[4th FLOOR] what protects our hearts
Characters: Reverie/Aizen (iniquicity), Argent/Christopher (twoninths), Ran/Gertrude (nobodysheroine)
Date/Time: August 28, mid-afternoon
Location: The City Without Walls
Rating: PG
Summary: When the elevator finally stops, Argent, Ran, and Reverie are just in time to witness a memory from Argent's childhood.
------
The room is large and mostly empty, dim as all its light is filtering in from a small window, set high in one of the corners of the room. The only pieces of furniture in the room are large marble slabs, solid and rectangular, raised slightly off the ground on legs. Most of them are bare, except a few which have lumps the shape of people covered in white sheets upon them. Some large, some small, some wide, some thin. None of them stir, and the room is, unsurprisingly, as silent as a morgue.
Until, with a deep, sudden inhale, one of the covered bodies sits up, pulling the sheet off of his face and bunching it down about his waist. He is a boy of about eleven: pale, dark-haired, thin, completely naked. He blinks about in confusion, opening and shutting his eyes like his eyelids have been stuck together by sleep, shivering and growing goosebumps in the cool air. He sits very still for a while, his eyes growing wider with every second that ticks by, until, finally, he wraps his sheet tightly about his waist and hops off his slab onto the ground, making an "oof" noise as he lands. He creeps, on silent tip-toes, across the floor to the nearest marble slab with a body on it and pulls back the sheet, revealing a weathered, tired old man with a beard. This man's face is almost a bluish-grey colour, and the boy's own face quickly drains of colour as well when he sees the dead body, though he reaches out in morbid curiosity and pokes its face anyway. Its head lolls to one side, hitting the slab with a dull thud.
The boy's eyes go very wide, very fast, and he gulps, both visibly and audibly. Panicked, he looks about the room, whipping his head about so fast that his hair tumbles into his eyes, trying to find something, somewhere, that is not more sheets and slabs. Eventually, he spots a large metal door at the far end of the room and goes scampering towards it. The sheet gets caught under-foot twice, nearly sending him sprawling, but he makes it and yanks on the handle. The door rattles but doesn't move, so he yanks again and again. Letting the sheet drop, he pounds on the door with both hands, in a desperate sort of fury now, shaking all over, and kicks at it with his feet.
A minute later, when his fists are starting to grow sore, the door's lock makes a clicking noise, and the boy has only barely enough time to retrieve his sheet off the ground and wrap it about his waist again before a large, red-faced man in white overalls stares into the room. He looks right over the boy's head at first but then his eyes drift downwards. In return, the boy stares up archly, tugging his sheet higher and raising his eyebrows in an imperious manner.
"What do you mean by locking this door?" he demands in a voice filled with disdain, like he is insulted not only on his own behalf but on the behalf of all the other corpses in the room. "Everybody's dead in here. They're not going to run away."
The man makes a noise between a deeply distressed moan and a whimper, his eyes rolling back in his head, before his whole body goes limp and drops in the doorway. The boy jumps back, looking down with a comically o-shaped mouth. His knuckles are white around the fistful of sheet he is holding. Then, in barely enough time for a proper blink, he is vaulting over the man and sprinting down the corridor blindly.
He takes two right turns and ends up in something far busier and nosier than the morgue; there are doctors and nurses and patients everywhere here, bustling about and talking to one another. A few turn to look at him, the little boy shaking in only a sheet and staring about with a pale, frantic look. One of the nurses actually comes over and puts a hand on his shoulder, muttering something about where his parents are, but he jerks back, dark eyes going even wider, to the point where they almost threaten to be too wide for his face.
"Where's school?" he shouts. "I'm missing cricket practice!" And takes off again, down the nearest hall, as the nurses calls after him.
This repeats for what seems like a very, very long time as the boy dashes about the halls, not seeming to know where he is going or what his goal is, his white sheet still clumsily wrapped about his waist, flapping in the wind he's stirring up as he runs. A rather large number of white-coated hospital staff jog after him, looking a mixture of distressed and out of breath. Every now and then, a new one makes an attempt to catch him, but the boy dodges every time and continues running, shrieking something about \his cricket practice whenever he has enough breath to do so, waving about the arm not dedicated to keeping himself vaguely clothed.
Outside one of the big double doors, above which a sign reading "Maternity Ward" hangs, one doctor catches him for long enough to stick a needle in his arm and inject a clear liquid. The boy goes limp and lazy-eyed almost immediately, staggering a few steps backward and bumping up against the wall.
"Calm down, son," says the doctor, another bearded old man, though this one is friendlier and more lively than the one in the morgue. "It's a shock to us too, you know. When I last saw you, your head was like a run-over pumpkin."
The boy's knees give out. He blinks heavily in doped confusion; each time he opens his eyes, it's slower and obviously more of a struggle than the last.
