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“God damnit, Ass!” You cringe and recoil from the angry callout. Callsigns are not freely chosen; it’s never as cool as media depicts. Everyone always thinks they’re going to have something ‘epic’ -- Silence , Reaper, Hangman, Ghost. Nah. It’s always inspired by the dumbest, most embarrassing shit that will haunt and follow you for the rest of your life during Basic. Or maybe you can just be unlucky and have an unfortunate last name. “How many fucking times have I told you--” Graves throws the door to your room open, takes angry steps in, grabs you by the collar of your shirt and hauls you to your feet. “If you’re going to fuck around with your little girlfriend, lock the fucking thing up after.” “I do -- jesus, chill. It’s not --”“Is that why we’re getting sent a fucking Taskforce then? Because we so clearly have things under control here?” Well, shit. Who narc’d? There had been some balding higher-up who swung by maybe a week ago. But that had been a quick and informal little walkthrough. A tour. Unless he had seen something and just waited to address it until after he got back to base. Petty bastard.“This isn’t just on you, makes me look like I fuck around all day doing fuck-all.” For someone who was such a chronic hardass he almost sounded hurt. And for once you couldn’t exactly blame him. Having a nephew -- who was only here because of unfiltered nepotism -- running the risk of ruining the entire project because you spent too much time thinking with your dick. Well, not so much literally . Thinking with your heart-dick. How would that even work? “I’ve been careful! I mean shit, it’s been what, two, three months? Plus what, like, she’s going to just fuckin’ walk out of here.” You try to retort, pulling your mind from the thoughts of if it would even be physically possible to try anything with your ‘girlfriend.’ Your uncle gives deep, slow, angry breaths; nostrils flaring as he just stares holes through your head. Lift your hands up in a sign of pacifistic defeat to show you held at least some regret. Takes the unspoken apology, releases his grip so you can actually stand on your own two feet. “Just don’t try any of your dumb shit when they get here. I mean it, Lewis. We cannot fuck this up. I’m not going to tell you again. Knock it the fuck off.” Meaty hand comes up to flick you square in the forehead with maybe a little too much force. He doesn’t bother to say anything else and just walks right on out, too busy to close the door behind him. You hated that he was right.A heavy sigh, your dry hand feeling the now-growing bump that sat square between your eyebrows. He hasn’t done that since you were a kid -- meaning he was mad, yeah, but not homicidally so. Plus you were just some dumb kid: fresh out of OCS with your first real ‘job’ being whatever the fuck this is. It’s not like you were actually trained and taught and conditioned to know better or anything. You’d just have to really lean into the naivete and hope to not get shitkeeled back home. Your watch beeps repeatedly, one of the alarms you’d set up to denote you only had a few more hours left until date night. It takes a bit of scrambling until you’re able to finally find those ugly and uncomfortable sandals (they were in the laundry basket), but it’s not like you could just dunk your feet in with actual shoes on. Sweatshirt is very quickly slid on and you assemble everything you’d need into a little pile on the cheap desk beside your bed. This was definitely a ‘nap beforehand’ type of night. You had time. Triple and then quadruple-checking you had enough additional alarms set so you’d actually wake up, you throw yourself onto the unmade bed for a powernap. That same annoying-ass beeping wakes you up eventually. Groggy eyes blink into focus the alarm clock and those familiar numbers temporarily blind you. 01:15. Showtime. You pull a pair of sweatpants on, slide into the sandals, have to double-back after ten seconds because you forgot the one thing you had to have. The laminated badge with that unfortunate last name of yours (and the unintended inspiration for your callsign) -- Cassabian -- printed in massive red block letters across the top. Barcode at the bottom was a little too-worn out from what he thought of as overuse, but it still worked. Phone, keys, badge; a quick self-patdown ensures you are in fact good to go now. While your middle-of-the-night trysts were more or less a daily occurrence, your heart still raced every time you entered that truly massive space. The industrial building more or less completely barren aside from the big fuck-off sized water tank in the middle. A compound big enough to be measured in acres rather than square feet. Which, for what they were using it for now, didn’t make too much sense to you. Above your paygrade. Plus it’s not like you -- the both of you -- would be around too much longer. It was basically a glorified glass-walled endless-style pool, modified to fit the purpose of housing these things . Luckily wide enough at the outer lip, maybe a foot out at the corners, for you to sit or even lie down on. You’d made this trek so many times you didn’t even need to activate the much-dimmed floor lights to find your way. But then again everyone here was used to working in the dark.Computer monitors and displays all set to the lowest brightness; the little blue lights atop each open-concept cubicle are your makeshift landing strip to her . Everything had to be kept dimmed. Even turning on the overhead fluorescents would cause the subjects to basically flop around and then go completely catatonic; something attributed to their more abyssal habitats. The tank is sealed up tighter than a nun’s cunt: weighted lid, redundant external locks, a motorised arm that would keep it fastened in place. All things that you normally took note of and set back into place after every visit. Except for last time, apparently. You swipe your badge across three separate panels on three separate desks and then head towards the tank.But you didn’t mind. If anything it made things more exciting: slinking through the blackness of night to meet up and spend time together. Your hand touches the chilled glass and is greeted immediately by hers. She was waiting. Waiting for you.You had big hands, but hers were even a size larger. That one extra joint on each finger, the claws, the hair-thin webbing that ran all the way up, only makes them that much more daunting. Sandals are kicked off, sweats rolled up to your knees, phone being palm-rolled into your hand so you wouldn’t have to fidget and accidentally drop it in the water (again) once up there. Her head only half pops out of the water and impossibly black eyes watch you get comfortable; wholly obsidian and empty aside from the paper-thin stripe of white that runs vertically through the centre. One of your legs slides into the glass-smooth surface of the murky water and you make a noise -- fuck that is cold. You’d think after all this time you’d be even a little acclimated. Phone unlocked and you set it face-up beside you to provide just enough light to barely even see in front of yourself. Beneath the water you can hear chain links clinking together, you can’t help but grin. She appears, lightly, so very impossibly delicately, grips around your ankle, flutters those big doe eyes up at you. “How’d you sleep?” You ask, knowing it didn’t matter. Knowing she can’t answer. Just hearing your voice makes that horrifically wide mouth of hers turn up into a smile. A crocodile’s greeting with those always-exposed teeth that ran from ear to ear -- even with the gag in place. The one thing you didn’t have a key for. But you loved that smile. Loved her. Your little benthic darling . The water was frigid, too cold, a constant artificial current running through it so she could breathe. Numb leg is withdrawn from the water and her grasp, and you pull it back into a comfortable cross-legged sit. An invitation. She notices this, too. A pair of long arms reach up, wrap around your waist just loose enough to not get carried off by the current. It’s a team effort. Sharp mountains of cartilage and scale jut out from her elbows -- extra weapons -- so it takes just a little extra manoeuvring for everyone to get comfortable. The row of little horns she had in place of eyebrows poke into your thigh as she lays her head down in your lap and it is a welcome feeling. Comforting, even. This -- this was the favourite part of your day. She coos, trills happily, pulls herself closer to you in an attempted hug. Someday (soon) you would be able to actually embrace her. Fully. But for now the comically oversized collar was affixed to the floor of the pool with just enough chain to get her in place for sampling. Just enough to have her choke and hang herself if she was ever able to even get out of her habitat. Just enough to be marginally comfortable. You run a hand through her scalp, down the side of her neck, down along the long fins that protrude from her back and shoulders. It was always fun to press down and watch them immediately spring back into place. Something you were grateful she didn’t seem to mind. Fascinating. You tell her about your day: all the little unimportant details, what you had to eat, what you did, things that annoyed you. The entire time staring at the lines of gills on her neck that fluttered and gaped whenever out of the water. After a while of just sitting there in silence, nothing but the hum of a motor and occasional sloshing of water, you bend over to plant the softest of all kisses in her hair. You’ll never get tired of that scent -- saltwater and lilac. Your sign of affection makes her bellow at an impossibly low, primal pitch. The waters around herself rippled out and away, as if a sign of reverence. A core memory unlocks: the first time you heard her make that sound you were sure you were about to die. Reflecting back on it now just makes you chuckle. Sure, she was beyond terrifying at first -- this twelve foot long half-fish monster made up of sharp edges and death -- but now? Now you knew that was just a hardened exterior. A façade. You could see straight through to her core; her true self that loved and treasured affection and touch. Your touch. You. She loved you. Even said it once, the single time you were able to get the gag rolled out and down enough for her to speak. Even sang to you then, too. That’s when you really knew. Thinking about it just makes your heart ache. Clawed hand tugs on your pant leg and you nod in the silent language you both spoke. She’d be pissed if you didn’t do this. You sit upright now, one hand still on her head, the other reaching for your phone. The brightness is lowered and you click around until finally finding the app. Your voice clears, you put on your best impression, and begin to read aloud. There were maybe only a dozen chapters left, both of you itching to know how the story ends. You decide to stop and save the very last chapter for tomorrow. For when you were both out of here, safe, settled, together. It would be motivation for them both. Something to look forward to. “Tomorrow night. You remember, right?” A quiet noise of acknowledgement. “It’ll be just like normal. But. You’ll have to hang onto me for a bit while we get out of here, yeah? We just have to make it past the main gates, the ones at the perimeter won’t care. If they do, I’ll just. Throw them money or something, I’ll figure it out.” Absently you begin to stroke her hair again. “Then? We’ll be out. We can hide out, rented a cabin a few counties over, it’s right on the coast so you’ll have access to water.” This would work. Had to. This extra Taskforce be damned. She knows what’s coming, whines out a sad call once she feels you pull away and off from your perch. Your hand lingers on hers for a minute too long. “I know. But it’s just one more night. One more. Then never again.” You sigh, take extra time to get everything put back in order and locked up. So that no one else would know you were even here. At this point it was an open secret that this was how you spent your evenings. But when she was so calm, willing, helpful during her own captivity. Security was laxer than it ever should be. Lulled into a comfortable laziness by the ease of everything. There was no need to keep up a third shift patrol when all she did was sleep all night. Night after night without issue or cause for fear. She’d only tried to break out once -- the first night here. But after that? Quiet, afraid, compliant. Made things impractically easy for both parties. She just wanted to help, be useful, be docile enough to gain small little allowances from the people studying her. Extra food, less restraints, extra concern for the brightness of the area. Which made you feel that much more confident. You can do this. You’d planned everything. Together. Your hand presses to the glass again and she mirrors it, frowning, clearly worried. Tomorrow will be rough, more eyes on you. More outsiders. You slide your mind slides to the perspective of them and you retrace your path; taking excessive caution and ensuring you leave no trace. You’re not strong enough to look back at her one last time as you walk out and back to your room.
Just one more day.
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Your big irrational fear now is that your meticulously planned escape would fall apart. That this new Taskforce was just waiting for you to be the right kind of alone so they could put you down for jeopardising things. The headline scrolling across the back of your forehead: ‘Officer First To Commit Treason and Marry Fish.’ Screw it. Who cares? You knew what she felt. How she felt. The love was there. Who were they to police this? Didn’t even begin to breach the subject of unethically experimenting on sentient creatures. Sentient mythical creatures. If anything you were just doing what’s right. You hear ‘Hey, Ass!’ from the opposite end of the cafeteria, head towards the call. The round table -- something old and very clearly bought from an auction of goods from a closing high school -- has attached benches, you slide on in among your friend group. Once again your brain had run too fast for your own good and you had forgotten to even grab food. Luckily there was enough to scavenge. You were grabbing up thick chunks of egg-substitute when you heard it. “Have you seen them yet? The new guys?”“Right big fucker, I didn’t realise it was fucking Halloween.”“Man read about Ed Gein and had to get in on--”“Who?”“Gein? Jesus dude aren’t you supposed to be the True Crime--”“The guy who they made Silence of the Lambs about?”“Brother are you fucking dense? No, Gein’s the guy who…”You can’t help but chuckle, listening as your friends all give eachother shit over lack of knowledge over (fictional, or real) serial killers. Bucket took it upon himself to educate everyone, while Wipes fights to get a word in edgewise about how he could ‘totally’ take all of the Taskforce guys on in a fight and win. Now they’re definitely not beating the crayon-eating accusations. “You don’t wear shit like that without overcompensating.”He had a point. Probably. You hadn’t seen them in person yet but when they keep bringing up how the edgy fucker wears some dumb skull-themed face covering, you know they’re either exaggerating or these guys are simply that different. “Such bullshit.” One of them mutters, in a sea of equally quiet complaints. Getting called in early -- only fifteen minutes -- but that was precious, precious time that could’ve been spent doing literally anything else. You’d have to survive on little sleep, even less food, and the fact you were about to commit arguably the worst kind of crime in just under eighteen hours nibbling at your mind. The herd of men pack together through the hallways, split off at their perspective turns, the handful that are left filter into that gigantic space. Work was-- The lights were on. All of them. Floors, stations, overheads. All of them . Your gut clenches and sinks so fast and hard you worry someone will see it. There’s three men standing near the tank but you only catch rogue glimpses from the corner of your eye. Don’t want to see her comatose and drifting lifelessly; shoved by the current into a corner on one end. Someone elbows you -- Bucket -- clearly telling you to get your shit together. Was it that obvious? But you don’t want to. You make yourself look. The three men are insignificant and unimportant; all you want to see is her. Make sure she’s okay. A crumpled body is jostled lightly in the current while being forced into the corner nearest to the group; hand , her hand, half-braced against the glass and you take it as a sign, a message, to you. For you. Her way of saying ‘I’m okay.’ That’s what you tell yourself. Just beyond that your uncle is speaking. Giving some overly-formal explanation of how there will be extra men around -- specialists -- to keep things orderly just in case. They’re just here as a precaution , to help, to ensure everyone’s safety. He ends it by saying to not expect to see them much. They’re going to lurk. Be around but out of sight, because, again, just in case.
