Day 48: Courtyard
"I could tell you some stories," Yuffie suggested brightly, "of unquestionable legality." Illegality, that was. Petty little things like the law didn't usually mean very much to her, except for the times when she had to uphold it. Always fun for the breaking, though, the law, and messy for the clean-up. Just the way she liked it
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Even though he didn't like the way that Heat phrased it, Peter realized that he had a point. Why would Roland have told him that he sometimes turned into a monstrous thing that had to eat other people in order to survive? Especially with the way Peter had confronted him about the very person he was now talking to, he could see why Roland had kept his own secret from him.
That didn't make it hurt any less.
Heat seemed to want to get rid of him already, but Peter wasn't going to let him off the hook that easily. There was one thing that still didn't add up. "You said that you have to eat your own kind... but Roland tried to bite me." He glanced down at his arm, looking at the strip of bandages that peeked out from under his sleeve. "I'm not a demon," he finished as he looked back to the other man. He was a mutated human, maybe, but that wasn't the same thing as a demon the last time he'd checked.
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There were plenty of times in the past, once he'd reached the real world, that it hadn't mattered whether or not the soldier he was devouring was actually a tuner. It was all just another meal. It wasn't as if anyone in the Karma Society had been born a demon anyway. None of them had been.
He peered at Peter through a curtain of red, smirk gone but still somewhat apparent in his tone. "So yeah. Roland was a cannibalistic, man-eating demon. Just like me."
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Not that he was going to tell Heat that he was like a zombie, but it was similar.
The way the redhead tried to be so blunt and in-your-face about it was getting on Peter's nerves, but he tried not to let it show. With this new knowledge to work with, along with what Roland had told him about Heat, he couldn't judge him as harshly as he had before. He sighed and glanced at the man. "So that night when you tried to attack that girl... that was because of that hunger," he recalled.
Maybe it wasn't the best idea to bring it up again, but Peter wanted Heat to know that he hadn't forgotten. While he realized he had now become a victim of the same thing, he wanted to give Roland the benefit of the doubt. He wanted to assume that he had held back as much as he could have before giving in. In a way, Peter was glad that he was the one who'd been attacked, rather than some unconnected innocent.
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Was there another tuner here he was being mistaken for? It might be possible in the dark - he wasn't the only one out of all the tribes with red hair. He thought he recalled someone else mentioning that he might have been there before as well, but he'd dismissed the issue soon after it had been brought up.
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Did he really not remember? It was possible that he'd been in such a hunger craze that his memories of the incident were cloudy, but that was just Peter making conjecture based off of what he knew, which wasn't much. "You did," he said, his tone leaving little space for arguing. "It was a while ago. I didn't see you actually do it, but I saw the aftermath. It happened somewhere near the stairwell." It all still stood out clearly in Peter's mind. He'd been with Brooklyn that night. Brooklyn, who had been gone for a while now. He couldn't help hoping that the kid was all right, wherever he was.
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"I would have remembered." If he'd lost himself to the hunger completely, it was doubtful he'd still be around. Even in a berzerker state when his thoughts were more animalistic, he still had enough control over his actions to recall what had happened once he returned to normal. This guy had to be referring to someone else.
Not that it was any of his business who he attacked in the first place.
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There was really only one explanation, then. Luckily, Peter was pretty familiar with the idea of people disappearing and then reappearing with no memories. Well, it wasn't lucky in that he'd had to go through it so many times already, but at least it meant that he wasn't too disoriented in this situation.
"I guess you were here before," he said as he glanced out across the courtyard. "Had anyone told you about that?" He looked back over to the sedated redhead and raised an eyebrow. It was odd to think that he could have spent a few days here and not have figured this out by now.
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A sudden breeze made him shudder and his arms, already crossed against his chest, were pulled a little tighter to him. How long was he going to have to sit out there in the cold? A guy could get sick out here, and the nurses claimed to care about their patients' well-being. Thinking about the cold was a bad idea, as it only made him feel it more.
"I don't know who you saw before, but it wasn't me. It's impossible that it could have been." When would he have been brought there and why wouldn't he have any memory of it? Heat didn't pay much attention to the board except when it came to getting a hold of his comrades. There was a lot he'd yet to figure out.
