Feb 14, 2008 03:14
Burly orderlies and agile Calm Effect nurses flooded the cafeteria from the Courtyard while regular hall nurses filed in from the Sun Room and ushered out those not involved in the rebellion. It indeed seemed as if Landel was sending out all the cavalry, and an effective cavalry they were: The riot didn't continue for much longer after the alarm
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diva,
raine,
axel,
anya,
kagura,
edward elric,
saber,
tyler,
nia,
danny phantom,
ken amada,
mason,
allen,
jack skellington,
simon (gl),
clark kent,
angel,
zelnick,
misa,
leon kennedy,
shana,
peter parker,
luxord,
kurogane,
signum,
artemis,
raiden,
knives millions,
harry,
mello,
rena,
hikaru,
matsumoto,
ion,
xellos,
heiji,
peter petrelli,
yohji,
archer,
ritsuka,
zuko,
farfarello,
zoro,
okita,
takaya,
mozenrath,
sanosuke,
hitsugaya,
haku,
yukari,
wolverine,
nathan petrelli,
willow,
haseo,
kunzite,
rubedo,
sanji,
rhode,
rinali,
obi-wan kenobi,
kenshin,
bella,
siegfried,
adelheid,
tenchi,
kaito,
fayt,
momo (xenosaga),
sora,
heiderich,
saïx,
usagi,
luffy,
reinforce,
ashton,
seishirou,
river,
birkin,
reno,
albel,
keman,
amelia,
mark,
rukia,
edgeworth,
itachi,
sousuke,
faust,
max,
roland,
harley,
peony,
argilla,
kenren,
dib,
hanyuu,
armand,
kairi,
hinamori momo,
zelgadis,
vlad,
roy,
frey,
cid,
fai,
cloud,
leon magnus,
sai,
sasuke,
schuldig,
daemon,
aidou,
sierra,
falis,
beatrix,
edward cullen,
brooklyn,
ashe,
scar (tlk),
hisoka,
gin,
omi,
rangiku,
subaru,
sanzo
And so he'd given up, let himself be led away and back to his room. What would resistance have gotten him anyway? Sedation? Something worse? It wasn't worth it at this point. Despite how helpless he felt, he wasn't an idiot.
It was mildly surprising to be led back to a different room in a different hall that he remembered. The nurse that escorted him so hastily didn't seem in the mood for questions, either, as was evident by the way he was literally shoved into his new room with the door bolted securely behind him. Nathan took a moment to take in his new surroundings, quickly finding them to be identical to the last ones.
The only difference being that there was someone else already in the room. Great. A roommate. Not quite in the mood for chit-chat, Nathan gave the other guy a quick nod as he passed him to take a seat on one of the beds.
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"Yo," he waved in response to the guy's nod, and he went back to his journal to add a couple more notes to himself. If the man didn't want to talk, Cid wasn't going to argue with it. He had enough things on his mind as was, though he was feeling a little better now that he'd met someone in the same situation - better enough, even, to organize his thoughts on paper. He always had been a damn master of blueprints and planning, at least when it came to engineering projects.
Cid got to the "whatever" section of his lists of acquaintances, and after looking over the unnamed patients he mentioned, his pen hovered over the page and he glanced back up at his new roommate. Was he a vet or fresh blood? He had a bandage around his left ankle, so he must've at least already spent one night here.
"So," Cid broke the ice with a cough, gesturing at his journal, "in the interest of fillin' out the facts here, who the hell are you?"
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"Nathan Petrelli," he offered without any hesitation; the man's gruff demeanor hadn't put him off in the slightest as Nathan himself wasn't in the best of moods after his little run-in with Claire and her bodyguard earlier in the day. "You can put 'fresh meat' next to my name when you add me."
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"Captain Cid Highwind," he returned, glancing up as he tore out the page he'd been writing on. "You can call me a vet, but I never seem to get anywhere at night, so if you got any questions about that, tough shit."
Cid got off the bed and set the journal back down on the desk, pocketing the scrap he'd made notes on. He paused suddenly and turned.
"Lemme guess - never heard of Gaia?"
The response Cid was hoping for was a little more optimistic than he'd like to admit.
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Cid's next question earned him a perplexed look. Gaia? What the hell was Gaia?
"I don't think I'll be able to help you there," he admitted, wondering whether or not the other man would launch into an explanation about that while he was here. People at Landels always seemed to have stories.
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It seemed like the pilot had found a new routine to follow when meeting new people here, and he didn't even want to think about the implications of that. He shook his head and sat back down on the edge of his bed, looking across the room at the guy. After a moment, he chuckled and scratched his nose. "Since you already know the drill, I guess this is the part where we bitch back and forth about how much our lives suck right now."
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He couldn't be responsible for anyone else...
Nathan stopped himself short on that, shaking his head and focusing again on the conversation at hand.
"Yeah," he answered simply before tossing in, "Or we could talk about all the morons that got us set to our rooms. Your choice. I'm not picky."
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"If you're fresh meat, then you prolly don't know just how much this place can drive you to that." He glanced back up at Nathan, expression a little more sobered. "New people comin' in all the time, old people disappearin' without a fuckin' trace, people not rememberin' shit because they're from further in the past than the rest of their friends - hell --" his eyes hardened as his tone got a little more frustrated "-- I'm one of that last kind."
He paused and added with a sigh:
"And as if that ain't enough of a hell, there's the brainwashing..."