A little late for that, you think to yourself.
Their names are given but are immediately gone from your mind, you’re too angry to grant them that. Moustache, Cringe (Jawless Cunt would be too long), Mohawk Himbo. You can tell by the glimmer in Moustache’s eyes that he’s going to be trouble. You swallow hard, a thrill rushing all the way to your fingertips. Just a road bump. You can do this. If nothing else you owed it to her to at least try. The brief introduction is completed and Moustache steps forward, doesn’t say anything, does a wide slow sweep of the crowd until he settles on you. “Lights on, all the time. Area off limits outside of work hours. No exceptions.” It takes more restraint than you think you have in you to not leap forward and start beating the man. He should’ve just addressed you directly. Coward. Himbo must’ve seen you glaring and you hear him stifle a chuckle. Whether it was from rage or embarrassment, you weren’t sure. But your face was burning. You hate that you have to fight so hard to calm yourself down. At this rate you’ll end up just pulling the stunt now out of spite. Everyone’s dismissed and you go to filter out. doing your best to stay with the herd. Behind you, Moustache calls out ‘Ass’ and does a demeaning hand wave: the one that’s open, palm-up, fingers bending back. Something you’d see from an entitled white woman about to berate underpaid waitstaff. Great. Reluctantly, angrily, you slink out, walk back over to the three men -- your uncle doing his best to look like he actually wants to be here -- standing to their side. “Nice name.” The Himbo tells me, boyish grin like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. Normally you’d be all for joining in on the self-shitting. But not today. Not now. Not with these men. You bury your dignity and stand, feet together, hands folded behind your back, polite. “I hear you’ve got a… unique attachment. To this project.” Moustache starts, eyes sliding from the skull-face one to you. “None of that now. I’m sure you understand…” He continues talking, laying into you, but you aren’t focusing anymore. Not when you can see her face. Curled body twitches, jerks, from time to time. Her face now miraculously pressed into the corner. That nictitating membrane is closed so you can only think you see her staring out at you -- pleadingly, desperately -- like being this close to you without touching was so physically painful. Maybe he can tell you’ve long since stopped listening to him. He takes a tactical step forward and from your spot you notice the other two men’s arms are now at their sides; fingers ready to reach for the sidearm. They were jumpy. No sudden moves, no loud noises, no bright flashes. “You hear me?” He asks, staring down. You were tall. He was taller. “Yes, sir.” You reply with a nod. Gives you a slap on the shoulder, a smile, like there is no bad blood and you are all brothers now. When you turn to leave you can almost swear you hear someone whisper ‘keep an eye on him’ when they think you’re out of earshot. All you had today was a stack of papers and data entry, grunt work. Easy yet mindless. It gives you time to think. What are you even doing here? Are you really going to go through this? You knew you had to though. What kind of man would you be if you quit now? Gave up after making such a deep promise? And what would happen to her ? She'll be crestfallen, give up, stop eating and just waste away in that tank now that she has no way out. It’s not just something he’s imagining. It’s what happened after that first escape attempt -- when she got the absolute shit beat and kicked and roughed out of her by the on-duty guards who found her. Because, as they put it, ‘this isn’t some exhibit that hopped the fence.’ It was a monster. A thing .These are the kind of wrong thoughts people have from spending too much time alone. You had to beat off these intrusive thoughts which meant you were being remarkably unproductive. Chastise yourself for catching yourself checking the time too often. Only eight more hours. You want to skip dinner but Wipes guilts you into it. Won’t let up. The entire table spends conversation after conversation giving you shit over the morning meeting. “Guess you’ll have to go get a real girl now.”“Next time you’re on leave you can go find a new wife at the fish market, the one off Main.”That one killed and you do your best to laugh along like you weren’t about to break her out of prison, disappear off into the night. You retort, going off about how you’ll be running off to fuck their mothers. A viable option if you didn’t get violently gunned down tonight. There was still time before lights out. You fish the stolen little key (you managed to smuggle it out of your uncle’s office earlier; thing sat on a forgotten keyring just inside his office door on hook) out of your pocket, set it on the desk next to your badge. It’d get her free from the last of those restraints and out of the building. You just need to pack now. You needed your sleep. You know. But your mind was too fast to let you. The bed is comfortable enough, you get to work counting all the bumps on your ugly popcorn ceiling. Eyes open and you swear at the alarm screaming in your ear. Still on time. You opt for comfort and movement over anything else and ultimately land on your running shoes, those same sweatpants, a hoodie. There’d be an opportunity to replace your wardrobe once you were both settled. Rucksack is shrugged up and over your shoulders, you pat at the ka-bar knife you slipped into your waistband. It’d be all you needed. Badge, keys, phone, knife. You were ready. Silent feet carry you onward; the path burned into your mind out of repetition. You keep waiting to see the unfamiliar sight of artificial lighting drowning the place but instead you are greeted by darkness. All you can think of is Moustache’s little speech about how ‘things were going to be different’ now that they were here. It grants you an additional layer of confidence. She’s right there now. You can see it. Feel it. She’s right there. Go through your routine to get things unlocked and opened, you’ve graduated from fast-walking to running . You get to the lip of the tank and her form is already rising to greet you, hand outstretched. She’s been waiting. “I thought we talked about this, Ass.” A voice yells out, echoing. Immediately after you hear the low hum that means the lights -- all of them -- were powering up. Would be on soon. Without even thinking you try and throw your body to cast a shadow over her; thinking that would do anything to help. Moustache is, rather tauntingly, walking slow, unbothered, in your direction. The Jawless Fuck beside him. No sign of the third, of the Himbo. Frantically you look around trying to find him. These three were the only things in your way. And you’d fight like hell. Nervous and shaky hands dig for the small stolen key and you hug her close, up into your arms. It takes two tries before you finally line the thing up, get the collar unlocked, watch in a silent awe as it slides off and drifts weightlessly to the bottom of the tank.You look up again. Those two were still approaching. You had to move. Now.“Oh , my love, my love .” Her voice is heaven on your ears and your heart flutters -- clear as day and everything you’ve ever needed. You freeze. The lights were on. And the gag. You hadn’t done anything to that. Just the collar. “You--”That’s all you get out before this thing is happening. An instant silver-green blur. It takes maybe half a second for the claws to grab your scalp, crank your head both up and to the side, your neck obviously cracking. An instant after, your neck breaks. Those claws shearing skull as easy as anything; carving down into the pulpy warm outside of your brain. Greyish-pink where it’s been opened and covered with a pale sheath all around that, blood just now seeping into the folds and crevices. Silence. Your throat is still sucking air in. Your eyes locked on her. Calling her traitor. Calling her killer. Calling her love -- one last time. A spattery stripe bisecting the area: going from floor to wall to ceiling, then going down again. The line between who she used to be and who you are now. Payment came due for her time in captivity. For every little thing in these three months. And now it was time to collect. Vision fleeting but still there, you see it. Those always-out teeth sliding, moving, the entire jaw dislocating and floating down to her clavicle like she was nothing but water. So she can have the space she needs. A void of teeth and membrane and death widens and opens, spreads. It’s dark. Think your head’s been entirely swallowed. You’re trying so hard to laugh -- or cry.
And then there’s nothing.
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The taste was more acrid than you remembered; more stale. It’d been a while since you last ate one — mostly due to the fact you typically reside much, much, much deeper in the seas — so this was like a little treat. Something to be savoured; a rarity. Too much hair though, you don’t like how it catches on your teeth, gets stuck on the back of your throat, itches on the way down. If you were going to eat a human again, they’d have to be bald. Of the three options left, maybe the skull-faced one would have the least hair. It’d been a mostly-easy past three months for you. Ideal, no, but you made it work. These idiots believed anything — so it was easy to feign weaknesses and fears and proclivities. And while you may not fully understand their language yet, you picked up enough to get by. Enough to know vaguely what was going on. It helped in your little act: when they wanted blood, you’d demure; lumbar punctures made you cry pathetically, weep and sob; when they turned the lights on, you’d writhe and reach out desperately before going limp. Whatever men can know, men can contain. And they would not know you. It’s why this was so easy for you. You are nature’s fiercest killing machine: surviving in depths that would grind into dust the bones of filthy little creatures like these humans. Humans like this Lewis. But you coalesced. You firmed. He had to be groomed first though. Groomed, and isolated, and cornered. It was so easy. He was so fragile. So delicately balanced; so unprepared to face what he’d done. Always busy -- even while eating. Motion above you, an accidental reflection of light. There’s a walkway, narrow, that spans the length of the room. Even from your spot you can see the top of a head quickly duck back down in hopes you didn’t see him. And that must be where the third one is. The taste was not to your liking anymore, too gamey. His lifeless (and now headless) body is dropped unceremoniously to the ground, rest of him joining soon after. You lean over and spit the half bone half sludge mixture out, taking care to fish out any particularly larger chunks from being caught in your maw. Lewis was not eaten out of necessity or want -- he had simply become weak, unusable. This was just nature. Just survival of the fittest. Your little cold-hearted display gets unhappy and disgusted-sounded reactions from your unanticipated audience, but you remain unbothered. Just noise. Rebound, reset. Now that the tank is filled with more gore than usual, the already murky waters do an even better job at hiding you. You had to go back, grab one last, massive ram of oxygen through your gills. While not preferred, you could technically survive on land; just not for long. Only get maybe a half hour before you have to start selectively shutting parts of your brain down to stay alive. So you’d have to make quick work of these remaining men. The only thing stopping you before had been that damned collar -- that damned metal that even you couldn’t claw through. But now? Sky’s the limit. Literally . You breach the surface, prop yourself up by the arms, stare out at the two men. They’ve taken to standing in place, like they didn’t want to -- or know how to -- proceed. Look like they’d prefer to just murder you here and now but even you are aware that wouldn’t be the best idea. You’d heard the scrawny little researchers talk about your importance; they need you alive. It took a singular second, maybe two, before you began to act. A pair of fins, one jutting from each hip, massive and iridescent, unfurl after being wrapped around you for so long. By the time they’re finally laid out the edges freely splay out on the floor. They’re twitching, then they’re flapping, and you can practically see the wheels turning in the heads of these two men. In their defence they had no way of knowing, because the researchers didn’t know. Because you kept that part hidden. More time is spent getting airborne than you would have liked (the metric being in seconds, you’re just inpatient) but once you are, it’s a straight line up. Windows, skylights, multiple points of escape for you. They’d thought to reinforce doorways and ground-level windows but not these. It wouldn’t’ve made sense to. You stop on that walkway, sitting, looking momentarily to see if there was a way to open these things without having to smash them out. It wasn’t that you had forgotten the other man who was camping up here — you just didn’t care. A latch, some sort of frame, whatever it was you were able to get the thing popped up and open. Arms are reached up and ready to pull yourself up when you hear angry shouting from below. To your left you hear the man rack the bolt back, clears it, studies his inhuman prey. The option of taking your chance fleeing now or gutting this one out of precaution weigh lightly in the front of your mind. You drop your arms and lean back into sitting. He opens the other eye he had closed to help aim. Faster than he ever would have thought possible, you were loping, galloping toward him using your hands and tail in tandem for propulsion. A shot fires.The round had grazed the side of your jaw, ricocheted, pierced a hole through the thin webbing where ears would be if you were human. This only serves to enrage you further. You’re on the man in no time, entirely unphased by his action. Those too-long fingers grab his throat, pull him in, tail coiling so tight around one of his legs you can hear it cracking — you want him to know what’s coming. You need see it. Eat his fear. Jaw unhinges and is only half-covering his face when he bucks up, when you feel wind rush by. The idiot had weaponised your writhing, how you had knocked a hole through the safety railing. You both tumble over the edge, fall, and in that moment your skull resets; you put on that wide-eyed terrified little expression that belongs on some other, much more harmless creature. Oh . You weren’t expecting this. Frantically, more desperate than anything you’d ever done before, you start flapping those not-quite-fully-wings of yours to save yourself. And now this idiot was hugging onto you. Tight . Tight enough to say ‘you’re going down with me.’ Grasp pushes (not claws) him away but he’s blindly grabbing and pulling and ripping for any point he could find purchase. You don’t yell or scream or hiss — you wail : the most evil and primal and unnatural thing any of them would ever hear. You want to unhook his ribcage and thumb through his organs. Make him cry out and yip from the sensation of feeling his insides be ripped out. One last bid to escape, one last full-body push. A crackling silence greets you upon landing. There’s a weight on you now; the man. It wasn’t enough to shatter your spine on impact, but it did raddle your head. Even harder on him. The man -- Soap, you remind yourself -- is out cold, the leg you broke resting at an impossible angle. Still breathing. There was still time to gut him even if he wouldn’t be awake to see it. You hiss, reposition, shove the limp body off your own. It’s still raining down loose paperwork when you hear another -- name of Price -- barrelling toward you at full speed. His hand dips and he grabs Soap’s gun while in motion, holding it sideways with the aim to shove it against your throat after he tackles you. Unfortunately for him, you manage to catch it with your mouth. The thing crumples, gets crushed in your grasp like it was made of plastic. You taste powder, copper, other materials, throw the worthless weapon aside. Now the skull one was jogging toward the writhing pile of limbs. You had to leave. Now. Or you’d never get another chance. Punch after punch is delivered to your face and you simply endure. Price draws his arm back for another and you make your move. All of your mass throws his way, you grab his arm, narrow your fingers on your free hand into a point, and plunge. You’re almost disappointed that you missed the spine. There’s viscera and gore all over your arm now -- the one you had just stabbed clean through this man’s chest in one quick move. The flesh and muscle hugging your forearm is hot to the touch. You withdraw your limb, push his body away, and go--More yelling, screaming. Can hear him prep a firearm of his own, this Ghost. Shit .You flatten against the ground behind a desk, let his fire graze against your back. But still, he knows. The way you can tell is the smell of a pistol at his hip: it’s oily-sick taste is in his mouth now. The man you stabbed -- Price -- tells (warns) Ghost about you some more using garbled wheezing, coughing, grunting. Their warning so clear, so urgent, so simple and articulate. Ghost had his chance. This is on him. None of them should’ve come out here. It’s quiet now. You raise, sit upright, ready to make a straight line for the ceiling.Your head still turned to the side, your eye on the right side rolling back down that barrel at him. Without even thinking about it, this is what you do: when in the hunter’s sights—you pull away. Still he sees. Not you. But the motion of you. The idea of something . Body squeezes into a flat line and you shoot up in the air. Ghost is moving, shuffling, firing blindly at you. He’s the only one left. Another round hits the webbing on your right pectoral fin in a perfect circle. It throws you off balance, your flapping now having to overcompensate. The walkway is within reach now and you claw your way up, drape your body over the cold metal. Just one more length and you’d be at the window you opened earlier. But your limbs are traitors, so heavy, so tired. Obsidian eyes bear down sheer hatred at the man still doing his best to bring you down. There was no idiot up here to death-roll, no one else. You were free. You’re dragging yourself along, now sitting right beneath your exit, you can feel the outside air. Actually feel it. There’s some coordination to get yourself up and lifted out -- the crack of firing following your every move. Did this idiot not take the hint? Not comprehending your unfathomably kind act -- you allowing him to live? He hits you square in the thick muscle of your tail. You hiss out, turn to bare your still-bloodied teeth at him as a warning. He hits you again; this time in your arm. If this man was ever out at sea, he was dead. The last portion of your oversized tailfin is slipping past -- you catch a glimpse of the two ugly splashes of your dark blue blood across the ceiling -- when, because you’re not meant to be happy, he gets one last shot in. It doesn’t throb like your other wounds; this one stings. You’re livid to see it’s… something else. Has a sleeker design, tapered body, makes you think it’s a shrimp. Whatever it is you swipe it away, rip the thing from your flesh just as soon as it has stuck. You hurt. But you were out. Maybe a mile out was the shore. You could even see it now. Even with your flight mildly compromised, you’d be able to make it with time to spare. Easily. All it takes is a loping flop-run and you were airborne. In this moment of triumph you can’t help but let out a shallow little rumbling bellow. It wouldn’t be long now. This is all you really needed. Just one chance to get out. If these other men hadn’t been there you’d be in the water by now. Uninjured and content. Your eyes close and you pull the daydream into your mind. No wait. Body shrugs, your eyes force open. You’re closer to the ground now. Losing altitude. It feels like you’re swimming through blood. Too viscous and heavy. No longer are you flying — you’re gliding. You’re trying to flatten out to find less resistance but you’re sweaty and tired and uneven. Halfway. You were halfway there. Slowly, you become aware of your lethargy. A minute ago this wasn’t an issue. Just a fish doing fish things: fighting, killing, flying. You’re thinking hard now. You look behind you, to that facility. When you turn back your body shudders with a sick feeling. It’s taken you too long to realise you’ve been going in a big circle. The water—you had to get to the water. Which way was the shore? It’s nothing but terrain in every direction; even that damn building is gone. There’s nothing. But it was right here. You were right there. You saw it. Your gaze whips across the landscape and you keep looking around and around, like it was permanently at the edge of your line of sight, running away from you. The ground is below, you dive to pad your landing. Where was the shore? There’s light, a reflection, you can smell it. You’d gotten turned around but managed to somehow find home again. Once more you’re in flight; this time barely high up enough to not have your tail dragging on the ground. Everything is so heavy. It’s right out of reach. Just one more push, just one more minute. Your arm reaches out, lowers so the squish of wet sand will be the first thing you feel. The scent of saltwater fills your nostrils. Eyes are open but you can’t see. At some point you had dropped down again and were now laying motionless, halfway on your side and still on land. When did that happen? It’s there now: the sound of waves lapping at the shore. You can’t see, you can’t really feel your body anymore, you just know you have to keep moving forward. Numb fingers dig in, carve into the soil and you pull yourself forward, inch by inch. And that’s where they find you, after having followed that very clear trail of blood: face-down, both arms flung forward desperately, unmoving body stuck, and at most, fifty feet from the waterline.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Ｆ Ｉ Ｓ Ｈ
You are the equivalent of suicide. Who would seek certain death?These idiots, apparently. Memories came back to you in flashes, hints, singular frames in time. There were… men. You thought you’d made it to the shore -- or was that a dream? Felt the saltwater on your skin, the darkness welcomed you in as you dove deeper and deeper and deeper still until there was no light visible. You were home. Free to live, to hunt, to trawl along the shelf floor to your heart’s content. But then… You think you remember hands. Remember crawling, remember being dragged back to that fucking tank. Someone had punched you, you can see it so clearly if you really focus. Ears too filled with sound. Nose too filled with blood. Dark cobalt-blue blood getting all over yourself and the fists of whoever was currently laying into your face. You’re pretty sure you took out two of them; had to leave the third behind in order to get out in time. There was no way the other two survived though, right? It’s so difficult to open your eyes anymore. Membranes keep closed just in case someone else tries to take out their frustration on you in the meantime. You’ve been out of the water so long, too long. Heartbeat was barely one per minute, blood pressure dangerously low. Body and mind going into life-support mode, doing the bare minimum yet everything it can to keep you alive. You weren’t built for this -- to be out for this amount of time. If you were dead you could go home. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. So you sleep. Content that it’s probably going to be your last. And that’s okay. Time meant nothing to you anymore. Consciousness was piecemealed back to you, an unwanted gift by this point. Your face hurts. Feels like you’ve been run over by a boat multiple, multiple times. There’s… stuff. All over you. You can’t open your mouth, move your jaw at all. Or your arms. Or tail. Anything other than your eyes it seemed. The sensation makes you feel violently ill -- not from the fact you were now fundamentally more trapped and less trusted than you’ve ever been -- but because you were robbed of what could have been. You think you are underwater now (it was hard to tell) and you can’t stop yourself from crying. Nearby you can hear voices; pick up on out-of-focus men, people. It’s still a monumental task to even keep your eyes open. Your head feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. To your right you can feel the familiar cold touch of glass, the gentle push of an artificial current. Your soul crushes. Withers away into nothing and it’s like you can feel it -- physically -- a part of you dies. You had your chance. One window for you to get out. To get back home. Instead you squandered it; spent time maiming men instead of just getting the fuck out of here the instant you could. Idiot. You were an idiot to think this would go any other way. A brain still recovering from hypoxia conjures something before you: like a prayer you don’t know how to say with words.Body belongs to the current now, rolling and shifting and going wherever it shoves you in this fucking tank. Like a carcass floating on the surface. At some point a hand reaches in, grabs a fistful of hair, yanks your head up and out of the water. In time you pry one eye open, then the other, given exhausted and uneven blinks. Maybe it’s the Ghost one who’s holding you like this. Faces don’t make sense anymore. Gloved hand pats you on your cheeks, trying to get your attention. You give no response because your body still feels like it’s actively dying. You’re so very, very, very empty. All you want to do is sleep. Someone laughs, and you’re tossed back beneath the waves. One of the surgeons told him he was lucky -- so remarkably lucky he needed to go buy a lottery ticket. He’d been impaled, the only real lasting damage being his spleen of all things. Something he could and would now have to live without. There was a small chance he’d be more prone to lung collapses in the future; aside from that he’d be fine. Still able to shoot, fight, work. Price had been lucky. Much like Johnny had. All they had to do was stick some metal plating in his leg and he was right as rain. Would have to work on walking, running, but that’d come back in due time. They’d both been beaten to shit while Simon got out with no real injuries to speak of. Price and Soap would be in wheelchairs for the time being; the both of them less than a week since surgery. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t still get together with the thing that had wrecked their shit. Now though -- now you were completely different, night and day -- from when they had last met you. Went from feral, quick, murderous, powerful, to… this. Some heavily-sedated ragdoll who spent their time just existing. If one could even call it that. There was no confusion though: he still very thoroughly hated you for what you did, the pain you inflicted. Part of his brain (the little lizard part he tries to not listen to) itched to see your conditions improve. To have some semblance of control, regardless of how little, be restored to you. Maybe someday. Just not now. You needed a little time to reflect back on your actions.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
If you were back home like this — back in your natural habitat — you’d be dead by now. If any of them saw you, you’d be ripped to threads and taken out immediately. Very basic and primal like that. You’re no longer you if you’re too damaged to hunt on your own. You’re prey. An
other
. Weakness is punished.
You wish you had the strength to open your eyes. Have to stick with one at a time being half-open and lazily looking around in an attempt to figure out what was happening. Your brain feels like it’s rattling around in your head. A constant stabbing headache follows you everywhere, which makes you aggressively miserable. Maybe Lewis and his predictions about you were accurate: you’ve stopped eating (not that you physically could), you don’t respond, you don’t really do much of anything. What a pathetic excuse you were now. In the past you’d gone into full ‘helpless’ mode; and that was a one-time act. Not like you could use it again now.
It could’ve been a day, a week, a month, a year. At some point they decide to finally taper off the sedatives, cut your jaw and mouth free so you could eat, and, to your complete surprise, unshackle you completely. This had been so they could lift you up and out, slap you onto an absolutely frigid table with wheels on the bottom. Where were you being carted off to? Despite having full range of motion, your limbs still felt impossibly heavy. Couldn’t escape -- let alone move -- even if you wanted to. You yawn, mouth opening and stretching until it’s nearly a flat circle, roll your head to one side. It’s when you notice the three men are here too. One of them -- the one who’s leg you had snapped -- is on what you now know are crutches. Everyone gets crowded into an elevator and you’re still too out of it to pay much mind.
“Christ, look at them things.” Soap says, grabbing your limp wrist and holding it up. Splays your fingers out as to bring attention to the claws.
“Cannae believe the size of ‘em.” More desynced blinking from you, mouth falling slack, barely open. It wasn’t out of malicious intent (more of you just wanting to see if he was even real), but your hand moves, grabs onto his. A jellyfish would have more grip strength than you did right now. Didn’t stop Ghost from chiding the man, reminding him to keep well away. Whenever you get this tired, yawn this much, your eyes water like crazy. So now it looks like you’re struggling to keep your eyes open with puddles of faux-tears forming on the table.
Think you might’ve fallen asleep again. You crack open an eye again and you don’t recognize this room, these people talking. It feels like you’re teleporting. You close your eyes and suddenly you’re somewhere else entirely the next time you open them. Either that or you truly are just that fucked up on whatever they’ve been pumping into your tank. You’ve long since stopped trying to figure out what’s going on around you. Was -- was someone carrying you now? As much as you’d love to be able to turn and see who, your body refuses to follow direction. Have to go by touch, smell, literally anything else. Something that is easy to find out: because it turns out Ghost
really
doesn’t like you (for whatever reason). Man unceremoniously flops you down on a flat surface, your head gets placed in… something. Directions are given that you do not understand. Luckily for them it’s not like you can do much objecting. There’s whirring, noise, a light that takes its time scanning over your entire body.
Turns out all these people needed to get results and not get violently maimed: be very loose with their drugging standards. Machinery dies down and your body gets slid back out to your
adoring
audience. You get hauled up and over someone’s shoulders like you’re a sack of potatoes, to which you also don’t object. Just a quiet hiss -- which ends up sounding more like a wheeze. By now your limbs are being drip-fed feeling again and -- no, that was a lie. May not be able to worm around but at least you can mostly lift up your head on your own now. The world around you is foggy and out of focus like it had been smeared with animal fat. Try to speak, to say something, but it’s too slurred to make any sense. Back onto that metal wheeled cart. Thing is colder than you remembered. Or maybe you’re just not acclimating; too much time out of water too consecutively. Your skin starts to shudder, shiver, you groan in discomfort. As much as you’d like to coil your body around itself like a gigantic serpent, you’re far too out of it and clumsy to even attempt. Any movement now would be perceived as a threat, anyway.
Moving now, your small party of people chatting idly while wheeling you around. A finger pokes at one of your teeth, wiggles it almost playfully, and is surprised when the thing just… pops free. Soap makes a noise of concern. The walking stops. There’s a tense silence now; like everyone is just waiting for you to lose your mind and start attacking. But it was just a tooth. It’d be replaced in a few weeks like they always are. For the first time all day you manage to actually blink normally, attention lazily sliding up to the man now holding the shed tooth between his fingers. Whether the gesture translated or not, you weren’t sure -- but your shoulders shrug, you roll your head to the side, focus on trying to at least move your arms to cover yourself. The shivering continues. Let him keep the thing as a souvenir.
