It isn't for exercise that the soldier finds his way to the pools, although the mistake would be easy to make. He's there a few times a week, more when his muscles start regaining their former strength. Different days, different times of day, purposefully disrupting any meaningful pattern. In black trunks and disappearing scar tissue, he cuts sharp lines through the water. Five laps, ten.

(There's something uniquely empty, he thinks, about being suspended in water. Slipping into the cold and numb, feeling nothing but the gentle tug of gravity against the body's natural tendency to subvert it, and not as a survival mechanism but out of a simple pull toward equilibrium, balance at the expense of everything else. He tells himself if he keeps moving he won't sink, if he has limbs to move he won't disappear, if any of his limbs are still his by the time this place is through -- and if he learns to associate clear thought and precise action with the desperate crush-gasping of his lungs, then--)

--Twelve, when a metal hand scrapes against tile out of sequence. Steel rakes four white lines into the surface with a chalkboard screech as the soldier pulls himself up and out with all the grace of a wet dog escaping the bath, hydraulics scream-whirring against the strain. He takes half the pool out with him. Water floods across the deck.

"Goddamn--" is his eloquent contribution to the situation, muttered between gritted teeth as he forces cloying, chemical-tinged air into his lungs again. He gropes for a towel, still squinting through the rivulets of water coming off his hair.

It's fine. He's just, y'know. an idiot.