towerofanimus | This is just all too much (open)

Entry tags:

This is just all too much (open)

Characters: Shion and anyone
Setting: Cafeteria
Format: Starting in prose but will follow you
Summary: Shion is freaking out, it's been a couple of days since Hitori Kakurenbo and Shion is not doing well. He's mostly been hiding in his room, but he is hungry.
Warnings: Mentions of events of Hitori Kakurenbo and death. Also Shion on the point of a breakdown. And tl'dr.

Shion couldn't even think anymore, the fear had been building for months since he had been brought here. Ripped from his world, told it was destroyed. Killed by monsters, he had met a few people but it was risky. One of the trolls he had spoken to had killed him, a boy he met had proceeded to cut out his heart...

He had died again, during the massacre that the tower had called a game. His body withered, as if he had been stung by a parasite bee. As if his fight to survive had been for nothing. He had chosen to live, and here he didn't have a choice, but it was a life in which he was also forced to experience death.

Shion had been trying not to think about it, trying not to think about the strangeness, or the fact he should be dead three times over. The fact this place made absolutely no scientific sense.

Teddy bears didn't move, they definitely didn't murder you. People didn't come back from the dead, floors didn't appear in buildings over night. The world couldn't have ended.

He poked at his food, he should eat but he was too scared. Every movement made him jump, he wanted to go back to his room.

Well really... really he wanted to go home. He was supposed to be helping Nezumi save Safu, to bring down the wall between No. 6 and the West Town. Well, truthfully the latter was his aim alone, but here he could do none of it. Who knew what had happened to Safu, had Nezumi tried to enter the correctional facility alone?

Were they even alive? Was the note he had read months ago true? Had the world truly ended?

Something clattered behind him and he jumped dropping his bowl onto the floor where it smashed.

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Equius sighed heavily, staring down at the offending tongs.

After the events of the past few days, he decided that the only way to get his mind off of things was just to go down and cook ~~shit~~ things for a couple of hours. Unfortunately, when he had gotten down to the cafeteria floor, he realized that there was a very limited amount of ingredients available -- much less than the last time he had come down here.

He had never really liked salad, and the white meat called 'chicken' simply confused him, but it was all there was. Not even anything for a decent grubloaf. Sigh.

But it's better than nothing, and that's what he's been doing for the last thirty minutes... unfortunately he can't even muster enough focus to hold a pair of salad tongs. That's the second one that he's dropped. Can't use it now, and he's running out of utensils.

Grumbling, Equius threw it in the sink with unusual force and started rifling through the drawers for another.

Shion had managed to gather up the broken pieces of bowl and was taking them back to the kitchen at about the exact time Equius threw the tongs into the sink. He jumped again and clutched the broken pieces of bowl to himself so he didn't drop them again.

His eyes flickered nervously to the troll and he gave a small smile, trying not to show how scared he was. Not of the troll, not in particular. Even now Shion was not going to give up giving people the benefit of the doubt. Believe everyone was not going to harm him until proven otherwise.

Because otherwise he did not think he could live. Everyone was the same after all, all humans, and trolls. Also other species who Shion had never heard of. All deserved to be treated the same.

"Hello..." He said nervously as he went to dispose of the broken dish.

Oh... someone else saw that... fortunately it was only a human, or he would have been really embarrassed, but it was still pretty bad right now; really, what had come over him? So they were both standing there for a few moments, looking at one another like deer in headlights before the small human spoke.

"...Uh. Hello." He looked down at the drawer and abruptly closed it with a loud clang. "Er. I'm sorry. Was I disturbing you?"

Shion gave a nervous smile and jumped again when the drawer clanged shut. "N...No sorry, I just dropped something and came in here and sorry if I disturbed you!"

He had to calm down, but it was near impossible. He was so scared that something awful was going to happen again, the fear clouded most of his mind and made it impossible to think straight.

Equius blinked, and noticed the glass pieces in Shion's hands. He cringed. "If you're going to pick up glass with your hands, at least wear gloves over them. Where did you drop it?" Tongs forgotten, Equius' attention then went to finding something else, probably the broom and dustpan. He kept setting it in the same place (because really, he cleans the kitchen almost constantly anyway), but there's always the one time where it gets moved somewhere else...

Shion blinked down at his hands, he hadn't even thought about that. He shrugged pain finally being acknowledge through the fear, at the few scratches he had. His arms shaking he threw the glass away and frowned, following the troll.

"In the cafeteria..." Yes they needed something to clean it up, so no one else got hurt... Shion tried to clear his head and think. It was hard though, when the only thing he could think about was how scared he was.