When everyone realises there will, in fact, be no more murder, they relent, continue escorting you around to… wherever. You’d love to ask when you’re going back due to it being less than hospitable, but know they wouldn’t understand or care. You resign to be uncomfortable for the foreseeable future. That is, until the same man who jostled your tooth free -- Soap -- does the most treasonous, unthinkable thing. He shrugs his jacket off and drapes it over you. Neither Price or Ghost are happy with this; Soap has to fight to keep it there. You’re not mad, you understand why they would want you to be as distressed as possible. Just more surprised that even one of them would extend even a singular crumb of kindness your way.
The warmth is the only thing you need right now. Inhospitable cold was only your preferred temperature when in water; not out. It takes every ounce of strength you have in you right now to withdraw your hands up, clasp them to your chest, get them warmed up too. Your shivering is staved off, for now.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
You can see straight through to the ground here. A few days ago there was this little bug -- a spider, maybe -- that snuck under the glass, made a slow trek across to the other end of the tank. It was just you now. You wonder if anyone back home even misses you, knows you’re gone. It’s been maybe a month; your only signal of time being the cycles of the moon. They didn’t bother to mess with keeping the lights off or on constantly now that your act was up. So now when it’s dark, when it’s in the peak of night, you can take these long sideways glances at the moon. Lid to your tank has been reinforced, thicker, more handles. You’d graduated from a singular collar to many others: around your neck, tail, wrists, elbows. Keeping those feral claws of yours locked behind your back until further notice. Just enough chain links to move from one side of the tank to the other.It’s the perfect distance. It’s the distance you’ve earned . You (understandably) don’t get extra food, time unsupervised. You’re back to square one -- treated like an untrained and feral animal that would bolt the instant you could. And, while not incorrect, you were too ruined. Could see the writing on the wall. Knew you had blown your one and only chance. This was all you are and all you’ll ever be. No excuses. Not for this. There’s times where you catch yourself floating, staring at the lid of the tank, wondering how you’d gotten here. You knew; more reflecting on your past life. Before here. In the water you were completely weightless, yet the heaviest thing in the world. If only you could’ve explained. You open your mouth, inhumanly long tongue darting around at some minor irritant lodged between your teeth. Dig for a bit, float your jaw, eventually dig the thing out. A tooth -- Lewis’s tooth. A molar, a bit of gum and flesh still miraculously clinging to the root. It’s slung out from your mouth but you watch yourself following it as it is carried along the floor of the tank. Going to get stuck in the filter. There’s a fear you’re going to rip your shoulders out trying to reach for it. But you can’t. You never could. There was a duty to fulfil and you had: so why did you feel like this? It has to be regret -- regret for doing it too soon. Something that had to be done; but you must’ve acted too hastily. That’s why you feel… For the first time since meeting, you’re happy to see the hulking beast of a man -- Ghost. He walks over, taps against the wall of your tank to show you’re no threat. And he’s right. His weight coming down shakes the ground. You weren’t afraid of him, more… you had an aversion to ever trying to fight him. Like you know it wouldn’t end well for either party, him always coming out on top. A silent staring contest is taken up between you and him. You close your eyes, open them again, and Ghost is still there. Give him a sloppy smile, just fortunate you even can now. One full month of getting your jaw wrapped to your head with tape over and over and over again until you couldn’t move a singular muscle. Your power was in closing -- not opening. Completely neutralised using something so simple. He studies your frame, like he’s trying to make sense of it all still. Finally settles on those pitch-black eyes that swallowed everything. You’re waiting for him to arm his weapon, take you out every time you see him. There was a definite hatred in those eyes -- you can feel it in every bone of your body. That same need for retribution that you once held. Once . He’s standing there, arms crossed atop the rifle slung over front from his shoulder. It wouldn’t’ve been perceptive to anyone else but you see it: that tactical twitch in his trigger finger, keeping straight until needed. Would be so easy to aim that barrel at you. You’re not sure why, but you begin to aimlessly drift away from him. Your jaw tightens, gets into place. “Love.” You speak, muffled by the water to the degree of it being nothing but a murmur. One of the ‘heavy’ words you knew in their language. Knew that it was… a label. It’s what Lewis would tell you, call you, during your--A buried memory: you’ll never finish that book. Now you’ll never find out if she dies. There was no attachment, you didn’t care. You just don’t like things being unfinished. A languid sigh escapes you, you stretch, a full-body yawn. Ahead of you still stands Ghost -- silent, unmoving, threateningly stoic. What did he want? To just stare you down during his nightwatch? Weird. The impulse to sing now itches in the back of your brain, keeps going until you’re forced to acknowledge it. Is that what he was after? You’re not that kind of siren. You’re not particularly beautiful, enthralling, feminine. You’re the kind to never be seen with living eyes: to be in the empty depths feasting on whale carcasses and other fish. Had no need to be a lure, to seduce with your voice so you can melt the resolve of others. So, you oblige his unspoken request. Your song splits the night in two. The sound shapes itself on your lips a bit at a time; like trying to add to a full note. Surface of the water vibrates with your noise; sounding like multiple voices ringing at once. He gives ground, like he’s falling for this, eyes half-lidded now. You couldn’t command or control or do much of anything with your songs. Just entertain. It was soft, warm, the tune being background noise for his chain smoking. He’ll finish, drop the butts in a random desk’s coffee cup, light up another. You shift your eyes for a moment, like taking stock. Your song stops, you withdraw, acting like you don’t even care he’s there. Something that earns what you think may be a chuckle from him. You nestle in the furthest corner, coil up into a tight shape, bury your face in (the best you can), and sleep.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Distantly, like it’s someone else, you watch. A pair of bodies -- one that looks like yours, wrapped around a man who looks like Lewis -- talking practised, heavy steps. They’re walking towards an ocean, a boundless body of water. Not much further now. The Not You is hugged onto Not Lewis: chest pressed to his, arms wrapped around his neck, their tail (tight, but not too tight) coiled around his waistline to prevent it dragging. From your impossible vantage you can see the repetitive movement of Not You’s eyes. Mechanically scanning back and forth, back and forth, in an ambulating pattern at the land behind them. Eventually you see it: the three-person party that was now in pursuit. The body of Not You wriggles up and uses Not Lewis’s shoulders as a launchpad. He keeps walking; Not You will meet him at the water shortly, you know. There’s only three of them. Why do they look familiar? The siren dives, hands already reaching out. Grabs the hat-wearing one by the sides of his head, too-long thumbs immediately going in. Her claws dig into both of his eye sockets — squelching and yelling and writhing until they are pushed deeper, until there’s cracking, popping. Until the grey-pink sponge of his brain is felt on her fingertips. The man stops moving. You realise now that none of these men are armed. Masqued one is next. Motion is fluid, the siren grabbing the giant body as he goes in for a tackle. You can see her grab his face covering and toss it (and most of his scalp) off to the side. It’s too quick for you to see his face. You’re distracted and looking for Not Lewis. When you look back it’s already over. The now-masqueless man is on the ground, his head maybe a foot away and held in place only by tendons. One left. You can’t look away now, if only out of curiosity. Not You is flying now, in a straight-shot to the only one standing. A clawed hand is shoved squarely through his abdomen, lifts, ripping his sternum up in a clean line. It gives her too-easy access to his chest cavity even though he’s long-stopped moving. She was ravenous, animalistic, roughly gripping and pulling his heart out, eating it whole in one bored bite. She had won. Not You whips, takes flight back to where Not Lewis in a boat that was previously not there, right at the waterline. The thing only has oars and he is sitting on the only bench, just watching her. Her motion was quick, easy, seamless: diving directly from the air down into the water. Not Lewis sits in his boat and the thing immediately launches out to follow her from above, like it was being propelled by an impossibly fast motor. Both of them are smiling, laughing, you can hear it. See it. You’re unsure why, but your heart hurts. The travels of Not You and Not Lewis are brief. It takes such little time for the land to disappear entirely. Once out far enough, Not You surfaces, embraces Not Lewis, him placing a chaste kiss to her cheek. In the distance you can hear explosions. Loud noises that make you recoil, your head hurt, fold the earflaps on the sides of your head closed out of instinct. It’s so bright out. “I know we’re… all hurting right now. But our priority should be to maintain the security and integrity of this project.” Eyelids open, membranes retract, you wake up. Everyone is standing around. Graves, the three men you’d maimed, everyone . You startling awake temporarily steals the attention in the room and you know no one is happy about that. For reasons entirely unrelated you proceed to situate yourself as far away as you can get, not facing anyone. Know you could (probably) kill them all when it came down to it. But the constant murderous glares were beginning to activate the part of your lizard brain that tells you to run. Not out of fear… More out of self-preservation. That label made it seem more dignified. The address continues and you listen in, only able to reasonably grasp about half of what’s being said. Lewis had been in the process of teaching you -- reading to you nightly to build your grasp on the language. But now that is over. He is over. You are over . Something about… boat. Site. Trial. Move. More. Testing. Results. How are you going to go about bribing for answers now? Fuck . You suppose you could finally act on your deathwish and attempt another escape. It’ll be next to impossible, they’ve double-triple-quadruple-downed on restraints and security. Plus it’s not like you’ll be allowed to befriend any more researchers. Mind whirls around while you try to form a list of possible people to manipulate. The list was exceedingly short. You could wait for some naïve new recruit; that might take months or longer for another one to show up. You could… Maybe a janitor? But they never got close enough. You could go for the man who kept your tooth; the one whose leg you broke. He did give you his jacket. But the other two wanted to keep you as far away as possible. Doubtful they’d let him be in the same room as you, especially unsupervised. Another dead end. You grind your gnarled teeth in frustration. Too distracted to notice that the room had cleared, that it was just the four men now, that the lid to your tank was being slid open. The hat one -- Price, you’ve heard -- leans over, greets you with an uneven smile. “Wake up lass. ‘S movin’ day.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
You hate how much freetime you have. Makes you go crazy. There’s nothing to do, nothing to engage with, no outside contact. How many laps had you made in this new, tiny, shitty pool? It couldn’t be more than six feet deep, maybe twenty feet long. Maybe . Nothing but plaster and tile and a film of something that coated everything . You genuinely never thought you’d ever believe this: but you miss your old tank. The one that had filtered and temperature controlled water; an artificial current running; was large enough for you to really sprawl out in. It was indescribable luxury and now you’re stuck in the equivalent of a rotting whale carcass. Back at the facility there was at least some type of schedule. A vague calendar that gives you the awareness of time passing. Not here. No windows, no real interaction, no anything. The fear your brain would rot before your body was very quickly becoming a possibility. You needed something -- anything -- to keep your mind preoccupied. Taken to fastidiously going over your tail -- what had once started as maintenance had quickly turned into a habit of peeling up scales, crushing them between your fingers, tossing them aside. Something your body wasn’t happy about. It would hurt, burn, continually sting; but it served as a good enough distraction. The pile of shed scales had started to collect near the only door into the room and the sight made your skin crawl for reasons you’re not able to fully figure out. It makes you hate yourself for what you’ve become — (somehow) more than you already did. For the first time in what could’ve been a thousand years you hear voices approaching. “--a tuxedo?” Soap asks, carrying his conversation in with him.There’s no response from Price.“So- fish -ticated.”Still no reply. “D’ye get it? Because… It's a mackerel. In a tux.” Soap looks almost hurt by the lack of appreciation for his refined humour. Beams the captain an exasperated look, shakes his head, passes a wayward glance at you. You think you hear him murmur ‘tough crowd.’ In the meantime you continue your maddening circuit of swimming because you don’t know what else to do. This was your way of self-soothing. As with all humans ( specifically these ones), you’d learned to keep well away. It’s how you ended up here: trapped in this undersized excuse for a habitat. One of them whistles for your attention and you pause, floating your head up to the surface and stare with those jet-black eyes. Price has a metal bucket in each hand and raises one of them up. As if trying to invite you, to denote they were for you. But you don’t move. You can’t trust they’re not going to punch your face in again. It gives you time to quickly reflect before you act. This place was too small, too temporary to have a hook in the floor. Instead you had been left mostly unrestrained aside from having your arms and wrists hooked together behind your back. Too cramped for you to even think about flying. The ceiling was too low, room too narrow. Plus the hallways were equally small. If you were planning on trying anything, your only option would be flopping around like a seal. Pretty much the most ineffective thing you could think of. So, with wary, narrowed eyes, you approach the edge of the pool where the two men stood. The scent was faint but it was there. They brought food. You kept just out of range, passing a benign gaze to this pair. Deathly stillness gripped the room. Now Price had a clear view of your eyes -- saw the cold ferocity of despair in them. He marked the way you idled: loose and ready, muscles prepared for victory (should the opportunity arise). A tight smile crossed the man’s expression and he crept forward instead. Like he knew you never gave quick death if he were to get too close. There was only one way to interpret these men being here: a threat to yourself. Price takes a step, and you dance away the same distance; that rough plaster grating against exposed skin. Your eyes widen, throat puffs up, that low, territorial bellow that denoted ‘stay away’ rumbling out. “It’s hard to be terrified of an enemy you commend.” He chuckles out, vaguely gesturing to his torso where you had impaled him. Languidly, Soap leans back against the wall and watches you two with the most amused expression. At least someone was having a good time. Price reaches into one of the buckets, retrieves a recently thawed-out salmon, tosses it at you. Naturally (and because it clearly was a trap) you dart away from the thing and watch it half-bob on the water’s surface. An action that garners you overlapping laughter from both men -- now you’re just more confused. What exactly was their plan here? They’d left you here to rot, only to show up now and throw fish at you? Instinctively you want to reach for the food with your hands, are reminded you can’t, decide to whip your tail around so you can send the thing flying back with a single solid slap . Your aim was off, though. Ideally you’d want it to hit Price square in the face -- instead it veered off course and hit Soap on the arm with a pathetic, wet sound. You hadn’t eaten -- not fully, not truly -- since, well, you’d eaten Lewis. And even then you had returned most of what you’d bit off. You were a creature of efficiency and power. Going without feeding was not anything new; yet it was still annoying all the same. The dull claws of hunger had begun to wrack through your insides and now these two show up with food. Very convenient. Silently you dip below the water, slide forward a distance, resurface near the pool’s edge. It’s just your eyes above water now, keeping a wary watch over a crouching Soap. He dips his hand in the other bucket, scoops something up, offers the translucent things to you. But you were quicker. “Soap...”