Day 48: Courtyard

[thatdamnedninja.livejournal.com]

"I could tell you some stories," Yuffie suggested brightly, "of unquestionable legality." Illegality, that was. Petty little things like the law didn't usually mean very much to her, except for the times when she had to uphold it. Always fun for the breaking, though, the law, and messy for the clean-up. Just the way she liked it.

Her nurse looked like she wanted to rub her temples. With sandpaper. "No, thank you," she said instead. "Why don't you run along, now?" Please!, was the unspoken request. Before I spontaneously combust. Or commit various acts of violence that would have me arrested, or placed in a loony bin. Like this one. Yuffie had quite a bit of fun filling in the blanks other people left. Sometimes she did it outloud, just to see the reaction; sometimes she kept it to herself. It really, really depended.

"Don't mind if I do!"

She took off, bolting out into the Courtyard. The weather was dour, overcast and threatening rain, but Yuffie didn't care. She'd refused a coat on principle, and had found herself bargaining: Fine, fine, Plucky had conced she could go without a coat, but unless she had at least a sweatshirt on, there'd be no outside-time for her. She ran a little ways down the dirt path, then toppled herself into a series of cartwheels. Straighten, run. Cartwheel. Straighten, run, just for the sheer sake of movement, and the whip of the wind. She laughed a little giddily, checking her gait down to a jog. Gawd, Leviathan, she'd needed this. Right from the get-go, she'd needed this. Every day she spent cooped up in side, the more nervous energy she had.

Nanaki had helped, she realized. Sort of. He'd…helped. In a way. His presence and everything that was wrong with it weighed on her, for sure, but he was still Nanaki. He didn't deserve to be here, didn't deserve to be stuck in a body that he hated and couldn't use, but all the same, she found herself glad to have him.

Yuffie started to hum, as she jogged leisurely around the Courtyard. A cheery little tune, one of her favorites; no, it was her favorite. A Wutaian walking song, with the roughly translated title of Pathway After the Rain. The pace stayed even but the tune picked up, and she found herself half-singing snatches of the lyrics to herself. It felt like ages since she'd last said anything in her native tongue, at least outloud; she wrote in it all the time.

[The Doctor]

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[not-rly-fai.livejournal.com]

Yuuhi had no logical explanation for why he was still here. It still felt surreal, like a dream, or more precisely, a nightmare. Waking up in that cold metal box, slowly bleeding out on the table, weak and helpless. His eye missing, taken away or given to his own doctor. Thinking back on it still made him feel sick. Was that the price?

Things shouldn't be so simple, he'd be the first to admit. Death could so rarely be undone, even if it was what he'd been searching for. Somehow he managed to keep living, though his brother had only been given one chance. Why couldn't he give up his sight before to the witch to bring back Fai? If that was all there was to pay, he'd have gladly done it. Or was it just the result of some failed experiment. Was he to be pieced away by the doctors or would he turn on the others one night without knowing how or why? There was no way of knowing what'd happened in that empty gap of time.

"What does it change? I'm the same as always, aren't I?" he asked, giving a shrug and looking for the easy way out once more. What did Yue want him to say? Yes, he'd died and somehow come back, but what'd been done was fixed. Damaged maybe, but still whole.

He shook his head, trying to free his mind of the oppressive thoughts. It was the last thing he wanted to be thinking about. He set a careful smile on his lips, fragile now, but too frightened of what might happen if it slipped. "Anyway, I guess it rules out the basement? Or are there other rooms to explore? At least you can mark that room off the list of possible exits, right?"

[winged_moon]

Even if Fai did know what had happened he wasn't likely to say anything about it -- even now he was wriggling his way out of any direct questions or statements, trying to deflect attention away from himself. Whether he truly didn't care or was glossing over truths he didn't want to admit to Yue was never certain, and it frustrated him more than slightly. All he wanted was an answer that would make everything...well, make sense again, and those didn't seem very common around here.

"Perhaps you are the same as always," he replied, though in a tone that implied that he didn't entirely believe that no matter what he might say. He paused again, then breathed out what wasn't quite a sigh but was close to it. "The rest of us, however, aren't quite so fortunate."

It was fortunate that Sakura apparently hadn't seen what had happened there that night, and that she believed the kindly-intentioned lie she'd been told. Touya, too, seemed to have missed at least the very end. The fact remained, though, that damages went far beyond simply physical injuries -- especially in his case, where all of his injuries had simply disappeared, new and old alike.

Something like anger flickered in the guardian's eyes, though it was quiet and slow-burning; he was too tired of this to even bother with anything more than that. "It was more than just yet another dead end in exploration." The third floor was out, along with the roof. And now the basement. And all they had left now was ground that had supposedly been trampled by many. Was it even worth continuing to search, at this point?