Night 51: Disciplinary Therapy Corridor

[madeinthehrl]

[from here]The hallway was dark and, as far as Soma could tell, utterly devoid of life. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the lack of lighting, waited for her breathing to steady, her pulse to normalize. The voice in her mind had, for the moment, faded to a quiet whisper. Perhaps Marie had realized just how much she was affecting her host

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[autophoenix]

[ from here ]

Well, she definitely found what she was looking for. There was someone there, all right, but this was in no way the crawl space she'd been looking at. Face reddened and blotchy from the crying, she reached up to rub her palms over her cheeks and get rid of some of the tears as she tried to find some way to rationalize what the hell had just happened.

She was still in Landel's. Landel's was still in one piece. Slowly, she stumbled further into the hallway, bracing one hand on the cold wall, pulse slowing as she tried to work through her anxiety. Did this mean they weren't dead? A look to her right told her Peter had come through the door with her, but --

That wasn't possible, he'd just …

"Peter?" Her voice was weak, scratchy. Terrified. She'd seen him blow up, there was no way. She'd felt the flesh being torn from her body. Burned and charred and forcibly decayed down into her very bones. There was no way he was standing there before her now, same as he had after the explosion above Kirby Plaza, like nothing was wrong.

No, judging by the look on his face, he knew very well that everything was wrong. She leaned some more of her weight against the wall as she stared at him like he was some kind of ghost, trying to work through what was happening and find some logical explanation. There was none.

"Peter, what just happened?" As if he'd have the answers. As if he'd know any better. "Are you --" her eyes flickered down over his body, searching for still-healing burns or injuries of any kind to give some indication that what had just happened was real. Nothing. Slowly, hesitantly, it drew her attention to her own uniform and the fact that it wasn't damaged. All of the burns she'd suffer, the way her body had depleted nearly beyond repair, and the thing wasn't even ripped?

Something was very, very wrong here.

[human_sponge]

Just as he'd been expecting for everything to go black (for real, this time), Peter was instead given the exact opposite. While wherever he had ended up was still very dark, he also felt very alive. When he took a breath, he felt it fill his lungs; when he reached out to his side, he felt a solid wall. A wall that should have been nothing but dust after what he'd done.

How could that be? He frowned, and just the fact that he had the face muscles to do so made no sense. But just as Peter was about to do a slow spin in place to figure out whether or not he was just hallucinating all over again, he heard a voice that made him tense in both surprise and relief.

He spun around to face his niece, taking in the girl's tear-stained face and letting out a heavy sigh, as if he was releasing all of the guilt that had built up in him over the past... however long that had been. He couldn't even really say, since it had been so surreal. It could have been minutes or hours, but it didn't matter, because... they were back. Everything was back and everyone was back.

If it had been gone in the first place.

He ran a hand through his hair, barely believing it and yet knowing that this was the hallway they had been trying to get into before all of that had started. Had that really been another trick of the mind? It had to have been, and yet it had felt so much more real than that other time, on the field. He hadn't seen the undead horse this time, so maybe it was different -- and much more potent, if he'd been that sure of his own death and the destruction of the building.

But Claire needed him. He listened to her shaky tone and could only imagine what she had seen, after the explosion. He didn't really want to think about it, and he didn't have any good answers for her. In the end, all he could do was pull the girl into a hug and rest his head on the top of hers.

"It's okay," he said. "We're okay." And yet some of the fear was still there -- just the possibility that that could actually happen, if he wasn't careful. And it made his heart beat faster than normal.

[madeinthehrl]

Voices. There were voices--people approaching--but something sounded wrong. The first figure to emerge out of the darkness was a girl not much younger than Soma, her expression one of shock, her hand pressed against the wall, much as Soma's was. Hard on her heels was a slightly older man whose expression practically mirrored the other girl's. He looked familiar--where had she seen him before? Realization came quickly: the night they'd fought the patient Alita had called Sparky.

She frowned slightly despite her--despite everything. Had they been taken for experimentation, too? But that didn't make sense. They were coming the wrong way; the experimental rooms were behind her.

Soma was hardly stable herself, but she was at least uninjured, and the invasive presence in her mind was choosing to lie dormant for the time being. That made it easier to forget she was broken. She took a deep breath and moved a little further forward. What was his name again? He'd mentioned it on the bulletin board.

"Peter?" she called, and was irrationally proud of how her voice only shook a little, how her breath hitched only slightly. "...are you all right?"

[autophoenix]

As he braced his arms around her, Claire unwittingly sank into the embrace, eyes shutting in relief. He was solid. He was real. He was there. Her arms wormed their way around his body and pulled him in tighter and she tried to ignore the constant, hurried throb of his heart against her temple. Her pulse was doing the same thing, rushing in her ears, but she was forcing herself to instead focus on the positive.

