In the Halls

[Michael Jones]

In nightmares, it was common for people to feel like they couldn’t get away from something. Maybe their body slowed down, or they felt themselves moving even in slow motion. This was a common occurrence mostly because the stage at which someone started to have dreams was called “REM” sleep, and a person’s body was paralyzed. However, when someone was awake, it was supposed to be different. When they wanted their body to move, they would simply have to think about putting one foot in front of the other, and then things would be normal. Michael, however, could only feel himself trudge along with no real direction to consider. He could see his feet moving in front of him, and they were not responding as he wanted them to. Maybe he was just tired…but that was why he was skipping training, was it not? He then remembered that he didn’t really need to skip it today, as his trainer was out of commission for about a week.

He was at least grateful for that. It’d take a bit for some more of his more recent injuries to heal. He needed that time, as much as he could get. Also, his newest box of Band-Aids hadn’t come yet because the ordering service he’d used apparently was not the correct one for getting anything delivered at all, so he was going to have to deal with his injuries going untreated. Yes, that was technically a bad thing, and he only had some pretty nasty ones, and some getting rather red and puffy, but he was not going to the infirmary again. They’d probably tell Vincent that he was still hurting himself outside of training. It was a lot harder to deal with things now that he became pretty sure his parents weren’t communicating with him. It had been far too long. It wasn’t at the point where he could do anything about it in terms of getting a foster family or something else, because they still provided for him…he was just isolated.

Michael scratched his head, being sure that his bag was shouldered and would not fall off. He walked forwards, looking around at the training rooms around him. His eyes closed as he walked away from the area. He was not feeling good, and he just wanted to get away from everything at that point, so he’d go somewhere else. He walked down the hallway with little care to how funny he looked while walking. It was likely that he had a fever of sorts, or that he would soon have something of the like if he didn’t actually take care of himself.

The skinny little thing looked around for some kind of door or exit to the building. Maybe it would help if he went outside to the courtyard area to think about what he had for his lot in life at the current point in time. He just knew that he couldn’t do anything for training today. Michael frowned. He wished he actually had someone taking care of him, and he’d never mentioned that he wished that before.

[Anita Wiley]

The fact that Anita's healing power didn't work on herself was a real pain, figuratively and literally. She exited one of the training rooms with the intention of visiting the infirmary, her hand covering a deep gash on her arm, trying to stop the flowing blood. Her trainer had made a tourniquet but the wound still needed disinfecting. She should have been more focused, shouldn't have let anything distract her, not even things happening at home. The obvious result of her not bringing her A-game was the wounds she healed transfering onto herself. She'd already almost mastered that!

She walked down the halls, annoyed at herself and, with the injured arm, reached into her cargo pants' back pocket and produced an old cellphone. The issue at home wasn't even that big of a deal, just that one of their cats ran away. Checking the time, she realized that she didn't even finish half a training session and would have to come back after her visit to the infirmary or else... Honor Sayers wasn't the type to joke around.

As she walked past closed doors, she could all kinds of noises from behind them. Muffled grunts, splashes, orders, bumps, even screams. However, one tiny sound grabbed her attention, only because it was clearer. It sounded like slow, dragged footsteps. Putting her phone away, she looked up and stopped in her tracks. In front of her, walking in her direction, was a skinny, pale little boy. Her alarm bells ringing, she rushed to him and put her hands on his shoulders to steady him. That's when she noticed his wounds, some of them seemingly starting to get infected.

"Whoa." she breathed. She wanted to chastise him but, taking a look at his feverish face, decided there was enough time for that later. "It's okay. I can take care of these." she said gently. She set to work, starting with the worst injuries, the ones that looked red and pink and swollen. She didn't remember to have seen injuries like his before, but she applied similar techniques to almost every type of wounds, so she did what she usually did with burns, being extra careful to keep them away from her own body.

When she finished, she gently touched the boy's pale face and tried to take his fever away too. She had only started working on body temperatures about a month before and wasn't very experienced since there weren't as many cases of fever as there were of cuts, bruises or burns. The little boy's temperature wasn't all that high, though and she managed to bring it down a notch.

She stood up from her crouched position and breathed a sigh of relief, feeling exhausted. "Are you okay? What the hell happened to you?" she asked with disbelief.

[Michael Jones]

He sometimes felt as though things were entirely his fault. He was upset a lot about what was going on, and he was really concerned that this was what caused all of his own issues. He couldn’t just “Snap out of it” though. It wasn’t as easy as that. For him, it was harder and harder to get up, knowing that he’d just fail again. Plus, the fact that he was bullied didn’t help his motivation. Yeah, he supposed it was a little bit easier to control, but only a little bit changed barely anything, because he could still hurt himself more than he wanted to do any time if he got too upset. He sighed lightly. Perhaps if he weren’t so destructive he’d be a happier person. It was quite the little paradox he had going for him. He wished he didn’t have that, but of course…that wouldn’t ever be the case. Maybe it faded away after puberty.

Of course, puberty was ever going, and didn’t really stop, so he wasn’t going to be okay with that much happening, as he’d still have it around for a while. The feverish boy was trying to discover whether or not he could live in a canyon for the rest of his life. It would be perfect. If he messed things up in the canyon or something, then he likely wouldn’t be blamed for it, considering he had already been in the canyon. Plus, he could hurt himself, but it was likely that he wouldn’t hurt anyone else or damage any property. He figured that the only person he could ever date would be a person who actually had some kind of shield capability, but he couldn’t imagine anything beyond being friends. Even being friends seemed kind of hard.

All he knew was that his head was just burning, and he hurt more than usual. Yeah, it wasn’t a good idea to ignore going to the nurse when he got hurt, but it was also not a good idea to go see the psychiatrist at all. He didn’t want to get made fun of even more, because he knew that they would be able to figure it out. Those twins were mean, and he didn’t understand why. He sighed as he continued down the hallways. He couldn’t wait to get out of this place now, because going past the training rooms was giving him the creeps. It felt like the other explosions and stuff he’d caused were haunting him, especially since at least the first time he’d tried it he’d destroyed something pretty near blast-proof and injured himself quite severely.

Just as he was about to simply sit down, because his head was spinning, some kind of happy carrot showed up. Wait…no it wasn’t a carrot, it was just more of a redheaded girl, which became increasingly clear as the pounding in his head slowly disappeared. As each wound slowly seemed to become less infected, and inevitably healed, he grew more and more aware of what was going on around him. Including that the carrot he’d originally been confused about was a lady. She was older than him, he wasn’t sure if she was a girl or teen, but she was kind of pretty.

He watched her as she leaned back, and he frowned a little bit, looking down at his hands. His cuts WERE gone. She’d healed them. He looked down at himself, confused and kind of upset he’d made someone else do something for him. The girl was standing now, and she’d asked him a question. His heart thumped in his chest, he panicked…he didn’t want to tell her what actually happened.

“Um…I fell. On a stick.” That…would totally work.