2010-02-25: Welcome to the Suck

Starring:

Daphne_V4icon.pngAlexandra_V4icon.pngMatt_V4icon.png

Date: February 25, 2010

Summary:

One inmate feels lousy, another is starting to get better, and a third is nosy.


"Welcome to the Suck"

Common Area — Building 27, Governor's Island

This day might as well be yesterday, or the first day, or any other in-between. The scenery certainly isn't changing; the barracks are still boring. Cleaned up from her previous day's foray into the mud, Daphne even looks exactly the same. And to keep up the theme, she's planted on the couch she seems to have claimed as hers. The television isn't on this time, but it hardly makes a difference when it is; nor does that seem to discourage the young woman from staring at its blank output. Her legs are flopped out in front of her, lazy and dangling to the side, and her arms are propped onto the arm of the couch where she's huddled. Chin pressed into the crook of her left elbow she makes that vaguely changed yet somehow still the same picture of uncaring she's made for the last… however long it's been.

If Daphne is the picture of uncaring, then today, for the first time in a while, Alexandra has striven to make herself a picture of actual caring. Well, appearance-wise at least. The AP-issue shampoo and prison-grade soap aren't doing wonders for anyone's skin or split ends, at least beyond serving the very specific purposes of getting them clean, but still, Alex made this morning's shower take a little longer than she has been. Taking advantage of the first shockingly nightmare-free sleeps in a long time, she woke up feeling moderately better. So that shower, combined with some AP-issue notepaper and an eraserless pencil, has Alex sitting at one of the tables doodling…something. It could be Chinese for anyone knows, what with all the funky symbols, the fractions, and all the letters. The bags under her eyes and the bloodshot red seem to have both abated some, and rather than wild hair, she's pulled it back in ponytail to keep it out of her face while she writes, oblivious to the rest of the room.

Matt is flipping through an old tabloid ("OLTL's hottie gets personal on love, life, and her career") as he wanders into the common room, once again looking more dejected than he really feels. It's not totally an act - he has an advantage, but he still doesn't exactly know what to do with it. Operating on the wrong side of (allegedly) duly constituted authority is still something he has only a scant few months of experience with.

"I saw this episode the first time it was on," he muses, leaning forward across the back of the couch as he tosses the yellow rag aside. "Turns out the guy's actually a triple agent."

Oh, the joyous sounds of other people around… one of the reasons Daphne wonders why she didn't just stay in her room. But she's here now, so. The nudge in the back of the couch has her shifting her weight somewhat, but only so far as she gets in a better position, her cheek smashed against her upper arm in absolute apathy. She seems to be operating under the age old parameters of that if she doesn't see them maybe they won't see her. Or maybe they'll go away.

"She's been like that all morning, practically. You probably won't have much luck in getting her to talk a whole heck of a lot," Alexandra informs Matt, using her wonderful powers of perception. "But that's ok, everyone seems to like the quiet anymore. Makes it easier to think." And think she's doing, in spades: the sheets of paper strewn out across the table are…well, it resembles something of her work, stuff she was doing before she was captured. A distraction, really, since it's impossible to do a lot of it without calculators or computer programs. It all goes back to something Elle said, a while ago. Time to start taking charge of her own life once again.

With a shrug, Matt makes his way around the side of the couch, settling down on the other side. The couch is big enough that it doesn't - quite - put him inappropriately close to Daphne. "Mmm. Thinking's good," he offers to Alexandra, leaning back and continuing to look bored himself.

Internally? Whole different situation. Here is someone he's met before he came here, albeit only briefly… and she wasn't anything like the hopeless lump that she's become now. They must've been especially rough on her to push her this far down. Carefully, now, mustn't startle her so badly that it gives away the game… « Ssh, pretend you're not hearing anything. »

Daphne's somewhat different inside as well, a torrent of unhappy feelings locked in by the persistent thought of how much she hates being seen like this — and wondering how much longer she'll have to go on paying for her previous lifestyle. Trapped in her own head, she's not really expecting someone else to invade it. She instantly startles like a wild animal: sort of the opposite of what he was going for, really. Her head whipping up and around, she stares openly in their direction for a second, lower lip quivering… and then, face registering only snark, "Jesus! When did you guys get here?"

"Well…I've been here a good two hours, I'd say. Right from the showers. Even tried to say hello, but you seemed out of it. I didn't press the matter." For the moment, the scribbles on the sheets of paper are forgotten, and Alex sets down the pencil as well; it's going to need to be resharpened here again soon anyway. "Sorry to shock you or whatever though. You must've been about a million miles away."

Well, hell. So much for not startling her! But Daphne's reaction looked entirely innocent, which is good enough. "Hey, it's okay," says Matt, turning toward Daphne and holding his hands up in front of his chest as he sits up straighter. "I'll leave you alone if you want, but— you look like you could use someone to talk to, you know?" Another sidelong glance at Alexandra, who was in quite the funk herself the other day; hopefully she'll be able to help get through to her.

The confusion's gone vanished; Daphne rolls her eyes away from Alexandra and they land no less skeptically on Matt. In that narrowed gaze is something more prying than purely annoyed. She's wary. She's wondering if he really did something or if it's her imagination. Eyes skip right to the collar around his neck, jump to his arm even though any puncture wounds wouldn't be visible. "It's okay? Really?" She clearly disbelieves, falling back sideways against the arm of the couch. With a jerking, forceful twist she pulls her right leg halfway up onto the couch to make up for her new positioning. "That's great and all, but you're wrong. I just need to…" Something, something.

