John sat down on the floor with Alex on his lap, the other two shrooms who'd been talking with Alex clustered around him, this time including Burr.

"So you're John?" A pale girl with a light French accent asked, hazel eyes seeming abnormally large when paired with her shallow cheeks and bony fingers, but didn't carry any hint of the glassy look that was common in the weary and hungry which meant either she was just normally that skinny and was doing fine, or she was good at a seeing the better side of things. John assumed it was the latter. "I'm Cathy, we've written."

I smiled and held out a hand. "Nice to meet you." She grabbed it and pulled me into a hug, which earned a squawk of disapproval from Alex, who was smushed in between Cathy and I.

"Alex has told us a lot about toi." Lafayette butted in.

"Toi?" John repeated, being that he didn't speak a lick of French.

"Pardon, should I vousvoy you?" John was still quite confused, so Laf repeated the question to Alex.

"Nah he's just an idiot who doesn't know what 'toi' means." Alex answered, then turned around and faced John. "Toi means you, Petalbasket."

"Oh." John wasn't sure if he should be insulted by the exchange he just witnessed. "Then what's 'voovoi'?"

"Le vousvoyement. Pretty sure that's a noun. Anyways, it's basically the fancy version of you." Alex explained, leaning against John's chest. John could feel Alex's cold skin and slight trembling, and the dead weight of metal was a constant reminder that his lovely yet reckless shroom had done something that probably fit more into the latter description. He was so so pale and his lips were chapped and dry, which John had had the honor of noticing first hand earlier.

"Please tell me you haven't just come here to snuggle your boyfriend and actually want to help bust us out." Cathy spoke up.

"Oh yeah there's five of us here to get you out." Burr answered. "Not much but still, it's something."

"It most certainly is." Alex commented. "I mean, technically, before we had three half-dead shrooms that also happened to be us. Now, tell us about our new aid."

"We have Herc, Tom, James, Burr and I." John explained. "Two Petalbaskets, one Fruitvine, one Woodheart and one Leafblood, all in pretty good health, as far as I'm aware."

"Neat." Cathy nodded. "Got a plan?"

"Nope." Burr shrugged. "Figured out where they were hiding you and came over with a very minimal plan in mind, which literally only consisted of how to get here."

"Ah. Well we have a few ideas, but dunno if they'll be any good." Alex stated, then started explaining the plans they'd come up with.

—~•~—

John and Burr walked out of the building after Burr gave very fake reports to the next guard on duty. John felt better then he had in three months, one week and two days, and wanted to return to Alex immediately.

Fun fact: Alex had gotten the handcuffs after he'd punched a guard (he'd also gotten a whipping, which made John feel absolutely horrible)

The first thing John said when they sat down at one of the tables with their lunches went something like this: "I swear to god I'm killing my father when I see him next."

"Why?"

"A) be sent Alex here, technically, and b) I've just always wanted to do it." John shrugged.

"Those are both very valid points." Burr nodded wisely. "D'you think the others'll be done soon?"

"No clue, I didn't memorize their schedules."

"But you memorized yours?"

"Both of ours. Down to the minute." Burr chuckled noiselessly at that, just exhaling in a pattern that indicated humor.

"So what do you know about Lafayette and Catherine?" Burr asked after a minute.

"Laf and Cathy." John corrected.

"Right. What do you know about Laf and Cathy."

"Laf is French, which you probably noticed, and gay as hell. Cathy is French too, but spent most of her time here (here being the US, I guess (it seems I've settled upon our beloved planet earth as a general location)) so it's considerably less noticeable. She's also gay."

"Are any of them straight?" Burr asked good-humoredly.

"Any of who?" John stiffened at the new voice in the conversation, fear creeping down his spine, until he recognized Thomas's frizzy hair and perpetual grin and relaxed.

"Shrooms." Burr answered.

"Oh yeah how'd that go, Johnny? Find your long lost love?"

John nodded, shooting Thomas a look that clearly read 'please be quiet, being gay is a crime round these parts', and Tom dropped his voice to a whisper.

"Was he there?" Actually, it was more of a stage whisper.

"Yeah."

"Well that's great! Now what?"

"Bust them out."

"Them being...?"

"The shrooms."

"Like, Alex's friends or..."

"All of them, Tom, all of them."

"Jesus, do you realize how many poor mushroom souls are being kept there? We got ahold of some numbers, it's basically the whole population of them."

"Taking into account that the population goes down by approximately ten every day but never goes up." Burr added. "Just wait a week or two and there's totally a reasonable amount to stage an escape with."

"Burr." John hissed. "That is a messed up way of thinking." There was a pause. "Not technically impractical though."

Burr smiled cockily.

"Ok but we're not doing that, right?" Thomas looked genuinely concerned, which was a little surprising. "We're not just letting them die for practicality's sake?"

"It's not like we have a choice anyways, all the plans take one week or more to execute." John sighed, pressing his fingers to his temples and resting his elbows on the table.

He tossed and turned every plan he'd been let in on in his mind over and over, trying to find the easiest one to set in motion that would result in the least deaths. It was quite the challenge.

Herc sat beside him, arriving surprisingly quietly. Or maybe John just hadn't been paying attention. Anyways, he literally jumped out of surprise when Herc spoke up beside him.

"You gonna eat that?" Herc was eyeing John's plate, and the Petalbasket shook his head, still half lost in thought.

He was dimly aware of things going on around him as he thought everything over, taking ideas from certain plans and putting them into others.

About an hour later he asked Burr for a paper and write his final idea down, praying to everyone he could possibly pray to that it would work.