"I'm missing cricket practice, I tell you!" he says, mushy-mouthed, with a vicious stab of his finger into the air but without much heat. And then his head bobs forward as he falls asleep.
Date/Time: August 28, mid-afternoon
Location: The City Without Walls
Rating: PG
Summary: When the elevator finally stops, Argent, Ran, and Reverie are just in time to witness a memory from Argent's childhood.
------
The room is large and mostly empty, dim as all its light is filtering in from a small window, set high in one of the corners of the room. The only pieces of furniture in the room are large marble slabs, solid and rectangular, raised slightly off the ground on legs. Most of them are bare, except a few which have lumps the shape of people covered in white sheets upon them. Some large, some small, some wide, some thin. None of them stir, and the room is, unsurprisingly, as silent as a morgue.
Until, with a deep, sudden inhale, one of the covered bodies sits up, pulling the sheet off of his face and bunching it down about his waist. He is a boy of about eleven: pale, dark-haired, thin, completely naked. He blinks about in confusion, opening and shutting his eyes like his eyelids have been stuck together by sleep, shivering and growing goosebumps in the cool air. He sits very still for a while, his eyes growing wider with every second that ticks by, until, finally, he wraps his sheet tightly about his waist and hops off his slab onto the ground, making an "oof" noise as he lands. He creeps, on silent tip-toes, across the floor to the nearest marble slab with a body on it and pulls back the sheet, revealing a weathered, tired old man with a beard. This man's face is almost a bluish-grey colour, and the boy's own face quickly drains of colour as well when he sees the dead body, though he reaches out in morbid curiosity and pokes its face anyway. Its head lolls to one side, hitting the slab with a dull thud.
The boy's eyes go very wide, very fast, and he gulps, both visibly and audibly. Panicked, he looks about the room, whipping his head about so fast that his hair tumbles into his eyes, trying to find something, somewhere, that is not more sheets and slabs. Eventually, he spots a large metal door at the far end of the room and goes scampering towards it. The sheet gets caught under-foot twice, nearly sending him sprawling, but he makes it and yanks on the handle. The door rattles but doesn't move, so he yanks again and again. Letting the sheet drop, he pounds on the door with both hands, in a desperate sort of fury now, shaking all over, and kicks at it with his feet.
A minute later, when his fists are starting to grow sore, the door's lock makes a clicking noise, and the boy has only barely enough time to retrieve his sheet off the ground and wrap it about his waist again before a large, red-faced man in white overalls stares into the room. He looks right over the boy's head at first but then his eyes drift downwards. In return, the boy stares up archly, tugging his sheet higher and raising his eyebrows in an imperious manner.
"What do you mean by locking this door?" he demands in a voice filled with disdain, like he is insulted not only on his own behalf but on the behalf of all the other corpses in the room. "Everybody's dead in here. They're not going to run away."
The man makes a noise between a deeply distressed moan and a whimper, his eyes rolling back in his head, before his whole body goes limp and drops in the doorway. The boy jumps back, looking down with a comically o-shaped mouth. His knuckles are white around the fistful of sheet he is holding. Then, in barely enough time for a proper blink, he is vaulting over the man and sprinting down the corridor blindly.
He takes two right turns and ends up in something far busier and nosier than the morgue; there are doctors and nurses and patients everywhere here, bustling about and talking to one another. A few turn to look at him, the little boy shaking in only a sheet and staring about with a pale, frantic look. One of the nurses actually comes over and puts a hand on his shoulder, muttering something about where his parents are, but he jerks back, dark eyes going even wider, to the point where they almost threaten to be too wide for his face.
"Where's school?" he shouts. "I'm missing cricket practice!" And takes off again, down the nearest hall, as the nurses calls after him.
This repeats for what seems like a very, very long time as the boy dashes about the halls, not seeming to know where he is going or what his goal is, his white sheet still clumsily wrapped about his waist, flapping in the wind he's stirring up as he runs. A rather large number of white-coated hospital staff jog after him, looking a mixture of distressed and out of breath. Every now and then, a new one makes an attempt to catch him, but the boy dodges every time and continues running, shrieking something about \his cricket practice whenever he has enough breath to do so, waving about the arm not dedicated to keeping himself vaguely clothed.
Outside one of the big double doors, above which a sign reading "Maternity Ward" hangs, one doctor catches him for long enough to stick a needle in his arm and inject a clear liquid. The boy goes limp and lazy-eyed almost immediately, staggering a few steps backward and bumping up against the wall.
"Calm down, son," says the doctor, another bearded old man, though this one is friendlier and more lively than the one in the morgue. "It's a shock to us too, you know. When I last saw you, your head was like a run-over pumpkin."
The boy's knees give out. He blinks heavily in doped confusion; each time he opens his eyes, it's slower and obviously more of a struggle than the last.
"I'm missing cricket practice, I tell you!" he says, mushy-mouthed, with a vicious stab of his finger into the air but without much heat. And then his head bobs forward as he falls asleep.