Vincent rubbed his cheek against the smooth white wall of his room. His prison. His room-prison. Maybe prison was too harsh, and Julian certainly didn't like the word - Vincent noticed the slight facial tic every time he broached the topic of internment, and therefore broached it as often as he could - but prison felt accurate. It was a room designed, specifically, to interfere with Vincent's leaving. It was hardly Vincent's fault that leaving was easier for him than the others. Decidedly unfair, and thoroughly deserved, treatment.

He stepped back and surveyed, as he had done so many times since his first night. Perfectly round, who knows what the original intention was for a round room in a luxury penthouse apartment, but the roundness fucked with Vincent; round things didn't have entrances and exits and clear edges and sensible interior design. 

His skin crawled from the lack of feng shui in this room. 

So, round walls. They were unevenly partitioned, and the idea was they freely slid back and forth from each other, so a wall could become a door at a moment's notice, but Julian was too clever by half for that; by some nefarious design he had developed a way to intermittently fasten each partition: a wall that slid away to allow passage one day never did the next. Occasionally Vincent would search the walls for the right one with the feverish fervour that can only be brought on by being woken at 3AM by a full bladder, and on his return from relief found that the walls had closed again, and the angle that granted him exit now stood a steadfast obstacle to entrance, and then by the time you find the right one again you're wound up, so you don't sleep, and what you do instead is march down to Julian's quarters, banging on doors and walls with steam coming out of your ears and wake him up and hit him enough to goad him into giving chase; then you take the sharp corner at the end of the corridor and you match it with Gabi's en-suite, and Julian has to awkwardly explain why he's stumbling bleary-eyed and swearing from Gabi's shower. 

Of course, Vincent often found that [i]no[/i] walls opened the next morning. 

Give-and-take was the foundation of whatever you wanted to call the budding dynamic between he and Julian.

[i]Round walls isn't even the half of it[/i], Vincent thought, having returned to himself after a tangent. No, to focus on the shape of the walls was to miss what was splashed across them, courtesy of an innocuous-looking half-sphere that bubbled from the centre of his room's ceiling. A projector: a full three-hundred and sixty degrees of crisp, 4K imaging, switching between global scenes of serenity on a semi-regular basis. Today was a calming tropical forest, with a gentle breeze ruffling the leaves. The deep green hid the seams of the walls quite well, as was the purpose of the projector rather than simple aesthetic. 


His current incarceration - well, that was a misunderstanding. Julian misunderstood how important it was that Vincent not be eaten by Dande- "Understudy for John Carpenter's The Thing" -lion. Just because the meat-moss gave itself a name doesn't mean it wasn't using the name to earn their trust and then suck out their insides through their noses while they slept. So Vincent hadn't exactly been 'welcoming', but Jesus Christ, he was twenty years old. Being grounded - grounded! - by a kid two years his junior inflamed him serious. And over schoolyard japes at best. Japes! 

Vincent resumed his search, muttering foul nothings under his breath as he pressed his face back against the wall to feel for draughts and carefully slid his palms up and down, splaying his fingers out to seek out the hidden crevice. The projector splashed the rainforest across the back of his head and he squinted as the light hit his eyes.

A moment later, Vincent's eyes went wide as the power went out and the light shut off completely. [i]Naturally[/i], he thought. He'd seen the clock creeping towards 7PM some many minutes ago. More fool him, he supposed. He stepped back, dejected and frustrated and deciding if the light was out he may as well get some sleep. Less time spent conscious in idle boredom.

Except there was the faintest red line coming from the opposite side of the room, just barely visible; it was only as Vincent's vision adjusted better to the pitch darkness that he was able to make out the soft glow of what he now realised was the emergency lighting outside his room. Emergency lighting that wormed its way through the very, very slightly open partition in the wall of his dorm. Vincent grinned in the dark, jeering triumph replacing frustrated curses. [i]Lights are gone except the one I was looking for[/i], Vincent thought, wondering how he could rub that in Julian's face later. Wondering, in fact, how long and far he could make Julian chase after him before he got the opportunity to partake in some face-rubbing. Tracking device or no, he could still be a pain in the ass to pin down. 

Vincent pulled on boots and a jacket as he moved towards the red light, and then with a practiced grip, pulled the wall apart. Either he'd gotten lucky and this was today's chosen wall regardless, or the powercut had knocked out whatever device kept them fastened - either way, the partition opened slowly but steadily, and with a little effort, Vincent was able to squeeze his lithe frame sideways through the gap, the hydraulics hissing and the wall clanking as it shut behind him. He took a deep breath. The air wasn't any fresher on this side of the wall - perhaps even a little danker without the AC of his room to purify the airflow - but Vincent liked the showmanship of it. More than that, though, he liked walking to the end of the corridor, focusing himself somewhat, and seeing the faintest shift and shimmer in the air as he folded the turn with a good estimate of the ground-floor elevator door. 

When he stepped around the corner he found himself neither in the corridor leading to his dorm, as is expected from rational geometry and basic architectural rules, nor did he find himself stepping from the lift into the building's antechamber as he had envisioned and attempted to fold together. Instead it was the corridor one-up from his dorm, where most of the team bunked. He swore. Why here? Usually it worked or it didn't, there were rarely half-measures. What bastard piece of him bridged one bit of the penthouse with another bit of the penthouse?

He didn't know, but he made a mental note to strangle it with tactically-placed vodka bomb-strikes when he got his hands on it. The cheaper the better. Paint-stripper stuff. Hell, maybe [i]actual[/i] paint-stripper.

The lights came back on, and Vincent groaned in frustration, lamenting the cartoonish timing of it all. He got his bearings on where [i]exactly[/i] in the penthouse he was, and in doing so saw Big Red sat perfectly serene on a chair, staring straight at the wall. Like the current quota of freakiness contained within the flat wasn't quite hitting the mark.

[color=9370DB]"You know Julian's had lanterns downstairs for during the blackout, right?"[/color] He called out, half to see if the guy hadn't just died sitting straight up in the dark.

[color=FF0000]"I'm in my room.  I know everything that's in here already. What's there to see?"[/color]

Vincent whistled a long, patronising whistle. 
[color=9370DB]"What's there to see he says..."[/color] He said, not really replying but aware Red could hear him regardless; he walked off down the corridor and past Hana, throwing a thumb over his shoulder back at Red's room and pointing another finger at his own temple, making circular motions. Hana didn't respond, staring at him blankly as she carried on her way. Vincent scoffed and made his way to the room in this corridor he was most familiar with - Conor's - and once again held the image of the ground floor lobby in his mind as he reached out into reality and did some light reorganising. He opened the door, pushed on through towards a night on the town...

...and, when he found himself coming out of the kitchen fridge, swore loudly and held two middle fingers up and no one in particular. He only lowered them so he could turn around and fish out a beer from the fridge that suddenly stopped being Conor's dorm. He watched over the rim of the bottle, waving over-enthusiastically, and with not a small amount of pettiness, as Hana walked in.