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And the brainwashing... He'd thought after being attacked by the mole men that he'd come to terms with the fact that this place didn't make sense, even by the Company's standards. Nathan leaned forward, shoulders hunched and hands folded in his lap.
Things were getting more and more complicated. Again.
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Two weeks... Cid had to pause in his speech and just think over that for a second. He finally shook his head and grit his teeth, looking to the side.
"I thought it was amnesia too, at first. Some pretty important shit went down and then I lost consciousness and wound up here - buddy of mine showed up too, but he couldn't remember said important shit. Then, some more of our comrades started showing up, all from a goddamn crazy future, and I wouldn't have believed them unless they looked different..."
He trailed off. The AVALANCHE members had started fading into the literal ether left and right after that, but he'd whined enough to Nathan already.
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Nathan didn't comment further. He didn't raise anymore futile questions, and he didn't intend to do so any time in the near future. There wasn't any use in asking; nobody really knew what the hell was going on anyway. The only thing certain and true was that they were all stuck there, and there wasn't any easy way out, not for any of them.
"You like to fly, I take it." Chosing to pursue the unlikely topic of the other man's career over the mind-breaking laws of Landels, Nathan couldn't help but indulge his own, inner, dry sense of what could sometimes be called humor.
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"Like to? Hell, it's what I live for!" He said in a tone far more upbeat than his previous muttering. He brushed his knuckle against the side of his nose and smirked. "I'm the best goddamn pilot on the face of the planet - my planet, anyway. Flew in the Wutai War and did enough damage to earn me my own space program once I did some engineering for the company bastards. Woulda gone up in the No. 26 model if it weren't for a faulty oxygen tank and a bunch of goddamn bureaucrats..."
Cid trailed off as his eyes lost a little of their light. There was someone else he could have blamed for all of that, and just a month ago, he would have. Shera had saved his life, even if it'd been in a fucking stupid way, and he'd only repaid her with being an asshole to the point of abuse for years.
He'd seen her and apologized his damn heart out before going off to his potential death, but it didn't excuse a damn thing until he got back home and proved his sincerity ten times over. He definitely wasn't anywhere close to marrying the woman, as much as his future-sent comrades might try to tell him, but he wasn't going to abandon her either. He owed her that much.
"Anyway," he finally ended with a sigh, rubbing his eyes and realizing that about half his explanation had probably gone over Nathan's head. "Yeah, I feel cooped up if I can't get off the ground, so you can imagine how much this place is pissing me off."
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"You have no idea," Nathan answered him finally, looking away as he thought, not about his time as a pilot in the service, but to something he'd just grown so accustomed to. To be able to fly... it had been like a black mark on his otherwise flawless image for so long, but to now have it taken away, reduced to just being able to hover... Well, if he was being honest with himself, it felt like being shackled to the ground.
"I was in the service as a pilot too." Clearly a better, easier explanation than the other option.
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"Y'serious?" He asked, and the shock on his face soon turned into a grin even wider than before. It occurred to him that this was too big of a coincidence to be just that, but he didn't really care at the moment. "Well, fuck me if that ain't the best thing I've heard all week! Another dogfighter!"
It was only after his initial response that Cid realized there was another level of excitement to all this. After all, if this Nathan guy was from a different world, it meant that his brand of civilization might have different technology, different methods of propulsion, and different ideas for Cid to take note of and implement once he got back home. Hell, if what Barret and the others had said about cutting off mako-usage was right, he'd have to figure out a new way to power his babies.
"So," he asked, leaning forward and feeling more lively than he had in a long damn time, "what'd you fly?"
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"Don't get your hopes up. After that, I got into politics," Nathan warned the other man, only half-joking as Cid certainly didn't seem the type who would be terribly fond of the government.
His roommate's question did stir up a lot of old memories, though, memories he rarely paid any attention to, so focused on the future and his career that the old days had just become another platform to speak from in his campaign. It was kind of sorry that he'd forgotten so much about where he'd come from. It wasn't until much later that he'd realized how much it all meant, everything. His life, his family...
Nathan sighed and than allowed himself to laugh at the twisted humor of it all. What did he fly...
"F-15 Eagle, among things. It's been a while, though. You?" he asked, surprised to find himself actually acting like a social, human being again.
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Nathan hadn't been wrong about Cid's preconceptions of government, though given where he came from, he had some good reasons for the negativity. Cid tried to take that into account as he heard the other man's words - tried to think, hey, maybe that world's government was more like the times before Shin-Ra than like Shin-Ra itself, but he still couldn't wrap his mind around the comment. After all, why the hell would someone throw away the sky for something like that? He'd heard of some war heroes going into Shin-Ra management as soon they'd gotten some clout with the public, but those guys were scumbags and Cid found himself sorely disappointed that the other airman might be that brand of asshole.
Then again, the guy had already expressed his understanding of Cid's sentiments, and Reeve had turned out all right in the end even if he'd kinda been a pussy.
Literally.
Cid then turned his attention to Nathan's explanation of what he flew, and though he should've been expecting some alien jargon, his insane amount of expertise in the field didn't really allow him to fully brace himself for it.
"F-15 whatnow?" He blinked dumbly, scratching the side of his head. "Uh, Shin-Ra P56 Monstrenco here, along with pretty much everything else under the sun, but I've got a feelin' we ain't on the same technological ground."
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