Logs:Exit Strategies
| Exit Strategies | |
|---|---|
cn: suicidal ideation/discussion of suicide | |
| Dramatis Personae | |
| In Absentia
|
2023-06-04 "Girl, you're in a gang." |
| Location | |
The sign by the door says "Rec Room", but someone with a permanent marker bookended the first word with "W" and "k" at some point, and the subsequent effort to undo the vandalism was lackluster. Inside it looks little different from dozens of other rec rooms in the complex, solidly furnished and in good repair, rarely an actual wreck, though it might be more interesting if it were. A large flatscreen television mounted on the wall dominates the space, with rows of folding chairs arrayed before it and many more stowed in the closet except on movie nights. The rest of the space is divided about evenly between reading and "activity" areas. A long sectional sofa brackets off the former, leaving the wallspace free for tall shelves, largely stocked with supermarket checkout paperbacks (about half James Patterson by volume, with Danielle Steel heavily represented). The latter plays host to several sagging card tables ringed with yet more folding chairs, supplied by tall shelves of games (mostly playing cards, chess, and Monopoly, variously missing pieces) and art supplies (a lot of crayons and pencils and markers, with some dried out paints and crunchy brushes). Echo is slouching on the sectional sofa in none other than drab olive scrubs, with a beat-up copy of the second -- the first is nowhere to be found -- Maximum Ride book close to her face, her brow intensely furrowed. In between scanning pages at a brisk pace, she occasionally seems to startle, lowering the book and giving a squinting glance around the room before settling her gaze in the direction of the TV. A careful observer might note that the squint subsides such that nothing but blobs must be visible, but after a minute or so she brings the book back up, lips once again twitching silently through bemused microexpressions. The TV goes to a commercial break, and Roscoe -- sitting in a folding chair with his feet propped up on another folding chair, faded scrubs loose on his frame -- kicks his footrest folding chair away with a loud scraping sound (the guard by the door looks over at Roscoe, then back at his Candy Crush game) and gets up in search of something new to do. He stops behind the sectional sofa, tilting his head to see Echo around her book. "You still don't have glasses?" Echo startles for real, eyes widening as she tries to sit upright but mostly succeeds in stabbing her chest with the bottom edge of the book. Grimacing, her eyes relax as she identifies Roscoe, and she tosses the volume aside unceremoniously. "Heard the eye doc doesn't come till halfway through this month. Plus it's expensive." Echo gestures toward the commercial, in which, she hears, "the Babybel snack heroes" (three red blurs strategically peeled to have ninja headbands, punching a robot) "are here to save the day," and then at Maximum Ride: School's Out--Forever. "Anyway, there's not much here. Not like I need to see the whiteboard." "He was here when you first got here," says Roscoe. "Probably too busy drooling over your friends with their snake eyes to bother with you. You mind?" He clambers over the back of the sofa to sit cross-legged a few feet away from her before she can answer. Echo probably can't see his eyeroll, but the tone comes across in his voice anyway. "It wouldn't kill you to be able to see, in here," he says. "I highly recommend it. Besides, I thought your friends were, like, flush with cash." Echo's mouth skews to the side and she gives a slow nod. "Nearsightedness, practically everyone's got that these days." Her slight shake of the head and shrug are unnecessary, but Echo seems to very much not mind Roscoe's presence, her posture much more attentive now than for Patterson. "I mean...I can see enough to know how to get from cell to here and when someone I should avoid is around. It's a hundred dollars," she says, as though this is self-explanatory. "My mom would kill," she cuts off, a pained look crossing her face, "--anyway I can't let my friends spend a hundred dollars on me. Especially in here, that might as well be a thousand dollars." Roscoe does not look convinced. "Your mom ain't in here," he says. "Your friends are, and they're flush with cash, and they probably would rather cough up the money than have you walk around with a big target on your back. And --" he props his elbow on the back of the sofa to lean against, squishing his cheek into his arm. "I snuck up on you easy-peasy." Echo crosses her arms. "She's somewhere in here," she points at her left temple before returning her hand to the cradling crook of her elbow. "You're telling me yours doesn't live rent-free in there?" There's a thread of curiosity running here as she juts out her chin towards Roscoe's head. Her right shoulder skews down as she shrugs. "You don't worry me. Physically, anyway." "Not anymore." Roscoe's posture sags slightly; his face against his forearm drags into a longer squish. "She would disapprove so hard of everything I do in here, I stopped keeping track. I'll deal with that if I ever see her again." He doesn't sound too fussed about the prospect, but his posture sags again, the motion pulling his right eye almost shut. "So? What if I had a knife?" The intent of Echo's glance is searching, but the inevitable straining to catch details of Roscoe's expression just makes her look suspicious. She drops her gaze down to the faded, dated pattern on the couch. "If..." She interrupts that train of thought to direct an eyeroll in Roscoe's direction. "Then they really won't have to waste money on me. Anyway I don't think you'd risk it. You like chatting up my friends, And the