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Happiness was... uncommon, at Warden's. The prisoners were - obviously - not there by choice, and miserable about their restricted freedoms. And for the most part, the guards were there as a sort of punishment detail, relegated to the prison weyr that nobody wanted to live at because no other weyr wanted them. That was the way of things.

And then there was Arkady.

Warden's was beautiful. It had sunlight and weather and other human beings to talk to. All things that were notably missing from the hole in the ground that had been his cell for... what, four turns? Something like that? It got sharding difficult to keep track of time when you never saw sunlight.

And they let him go outside! Only for an hour a day, but Ark had actively terrorized the first guard assigned to take him outdoors to the prison yard. He hadn't threatened the guard, made no aggressive motion towards him: Ark had just been oppressively, terrifyingly delighted by this unfamiliar little taste of freedom. The guard had threatened to have him transferred to Unstable block. Arkady protested he was not unstable. You know what an unstable man looks like? A man who spends four years in a hole and DOESN'T go crazy when you let him out. That's unstable. Arkady is completely sane.

Completely.

Now granted, a weaker-willed man might have been content with this. Might have put up a show of remorse, of rehabilitation, cronying to the guards in hopes of better treatment still. But they only let him outside in shackles. And that simply wouldn't do.

Still, today's guard had opted to shackle Arkady's hands in front of him, rather than cuffing him behind his back... which, in other words, meant he might as well have not bothered to restrain the ex-Harper's hands at all. A man with his hands shackled in front of him can still do an awful lot, and has the added benefit of a short convenient length of metal chain. But he was being good. For now. When they let out the Dangerous and the Murderer's Row, the guards went on high alert. You'd have to be pretty stupid to stage an escape in broad daylight, in full view of all the guards and the riders. So Arkady merely explored the boundaries of the bare, sparse prison yard with nonchalant curiosity. It should not have been possible for a man in chains to stroll, smug and languorous as a feline in the sun, but he managed it impressively nonetheless.

He was making a show of stretching his legs – the legs they had declined to shackle for today, as he had nowhere to run in the prison yard and the guards knew it. But even as he did so, Arkady was inspecting the walls. The possibility of actually escaping was… slim, to say the least. Nobody had managed it yet. But then again, Warden’s had never had an Arkady before. So he took note of the security, the walls, the positions of the guards. You’d have to be crazy to try and break out during the designated hour when all the dangerous prisoners were outside and all the guards were on duty… But if he could somehow find a way to make it out to the yard during some other hour…

Busy looking up at the top of the wall, Arkady came dangerously close to actually tripping right over the two boys cuddled up in the corner. He paused in mid-step, danced sideways with a brief echo of the old grace that had once come so naturally to him, and then rocked back on his heels to regard the two curiously.

“Well, now. Afternoon, you two.” He flashed both of them a dazzling (to him) predatory (to anyone else) grin, the kind that had entirely too many teeth and not enough human emotion in it. “Not, er, interrupting anything, am I?” Although if Ark were to pick a place for private time, he probably would not have selected a corner of the prison yard. But there was no accounting for taste. Some people just got off on that.

Arkady’s grin, if anything, got even more disconcertingly cheerful when the two got up. “Ahhh, brothers, then. My mistake. Always have to check around here – we get some of the weird folks at Warden’s too. Guess we’re all lucky they don’t let Special Pop out with the rest of us, eh?”

He spread his hands as wide as he could in front of him, waggling his fingers as he casually showed off the cuffs. “I know, right? They were a present from the Warden. He’s a nice guy. I like him. Much better than my last one!” If Arkady was even remotely put off by the situation, what with it being two on one, he certainly showed no outward sign of it. His voice was light, cheerful, conversational even.