damned_institute | Night 53: Disciplinary Therapy Corridor

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Night 53: Disciplinary Therapy Corridor

[from here]

"Of the times I've been up here voluntarily, a couple have gotten out before we got up here. Usually we have to cool our heels for a while." He shrugged, and then started unearthing unpleasant memories. The investigation pulled up nothing except the sneaking suspicion he could still smell SLUD-induced vomit in the cracks in the floor. "The other time, fuck if I know how long. Spider raided the drugs and the janitor's closet before passing out here."

"Don't try to kick these doors open. You'll break your leg. They're less normal than the rest of this place. The Frankensteins don't ever show on this side." A lot of people forgot that Frankenstein was the mad scientist, not the monster he created. Igor had achieved a cross-media cultural blitzkrieg that no one confused him with Abby Normal's. Just the top brass and their monster. Middle-level management strictly not liable. "Transporter doors, staff only. Have to be." He didn't have to add not to open them. Mello wasn't an idiot, even if he was getting way too into this for an impartial observer.

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Mello spared S.T. a fraction of a second's glance, half scowl, half puzzlement; decided the Tootsie Roll comment wasn't worth fully deciphering, as the sense was clear enough. The rest he noted, but mostly willfully ignored, and strode past S.T. to start pounding on doors with the butt of the flashlight. He would have used both hands, if they'd both been functional.

Of course they'd use doors that didn't go where they ought; he should have thought of that ages ago, and hadn't. That night when the prisoners had been subjected to them seemed more and more like the Head Arsehole rubbing their faces in it: Look, I can warp reality whenever I want. What can you do but take it?

It wasn't going to be tonight, but Mello's resolve to show exactly what he could do had never been greater. It gripped him like a fist around his guts, like a desperation he hadn't felt since that awful day five years ago, which would have counted as the worst in his life before Landel's. Do something, do anything, even if it's wrong, only move.

He knew damn well the doors wouldn't budge until... Until it was over behind them. Still clung to the crazy hope that Matt would hear the banging, know someone was out here, maybe even draw strength from it, if he still could. And at that thought, Mello let loose a kick in spite of it all, jarring his very bones against the unyielding door, the middle one, as it happened. It hurt like fuckall, but was weirdly satisfying all the same.

"Yeah, I know," he muttered, in S.T.'s approximate direction. "Had to try."

"That's what you get for having principles, man." S.T. had followed, tucking the pipe length in his armpit and cupping a hand to his ear. Not a whisper from any of the doors.

The surgical use of anesthesia began, like so many politicians at a Harvard party. Shit went down, some guy busted his leg open, but was so tanked on nitrous he didn't give a fuck. Two dentists who were failing out of med school had hundred-watt incandescent go off over their heads. (The electric light bulb was forty-odd years late to the party, given that Edison was born two years after the party in question.) Then followed a rash of demonstrations, press releases, lawsuits, guys running off to Paris or prostitutes in an intoxicated/indignant huff, and untimely deaths. Most of the principles were pushing up granite down in Mount Auburn (the cemetery, not the hospital). S.T. knew about it from classes and trying to convince Dr. J to let them sneak into the Etherdome and hold an appropriate commemoration.

A hundred and fifty years later, and no-one used nitrous for wisdom teeth, and Harvard med students had mostly switched to snorting cocaine for expensive thrills. Nitrous was too easy and not type A enough for trust-fund legacy kids with three-piece suit ambitions.

S.T. didn't have any of the above, though he wasn't empty-handed. "Want some aspirin?" He hefted the toolkit enough that the pill bottles rattled inside. Then he leaned back against the wall, which was cold and reassuringly non-digestive. "Shit. I could use a beer right about now." Or better, some nitrous, but Mello didn't look like he wanted a lecture on the relative toxicity of recreational chemicals right now.