In direct contrast to Shion's dilemma, Equius welcomed more things to do. It kept his mind on the task at hand, instead of the fact that he just died and he just came back and everyone was screwed. Cleaning, cooking, and robotics; that was basically what his life consisted of when he wasn't sacrificing it to lick a highblood's boot, and it has developed into an odd form of therapy for when things got too hot to handle. In fact, considering he lived on Alternia, it was probably the only kind of therapy he would ever get.

He didn't complain or anything, just looked completely intent; grabbing the dustpan and broom, he slipped easily past Shion into the main cafeteria. The place where the bowl dropped was fairly obvious, from the explosion of dust spilling out in every direction, so he immediately set to work gathering the far-spread debris into a little pile.

Shion followed the troll, trying to concentrate. His mind kept slipping, imagining he was not here. That instead of this freezing cold tower it was the coldness of the West Town. That he was there planning their way into the correctional facility and he was not here in a tower were nothing made sense and death meant nothing.

He blinked, he was zoning out again. He caught up to the troll and blinked. "Erm... I can do that..."

"Ah, well, I've made something of a habit of cleaning up around this place... and I would have thought you wouldn't have wanted to, anyhow..." Interesting how he's now imposing a highblood level of reverence upon human beings, who didn't seem to use a caste system at all. Maybe Shion was able to do it himself, but through some combination of that and the fact that anything looking sloppy was Simply Not Acceptable, Equius had taken it upon himself without a second thought.

What can we say, he lives alone.

"Oh..." He didn't really want him cleaning up after him, but didn't want to insult him... He stood for a moment not quite knowing what to do. "Erm... I don't mind, I made the mess..." He smiled and waited to see if the troll gave him the dustpan and brush. He didn't want to just try and take it in case he insulted him in some way.

Unfortunately, by this time, Equius had finished cleaning up and was heading over to the trash can. (And of course, the floor was spotless.) A little late for that, Shion. And besides; you've basically got a free pass to be rid of all responsibility while you're around him, so you might as well enjoy it, right? Mr. OCD over here wants to do all the menial chores, all of them. After all, if he didn't, then the place would be a mess, and who knows how many steps it would take to go from a messy kitchen to the complete ruination of all of Tower-based society?????

...Probably a lot of steps, but whatever.

Shion just watched this in quiet amazement, he wasn't exactly useless... okay he was but he could have at least managed this much. But no where near as efficiently as Equius had managed.

"Thanks..." He blinked again, "Erm, I'm Shion."

"My name is Equius," he said. "A pleasure, Shion." He checked the cabinet where he knew the bowls were contained; at least it was only one bowl broken, and who knows, it might even replace itself like some of the other things in the tower. "What were you going to use that bowl for? I was about to make something." Something. Anything.

Shion smiled again, the troll seemed friendly so Shion began to feel less scared and followed him over to the cupboard. "Oh... I was just eating..." He smiled though, he hadn't actually explored the kitchen, mainly because he wasn't sure if they were allowed to or if they were expected to eat what they were given.

He liked baking though, his mum owned a bakery and even before they lived in Lost Town, when they were still elites she had enjoyed cooking and baking and had taught Shion.

"Can I help?"

This doesn't seem to be cowering together in the corner as the thread had originally been planned for, but you know what, this is adorable so the mun sooooo does not care.

"Yes."

Let's see, what is here... unfortunately, it's the same bare-bones ingredients as the rest of the days he'd come down. Equius grimaced again, looking through the various fruits and vegetables for any flour or... anything. Anything at all? No? Darn. Soup again. Sigh. ...Sitting on the counter, there was a large rucksack, black in color, with Equius' symbol on it; he went over to it now, reaching in and setting on the table several jars of some chopped substances in various colors. Normally he would use a rustblood to cook something, because he has more of those, but today he's cooking for someone else as well. He'll just use the tealbloods, maybe darker blue as a supplement if there isn't enough?

Equius returned all of the jars colored in things that weren't teal or cerulean. From here they're chopped-up little things that aren't identifiable as anything at all, but they're staples of the Alternian diet, and fortunately some of them do taste pretty good. If he mixes them with some of the small green Earth vegetables... well, he's not sure what will happen, but in the trying circumstances it's all he can do.

Shion moved over to him ready to help, he peered into the cupboards but there didn't seem to be many ingredients, it seemed that there was only the ingredients needed to make what was being served in the cafeteria.

He stared at what Equius took out of his bag, wondering what it was. "Erm... do you need me to do anything?"

"Yes, if you would be willing." He grabbed the jars of cut-up grubs and set them both in front of Shion. "Please measure... a cup of each of these." It seems he's running the recipe from his mind. With that, he grabs a cutting board and some of the things called tomatoes (the green ones were gone), beginning to chop them with a... very large knife.

