The energetic girl had looked at Jason, but passed. Jason wondered if it was because he looked unfriendly. He knew he could be mean, and angry, and generally difficult. Maybe it was because he was sitting by himself in the corner? He got up and began to pace the room, bored and anxious. His stomach grumbled, and as he walked towards the entrance to the kitchen, he saw the energetic girl kiss the bandages of a shy-looking guy with gauzed wrists. He felt a pang in his stomach. He'd never really been in a relationship. He was a little too crazy, and when he had been in public school, people could sense that.

I guess we're all crazy here, he thought.

He stepped into the kitchen and saw the angry guy pulling a girl into a hug. Another girl sat limply at the table, a piece of toast untouched on her plate. Jason addressed the skinny girl at the table.

"Excuse me? Uh, do you know if we can just take, like, whatever?"

He chastised himself for being so nervous-sounding.

Wanda's face flushed, and she began to stammer. "I um, I-I-I...we're, you know, um, o-out of t-toast... I don't w-want it, if s-someone else d-does."

"Yeah, you can just take whatever," Priya said, eyeing the food carefully, as she wheeled up to the table.

Jason thanked the girl in the wheelchair. He felt bad for the other girl, though. Was she afraid of him? He walked over to the cabinet, contemplating this. He HAD had people scared of him before, but so far he'd been normal here. He shrugged away the thought and poured some cereal with milk. He then sat down next to the shy girl.

"Hey," he said. "I'm Jason. I'm new here, and I promise, I don't bite."

Gage clapped his hands happily, jumping up for a moment when Katie agreed to the nickname. "Yay!" He exclaimed, going back to his previous position of leaning against his door. Though as he looked out to the kitchen, he smiled to Wanda and waved for her to come over. "No need to be shy cutie, someone'll eat the toast sooner or later." Nodding, Gage crossed his arms over his chest and shifted his eyes from Kat to Wanda and back a few times. Waiting for one of the two to reply.

"You better not. The human mouth is host to tons of germs," Priya said.

Wanda got more flustered at this, and eventually came over to him. She struggled to speak, not able to get out much but stammered I's.

"You better not. The human mouth is host to tons of germs," said the girl in the wheelchair.

"I was trying to be friendly... you know, making a joke?" he said.

Jason felt bad for the skinny girl... she was stammering helplessly. He almost laughed but then chastised himself for even thinking of doing such a thing.

"Uh, hey, forget about the breakfast. Wanna go over in the other room with the rest of the, uh, residents?"

"Sorry," Priya said. She wasn't. Priya was pretty bad at interacting with people, almost seeming robotic at times, as her voice was always a monotone drone when she wasn't very interested, which was never. She knew how to interact, and had been quite a social person before the accident, but she had decided after the accident she hated God, she hated Fate, and she hated her parents, herself, everyone around her, and life. She grabbed whatever looked like it had been touched the least, cautiously taking a bite. "Sure."

It finally clicked to Lakesha that she was hurting Max, and she let go. "Fenix, I clearly need to go and cool down. Can you take care of him?" Lakesha felt rather terrible, in all honesty. She had lost her temper, and let Max really get to her. This was why she tried to avoid the more violent ones; she knew she would clash with them.

Lost somewhere between pain and distress, Max felt as though time were stretching into some vast, unimaginably terrifying leviathan around him. One moment he was certain that he had been shouting at the Big Nurse to let him go, the next some strange hallucination that wove into the shape of a boy kicking a girl soundly in the face assaulted him, and then it all faded away into a muddle of tears and conversation that made no sense. He wasn’t quite sobbing, being too breathless to cry properly, but the tears blinding him were as visible to the rest of the room as they were to him.

There was no response, of that he was certain. His arm was a blinding pain, held into a twisted position that had him flinching with every tiny movement; he wanted to sit down rather badly for some reason, but a frantic part of himself forbade it. He wondered, in a brief moment of clarity, just what would happen if he allowed his knees to buckle, but the threat of more pain made him hold still. He might have cried out, but there was no judging how much of the shrieking was in his head and how much actually broke past the fog and escaped his gritted teeth.

Vaguely, he knew that a dislocated shoulder could be put back in. He had done it himself on occasion, given how often it decided to displace itself, but for the life of him he couldn’t think why he was thinking of it. He blinked. His eyes found the Big Nurse for a moment, noting that she was saying something, the words lost in a haze of pain and misery. Her letting him go, however, registered, and sent him staggering back with a strangled cry. He wanted nothing more than to be as far away from the woman as possible, but the pain in his arm rapidly curtailed his intentions to bolt through the door and away; seconds after staggering away from her he wound up on his knees, sobbing over his twisted arm.

“...where’s Horatio?” he asked bitterly, hardly expecting to get an answer.

Fenix, trying to disregard the insults directed at her recently before, made her way over to Max kneeling down so she was on his level. Currently her offense at how she'd been treated was overriden by her feeling of concern. The boy clearly had his arm dislocated at the shoulder, and was not handling it too well. She had been trained well enough in medical procedures that she knew how to deal with such an injury, as least as far as it appeared, but she wasn't sure if he would let her.

