Day 58: Lunch

[full_score]

Although it had been good to see his mom again, Claude entered the cafeteria with a dark expression on his face. He was glad she felt comfortable enough with him to share her experiences from last night, but that didn't make him any less angry at the military for using her to do their dirty work. Why couldn't those bastards clean up their own

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[tasteoftruth]

It was probably best that Badd started hallucinating again after he made it through the food line. Gant was the last person he'd needed to see today and rage was billowing inside him like a river about to crash through a weakened dam. Someone needed to pay for Byrne's pain. Someone needed to bleed. At this point he barely cared who.

As he picked up his bowl and spoon the walls around him narrowed and turned sickly yellow. He was walking down the corridors of the hotel, worn lollipop stick between his teeth, one hand under his coat. He was plainclothes, as were the cops surrounding the building, but it was hard to walk like a civilian instead of a badass.

He turned a corner and walked into a hail of bullets. They ripped holes in the collar of his coat as he dove to the side, going from paranoid to panicked in the span of moments. One hit his bulletproof vest, knocking the wind out of him before he could get his own firearm free. It gave the hidden gunman the opening he needed to aim lower and shoot him in the leg. Badd gave a low scream, even as he fumbled for his own gun. Go past the pain. Ignore it. Do your job. You've been shot before. Keep going.

He fired, but he could already hear the gunman carpet-muffled feet running down the hallway. Badd tried to get to his feet but fell back on one knee, sweating with pain and effort.

Cece!

Badd found himself leaning backwards against one of the tables, one hand on his thigh, breathing hard. Very carefully he pulled out his seat and sat down as if nothing strange had happened. He had no idea what he'd done during this bout of madness and didn't dare look up to see if anyone was staring at him.

[unheroed]

For a little while there, Harvey had actually felt like he might get to have this time to himself. Just this once, people would realize that he shouldn't be bothered and maybe -- just maybe -- he'd actually doze off for a little bit. If he just pretended that he was already asleep, no one was going to come wake him up, right?

Well, that worked well enough until the table his head was resting on was suddenly jostled. It caused him to startle, lifting his head back up as he tried to figure out what was going on.

It was at that point that he saw a man around his age fall into the seat across from him, except that the guy seemed to have something wrong with him. He was breathing hard, like he was under interrogation rather than sitting in a packed cafeteria. Did he have anxiety in crowds or something?

Harvey glanced around to make sure that there wasn't something obvious that the man was reacting to. He realized at a delay that the stranger had leaned against the table and that was what had roused him in the first place, but he still didn't get what had triggered all this.

He could have ignored it. Could have put his head back down and made it clear that he didn't care. But this was too weird to brush off. "You all right?" He tried to make sure there was little to no concern in his tone.

[tasteoftruth]

Badd forced his breathing to slow. It was the bandaged guy from the restaurant in Doyleton, the zombie survivor. Had seemed all right. "Nothing. It's fine." The walls were not sickly cream yellow. The floor wasn't carpeted. And his hand kept squeezing his thigh in an attempt to remind himself that he hadn't been shot.

Badd looked up to the guards circulating through the crowds and felt a new surge of rage, slightly muted by the terror that had felt so real a moment ago. "Hallucination," he finally added. Everyone else seemed to be having problems today too. If the bandaged man (what was his name?) wanted to mock him for being stupid enough to take the drugs, Badd would mess up the other side of his face.

God. He was going to kill them all the moment he had the power to do so, and to hell with his oaths. Even if they were begging on their knees he'd shoot them in the head, from Aguilar on down to whoever swept the floors at night and put the patients back in their beds.

[unheroed]

The first time that Harvey had talked to this guy, which was just a couple days ago, he had been a whole lot calmer than this. He'd been alert, sure, but this was bordering on paranoia. There was something about the sheen of sweat on his forehead and the way that he was glancing around that gave Harvey the feeling that he was a little off. But--

However, his original answer that everything was fine was quickly amended to something that definitely didn't count as nothing. Hallucinations? Harvey raised a brow (the uncovered one) at that. He'd dealt with his fair share of visions and auditory hallucinations at night, but during the day?