idea of being not here, someday. Probably." There's a faint question mark hovering there. After a beat, Echo's knee starts to bounce restlessly and she looks away. "Does she -- know you're in here?" comes abruptly, a little clipped. Roscoe's face pulls into a wide, toothy grin, but his tone, when he speaks, is unchanged -- light and indifferent. "Says who? You don't know me." He readjusts himself in the sofa, scratches behind his ear. Her question seems to honestly surprise him -- maybe he thought they had left the topic behind. "My mom?" he says. "Yeah, 'course she does." A little defensively, he adds, "She didn't know what Prometheus is, it was before the documentary came out." Echo's shrug is bigger, this time, a wry twist to her mouth as something in her gaze turns inward. "True," she says, and leaves it at that. Her eyes but not her head return to Roscoe's face. "I mean, doubt they've told ours. I know, it's different. Not that --" She stops, closes her mouth, tries again. "Just thought, if she knows, and they want you back, they'd make some noise eventually. I dunno, maybe you got other golden kids at home." Her tone is controlled, only slightly pained. Roscoe's tone is a little less controlled; it comes out in a short, forceful burst. "They do want me back," he says. "Just 'cause they're not Spencer Holland's anarchist dad doesn't -- why you freaks act like it's so easy to get bailed out of this place? That documentary lied to you. There's no raid team anymore, you're on your own." "Must be nice, then," Echo shoots back, the sharpest her tone has been since she arrived at Lassiter. Her gaze is drilling a hole around where Roscoe's torso meets the couch, fingers tight on opposing arms. She's softer but still a bit tight when she speaks again. "Sorry. I really didn't -- I just meant, if you've got that, maybe you could have better than 'if'." There's not a ton of her borrowed belief in her voice here, just some deadened reasoning: "Like, if you really don't believe in any after, what's the point? Might as well off yourself now, give them less along the way." "They have a guy here could just bring you back to life." Roscoe's voice has relaxed again into the earlier, mild, disinterested tone, but his posture is tense, tendons stark and spidery in his hand where it clutches the back of the sofa. "Then you get to sit alone in a padded cell until they think you can be trusted to pee by yourself again. Sort of a dumb way to make a point." Echo blinks a few times, and then squints. "Huh," comes out slowly and a tad dubiously. "Really are all kinds of powers. But that's gotta come with some kind of catch, they really gonna do that for every person who's like, 150% strength? Walking tape recorder?" A self-deprecating ghost of a smile as she slides a couple inches further down the couch, pointing her thumb at herself, then shrugs. "Your strategy's working for you, I guess. Least Ansel's nice to you." Roscoe's eyes narrow; for a moment it seems he's going to ignore Echo's question entirely. His posture slumps again when he evidently decides not to; his answer is a very quiet "No." He settles his head back against his arm, his features pinching into a troubled frown. Probably Echo can barely see it, but he tilts his head away from her anyway. "I hate Ansel," he says. "It's really not worth it playing nice in here. Maybe all the labcoats like me, but it's not like that gets me out of being their guinea pig. You're lucky you got friends to look out for you." Echo tilts her head and squints harder at the latest development in Roscoe's voice. Her tiny smile is derisive, but her gaze is in the direction of the guards. "Yeah, I mean. You've got eyes. Which is good, and not a pun," she hastens to add. At the mention of friends, she frowns a little and picks at the hem of her scrub top. "Yeah, I really am, I know. Otherwise, dunno, I'd be using your strategy, and probably doing it worse." Echo's forehead scrunches together in some deeply preoccupying thought. After a long pause, she ventures, "I don't...actually know them that well, you know. Half...most? of them I'd barely met before all this. Finding or building community...it's kind of a work in progress, for me." For a moment Roscoe just blinks blankly at Echo, more taken aback than anything -- his hand finds its way to trace the bag below one eye, before he tucks it back behind his neck and decides to move on. "Heh," he says, his gaze starting to wander away, his lips pressing into a thin, faintly mocking smile. "I think you could hack it." For a while he just stares absently at the telenovela on TV; it's not clear at first if he's even listening to Echo, until he says, with a small grunting laugh, "Building community? Girl, you're in a gang." Echo's head shrinks an inch or so into her neck, expression abashed, as the silence stretches; perhaps for the best, she does not try to further clarify what obviously did not need clarification in the first place. She puts a hand to her forehead at Roscoe's word choice, entire face scrunched, now. "That..." she mutters. "I'm just saying, besides the circumstance of our poorly-advised venture, I'm new to the...cohort. So the luck is also something I'm working to hang on to." She switches to leaning forward, propping her chin on an elbow. "I dunno, like maybe we never get out of here and I test my luck on the useless-enough-power dice eventually. Until then, I just think the steps to imagining what not being here forever could look like and making this all sort of tolerable look pretty much the same." Roscoe gives Echo a shit-eating grin, obviously enjoying her embarrassment, but it fades quickly. "Heh," he says again, with even less humor than before, with almost no inflection. "Step one, don't think so much about it." | |