That was as close as he generally got to self-anesthesia or armchair psychologist, at least with non-girlfriends. Beer and five-alarm nachos and playing skeeball and talking about the Sox (summer), Celtics (winter), or hair bands (Bart).

"I could use a fucking grenade," Mello said, though, honestly, he doubted it would have done anything but make the two of them extremely unhappy.

He still finished his circuit of the hall, rapping hard on the last couple of doors with the torch, more out of sheer bloody-mindedness than any hope of getting through.

"And thanks, but no thanks." He had better than aspirin in his room, and had deliberately not taken any. He'd thought he'd need his wits about him for an entirely different mission, but this one was no less important. "I'd need higher-octane, or I'd need nothing, and I went with nothing."

This was more than he'd usually admit, but Mello approved of S.T., though he couldn't condone what he did, or rather, failed to do, with the knowledge he'd surely amassed. Besides, ever since that blond kid had pelted towards him, he'd felt like a bruise, everything hurting and too close to the surface, the iron control he'd fought for years to gain deserting him. He stalked back over to S.T., let himself slump against the wall opposite him, looking at the ceiling, as if that could somehow make what he knew he was about to say not count.

"My best friend's in one of those rooms. Not from here, from home." He was sure the significance of that wouldn't have been lost on any of his fellow prisoners, much less this guy.

Edited 2010-12-19 06:36 (UTC)

Definitely the first time Mello had been back up here. S.T. didn't know exactly what they'd done to him, but they were all fucking walking wounded. It made him look older than barely needing to shave weekly. S.T. let him keep pacing and assaulting door handles until he'd worked it out of his system.

Friend. S.T. tried to imagine anyone from home up here. Bart, strapped to a music video carnival wheel where the knives didn't all miss, while someone tried to find two brain cells not already half-rotted with whatever he'd scored this week and inhaled along with half a tire's worth of vulcanized rubber because he hadn't bothered to wash up. That was about it for friends, besides the girls. Maybe Boone, but what the fuck would freak Boone out? He'd just sit there like a guru and wouldn't need to threaten to blow this place to kingdom come.

"You couldn't have stopped them. My roommate was a trained spook. We went for them. Not a fucking chance." Wouldn't stop him if he was really set on a guilt trip, but it couldn't hurt.

"There's hydrocodone in the same bottle. Plus some antihistamines, with proper labeling. If anyone needs it and I'm not around to dish it out." Investigating the scene while letting the applied biology experts clean up the mess. Or whatever.

This was ridiculous. "Tell me you've got a deck of cards or something."

You couldn't have stopped them. Hearing it didn't help. Mello had known it all along, even as he'd struggled to believe otherwise. The blame still rested on him. Without him, Matt would be at home, safely anonymous, keeping his head down, like he'd done for years. Mello still didn't know what exact criteria they used to select prisoners, but he was pretty damn sure a random hacker who'd once gone to a school for geniuses didn't fit them. More importantly, Matt would be alive if Mello had never called him, and though Mello had sworn he never would, if he remembered any of this when he got back, he had a sick, lingering feeling it wouldn't make a difference.

He noted S.T.'s run-down of his portable pharmacy with a nod. If Mello had known he'd be coming up here, and why, he might have swung by Matt's room to grab a pack of smokes for him. Might have. More likely, he still would've made a pointless dash.

"Do I look like I brought entertainment?" he snapped. He clicked the torch on, played it over each door. Nothing. Clicked it back off.

"Who's your roommate?" Someone with an intelligence background, assuming Mello hadn't already met him, would be very useful to know. If nothing else, it was a distraction from the silence that sat heavier in this hallway than anywhere else in the Institute, from the images he was trying to keep his mind from conjuring up of what that silence masked.

S.T. gave a shrug that conveyed the near-universal sentiment that it never hurt to ask. He hadn't brought anything either, unless a half-bottle of Vicodin counted. Mello still looked like he was blaming himself for everything since the Big Bang, which was the prerogative of the young. S.T. considered himself old enough to know his own limits both forward and backwards. No original sin, and the sun would eat the Earth for breakfast one day. In the interim, he'd just try to keep it safe for/from humanity.

