Night 55, Main Hallway 2-Center

[swornandbroken]

[from here]He'd seen pins whose meaning he wasn't certain of, on other people's berets, a sword and shield the main one. Given Aguilar's fixation on results, and on the prisoners' proving their worth, Mello had to wonder if they'd be seeing a weeding-out of those who hadn't faced ordeals deemed worthy of pins. He was both disturbed and strangely

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[autophoenix]

[ back from here ]

Walking straight out of the room, she rested her forearms on the railing of the balcony, peering over into the darkness below. Curious, she shined her flashlight down in hopes of figuring out what was in there during the night, but … for some reason, there was still nothing but blackness. She squinted for a long minute, trying to figure out why it wasn't going away, and then she noticed that it was massive and … and wriggling. She nearly dropped her flashlight but instead secured her grip on it tighter and backed quickly away from the edge, eyes widened with fear and back slamming against the door of the staff seminar room, shutting it again

Round Two.... FIGHT!

[product_of_fear]

As Claire started to move, a noise, soft enough that it could have easily been imagined, started. It was a male voice laughing, or perhaps crying, but it was flat and almost too regular, like a recording played softly in a distant room. It faded almost immediately, but by then Claire might have been distracted by other things. As others had found before her, the room around her seemed to change with every step she took, the floor groaning as it seemed to literally crumble away to rotten boards and ash under her feet. The signs of damage spread up the walls and ceiling as well, decaying and breaking them down until Claire was suddenly standing in the ruined remains of a building, the blackened walls framing a patch of sky that was dominated by a great, pale moon.

Nothing grew in the black ash-like earth under her feet, though it would have been wrong to say there was no life here. A flutter of movement caught the light from the moon overhead, revealing itself to be a crow digging into a still figure wearing a familiar military uniform

[autophoenix]

The laughter -- tears? -- caught her attention and Claire began to move through the hallway down further across the central hallway, disregarding the stairs. If there was something going on, she needed to help. But before she could figure out where it was coming from, flashlight eagerly searching the emptiness, she felt the floorboards crack beneath her and for a minute she was sure that she was going to fall through. She could even recall the exact cracks of her bones from that kind of fall, expecting them

[product_of_fear]

Unfortunately for Claire, even after the crow flew away in fright from her approach it became apparent that the person lying there was beyond help. His face a wrecked mess of torn flesh and exposed bone that had obviously been like that for several days at the least. Small things wriggled in the corpse's flesh and the air was thick with the pungent smell of rot, while the uniform itself was shredded and torn, little more than scraps of cloth

[autophoenix]

It wasn't someone she knew -- but that wasn't reassuring. Whatever had happened, whatever had eaten away at the building, it had apparently gotten everyone else. Everyone but her. But what else was new? She knew this feeling. She knew it from Bob Bisho trying to use her blood to cure … superpowers AIDS or whatever it was. Somehow, it didn't affect her, and everyone else at the institute had desiccated into nothing because of it. She got to her feet and gazed out on the field of bodies, scrutinizing for a minute

[product_of_fear]

"Claire..." His voice was weak and it was clearly a struggle for him to raise his head enough to just see her face. He swallowed thickly, talking extremely difficult when he hadn't had as much as a sip of water in days.

"W-why did this have to happen to me? Why are you standing there perfectly fine when I'm... like this?"

He took a laboured breath, body shaking as he hung there. The ropes were twisted and knotted, tight enough that it was almost like they'd fused into one large knot about his wrists and thick enough that it would take a knife and a lot of time to get him down.

"Why does everyone around you get hurt?"

[autophoenix]

At first, she didn't manage to process the specifics of what he was saying. The fact that he was talking at all had her both elated and worried. Even though there was nothing that could be done for the knots, she didn't give up trying, to the point of rubbing away and injuring her fingertips from the tightness of the knot and her eagerness to try and get it untied. The blood, unfortunately, made it harder to get any leeway though