Ain't been feeling so great past few days...so this might be short. Head hurts, heart hurt, stomach's kicking anything I put in right back out. Course the docs notice but they don't notice why, they just think I'm trying to go bulimic on them or something. But how the hell can you stop that, huh? They give me shit to calm my stomach and sometimes it works, and sometimes I wind up spitting my insides into the porcilien master until I think I'm turning inside out and tears are coming down like waterfalls and all you can smell is the stink of the inside of a person's body. It's nothing I'd wish on anyone else. But if the entry gets cut short, I guess that's why.

So we get out of this self help circle thing where I spend the entire time staring at the ceiling thinking nothing nothing nothing...and I go back to my room. Lovely place, this goddamn bugged sterile room. At least I thought so. I hadn't been feeling so hot, ya know...not even then. Headaches were already kicking in, and I didn't feel focused. It was like everything was halfway a dream, painted over with some clear gloss that you can't entirely see but you know is there. The whole thing with the kid got my stomach lurching...I came back to my room ready to collapse on the bed and fall asleep, or something. Don't know what. Maybe sleep forever, sleep for two weeks and sleep my way out of here, but I doubt that would work. I was completely not ready for what I saw, though.

Once again, I had a welcoming committee. Yulling this time, holding that kid I'd saved from the docs by his arm. He was still cuffed up tight like a wild animal, like they were afraid he was going to jump loose and start mauling people. The kid had that quiet air about him like the calm everyone puts in the air before a firecracker goes off, where you're all just holding your breath steeling to jump, like you know you will. He was like that, living. He was all that and the firecracker slowly counting down its own wick, thread after thread burning away. You knew he was going to snap and make a lot of noise, and sparks, but not really hurt anyone. They didn't really get that, I guess. Maybe the kid had been pissing Yulling off, maybe not, but the next few moments I wound up with Juudai knocking me to the floor when Yulling threw him at me. One thing you gotta know, that I learned right away about Juu's that he's increadably sarcastic.

So we're lying in a heap on the floor, and he looks curled up like a shrimp or some girl out of a bad porn with all that long hair of his, his hands cuffed together so he cant really prop himself up so well, hands on my chest and head on my stomach, and I'm on my back staring at my own stucco ceiling where another bee's hopping around. Guess between my knife and their chewing, they finally got in. What sucks is that the hospital's going to try to exterminate them, which freaks me out. I mean if we're all bees, and they're exterminating the bees....Does that mean we're all gonna die? Maybe they'll ignore em...they're only bees after all, not that disruptive, not stingin nobody yet anyway...Back to my awkward position.

So Juu, this kid, is basicly on top of me and his voice just goes entirely flatline and he shouts out, if you can shout monotone, "Well Kyo, I never figured you for this kinda person. Shall I suck your cock while I'm over here?"

I think I just blinked at him. I think. Juu told me later that I said something smartass right back at him, which I'd rather not write here least people infer the wrong things about Juu and me. And knowing Juu, he made that up anyway. I was out of it as I said, he might be right though. I think I rely on others to tell me what's real and what's not too much. Anyway, I eventually push the kid off me and sit up and Yulling's already telling me something I'm missing. Juudai was schedualed to be my roomie for a few days, but the move wasn't going to take place til about the last three nights of my stay. Juu's a long term patient, refered here sometime last two months or so, and spontaniously refuses and accepts treatments like he sees fit. So it's no wonder I didn't see him before hand and he didn't see me. But now that I think back to it, I saw his name on some of the sign out sheets. Well, after the fiasco with Juu's private rebellion during group therapy today, they decided to move us together faster. Since I quieted the kid down, I guess. Maybe they thought I'd be a good influence. I dunno, past few days if anything, Juu's influenced me. I mean these people fuck him over time and time again and although he tries to fight every single one of them, he's constantly talking 'bout how much he loves everything on the planet. Even though I'm pretty sure it's just medication talking through his mouth like a zombie's master movin it to send a message, I'm taking it in.

