St. Peter's Asylum discussion

"The fire?" Lenore's eyes widened, though not with fear--with curiosity. {A fire!} That very redhead's voice exploded in her mind, excited and childlike. This was not the somber, steel-voiced Curiosity that spoke to her when she was getting ill vibes, no; this was his brighter side, loud and insatiable. But she pressed him down, out of necessity more than anything, and simply looked at the dark-haired girl. "We are awed," she told her. "There was a fire here? Here?"

{So it seems.} Not Curiosity this time, but Thoughtfulness's low, smooth tones. {She said so, didn't she? It's hard to think what might have caused it--this is no place of earth, it is metal and brick and concrete--but somehow, some way, something happened.}

I would know what.

{Do not ask, my child, lest you bring up painful memories. Think, instead. Imagine it: bright and hot, and the air dark with smoke.}

Were there screams?

{I cannot know. More than likely. And death, too. Fire eats. It consumes. Always hungry. Life was lost, I would wager.}

Lenore nodded, a distant look crossing her own pale features as she imagined the scene. It must have been terrible, for the people here; to think that their one prison, their one inescapable prison, would trap them all and kill them when it was supposed to keep them safe! A horrible thing, she was sure. But despite the urging of the mischievous gray-eyed youth in her mind, the white-haired girl kept her tongue, and did not ask any more of Elin. Her newfound friend would speak if she wanted, she reasoned; there was no reason to rush her, no reason to ruin this pleasant night with talk of pain and burning death. She was having too good a time for that.

Elin nodded, not with a smile but not with a solemn expression either. Elin hadn't lost anyone in the fire, nor had she herself faced any adverse effects of it. Her nurse had gotten her out safe and sound. It had been dark, oh so very dark, and terrifying, and Elin had almost fainted, but her nurse helped her, and she made it out just fine. There was nothing keeping the girl from talking about it. 'A girl named Sam started it," she explained, with a soft, nostalgic smile. "She had multiple-personality-disorder, they say, and one of her more violent counterparts led her to light the attic on fire. She died, a little girl died, and a few others died as well, but most people made it out okay." Elin then cocked her head to the side, and knit her brows. "I'm surprised you haven't heard about it; the staff just opened the top floors of the asylum again. They were closed of for renovation for who-knows-how-long." The girl laughed a little, though it was softer in light of the discussion. "It was the most interesting thing that's happened here for years."

Lenore nodded slowly. "We see," she replied, with a slight, puckering frown at the corners of her lips. Of course, she knew that "interesting" here was also a strange thing, like the passage of time: the cruelest of situations and the most tragic of casualties could be labeled as interesting if you asked the right person, after all. And the people here had a tendency to be of that type, she had found (and had been told); they had a tendency to latch on to violence, trouble, all things that lay in pastures which were dead and yellow, the ones people were always trying to escape when they spoke of greener grass on the other side. "We are not surprised," she told Elin. "Interesting certainly has a...strange definition here. Lots of things you wouldn't call interesting outside are almost--almost glorified, in some ways." Thin, dark brows knit, but then the white-haired girl shook her head and offered a bright smile. "Still," she said, "not all things are like that. We would call you, for instance, very interesting--and you are not at all bad, Elin. In fact, we are fascinated by you. We like you very much." Not a trace of self-consciousness was evident on the young girl as she spoke; for she felt none. Above her, Thoughtfulness was smiling, and a warm wave of murmured, general approval was rolling through her head. In that moment, it was clear Lenore had no problems thinking, believing, or speaking the words. They were true, after all. She would be hard-pressed to ever find a problem with the truth.

Elin's cheeks flushed ever-so-slightly; the black-haired beauty wasn't used to such compliments, and a big grin crossed her features. "That's sweet of you to say, Lenore," she said with a little laugh and an even wider smile. "I like you very much as well. It's nice to find someone who isn't out to kill you in here, y'know?" Or lock you in a dark room. To Elin, the latter was worse. During her first few years in the asylum, when Zachary was still with her, Elin was subject to some of the above bullying, which led her to be very wary about the people she spoke to and the friends she kept. Elin enjoyed the company of the white-haired girl beneath the peach tree, maybe a little more than she should, and she offered Lenore a big smile. "Not many people are so friendly around here, and it gets a little boring, especially when you know you're not going to leave anytime soon."