"... What's causing it?" It wasn't like there could be a monster at the bottom of it, so what else? Harvey couldn't help but seize the topic, wanting to get his mind off of the horrible things he'd been through the night before. Unfortunately, he was pretty damn sure that none of that had been fake.

[tasteoftruth]

So far the bandaged man was being surprisingly reasonable about it. Not insulting him, just asking questions like a normal reasonable person. That sort of thing always caught Badd by surprise.

"I took the meds they were offering down in the infirmary last night," he said, staying as calm about it as possible. He'd just wanted Byrne back. It hadn't been for a weapon or for brownie points with the administration. No shame in it. "They've been giving me hallucinations all last night and all of today. The kid I was walking with got it worse, he turned into this mutated monster sheep thing in the middle of the hallway." Badd made a slight, self-disparaging smirk. "Of course since I was hallucinating I couldn't tell that part was real, so we never went to blows over it."

Which in retrospect was good for the kid. If Badd had been perfectly lucid and then seen him changing into a rotting monster, he'd probably have bludgeoned him to death and asked questions later. As it stood he'd probably protected the kid--anyone who'd seen him walking peacefully with that thing would have assumed he had the situation under control and not bothered to attack either.

[unheroed]

Oh, right. That whole thing. Considering everything else that Harvey had dealt with last night, he had completely forgotten about Aguilar's rant at the beginning of the night and his challenge to the patients. Dammit, he had seen the man right in those stands and he hadn't been able to do a damn thing to him. It was enough to make his blood start boiling all over again.

The coliseum had also showed him just how cold the general was; it came as no surprise that those drugs had had terrible effects. Hallucinating was one thing, but turning into a monster? Harvey quietly hoped that that had just been the guy seeing things. The sad thing was that he wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't, though.

"I believe it. Aguilar might not play up the whole sadistic side of things, but that doesn't mean he isn't a sadist." He shook his head and scoffed. "I wouldn't be surprised if you guys don't even get anything for going through that." They'd been promised something good for checking out the basement, after all. Instead, they'd gotten death and an unhealthy dose of trauma.

[tasteoftruth]

"He's nothing but a sadist," Badd snarled. "A sadist ruling a bunch of other psychopaths. They made a man think his daughter was being tortured...made him watch, just so they could make him say that he'd forsake his principles to make them leave her alone. There was no point to it!" His hand slammed down on the table. He was breathing hard again, but for a far different reason.

It had been Badd's duty to protect him. And if he couldn't do that he'd punish the people who hurt him. Byrne had died once even if he didn't remember it and Badd would not let it happen again.

Badd's hand slid back down and he hunched over the table like a scowling gargoyle. It would do no good to have an outburst when the guards were watching. As much as he wanted to take a swing at them and to hell with the consequences he knew he'd just get a sedative and be useless for a few hours. He couldn't afford to let his mind stop working.

"The rewards are lies. Shiny pins, or he gives you a bit of nice food for cooperating with the guards and not trying to escape. In the end all he wants to do is break us."

[unheroed]

That was hardly the reaction that Harvey had been expecting. It wasn't that he hadn't seen people get up in arms about what they were put through before. No, that was something you could see every damn day if you looked around and tuned in to other conversations. But still, Badd had been pretty composed when they'd talked the first time.

It was hard to tell if Badd's outburst about a man and his daughter was in reference to someone else or a friend of his. It was all buried under so much anger, something that felt very familiar; something that Harvey could relate to. If he'd known the man better, he might have been able to say for sure who it was about, but it didn't matter, did it? Someone had been put through that.

A father being made to think his daughter was being tortured, a kid being forced into a situation where he had to kill someone he looked up to...

Badd was right. That was what they were trying to do in the end: break their spirits. And he couldn't help but think that it was working. "You're right. They want to beat all the fight out of us until they can make us into what they want." Whether that was a soldier or a productive member of society or something else, that was what was going on here. He hadn't really wanted to talk to anyone this shift, but in a way it was nice to vent.

[tasteoftruth]

Badd ran one hand over his weathered face. In some ways this hurt more than finding Byrne's corpse. Back then the shock of it had numbed him enough to go into detective mode and shut his emotions down until later, when he could release his pain in private. Now he had to cope with seeing Byrne's face twisted in anguish and hearing his best friend try to blame himself for falling victim to their plot. They'd made him blame himself.

