damned_institute | Day 47: Sun Room [2nd shift]

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Day 47: Sun Room [2nd shift]

Cloud knew he should be taking the opportunity to check out the rec field during the day. The fresh air would be a welcome change from the crowded stuffiness the Institute usually provided, and he would have a chance to scope out the area when it wasn't all under the cover of darkness. When offered a choice, however, he remained in the sun room. He told himself it was so that he could watch the bulletin, him still being fairly new and needing all the information he could get, but the thought rang hollow.

The real reason he was here, he knew, was because he would be out there. Maybe it was weak of him, but he needed a chance to breathe. Ever since he'd arrived it had been nothing but one shock after another, and seeing Zack standing in the cafeteria that morning talking to Aerith had been the final card that caused his tower to crumble. He needed to just sit back somewhere out of the way and start rebuilding.

Being able to watch the bulletin from here was just a perk. Cloud made himself comfortable on one of the sofas, watching people come and go but not really paying attention to them. He took the time to try and rate this on a scale of the biggest messes he'd ever gotten thrown into.

(for Sheena)

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Kurt had a rude awakening from his book when someone nearly fell straight into his lap. With a startled yell, Kurt threw the book in the air and scampered up the back of the chair.

He didn't know who had suddenly fallen towards him, he'd been too absorbed in his book. However, he wasn't about to just sit there while someone beat him up again. The book landed next to the chair and Kurt flinched--just then realizing that he'd thrown it. From the back of the chair, Kurt peered at the person who had nearly fallen on him.

Slowly, his eyebrows raised as he got a better look at the person. Kurt remembered him. He came to his... and Kon's... room one night, hadn't he? And he'd asked that strange question about if his body was custom or something like that. His eyebrows came down and he scrutinized the guy, seemingly not bothered that he himself was perched on the back of a chair.

"Sorry!" Scourge quickly rolled over and looked up at the ceiling, back the way he'd come. He really hoped he hadn't fallen over anyone too big or too mean. One hand went out, looking for the floor and finding the leg of the chair instead. He slid his hand up to the armrest and used to lever himself carefully to his feet, his other hand held up in case of anyone trying to run into him.

"Didn't see you there. Sorry," he said to the chair, facing Kurt's general direction but not actually looking at him. That yell sounded sort of familiar. More scared than scary, which was a good sign.

Kurt tilted his head a little, watching the guy struggle to get up. It looked like he wasn't quite used to standing or something--or he was nervous that Kurt was going to throttle him for falling over the mutant. That was a funny image right there. Kurt couldn't hurt someone even if he wanted to, especially someone who was apologizing as much as this guy was.

"Hey, it's okay," Kurt said, climbing off the back of the chair and picking up his book. "You okay? You're not hurt, right?"

No doubt about it... this was the guy who'd come to Kon's 'clinic'. Unfortunately, Kurt couldn't remember him giving his name. Which... might be better, given that Kurt liked to keep his human form and mutant form separate, identity-wise.

Definitely hurt, but not by the fall. Scourge was about to make his excuses and back out (and probably fall right over someone else), when he finally recognized that surprised voice.

"Hey! You're that guy with the fuzzy blue body aren't you?" Scourge pointed an accusing pink nail at Kurt and shifted, standing up a bit straighter. "Where have you been?" It figured, the one day he was blind was the day the amazingly visually noticeable organic showed his furry face. Completely unfair--this place gives him a tail and all Scourge gets is needles to the chest.

Kurt stared at the pink polished finger being pointed at him. How in the world had this guy pinpointed him as the 'fuzzy blue body'? Especially when he looked normal right now?

...and why wasn't he looking right at Kurt?

"I-I'm not. I'm not fuzzy or blue," Kurt said, struggling to find his voice. He dropped it way down, because if the guy could see who Kurt was even without the fur, there wouldn't be much point in arguing. "At least not during the day," he muttered, hopefully so only the pink-nailed guy who wasn't really looking at him could hear.

Scourge stumbled a halfstep forward and caught the arm of Kurt's chair. He stared down at where Kurt's voice was coming from, his movements still very careful and stiff.

"What do you mean? I know you're the same guy, you sound the same. How'd you manage to hide it?" And why, for that matter? If Scourge was fuzzy and blue he'd be flaunting it like a full body manicure around here.

Kurt was starting to piece things together. For one, he'd spent at least some time around Matt, and he'd figured out Matt was blind in short order mostly because Matt wouldn't look directly at him. Because the first time they met, Matt talked over his head--to an older, taller version of himself. Second, the man who'd fallen over him was fumbling for things to hang on to, and still wasn't exactly meeting his eyes. And lastly, this man had identified Kurt by his voice, which made sense he supposed. People were more willing to believe their eyes.

