he doesn't cry for us

[afeatherpillow]

WHO: Takaya, Katurian, and Alpha
WHERE: City asylum
WHEN: Saturday afternoon (forward-dated)
SUMMARY: Katurian and Takaya encounter each other in the psychiatric hospital. Alpha has other plans for them.
WARNINGS: Violence (?)
FORMAT: Paragraph to start, but whichever you'd like!

Comments

[messiah_maybe]

Takaya had spent a good week reacclimating to the asylum again, picking up on the rules. Don't skulk in the shadows. Be cooperative with the staff. Take your pills. Loudly declaring threats against the entire world around the nervous patients isn't funny and you shouldn't do it. Discussing the futility of life with morbidly depressed and suicidal patients is really not funny and "releasing them from their torment" isn't a good excuse.

The quiet and antiseptic ambiance of the hospital helped calm him and his thoughts. The drugs did it better. The first few days were spent trying to find what worked with the suppressants he willingly turned over as a life-preserving medication; he spent a day staring blankly at a wall, he spent another pacing endlessly because his skin absolutely crawled, and yet another he refused to leave his room due to his consciousness hanging just off the edge of completely delirious, every noise about a thousand times louder to him than it really was. They'd finally struck a fine balance three days ago with tranquilizers.

He'd only recently been allowed back into general population, namely because he'd spent two days in his room for validating all of a psychotic depressive's fears about there being no point to existence, the belief of which was probably helped along by the man being totally convinced he was speaking with Jesus (a misconception Takaya for once didn't correct).

When he spotted Katurian in the corner however, all ideas of seeing if he could drive someone to suicide on Good Friday were replaced with a much more interesting option. He smirked, crossing the room and approaching from the left - coming to a stop beside Katurian's chair.

"Have you really come to join the mad, Katurian?" He queried smugly, sneering despite himself. The damn drugs screwed with his guardedness, the boundary between what he really was and what the world was allowed to see.

[afeatherpillow]

The whole world was dim when compared to the fever of his mind, stories on top of stories on top of his cracked bones, and he didn't even notice Takaya until he was right on top of him. He flinched at the voice. It was familiar in a way he hated (or thought he hated), and he squeezed his eyes shut, because he couldn't believe it, no, not Takaya, not right now, he was just visiting him here.

Despite everything, when Katurian raised his eyes, the first thing he looked for was whether or not Takaya was holding a notebook. Then he looked at his face.

"No," he said. Even the word sounded frail. He couldn't fool himself.

[messiah_maybe]

"Good. Neither have I."

Predictably he took a place leaning against the wall, arms crossed over his chest - and the shirt he'd been more or less forced into, which covered up his tattoos. He'd also had to put his hair up in a ponytail ("To resolve...confusion about your appearance," they'd told him) so he wouldn't freak out the other patients on Easter Sunday. He'd also had to shave, meaning scruffy evil Jesus now almost looked like a functioning member of society. Y'know, almost.

"Does this creative mania still seize you?"

[afeatherpillow]

Katurian had spent minimal effort taking care of himself, despite the nurses' protests. He had showered before joining the group time, but that was where it ended. His hair was mussed. He had a week-old beard. Gray circles hung under his eyes.

"I need to be writing," he whispered. What would have been a panic attack four days ago was a nervous fidget in the present. He tapped at the table in front of him with his fingernails. Clink clink clink. A typewriter. He knew it wasn't there, but it grounded him. Minimally. His fingers still didn't have much movement. "Can you get me a pen, Takaya? I need a pen. I'll do nice things for you. I w-won't call you names anymore."

Never mind that no one had wanted to give him any writing supplies for almost two weeks. Never mind he couldn't write with a pen anyway. Never mind that the sane question to ask would have been: Takaya, why are you here? What did you do?

Katurian didn't care.

[messiah_maybe]

"They don't permit me writing utensils. Or anything else that could be used as a tool to maim another, though they neglect the fact I find excess gore distasteful." He could point out the obvious things, like you can't use it anyway, I don't feel like it, or I still haven't started caring what you call me, Katurian, but refrained. Instead, he was finding himself more interested in Katurian's...condition, watching remotely. The fact that Takaya looked more adjusted than Katurian presently did was enough to signify something was terrifically wrong here.

"Why were you relocated to this lunatic kingdom?" He was terribly interested in that.

[afeatherpillow]

"Assault," he said. The word tasted like blood on his lips. He had murdered three people with his own hands and led another to her demise, but Katurian Katurian still didn't think of himself as a violent person. He wasn't, usually. That he had lost such complete control, that he had hurt a friend after losing this control, was an all-together foreign experience to him.

Again, he tapped his fingers on the table. His head was starting to spin.

[messiah_maybe]

Assault? Not the crime he'd expected, not in the least. At the tapping, Takaya was broken out of his musings and was instead dragged back to his slightly off-kilter reality.

"And your hands? How do they fare?"

