Her words take the effort to speak straight from his mouth, and he puts up little by way of a fight. Across the table from one another, the two sit in complete silence. Breakfast is laid out before them by well-meaning but uncomfortable and even frightened looking hospital staff members, and then cleared again half an hour later. And while other patients at other tables mutter sentences to each other with varying levels of coherence, the two mutants sit with one another without ever even looking at each other. When the breakfast bell rings for the second time, the two of them depart to opposite ends of the hospital, returning the ways they came. Ruby returns to Ward Four, and Alex to Ward One.

But then, Alex is caught by a doctor and pulled into his office for his first counseling session. The medicine cup that they gave him before breakfast drove him away from the living nightmares that his illness constantly surrounds him with and pushes him into a heavy fog in the dead of night. His mind is in a clouded forest, dense and hard to travel. The doctor asks him question after question, and Alex is sure that he answers, as he sees the older, dignified man nod and scribble in his pad. On the corners of his memory, frayed images of firefights and steadily paling faces with blue-strained veins dance around, but there is nothing solid to them, they feel only an inch or two out of his reach, as if he could run just a little bit faster and reach them, hold them in his hands. Unfortunately, the medicine keeps his feet in cement, and his memories remain in that place just between impossible and tangible.

It doesn't feel so much like therapy as it does an unwinnable race.

Eventually, though, the man in the white lab coat beckons Alex to stand, and reaches for the young soldier's lapel. There is a brief moment of contact where the fingers of the doctor brush the cloth of Alex's clothes, and almost instantly he sees a hazy memory of a pin of the American Flag finding its way to almost the same spot, but on a green uniform instead of a grey. He feels the phantom weight of that first moment even now, as he looks down and sees what is happening in the present moment. The pin is not multicolored this time, but yellow and in the shape of a cross. Alex gulps at the sight of it and opens his mouth to ask what it means, but before a sound can even escape, he is taken out of the small, cramped office and brought into what he was told yesterday on his tour is an Exercise Yard. It isn't half bad, as far as mental hospital exercise yards go, at least, not that Alex has any other knowledge to compare it to. The grass is green and lush, manicured and well looked after as it sprawls for three acres or so before dissolving into a mass of tall green trees. There's a fountain and wrought-iron chairs. Benches. Patients mill about, some with the company of nurses and other alone.

And then, on a blanket on the center of the back lawn, Alex sees her. The girl from this morning, the girl who sat across from him without giving him the dignity of a meaningful conversation. The girl with the scar on her face. Left to his own devices out here in the yard, Alex makes the bold decision and crosses the length of the grass between the two of them, looming over her as her dark hair sweeps around her in the gentle breeze. She's reading a book, the leather bound cover of which is propped up on the knees which are bent up into her chest. He stares down at her, pushing through his medicated haze to come up with something intelligent to say.

"Hello again," she says, her voice as easy as the air blowing around them as she flips a page.

The blonde standing above her startles at the sound of her voice. It takes him a moment, wondering how she could have know that someone, much less emhe/em, was looming over her. But then, the obvious conclusion appears in his mind. His shadow. Of course. His shadow is drawn in dark shades on the grass, and she caught it from the corner of her eye as she read the fresh page of her book.

"Uh-hi," he engineers, wondering where his power of speech went when it left him.

Medication often has side effects such as these, and he plops himself down on the ground with the weight of a sack of potatoes, hoping the reverb of his body might shake the remnants of the fog from his body. While he doesn't succeed completely, it does help somewhat, though perhaps that effect is just wishful thinking. Laying his legs out in front of him, he offers her his hand, hoping she will not acknowledge the slight tremor in the bones that comes with the warning label on the bright orange pill bottle they emptied into his white prescription cup this morning.

"Alex Summers," he introduces, forcing his jaw and his vocal cords to work as they are meant to.

As the young man hopes, the woman does not acknowledge the trembling in his hands, but that is because she does not acknowledge that he has tried to shake her hand at all. Instead, she keeps her eyes focused on the book in her hand, giving it all of her attention. Well, almost all of her attention.

"Ruby Warmin," she mutters.

That is when the cold-skinned smack of realization knocks Alex across the face. He sat on her right, and thus she presents the right side of her face to him, giving him a front row seat to the jagged scar that dominates her features. An invisible hand strangles him, wrapping around his throat as his eyes do tactical reconnaissance missions around that collection of jagged scar tissues. He tries to rip the hand from his throat, claw the elephant from its resting place on his chest, clenching and unclenching his fist and fingers in an attempt to exert the energy bubbling in the prison of his ribs.

