damned_institute | Day 23: Lunch

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Day 23: Lunch

The second the intercom sounded, while the man on the intercom was still talking, Ashton pulled himself off the couch in the Music Room and slowly made his way to the door. He walked, glided even, as if he were a ghost in a dream. The nurses had already filed up to escort the patients to the lunchroom, and one bustled over to walk Ashton those few feet from one room to another.

"You're not looking very well, Mr. Pritchett," she said cheerfully. "Didn't you enjoy your shower?"

Ashton replied with a small, forced smile, then shook his head. He didn't feel like talking now. Though the nurses were pushy and downright annoying, he figured he owed this one at least a little explanation. They didn't know - or didn't believe - what went on after dark, but he owed them the benefit of the doubt. "Bad day," he decided on telling her.

Bad day indeed. The showers and the music had done nothing for his nerves. But then again, what could get that graphic image out of his head?

He glided ghostily through the taco line and settled on two chicken and bean tacos, with chips, a scoop of guacamole, two churros on the side, and a glass of apple juice. He wasn't used to this sort of food (save the juice) and he wasn't even sure he'd eat it, but the chances were high that he'd be able to pass it off on someone.

He was on the verge of tears again, too. What he would have given to just sit down next to a barrel and eat a hamburger.

Thank goodness the cafeteria was bare just now, too. It left all the corner tables open, the tables that shouted 'Don't talk to me, I'm brooding over here.' He sat at one, pushed his food a little away from him, and buried his head in his arms.

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Jack was more than happy to let the nurse guide him through the lunch line. He even flirted with her as he was getting his tacos together.

Then he had to decide where to sit. It was tempting to bother Lyta some more, just because he wanted to know what her big problem was. He was curious. But then he spotted the young man from the showers, which brought up other questions...

He sat himself down across from him. "Your stalker is certainly an odd fellow," he said, conversationally.

Despite spending most of his life living in Japan, Aidou had never had trouble stomaching (or mastering the art) of foreign food. The Mexican cuisine here wasn't terribly well-prepared, but it was better than the servants back home could have done.

Aidou had been multitasking between covering a yawn with one hand and folding one of his many tacos more tightly with the other, as someone sat down across him from him. He realized who it was with a stark jolt when he glanced up through his bangs. He didn't quite flush, but it was a near thing.

"Do you mean yourself, or the ugly seven foot brute?"

Jack took a bite of his taco and gave Aidou a pleasant smile. "Well, let's see if my mere presence makes you flee," he said. "Then we'll both have an answer, eh?"

If Aidou just kept his long-term goals fixed in his mind's eye, it was easy to prevent his eye roll from completing a full rotation.

Shiki had had a stalker for the longest time, and he'd gotten rid of the guy through nothing more than his complete lack of interest in anything said or done. He hadn't done more than blink impassively when the poor fool had tried to scale the outside of the modelling agency just to see him. Which was how Shiki approached life in general, but it was the idea that counted.

"I accept most stalkers with open arms. They're more interesting than the usual fan." Aidou shrugged. "Do what you want."

Jack grinned. "Oh, you don't want me to do what I want," he said. He ate another bite of his taco. "Someone who's scared to be naked in front of other men certainly isn't ready for that leap." More taco. "So it is the Alucard guy. He is a little... loomy, isn't he. What's got him plastered so tenderly to your ass, hm?"

His expression didn't change, but his cheeks reddened with a mixture of irritation and embarrassment. 'Aidou' and 'diffident' didn't belong in the same sentence, unless the word was preceded by 'was not'. Still, no one had spoken to him like that before.

"I'm not the faint-hearted type - and I'm afraid you wouldn't be ready for my fetishes," Aidou said, not missing a beat. It wouldn't be hard to tell he was speaking the truth. "You wouldn't be the first toy I wore out."

Sexual encounters with humans was certainly nothing Aidou was interested in, but it never hurt to set the record straight. And he wasn't the type to back down either.

When Alucard was brought up, however, Aidou blew out a sigh, ruffling his hair, before beginning to eat in between careful wipes of a napkin. Why did Alucard have to come up every single time someone said something, in one way or another? It was seriously pissing him off! Aidou was beginning to feel less like a Night Class representative washing his hands clean of him, and more like the neurotic Lady Macbeth from the humans' Shakespeare plays.

Aidou smiled, though. Rather slyly. "He wants what he can't have. And he gets violent when he can't have it." The claw marks on his face were still an angry red against his fair skin. "In fact, I'm surprised you're here with me now. I hear he's quite receptive to amorous advances. I would've thought you'd get along well."

It was all partly true, anyway. With the exclusion of Alucard being nuts, and dimwitted on top of that.