They can beat the crap outta you, but you still gotta love em. Hate em, what good's that do you? Just prolongs the pain and war and causes more pain for others.

So two days ago Juudai Arano moved in with me, and when Yulling left, the cuffs left too, and instantly the kid is rooting through everything in the room for god knows what. Ten seconds searching he finds the slit in the matress I made, but nothing's inside. He looks up at me and starts talking to me about Kammi and how she talked about me sometimes. I think the exact words were something like this...

"Hey, Kammi told me a lot about you, man."

"Kammi's cool. What'd she say?"

"She said you used to be a prep," and then he grinned to the point where I thought maybe Hekshanians were directly related to Cheshire cats at me and goes "And now you're a total boozehound."

I think I shoulda been offended or something, but I wasn't. I mean, what do I care, right? Derogitory terms, that's like calling Myches 'space donkeys.' Do they care? No. Do they look like that? Yes. For some reason it's a bad thing, guess it's a slur on their intelligence. But for me, the insults are the same way. Call me a drunk. Am I constantly? No. A lot? Yes. But what do I care, it's not like it's something I'm ashamed of. Maybe it's a slur on my self control. Or maybe I'm really in denial and I should be listening to what they blather in those group sessions about self medication. What it comes down to is if they gave us a purpose or a meaning or some way to fight back at the people who fucked us up so badly, we wouldn't need to self medicate. We wouldn't need to hide what we did, because we could go and take it down in reality just like the memory. Confront fears and stuff like that.

They moved in another bed the same night, and Juu's sitting on it and I'm sitting on my bed and we're talking a while. Juudai's slick, if not a little sick. You don't even wanna know where he hid his 'medicine' when he came in here, but you could probobly guess. Depending on Juu's mood, he'll be screaming random lyrics, or muttering them in the middle of his sentances. Some people quote great literary works. Juudai quotes Toybox, Grand Theft Audio, Darksilver, Dichkiiari...all those old banned bands. One thing to his credit, all the songs in his head are perfectly memorized and with hair like that, watching him headbang around a room singing, high on whatever it is he's got with him, you can't help but laugh. Most druggies you hear one story, you hear them all. Juu doesn't tell stories, he just shows off. He ain't annoying, or stupid. He ain't slow. Juudai gets happy, gets hyper, gets insane. It's something I haven't seen here a lot. One thing that does bug me though...is what he tends to do to get drugs around the center.

Some patients are on shit to keep em calm. The really insane ones. But we have common areas we can all go to, and groups we all go to. Juu bargains with them, plays off em to get their medications. It ain't right, I hate watching it, but the way I feel without my own drug of choice, like I said, I wouldn't wish on anyone. One of the all time highlights of Juu though...in the middle of the very same meeting we met in, he raised his hand and very seriously announced that he sometimes liked to slather his nude body in chocolate pudding and go to the nearest place of worship. once there, he would kill the clergyman to get the attention of the congrigation, then proceed to make emphatic pelvic thrusts while reciting the most holy text of whatever religion that happened to be. I know exactly what he said, because he says it all the time. It's part of another song floating inside his head. Juudai's a good roomie, overall. Think I like staying with him. That's Juudai Arano.

What's strange, is I think Juu's name is one he gave himself. Or maybe the Humans did, it's a base in the Human language Japanese, the old dead one. Maybe the people who killed his parents told him that was his name. Maybe his social worker is Japanese. But I can pick his name down to basics. Teenage Wasteland. That's him to perfection, I guess. Juu really wasn't very old at all when they shot his folks. I was eightteen, Juudai's like...fourteen now. I'm nineteen. So he was thirteen. That's pretty young, even younger than...yeah...I'm not going to write about that...