“I’ve gottae--”That hand of his was close -- but it wasn’t a guarantee. It’s not what you’re tracking. He senses your movements, clumsily leaps backward, so narrowly avoiding the sharp clamp down of your jaws. You were aiming for his head. Almost had it too. There was that familiar popping sound -- the noise made not from your teeth closing together, but the air itself being forced out inhumanly fast. Price swats him across the back of his head, Soap looking more amused than anything. The scrape of plaster against you on the way back down only serves to inflame you more. You can’t -- you’ve already tried to, failed -- escape. You’re trapped. You’re hungry. You’re going mad from being trapped in this sterile little space. This incident just being the one last thing you didn’t need. For reasons you don’t fully understand, you cry, you wail, you scream . An inarticulate sound -- one so high and shrill and sharp that it manages to make both men wince. Your body and tail contort, curl up and in until you’re round up into an impossibly tight ball, shoulders flexing tight against the restraints, hair tangling and covering your face and frame. A veritable maelstrom of frustration and self-hatred. Gills around your neck and shoulders flutter so furiously in your attempt to breathe that it’s almost painful. Something deserved . From their vantage point you just look like some furious child having a tantrum; neither sure how to proceed. Not like they could just continue to pelt you with fish and ice cubes. It’s a good thing you’re underwater -- even with your own raging you can hear their voices. It’s not that you were upset… Or maybe you were. It felt like your brain was actively melting within your skull, sloshing around like loose pulp. Maybe you shouldn’t’ve discarded Lewis too soon. Maybe you should’ve just waited longer. Should’ve made straight for that window instead of wasting time maiming extra targets. Should’ve been able to make it out in time. Should’ve, should’ve, should’ve . All you want to do is bash your head into this damn pool’s edge. Cave your bones in so you could be out of your misery already. You don’t miss Lewis. You don’t. Can’t. You just… don’t want to be anymore. Pathetic. It’s uncertain how long you continued to thrash and writhe violently, curled up like this; when you finally do manage to unfurl the men are gone, you’re alone again. In their absence they’ve left both of those buckets precariously perched on the far side of your pool. After much, much, much consideration, you lifelessly float your way over. But… It was further away -- not in distance, but in height. Had to stretch up further to clutch the ledge. And the water did seem marginally shallower. There’s a panic, your eyes narrowing as you take in your surroundings carefully. You find it in the first sweep: a crack in a joining wall of the pool; conveniently where you had been flailing. Run a hand over it, feel the light pull of water seeping out, freeze. Well.Either they’d be back in time -- or you’d get your wish.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
‘This is what you get.’ That first line, that first thing you told yourself after arriving. And time after time it proved to be true. You were set to fail the moment you wandered too close to the surface, got too idly curious. In following your own cultural standards, you should be marked for death. Done what you had to in order to get a chance at freedom again. And you can’t feel bad about that. The boy was an obstacle. Something in your way who had contributed to your suffering -- just like everyone else here. None of them were clean. None. They taught painful lessons. These men give with one hand and take with the other. Even now. You were beached on the floor of your mostly-drained pool, submerged in the darkest part where it was maybe six inches deep; just enough to barely keep you alive. Barely. What you needed was moving water -- not this sad excuse for a puddle. Gills venting open, fluttering, trying to create your own movement so you could breathe. It wasn’t enough. The longer you lay here, delirious from only being able to take half-breaths, you were forced to mull over your own thoughts. You thought about the violence you perpetrated in the name of being free. So you force your mind to mental alertness. Things were bleak now: more than they had ever been, it’s not like you could go out and find another Lewis. These humans had learned their lesson, and they wouldn’t fall for it again. No chance for escape if you were kept locked up in this, this metal that you just couldn’t punch or claw through. Somewhere in the back of your brain you can feel it -- physically, like the pieces were tangibly snapping together -- and everything just… happens .You were angry (angrier than you’d ever been) at how easily you had allowed yourself to give up. To roll over and accept that this was your life now. How could you have been this feeble? After all you’d been through, endured, fought and won, put up with: this was how you were choosing to go? Any emotions you harboured for these humans were disregarded, now turned inward on yourself. Let them do what they want. You just needed to get your shit together, stop feeling sorry for yourself, to get back in the pre-failed-attempt headspace. Don’t want to give them the satisfaction of coming in and seeing you’d died like this: face-down in a pathetic little reservoir the size of a hand. Face dips down and scrapes against the rough plaster as you get one last struggling breath. For good measure and in an act of shameless self-punishment you bring your head (and face) down at the dried pool flooring, over and over and over again -- until you can see the dark-blue smudged imprint beneath you. Should teach you to never be this pitiful ever again.You shake the growing flow of blood from your probably-broken nose, start your mental timer for remaining time starts, turn to look up at the door. Arms were still bound and now you’d have to figure out how to even get up there with your movement options severely limited. Dragging was out of the question; you wouldn’t have any skin left if you tried. The ceiling was low in here but you figured you might as well attempt it once. Too-long twin fins at your hips unfurl, land dryly on the floor, stretch out with an uncanny degree of control. Generating lift was more difficult than expected: you end up flailing, squashing into the ceiling, bouncing around with an obvious impaired control. Hadn’t exactly thought to try flying without the use of your arms but apparently they were a lot more involved in the balancing aspect. So you end up shooting down at an odd angle, head first, the wall beside the door being the thing that stopped you. Body slides down, rolls into an uncomfortable shape of limbs on the floor. You have to flex into sitting upright and stare at your target. The door itself looked sturdy, but you were also all muscle and frustration at this point. Grinding your skin against this fucking flooring was just about as painful as when yo had been punched; missing patches of scales only serving to make things that much more uncomfortable. With no arms your options were limited. In your mind’s eye you project where the best position would be for you to exert maximum force. Awkward body movements help you worm your way a few feet forward, you sit upright, pivot. It’s ineffective, hurts, and is loud enough where everyone within fifty nautical miles would be able to hear. The motion alternated between your tailfin and the ‘beefier’ half of your tail, whipping it against the metal over and over. You’d stopped counting after ten. But the damage was there: the door now letting cracks of light in on the sides where it had begun to burst outward. Keep at it -- you had to keep at it. This was going to leave you immeasurably sore in the coming days. You give one last swing -- the sensation making you let out a stifled hiss of a whine -- and the thing is down. Well, mostly. Enough for you to hop and wiggle your way through out and into the hallway. Too narrow here to attempt flight; unless you wanted to attempt using just one. It’s once you start to slither your way around (thanks to a patchy layer of your own blood from that damn plaster working as lubrication) you realise just how slow your progress is. The distance between you and the door was maybe on full body length, maybe less, and you were already feeling that bone-deep fatigue. You really weren’t meant to be up on land. Not like this, anyway. Out of the corner of your eyes you spot it: movement. One you did not recognise was now approaching, hand on something at his waist, head turning to the side so he could talk into his sleeve. It’s not like you could fault him for acting this way. It was his version of instinct. He hurries to you, squats down near your shoulder, examines your still-bound forme. Your arms were still trapped but the rest of you sure wasn’t. You raise your torso, face your body towards him. He had gotten too close. Jaw opens impossibly wide and you bite down on his knee with one quick motion. His posture is immediately ruined seeing as you’d just essentially cut his leg in half at the kneecap -- his surprise written clear as day on that now-pallid visage. Tries to get up, run, can’t, falls back down to write beside you. The next crunch is wetter. The one after that deeper. Puncturing through into a darker space; brain lazily sloughing out from a crushed and now-open skull. The muscles closer to this nameless man’s remaining shinbone are the last to die; twitching up until the very end.You lean back against the wall, waiver, an insubstantial shape of a person. There’s little swathes of purple around you now -- where your blood and his had mixed -- and you find yourself distracted by the strange vibrance of it all. Your head rocks back, resting. They weren’t too far off now, you could hear them. Overlapping stomps of boots and angry yelling the definitive sign. You can feel it in the flooring but all it does is make your stomach growl. Black eyes shoot back to the dead man before you impulsively and you get to work gorging yourself as much as possible while you still can. He was too wide at the shoulders -- you’d have to start shattering his remaining leg and going for that instead. The fabric he was covered in was unpleasant on your throat and you do your best to rip the remaining portions away before continuing your meal. Backup arrived and you’d disappeared both of his legs (minus the feet, you couldn’t get rid of those damn boots) and had gone on to chewing through his abdomen. Gnarled teeth catch on his lungs and end up dangling past your chin. A boot, heavy, kicks at you, stomps firmly and squarely between your shoulder blades. Being forced down like this means your face is slammed into the tile, your food creating a disgusting squelching noise. You’re allowed to turn your head just enough to see it’s the skull-face one, the very limited and visible parts of his place blasting nothing but unhappiness. He’s just lucky this wasn’t an earnest attempt. All you were after was to get their attention, fix your pool. Getting food was a pleasant bonus. “Not again…” You hear a new voice from the far end of the hallway. The one that belonged to the one Lewis always used to follow around. Graves. Yells, tells the men to drag you back to your enclosure. Ghost remains determinedly fixed in place, not willing to let up for a moment. Not until Price strides by, grabs you at the end of your tail, pulls, trying to get you back in your rinkydink pool. He was almost reluctant to remove his foot, but eventually Ghost did. He made a point to stick your side with something -- a dart -- out of an earned precaution. Out of nowhere Soap shows up to hook his arm beneath one of yours, lifting so you wouldn’t have to be dragged around. A gesture you were oddly thankful for. Your travels were short, though: Price stopping at the destroyed door and making an admonished noise at the sight of the empty pool. He drops your tail unceremoniously but Soap is kind enough to gently lower you down. Graves immediately jogs over to see for himself. He shares hushed words with Price but you’re not focused on that. You’re zeroed in on the keychain dangling from a badge-thing on Soap’s hip. It’s your tooth; a tiny hole drilled in it, some sort of threading looping through it. The realisation makes your eyelids twitch. He’s your next mark, your target, your one to befriend and shape into something who will help you escape. You don’t think -- only act. “Need… wa-ter.” Your mouth was not shaped for speech, vocal chords not nearly practised enough. Yet here you were; talking. Something that captures the attention of everyone: all eyes on you, Graves’s eyebrows looking like they are about to shoot off his head. The uniform reactions tell you this was not something they were expecting. “It speaks.” Ghost cuts in, that boot of his finding its familiar spot on your back. It’s becoming too hard to keep your eyes open now. There’s a lot of overlapping voices now and you catch yourself wishing you understood anything being said. More talking. Just background noise to you now. You take it upon yourself to adjust, get your head comfortable, let your eyes rest for the time being. Graves swears and kicks the now-ejected, gloved hand reaching to pinch the skin between his eyebrows. “Just.” Pauses, looks to Price. “Go grab the tape, use an entire roll if you have to. Get that thing muzzled, go… throw it in one of your tubs until we can get the other tank up and running. I don't care. Just don't kill it yet.” The body of the man you ate is cautiously dragged away -- almost reverently -- and you try to watch through half-lidded eyes. Where would they take him? A pair of boots, these ones new, plant on each side of your head, you feel the weight of someone… sitting on your back. The familiar noise of that black tape being pulled up, out, prepping. Now a pair of calloused hands reach, lift your head from the floor, tilt it so you’re facing forward. You think it’s Soap’s. Either way, you involuntarily let out a low and slow hiss to show your displeasure. A reaction that gets the one sitting on your back -- Price -- to murmur sweet affirmations (even if they were sarcastic) to you. Tape is wrapped a million times in a vertical loop around your skull until your jaw is stuck (painfully) closed. You can feel your teeth gnash together and it feels like they’re all going to explode out from the pressure alone. Can’t bite, can’t move, can’t use your arms, can’t stay awake. You’re just a limp body for them to carry off to wherever they see fit. Which was the perfect time to involuntarily sleep. Swathes of colours and movement haunt you from time to time; these travels bleeding into the floating nothing that was your sedated mind. It was that unfortunately too familiar feeling: your skin drying out and gills sticking shut with a little bit of malaise added in. All you wanted was to go back in the water. To appease your body with the one thing needed to live. That acrid bite of smoke was the first thing to berate your runny senses. Your eyes were only closed for a single second but you were teleporting again -- now waking up somewhere else. Saltwater, it’s shallow, marginally colder than lukewarm. But… you were still dry. Or, part of you was. Takes time for your brain to catch up, to stop warbling around. You were technically underwater, but it was just your torso; the rest of you was bizarrely folded over, draped, spilling out of wherever you were and onto the floor. Accommodating a twelve foot long fish-thing probably wasn’t the most flawless solution: filling up a bathtub with saltwater, having just your torso fully submerged, the rest of you outside of it and laying across cold tile. At least there was some sort of movement here. Not quite. Eyes focus and you notice Ghost lingering menacingly nearby; reclined in the doorway, smoking, staring at you like he was just waiting for you to slip up. So he could act out. Some sort of assorted violence, per usual. Directly next to the bathtub sat Soap, one hand running back and forth to keep the water flowing, doing something on his phone in the other. Just doing mindless work to ensure you (probably) wouldn’t die here. Not yet, anyway. Not until they’d strained everything they needed from you, until they’d dissected you down to every layer to figure out how exactly your kind works. You were tired. You can’t breathe right. Never want to breathe ever again. Your pain is constant and sharp. You don’t hope for a better world for yourself; for these people to know peace after you have escaped. In fact, you want your pain to be inflicted on others. You want no one to escape. Biding time was your focus now. You had your mark. Belief can be manipulated; only knowledge is dangerous. And they would not know you. You only had one thing left. Just like the flight -- you’ll have to keep it under wraps until the time is right. Even in this semi-delirious state your mind is busy humming with connecting thoughts on how to best leave your mark on these people, how you’re going to rip limbs off rather than let them prod you with more needles. Determination hardens you and, once more, you relent to this artificial sleep.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
If your skin was any lighter you’d look like a ringed octopus; only made out of bruises instead. Hips, back, arms. You were covered in them now: mottled and ugly with each one in a different stage of healing. There was being sore -- and then there was being sore. Thought it was bad before, but now these little humans were acting entirely out of spite. It wasn’t like you’d been terribly out of character. They can’t keep getting upset when you “somehow manage” to gore a medic, a grunt, anyone within biting range. Especially when they were too inexperienced to realise they hadn’t used enough of that fucking tape to trap your mouth shut.
