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]

[identity profile] scalyfishman.livejournal.com 2009-09-24 08:23 am (UTC)(link)
'Intelligent and efficient' weren't two words Depth Charge generally associated with beings with around the same degree of evolutionary maturity as tadpoles, but he was willing to accept that it could happen some day. The people he'd met here hadn't been half bad.

Rather less easy to get his head around was HK's little misunderstanding. Depth Charge gave him a blank look for a moment before, bluntly and maybe a little too quickly, said, "You're really not my type. Either of you."

[identity profile] arc-wrench.livejournal.com 2009-09-24 04:17 pm (UTC)(link)
HK sighed irritably. Why were they talking about this in the first place?

...Oh, right. The bite marks. "Explanation: I think by this point, after several days of almost non-stop tormenting on the general subject from every single individual I have met, that it is understandable that I misinterpret such a statement by now."

Oh, good, this was one less person to worry about. "Statement: Good. I was never programmed for any of this and it is extremely distressing." He was an assassin droid, not a-- ...Whatever the fekk the meatbags wanted him to be!