It wasn't real. Whatever it was, it was over, and he was here, and people were here and --

Right. People. She heard the sound of a weak voice and she slowly forced herself to pull back a little from Peter, keeping her arms looped loosely around him because she wasn't quite ready to sacrifice the human contact yet. The latent fear was still there. He could vanish. But, there stood a girl who appeared to have come stumbling out of one of the patient rooms, and wasn't that what they'd come for?

"Hi," she breathed awkwardly, offering a grim, not-all-there smile. She looked between Soma and Peter, confused. "You guys know each other?" Her gaze landed on Soma definitely and she awkwardly sought for her words, throat still healing from how scratchy it had become through her screams and sobs, making her voice scratchy. "We're … here to help."

It felt stupid now, seeing the girl walking around. Obviously she wasn't that hurt -- not nearly as bad as Claire had been expecting, anyway. She wasn't disfigured, though, and anything less than that wouldn't exactly be what Claire had been expecting, if she was being entirely honest.

[human_sponge]

While Peter was a bit reluctant to let go of Claire, he didn't blame her for doing so when it turned out that there was someone there. It was a bit awkward to be found hugging like this, and Peter knew that Claire didn't like to be viewed as weak, just like he didn't. She didn't let go completely, and that was fine by him. If she needed to hold on, she could do so for as long as she needed to.

As it turned out, that voice belonged to someone who he knew. It took him a second to place the tone and the face, but then he remembered the night that Roland had lost it and chased after him with all the blood lust of... well, of a cannibal. It wasn't something he liked to think back on, but Soma had been there, along with the others, to help him out. And now it looked like it was time to return the favor.

Just looking her over, though, he couldn't see any obvious physical injuries. There was no blood staining her shirt, no limp to her gait. There were, of course, other ways to hurt someone, and in this case it seemed like any trauma was mental. That was much harder to heal.

Still, they could be there for her, so she knew she wasn't alone. "Yeah, it's me," he said as he nodded to her. "This is my niece, Claire," he explained while motioning to the small blond. He glanced down at Claire. "Soma helped me out once." He didn't really want to go into the details now, and figured he could go over it with Claire later.

Finally, Peter pulled away from Claire so that he could step up to Soma and give her a closer look. "Are you... all right?" Clearly not, but he hoped that she could understand his meaning; he needed to know if she had any injuries.

[madeinthehrl]

It was easier to breathe if she focused on the details: the drying tears on Claire's face, the look of receding fear on Peter's. Peter. She recalled the bulletin board: he had mentioned wanting to come up here. He was a healer of some sort. He and Claire were a rescue team. That made sense. And they had seemed injured, if not physically--so the hall outside was guarded. No exit strategy to speak of--but that was all right. They could think of one. There was nobody else in this hall; they had time to figure something out.

The thoughts came one after the other, and she let them come. It was a moment before she realized Peter had asked her a question.

"I'm uninjured." She tried to put a little more steel in her posture, a little more confidence in her voice, and failed at both. "They didn't touch me, just..." Her hand rose to her head before she could help herself. "They did something to my head. But it doesn't hurt."

A slow breath. "You should look for the other patients who were taken. I'll be all right."

[autophoenix]

The explanations and introductions garnered an awkward, tense, and not altogether convincing smile from Claire that was clearly out of obligation. It wasn't that she had any reason to not give the usual niceties to Soma, or that she disliked her in anyway, but it was hard to muster those niceties up when she'd just come off of living her worst nightmare and was still reeling from it.

When Peter pulled away to go check on the other girl, Claire tried not to let herself feel too scorned. Logically, she understood the impulse, but the bitter, effeminate, instinctively competitive part of her automatically was snapping some bitter offhand comment in the back of her mind about how Peter always needed to be the hero, but only cared as long as you were injured. Claire had been declared free of visible injury, and he'd moved onto the next victim.

But, it was a part of who he was that Claire had come to expect, so she tried not to let the bitterness linger and instead moved closer, peering past Soma at the other opening doors. By the looks of Soma, she wouldn't make a very good test subject to find out about that healing blood, but maybe one of the others …

Well, Peter seemed concerned enough with this patient that they probably weren't going to get the chance to find another, even after all they'd been through to get here. So, she tempered her eager gaze further into the hallway and just fixed it on the distraught girl before her.

"Uninjured physically," she corrected. Mostly because what was coming out of Soma's mouth sounded a lot like her excuses for when she came out of things without a scratch on her, and she knew the tone of voice that said mentally, it was a lot worse than that. Fine didn't even begin to cover it. "Are you sure? Do you need anything?" Offering a hand to hold seemed kind of presumptuous, seeing that it was the first time they'd met, but it was the best Claire had and feeling useless didn't sit well with her.

