Day 60: Cafeteria
Anise had been lying snug in bed, only vaguely aware that she was awake, when her rest was disturbed by the one sound in the world she'd never wanted to hear again.
"Good morning, everyone!"
The girl's eyes shot open and she immediately sat up straight. There was no doubt about it. That was the Head Doctor, that bastard, and he was back! Now that ( Read more... )
"Good morning, everyone!"
The girl's eyes shot open and she immediately sat up straight. There was no doubt about it. That was the Head Doctor, that bastard, and he was back! Now that ( Read more... )
Oh… no. No. The coming of day brought to an end what might have been the first truly pleasant "dream" he’d had in his entire residency, leaving him to wake up to a familiar, white-washed box of a room and a too familiar uniform. Weak again.
No! It was all over? Just like that?
Aidou didn’t want to believe it, but the situation wasn’t giving him much choice. He also seemed to have been warped into the past, because in place of the military there were nurse escorts again, and real food, and that goddamn voice on the intercom. It wasn’t just his physical restraints that had been put back in place, it seemed, but Landel as well, back on his throne in the wake of the military’s retreat.
Not everything was back to a post-Aguilar standard, however. For one, there was a stupid wristband attached to his person that the vampire spent his walk to the cafeteria yanking at, a rather paltry target for his frustrations in comparison to what he had been capable of last night.
Unbelievable. To have his strength flipped off and on like a switch… it wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right!
That little flicker of hope he’d felt the night prior was properly extinguished once he was seated with a tray of cafeteria food in front of him. The usual routine of a prisoner. Putting his chin in his hands, Aidou let himself mourn lost chances. "Why isn’t that bastard dead yet?" he muttered to himself, already loathing the gloating Landel was no doubt going to deafen them with over the course of the day. Meanwhile, Aidou was no closer to actually silencing him once for all. As for the military or Marc, who knew what the hell they were doing out there.
The waffles started up at him from his plate, as if trying to bribe him into complacency with sugar.
"Damn you, too," he said at them.
Reply
Niikura sat up in bed and groaned as he ran a hand through his hair. Landel was back, and so were the smiley faces. That was awesome, just awesome--but now he and his team were all armed and ready for a sick basement adventure in a matter of twelve hours! Yeah! That, coupled with the realization that he no longer had to shove his hair under a hat (little things, you had to think about the little things in this place), was enough to get a little bit of a bounce into his step, and Niikura walked into the cafeteria feeling better than he had in days.
And then he saw the waffles, and life got that much better. He resisted the urge to actually jump for joy and instead parlayed his excitement into a fist pump. "Sweet!" Food, food, real food! Okay, now things were looking up. The teen gleefully accepted a full tray and bounded over to the nearest table, trying not to start eating before he had even sat down.
He fell into a chair across from a mopey-looking blond and began digging in without a second glance, savoring each delicious bite of pure flavor. These things were probably made from a mix, but compared to pink oatmeal, they were like heaven. Yessssssssss.... The word went on and on in his mind as Niikura continued to eat until finally, he had to stop to take a breath and wipe his mouth before he forgot and gave himself a syrup mustache to sport for the rest of the day.
He glanced at the guy across from him and then down to his untouched plate of waffles. "Hey, ya gonna eat those or somethin'? 'Cause I'll take 'em off your hands if not."
Reply
The process didn’t much change the end result: the Head Buffoon was back, and the military group, it seemed, had made good their retreat. He, meanwhile, was spinning his wheels. Not even his full strength had allowed him to get much accomplished last night, short of exterminating swarms of vermin, but at the same time, none of the other prisoners appeared to have made a breakthrough, either, or else they wouldn’t still be dining in the hospital cafeteria like good little captives. The staggering impotency of the prisoner population was unnerving to think about.
Perhaps it was a matter of fortune that someone chose that moment to speak to him, though Aidou had pretty much forgotten what it was like to be pleased by strangers approaching him for conversations. There were too many annoying people in the Institute. Just from the look of him, Aidou suspected the other boy might be one of those people.
