damned_institute | 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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Kio hurt for the other man. He wished he had a lolly to offer, it seemed to get people talking. "I've been here over a week now." He didn't seem to be getting any better. The therapy sessions were a joke and more often than not, he couldn't remember going from one place to the next. "The nights are bad, but if you're with good people, they can be helpful."

He munched a little on his toast. Bland, like everything else here. "You know, there are good parts about this place. The free food. Company. You ignore the nurses for long enough, and it feels like a holiday. What do you like to do in your spare time

It felt like a silly question to ask, but he needed to get the man talking. To make him stop thinking about where he really was.

More squishy shuffling.

"I like to read, mostly," Abe mumbled, head bowed over his breakfast. Three books a day on a good day, and if he had someone to turn the pages on a regular basis. "And swimming, I suppose. I used to be better at it."

It wasn't the walls that bothered him. He'd lived most of his life in a gilded cage, one with the gilt taken off wasn't so bad. He was even socializing now, with actual humans who didn't have any idea what he had once been. But after last night...he'd died. He'd welcomed it. And here he was alive again and this idiot was asking about his hobbies as if nothing was wrong. Did he really not know what had happened or was he feigning shallowness?

So... this was going to be ridiculously awkward, wasn't it? "We have a Library here." It sounded so lame, as if he were reciting from a Landel's Visiting Guide for the Mentally Challenged. "Um... not so sure about swimming, but we do have showers twice a week."

Kio shuffled around. It was like a great big sword was hanging over their heads and no one could mention it, lest it fall on them. "Look, if you don't want to talk about it, sure. Fine. No one wants to say why they're here. But I can help. I want to help." He sighed. "It's just so hard when no one wants to be helped." If only he had known what had happened during the night, then perhaps he could have actually done with more compassion.

All right, perhaps he could manage some anger this morning. Just for...whoever this was. Nameless.

"I'm very sorry for inconveniencing you," Abe hissed in the coldest of tones, stabbing his french toast. "Perhaps someone who hasn't bled to death in the past twenty-four hours would be more welcoming."

He brought the knife down on his french toast and took a defiant bite of it, still looking away from the man next to him. The outburst was probably unwarranted, Nameless only wanted to make him feel better. But it felt horrifically patronizing and reminded him of the BPRD psychologist who'd tried to tease some measure of analysis out of him for a paper no one would read.

Kio gaped. He had not met with this kind of hostility since he'd tried talking to Soubi and-- wait, what? Bled to death?

"You don't look like someone who's bled to death." He sounded uncouth, but he was genuinely curious. "All I know is that the Institute blew up last night. Well, by the looks of it now, you couldn't tell, but when can you ever be sure. I didn't notice anything else strange, so... what happened?"

He tried to make himself less obtrusive and finished his breakfast hastily, proceeding to sip on his orange juice. It was obvious that whatever this man had gone through, it had been traumatic and long. On his first night. A double-whopper. Kio hoped that if he truly opened up, he could be helped.

Abe sucked in air through pursed lips, calming himself. Ignorance, not malice. His hands fiddled with the silverware as he resisted the urge to wave them about in his usual expressive manner.

"You must not have been reading the bulletin board. There were a number of incidents last night," he said, trying to calm his voice to the tone of a gentle but distant teacher. "Many people, myself included, found themselves hallucinating images of a dead loved one and then experiencing their death as if they were that person. In my case, I was stabbed in the stomach and bled to death. Upon awaking I, like the others, found myself alive and without any sign that I had ever been wounded." Abe made it sound clinical and clean. It was his best coping mechanism, to break something into pure analysis and logic and thus render it unable to terrify him.

He was having a hard time making it work when the monster stabbed at his heart rather than his flesh. Scarecrow-like, he'd barely known he had one to hurt.

Oh. Oh. So this is what he got for not paying attention. Still, Kio couldn't exactly fault the man, it wasn't like he had had the best of nights. He was suddenly feeling very foolish indeed.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, looking at the table. Death of a loved one. Kio hadn't been affected because no one he loved was dead. Not yet, anyway. First zombies and now loved ones dying everywhere. Landel was sure on a roll. Placing his hand over the stranger's, Kio felt it right to say something. "I hope that the one you lost is in a better place now." Fabricated. Lies. Lies people needed to hear. "I would not wish such a fate on anyone and it hurts me that someone so new to this place had to go through it like that. Their death will not go unremembered. By carrying their memory in this way, you are giving them the best possible homage. A sign of great respect indeed."

He didn't know what else to say. What can you say to someone who lost a loved one and then experienced their death? The human language did not contain words for such grief.

Abe tensed, jaws clenching together with the effort of not picking up the man and throwing him across the room into a tray of reconstituted eggs. All that and how he was being patronized by some idiot who'd probably never known grief and death so intimately. He twisted his wrist sharply and trapped the intruding hand in a tight grip.

Kaido Kio. Artist. Nothing of worth. The flashing headache only served to invigorate him.

"You didn't even know who she is," Abe hissed, the fingers of his other hand curling around the knife. His voice grew louder as he spoke, filling with uncharacteristic hate. "How dare you say what would be the best homage to her memory, how dare you say anything about her as if you knew what I've gone through? You aren't worthy to know her name, let alone talk about her like she was some mere...human!" He spat out the last word like it was a worm in his eggs. After their exposure and her death, he'd started to see why Nuada considered them mindless parasites at best.

Day 44: breakfast

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