Down in this replacement tank now, you aimlessly drift in this newer, much weaker artificial current. More of a glorified wave pool. Again you are stuck in a box too small -- just long enough to fit in, but not stretch out. It served its purpose and that’s all that mattered. You were alive. For now. One of these days they were going to call it quits; too frustrated by your untamable feral nature that they just put you down. Use your corpse for some misguided study of ‘what’s out there.’ Of what could be. Of what happens when humanity decides to get a little too curious.
Everywhere you looked, you saw nothing but the same flat weariness of interminable plainess. Nowhere are any signs of life, that anyone has even been in here. The research setup was so empty, so sterile now. All desks in perfectly uniform rows, kept clean and clear of all clutter and materials. Were they worried you would try to weaponise something? A door slamming in the opposite end of the room steals your attention away, and, despite it being it being a near-complete dark, you can gleam the figure of the one who was always with Lewis -- Graves -- hurriedly walking to a far desk. By body language alone you can tell he’s unhappy. Pulls out a chair from one of the far desks, sits, glowers at the clunky desk phone until it eventually rings. He talks a lot with his hands.
Without warning, the lights of the two overheads turned on, went low, and then shone with a blue effulgence. You look up, quickly, and as you do so, you see the lights sink into a dull, ruddy tint; so that the room glows with a strange, heavy, crimson twilight. Gave the shadows behind the chairs and tables a double depth of blackness. Wherever the light struck, it was as though luminous blood had been splashed over the room. To him it’s business as usual. Planned, routine. Graves retrieves a bloated folder from within his jacket, slaps the thing on the desk, begins to furiously comb through the thing for one paper in particular.
“Yes sir, I heard y'all'd've--”
He gets cut off. Even from here you can see his eyes narrow in frustration.
“There was more information on that report, especially in regards to--”
This time he flattens his mouth into a line, sucks his lips in to keep himself from speaking his mind.
“I know, sir. But the bone marrow transplant study showed we--”
Surprisingly he gives up, gives terse little ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, sir’ answers for everything. That much you at least understood. An unsettling air hangs over the room; the man slamming the phone down after silently listening for a few more minutes. Perhaps he was hoping for better news. Instead he got… whatever this is. Wide strides are projected along the walls in enormous black lines that eat up portions of the entire view. He was just a man, yes, but this ominous lighting coupled with his demeanour made your brain itch. No time at all and he’s standing before your tank; so close that you can see his breath fog up the outside edge of the glass. You were a creature of solitude and malice -- but Graves? Something else entirely. Something much, much worse.
Slowly, cautiously, you unfold; untangle yourself from the literal pretzel that was your prone sleeping position. The cramped space means your tail has to fold back on itself in order for you to fully unravel. He takes a tactical half-step back, plays it off as just shifting his weight around, props his hands on his hips. Despite everything -- all the precautions -- you can still see his left hand shift lower with a practised pace, motion smooth, resting just above a slim sidearm. From those eyes of his exudes nothing but a deep and unending hatred; a look so menacing it almost reflects your own. Almost. You remember seeing Lewis shadow him around constantly… Was he still upset over that? Must be. If the circumstances were any different now he’d probably be strangling you with his own two hands. Vengeance, payback, whatever he’d want to label it. The impulsive thought of reuniting him with Lewis in the same exact manner floats into your awareness but is quickly dispelled. Tempting, but you’d have to get out of this box first.
Wide double-doors swing open on the same end of the room, footsteps, a stifled one-note chuckle from someone. Neither of you look away, too absorbed in this staring contest. Without having to look you already know it’s them; would recognise their voices anywhere. Because he has to -- and because it irritates Ghost -- Soap knocks rhythmically on the glass as he walks by. One of these days you were going to gut every last one of these men, it was all you could dream of. Just thinking about it is enough to stir some type of arousal within you. Basking in their gore, shredding through skin like it was paper, whittling their bones into souvenirs for home. Nothing would make you happier. There’s a certain degree of satisfaction that you gain from not being the first to break eye contact, to see Graves fold first.
“And I suppose we’re too late for the meeting.” Price casually ‘asks,’ sounding so very terribly upset.
“Just in time. Can’t say y’all missed much.” That same folder from earlier is offered to Price and he begins reading through the paperwork with a renewed interest.
“What now?” Ghost prompts. In lieu of gesturing he nods his head at you. “We done here?” A question you’d also like the answer to. Graves sighs, opens his mouth to speak, gets interrupted.
“Full mobility?” Price cuts in, pauses and quickly rereads a paragraph. “So it does work.” Was that… a hint of reverence in his tone? You don’t like the sudden shift in attitude; can feel your stomach tense and drop. The man mumbles out some other titles, figures, numbers from the paper he was currently enraptured in. In time this draws the other two, Soap and Ghost, in to see for themselves. You hold little interest for whatever it is that has them so enthralled -- you already have an idea. No doubt it involved all the things they’d been stealing from you: blood, bone marrow, spinal fluid, increasingly large patches of skin from the midsection of your tail. All things you would take your sweet revenge for in due time.
They’d done away with a solid metal chunk for a lid and instead replaced it with metal bars. Maybe two, three inches top between each rung; too narrow to really work with. If you tried hard enough maybe you could pull at least one of someone else’s limbs through… but your hands are still bound, that wouldn’t work. Filled with teeth which catch, you could try to bite down and pull someone in. But they’d have to fully be through the bars for that, not enough room for you to be proactive. There’s no way that’d work either. You guessed if you truly had to -- the final of final options -- you could try and smash your way out of the glass; but then that ran the risk of just shredding yourself in the process. Not to mention it didn’t guarantee an escape.
You’d still have to snake your arms free. So… that was also out. You can’t force your way out… so you’d need them to come to you. To force them into opening the gate. Options were limited. Arms were always important, just yank one of those off and hang onto it… You follow this train of thought and allow your mind to wander. What if you just nabbed a hostage (somehow)? It’d give you a reason to be let out, give them a reason to follow your demands. Couldn’t be some low-level lab tech; not after how they were so unquestionably (and suspiciously) nonchalant when you ate a man’s leg last week. Had to be one of these four.
You’re now fully checked out and drift up to the surface of your tank, take a good look at the bars, narrow your dark eyes. Like a curious toddler: the way you’re sliding your mouth open, inquisitively teething at a few of the metal bars. An action that instantly garners attention from Graves.
“Hey, hey knock that off!” He calls, chastising you like he would a pet trying to dig up a houseplant. And you (reluctantly) oblige, drone out a quiet hiss, slide back and away. It takes longer than you’d hoped for their conversation to return to normal, all eyes always warily watching you. The fins that where your ears would be were you human flatten, lower, make you look like a pet fresh out of a scolding. Which, you guess you technically were. Your mind is expertly partitioned into halves -- one working in the background to further elaborate on potential escape ideas, the other watching with a previously unseen interest at this little gaggle of men talking away.
“So they just want us to hang around until we can finally put the thing down?” Price asks, closes the dossier, hands it back over to Graves.
“I can help with that.” Ghost quickly adds -- maybe a little too enthusiastically.
“D’ye think she has a name?” Soap asks, rubbing at his jaw, clearly deep in thought. A question that garners disbelieving looks from the other three.
“That
thing
broke your leg. Don’t get familiar with it. You’ll just end up like…” Graves’s voice tapers out, like he was incapable of even saying the boy’s name now. Things are awkward now. And not the fun kind. “Get it figured out. Someone has to stay behind to feed the thing. It’s been a week, and we’ve had to switch to chum on account of this new setup. Just don’t go sticking your hands between the bars.” He gives Price one last slap to the shoulder before turning and leaving. And now there were three.
Little time is wasted before they start furiously playing rock paper scissors to determine who would get stuck on feeding duty. You wouldn’t’ve pegged any of them as being overly competitive; until now. Price wins -- so easily that he’s getting accused of cheating -- and now it's down to Ghost and Soap. This was fascinating to watch, your free entertainment. Plus you’ve learned some new words, vocabulary staples like
fuck
,
cunt
,
shit
. Very insightful. After all is said and done it’s Soap that is the loser, is the one who has to stay behind. Ghost and Price exchange idle pleasantries and exit, calling out to have Soap find them when he is done. He acted reluctant but there was something else in his quickened pace; the way he hurried to grab a bucket from another room, hurry back with a crooked smile.
“Alright, here we go.” A short ladder is slid over, propped to the side of your tank. He sets the bucket down on the grating and you gradually float up to meet him. Even from here you can smell your impending meal, if it was in you to salivate the tank would be overflowing by now. The fish was a nice bonus too, even if it was chunked up into chum. He snaps a glove on and tosses you the first handful -- not before making a disgusted little grunt at the squelching noises. Subpar at best, not the most savoury thing you’d ever eaten, but you were not in a place to be picky. Food was food. And you sure wasted no time swallowing up everything in one big swoop. You can see him moving for another serving and you’re already shifting over, opening and flattening your toothy mouth all the way into that not-quite-180* angle; chomping on the metal bars and using them to hold you in place like you’re trying to be a sentient garbage disposal.
“Needy needy,” he lyrically taunts, your only response being a rumbling, deep hiss. He’s not exactly wrong. You were just very rapidly approaching hangry territory. The next handful of food disappears the second he drops it in. In the meantime he leans there, watching, rather transfixed by the smooth movement of your unnaturally long tongue. It lathes across row after row of teeth, meticulously, making sure you left no morsel behind. When you’re both satisfied, he continues. He doesn’t seem to notice -- but you do. Each serving is dropped closer and closer to the bars, like he wanted to have you eat it out of his hand. Can tell by the delay between feedings that he’s running out of food. You had yet to make a move, and maybe that’s why he felt so comfortable getting this close. If not this one, then the next. Your mind was running on autopilot.
Again the gloved hand clenches, lowers, sets directly against the metal bars now, opens to drop minced fish. And again you thankfully swallow every last bone, every last scale, every last bit of everything. You hadn’t planned on it but he
was
right there. Without thinking your tongue swipes over teeth again, moves, ends up sliding up and out until loosely wrapped around his wrist. The absolute sound this man makes is enough to get you to frightfully recoil, shrink back, shoot yourself to the furthest reach of the tank. It was a high-pitch yelp-scream, a denotation you had truly caught him off guard, that he wasn’t expecting that. And to be fair, neither were you. Humans could make noises, yes, but this was… new. He’s leaned back on the ladder now, clenching his wrist with his other hand, grinning and laughing at the absurdity of it all. While all you can do is further shrink away, look at him with pure confusion. Something is mumbled out to you but it’s too muffled to hear.
Before you even have time to process anything else, he’s gone.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
You wonder, casually, how much was left. They’d arrived every day lately in search of blood, of your guts, of whatever else could be feasibly harvested without killing you. It left you fatigued, on-edge, sore. Oh what you would not give to just be left alone for more than a day or two at a time. A week, even -- you’d trade anything. Almost hard for you to imagine at this point. Anymore the water in your tank was always tinted a dark blue, the blood from your perpetual wounds constantly seeping out. With everything they’d taken you still find yourself surprised at how much left there was to give. Figured you’d be completely shrivelled up by now; but each day they show up and each day it continues to flow from your arms.
A week, a month, a year, time was less finite and more of an abstract construct to you now. Still in that same tank with the metal grating, but you’d been moved one room over into what could only be classified as a larger meeting room. Not nearly as tall or wide as the first place you’d been stuck in -- with the impossibly high ceiling, the walkway, the skylights -- this was… something else. An odd medium between gymnasium and supply closet. It gave just enough room for the bleach-scented men to come in, issue heavy threats, sedate you for whatever it was needed harvested that day, and then leave you alone. If you were lucky they’d remember to feed you after. Other times someone would hurry in, distracted by the phone in their hand, throw a bucket of food over the top of your enclosure, exit before even seeing that it landed correctly to drop the lazily-chopped fish in. You’d gotten good at the only thing that provided any happiness: the game of Tongue-Only Bucket Flip. Maneater, public menace, alien creature from depths unknown, bucket flipper -- just one more title to add to your collection.