"They’re mine to eat or not eat," Aidou protested. Granted, he would much rather eat something else, something far sweeter to his senses than waffles, but still. "Go get more if you’re that hungry."
Reply
He shrugged. "I mean, I'm not demandin' 'em from you this very instant; I'm just asking." At least the other boy hadn't done that awkward deal where he said no in a very pointed manner before shoveling food into his mouth to prove a point. It always made him wonder what he'd done to come off in that kind of way, although the response he'd gotten hadn't been much better.
...Actually, why wasn't this guy shoveling food into his mouth? Maybe he was one of those special types that had gotten the normal menu the whole time. Figured. Total ingratitude. They ought to have served the pink oatmeal to everyone at least once just so they could all appreciate how delicious real food was.
[sorry for the repost! ;A;]
Reply
The vampire’s brows lowered into a flat line, clearly unconvinced by Niikura’s logic. “If they go to waste, who cares. It’ll regenerate itself like everything else in this place. Eating them or leaving them, it doesn’t change anything.” Not to Aidou, anyway. He was still going to be hungry, and there were still two more meals to sit through until the day was done. Three meals a day for however many days there were left in this prison sentence…
Ah, but perhaps that line of thinking would be too philosophical for a person who was content just to stuff his face. Regretfully, Aidou didn’t share the same enthusiasm for pigging out, though granted, it’d be smart for him to eat something. The combination of Aigis plus the anarchy of the night before had kind of turned his plans to find blood sideways.
Even so, who could eat knowing one stupid bastard had merely been traded for another?
Reply
Ah, time to have some fun by seeing if he could stick it to this guy. Philosophy had always been one of his hobbies, especially following Katsuragi's death. One couldn't just launch a campaign against evil without giving it some serious thought first, after all.
He swallowed. "Aye, but that's not what I'm concerned with. I just wanna know if ya want 'em or not, and if not, if I can have your waffles." He shrugged. "But I see ya had to use them as your pulpit for expoundin' that deep, meaningful message right there. Might be absurd to bother considerin' whether to eat them or leave them, but I read somewhere that continuin' the fight in the face of absurdity is enough to fill a man's heart."
Niikura resisted tacking on a comment about how struggling against this particular absurdity filled his stomach as well.
"More interesting than just sittin' around moping about stuff I can't change anyway. At least ya have a choice, y'know: to eat or not to eat, that's the question."
Alright, and now he was just being hideous.
Reply
The problem was that he wanted real company. Real conversation, someone who could help him challenge his mental blocks.
He wouldn’t wish Akatsuki stuck here again, but he missed him all the same.
"You talk too much," said Aidou. "First Landel and now you… two people who lack brevity and wit. This sucks. Go back to stuffing your face, please." That was a simple enough request, wasn’t it? Why did he have to attract all of these annoying personalities?
Reply
Niikura sighed and shook his head as he went back to cutting up his waffles. "Picky, picky. I even went through the trouble of feedin' ya some Camus, but I guess absurdism's just too deep for kids these days." He really liked Nietzsche more, himself, but he was kind of biased: Katsuragi had been fond of Nietzsche, and anything his best friend had liked, he'd kind of tried to pick up out of reverence (and maybe a tinge of guilt).
Reply
But this entire situation was an old argument. Irritating people who had nothing better to do than talk down at him as if they were on the same level--ugh! How easy it should’ve been to just freeze the stranger’s mouth shut and be about his way, but no, he had to be here and his powers out of reach again. Treated like a child. Treated like something other than what he was.
But that, too, was an old, old argument. The ugly boy was nearing the truth about one thing: there were some things that could not be changed at the moment, and Aidou knew it. He did.
It was just… difficult facing another morning in the Institute. Infinitely difficult.
