<span style="font-style: italic">Scrrrrrrr-click-click-scrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-click-scrrrrrrrrrr</span><br/><br/>Those walls. Those m-m-minty fresh, white washed walls. Those cold-mongering, mother facking walls.<br/><br/>How well did he know those walls?<br/>Well.<br/>Well enough he could paint them in immaculate detail in his sleep, in fact, Dante believed he HAD once or twice. Quite literally. He lived this place, he breathed this place and when he closed his eyes at night, full to the brim with exhaustion, shitter-than-prison-food shifting restlessly in his gut like a wino sleeping one off, enough bags under his eyes to house a chain store comfortably for ten years-- he DREAMED this place...<br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">-click-scrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr</span><br/><br/>As he paced the edge of his room, Dante ran the  nail of his index finger across them. It was a sorry looking example of it's kind, gnawed roughly down to the bare wick, criss-crossed with white, suspiciously incisor shaped marks, enough to host a world O's and X's championship and connected to pale, spidery hands that were speckled with dry, flaky blood. From his gums. If things got too boring, Dante was of the opinion that small doses of pain would brighten things up.<br/><br/>But that's a story for another night;<br/><br/>He ran a finger parallel to his path--<br/>Up, down. To, fro.<br/>Hither, hereafter.<br/>Whatever, Trevor.<br/>---nail occasionally catching in groves with a click or skewing momentarily off at a tangent, but always returning to his side like a faithful old dog. It was a game that played much better with wallpaper, where you could catch stray tails of material and soon enough strip the wall in long floral printed tendons, but the staff here had clearly played this one before and knew better than to cash out on a hundred new reams of wallpaper each week and instead, broke the rules of fair play, and opted for paint.<br/><br/>Spoil sports.<br/><br/>Cheaters.<br/><br/>Liars.<br/><br/>Whores.<br/><br/>There was a circle in hell<span style="font-style: italic">dedicated</span>just to those sticks in the mud that wouldn't join in the reindeer's fun and games and ruined it for everyone else involved! Paint wasn't a pleasant substitute, no matter how peely, even if it did come off in satisfying flakes, like household sunburn, there was always that one bit that went straight for the sensitive flesh just beneath your nail and jammed fierce enough to draw blood!<br/><br/>Carpe digitus, mothertruckerrrrrsss! Carpe digitus!<br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">Scrrrrrrrrrrrr-clickâ€”</span><br/><br/>â€œAh! Crap!â€ The lanky figure flinched away from the wall as though it were made of electric, not brick and mortar, pocketing his injured digit between his lips and sucking on it sulkily, dark brow kissing in the middle of his face. For a few moments he could do little more than glare the wall down.<br/><span style="font-style: italic">'A Mexican stand off. Dante-Beu vs dry wall. Fourty paces at sunrise and all that jazz. Ding ding! '</span>a cheeky voice quipped from somewhere in the back of his head.<br/>Shu' chyo mouwf!<br/>It should have been amusing, hell, in THIS place a broken arm could be considered 'amusing', but behind the mindless jokes he could feel a dam of anxiety creaking and straining, just waiting to blow and send them all to hell.<br/>'All' meaning himself and his voices. All six of them. Was he joking? Was he not?<br/>A irksome sensation of impending doom, that something really bad was about to happen, was creeping under his skin. The Fear Lurgy. He'd caught it!<br/><br/>Was it just the drugs though?<br/><br/>Or the lack of them. The good ones.<br/><br/>Who the holy fuckaroo knew!<br/><br/>Dante shifted his weight from foot to foot, unsure whether this sensation required dissecting and figuring out or was all bark and no bite, something best left alone.<br/>Emotions made him restless. Frequently he paced, weighed down by unwarranted sensations of unease and disturbance. It wasn't uncommon to see him padding barefooted along the linoleum tracing his fingers across the walls, eyes glazed over, lost in their own mental labyrinth.<br/><br/>What if it really WAS something?<br/><br/>Dante inhaled sharply, whites in his eyes stood out  like car headlamps, breath catching in his throat, suddenly overwhelmed by the need to check back in with other people, rediscover reality,  touch base and take stock of his playthings/ fellow inmates.<br/><br/>As if on a carefully scripted cue (perhaps not, Dante struggled to keep time at the best of times, the asylum was a thief in the night when it came to the clock. It could have been a minute into that train of thought or an hour afterwards.) there was a distraction. A sound next door.<br/><br/>For a moment he froze. Dead. The girl next door... the one with the hats...<br/><br/>Dante threw a hand through the bleached-bone mane of his hair, snapped his fingers, grit his teeth--<br/><br/>The name arrived with a mental bang. Like something heavy had landed in his skull.<br/><br/>â€œKaaaatriiiiina!â€ he hollered,  snapping up against the door, hands curled around the bars, on tiptoes despite his natural height, â€œHey guuurrrl, I he-ar ya!â€ a small grin tipped the corners of his lips, accent curling his words until they had more southern twang than a broken banjo sting, â€œ ya'll wanna show sahm neighborly love 'n teyall us what's goin' orn, hun?â€<br/><br/>It was instant relief, dope in the form of socialization, there was no natural sympathy for her, only a deep curiosity and an ITCHING need to talk.