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)

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

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.'

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?

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?"

"Not if you went too." She looks away, staring off at a wall past L's shoulder. There's a breath of laughter, but it lacks her customary warmth. "There's nothing I could have possibly learned that you didn't, and understood better than I ever will."

The brittle laugh causes him to tilt his head and look at her more curiously, and there's a beat of silence, underscored by the general hum and chatter of medbay, before he answers her.

"That's based on the assumption that we experienced the same things. But that seems unlikely. I've been back here a little longer than you have. I can't learn much from a conversation I didn't have."

If a day felt like it could have been a week or a month or a year, how much more had she suffered? Had she held out longer?

Darcy's eyes fill with tears that start running hot down her face before she's even aware of the threat. One hand hastily comes up to wipe them away. "I'm not even sure what was real," she admits, turning her face half into the pillow to hide her embarrassment as well as the rush of emotion that she just can't quell. Not yet anyway. Where did that even come from?

Watching people cry rarely makes him uncomfortable. How he responds to almost anything depends on what he wants to achieve in the situation, and in this case, sitting back and watching Darcy spill over with tears on the putative grounds that he 'thinks she wants to be left alone' probably won't help. He needs to maintain their rapport.

He lets his feet slide to the ground, sits up, reaches over, and pats her closer hand. The rhythm is slightly awkward: he isn't really used to consoling anyone.

His next words come out softer. "It's all right. I can't say that I am, either."

The contact surprises her, startles her enough that a brief shudder runs through her. Internally, she curses herself further. The crying was bad enough, but this? Before he can think about withdrawing, consider leaving her alone, she turns her so she can grasp at his weakly. He's not great at this, but he doesn't have to be. He's here, and that's okay.

"Do you want to know something really stupid?" That's a rhetorical question. She's going to tell him anyway. "I thought, I have to get out of this. I can't give up. I have to get back so I can tell 'Zak what's going on. I should have known I wasn't the only one called. I should have known he would have contacted you." The pace of her words picks up to the point where Darcy seems like she could stumble on them. Then, she takes a deep breath, wipes at her face with her free hand again, and sighs. "I don't know why I was called in the first place."

He shouldn't be surprised when she turns her hand over and clutches at his, but he is. His first reaction is an almost imperceptible stiffening of his fingers in hers, his arm, all the way down to his toes. His second is to relax almost as quickly, and to give her hand the smallest squeeze. It seems like the thing to do.

"We can try to find out. I've made a note of everyone I recognize who's here. Some people might have come in and been released, but we'll probably be able to find out about that later."

He sighs, then adds, somewhat dubious, "Zak?"

But he's not much attached to what anyone calls him as long as it's not his real name when he doesn't want it to be. And she could be calling him that if she felt like it, but isn't.

Darcy isn't the least bit surprised that he doesn't necessarily seem prepared for her physical demonstration of affection. After all, he clearly isn't used to comforting a person who's crying. She doesn't hold it against him, but she doesn't let him off that easily either.

Of course he's noted who else may be here. She hasn't bothered to, honestly, but she probably should. She could stand to be more attentive.

"You did that the last time I called you that. Friends get nicknames, man. Don't fight it." There's a sudden uncertainty to her look, like maybe she's just horribly misstepped, but the tears have at least begun to dry up. "We are friends, right?" After the L*CKDOWN fiasco, she still has her worries.

"If we weren't, why would I be here?"

He isn't really sure what nearly anyone on the ship is to him. So many people come and go so often in so many different ways, some more final than others, that it seems like a bad idea to get too attached to anyone.

He supposes that he and Nathan had been friends, of a kind, or at least men who had a mutual agenda and got along well. But he also knows that he would have worked against Nathan if a situation that required it had arisen. The same is true of Bail, Dick, even Darcy -- the difference for all of them, and for Nathan, what sets them apart from others, is that L would find such a state of affairs regrettable.

"I've only been out of the halls a little bit longer than you have." Meaning that he's only a day ahead of her in terms of recovery, and probably shouldn't be out of bed.

Edited 2015-01-15 04:38 (UTC)

Darcy laughs in spite of herself. "Do you want me to answer that question?" That might be a little uncharitable, but she doesn't have to be aware of the fact that he literally chained himself to his mortal enemy to be firm in her belief that if he thought he'd get information worth having out of her, he'd be here even if he couldn't stand the sight of her. Okay, it's very uncharitable, but she means it to be more so to herself than to him. She smiles in a way that's meant to banish the thought for both of them. He's said it, and she'll take him at his word.

"I hear it's only been three weeks. That's fucked up." To put it mildly. "Would you rather I call you something else?" Staying on track is for people way more focused than she is.

It's better that she's smiling and laughing, rather than crying. He slumps in the direction of his extended arm, so he can rest the side of his head against it.

"I really don't care what you call me, as long as it isn't -- " He finishes the statement with a meaningful look. She had accepted that request without asking for an explanation.

He lifts his head an inch or two, shoots a look from side to side in their immediate vicinity, then drops down again. Charlotte doesn't seem to be around. That might be important, in a moment.

"Long periods of sensory deprivation can easily alter our perceptions of time, but I'm not sure it could alter them that much. Something else is a factor."

Edited 2015-01-15 05:34 (UTC)

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

Elizabeth // songburdened

Jennifer Keller // forsometimenow

Dick "Robin" Grayson // peckish4action

Darcy Lewis // 50000volts

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