Abruptly, Aidou threw himself back in his chair until it leaned on two legs and swept Niikura with a clinical appraisal. “That’s correct, I’m picky,” he announced more loudly than before. “That’s my right. You want to make something of it?” But he wasn’t actually interested in hearing the boy’s response and so didn’t give him a chance to reply. Talking about waffles and silly literary references served no purpose, but maybe the other male could be useful as long as he insisted on being a bother. “Never mind. Allow me to feed you a question in return: what did you see last night? If we‘re going to enter into a conversation, it might as well be about something practical.”
He could smell a fresh injury from a mile away, and the boy probably hadn’t gotten it running with scissors as the nurses liked to claim.
Reply
The difference was that he didn't mind it. In fact, it was convenient. People constantly underestimating him gave him more room to maneuver until the web had been spun and the victim completely (and unknowingly--that was important) ensnared. Of course, there was a certain time and place to this type of trap, and expending all that precise, careful effort on one boy who had a stick up his ass seemed like a waste.
He was about to say something along the lines of "You're trying too hard," but then the questions turned in his direction, and Niikura actually paused for a moment as he tried to figure out exactly what the other boy was getting at. What did he see? Well, unless you were blind...
"Uh...monsters? Nothin' special." People saw monsters every night, after all. There just happened to be more of them last night. "Why do you ask?"
Reply
Aidou was convinced one would have to be completely insensible to have missed all of the filthy critters running around, unless they had spent the entire night holed up in their cell. One didn’t even require fully functioning eyes to make them out, as Sasuke had demonstrated. Not to mention the pinkish barriers lighting up the darkness all over the building.
“Their numbers were special, however. But I mean more remarkable happenings. Did you do anything of note? Encounter anything? Last night was an unusual occasion, as you may have noticed.”
Reply
Duh.
"But yeah, for me, last night was business as usual, aside from all the extra monsters." He idly picked at the bandage just barely poking out from under his sleeve, totally unaware that it had already been detected long before he'd inadvertently brought attention to it. "What about you? I'm guessin' ya did somethin' out of the ordinary, if you're gonna be askin' other people about it."
Reply
But who was counting? The omission was negligible in the long run, not only because the vampire already had an idea of what the protective pink defences were for. If someone had cracked the mystery of the barriers function and how they could be disabled, he doubted it would have been a single gluttonous boy who talked too much. He felt safe making that assumption.
The other male, on the other hand, was veering off with his own strange logic. Wasn’t it obvious that he would ask? How else was he supposed to figure out what the other patients were up to? He couldn’t read the boy’s mind or dig into his memories and share his experiences.
Well, not anymore, anyway.
“How else would I get a picture of what was going on without collecting stories? But I believe you about not finding anything. That’s too bad.” The last part was said mostly to himself. Wouldn’t it be convenient, to isolate the one person who might’ve encountered one of the radio people, or any of the other fortuitous events that seemed to find certain prisoners. Unfortunately, the ugly boy was not his winning horse, it seemed.
Reply
"Ah, nothing, then," Niikura said, pointing his fork briefly at the other boy. "Shame." Damn it. For one second there, he'd really thought that he'd get to learn about something exciting beyond extra monsters and glowing pink barriers.
Reply
It was an intolerable situation, and although he knew he should focus on tackling breakfast given that the boy had nothing groundbreaking to contribute, Aidou found it hard to shake off his disappointment.
If he was being honest, it was the setback more than the loss of his powers that bothered him.
He eyed the eating utensil as it was branded in his direction before resting his chin in his hand. Being ugly wouldn’t be a blessing at all, but he almost missed being as oblivious as this weirdo. Eating without worrying about a single thing. Wouldn’t that be nice?
“Do you know anything that isn’t already public knowledge?”
Reply
Niikura smiled at the other boy's question. Do I know anything? Of course I do, but nothing that you need to be aware of. It probably didn't interest him anyway, since he was so caught up in himself. The things that Niikura liked to learn about typically had nothing to do with Landel or with the military. One day his focus would probably be shifted toward them, but first, he had wanted to stretch his legs for a bit. "Eh, probably not, but at least I know when to admit it." Unlike someone.
Reply
Leave a comment