Aside from entire limbs, you idly wondered what these men would eye to take next from you. They’d kept the few spare teeth that’d fallen out on their own, scales, the one claw you’d accidentally sheared down the middle and had to rip off. All things that would regrow in due time, things you already shed. Would think that after all this time they’d understand you on a molecular level. So why did they keep coming back? Always taking things they already have. Stockpiling, maybe? Trying to understand the inner machinations of these little humans only made your head hurt. Maybe someday; just not today (or anytime soon).
You were deep in thought, trying to shove your face as close to the tank pump as possible. Hair that was already too long and left to roll into a singular giant knot had been untouched, unkempt -- not since Lewis. Held an unwanted weight to it now, tugging at your scalp ever so slightly whenever you would move around. Were you desperate enough to trade a finger or two for a comb? Probably. Your arms had been stuck, locked behind your back for so long, atrophied, that you doubted you’d even be able to hold anything. Might as well. While you are running the pros and cons of somehow gnawing your own arm off for trade purposes, you hear the doors slide open.
It’s the one you accidentally impaled. Well, you remember it as an accident. He’d fallen on you (and
through
you) in the midst of that first escape attempt. Just a tragic and unavoidable mishap; a workplace hazard.
The older man stood in this doorway, peering out with those singular-focus eyes; veiled by that native suspicion all men held for you. Bitter lines tortured the edges of his mouth, where it could be seen through the fringes of a brown beard. Could that
thing
be called a beard? You’d never seen one like it -- not that you held a vast array of facial hair knowledge or variances. Looks like he’s the delivery boy today, greets you with a quick grunt that tells you all you need to know. You shoot a quick glance at him from the corner of your eyes, continue to try having the weak artificial current untangle your hair. It feels like it’s only making things worse. Maybe if you turned fast enough you could snag at least some of it with your teeth, saw off as much as possible. It wouldn’t look good by any measure but at least it’d be out of the way. So you try. But your hair is knotted too close to your scalp; all you end up doing is spinning too fast and making yourself dizzy. Price comments on your bizarre actions and you try to look at him, fail, end up running head-first into the glass instead.
It’s embarrassing how loud the sound was. The fact he’s brave enough to laugh at you only makes it worse. You don’t particularly care for the opinions of humans but this one? You’ll have to pluck his eyes and tongue out; no way to spread what he just saw. Maybe skin his entire face just to be safe. Already your mind gets to work at how you can achieve this immediately. All you wanted was to get your joke of a hair under control, to make it manageable, to have it not be a rat’s nest. But you can’t even have that. So you bellow, low and guttural, the water around you violently vibrating from the sound. That specific noise that denoted ‘
I am actively thinking about murder.
’ Price is, as usual, unphased by your little display. It’s infuriating. Were you in the wild -- unrestrained and free -- he’d be arcing his body away, doing any and everything to escape. Now you’re just an attraction; something to gawk at in their spare time. You wish you’d finished it. Finished
them
.
He still had the food bucket in hand, still did when he promptly turned, left the room without a word, returned some time later with the other two. And now there were three, great. Ghost with his usual ominous stare, Soap doing…
things
, Price wearing a genuine look of curiosity. You don’t like that. Instinctively you back away (not that it would make a difference). In Ghost’s grasp was that thin, long rifle that you know contains sedatives: the little shrimp-things that always make your consciousness eject from your body. Body is quick to curl, lay flat along the tank floor, mouth open and hissing to show off your many,
many
gnarled teeth. A warning. One they didn’t seem bothered by. You longed for the old days -- when you were the apex predator.
Managed to dodge the first shot (somehow), launch to the opposite end of the tank, try to keep as mobile as possible. Yet Ghost is still perched on his little step ladder, aiming down directly at you. He doesn’t miss again. As soon as the thing pierces into the flesh on your back, you feel it. That luring pull of dreaming that you were yet to overpower. From time to time your body randomly twitches, flounders, settles into a limp line. You watch, as if it was happening to someone else, as your body gradually floats up to the surface like a half-bloated corpse. Behind you, the sound of the heavy metal grating being unlocked, moved, your tank being opened.
Vision is blurry, out of focus, slow to move. A thin metallic pole is shoved past you and used to herd your form closer to the edge, where a less-than-thrilled Ghost awaited. Head half-submerged and drugged, you could still see he struggled with an intense dislike for his ward. For you. You’d maimed his comrades: not
him
. So why was he so angry?
“Why do we have to do this again?” He asks, distrust evident.
“Should’ve seen it. Thing rammed right into the wall.” Price replays the memory, chuckles to himself. “It’s been long enough. Figure we can help it out, gain a favour.”
This, most likely, was true.
“Captain, you can’t bargain with an animal. You think this thing even understands?” Unsurprisingly, Ghost is against this plan. If anything, they were trying to
train
you.
Across the room, Soap digs into a small black bag, approaches, grabs a thick comb.
Price’s lips went thin, but he nodded. The captain sighs and goes to idly loiter, leaning against your tank. Ghost remains where he is and yanks you closer by one of your bound arms, a makeshift handle. Just outside of view there was a clamouring, Soap appearing beside him on a ladder of his own shortly after. It’s not in you to thrash, attack, rip through skin and bone -- so all you do is let out a pathetic, offkey hiss. The flesh of your throat weakly inflates, vibrating. One of them (you’re not sure which) laughs at this. Dark eyes stare hard at you and you’re suddenly much more focused on
not
looking at Ghost. In your mind you picture that you’re elsewhere: home, marvelling in the endless darkness.
Soap leans in, touches you. Body is still paralysed; all you can do is make your skin shudder -- akin to a horse trying to ward off flies. You find yourself getting immersed in the floating dreaminess that was heavy sedation: eyes that can’t stay open, body weighless, mind in the process of leaving. You can close your eyes now and disappear. But… There’s hands. Eyes open, slowly, glide to look up. Soap has the back of his hand gently placed against your cheek -- brushing between the sharp bone structure and the line of teeth directly below. He watches you with eyes that held a denied compassion. A sea creature, supposed to disgust him. You think you see him smile.
Narcotic dullness fills your eyes. You can’t place the instant you fade away, but you do. Awareness lay deep within this sedation and lost somewhere else entirely.
Slowly, Soap reaches over, grabs a careful fistful of your hair, shifts your head and neck around so it’s easier to handle. As best he can, Soap parts your hair into two halves. In the small bag he brought with him were combs, a pair of scissors, ties, a well-worn brush. None of them were stylists, but they made it work. They tried to not randomly chop entire handfuls off and instead opted to try and comb things out. It was a good thing you were so out: Ghost was less-than-gentle with his half. His thoughts went into an angry frustration that he even had to do this. A complete waste of time. Maybe that’s why he was so liberal with his use of the scissors.
When it was all said and done you technically had proper haircare. No longer a massive ball and tangled mess: now it was combed out, randomly layered and missing large chunks, free-flowing again. Like it had been when you first arrived, after the nights when Lewis would sit perched and play with your hair to keep it from being messy. While you didn’t miss him, it was nice.
After an unknown amount of time later you lazily return to your body, to awakeness. Takes a while for your limbs to regain feeling. The smooth glide of your head through the water was the first thing you noticed. Could actually turn and -- had they --
The filter on the opposite end of your tank is now making angry noises. You can see from here the thing is having a hard time intaking the halo of cut hair they’d left in here with you. Probably not the best plan. You think it’ll probably still function (for now). To top it all off there was a bucket of slurried fish already on its side just waiting for you to get into it. A deep distrust roots itself in your gut now and you get to work eating. The fact these men had apparently decided to help you now, after everything, was unsettling. Your abject suffering before hadn’t swayed them; so why the sudden kindness? Maybe they were hoping to avoid being gored again on your next -- inevitable -- escape. That was off the table, non-negotiable, something that you had already set your heart on.
You don’t like it; don’t like them. Mind drifts off trying to think of any ulterior motives. Every search only brought up the same thing: some possible pardon from your wrath. You’re sure that’s what Lewis had hoped for, too. That definitely turned out great for him -- just like it would for them.
A mutual distrust was now well-established between all parties; not like it wasn’t there before. Just more out in the open now. These men give with one hand and take with the other. You won’t get something for nothing. But whatever it was they were after -- you were already set on not obliging.
Dinner was gone, the lingering drowsiness providing the extra push needed to settle in for sleep. You curl, wrap yourself into a tight ball of fins and scales, and make sure to face towards the flow of water. Had to make sure your newly-freed hair wouldn’t re-tangle itself in your rest. In the last glimmering moments of awareness you find yourself annoyed that you are
still
so focused on what it is that these men want.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
There’s a reason these people don’t like you — something you don’t understand after all this time. And the distance between trained and tamed only grew with each passing day; the equivalent of being upset at water for being wet. You don’t belong here. Yet here
they
are:
still
getting habitually mauled, maimed, disfigured, killed. Made you wonder if this was how they treated
all
beasts in captivity — or just
you
. To their credit they were technically using proper precaution, you just didn’t care for it. You were in another bout of frustrated burnout that came and went every few weeks. Be a defeated, sad mess; an overtly-overly-aggressive animal; a curious and docile creature to be studied. Your moods in predictable phases now. Something you attributed to the rot that had taken over your brain from lack of… anything. Confinement did not suit you. Made you stir-crazy, a bit mad, bored, emotional. It was an experience you would not wish on your worst enemy. Sure you could continue to fight, survive, but for how much longer you grew more and more unsure. Hadn’t even noticed that you’d gone back to swimming in the same circle all day, over and over again, like it would somehow grant you a different result eventually. Maybe if this kept going long enough you could somehow harness a whirlpool and… use that to escape. Somehow. The fact you’d even come up with something so stupid just makes you close your eyes, shake your head in shame. This place was rotting your mind. Just another way to die.
You conjure an impossibly wide smile, use the expression to play with your jaw, seeing how far you could extend it out, figuring just how much you might be able to scoop up. An act interrupted by what was now
your
personal posse of humans. All these oversized military men were still dwarfed by you -- and you made it a point to constantly remind them of this whenever possible. But there was someone else with them now. A shorter man with cropped hair, bright eyes, a certain unplaceable
something
in his gait. Not quite a limp, an injury? As they move closer you catch your own reflection in the glass of your prison, long body bracing for whatever
this
was out of sheer instinct. The bioluminescent patches of your scaled skin glaring, bright, distracting and acting as a line to where the real danger was: your face. You exist now in a universe whose dimensions were outlined by the threatening whims of your captors. And you never let your displeasure be hidden.
“Is this it then?” The short man asks, eyes wide in a reverent disbelief. He takes a step forward, backward, fidgets with the badge on a lanyard around his neck. You make out the word
‘guest’
in block lettering along the top.
“Yessir. In the flesh.” Graves clicks his tongue, stares you down. His attentive posture begins to annoy you. You imagine the sweet-slick taste of his bones being crushed between your jaws, lapping up the spilling marrow like a starving beast. Something about him now made you intensely aware he was one of the
primitives
. He continues to stare and you drift to the surface, keep your front to them, hiss out a low warning. Need for action fought lethargy in the cold water.
“It’s so crazy, to think this… thing—” Short Guest speaks up again, is cut off by Price.
“How
are
your legs? The rehab helping? Read the report on your convoy, the IED.”
Short Guest huffs out a happy-nervous sound, scratches the back of his head, sticks one of his legs out straight as if to demonstrate. “Oh aye, sir. Hard to believe I was told I’d never walk again. And now it’s been what, a few months of treatment? I’m hoping I’ll be able to run a 5K by the end of the year.” His optimism was contagious, the other men copying his smile. Price gives his shoulder a firm tap.
“Turns out all you needed was help from one of—” Graves gestures to you and doesn’t bother to hide the disdain in his voice. “—these
things
. Y’all wouldn’t believe the things we’re still finding out about just the spinal fluid.”
Behind him, Soap whistles, impressed.
“Cannae believe that. Like it never happened.” Just as Price had done, he leans to pat the man on his opposite shoulder.
They laughed at everything Soap said — terms and words and jokes you did not understand. Overlapping voices a constant assault of your awareness while you could do nothing but watch. Your dark eyes jerk here, there; questing, measuring. How kind can you be expected to be? Looking bored, Graves motions for everyone to follow him off to do something else. But Short Guest moves with an obvious reluctance. Instead he takes up a position flush against your tank, rests his hand on the glass like he was trying to personally interact with you. He used a phrase you recognised from your time with Lewis — ‘thank you.’ And you float there, eyes narrow and shadowed, your glare and low drone of a hiss a clear warning. So you descend, sink to hover roughly eye-level with him. Measuring, waiting, observing minutiae. Ghost, sensing the growing tension, moved a step nearer, fixed his attention to the fish reclining in the tank. Shor Guest is distracted and you make your move.
You arch your neck, stare at him with a look of apprehension, lunge with mouth open at the wall of your tank with the hope of breaking through. Knew you wouldn’t; but it was worth it to try anyway. To demonstrate your boldness in the face of someone who had apparently profited from
this
. From you. Short Guest jumps out of his skin, is so startled that he stumbles over his own feet and onto the ground. The remaining men hurriedly walk over, help the man up.