"Was. Jason Bourne, but that was a different room and three roommates ago. More if I slept through any one-hit wonders." Two and a half weeks was pocket change in S.T.'s world. Ecological disasters could happen overnight if an oil tanker ran aground, but most of them were slow (and usually deliberate, or at a conservative estimate, clueless) poisonings. "Nice guy." Not the description most people would have given him. Doughy cheeks like a well-fed stockbrokers son who hadn't seen anything tougher than a Harvard debate team, fought like a Southie punk.

"Wonder what happened to him?" All of the answers were depressing and unprovable, but talking was better than sulking. Better than watching Mello sulk, too.

Edited 2010-12-24 04:18 (UTC)

"I had this shite group therapy session today. Asked about my old roommate, and all I got was the party line about being 'released.' Shame, really. He looked dumb, but he wasn't." Mello hadn't had a chance to find out what they'd done to Emmett. Now that he'd run into his share of brainwash victims, he'd bet that was it. Unlike Matt, Emmett could fight.

Mello clicked the flashlight on and did another sweep across the doors. If S.T. was going to be annoyed by it, he'd just have to deal. The second any of the doors opened, Mello was going to be there. He knew he wasn't doing a great job accepting that all he could do was wait until that moment, but he couldn't have cared less. He was saving the pacing until standing still became unbearable, though. He gave that about five more minutes.

"I'm on my third roommate now." In slightly more than a week, but that appeared to be relatively normal. "Roommate number two had Javert's notes about this bullshit." He gestured in the direction of the doors with the flashlight. "Have you seen them?"

"Seen them, no." S.T. leaned back against the wall, and waited a calculated beat before smirking. It was shorter than he'd usually do. Mello Yello was still looking appropriately green and twitchy over there. "Helped write the later ones, yeah. I could use a copy if you've got them here."

One more educated guess.

"Was there something you were looking for?" Mello had to have the damn things memorized, though S.T. wasn't going to ask him for a recital. Kid was too good not to have them cold even if he'd only had a short shot at them while his roommate dozed off or something.

Mello's smile didn't reach his eyes, but he did smile. He should've known S.T. had had a hand in those. He also had a good idea which case study referred to him. Playing around with one's genes was pretty damn specific.

"I don't have them on me. I was going to offer you a look if you hadn't seen them." To solidify their not-exactly-alliance, for one thing, but also because S.T. was coming at the problem from a different angle, and while Mello preferred working alone, he'd also learnt to tell when cooperating would get him what he wanted faster.

"What do you think about the guy who got taken twice?" Either that case didn't belong in the list at all, or it was an anomaly worth knowing more about.

He could get them from the horse's mouth if he wanted. He and Javert got along pretty well, even if the man wore a suit like metal fans wore black. Second skin. Nobody'd worn a suit like that in decades. Even corporate drones looked vaguely apologetic about the things.

"Not a fucking thing. Poor bastard." S.T. hadn't heard of anyone being taken twice before. Not that it should have been a surprise. Anyone who'd passed middle school math and wasn't sitting in front of a slot machine knew that it wasn't unlikely. If Landel was picking names out of a hat.

There was a cute party trick S.T. had done a few times as a combination ice-breaker and statistics lesson. It took a room of about thirty people to have a decent chance of working. Fifty and it was almost too easy. All it took was a group of people who didn't know each other well enough to have each other's birthdays in their Rolodexes. S.T. would pull out a crisp five dollar bill and see who'd bet against him that there weren't two people in the room with the same birthday.