Another thing Juu's good for is getting paper. He can con almost anyone into getting anything. And if he can't...they have to suffer for it. One of his favourite tortures I've seen these past two days is him stripping off his shirt and clinging to their feet screaming. It's pretty easy to see why Juudai got put in here. But talking one on one...he's not crazy. Not any more crazy than any of us. He sticks around me now, I guess I expected him to. I sure as hell hope he ain't trying to impress me by popping pills. But I don't think he is. Juu's got his own mind...even if the docs tell me otherwise. Yes, I have my one on one session idiot tell me that Juu is only copying what he sees in me. The kid has his own mind, I say. The kid is thinking for himself, just because he's found me to think like him, I'm automaticly at fault cause I'm older? Bastard idiots...

Tomorrow I have work duty in the kitchen again, I think. Juu's jumping around the room now screaming some song I don't know. Most of it's about drugs. I'd like to know where he found the music and learned the music he found and learned. I'd like to hear it for real again, once I reach the outside. Tomorrow...how long will it have been by then. Six days. Another eight to go til I'm out of here, craika. At least now with Juudai, I think I might be able to handle it. We can talk and bitch them out right in front of the cameras and not care. What are they going to do? They won't split us up, Juu's apparently stopped being so violent since rooming with me. Hell, he doesn't randomly start fights anymore. And I guess I've been less 'withdrawn' to them. Withdrawn my ass. I'm just glad the bees are inside the room now. I think they might be building a hive outside and getting materials from inside. Wouldn't that be somethin, taking something from in here and actually using it outside. Someone once told me all Earth bees are female. Well, Hekshanian bees are both sexes. Dunno why. They don't seem to care, the workers don't make baby bees anyway. They're geneticly impaired, I think. I mean they try, and sometimes they get a larve, but the queen tends to kill it before it gets out. I guess it has a certain smell around it. They raise the worker-kids in captivity sometimes. They're nothing really special, they tend to be a little disoriented actually. One weird thing they found about the worker-kids though...you put them in with a queen, the queen won't fight. In fact, she'll turn around and let the worker-kid attack her. And the kid does. And the kid wins. Maybe that's why queens keep eating the eggs, to keep the kids from being born. Because they're afraid what might come out. But in captivity, there's no way for a worker-kid to lead a colony.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm a worker, or a worker-kid. It could happen. Lying on my back here, looking up, writing against a clipboard Juu got someone to bring in that they won't bother to take because my self destructive tendencies have supposidly 'stopped' since they took my knives and booze and music...looking up like this at the ceiling and out at the window, I'm watching two worker bees on the inside creeping around trying to find the same hold they came in through. I think back to the bee trapped in the florecent light and wonder if it ever got out. I go back to session same time every other day, so I guess I'll find out then. But shit...I feel like shit...I can't write anymore. I gotta either sleep, or puke, or something.

I'm rooming with a Teenage Wasteland. That's sort of poetic, in a lame kinda way.

He felt cold, clammy, sick, and the silence was roaring in his ears. He reached up hands to rub his face and one of the orderlies noticed and pushed his arms back down. Don't move, you shouldn't move, stop moving. You're going to the medical station....the words disolved into a shakey fizzing in his mind, he wanted it all to shut up. Who had taken the time away, what had it meant, why did he feel so damned weak? Everything ached, sore, as if he had been working out or running for miles. Stiff and sore, he wondered if he'd been shot through with electric shocks. Could they do that? Did they still do that? If they had, how had they gotten him from work duty to the electro therapy without his remembering any of it? There was an acrid smell in the air, like salt and dirty water and butter, all melded together far too thickly. The smell of urine, piss. Something was very wrong with this picture.

