"Are you kidding, I'd love to have something useful to do," Jim said as he forked up the last of the eggs on his plate. "I bet a lot of people here have cool skills, might as well learn things from each other if we're all stuck here together." That made it all seem more benign, like some workshop weekend. Just one that he hadn't signed up for. Or known about. And his family and fellow Oblates probably all thought he'd been murdered. Fortunately, he had some practice in shoving his own feelings aside to deal with them later, in the interest of looking like he had it all together. "You might want to go with Italian, because if you learn French from me you'll pick up a Quebec accent and the Euro snobs will all laugh at you. Not that I speak from experience or anything."
Her last remark made him laugh a bit. "I like the juxtaposition there, language lessons and torture. They have more in common than you might think." But his usual tactic with jokes that verged on the sexual was to take them with a selective earnestness, as if the underlying meaning had gone right over his head, and in this case the earnest reading was kind of distractingly depressing. This place did seem to have every intention of taking away their human dignity, and friendship probably was the best shield they had. "Yeah, maybe it does strengthen people's bonds, going through this. I hope so."