[human_sponge]

Something had been to done to her head. Peter frowned, knowing that that could be any number of things, and yet he had no right to ask. Still, while it was a good thing that she didn't have any physical wounds to contend with, it also meant that he was more or less useless in this situation. He was almost sure that Soma had other people she wanted to see now, people who weren't him or Claire.

Still, those people might not make it, especially if they were hit by whatever had put Claire and himself through that nightmare back there. Peter managed to do his best to forget about all that and focus on the living, breathing people here who needed him, but he wasn't sure how Claire was holding up.

He did send her a glance when she made her comment, not understanding why she felt the need to rub it in when that was already obvious. He sent Soma an apologetic look, but was glad to hear Claire get over herself and be more sincere in her offers.

"It might be better if we stay in this hallway until night ends," he mentioned. "There's something out there..." And he couldn't help glancing over his shoulder at the door that they'd just stumbled through. It wasn't something as much as -- well, he honestly didn't know how to define it, but there was no way he was letting Soma step into that.

Knowing what little he did of Soma, she probably wouldn't be able to relax until they looked to see if others needed help. "I'll check the doors," he said as he slowly moved away from the two girls. But as he continued down the hall, he found that each one he tried was locked. So Soma had made it out first. Compared to the others, she could have even been called lucky. And that was a nauseating enough thought on its own.

[madeinthehrl]

"Uninjured physically," Soma repeated, and this time there was a finality to her voice that hadn't been there before. She appreciated their concern--it would have been understandable even if they hadn't come with the intention of helping to begin with--but she had always been proud. Even now, accepting help--if they could help at all, which she doubted--would seem like a concession.

"Thank you, but there's nothing you can do for me." That was delivered to Claire a little more bluntly than she had intended, and she was quick to amend: "It's not that I don't trust your abilities, but you probably don't have the technology for it."

But it was better if she didn't think too much about that; it led somewhere she didn't want to go at the moment, and probably never would want to go. Best to focus on the situation in the hallway for the time being. Peter was already establishing that the other doors were locked: none of the other experiments were complete yet, then. And what he'd said about the adjacent hallway...

"Who's guarding it?" Focus, Soma. Don't think about her. Don't think about how he'll react when he hears about her. "Or what, rather?"

[autophoenix]

The look from Peter didn't go missed by Claire, and she just gave an innocent kind of shrug that showed she had no idea what she'd said that was so wrong for him to give her the disapproving look. It wasn't like she'd asked how they'd managed to screw Soma up -- she was just trying to be understanding. Or, rather, empathetic, really. Which was a rarity in itself for her -- it wasn't often she got to see exactly how screwed up she'd become reflecting in other people and it was her instinct to grab onto it, as insensitive as she was realizing that was.

Peter couldn't know what it was like to feel broken on the inside and not on the outside, though, and as she shifted her gaze from him back to Soma, she realized that was exactly the problem. So, Claire just forced a grim smile onto her lips that split apart as soon as Soma's hardened attitude drove her to ask what was outside the hall. Turning to look over her shoulder, Claire couldn't suppress the shudder at the thought.

"I don't know," she confessed in a quiet voice. "Whatever it is, though, it's bad. It's like … I think whoever's out there can make illusions. And is catching people in them." It wasn't that hard to imagine someone with an ability like that -- the real surprise was that they might have an ability like that and yet it wasn't limited.

[human_sponge]

All the doors were locked, and the one that did open was already empty, meaning it either hadn't been used for the night, or some rescuers had made it through before them. Peter wasn't sure how, unless they were the only two who had been unlucky enough to be put through whatever that had been. Sighing, he turned from the last door and moved back down the hall toward the two girls, wiping some sweat from his forehead now that he had the chance.

They didn't have the technology. What did that mean? Most likely, something had been done to her internally that was unable to be fixed with just a few bandages and some medical expertise. It was frustrating, but he wasn't going to push the girl.

Claire gave a decent enough explanation of what had happened to them without giving away any unfortunate details, which Peter was grateful for. They didn't need to be airing their secret fears to anyone, even if Soma had helped him in the past. Peter just leaned himself against the wall, grateful for a slight respite after all that.

"Do you know if people might be coming for you?" he asked the girl. "Those friends of yours, maybe?" Meche and Senna, right? "We can stay with you until the night ends or they show up, whichever comes first." It wasn't much, but it was the best they could do until some of the other doors opened up.

[madeinthehrl]

Illusions. Soma pressed her lips together tightly. Judging from the state in which Peter and Claire had emerged from the hallway, the last thing she needed was to venture out there. Whatever it was, it sounded as if her rescuers had gone through just as terrible a time getting here as she'd spent in the experimental treatment room.