"Yeah, I'm the same guy," Kurt said, putting his hands gently and slowly on the other man's shoulders to steady him. He must have been blinded recently--Matt never walked like this. "A bracelet I have on hides it during the day, it looks like a bracelet that tells paramedics that I'm allergic to penicillin, even though I'm not. And I hide it because not everybody likes the look of me when I'm blue."

He paused briefly, wondering if he should even breach the subject. "I mean... you're blind, right? That's why you can't see that somebody beat me up last night?"

Scourge flinched away from the touch, then steadied again and grabbed one of Kurt's hands. He ran his fingers over it, felt the space between thumb and forefinger and then groped Kurt's forearm. All squish but no fuzz.

"Just today," he admitted. "The humans messed around with my optical sensors or something." A few more touches to Kurt's arm, just to make sure Kurt wasn't messing with his head. "Sounds like we both had pretty stupid nights." He could understand being jealous of Kurt's body, beating him up for it seemed ridiculous. Wouldn't you want to make an ally of someone so nimble, so protected?

Slag, he probably looked ridiculous like this, unable to tell the slightest detail about someone. Scourge tried in vain to meet Kurt's eyes agai.

Somehow, the thought that it hadn't been caused by a run-in with a monster only made Kurt feel even more sympathy for this newly blinded person. He must have been experimented on--robbed of his sight that way. Matt had been blind since he was born, hadn't he? He was used to this sort of thing, which was why he hadn't tripped over chairs or run into doorways.

"Yeah..." Kurt said, letting the blind man confirm that there currently wasn't any fuzz on his arm or hand. "Hey, did you want to sit down? You seem a little unsteady on your feet right now."

He could also tell that he was trying to look at him, and was just a little off. "Erm... here," Kurt awkwardly tilted the man's head until he was looking comfortably at Kurt. "I'm right here, but I'm a little short so not everybody's here," he said with a small smile.

"Stop groping me." Scourge scowled and knocked Kurt's hands aside. "I'm blind, not a human's child." He could tolerate Piper doing this to him but not some random stranger. Piper, he knew, wasn't secretly laughing where he couldn't see.

He kicked backwards with his feet until he found the front of the chair and sat down in it, glaring upward at the no-longer-fuzzy human. "If you don't want the body, switch with me," he said, trying to appeal to Kurt's stupidity. "The blindness might not even last, Piper says humans recover from this stuff. I can even run stuff for you, pay you for it."

Kurt drew his hands back, looking a little hurt. He'd just been trying to help, but...

"Switch with...?" Kurt stared at the man, not exactly sure how this would be at all possible. For all intents and purposes it should have been impossible, but the way he was just flippantly throwing around Kurt selling him his body... Did he actually think that was possible?

"Euh... no offense, your body seems great and all, but I'd rather not... you know. Sell mine." This was arguably the weirdest conversation he'd had here. Hands down.

"What about if I get rid of the blindness?" Scourge persisted. "It's a good solid body. No one's beat me up for having it. Only a little damage and it's mostly healed up, doesn't impair motion at all."

He looked up pleadingly at Kurt, firmly convinced that the blue organic was holding out on him for some unknown reason. He'd gotten into one new body, he had to know how to repeat the process. "Or at least show me how to get one for myself. I'm in pretty good with Lord Recluse, I can arrange some good stuff for you." Whatever the heck that meant. Scourge was mostly putting out scrap now, anything just to get Kurt bargaining.

Kurt looked more and more uncomfortable as the man continued to plead to trade places with him. And, as impossible as it sounded, after the events of last night it was looking like a pretty good deal. Not getting beat-up all the time, not being stared at or pointed at or whispered about, not being a mutant anymore... Sure he'd age like... ten years, but maybe it would be worth it.

"Look man..." Kurt began, trying to sound as sympathetic as possible. The blind guy sounded really desperate, he didn't want to be mean or anything. "Even if we could trade bodies--which... I don't think we can, it's...

"I mean, it's like having a puppy," he said, wondering if this analogy would even work. "At first, it's cute and adorable and wants to play all the time, but soon you realize that it's not just cute, it's a responsibility. You have to take care of the puppy.

"You'd have to deal with being made fun of, chased out of towns and churches, tied to stakes because the townspeople think that's the only way to get rid of you..." he found himself twisting his fingers together worriedly. "Then it's not so cool.