"Yes," Lenore said quietly. "We would agree with you. Perhaps...perhaps we may try to make things less boring for each other, in the future." A little smile was given at this invitation, and while the white-haired girl did not utter the words with any trace of self-consciousness, there was a hint of something--tentativeness, almost--behind her dark brown gaze. It was not often that people enjoyed her company, after all, and now that someone was finally doing so, she could not help but feel the slightest bit awkward. Still, she did like Elin, and something told her that no matter how oddly she'd acted tonight, this small, dark-haired girl liked her, too--and what was more, she didn't seem about ready to change that opinion.

((Fade?))

((Fade.))

((Content warning for rape mention in the first paragraph.))
God, it was actually sunny outside. Sel couldn't remember the last time it had been so warm, the sky literally cloudless, a deep, domed summer-blue with a single white eye in the center, blazing as if with joy. The entire world seemed exultant, in fact–a poor bedraggled landscape emerging from a hellish winter, all the plants and animals practically shrieking I'M ALLLLLLIIIIIIIIVEEEEEE!!!! after the killing cold of the last few months. It was impossible to feel down in this kind of weather. Which was, frankly, a change so nice it was kind of weird. Between freaking out over school, and caring for her sisters and baba, and trying to deal with the fact that she kind of totally sort of was hopelessly in love with her best friend Sean who had never probably even noticed that she was a moderately attractive and really nice and funny girl
(oh and let's not forget, your other best friend was raped by her evil demon boyfriend and she's currently living in the loony bin and half-catatonic with trauma and can't stop crying and having flashbacks but y'know whatever that's not a big deal it doesn't keep you both up all night shaking in terror or anything hahahahaha nope).
So, yeah. Basically her life had kind of fallen to shit, a bit.
Which was why, having gotten a break from her bitch-from-hell boss for the afternoon, she was hiking up the hill by the old peach tree to pray. She hated having to make them up when she got home every. Single. Day; and today was the sort of day where she thought she could actually get some peace from praying, some contented solitude instead of the desperate, yearning loneliness she felt whenever she talked to God recently. God, being the busy Man that He was, never seemed particularly eager to answer.
But maybe today. On a day like this, when all of creation was exulting, how could the Creator not be paying attention?
So she walked to the summit of the little hillock, unrolled her little prayer rug from her knapsack and laid it on the ground in the shadow of the tree. She checked the little compass/locket Baba had given her when she was little, to help her find Mecca.
She breathed in, out. Imagined her thoughts carrying all the way across the Atlantic and the Red Sea to Jerusalem, to the Dome of the Rock, to Mecca, to some holy place God might have one ear on the lookout for.
She bowed her head, thinking of Alys and her sisters and her mother and father, and began to pray.

Anna was not looking for spiritual peace when she trekked out to the peach tree, but physical. Her first winter at St. Peter's had been--dare she say it--hellish. It was cold, bitingly cold, colder than it had ever been back in the woods of Oklahoma; she had woken up each morning a stiff block of ice and gone to bed each night more restless than a cat with fleas, so cooped up had she been in the cold weather. I'll be fine, she'd insisted to nurse after nurse, door guard after door guard. I sewed some good pants and my shirt's long and fringed. Let me out, damn it. And when that had not worked she'd tried to coddle, simper, apply her Southern charm like makeup and play it for all it was worth--but even that had done nothing. Everyone she'd asked, whether they were young or old, tired or alert, kind or nervous or sticks in the mud, had told her no. No explanation, no apologies; simply no.

She'd snuck out a few times, of course. No one could keep a fox contained when she wanted so desperately to be free. But eventually, that had grown tiresome, and Anna had resigned herself to a winter stuck inside, meandering uselessly about stark white halls and rooms that tried too hard to be warm and cozy, caught up in an endless loop of boredom, agitation, and (once the confinement had gotten to be a little too much for her) straight-up bitchiness.

But now she was finally out. Someone had finally swiped a keycard and opened the doors and let her out. The Indian girl had wasted no time taking advantage of her freedom; she'd taken off like a bat out of hell, long dark hair flying out behind her like so many horses' tails, bare feet pressing into grass--grass!--with every loping stride she took. The feeling had been such utter bliss she'd laughed aloud. She was still laughing now, as she came to the peach tree; and even as she squirreled her way up the fence chuckles were bubbling from behind her lips. She did not notice the dark, limber figure of the girl on the prayer rug, did not hear her murmuring; no, she was a bit preoccupied at the moment, scurrying up the branches of the tree, hand over hand in great climbing strides, ecstatic. She hadn't been out in so long. So long. The freedom was heavenly.

