that gets slippery," Phoenix countered, gesturing with his fork. "What about Landel himself? From what I've heard, he's only been seen once, and nobody's actually managed to touch him. With how unbelievable everything here is, you could make a case for nothing being real except for what we remember from home." He paused, then snorted, a wry smirk worming its way onto his face. "Which is funny, considering that's the one thing they're trying to convince us is fake."

He propped his chin on his palm, frowning thoughtfully. "I talked with one of the other patients awhile back, about possibly tracing where the radio is broadcasting from. That's the best lead I have for trying to figure out Doyle and his people, but even then, getting the machinery and setting everything up would be a huge project. I'm not sure any of the clubs would be willing to pick it up."

Edited 2009-09-22 00:54 (UTC)

"You could make that case," Edgeworth admitted, nodding a bit hesitantly. "But I don't think so. It's true that no one's been able to touch him, but...I don't want to doubt my own senses more than I already am. I'm one of the few witnesses left, I'll admit, but..."

Miles drifted back off into silence again. That hadn't gone as planned, and if logic was only going to lead to slippery slopes like that, then what in the world could there be to trust? "Though that's probably their plan in the end - throw enough things at the wall, see what sticks." He sighed again, frowning deeply.

"I don't think that's feasible, either. The machinery alone would be hard enough to get, and that's not even beginning to mention the setup and power issues."

"Right. That's why it never got far past the 'talking' stage." The weapons-makers probably had enough work on their hands making actual swords and knives and everything. Just commissioning a couple of enormous antennae would have been a nightmare. The institute probably had a few geniuses who could make the rest of the electronic equipment, but getting it out into the field . . . ? Not with all of the monsters everywhere.

So much for that brilliant idea.

There just weren't enough solid pieces to fix this problem. That was the real issue, and even though the Institute was eerily obliging in letting them keep their ill-gotten gains, there wasn't anything out of the ordinary about them. "I guess we're back to looking through assorted rooms, then. Unless you have a better idea."

"Right. Of course, there's the manual exploration route. Someone's finally gotten up some definite information on the basement, and I'll be keeping an eye on that to see if there are any clues as to possible locations for our magical disappearing head doctor and DJ," he said, the last part tinged with sarcasm.

"I don't think hitting assorted rooms will do us much good; it needs to be a more targeted approach. I've looked in one of the doctors' offices at night and there was nothing of much interest there, but there are some upstairs file rooms, and I haven't made it up to patient possessions yet. So it's possible there might be something there."

Knowing this place, they'd put in something ridiculous, like glow-in-the-dark prophylactics, but...

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Day 44: breakfast

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