Locked in a cage *OTA, nudge to family members*

[mongrelverine]

The first sensation Daken realized when he groggily woke up was feeling cold. His shirt had been shredded in the fight with Logan and the girl with the white stripes in her hair, and he doubted if his enemies had been courteous enough to replace it. His last memory had been of claws at his throat and fingers on his forehead. Just what had that girl

Comments

[mad_asahatter]

Since the fight in the mess hall, Ophelia had been entertaining some strange notions. She wasn't even sure what it was, this cloying, dragging, consuming feeling that was seeping into her almost constantly. There was no where to filter it, nothing to gain from it. She couldn't just release it, couldn't store it. But there was nothing to do with it.

So she figured, since it started with the nameless solider in the mess hall, she'd find something from him.

Gaining access to the brig area was a little difficult. Using her powers of persuasion, mostly just a deep sense of persuasion filtered carefully, Ophelia managed to find her way to the floor she needed and the cell block she was looking for. Empathic signatures were easy to follow in that regard.

Halting outside the cell, Ophelia sat on the floor to the side of the door, stopping to just feel for a moment. Everything was cluttered and messed up; but not like it usually was. She was finding it terribly difficult just to organise it at all.

[mongrelverine]

Daken was wondering if it was possible to die from boredom at this point. There was only so much he could take, not even being able to move around his cell. He may have been old enough to be the father of most of the team's members, but mentally he was still a teenager, and a rebellious teenager at that.

He didn't see Ophelia enter and sit on the floor, his head slumped forward as he was in a half-dozing state at this point, but it snapped back up when he heard the movements outside his cell.

A minute ticked by as he waited for whoever it was to show themselves. When nothing happened, he called, his voice annoyed and with a definite growl to it. "Quit hiding. I know you're out there."

[mad_asahatter]

It was the frustration and annoyance that made her shift; like a shiver down her spine, like a cool finger drawing over her neck and Ophelia was almost compelled to shift towards the door, leaning up to peek over the glass and peer inside.

She wasn't sure what she was expecting. She'd seen what he looked like, but she was still almost surprised at it. The tattoos, the hair, the chains. It definitely wasn't what she'd envisioned seeing. But feeling; the raw hate, the blistering fury, the simmering annoyance. That was exactly how she expected it would be.

Nibbling her bottom lip, weighing the choices of staying or skittering away, Ophelia held back from pressing her face to the glass. "Tight as tight to stop a fight, not quite sure what's wrong, what's right."

[mongrelverine]

If Ophelia hadn't been expecting to see what she did, Daken likewise felt the same way when the pale little face appeared in the window. He wondered if he had gotten a concussion at some point in the fight his healing factor hadn't taken care of, for the one on the other side of the glass looked like a being straight out of Lewis Caroll's imagination.

From the heart tattooed on her cheek to her flamboyantly red hair, Daken stared, hardly believing this could possibly be a member of the team. Her strange rhyming way of talking only added to the feral's confusion. He almost believed he was having some sort of hallucinogenic fit.

He bluntly asked, "Who the hell are you?" He wondered if the answer would come in the form of another rhyme or maybe a little song and dance this time.

[mad_asahatter]

Worrying her lip slightly, Ophelia frowned moderately, drawing her eyebrows together and creasing her forehead before that stream of confusion from him worked its way through. "Ophelia is a name, part and parcel with a game. It's not rightly the same, but it does for this frame."

She could do a song and dance, it would rhyme as well and likely the dance would include mud in some form. But there wasn't any handy and at that point in time, Ophelia was lacking in any kind of rhythm for her rhymes.

Despite the calmness of the situation, the glass and metal separating them, the fact that he was restrained, Ophelia still felt this cloying tightness of anger and hate. Like her bones were just holding the feeling close. She wasn't sure what to do with it; keep it or give it back. But she might not be able to give it back.

"Why so blue, why so green? What's the cause that makes you mean?"

[mongrelverine]

"Okay..." If he could have reached his hand up, Daken would have been facepalming. It was like talking to a book of nursery rhymes. He felt like this 'Ophelia' should have come with a translator or at the very least some subtitles. "That made absolutely no sense at all."

Daken had learned to be a patient man over the course of his life, but right now he was tempted to say to hell with it all. He was locked up, cold, sore, hungry, and to top it all off there was some deranged lunatic spouting nonsense rhymes off on the other side of the door.

He began to tune Ophelia back out. Maybe if he ignored her, she'd eventually get bored and leave to pester someone else. But then she began another rhyme. The beginning didn't make sense, but last bit did. Daken shrugged. "It's just the way I am."

[mad_asahatter]

The way he was. A natural, born and bred sociopath was hard to come by. Ophelia knew this because even in the asylum, where there were so many that were labelled psychopathic and sociopathic, they all had something in there that she could find, this sense of something being broken, something that made them this way.

She wondered if she'd ever be able to find it in him. She wondered if she ever dared go deep enough.

"Not right, not wrong, don't know another song. Feel free, feel trapped, all that power zapped. Woke up chained, locked and caged, someone should check the doctor's paged." She wasn't trying to make sense, she knew she made sense to herself, she understood, she knew it all. But unless there was the effort, she was just static noise to others.

"Why the bric, why the brac, why my Mexican you attack?"

[mongrelverine]

It would have been a surprise to Daken that Ophelia knew his mind just about better than any other. He was an animal through and through. Whatever part of him had once been human had been left behind many years ago. He'd never even made a conscious choice to be what he was. It merely happened the same way breathing or eating occurred, an unconscious process of the mind.

Daken groaned as she went off into another nonsense ditty, waiting for some grain of sense to show itself once again. He could interpret Ophelia's questions without too much difficulty. It was the rest he didn't bother to try and understand. "I attacked him because I was ordered to." That was the simplest explanation and surely one even this simple-minded fool would understand.

[mad_asahatter]

She didn't really like the sound of that. Someone had ordered him to attack Ric, her Ric! That just wouldn't do at all. Eyes narrowing, Ophelia leant up a slight bit more, slowly rising to stand in front of the door.

"Not nice to play in others back yard, it's not nice to deal someone's death card. Can't take it back so no need to try, it's just how it goes before a brain fry." Gone was the light tone, and Ophelia just stared, probably a little more unsettling than anything else she'd be able to do.

Her head eventually tilted to the side, and Ophelia frown slightly, "Not got love, not got soul, what you got you'll never know. Try too hard, growl too loud, that emptiness will always show."

[mongrelverine]

The girl may have looked like little more than a crazy waif, but the stare she gave Daken unnerved him. That was the stare of someone who knew exactly who and what he was, yet she showed no fear in front of him. The feral mutant was finally beginning to understand that Ophelia knew much more than she appeared to.

"I'm an animal. It's all I know how to be." Daken shrugged, considering the conversation now over.