Sel, on the other hand, had caught sight of Anna as the long-haired girl clad in–was that actual honest-to-God buckskin?– practically vaulted herself into the tree. The sight of a grown woman clambering up a tree with such squirrelly agility and evident childlike joy was, thankfully, enough to turn her thoughts away from her mournful reverie; though now she was, of course, insatiably curious about someone who climbed trees faster than an orangutan on crack and ran around in deerskin, and her attention had lapsed from the surah she was supposed to be reciting from. Pious duty won out, however–unfinished prayers didn't count–and she finished reciting her chosen verse. Then she knelt up, stretched her back, tilted her head back to look at the climbing girl, and called aloud "Hello up there!", trying not to grin.

For a moment, Anna did not respond--or at least, not with her voice. Her eyes, on the other hand, flashed down to the kneeling figure immediately, black and sharp and keen as any bird's; and her mouth twitched, just a little, just a tick, at one corner, as though she did not know whether to purse her lips or frown. She could see the grin teasing at the stranger's mouth and wondered if it was well-intentioned or mocking, as so many often were around here, showing sly on the faces of girls and boys her age who had the gall to stare but not to speak. They had done much more of it in her early days, of course, when she had first began to make her way about St. Peter's grounds (then foreign territory, now almost as well-known as her beloved Oklahoma woods) but she did not recognize this girl, did not know her, and for the nonce she couldn't tell if Sel was one she was better off decking or befriending.

All this Anna noted with a wary detachment, a sharply ingrained but passive distrust that had wormed its way into her very bones when she was twelve years old and hadn't given her an inch of ground since. It had always been better this way, not to give new faces the benefit of the doubt, no matter how friendly or well-intentioned they seemed. One never knew, after all, which pretty smile was hiding a snake's tongue, which comfortable cloak a dagger.

But now she was starting to sound like Phoenix. That girl Anna had seen around, her hair red as flame and eyes chips of ice or pools of river water, almost always dependent on who was around, what show she was playing. Anna had observed her own unwillingness to trust in the little German girl, but she had to admit, Phoenix seemed to take it to extremes she had never herself considered. So she looked again at the lithe figure on the ground, who was looking up at her with that same almost-smile on her face and amusement shining in dark brown eyes, and said, "Hello to you, too."

Sel had to crane her neck way back to get a proper look at Squirrel Girl (as her subconscious had already dubbed the stranger) and she felt her stiffened vertebrae stretch, then pop blissfully. Squirrel Girl was peering down from her perch, head quizzically cocked, with something like suspicion- Sel'd learned after many months working in St. Peter's the myriad forms distrust and fear could take on a face- but she'd greeted Sel courteously enough. Plus Sel was now really curious...and also, it would be really nice to have some company that didn't make her angry, or stressed, or soul-crushingly worried and sad for them, and who actually talked back.
So she hedged her bets and called up "I'm Sel! What's your name?"

Anna, Anna replied--but only in her head. Out loud she said, eyes narrowing to dark slits: "What's it to you? You're not a patient." And she was not, Anna knew that for a fact. There were no patients who called St. Peter's home that had even a darker complexion than she and Raven, let alone the patterned carpet on which the stranger knelt up. She would have noticed it; and if she never caught it, her brother certainly would have. And so she offered the smiling girl--Sel--no more than that, shifting her weight on the branch so that it creaked ominously, almost in warning. She wouldn't fall, but she thought it was worth getting out there that she could certainly jump, and be on the ground and gone before the stranger knew what happened. If some damn nurse had sent someone out to fetch her back so quickly--if it was time for some kind of bullshit exam or (spirits forbid) a therapy session with dear Samuel Fairchild--she wanted the girl below her to know she wasn't going to be so easily corralled back after so little a taste of real freedom.

Sel rolled her eyes, even though she knew standoffishness was par for the course in the nuthouse- and often, she heard it whispered, a necessary measure of protection against the more dangerous denizens, who could and would use any scrap of information against their victims. But still, she couldn't help the fact that her pride and sense of propriety smarted at the other girl's clipped tone, nor could she corral the impulse to backsass this squirrelly stranger, if only in play.
"Well, 'scuse me for living," she retorted, laughing and smiling to gentle her tone, and then, remembering herself, waited a moment to check if she'd offended the stranger. When Squirrel Girl's expression didn't change, she figured she was in the clear, and continued, "I'm a volunteer. You climbed into my praying tree- I figured I'd better introduce myself."