The trick worked because people were egotists. Birthdays were supposed to be unique. Never mind that there were only three hundred and sixty five days in the year, and each was equally likely to spit out babies. (This was the part in the explanation where some nerd in the back row stuck his hand up, and then when S.T. ignored him, started bitching about leap years or the baby boom after the Blizzard of '78 or June weddings until the entire room shushed him.) People thought about the odds that someone else had their birthday, which in a small crowd wasn't that likely. Say it was thirty people. That gave 30 * (1/365) chances. Call it one in twelve, keep the change. Easy to bet against.

The problem was that they'd skipped all the other people's odds. Actually doing the math out would turn him into a social pariah, but he could start walking around the room, pointing out that Roger and Rachel had one chance, and then Roger and Mick, and Kenny and John, and before long he had everyone nodding. Then the big reveal, and ten bucks in his pocket.

Sometimes people even learned something. It was a dangerous gamble, not because of the probabilities, but because he couldn't help wondering when some flack was going to figure it out, too. They were collectively a bunch of crap-flinging monkeys, but they'd learned what stuck. Clever metaphors for mathematical concepts were high on the list. Boxcars and banana peel bullshit. Two dozen cases of rare brain cancers weren't a statistical likelihood, they were a fucking smoking gun. Especially when the statistics were being dredged up by the people who'd been pouring vinylidene chloride in the local swimming hole.

"Think I'll take you up on those notes." He shrugged. "Whenever." He was still trying not to decide if it would be better or worse the second time. Getting dragged up here. "I could use the short version now, though."

Mello nodded, and clicked the flashlight on for another check, sweeping the beam over the people he didn't know as if they weren't there. Poor bastards in the same situation as him, most likely. As long as they stayed out of his way, he'd stay out of theirs.

"The effects fall into two or three different categories. Either they amount to ongoing torture, or they have some kind of side benefit. In at least one instance, they're nonexistent, or they wore off. Presumably, in those cases, the original trauma was considered sufficient." Only S.T. could have said which category his experience fell into. Mello thought it was probably the first, like his own. All this was leaving out the one patient who was an exception to much of the usual MO, the one Javert had considered an unreliable source, but whose second trip up here sounded more typical. It was something to look into, later.

The information Javert had gathered wasn't where Mello would have focused his efforts. He cared very little about how varied the constellation of tortures the Institute was capable of inflicting was; they were so tailored to the individual victim as to be almost useless in helping him undo his own. Another information trawl through the victims who were still here would be worthwhile, if he could get past that damn reluctance to talk about it. Understandable, but annoying. Past annoying and into infuriating was how he'd have to give up a little about what had happened to him, if only by drawing a pretty clear path for inference, to find out more about the areas that did interest him.

"When you were in there," he said, low, "did you get a look at the doctor?"

S.T. had the same impression of the other team. Three kids in matching diving suits, and an older guy. Two teams. The doors had been locked, but made-for-TV magic kicked in and one of them opened for the Junior Space Brigade.

Little bit from column A, little bit from column B. Either Javert's notes as copied were an earlier vintage or the guy took privacy seriously.

"Yeah. Up close and personal. Walking advertisement for the fluoridation program." S.T. flashed a smile, in case Mello's universe had better dentist's unions than Pennsylvania industrialists with fluorine to burn. Not literally, though the stuff was pretty fucking flammable. "One of those guys who don't have a problem looking someone right in the eye and lying their ass off. No soul in there." Between that and the grin the guy was a makeup team and some seed money away from political success.
He was about two syllables into asking I take it you didn't? when Frankenstein's burned-in smile fuzzed out and the memory of Mello's expression when they'd dragged him out turned in. Shit. Keep it general.

"A lot of the effects are sensory. Or E.S.P., which puts it in the ballpark." Or over the wall and headed for eastbound on the Mass Pike, but the same game. "Ironic, too. The effects. Not all of them, but they know us. Used my real name, not this Paul Quincy bullshit, and knew what scares me."

Mello made a beeline for the door when it opened, right behind the kids, but backed off when he got a look at who was inside. He looked back to S.T. and shook his head briefly: Not my person.