"A cup?" He looked around for one and started measuring. He still had no idea what the things were and they looked strange. Strange and a little worrying. He side eyed the knife fearfully but he had to trust that Equius wouldn't hurt him, had to regain his trust in somebody in this tower or he wasn't going to last long.

After all most people didn't try and hurt others. It was just Shion's bad luck that had got him attacked. He continued measuring, his hands shaking.

Fortunately, Equius looked like he knew what he was doing with that very large knife. And he only looked over at Shion briefly, every so often, to make sure that he wasn't putting in too much of one color or the other. But fortunately Shion seemed to have at least rudimentary cooking skills, so his concerns were unfounded; the bigger question was how he was supposed to manage these red things. Eventually he decided just to treat them like any other soup ingredient and chop them in chunks.

Shion glanced at Equius every so often warily but for the most part concentrated on his task of measuring out the ingredients. Tomatoe chunks were fine in soup as far as he was concerned so he didn't interrupt Equius' chopping. He looked over when he was done.

"Where do you want these?"

He was feeling much calmer now, that he was doing something that he understood.

"Put them in bowls, please." With the tomatoes in acceptable shape, Equius turned his attention to the next onjective: finding the broth. While he did that, he waved in the general direction of one of the shelves. "Are there any liquid measuring cups in there?" Normally there are, but you can never tell in public kitchens like this.

Bowls, Shion started hunting through the cupboards probably disturbing any sense of order that Equius had created within the kitchen.

Soon however he had bowls, which he quickly filled with the strange alien food. At the question he went back over to the cupboard and started ratching around some more, "Like this?" He held up a measuring jug.

The clatter and resulting crash was further punctuated by a cry of surprise. "Ah!" She hadn't meant to drop her plate, but holding things with her non-dominant hand was a challenge that took getting used to. Upon looking up and seeing Shion, Xion looks back down. "... sorry..."

She pauses, before walking around towards him, to the smashed bowl and food. "Do you need help?" She wouldn't be able to help much - one arm still in a sling - but she could some, at least.

Shion looked up fearfully as someone approached but relaxed a little when he realised he knew them. He took in her appearance including her arm and blinked at her worried. "Are you hurt?" He began picking up the broken pieces.

At Shion's question, she looked away.

"It's fine," she replied, shifting her arm in the sling a little. "I just ran into some monsters a few days ago." But she's okay now. Really.

Shion looked even more worried, "Are you sure?" He had had enough close run ins with the monsters to know she was probably lucky to still be alive...

"You went to the infirmary right?"

"Yeah. They gave me this," she picked a little at the fabric of the sling with her other hand to indicate it. They gave her the sling and not much else - not even directions on how long her arm was supposed to stay in it. It was kind of frustrating, not knowing what to do, though thankfully her shoulder was a lot less painful than when she'd first dislocated it.

Shion frowned and blinked again. He moved a little closer to her reaching out to touch her arm. "Can I take a look?" It wasn't that he didn't trust those in the infirmary but Xion was his friend, and he wanted to make sure she would be okay.

Trust him he studied ecology when he was a small child...

For a moment Xion shifted uncomfortably, unsure what to do... but then again, the people at the infirmary had already looked at it, and she trusted Shion more than she trusted the people who were actually FROM the Tower...

"Okay," she said finally, reaching up and working at the sling until she was able to slide her arm out more easily.

The problem wasn't her arm itself - rather her shoulder, which had gotten dislocated in the fighting. It was back in place now, but still a little swollen, and sore, not to mention it hurt a little to move around too much.

Shion took her arm gently he didn't move it more than was strictly necessary but felt it for additional breaks or such. It seemed that only the shoulder was damaged as well, and for all their faults those in the infirmary had done all they could.

"It should be okay in a week or so... did they give you anything to stop the pain?" Somehow he doubted it.

She shook her head. "Not really, they just fixed my shoulder, gave me this-" she indicated the sling "- and let me go."

She couldn't say she was fond of the quick, brusque treatment she'd been given by the Tower's staff, but still... it wasn't anything she wasn't used to. Besides, before they'd fixed it, her shoulder had been excruciating - it'd hurt to even try to move.

"It's okay, though. It's a lot better now than it was."

Edited 2012-03-17 08:11 (UTC)

"I guess when they can just bring us back... they don't really care..." He doubted they would give them any thing to stop pain even if they asked them... He smiled sadly at Xion, reaching out to help her put her arm back into her sling.

"I am sorry you are in pain."

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This is just all too much (open)

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Sorry for the late tag - was waiting on some event stuff

<3!

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