Trying to speak his throat was hoarse and sore, his voice scratched out like he'd been burried in a tomb for a thousand years. What happened? Where are we going? Nobody answered him, none of the orderlies turned to look. He craned his neck, which was sore too. Like he'd been hanging it backwards over a chair for far longer than just a few minutes during a therapy session. Twisting to get a better view around, it didn't help. The white walls of the hospital looked the same, like out of an abstract painting to which there was no end or differentiating in the solid hallways. The orderlies were unbroken in their white uniforms, colours were toned down to a greyscale in his mind and so there was no difference even there. Identical, twins, all of them. Trailing behind breaking the symatry, the girl was walked between two other white garbed watchers, her crimsion eyes glaring after him like demonic beacons in the white. Some sort of sloppy sharp sick painting, hung up in an ammature gallery and sold for too much money. The hallway, the gurrney, the girl. Everything hurt, it all hurt so much. He didn't want to move. Lying his head back down on the solidly stuffed gurrney pillow, Kyotoshi stared up at the flashing ceiling lights again. Symetrical, pattern, unbreaking. Light, white, flash, dark, his pupils never having time to widen before shrinking down again. It was like a neverending dream, one of those nightmares where he kept running and running in a circle and couldn't stop, no matter how hard he concentrated on the fact it was simply a dream.

Clinking over the metal stop into a room, Kyotoshi blinked and wondered if this was what it liked when you died, if this was death. If death itself was just a long hospital hallway, where nobody spoke and everyone looked alike. Was death so unglamorous, so elitist that only the most masochistic could enjoy the feeling of dying? Had he died, had she died, was that the explanation for the missing time? Had the ceiling maybe collapsed, had there been an explosion...had the Rulerists bombed the hospital? He'd heard rumors of hosptial bombings, but on planets that were more outspoken about their discontentment. He remembered reading once in a book about the Opera Ghost of Paris on earth that the Humans had bombed hospitals before, during warfare. So the wounded would have no place to go. But this wasn't really a true hospital, it was an institution for the mentally disturbed. So far, Kyotoshi hadn't met any truely disturbed patients in his opinion...but then again Rulerist warfare was different than the traditional warfare...He lay on the gurrney even as the orderlies stepped away and one told him to stand. He didn't want to stand, everything was stiff. Someone entered the room whom he had not previously met, but he could smell. Lupine, Feline, a half blood. They swept past him talking, but Kyotoshi did not sit or stand to see them.

"Am I dead?" He asked quietly. The question was slamming on the sides of his head in a sort of desperation. If this was death, it wasn't a desperation or a feeling of injustice that drove him to find out. It was more for the knowing finality.

The person, whomever it was, had an undefinable voice. Between male and female, at least for Hekshanian dialects. Whatever it was didn't laugh, it didn't respond in any way that wasn't mechanical...deadpan. "Dead? Not yet," The voice became muffled, muttering. Looking down, probobly, Kyotoshi thought. Okay, so he wasn't dead. That was a plus, he guessed. But that took his only plausable explanation for where the missing time had gone, or where he was, away. The voice continued, Kyotoshi's curiosity mounted. "You should count yourself lucky on that one though." He thought he could hear a pencil scratching against paper, the faint sound of granuals of lead scraping off on white fibers. Everything was still so surreal, so dream-like.

"What happened to me?" It felt as if he was floating in this realm of unreality, that he'd stepped through a door and everything happening just couldn't be happening. Too real, too unreal. It was like everything was moving at hyper speed, he didn't have time to take it all in. It was like those mornings you woke up and you knew everything was going to crash down, too much bad luck all at once and something inside you just refused to believe it was happening at all. Pencils scratching too loud, silence roaring when silence wasn't supposed to roar, a person he couldn't see speaking in a voice that he didn't know if it was male or female or neither or both...mechanical or real...