That meant they were... finishing up. Mello had been trying not to think about it, mostly successfully distracted, but now it felt as if the wall he'd sealed all those thoughts up behind were starting to crack at the foundation. Would he even be able to do anything for Matt? It meant going back into one of those rooms, which was going to be swept clean of evidence, somehow, by the time door opened, but was still the site, or its copy, of the worst night of his life.

In defiance of that uncertainty and reluctance, he walked along to the far end of the hall and worked his way back, trying each of the remaining doors in turn, rapping each with the flashlight. Nothing. He had to pace, now, a circuit of a few feet back and forth in front of S.T. For anyone who came through here at this point, eavesdropping would be the last thing on their mind.

So the doctor for S.T. hadn't been anyone he knew, unless he wasn't saying, but that seemed unlikely. Generic representation of what he hated the most? Maybe they hadn't had a specific one handy, Mello thought, and almost let a dry laugh escape at that.

"Exactly. The bastards in there aren't pretending they don't have our real info. They want us to know they do." He would've bet, though, that they made less of a point of it for people who weren't in the habit of hiding all their personal data. "And they want to dress up the torture as something else. Be a better person, whether you like it or not, only they twist 'better' as far as they fucking can. Every benefit they end up giving has a price."

S.T. had read off the kids' faces that Mello was going to be disappointed. He wasn't looking forward to casing the room they'd gone into. Maybe he could delegate. Except that a before-and-after was better data than most nights, and he knew what that room had looked like a couple of weeks ago. He could smell his own pheromone-laced sweat. Adrenaline and anxiety. Fight or flight, except that the people who needed their asses kicked had all gone back to their hidey-holes. Bastards.

Mello wasn't the only one trying to keep up the conversation just as a distraction.

"Fuck, you got a nice one." The sneer on his face was echoed in his voice, going beyond his usual asshole act into bitter old man territory. "Mine didn't bother with the foreplay. Just the next rat with the right genes. Squirt a little of this in, hope it survives, if not, grab the next tail. Hell, I'm surprised they don't pack us in in breeding pairs just to save themselves the trouble of firing up the transuniversal transporter."

"Heh." A bark of a laugh, almost, short and acid, and Mello shook his head. "That'd leave too much to chance."

He wasn't going to explain that, for him, the lead-up had been just as bad as the actual 'treatment,' which had certainly been part of the point of doing it that way: let him stew in his helplessness, give him ample time to turn over in his mind what he could have done to prevent it. Let him conclude that there wasn't anything he could have done. Mello was sure they'd played S.T. the same way. Lab rats, the assembly-line impersonality of it all, the bland face of someone playing god not for ego's sake, but all in a day's work. Yeah, he could understand how that would get to the guy.

He took another look at the row of doors. Fuck's sake.

"What they do in there? It's the real point of this place, or part of it." But a piece only, to a picture the prisoners hadn't even been allowed to glimpse. Mello still had to wonder, resenting it all the while, if his certainty that they never would were the product of the bugs or the sane reaction to an impossible situation. Has to be the bugs, he told himself. You're the one who, when you're blocked into a corner, brings the goddamn walls down, remember?

[From here (http://community.livejournal.com/damned/1023910.html?thread=75083430#t75083430).]

The hallway was not remarkable, but Kaworu could now place it, at least within the scope of his own experience. Within one of these doors, there was a small room. In it, there were the remains of an entry plug. False or genuine, it didn't matter. It was true in his mind, and that was what gave it substance.

Without hesitation, he went to the first door. It was jarring when it didn't move. He recognized in himself what he could only think was fear, or something close to it.

Movements were noted quietly behind her. The others filing in and experiencing the scenery. Rei remembered the feeling of before, of coming to this place because of a pull within her--the knowledge of familiarity near to her, far ahead. Here, there was a close similarity. Something like that. But nothing as clear as there had been before. Rei understood Ikari was nearby. But she did not know where he was.