Jack smirked at Aidou's mention of fetishes. "Oh yeah? Try me." He'd slept his way around the universe, in several different time periods. He sincerely doubted that the boy would be able to come up with anything that off the wall, though it'd be fun to see him try. "If we're going to start making remarks about toys, you should tell me your name. I like to know who's talking dirty to me."

So Alucard was the one that had hit the boy. Jack filed that away as a fact of note. "He's really not my type," Jack said. Which wasn't actually true. Most everything was his type. But he'd been more interested in flirting with Wesker.

"Don't tempt me. I might take you up on it," Aidou returned, smiling impishly. Although what was going through Jack's mind and what was going through Aidou's mind might have differentiated somewhere between bedroom antics and general food. Propping his head against his hand, he went back to eating. He was too sleepy to be annoyed at having to introduce himself all the time. "My name is Aidou Hanabusa, and I don't speak dirty, just honestly. I would be on the top and that's final."

With clothes on, the topic of sex was more amusing than anything else.

Glancing back up, he replied, "Sure. And I bet you had an overly dull conversation in the showers too." He could only imagine what had happened had Alucard opened his mouth. Things that should be kept confidential seemed to flow of his tongue like water, the bastard.

Jack shrugged. "I'm a man that likes variety." He nodded. Sounded like a Japanese name, so, stick with the family name. "Aidou, then."

"I guess you could count it as interesting. Wasn't anything new to me," he said.

It was hard to eat and talk at the same - mostly because Aidou refused to speak around food. In the end, he had nothing to say that wouldn't be insignificant drivel. Small talk was like that.

What he did do was reach out and take Jack's right hand, turning it palm up. (Not that Aidou ever completely understood why he was scolded so often about touching other humans - it wasn't like he was doing something shady. Most of the time.) He didn't touch heavily, just enough to examine the rough contours; the pad of his finger met Jack's pulse point. It was nice and strong to Aidou's senses. And it wasn't misplaced attitude this one wore. When he finally let go, he said, "Mmm. Perhaps. I'm not entirely convinced."

Of course, Aidou's own hands were soft and without flaws. It may it especially hard to gauge other vampires when their bodies didn't retain marks.

Aidou was pleased the other had used his surname - mostly because he looked like he actually understood the reversal in Japanese introductions. If he knew little about Japanese culture and only assumed he did, he might have said 'Hanabusa', which would have been annoying.

"So? Did you come to me to talk about something in particular, or just to stare at me some more?"

Jack seemed entirely unbothered by Aidou taking his hand. He simply continued eating his taco with the other hand for that brief time. "Well, if you ever feel like being convinced, I'm sure you can find me." He shrugged.

"No real reason other than my own curiousity," Jack said. "You scurried pretty quick when Alucard decided to loom in your general vicinity. He mentioned some stuff that's of mild interest to me - a hobby, really - so I'm wondering what it might have to do with you." He smirked. "Or did he just corner you and touch you in your bathing suit region?"

Aidou had immediately become wary at Jack's words, but at the jest he stiffened, eyes flashing. "I left because I would have killed him otherwise," he hissed, not at all pleased by the insinuation. It disgusted him beyond words. He quickly turned his face away and anchored his gaze to the wall until he could speak without snarling. "If you want to talk, don't talk about him." After a moment, he looked back at Jack. He hesitated, then: "I... I would appreciate it. Got it?"

With luck that would be enough to keep Jack silenced on the matter. There were always other ways to go about it, but didn't want to resort to them.

Jack filed Aidou's reaction away under moments of interest, as well as his claim that he could kill Alucard. He seemed pretty sure of himself.

Well, time to see what reaction this got.

He ticked off points on his fingers. "So, lethargic during the daytime. I'd guess mildly photosensitive too. You are eating solid food, which narrows the field. And you have some beef with Mr. 'I'm part of a secret organization that hunts vampires.' Off the top of my head, I can think of about five different species that meet those criteria and lay claim to the moniker, so I'm just kind of wondering which you are."

Jack was very quick and decisive when it came to his conclusions, and inwardly it caught Aidou unprepared. He hadn't thought Jack had been watching him. Not closely enough to be stringing these verdicts together without knowing that Aidou was a -

He bit the inside of his cheek. Unless Jack had known the entire time. Could he have really overlooked something like that? Aidou was intelligent, but young. Inexperienced to a degree. It wasn't implausible he had screwed up something without noticing - he'd slipped up with some facts, he knew. But things weren't fitting. Jack had hit two facts on the mark, but was still asking as if he wasn't sure. Someone who understood the truth behind vampire myth would have understood why Aidou was at odds with Alucard, only making it seem more like Jack knew. But solid food? 'Five species'? A 'secret' hunters' organization that Alucard was part of? What the hell did that mean?

