ataraxionlogs | We Would Have A Fine Time Living In The Night [semi-open]

He knows he’s spoken to the girl in the next bed before.

She looks a little bit better than he feels, and he’s learned that she made a post to the network not too long before he emerged from the halls, but not much more than that. He doesn’t know how many people were summoned, or how many of those accepted the invitation. A few people have come in after him, too, which suggests that still more could be coming… up to the jump, then probably no more. It’s a grim thought, but he doesn’t shy away from it.

What can he remember about her? It seems like such a long, long time ago, as if months and months of chasing after answers, and of being the plaything of whatever Smiley is, stand between him and any memory of what he now has to think of as his real life. Before, his life on the ship had seemed unreal and he had still been a little unable to accept it: as far as he was concerned, his real life was on solid ground, aimed at reliably bringing the worst people to heel. He doesn’t have to forget that, but setting it aside for a while has been fruitful.

He can recall, finally, that her name is Elizabeth, and she can do something interesting, sometimes. Not anymore, but maybe again soon. When it doesn’t come to him immediately, he wonders what he’s done to himself.

Proximity makes it easy to talk to her. When he feels up to conversation, he turns on his side, props his head on his hand, and addresses her. “Elizabeth. Please talk with me for a few minutes?”

The scruff of beard he’d grown in the halls is gone now, and he’s asked them to hack at his hair, but only time will fix how he’s gone from thin to gaunt. His grey eyes look very large, and not very lively.

Edited 2015-01-16 11:24 (UTC)

He hasn’t been in medbay for long, half a day at most, on fluids and mostly asleep, when he stirs because he feels a presence near the bed. One eye slides open. He recognizes the presence as a doctor, but it takes longer for him to recognize Jennifer Keller.

This encourages him to attempt to wake up, but nothing is really obeying him yet. He makes a soft, strangled sound, then reaches out one heavy hand to try to touch her wrist.

Finally, he manages to murmur, "Dr. Keller."

Edited 2015-01-16 11:49 (UTC)

Jennifer had just been coming to check on Ryuuzaki's monitors when she saw him stirring, heard her name.

"Hey- try to keep still, okay?" she said soothingly, touching his hand when she saw him reaching out, hoping it was a comfort. "You've been out cold since you were brought in and you were very dehydrated. I'm giving you fluids and monitoring your vitals. Can you talk?"

"Good. Yes. I can. It's bad?"

It feels like it's probably bad. His hand isn't fully obeying him; his gaze wavers; it's almost unimaginably hard to move, because everything weighs a thousand pounds more than it ought to.

Still, it's good to see her, and good to be in what passes for a safe place here.

"How long until the jump?"

[OOC: Let's say about three days or so here!]

She sighs, taking the opportunity to check the various monitors.

"We still have a few days- but I might have to help you in," she replied with a smile. "But we'll find some way to manage it. You're very weak. Can you..." She hesitates. "What happened to you?"

The dry noise is somewhere between a cough and an ironic chuckle, but because of his current condition, it doesn't sound good.

"Went into the corridors -- I was invited into the corridors. A year ago, I wouldn't have gone. Now -- " Shrugging is difficult when you're lying on your side. "In any case, I'm stronger than I look."

He pauses, sniffs, then adds, "I wanted to ask you to do something." It may already be too late, but he wasn't really in much condition to ask six hours ago.

That makes Jennifer look at him with more concern and start reaching for her stethoscope, but she pauses.

"Invited?" she repeated, wanting to know more, but she swallowed her questions and nodded. "Ask away."

He swallows, and his glance strays to the stethoscope.

"Take all the vitals you need -- it can't hurt. But when you do, analyze a sample of my blood. Look for anything unusual apart from the nanites. Specifically, hallucinogens."

Jennifer nodded in response to his request as she began checking his vitals; she was silent until that task was done, digesting the implications of it, before preparing a needle and a vial to take the blood sample.

"So you have reason to believe you were drugged?" she asked carefully.

"Not precisely. But I saw a number of weird things out there, and... it's only been a few weeks? You have to understand, it felt like years."

It looks like he may have been out there for months or years, too -- it's that way for everyone who's come in.

"I'm wondering what could... what could dilate my experience of time in that way. Ruling out drugs as far as possible seems like a good idea."

