xp_logs | Log: Angelo and Pete - takes place shortly after Angelo's email

Pete stubbed out his cigarette, and headed for the medlab. No sense in putting anything off, after all, and the phone call he'd been expecting wasn't likely to materialise until tomorrow now, anyway.

He knocked once, then limped in to Angelo's room, still leaning heavily on his stick.

"What can I do you for, then?"

Angelo looked up at him, not smiling. He cut straight to the point. Pete had asked, after all. "Your side of what exactly happened to get me stuck down here."

"If you mean exactly what happened to you, then I don't really know. But in general, someone back home decided they wanted me dead, and sent a bunch of badly qualified bastards lead by a sadistic muppet to make it happen. Check back on the journals if you haven't already, you'll find the whole sad story on there."

Pete waved a hand at the chair. "D'you mind if I sit?"

"Go ahead", Angelo answered, aware of Pete's injuries. He sat silently in the bed and waited for more, if more was coming.

"Basically, when I got fired, I took steps to make sure that they wouldn't come after me. A change of staff made a lot of the steps I took pointless, and someone remembered I was still alive. So they decided it'd be funny to use a memo I'd forgotten I wrote as the basis for an assassination attempt."

Pete sat.

Angelo nodded slowly, taking that in. "Did the staff know about any of this?" he asked simply.

Pete shrugged. "Which bits? That it was possible someone might try and kill me? That I'd written the memo?"

"Any of it", Angelo insisted, not letting him off.

"The first one, I'd assume so. For all his faults, Charlie's not bloody stupid, and even if he didn't, it'd have to have occured to Jake, and probably Emma too. The second, no. I'd forgotten I wrote it, and how else would they have found out?"

Angelo nodded again. The second was the least important part, anyway. Almost to himself, he muttered, "So why didn't they do anything about it, if they knew?"

Pete shrugged again.

"Short of making sure I wasn't here, there's not a lot else they could have done. Then only way to make this place secure against that sort of thing would be to turn it into a fortress, make it a fucking paramilitary compound. And that'd be worse."

Angelo frowned, dissatisfied and still angry. "But there has to be some kind of way to get people warned, at least, before things get as far as they did."

Pete smiled, wryly.

"Sure, if you could get everyone to accept that everyone has to be in bed by a certain time, because roaming the halls will trigger alarms, and that the doors and windows will be alarmed past 11 at night, or we had the staff to be manning a CCTV room 24/7. Anything else gets legally tricky, because this is a school, and these are minors we're talking about."

"Yeah, this is a school, and these are minors", Angelo snapped back. "We were all told we'd be safe."

Pete scowled.

"What d'you want me to say? That I'm sorry that someone wanted me dead? Because I really fucking am, but y'know, I'm not going to beat myself up about it more than I already have because really, it's not my fucking fault that someone else tried to kill me. That Charlie makes promises he can't always keep? That I don't bleeding agree with half of what goes on here?"

Angelo smiled grimly. "Finally, someone's being honest about stuff. And no, I'm not blamin' you for that last bit... not really."

"I'm a lot of things, sunbeam, but I'm usually honest. And I've been trying to sit down with Charlie for a month or two now to talk things out, y'know? But either he's busy, or I'm busy, or the sky is falling."

Angelo nodded. "Yeah. The sky seems to fall one hell of a lot, round here."

"And I don't see it getting too much better, so fuck knows what we're going to do with these poor bastard kids." Pete shook his head resignedly.

Angelo's eyes narrowed. "You mean the little ones?" He sighed wearily. "Yeah. I don't wanna see them go, but they're just targets here. Well, no more than the rest of us are, I guess, but they shouldn't have to deal with that."

"Exactly. But the really shitty bit is this: where else can they go? If I thought there was a better alternative to Charlie out there right now, I'd be there, and I'd take as many of them with me as I could. But there ain't." Pete's shoulders slumped slightly.

Angelo's jaw set. "True. Well, there's not a one of us here who wouldn't fight for them, if it comes to that again."

Another wry grin. "I wish I had your confidence in that, sunshine. I really do."

Angelo shrugged. "Nobody I've talked to, then. You heard what happened Sunday?"

"Yeah." A bleak look passed across Pete's face. "I'm going to have to sit down with the pair of them in my professional capacity, at some point, I think. I know the staff have been less that clever about telling students things, but fucking hell..."

Angelo's face darkened. "They should've said something", he agreed. "But I can almost understand why they didn't."

"Almost." He sighed. "I dunno, I had Yoshida's cultutal snobbery pegged as annoying but harmless, and now I'm just left wondering what else I don't know about his family."

"A lot?" Angelo suggested. "I don't think for a second he's spilled everything to whoever's asked him."

"Yeah. Bad enough that I've had to work up a couple of the staff here in the past for me own peace of mind, but I really don't want to have to do it to a student." He stopped for a second, thinking.

"Ah, bollocks to it. I'll talk to him first, then see what's what."

Angelo nodded, not sure what to answer to that. "I wouldn't mind a word with him myself, not that he'd talk to me."

"You never know." Pete stood up. "Anyway, I'd better get going. I'd offer to leave you a pack of fags, but the blue hairpile out there is a lot bigger than me."

With that, he grabbed his stick, and headed for the door, looking slightly preoccupied.