"But, if you wanted one like mine, it's caused by a genetic mutation. You'd have to try to mutate your DNA, which I don't know much about beside the fact that it's really dangerous."

Scourge listened to Kurt ramble on with a slightly tilted head and a confused expression directed at Kurt's stomach. As far as he could tell all of Kurt's problems were self-imposed. Who would want to be a human if there was any way out of weak, trembling flesh that broke at the slightest jab of a needle?

When the blue idiot had finished, Scourge sat back with his arms folded. "Dangerous, yeah, okay. I don't like dangerous, so I'll hold off until I know if there's a safer way of doing it. But your other stuff is just slag to me."

He held up one hand, displaying his oft-mocked pink fingernails. The edges of the nails were chipped and broken from where he'd spent the night trying to claw his way through the arms of his chair. "I already get made fun of because I don't fit in with the humans. We only go to town once a week, I don't care about puppies, and I have no idea what a church is but it's probably not anywhere interesting anyway. I don't plan on staying organic forever, but if I'm going to be organic I'd rather be one with a better chance of living. And blue."

Kurt didn't deserve his blue.

"A better chance of living...?" Kurt repeated, raising an eyebrow. "You think I'm some kind of super-human? No way--I get bruises and broken bones just like you do now. People pull my tail and it hurts. The first time I tried to teleport while here, I couldn't stay on the ceiling my head was spinning so badly. And when I fell off the ceiling and landed on Kon? That hurt too.

"It may surprise you," Kurt continued, now having lost any desire to not cushion the blind man's feelings. "But I'm human. Mutated, but human. I can be killed as easily as you can. If you want a body that's hard to kill, you should talk to Wolverine, not me. Though he wouldn't be able to help you with the blue."

This was incredibly aggravating. It felt like this man was totally blowing off all of the intolerance and hate Kurt had dealt with his whole life. Saying that it didn't matter because he was already dealing with the same things. In the form of nailpolish and a strange way of looking at things ('organic'? Didn't know what a church was?). But he didn't have nightmares of being burned at the stake. He wasn't beaten last night with a flashlight, despite his best attempts to explain that he wasn't going to hurt his attacker. He hadn't been driven from town after town in Germany. It was enough to make Kurt just walk away without telling the blind guy he was leaving.

But... the grass was always greener, or something. This man had been recently blinded, he probably thought that any situation was better than the one he was in. And maybe right now Kurt's situation was better than being blind, but it hadn't always been.

That was it. Kurt lost all right to complaining once his list of complaints included 'warping was sort of hard the first time'.

"You can teleport." Scourge gritted his teeth, feeling quite ready to strangle Kurt if he ever got the opportunity to figure out where his neck was. "Why is it always the stupid people who get the good powers? You and Skywarp and not a single capacitor's worth of sense between you." That and Skywarp was dead, but it wasn't because he could teleport.

It wasn't as if Scourge planned on keeping the body. Yeah, he could see why looking weird might get you laughed at, but Scourge had always looked weird. Thick wide wings and a beard weren't exactly the standard of Decepticon beauty. Humans coming and chasing him off for it wasn't something he could believe, it seemed far too ludicrous to a mech whose culture praised strength over paint job.

The tracker's fingers flexed, his fingernails tracing lines over the fabric of the chair arm. "So what if you're still human, we're all stuck being human," he snarled. "Anything that's even a half-step away from being human's a step up."

"Stupid people?" Kurt couldn't believe what he was hearing. Someone had genuinely just called him stupid. Stupid for what? For not running around Bayville blue and fuzzy, just waiting to be pummeled? For not enjoying being chased with farming implements? For letting blatant anger and fear get to him? For feeling like he'd never have a friend who would understand that he wasn't a monster?

"I am not a half-step away from being human," Kurt snapped, hands balling into fists. "I am one gene away from the human genome. That's not even a step, that a gene. And for being human, you sure don't seem to like them very much.

"Why Kon would want to involve himself with someone like you is beyond me," Kurt continued, officially having lost his temper. At this point, he was resorting to taking digs. "He didn't understand why I was so nervous, but he at least never called me stupid."

"Of course I don't like humans!" Scourge snapped back, rising unsteadily to his feet. "I hate being human! My wings are gone, I can barely see even when I'm not blind, I'm small and frail and people can just come up and do horrible things to me whenever they feel like it."

It was the last one that was the worst. Landel's could do anything it wanted to him, with monsters or with needles, at any moments of day or night. The only power Scourge had left to him was the power to run and hide and find bigger people to fight his battles for him. And here Kurt was flaunting that power right in his face, taunting him by telling him how bad off he'd be with the ability to escape through solid walls.