"Well…relatively speaking, I suppose. Neither of us seem to be in a particular good place…" Alex says in the direction of Matt and Daphne. For a moment, she just closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, even though behind the lids her eyes are racing, her mouth pulls back into a little wincing grin, and she shifts a little uncomfortably on the chair, knowing that this is probably the best mental place she's been in weeks. When she opens her eyes, she slides some papers around, looking for one in particular. "The trick is to keep your mind occupied, it seems. I dwelled too much on what happened, instead of thinking like I would were I outside this place."

Matt considers pushing with his telepathy some more— but no, now isn't a good time, it only takes a few minutes for his headache to come rushing back. Especially when there's a spoken conversation to keep up with at the same time. "It could be worse. It was, for a while— I stank like a fish the first couple hours after they woke me up." Thanks for sharing, man. "So how would you be thinking if you were out?" he continues; Alexandra, too, he only knows by bits and pieces so far.

Daphne doesn't actively disagree so much as she just doesn't have a response whatsoever. Once again sagged against the barracks furniture, she only drops her head and stares dejectedly at her feet at the peppy whatever talk. Musing her lips together, there's only so much time before she's forced into commenting, though, with a much more accepting tone now. "Yeah, well, if I were out of here, that'd be a whole hell of a lot different… but thinking happy thoughts and fairy dust isn't gonna make this go away. We're in it now. Tada. It's done. Over."

"Boy do I know how that feels…" Alex mumbles under her breath a bit. Were she out, or even just free of this solution, this place wouldn't stand much of a chance. "I'd bring the whole place down, if I could, so nobody else gets put through this…" she continues, mostly to herself, but the others can probably hear in the silence of the room. To hell with her ability to you know, stay sane. What's her life worth compared to hundreds or thousands more they might be gunning for. "Were I out," she finally speaks up, "I'd be thinking about work. Which is what I'm trying to remember through here on these sheets."

At that, Matt glances over toward the nearest wall. Tearing down the building is certainly a noble goal, yeah. "What'd you do for a living?" he asks, glancing over at the papers purely out of habit - he already knows he won't be able to make much sense of them. As for Daphne… he doesn't have much of a handle for conversation there, yet, he'll wait until one does come along.

"Coulda, woulda, shoulda," Daphne retorts, resigned, as she crosses arms over her chest and turns away to the television, finding its gray nothingness preferable to the small talk.

"I was…I mean, I am, an engineer," Alex informs Matt, while looking at Daphne from the corners of her eyes. "So what I'm doing here is trying to keep myself a little uh, more sane than you saw the other day. And look." She holds up her hands, which are clean; the nails are growing back well too, the jagged, broken ends grown out enough to really get them back into shape.

Matt dutifully checks out Alex's sorry excuse for a manicure, nodding. "They do look better." And… on second thought, forget a handle, maybe a blunt instrument is what it'll take to get Daphne to open up a little. She's certainly no help to any of them as long as she's feeling like this. "What about you? You probably write for stuff like this, right?" The magazine from earlier is picked up again, only to be dropped unceremoniously onto the table, falling open to a piece of content-free babydaddy filler.

She doesn't even spare a second for the magazine. Daphne instead flicks half-mast eyes in Matt's direction at the splat of the pages hitting the table. After a moment's further investigation of him, she rolls her shoulders around to accompany a need-patience sigh. "Look, I get what you're trying to do. And, maybe in some other place or time I would've appreciated it. Rah rah team, and all that. But pretending that this place is some normal dandy life that I can live is just not something I can do." The attention shifts briefly to Alexandra, her nails and her sketches. "Also, your jobs are boring."

"Look, I'm not pretending that this is a normal life for me. For one of the first nights since I've been in here, I haven't woken up screaming because of the night terrors. Excuse me if I'm taking a few hours to enjoy the relative peace that that brings." What really seems to hurt Alexandra though is the suggestion that her job is boring! "You might think my job is boring, but I happen to love it. Enough that I spent more than half my life in school to land it. So…yeah…not boring to me." With a huff though, she starts to gather up those papers, looking like she's about to make a dash for the bunk room.

The man on the couch, on the other hand, doesn't reply at all; with Daphne all dejected and Alex all offended, what's the point? He turns back around, head slumping against the back of the couch as he pretends to veg out. Pretends. « I'm looking for the right time to hit back, » he projects, targeting the erstwhile speedster behind him. « And screw you, I get shot at at my job! »

"You're excused…" Hey, what does Daphne care. They're the ones who had to go disturbing what was a perfectly good utter silence before this. Sinking into her former state of zoning out, she only gets so far before there's a clear and obvious tensing all up her arms and in the tightness of her neck. She manages to not physically lurch in any direction, but the fingers tighten around her arms and show no sign of letting up. Meanwhile, she bites down hard on the inside of her cheek and glares off at some random wall. Creep! Get outta my head! And how are you doing that? But don't do it!

That's just what Alexandra does, too. She gets up, papers in hand, and sulks off towards the bunk room. "Well, for what it's worth, I hope you start to feel a little more normal soon. Otherwise, they really have won. Maybe I just see that now after an actual night's sleep, but…." She never finishes her sentence. Instead she disappears through the door into the bunk room.

« It's the only advantage I've got over these guys right now. When you change your mind, come find me. » There's only a little bit of venom behind it - again, he's mostly annoyed with whoever drove her to this state in the first place - but some of it does leak through regardless.

Matt continues to lay there for a while afterward, falling into thoughts of his scattered family on the outside, before he too gets up and heads back down the hall. The magazine is left behind as a parting gift.

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