Edited 2015-01-13 11:14 (UTC)

Dick's definitely wearing the shades all the time, by now. It's been a complicated jump, and the ship is warm and quiet, and the Comms department is a little hushed, engineering is working overtime even if it's a little understaffed already, something is happening outside, and a good twenty people never woke up from the med couches.

Twenty people, as far as Dick has seen, is a lot of people.

And some of them are friends.

So, since sleep is ~~for the weak~~ evading him right now, he spends time down at and around medbay, anyway. In his supposedly 'down' hours. And trying to wrest out sense of what he gleans while down there. Some of the glimpses match what he's spoken with Quill about. Others are familiar in a different way, and he makes a note to try and find out who that is. Some of them are very strange altogether.

It's when he's slipping back out when he notices Ryuuzaki. His face lifts up, and his shoulders square a bit, and he more or less runs over to the bed, watching for a moment, to make sure the man's awake, and how bad it is.

(It's not good. Not immediate life danger, either, though.)

"... hey."

That's a good starter, right?

As a matter of habit, L drops off to sleep quickly, comes to alertness as quickly as he can, usually doesn't spend a lot of time in the haze between the two states. His extreme exhaustion has taken over, though, so when Robin approaches his bed, he's only awake by the most technical and perfunctory definition.

One eye is easier to open wide than the other, so he opens it, raising the eyebrow above it.

Robin looks... Robin looks exactly as he had the last time L saw him, which most likely means that he didn't go out into the corridors, if he received an invitation. Relief is a physical sensation. Bail didn't go, either. Was it only L and Darcy?

He presses his lips together, then licks them, disliking the taste in his mouth. He knows he's been given fluids, but he also feels like he's swallowed a mouse, and the attendant slight disgust of having a dry, sticky mouth with an unpleasant flavor living in it.

"Hello." He attempts to brighten and almost makes it, managing more of a cheerfully sickly look. "Water. -- How long have I been gone?"

[Three weeks!]

Robin didn't get an invitation. Which was probably for the better, since because people going missing and people going in the pods, he was in exactly the kind of mood to make him hare off and get into trouble. A lot of trouble.

He watches the way Ryuuzaki licks his lips, and winces in sympathy. He knows exactly how that feels. Less from starvation and dehydration from that long and more from a mix of some starvation and dehydration with blood loss and extreme physical activity.

He tilts his chin up, then.

"Twenty-one, twenty-two days - depending on when you got here exactly. I didn't come down to medbay yesterday." His mouth twists a bit.

"Wanna try a bit of that 'drink in small sips' thing they always tell you? I'll bring water and hold your head up, if you do."

He's barely awake when Darcy comes in, but even in his current state, it’s obvious to L where she’s been.

That causes him to feel something: a faint twist of alarm. She accepted the invitation? It's followed by dismay, which he finds curious… but his eyelids are heavy, and he lets them close. The medical staff will look after her, feed her and clean her up and help her rest, although she might be in for stiff lectures from a few of them. And anyway, it’s very stupid to care too much about the fate of any one particular person here.

The series of messages that pulled him into the halls feels both like it was years ago and like it's something that will never leave him, one of life's decisive moments -- a decision he hadn't had time to weigh, an opportunity he wonders if he should have rejected. This level of personal involvement in the business of the ship is becoming second nature to him, and maybe, maybe, it's leading him towards disaster. Or he's headed in that direction no matter what he does, and he might as well try to feel like he's doing something about it. He can't decide.

However, he’s always been able to take tremendous emotional and physical pressure. He's not sure the same is true of Darcy. She has more tenacity than he thinks someone would assume at first glance, but if she experienced anything like the same things he did out in the halls, it must have worn on her in deeper ways. He's not sure she'll be the same woman she was the last time he spoke to her.

That leads him to wonder, in a brief, foggy tangent, if he's the same man.

Either way, if there's anything left of Darcy at all (likely), and if her tongue hasn't somehow been stopped on the subject of her recent experiences (unfortunately possible), he does suspect that she'll tell him what she can, if for no other reason than that she may feel like she owes it to him.