So Kaworu Nagisa moved without hesitation to try a nearby door. The sound of its locked nature echoed briefly around the room, and Ayanami walked further in, stepping to the next door and trying it. Nothing gave. This one, too, was locked.

Stefan stood at the mouth of the corridor for a moment, staring after the backs of the children who made their way inside, lingering in particular on the pale, messy hair which marked Kaworu out as clear as if it was daylight. What did he mean, talking of fear like that? Could he read minds, like Edward? Maybe, but it wasn't much of a stretch to think Stefan was afraid — but not for the obvious reasons. Not for himself. Even last night, he hadn't been afraid for his own safety.

Or maybe Kaworu was thinking exactly along the lines he was. They were all here in search of someone. However, Stefan was the only one here for Elena, and he moved finally to the doors on the opposite side of the hall. Still keeping an eye out for any possible danger to the three he was with, Stefan tried each door in turn. He even put his full strength into it, or at least whatever had been left to him. Nothing.

And if Elena, or anyone else, was behind any of these doors, he couldn't hear it.

"How did you get in last time?" he asked after the fourth locked door, sounding frustrated.

Asuka didn't make a sound (being a leader of sorts came with sacrifices), but that didn't mean she couldn't roll her eyes at Kaworu's sudden bout of philosophical drivel. What was there to be afraid of? There were four of them, and three of them dismembered monsters for a living. They didn't have their evangelions anymore for that, but the pilot was still confident that numbers would ultimately win the battle. Plus, Kaworu was oh so holy; he could probably neutralize monsters with his powers, especially if it was the only way through to Shinji.

It occurred to her that if the albino angel was this "devoted" to wonder boy, Kaworu would be a good bodyguard during the nights. Not that she would ever sink so low as to ignore the fact he was an angel, but a good leader needed to look at the big picture and keep all his or her options open. That's all.

Passing Stefan, Asuka ignored his question and continued the seemingly futile assembly line that Rei and Kaworu had started. "You idiots are hopeless. Let me do it!"

She set her baseball bat against the wall beside the fifth door and tested the doorknob. Locked, of course. But unlike the others, the redhead wouldn't give up so easily. Stepping back, Asuka raised her leg and began kicking the door around the lock. She got the shack outside open this way, it would work eventually!

But eventually was becoming increasingly distant. Her leg was going numb from the tremors running up her foot. Panting from the exertion, she lowered her leg and glared at the stubborn door. It was about the time she lifted her left leg to finish what the right had started that she heard a mechanical click which made her pause.

"What the...?" Hoping against hope, Asuka tried the door handle tentatively and guffawed victoriously when it turned. "See? Perseverance always wins in the end!" The door swung open slowly and Asuka was greeted by the painful brightness of an overhead light. It reflected down on a familiar shape that she longed to reacquaint herself with.

Kaworu had moved to eventually stand behind Asuka, but with distance still between them. Where she felt anger or frustration, Kaworu could only now identify the tension that had been with him since he had realized Shinji was gone. When he stayed out of her range, away from her wrath, he felt more comfortable. Kaworu watched her strain against the door, which only relented of its own volition after her assault ended. They had no impact on the things that would pass here.

Kaworu responded, or his body did, with an audible gasp he could not control. The door revealed what he had perhaps already pictured in his head, and his powerlessness and desire for distance were forgotten. He recognized the shapes inside too easily. The sharp lines of what was intended to be an entry plug. The unsettling bright light highlighted it, and neither the light nor the tube belonged here. All of it was unwelcome, and yet, Kaworu didn't hesitate. He moved past Asuka, even brushing against her as he angled for the space between her and the door, but the moment of contact was gone too quickly. Too quickly for him to wonder about her distaste. How she might be disgusted by him, or by the way he ran to Shinji now.

[To here (http://community.livejournal.com/damned/1022236.html?thread=75139612#t75139612).]

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Night 53: Disciplinary Therapy Corridor

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