[afeatherpillow]

He cringed. How long did the doctors say? He didn't remember and it didn't matter - they were broken forever in his mind, and if they were broken forever, he would be in here forever. He would fade from existence with only Takaya for company and nothing would ever get written, and he couldn't take that, no, not even with the drugs, he couldn't he could he couldn't he couldn't.

A whimper escaped the back of his throat. He ducked his head.

"Takaya," he said. "Are you sure you can't get a pen? Y-You're stronger, you can take down zombies, you should be able to get a..."

His voice dropped off as he raised his head to scan the rest of the room, wide-eyed. Someone had to have something, didn't they? But no. No pens he could take. No notebooks. The part of his mind that was still lucid told him to focus on Takaya, to take his mind of all of this. He turned back, opened his mouth, and closed it again.

"How are you, Takaya?" Like they were acquaintances just running into each other at the supermarket.

[messiah_maybe]

Now though he didn't exactly like Katurian, didn't care what happened to him on any sort of personal level...he really didn't like seeing him like this. They had had such intrinsic and strong struggles for power between the two of them and their morals, and now Takaya's main moral opponent was reduced to a whimpering and scattered mess. He made a very soft noise in his throat that might have been disgust, and chose not to answer the query about a pen.

"Drugged." His answer was apathetically curt, mainly for lack of interest. An evil thought crossed his mind, was brushed away, but returned and in his haze, Takaya saw no problem with mentioning it.

"You need no ink to write, Katurian."

[afeatherpillow]

As a writer unusually well-versed in the macabre, Katurian knew what Takaya meant immediately. He also knew what Takaya was trying to do, and though he hated it, though the rational part of his mind screamed don't be an idiot, he couldn't help but latch onto the thought. It twisted and grew in his mind. How many words could he get out in his own blood? Not many, certainly. He wouldn't have much time before the nurses caught on, stopped him, and isolated him all over again. Could those few words be worth it? Could they be enough to carry all the rest? Would they shine on the walls and floors, unhindered by disinfectants, hanging onto this world forever and ever?

Don't be an idiot, his thoughts shrieked again. Takaya is not your friend.

But it was so difficult.

"No," he said. "I'm not stupid." Forever and ever. "Playing me like I'm a-- no, what I need to do is write, and it's going to be in ink, when I write, and once it gets the apology, everyone'll give me ink, and I'll be writing, I'll be writing." His hands trembled.

[messiah_maybe]

Takaya was only marginally disappointed when Katurian didn't latch on to that option. But he wouldn't push; if so, he'd lose his chance at ever speaking with Katurian during this sojourn, and though he preferred solitude, when would he get another chance for such an intimate examination of what the hell was wrong with Katurian K. Katurian?

"Apology?" He queried, gently steering the conversation away from the macabre. If something else came to him, he could introduce that instead. Right now he wanted and needed to distract Katurian, throw him off.

[afeatherpillow]

He hesitated, startled, as though he hadn't meant to say those words. He didn't think he had. His punishment was something he was as familiar with as his own breathing. It was as ever present as the world around him. It had become him. Others couldn't see that.

Lie. How could he lie? He fumbled with the words, half-formed excuses, but his brain was too clogged to make much use of them. "Apology," he echoed. "I did something wrong."

Those four words poured out.

[messiah_maybe]

"Something wrong?"

This did surprise Takaya, mainly because Katurian seemed far too meek to actually do anything worth punishing. He watched more closely, a little less than focused himself, and wondered how much Katurian would say.

"Did you do something naughty, Katurian?"

[afeatherpillow]

The word 'naughty' made him feel like a rebuked child. He grimaced at it. For Katurian, childhood was a time of saccharine sweet lies, of whirling drills and muffled shrieks, of his hands braced against the rough metal of a shovel and two holes in which to bury the people he had trusted the most. It was for this same reason that he hated whenever Tyki called him 'boy.' Katurian clawed himself out of childhood. He didn't look back.

But saccharine sweet lies and muffled shrieks. Was it so different, what he had done? For the briefest moment, Katurian's mind snagged on these horrors. He stared down at his hands, shuddering slightly, and it was almost like he could see the blood on them.

His silence was probably answer enough.

[messiah_maybe]

Takaya's smile grew, sickeningly knowing.

"I hadn't the slightest inclination you were capable." He didn't ask what Katurian had done, didn't need to. From his reaction he could assume it was terrible enough. He gestured at Katurian's hands, inwardly wondering whether or not his conversational partner would simply implode if pressed hard enough. The temptation of trying was there.

"Is this your punishment for such a sin?"

[afeatherpillow]

Katurian thought Takaya suspected he was capable, but he swallowed his words before they were fully formed. He worried about conforming to Takaya's impression of him. A murderer's heart, he had said. Was that him?

He didn't have to worry long. Takaya's gesture at his hands was enough to win his attention back to his current state. Writing. And it was writing that became his first love--

"It means to kill me," he whispered. "It knows I'm not built to last."