One look at her told him that her condition was every bit as bad as his had been. She'll be resting for a while, and his recovery is obviously further along than hers. So at some point a day or so later, she’ll wake up to a pair of feet pressed up against the edge of her bed, knees bent above them, a face that looks worse for wear occasionally peeking out from behind the knees. L seems to be idly perusing something on his network device -- it’s a book he’d found in the media library months ago, a classic from what seems like long after his own time, downloaded in the event of this kind of rainy day.

He probably shouldn’t be out of bed yet.

To be fair, Darcy's barely awake when she comes in. She's largely unaware of her surroundings, and sedated enough to facilitate sleep that's deep and blissfully dreamless. When she wakes, there's light, and just the hum of medical equipment that seems to be a comfort somehow. No more whispers in the pitch dark. It takes a foggy moment for Darcy to register the presence and shape of a man next to her bed. Bare feet give him away almost before the shock of dark hair and dark circles beneath his eyes.

"Hey." Her smile is tired, her voice dry and weak. It feels like months since she's had a use for it beyond cries of terror and rambling prayers in the black corridors. There's more she'd like to say, but instead she swallows, the sensation is uncomfortable, and turns her head against the pillow, blinking at Ryuuzaki's fuzzy visage until he comes into clearer view.

It's not long before she wakes up. He wonders if it took him as long to come to any kind of awareness... he used to wake up quickly, isn't so sure now.

He sets aside the communicator, and nearly smiles.

"You're awake. Rough year?"

It had felt like -- no, he still couldn't put a number on his experience of the passage of time. But it had felt like a very long time. Had it been so long for her? Her condition suggests it, but maybe that isn't conclusive.

"Sure seems like it," she replies with more humor in her tone than she really feels. But she's grateful for his soft approach to this. "I'd rather do nothing but final exams for three months than do that again." Finals were hard, okay? We can't all be top of our class easy A geniuses like him.

"You?"

His old story, abandoned for a long time now, was that he had been a university student before the ship pulled him away from his education. True in the technical sense, but not in spirit.

"I've never taken a final exam. -- It was a long time, however." His face falls a little; his voice sounds ragged. "I'm not sure whether or not I'd do it again. It doesn't seem like a good idea."

There's sometimes a difference between 'a good idea' and 'a potentially valuable experience.'

A dry sound of disgust accompanies a good-natured roll of her eyes. "Of course you haven't." He would just be this good without post-secondary education, wouldn't he?

But this is serious. They're being serious, and the ghost of a smile on her lips vanishes without a trace. "No, it really doesn't. I'm surprised you went at all. I thought you'd have sent back an intelligently worded fuck you and been done with it. You know what they say about curiosity, right?"

They're lucky they're not both just a couple of dead cats here, really.

"Mm. Yes, I believe it was something about pots, kettles, and black cats."

He doesn't let that hang in the air before he goes on, in a more weighted tone, "I had a ten-minute countdown. Did you have the same?"

"Yeah, but you're smarter than me. If anyone should do the dumb shit, it should be me. Nothing-" Darcy coughs weakly just once and squeezes her eyes shut, shaking her head. Never mind.

"Yeah, ten minutes to get to the place on the map. That's why I didn't tell anybody. I just... left." Her instinct is to apologize, say she's sorry for having up and disappeared. But he did exactly the same thing, didn't he? Pots, kettles, and black cats indeed.

He's smarter than almost anyone he's ever met, but that's beside the point.

A brief surge of fatigue passes over him. He shifts his weight in his seat, sliding down a little and leaning to the side, almost curling in on himself, and lets his right hand slip up past his temple into his hair, with his elbow nestled between his knees and chest. To an observer, it might just look like he's trying to get more comfortable.

"Why did you decide to go?"

His movements are watched through equally tired eyes. If she recognizes his shift in posture for what it is, she doesn't comment on it. His question - his attention, really - makes her uncomfortable as it is. (Though not for the reason one might expect.) There's no sense in them both feeling that way. Darcy draws in and exhales a ragged breath. "I thought if I went, I might learn something. I wanted to be useful."

He exhales too, but soft and drawn out, not ragged.

"Then we went for the same reason. Did it work?"

Elizabeth // songburdened

Jennifer Keller // forsometimenow

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so sorry, I lost the notif!

<3

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Dick "Robin" Grayson // peckish4action

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Darcy Lewis // 50000volts

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