awake {exile} | orson & mouse
[The interrogations have long since ended, and the cells are wrapped in silence. After eating a small supper, the guards provide blankets, and everyone settled in for their incarceration at different rates. Mouse can’t relax. It’s not that he wouldn’t like to---there’s no better use of his time than to rest, right now. Trying to sift through everyone’s scattered feelings around him yields no actual information, and just makes him feel stretched thin. There’s no way of telling what they did or didn’t get out of all their questions, but if they had anything on Mouse, no doubt he’d be facing immediate consequences, not huddled here in the chilly dark cell with everyone else.]
[What’s most disturbing, though, is that after some time, he began to feel an ache that had nothing to do with sitting cramped up against the wall like this. He wishes he could know for sure what it is. What he suspects is enough to turn his stomach, though---someone’s hurt, nearby. It’s not the guards outside---he’s checked them all as they walk slowly by on rotation. And it’s not one of the Lost Boys. It’s not Lake, who he can sense stronger. Which leaves a blank void of possible options---someone he cares about deeply, maybe, outside. Or, and this seems more likely, it’s someone nearer, in another cell. They’re hurt pretty badly probably, for him to feel it from here. He doesn’t want to think that it was the NWRF going hard on someone---but what other conclusion is there? He didn’t notice it before the interrogations, and now it’s here, bruising him invisibly by proxy.]
[If he thought Benji or Kip were awake, he’d be trying to push down the sensation and the nauseating guilt that it causes for their sakes, but he’s pretty sure they’re both out. Orson’s awake, the dim light from outside catching the angles of his pale face as he rests nearby. But Mouse has no idea what he could say to him right now that would be anything other than a bleak sentiment or a bad joke. It’d just make it worse, probably.]
@bear-little-loss