"So..."He trails, hoping to find his thoughts along the way with little success

She turns a page, ever the casual tone coming out of her.

"So..." She parrots.

The first thing that comes to his mind is not the thing he should say, but it isn't the worst thing he could have thought of, either. He settles for a few easy words, taking what he can get when it comes to his own competence.

"I had therapy today," he says before the sentence can get caught anywhere on the path between his mind and his lips.

Ruby shakes her head, letting it roll from side to side as she remarks to herself how disappointing this all is. How disappointing he is, in fact. The air around them begins to taste of bread, of the steadily rising lunch that is beginning to come out of the smokestacks of the kitchen.

"You can just say it," she mumbles.

Alex isn't particularly good at looking innocent, but he does a pretty passable job in this moment. All the same, Ruby doesn't buy it. She knows better, and has done since the moment she came to bear the face she wears now.

"I can just say what?" Alex asks, ever so slightly tightening his voice to make it sound like a plausible question.

She doesn't have the energy to play a game with him. An angry page turns in her book and she struggles to control her breathing and her own tone of voice, not wanting to make any enemies, but not looking to make a friend either. She just wants honesty from the people she can demand it from. And this kid is someone she can demand it from. She knows she is owed that much, at least.

"You stared at my scar through breakfast and now you're doing it again," she says.

Alex splutters against the accusation and indictment.

"I wasn't- I mean, I didn't-" He stammers out.

She raises an eyebrow, letting her eyes skirt to meet his from the corner of her eye for only a second before returning to her book. Her spine locks up, the vertebra grinding against each other with painful grit.

"You didn't mean to?" She questions, attempting to finish the sentence for him.

It is that moment that, like an airplane bursting from a slow crawl on a runway into the sky to find nothing but blue eternity stretching out before it, Alex shatters through the fog plaguing his mind, and allows his tongue to run away.

"So you're a mutant?" He asks.

Ruby looks down on his chest to the yellow cross now gracing his lapel, letting the yellow light glint on the yellow and wondering when yellow became such a sickening color. Yellow, yellow, yellow. In this place, it is a symbol of several distinctions. Post-partum depression, Gender-based schizophrenia, and-

"So you have PTSD?" She retorts.

It's a new disorder. Not many people are willing to diagnose patients with it. But now that the soldiers are coming back, completely unprepared to deal with the world they left when they took their oath to serve and protect, there are very few options available to any doctor dealing in psychiatric medicine. Alex looks down at his hands, gulping down hard. Yes, that's what he's here for. But he isn't going to say out loud. He's in here for the protection of those around him; he isn't here to talk about his illness.

"Is that what you're in here for? Being a mutant?" He questions.

"Yes."

"Are they allowed to do that?"

"No."

Alex furrows his brow, turning his full attention to her, noticing that she is not really reading the words on the pages of her novel, but instead, staring at it with the force of visual warfare, gripping the cover until her knuckles whiten.

"Then why are you here?" He asks.

She swallows hard, her voice trembling with the force it takes to hold her anger at bay.

"Why do you want to know?"

They're quarantined together, not that she needs to know why just yet. So, Alex settles on giving her back the information that she needs to know.

"We're gonna be eating at the same table for the next two months. Might as well be friends," he says with a shrug.

Ruby rolls her eyes.

"No one has friends in here."

For the first time this conversation, Alex chuckles to himself, taking in the yeast-soaked air, wondering all the while how he managed to let himself get dragged into the mud of this chat.

"Maybe that's the reason no one's getting any better," he responds.

Ruby wonders for a long stretch of quiet if she should tell him. After all, he has a point. Perhaps the solitude is the reason no one is sane here. Maybe they're all stuck in a world of madness because they are all just lonely. With no one to take their hand and pull them from the water, there is no way of getting onto the lifeboat that might save them. Tentatively, Ruby reaches out for the lifesaver that Alex seems to have thrown her with his words. She closes her book, sticking her finger into the pages to save her place.
"I'm here because I survived," she says.

Alex knows he probably shouldn't ask, but he's never been great at holding his tongue. The question pops out of him like a cork from a champagne glass.

"Survived what?" He asks, suddenly intensely curious.

He needs to know. He needs to know if she came from Trask. He needs to know for sure. But, Ruby retreats into ambiguity, tightening her grip on her book until her hand shakes.