"Listen, Max...I can probably put your shoulder back in line if you let me, but I'm not going to do it unless you agree. If you pull away while I'm doing it it would only cause more complications, so it's up to you. Will you let me re-set your arm?" she asked, trying to sound as understanding as was possible in the situation, with her pride still rather battered.

Underneath the pain and cold of what was probably shock, Max was acutely aware of his situation. His mind, though muddled on the surface, had taken on a clarity that injury alone seemed able to create for him, and as a result he was suddenly aware of Fenix and her words, though that did little to impress him. His thoughts were clinical, rather than the guarded, opinionated posturing of before, though it took a great deal of pushing past the muddle of distress and his continued, keening cries for Horatio and speak.

“No.” His voice was faint but determined, and he clutched his arm protectively against his chest. Anterior dislocation, his mind quietly supplied, while the rest of him howled and trembled. “Don’t touch me.”

Underneath the clearly shocked calm there was a lurking fear and what might have been disgust, though he was a little too distressed to be accurately judged. His eyes, when they found the woman, where wild. “You can’t.” The walls, Lakesha, Fenix, everything was spared a quick, frightened glance. “Not a doctor. Not allowed. Illegal.”

It was hard to swallow around his continued tears and unsteady breathing, but he managed after an extended moment, licking his lips. “What- what is... this place?” he gasped, twitching his uninjured arm towards the room in general. “Prison...? Outside the law... 1984! ...battered by the Big Nurse...”

There was a definite tinge of hysteria in his narrative and the way that he laughed then, but he managed to reign himself back into some semblance of control after three unsteady breaths. “I want to go to the hospital. I want Horatio.” Max drew himself up lopsidedly, gathering his shredded pride around him like a tattered blanket. “I want a real doctor... you’re not doctors. You’re carers... social workers... whatever... you’re not nurses... and nurses aren’t allowed to do that anyway... you’re certainly not a doctor. This place... what is this place. Fagin? Big Brother?” He laughed again. “Atticus was half blind but he was still the best shot in the village; I want Horatio.”

"We have a resident Doctor here in the building that can handle this sort of thing, but that means you're going to have to wait until they're set up." Fenix replied, straightening up and shrugging her shoulder.
"I was just offering if you'd prefer not to suffer being in pain like this until they're ready to see you, but it's entirely your decision." she responded.
She took a phone out of her pocket, taking a few steps away in order to give the resident Doctor a call regarding what was going on and what would be neede,d though inwardly all she felt was a massive sinking feeling, as it appeared the only thing the boy was intetested in was trying to pick at everything he came across. She was tempted to argue about his claims of being 'battered', cosnidering it was his pulling that had injured him, but decided better of it considering they were in enough potential trouble already.
"Doc, uh we've just got a new arrival and he's managed to get a dislocated shoulder....yeah...sorry it's all been a bit of a disaster so far. How soon will you be ready? Alright, twenty minutes." she stated.
She ended the call and looked round.
"Well, er...if you don't want me to help you you're going to have to make your own way to the clinic on the ground floor."

It took a full three minutes of blank staring for Max to fully process what he had been told, during which time he blinked expressionlessly at Fenix in a faintly absent manner. He had heard what was said, that was obvious, but he was either so muddled or so surprised by the content that there was a delay between hearing and fully understanding. When the information finally went in, however, Max’s expression morphed into one of blind terror.

“Please,” he whispered, all of his former arrogance falling away to leave a vulnerable child crouching where a belligerent young man had stood not so long ago. There were no longer tears running down his face, but his shocked, panicked expression suggested there would be more when the full force of the emotional reaction caught up with him. “Please, I won’t tell anyone.”

His voice was frail, thoughts running faster than he had ever felt then run before; the Big Nurse wouldn’t let him leave. He wasn’t committed... he can’t have been sectioned without knowing about it... this wasn’t prison, he’d never let himself do anything that bad... “I won’t tell anyone. It just comes out. Honest. But- I’ll say I did it climbing out the window. Please, just- please let me go to the hospital.”

He huddled into a protective ball around his arm, feeling the combined weight of the two wrong choices threaten to smother him. He didn’t want to let this unqualified woman set his arm (illegal! Dangerous, his frantic mind wailed), but he didn’t know where this other doctor was. He didn’t want to see some stranger, and the idea of walking through the house with his arm in such a state, trying to find this mysterious and unheard-of doctor... Hansel and Gretel; he’d be stuffed in the oven for sure.

“I’ll- I’ll do anything you want. I won’t- I’ll pretend I can’t talk. Anything. Just- please let me go to the hospital. Or call Horatio! Please, he’s in town...” Momentarily, panic surged up to choke him; what if they stopped the man becoming his legal guardian now that he was in this place? “He’s a doctor... he knows how to get to the hospital. If you don’t want to take me he can. I mean-” Panic. “-I don’t mean you won’t want to just- ...if you’ve not got time.”