What lay out there? Fears? Dreams? She felt curious, in a detached sort of way, but not nearly curious--or foolish enough--to see for herself. And yet--

"I arranged to meet with Senna and Meche and Hokuto," she said. "They would have noticed when I didn't show up." But there was no way of telling if they knew where to find her, and even if they did...

...they might be out there, right now. In that hallway, facing whatever it was that had had such an effect on Peter and Claire. Worry began to grow inside her, and she glanced back at the two of them, her thoughts clearly written on her face. Still, she attempted a faint nod at Peter's offer to stay.

"Thank you," she said quietly. "I appreciate it."

[autophoenix]

As hard as she tried, she couldn't help casting a meaningful look in Peter's direction when he mentioned people coming for her. If they came through that hallway, she could only bet there was a fifty percent chance they were going to come out of it in any condition to help anyone, let alone get into the hallway of experiment rooms at all.

She still couldn't quite figure out how they'd managed to, all things considered, but that probably had something to do with the fact that she couldn't tell her shoulder was still dislocated and broken from slamming the door in. Without pain, and with the baggy t-shirt of the institute on, it looked normal enough. Nothing was sticking out where it shouldn't be, but her healing had slowed enough that it was still chugging its way through fixing what she'd done to it in her hallucinated haze.

With a curt look, she shifted her gaze back to Soma and blurted out before she could stop herself.

"I wouldn't count on them making it here, if they do figure out where you are. With what's out there, I wouldn't be surprised if no one else made it in here, open door or not." Comforting? Probably not, but it was honest and really, that was more important. There was no point in hoping for a rescue that wasn't coming. No matter how obviously hurting Soma was, or how empathetic Claire felt about it, she wasn't going to sugarcoat. If she were in Soma's position, she wouldn't want that, and so she wasn't about to give it unnecessarily. Besides, Peter seemed to have the comforting under control by promising they'd stay.

[human_sponge]

So he'd been right. Senna and Meche were the two who had come to help him alongside Soma, though there had been one other. He'd talked to her, so what was her name again? Falis? Either way, he knew it hadn't been Hokuto, so he had to wonder what had happened to that one girl. It probably wasn't something he needed to be bringing up at that moment, though, and so he left it alone.

Still, if those girls had realized that Soma wasn't showing up even though she should have, then it was a safe bet they were trying to get up here. Unless they didn't know the way, but chances were one out of the three had been up here for a rescue in the past.

Though once again, Claire chimed in with a rather dismal piece of information. All of them had probably been thinking that it was unlikely that they'd make it through, but did she really need to go out and say it? "On the other hand, we made it through," he cut in. "Maybe they will too. There's no guarantee, but..." Well, at least they were here. They weren't friends, but they were people who could try to get her mind off of whatever she'd just been through.

Which was... easier said than done. Seriously, how did you make small talk with someone who had just been experimented on? Peter was usually decent at chatting people up, but this was out of his element, even. "What had you guys been planning to do tonight?" was what he eventually asked. "I can't imagine you normally run around looking to save guys from demons." Which he realized he'd have to explain to Claire later, but... later.

[madeinthehrl]

Soma glanced at Claire sharply, anger flashing in her eyes for a moment before the emotion passed and there was only exhaustion written on her face.

"They'll come," she said simply. She hadn't believed it before; now, she knew they would. They had to. "They're stronger than you think. They'll get through that hallway, illusions or not."

Another deep breath. Her pulse was slowing now. She focused on Peter's question, attempting a faint smile. "I haven't seen any of them for a while. We were planning to catch up with one another, I suppose. Perhaps explore the area outside the institute; that's how all of us met in the first place."

[autophoenix]

Demons? Peter's question got a sharp look from Claire -- about on par with the one she'd received for being so blunt with Soma, really. Why hadn't he told her if he'd needed saving from demons? That seemed like the kind of thing that one would bring up with the person they were stuck with and relying on. Hypocrisy aside, of course -- it wasn't as though she was chomping at the bit for a chance to tell Peter all about how Sylar brain-raped her last week.

The attentive look softened into something that was just frustratedly understanding and she turned begrudgingly to look to Soma for a response. Not altogether an exciting plan for the night, but she supposed they couldn't all be as exciting and momentous as Claire and Peter's had been.

"You didn't miss out on all that much, aside from some creepy … ruined city. There's not much to look at outside aside from the shed," then again, truth be told, just the thought of the outside of the institute dragged the fringes of her mind back toward the fearful place she'd been mentally scrambling away from, so she was trying to shut down that conversation quickly.

"Anyway. If your friends do get here, you'd better hope they came prepared with a way back out -- I don't think any of us are getting through that door. I don't think any of us would want to, at this point."