"Something bloody and painful," she responds.

Her gaze is distant, stuck somewhere in the deep basement that is the illegal testing facility of Trask Industries.

"Were you in a war?" He asks, though he knows the answer.

He hopes that guessing wrong might give her permission to speak freely, that she will want desperately to correct him and thus giving herself away. But she doesn't. Instead, she shrugs.

"Of sorts," she agrees.

She feels like she has gone through a war. He isn't sure how he feels about that. So, he asks another question that he has no business asking.

"How did you get that scar?" He asks.

Her teeth grind against each other, rubbing until they give her shivers up and down her spine. Her eyes close against the memories of the day she received it, and she fights against the storm of feelings deep down inside her.

"It's a brand," Ruby responds.

There is hope in her chest, hope that he will end this conversation, but she somehow knows that he will not. And sure enough, he follows through with the expectation she has placed on him. In contrast to the sunshine of the world around her, her mind lurks in darkness.

"What kind of brand?" Alex prompts.

Desperately, he reaches at straws, hoping that she will say it. Hoping that she will just say Trask so he can understand what he might have suffered. Perhaps that is the key to him being better, to freeing himself from his illness. Perhaps if he just knows how much worse he could have had it, perhaps he can release himself...

"You know how they put brands on cows? To mark who they belong to?" She asks.

Alex nods.

"Yeah."

She mirrors his nod.

"That kind of brand," she finishes.

That quiets Alex for a long while. Branded like livestock. Branded for slaughter and study and then thrown away when all of it was done. Thrown into a hospital when she isn't even sick. Being a mutant is like being an animal. And she's now eternally marked like one.

"So, how did you get it?" He finally whispers, unsure of how to approach the fact that she did not even answer his question the first time.

Ruby slams her book closed and the noise of it shatters the moment that Alex thought was growing between them. She places it at her side and wraps her arms around her knees, looking straight out into the horizon.

"Don't get ahead of yourself. We aren't friends yet," she snaps.

Her voice sharpens like a blade against a stone. There isn't any reason for him to know that information. He doesn't need to know about Trask and about the experiments and about... Well, about anything from that chapter in her life beyond what he can see on her face. Alex gulps, but finds hope in that one word. Yet.

"But you'll tell me someday. Right?" He asks.

She attempts to stab him with his words, but misses him by a country mile.

"Will you tell me about the war?" She barks.

He wants to ask which one she's talking about, which war she is hoping he'll divulge the secrets of to her, but he doesn't. He holds his tongue and knows that she isn't quite ready for that. She isn't ready to know about the many wars he feels he's been fighting his whole life. He just nods, his voice not unlike the quiet suburbian breeze hanging between them.

"Yeah. I'll tell you someday."

"Okay," she says, surprise creeping into her pose.

Their silence this time is comfortable, like two friends on a pond-side picnic instead of two virtual strangers out on break from their time in the mental ward. He takes her in, really takes her in, beyond the scar. And then breathes in a deep chestful of air before reaching out far enough from his little lifeboat that he risks falling out into the troublesome ocean himself.
"You know I'm like you, right?" He asks.

Ruby's eyes widen, stretching her skin uncomfortably tight as he sees genuine shock come across her face.

"You're what?"

He repeats himself.

"I'm a mutant. Just like you."

She struggles for words before managing to ask:

"What can you do?"

He shrugs, knowing that he can't actually follow through on what he is about to suggest. Not here. Not out in the open.

"I'll show you mine if you show me yours," he suggests with a wink.

She breathes a laugh, looking at her feet which twitch in the hospital-issued shoes covering her feet. Offering him her hands, letting them stretch upward like doctors with surgery-sterile arms, she shakes her head in frustration. Oh, what she would give to be able to see his power. What she would give to show off her own.

"I can't. The medication...It does things to me."

All the same, he looks at her and smiles, hoping to encourage one out of her if he can manage it.

"Oh. Someday, then?" He hopes.

She resigns herself to a promise without a name, knowing that someday that she will be called upon to fulfill it.

"Yeah. Someday."

And even though an air of disappointment hangs like Christmas lights around them, Alex sees something in the etch of the woman's face beside him. Something lighter. Something almost like freedom. Something almost like trust. And he thinks that maybe, just maybe, they're getting somewhere.

Here we are! Chapter two! Please let me know what you think in a review! I would love to hear your thoughts!