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"It happens more often than you'd think," he said with a shrug of his shoulders. "People will be here, then disappear and come back with no memories of that first time. It... it's happened to friends of mine," he admitted. Peter wasn't sure if he felt comfortable enough with this guy to start telling him about the whole saga with his brother. "Anyway, that time I saw you with the girl was more than a week ago, so that must be what happened." If Heat didn't want to believe him, then that was his own problem.
Despite Peter's lukewarm feeling toward this guy, he couldn't help but notice that he wasn't dealing with the cold well. As a New Yorker, he knew that he could handle this without too much discomfort, and in the end, Peter found it hard to be deliberately malicious. He started to shrug out of his coat. "Did you want another layer?" he asked.
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"That doesn't make any sense," he repeated, but with the distracted tone of someone already thinking about the possibilities. That was something to bring up on the bulletin, perhaps. Except then he'd have to deal with whatever morons felt like responding. Who knew if he'd even get a clear answer.
He didn't realize what Peter was doing until the man was already starting to shrug off his jacket. Heat looked startled and held out a hand to stop him. "I don't need your damn coat," he grumbled, and though he tried to wave off the offer it was clear he didn't know what to think of it. The demon hated showing weakness - especially his elemental weakness. And anyway, looking at Peter sitting around without a jacket on would just make him feel cold despite the extra layer.
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The man's rejection of his coat caused Peter to pull his arms back into it. He wasn't going to force it on him, since that would most likely just make him even more resistant to taking it. If the guy preferred to freeze, then that was his decision, right? Peter leaned more of his weight against the wall and then went back to watching the other patients.
Even if they had gotten sidetracked from their original topic, the knowledge of Roland's death was still weighing heavily on Peter. He clenched his jaw as the thoughts and feelings from the night before came back to him again. "At least... he didn't have to die with the guilt that he'd killed people he was friendly with," he muttered to himself. It was hardly a consolation for either of them, but it was better than nothing.
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"Yeah, he didn't need that," Heat agreed. Why he was entertaining small talk with this man he wasn't exactly sure. He supposed he owed it to Roland to do at least that much. The cold, unwanted as it was, at least helped to clear his thoughts. "What did you know about him, anyway? What'd the two of you talk about?" If Roland avoided anything involving what he was, but the two of them still conversed enough to consider each other friends, then what came up when they spoke?
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"Well, all sorts of things," he said with a shrug, which he regretted. He needed to stop moving the parts of him that hurt. "He... saw me in action when I got brainwashed a few weeks ago, so that was how we first started talking, but after that we would just talk about whatever problems we were going through at the time. Both of us had visitors come to see us, so we talked about that, and... I don't know. Just whatever came up, I guess." He didn't know if he was giving Heat a particularly satisfactory answer, but it wasn't like he and Roland had only discussed one thing. Who did that?
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He wondered if Roland would have wanted him to disclose more about who he was now that he was gone - at least to this friend of his. All the demon knew was hearsay, but some of it would at least put him in a positive light. For now, he held his tongue. This man might have been Roland's friend, but Heat hardly knew him. He'd told him enough.
"Visitors?" Heat thought out loud before he could catch himself. What visitors could they possibly have here that wouldn't try to rescue them given the opportunity. He wasn't sure, but memories of the person who was Seraph and yet wasn't had him wanting to see them first hand. Maybe he was getting too far ahead of himself and it was something completely different.
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That was when his mother had come to see him -- no, to see him and Nathan. It was hard to believe that that had been less than a week ago, when he'd been spending the past two days worrying over his brother. It was strange how anxiety could make it seem like minutes were hours. Once again, Peter held back a sigh and huddled up into his coat.
"Every Sunday people from outside come to visit, but they're brainwashed," he explained. "For example, I saw my mom last time, and she was just as convinced as the nurses that I was sick. Some people think they're fakes, but me and Roland agreed that they were real - that was my mom, no doubt about it. Still, there's gotta be a way to snap them out of it." He figured that the mass brainwashing that had happened a few days back was even further proof of that. If they could just figure out how Landel seemed to do that as if he was flipping a switch, then they'd be able to make real progress.
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"Do you know who visited Roland?" More questions. He didn't like having to rely on this man for so many answers, but with the last of his tribe gone there weren't many others to turn to. Chances were it wasn't even anyone he knew. What members of the Lokapala he'd met hadn't lived long enough for him to remember them. Who knew who their leader considered the most important.
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