The voice sighed and whatever it was got up, moving to Kyotoshi and putting its hand behind his head, lifting him with a sort of muffled grunt. Forcing him up to a sitting position, it let go, and Kyotoshi put his arms behind him. They felt shakey and weak, too hot under the white canvas of the hospital cloths. The person, alien, moved around in front of him and stood there, seeming to blur in and out of the wall in their spotless white coat which flowed to their ankles. The ears were too short, the claws were too long, there was no tail. He had been right, at least he thought he had been. Half blood, Hekshanian and maybe Mite. There weren't many Mites around anymore, not since the Rulerists completely wiped out their homeworld. It was all too weird, too dream like. An angelic rabbit in white, and he'd been raced down the hole out of control. He watched as the doctor sighed and sat down slowly, gingerly, in a plastic chair across the room from him. It looked like every emergency room he'd ever seen on the tele or in reality. The doctor had a clipboard in its claws.

Looking down at its notes momentarily, as if frustrated at some massive oversight, the doctor placed the board aside on the examining table and interlaced its fingers, letting them drop between its knees. "You had a grand mal seizure," he said with a quiet and serious bluntness to his words. Before the words could even fully click together in Kyotoshi's mind, the doctor was talking again, looking down at the floor. "It was probobly brought on by alcohol withdrawl, it happens in some extreme cases. Honestly, if I were you I'd be glad to be alive. There's always a risk of death there." An amber eye regarded the yellow Hekshanian. Kyotoshi was quiet, unmoving, unsmiling. He knew what it meant. A grimice crossed the half blood's face and he stood, moving across the room. "Had we had any idea that you were this severely addicted, we would have given you the proper treatment. But you never said anything in therapy."

There was a wet cold lump in Kyotoshi's stomach now, like an undigested peice of food that was too rich. He looked down away and to the side, refusing to hold eye contact. His voice was quiet, to himself. "What good would complaining have done?"

"This could have been avoided," the doctor said quite coolly. Picking up the clipboard again, it flipped through the notes. Any semblance of guilt or moral obligation was gone. "Ms....Nikko was with you," It read as it spoke. "I need to ask a few questions of her, do you mind if she's present."

Kyotoshi's cobalt eyes roamed across the pale floor tiles, square foot by square foot until they reached the jamb of the shut door. In the tiny slitted crack between floor and portal, shadows moved thick and swift, like rats. "Go right ahead, it's better everyone knows I ain't dead, right?" He cast the doctor a slight lopsided grin, but the half blood wasn't watching him. Light thoughts like moths fluttered past his conciousness as the reality of the situation refused to land on him. He wondered if it ever would, if it would circle like an insect bobbing about the outside of his head for his entire lifetime. That he'd been in danger, but never realize it. That he would know, but not realize. The latch on the door clicked as the silver stainless steel swiveled and the girl was marched in. Nikko...Kyotoshi knew the name from before, from when he had been writing on sign out sheets.

Zara Nikko. The blue furred girl with the silver hair and red eyes. The girl always fighting. The girl who was begging him to be saved, but in an entirely different way than Juudai. If I could save them all, maybe I'd save myself...

Strength and balance gave out as the girl rushed the cot he was sitting on, her white clothed arms flying around his upper torso, closing tight behind him like doors of a church, a shelter where he was claiming sanctuary. Kyotoshi's vision became lost in her light hair, her body was on the cot against his, warm and alive and it wasn't a dream or death anymore. Yellow paws laced behind Zara's body and Kyotoshi let his fingers do all they could do at this moment. Cling- to cling to the only stability and clarity there was. Feathery breathing was light in his ear and he knew that she, like himself, was refusing to cry. They would not allow themselves to cry. Zara Nikko, like ice on sunlight, holding Kyotoshi as the yellow Hekshanian burrowed his head into her shoulder. The docters were talking, pulling Zara, telling Kyotoshi about medicines they would prescribe him, but through it all punched only her words whispered in his ear, tickling the soft fur.

"Come visit me. East wing, room 587. Please."

Pulled away from the white girl, Kyotoshi fell backwards, weak, and shut his eyes. He would ignore the pricks of needles, he would ignore the words said to him, he would ignore the sensation of being taken back to his room. All that mattered was locked inside the body of ice, with red eyes like fresh blood on ice caps. He felt weak, he felt tired...he wanted stability now, and nothing more.