Once the doctor had finished with him, the cuffs had gone back on, and he'd been herded at gun point out of the room. He watched as they went through every fold in his bed, and rifled through the books. Then they prodded him away to the glass cell that he always had his visits from Kaizuka in.

They took off the cuffs, and left him there, with a guard standing watch. He noticed right away that the table and chairs that had been there before were long gone. He wondered briefly if Kaizuka was going to visit, and that was why he was there, but as the hours passed, he realized that was not the case. A second guard came to replace the other, and through a haze, he realized that they were moving him into the glass room. Perhaps permanently. He'd had it pretty good before, three stone walls and one of iron bars. He at least had the illusion of privacy, and he could curl up on the bed and face the wall, ignoring everything else. Here, he didn't have a bed, and he wondered if they really were just going to leave him there, in the glass cage, where he would never get a moment of privacy again.

It shouldn't have mattered, but it did. His neck hurt horribly.

Resigned that he was likely not there for a visit, he gravitated to the far corner, furthest from the guards. He slumped against the glass wall, before finding even sitting up to be too much effort, and gingerly lowering himself down onto the stone floor. But the ground was so hard and cold. The drastic change in temperature felt good on the back of his neck, but made him shiver at the same time, which only aggravated the injury.

He felt more tired than he'd ever felt in his life, but sleep would not come. Many, many hours later -or what felt like many, many hours later, the woman showed up, and she was mad. She made a point of stomping her way right over to his corner and glaring down at him through the glass. He didn't dare look up at her. In fact, he wished he was asleep, or dead. One would be better than the other, but he'd take either at this point.

"That was a stupid thing to do." She sneered at him, and he noticed that she was looking right at his face, something she'd never done before. She'd always looked around him, or past him, or at the various things little things that inhabited his space. She was now deliberately going out her way, out of her own comfort zone, to try and prove some sort of point, or perhaps to punish him.

He kept his eyes off of her, and turned his head away. She huffed, and moved, so that she was in his direct line of sight. "You can't hide in your bed anymore." Her words bit, and he without thinking about it, he turned his head away from her again. She moved again into his line of sight, and he gave up. There was no escaping her. But the moment he stopped trying, she seemed to lose some of her anger. It was still there, pulsing in her fisted fingers, in the rigid line of her lips, but her eyes weren't swimming in it anymore. The sigh that escaped her sounded frustrated. "Why? If you were going to hang yourself, you could have done it months ago with the bed sheets. You liked the cello. You were actually enjoying yourself."

Maybe that was the root of the matter. He loved that cello, it had only seemed appropriate that he enjoy it like a man on his death bed.

He didn't have an answer for her; he just blankly stared in her general direction -because he couldn't escape her now- and hoped she'd go away. He didn't even know if he could answer her, wasn't sure if his vocal chords still worked properly. The whole area ached, and even breathing was painful, it was hard to tell what specific parts were hurt. The doctor hadn't told him anything about having problems speaking, but the doctor hadn't spoken to him at all. Whatever conclusions he'd come to, he hadn't shared them with his patient.

She was opening her mouth to say something else, when the large metal door to the room opened. The woman looked up at the disturbance, but Slaine didn't. He hoped it was someone who was going to take her away. He was hopeful for a few moments, when she stomped away from him, but that hope died as he followed her steps with his eyes.

Kaizuka was standing at the entrance way, dressed in civilian clothes, with a gleaming white cast on his leg, and his arm in a sling. So that's why the woman had been so different the second time she'd visited. Slaine wondered idly if being related to Kaizuka was worth all the effort on her part. He doubted it.

The woman went to meet Kaizuka, their tones were clipped and soft, and he couldn't hear them. He might have been able to try and hear, but he found that he really didn't care what they were saying. Standing side by side, it was the most obvious thing in the world that they were related. She might even have been subtly mothering him, right there in broad daylight. Might, it was hard to tell, and Slaine couldn't bring himself to care. He let his eyes wander as they conversed with one another.

His eyes must have drifted closed at some point, but he sluggishly opened them again when he heard the sound of the glass door opening. He looked up enough to see that Kaizuka was standing over him, and to notice that the woman was gone. Kaizuka had never frightened him as the woman had, so he raised his head up despite the pain in his neck, and looked straight at that one eye looking down on him.

It almost looked like Kaizuka didn't know what to say. He'd always been so forthcoming with useless words and matter of fact statements. Kaizuka hid behind them, to hide that he didn't know what he was suppose to say about situations, or at least, that was what Slaine had concluded. Now, Kaizuka just stood there saying nothing. If Slaine wasn't so tired, he would have been unnerved by it, but he found he was having a hard time feeling much of anything.

When Kaizuka did speak, it was not what Slaine expected. "Do you want to play chess?"

It was a dumb, moronic question, and it spoke to just how out of his element Kaizuka was. He didn't know what to do, and it was painfully obvious. Slaine should have laughed, would have under almost any other circumstances. Instead, Slaine just nodded once, and that's what they did. They played their first chess game, and predictably, Slaine lost.