And despite it all, the man was calm. Like he really didn't what end of the spectrum the truth landed on, so long as he found out. It wasn't fear he felt, but an unease. Either Jack was - and had been - playing him for a complete fool the entire time, or Aidou was missing something crucial.

Argh! What a pain.

"I don't understand what you're getting at," he said. And that was the truth. In fact, he was pretty confused.

Jack watched Aidou curiously, more interested in his reaction than to anything else. Still, he wasn't certain if the boy's apparent confusion was feigned or not.

"Vampire." Jack said. "You're a vampire of some sort. Which particular kind?"

Aidou was the type who hated dancing around a subject. He preferred having it out in the open, or not at all. It really pissed his father off sometimes.

Well, it was out now. It was a bit of tedium off his shoulders. But although he somehow knew of vampires, Jack wasn't particularly keen on the subject. Aidou had to wonder if this was more of Alucard's ham-handed work.

Nonetheless, his expression smoothed out into something more smooth and open. He smiled winningly. "You caught me. But why ask what kind?" The line between nobility and the average classes was self-evident, even for dilettantes.

Jack wondered how many times he'd have to repeat himself. Just because he couldn't die didn't mean his patience was endless. "Because I've encountered five species," he said. "All of which are pretty similar, but I'm a detail-oriented kind of guy."

Jack's mild annoyance only led to Aidou's annoyance. "You mean classes. And there's only four." Ex-humans didn't count. And they most certainly weren't similar, but Aidou wasn't about to go off on a tangent about rankings when it would probably fly over Jack's head.

He continued to dig into his pile of food, more at ease. "But tell me more of what that imbecile Alucard said."

"No," Jack said, smiling, "I mean species. Subdivisions within species... we can get in to that once we've narrowed it down." He took a thoughtful bite of his taco. "Oh, wait. I get it. You didn't know there were other species, did you. Well, it's a big, wide universe out there, Aidou." He rubbed his chin, giving Aidou a thoughtful look. "We could do this the easy. What's your planet of origin and the relative time your from? That's all I really need to know."

Aidou could have moaned. In fact, he did moan, and pressed a hand to his head. Not this alternative universe stuff. It was just so implausible. He liked reading manga too, but to be sitting in a roomful of noisy humans wearing a yellow smiley face and discussing the width and depth of the universe? He was hungry, damn it. Hungry for blood.

He didn't want to know what drugs did to a human. Because if this was anything like it, he wasn't interested.

"Fine, fine. Earth. Twenty first century. Happy?" Then he cut a glance at Jack. "But I want to know. And for that matter, how long did you suspect I wasn't human?"

"Since I first saw you," Jack said. "It's the eyes. And no one has skin that nice unless they've replaced it synthetically." He smirked.

Twenty-first century? He found that odd to believe. He was familiar with most of what had happened then, at least superficially, and he was of course living through it year by year now. He didn't recall having run across anything like Aidou so far. He finished off his taco thoughtfully. "Well, assuming you're post '05... what'd you think about the Battle of Canary Wharf?"

Aidou smirked back. That was true. He did have great skin.

"That's not a battle from my history, sorry." Leaning forward, he laced his fingers beneath his chin. He felt a lot more engaged now that he was speaking as a vampire, not a vampire acting human. "You're awfully calm. You carried on with me even knowing I was a vampire." He snickered. "That's amusing. But you're not a hunter, so why?"

"I didn't think so," Jack said. "Oh well. And I thought I was about to discover something new and interesting to go home with."

There was really no telling what sense he meant that in.

"Couple of reasons," he said, leaning one elbow on the table, chin in his hand. "I head one arm of an organization that monitors extra-terrestrial activity and makes sure the Earth stays happy for us Earthlings. After a while, you just stop getting scared, or you completely lose your marbles." He smiled. "And I'm originally from the 51st century. I get around. I've gotten blowjobs from things far scarrier and a hell of a lot uglier than you."

And there was that whole not being able to die thing. But that he wasn't sharing.

Aidou's eyebrow inched ever higher the longer Jack talked. "I knew it. You talk big, but you understand little about vampires, no matter what place in time you come from." It was a little irritating to have had Jack lead him on all this time, but in the end, ferreting out a vampire from a group of humans was only superficial knowledge. It was bound to have happened, by less competent people. Only a vampire would know anymore than that. "How boring."

Despite it all, it was kind of like being in a bizarre sci-fi game. Jack had seemed like a fun state of affairs, but he was obviously only dead set on categorizing Aidou for the sake of knowledge. How dumb.

"No offence, Sparrow, but I'll by the end of my stay here I'll have to remove your memory of me. Too bad."

If Jack noticed the abuse of his name, he didn't react.

"You're not too good at this," Jack observed. "But it's cute." He smirked. "Feel free to erase as much of my memory as you like. Better beings than you have failed."

He stood, grabbing his tray. "See you later."

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