"And there's kids here. And people who wouldn't know what to do with a gun if it came with fold out instructions. They want to make soldiers out of some of the last people who should be on a battlefield." Badd eyed the pink goo (he'd missed breakfast, he'd never have been able to choke food down when Byrne was halfway clinging to his arm) and pondered if giving in to his own hunger was itself a capitulation to their demands.

One hand folded into a fist underneath the table."They're getting part of what they want, anyway. I had some oaths, once, about protecting the helpless...about never taking a life unless it meant saving another. But the moment there's a gun in my hands I'm going to kill them all." He'd bent, when Byrne had encouraged him to lie and steal for justice. He'd bent further when Miles Edgeworth came home early. And now, perhaps, they had totally broken former Detective Badd...but Mr. Badd was going to be a lot harder for them to deal with.

[unheroed]

What Badd said next hit a little too close to home. Kids who didn't know what to do with a gun. The image of Peter wresting Jones' gun away from him and trying to shoot himself in the head hit Harvey like a bag of bricks. He didn't even know the kid that well, but the very fact that he'd been put into that kind of situation was bad enough. Harvey had gone pretty cold by now, but that made an impression even on him.

"I wonder if that's even what they're making us into, in the end." He'd spoken with Lana about this a day or two ago, as they'd tried to work out an ultimate goal that wasn't quite so obvious. It was possible that all of this torture and trauma was simply to make them compliant, but when brainwashing was clearly something they were capable of, why bother?

But he didn't have the energy to think about any of that right now, not after the night and day that he'd had. As it turned out, Badd and him had a lot more in common than he'd even realized. Here was someone else who had held tight onto morals until the world had pushed him too hard and he'd cracked a little. "I went through that before I even came here," he admitted, finding it surprisingly liberating to say that out loud, "but this place certainly isn't making me want to change my mind on that point." He already had a gun; the temptation to smuggle it to breakfast with him someday and start shooting was tempting, and yet Harvey's code of justice didn't work that way.

Besides, he doubted it would accomplish much of anything. He had to save the few bullets that he had.

[tasteoftruth]

If Badd had been in any state to notice he was pouring his heart out to a man he'd only met once before, he'd have thrown out some sharp barb and used the resulting argument as an excuse to stomp off. Men like him weren't supposed to admit they needed to blow off steam as much as anyone else.

"I was never the most by the book guy myself," Badd said, taking in a slow breath. "But I had my lines. I kept the law where I could, and where the law fell down I still tried to bring the world some justice. The only law around here is Aguilar, and the only decent thing a man can do here is resist it. Destroy it, if possible."

It seemed impossible. The army held every shred of power over them. During the day they were at gun and needle point with their every action conforming to a careful schedule. At night they could walk around freely, but it was pointless; tey never made a dent in Aguilar's army and their only gains were small, trifling goods like makeshift weaponry or food. Day or night a prisoner could be snapped up and tortured or manipulated without the slightest provocation.

Maybe going down in a hail of bullets really was the only way to win. Maybe the food fight guy had the right idea and just hadn't gone far enough.

[unheroed]

There was too much in common between them, and yet Harvey got the feeling that Badd hadn't fallen quite as far as he had. Still, it was odd seeing so much of him reflected in someone else. Except that the reflection was wrong, because Badd's face was all still intact. Weathered and worn down by stress, maybe, but intact nonetheless.

"No arguments there," he said after a pause that had maybe dragged out for too long. There were so many more things he could have said about his own background and how he'd stood for the same principles at one point, but he couldn't find the words and he wasn't sure that he wanted to. Besides, the very fact that they were commiserating about this in the first place already implied that they were in the same boat. It didn't need to be spelled out.

Granted, all of this venting didn't actually accomplish anything, and yet he couldn't deny that it felt good in a masochistic sort of way. He didn't really have a problem with self-harm these days.

The intercom sounded then, that major's cheery voice cutting into their conversation in the least appropriate way possible. That excitement in the man's tone was in no way representative of the overall feel of the cafeteria right now. It was almost insulting.

Harvey got to his feet and sent Badd a glance, wondering about his hallucinations and if they were ever leave him alone. It was one way to slowly go crazy. "Until next time, then."