"And you're clinging to it like the best thing in the world. You're beyond stupid, you're right into fragging crazy." Scourge's frayed nails dug into his palms as he glared at the ungrateful organic. His arm swept out, making a blind grab for Kurt that was made even more clumsy by anger.

"Yeah, well, welcome to being human!" Kurt said, throwing out his arms. "People do things to you whenever they feel like it. It doesn't mean they're right or wrong, it's free will! And you've just stopped fighting not because you're human now--but because you feel powerless! Newsflash: everyone does! Humans or non-humans, we're all struggling here!"

Kurt may have been intending to say more, but he was caught off-guard by the wild grab. Part of him was snorting at the futile effort--what blind person could grab him? Especially when they were newly blinded? Matt he had no doubt could turn Kurt inside out without any trouble, but this guy? Who was talking to Kurt's stomach? Not likely. Kurt would just step ba--

Too late. The blind guy had grabbed his upper arm. Probably not the intended target, but he still had a grip on Kurt.

"Hey, let go!" Kurt shouted, thrashing in an effort to get away.

Scourge was almost surprised to find that he'd managed to actually grab Kurt, it had been a symbolic gesture at best. He clung to the human's arm with both hands, fingernails digging into his skin. "Maybe if I claw your optics out you'll get some perspective on the issue."

No, the nurses would find him long before that. He didn't want to spend the rest of the day blind and drugged. Instead, Scourge made a grab for Kurt's wrist, trying to find that bracelet he'd been talking about and tear it off him.

If Kurt was so afraid of people seeing his power, then Scourge was going to spite him and expose it to the whole slagging institution.

"Ow!" Kurt yelped, trying to tug the hand off of his arm. He was starting to get a little panicked--the threat to 'claw his optics out' was not a pleasant one. Even if he hadn't said 'claw your eyes out', Kurt could put two and two together. He'd pissed Scourge off and now he was being threatened and grabbed. Possibly beaten up again.

Kurt tried to pull his arm away, but given that his arm was being gripped tightly already, it wasn't hard for the blind man to find the bracelet (http://www.medicaltags.co.uk/charms/large-medical-bracelet.jpg) that had slipped down to the middle of his forearm.

"Let go!" Kurt shouted again. What was this guy trying to pull?!

Scourge's fingertips brushed cool metal, some kind of chain fastened (welded?) around Kurt's wrist. That had to be the bracelet. He hooked his fingers into it and tried pulling it down the human's arm, catching on his wrist.

It had to come off somehow. Kurt wouldn't leave it on all the time no matter how much he complained about his blue form.

"OW!" Kurt shouted, wondering if this man was not only blind, but deaf. Couldn't he at least realize that he was hurting Kurt?

Of course, he couldn't see that the bracelet didn't have a clasp, and Kurt had tried to get it off before without any results. The links were smooth without any weld-lines, and it wouldn't go over his hand no matter how small he tried to make it. And this man was trying to get it off of him, and hurting him in the process.

"Stop!" Kurt took hold of his own arm and tried to pull it away from Scourge. "It doesn't come off, I've tried to get it off! There's no clasp on it, it doesn't go over my hand!"

Scourge kept running his fingers over the bracelet, looking for some sort of weak point or clasp. When he felt none he finally released Kurt's arm and shoved the human away from him with another disdainful growl.

"So it just doesn't come off," he spat. "So you just stay like that all day, all nice and human and weak. Must be perfect for a pathetic organic like you." He pointed his finger in Kurt's direction, backing away slightly just in case the human decided to attack him, face showing mixed hatred and fear. "If I ever get my body back I'm going to come back and burn this place down to the bedrock."

Sometimes violent fantasies were the only thing that got him through the shift. They were the only place he could feel strong.

"Mr. Cho, an attitude like that will do nothing to help with your recovery." Alerted by the younger man's shouting, the nurse had approached to find out what was going on and put a stop to it, and catching the tail end of the comment left her looking even more displeased than she had been before. She frowned at him a moment longer, then turned her back on the man, leaving him to the impassive stares of the orderlies who had accompanied her over. They didn't have to do anything to make a threat, even during the daytime; just their presence alone was adequate.

"And Kurt, are you all right?" she continued, her expression softening into concern as she glanced at his arm. "Did he hurt you at all?" It looked like the man had been trying to take away the medical bracelet Kurt wore; it didn't make any sense, but a lot of the behaviors of the patients here didn't.

Day 47: Sun Room [2nd shift]

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