A tremor passed along Price’s face. “I presume you know how dangerous that was.” There was a previously unheard sternness in his voice, low and profoundly serious.
“I didn’t think—” An undertone of comfortable humour, Short Guest laughs nervously. Because they were grouped so closely together you act without thinking. Wide tail fans out, swipes around you, launches a heavy scoop of water up and out to douse the men (and everything around them). You turn your laughing gaze at the men and grimace what could be a gloating look. Expressions were still something you were working on.
Graves signalled to all around him that the audience was at an end, a vein throbbing at his temple. It was not a question of
if
you were going to pay for this, but
when
. It was dangerous to ‘act out’ like this; especially around Graves. Man held a zero-tolerance policy for your very existence. Your reverie is broken by the sound of rushed footsteps, and you were alone again.
The rest of the day was uneventful. That day was a dull, lost witness to the cycle of the sun. Unsurprisingly you were denied dinner in an amusing beginning to your payback. You wonder if they knew how long you could truthfully go without food; how perfectly crafted for your native environment you actually were. It’d be for the best to keep them in the dark on this too, to let them think they hold power over you by skipping a single disgusting meal. And immediately your mind goes to work plotting up the best way to act, to put on a show of urgency, sadness, that you were in fact actually starving to death and were actively wasting away under their care. Body resets into its usual giant knot and you sigh, wind down from your day, limbs wrapping and folding in on themselves. Well, to the best of your ability. Passively you wonder what it would take to get your arms free if only for a day.
It was low, quiet, but you caught it: the sound of the door to this massive room opening and closing, purposefully dampened. You shift your head to peer between the tangle of your tail out into the darkness.
Now you see there are other
things
up among the equipment. Further off, reclining on a lofty ledge, you spy a living mass: irregular, ghoulish. It seemed without form, save for an unclean, skull-face that looked out, vilely, from somewhere about its middle. And then you see others — there were maybe a dozen of them — seemed to grow out of the shadows. Several you recognize almost immediately as the ones who busied around the place at desks and stanchions; others were strange to you, utterly so, beyond the power of your diminished fish mind to conceive. Face coverings were distorting your vision in ways you didn’t know you were possible. This was new. The other half for your actions earlier?
Cautiously, sluggishly, you unwind, keeping yourself decisively small and away from the glass wall. Unannounced visits -- especially ones in the middle of the night with no warning -- were seldom a good thing here. Eventually he comes into focus: Soap sliding forward, hushing all of the other men and blindly reaching his arm back for something. One of his faceless peers hands him a blue bag that makes
so much
noise when he touches it. This just makes you more confused. Your last encounter with him had been by all technical means
something
, so why was he now showing up here and now? Never once does your wary gaze drift from him; fixed firmly in place. There’s… laughter? It’s quiet, quickly silenced, replaced with a different chuffed chuckle. Visibly you frown.
But Soap doesn’t seem to mind. He climbs his way up the short ramp to be waist-high with the top of your tank, man grinning the entire time.
“No, use mine.” He instructs, fishing what you know to be a cellphone out from his pocket. Hands it to one of the other men who does something, holds it up, points it at your tank.
“Fuck’sake.” Ghost cuts in once he sees the other man is actually going through with it. Something that only encourages Soap. He tears the bag open, shoves his hand in, turns to face the other men who were now settling into a semi-circle around this whole spectacle. One of them nods up to him.
“Do fish monsters like Fuego Takis? Let’s find out.” Those sure were words. Soap grabs a handful of something, dips his hand (with some skilful manoeuvring) through the metal grating, rests the back of his hand against the frigid water. This was a trap. Had to be. What other explanation was there? You don’t move. Body keeps in its corner, still, cautious eyes staying on the man who was appearing to offer you something. You catch a glimpse of one of them getting caught and floating out from his hand, the size and shape only confusing you further. A… fish? No, there was red-orange
stuff
wafting off it, the snack bloating and softening above you. What the fuck was even going on? As if seeking approval you snap your head to the side, focus your sight, immediately find the Skull-Faced one in the small crowd. Entire face was covered, so trying to get a read or go-ahead was useless. Everyone else though — they were some bastard combination of fear, excitement, joy. Were they… waiting on your reaction? One of them shouts at you to move and you visibly flinch at the sudden noise.
Above you, Soap shakes his hand as if to entice you, speaks little words of encouragement you can barely hear. He turns back to the other men, shrugs, is absolutely thrilled when one of them points out you were actually doing it. Slower than you ever had before you eventually slide your way upward, still maybe an arm’s length away from where his hand was settled. Which meant you were now close enough to whatever it was that had gotten free earlier. You tactfully usher the still-bloated snack away from his hand before deciding to eat it. No sudden movements, no hinting that you planned on trying to rip his hand off. He’d been one to help you earlier, yes, but…
When is a gift not a gift?
Ghost obviously sensed the tensions growing between you and everyone else, and was disturbed by it — even if he didn’t show it.
So you inhale the half-dissolved offering. It was… unpleasant. The taste itself was tolerable (at best), but there was an unplaceable extra that followed, made your mouth feel like it was filled with something crawling, something alive. You make your displeasure known, pinching your eyes shut, shaking your head, hissing out a quiet noise that meant nothing at all. Above you are the sounds of a disbelieving Soap. The handful you had refused earlier was apparently beyond saving and he scoops them back out, mutters something, replaces it with a fresh batch. This time you glide over, cautious, slow, pausing before getting within range of his lowered hand. You make obvious, exaggerated motions to try and tell everyone ‘
I’m not going to try anything.
’ Wide jaws open, rises to just below his hand, half-closes around it so that long, pale tongue of yours can get to work shovelling whatever this was into your waiting mouth. At least this time around he doesn’t make that shockingly-shrill noise; instead opting to laugh and immediately pull his limb out
just in case.
This was even worse. Is this something humans actively ate?
Willingly
? You maybe swallow half, sputter and spit the other half out, recoiling and doing your best to clear any trace of it from your palette. An act that gets laughs and scoffs from anyone watching. Had you… failed? Not passed whatever obscure test this was meant to be?
“Guess not! Aye, more for me then.” Soap says tilting the bag back to get a loose mouthful of the disgusting food. “Comment what you think I should try next—”
“No.” Ghost immediately cuts in. “You’re not posting this shite.”
There was some back-and-forth banter between the two and Soap eventually gives in, hopping back down and grabbing his phone again. More laughing, more shoulder pats, more little noises of disbelief. No one says another word to you and just as quickly as they had appeared this group of men were gone.
What the fuck had just happened.
You wait, thinking there was going to be something else, a part two. But no. Just you, alone, with disgusting food getting stuck in the fine combs of your tank filter. At least with all of their poking, prodding, bruising, you knew what their end goal was. But this? No idea. You gave up on trying to make sense of it all after a while, opting to return to a (mostly) less-than-restful sleep.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
You had sworn an oath of eternal and eventual revenge that day. Vowed to personally crush the man’s windpipe yourself. That fiend, that menace, that horrible little creature called Soap . Ever since his bizarre little stunt of feeding you disgusting food, random people would toss random things into your tank in passing while no one was looking. Phones held up, ready, recording to get a reaction. If it was actual food you wouldn’t be complaining. Not this. After one particularly excessively sour and gummy-thing had been tossed in, you were over it. That one alone made you think you were actually dying. And now, because of this all, you were being wheeled around by a new entourage — one much less engaging. People coming and going in a peculiar stream of unknown faces. Your attention was more focused on how you had pulled back, tried to retreat in on, curl yourself up on this uncomfortably gurney. Something you had been fed was now making you vomit any time you ate. Unpleasant for you and remarkably frustrating to everyone else. It was difficult to attempt their little tests and measurements when you were violently ill like this. You squirm against the unaccommodating metal, try to alleviate pressure from your shoulders. Hands had been restrained like this behind your back for so long it was a struggle to imagine it had ever been otherwise. Those were almost-memories. Body gets jostled just enough to send a shooting pain down your arm, a soft throbbing, making the muscle twitch along your jaw. What was the first thing you’d do when freed? Make sure you can even move or rotate your arms anymore. Imagine your bones would be so brittle now from atrophy. Compulsively you open and close your fists, again and again and again, attempting to keep blood flowing and that creeping tingling at bay. A task not remotely helped by… all this . How many times had they taken you out today? Fed you through some massive rotating machinery, made sure you stayed still for pictures, whatever it was they felt like doing to you. You’d settle for just being able to eat again. They were out of tape (or too lazy), opting instead to fix your mouth closed using a wide and suspiciously soft belt-thing. Maybe on purpose, maybe on accident, but they’d notched it two spaces too tight; gnarled teeth digging sharply into the thin skin on your face. The idea had been Price’s, and you hated him for it. You were set on your back but could still feel the slow ooze of blood from the constant pinpricks of pressure. Though you were able to keep yourself somewhat sane by remembering this would not be forever. Just temporary. Something you think the other men noticed, picked up on, as well. There was still an uncountable distance between being tamed and being trained, though. You knew your current situation, understood it, gathered that it wouldn’t be beneficial to try and maim while under such close observation. The wider man — Price — knees one of the other Shadows for getting too close. Hand had been maybe two inches up from your mouth when all parties knew what could happen. None of these other men you recognise. Only ones you’d truly memorised were the three you attacked, one or two of the more persistent scientists, a woman from the medical staff. But these were all just copies of the same blank template: all dressed in the same dark clothing, the same uninterested expressions, all carrying the same impatient habits and behaviours. You didn’t trust the way they could appear and vanish from nowhere; multiple shadows of men contorting on walls like creatures seeking their own forme. The jackals gather. The questioning silence of the moment was broken by the sound of someone whistling as he walked down the outer hall. Whistling was stilled by a guardsman's barked command as it came opposite the door. Graves .In the abrupt stillness in the moment, you edge yourself into a position where you could study his face. Slyness touched by respect for another’s privacy; a movement of necessity. He saw your glare, shrugged, lips pulling taut into a flat line. How like Lewis: that gesture, you thought. But that boy was dead. Felled by your own hand, chewed up, spat out, just an obstacle. So why was he (once again) presenting himself in your mind? You don’t care — didn’t care — won’t care about him. Got what he and everyone else in this forsaken place deserves. As if trying to verbally explain it, you huff in a shallow agitation, wallowing in your own internal frustration. A struggle that Graves, and perhaps even Price, can practically hear. Maybe that’s why he was staring you down like this. Gaze narrows, watches as you with the eyes of a careful predator, taps his foot impatiently periodically. You don’t like it. Don’t like the extra attention. Don’t like him. At least the feeling was mutual. Tell yourself too many times it’d have to be one of the three men who initially stopped you from escaping -- first on the list of people to take out as soon as you're able. A list of priorities, Graves was inching his way closer and closer to that coveted top spot with every encounter now -- was he doing this intentionally? Just going out of his way to earn your ire? Rack up points knowing how this would all end? Currently it was the only explanation your exhausted mind could patch together. Secretly you hoped it was the case. He’d be so delicious: breaking apart like dry sand between your jaws, crumbling, shattering into dust like the good-for-nothing he was. If this was how you envisioned your time ending with him… How did he picture the opposite? Would he be the one to come for you once these people finally decided enough was enough? Probably. From what you were able to observe he was still a tad upset over the whole ‘eating his nephew’ part. But the boy knew what he was signing up for. You'd warned him. Warned them all. It’d been so clear, so urgent, so simple and articulate; buried message in the corpses you’d left in your wake. All of them . They’d had their chance. This is on them. None of them should’ve come out here -- taken you out here.It’d be accurate to say your understanding of their language was passable at best. You’d been listening and stringing meanings together when able; but you were by no means ready to hold full conversations. This knowledge is put to the test when you hear Graves stand close, murmur a question or two to the other men, issuing out pats to the shoulder when they would nod in response. You knew maybe one or two words… The rest being too quiet to understand from where you were stranded; an island alone on your little wheeled gurney. You think they were bickering about your restraints based on your limited vocabulary and their gestures. Did they need to free your arms up for something? Just the idea of it sends your mind skittering off to the possibilities: maybe if you had your arms free you could chance another escape. Or, at the very least, dismember more of these men. How many more would you have to go after before they understood, before they got the hint, before they had the knowledge that you did not belong here ? “What are you doing out here?” Graves speaks, bursting the bubble of tense silence in the room. Poignant tone guides you to the man he was talking at.“My job. Should try it sometime.” Price’s tone annoyed, like he was bothered the other man had the audacity to even address him. Graves raises his head, his hands (palms facing out, a pacifying gesture), steps forward twice. “Woah now, I only ask because Major General Cormac got here last night. You didn’t… get that message?” He scoffs, perks his eyebrows up incredulously out of sheer disbelief. Some common errand lost in the bureaucratic shuffle. “Met with him this morning already, said he wanted to meet with ‘whoever else’s in charge here.’ I mean…” Graves makes a little noise. “You know how he gets. Man doesn’t like being left waiting.” Price has this unexplainable habit of standing near you during every transport. This was no different. These featureless other men disagree and go out of their way to antagonise. Unremarkable Shadows gradually enter and talk amongst themselves in the opposite end of the room; eventually they meander over to where Price and Graves loiter. “What's it to you old man?” One of them asks, tired of waiting. Price watches the shadowed dark before him where Graves stands. You turned to him, your eyes were wet, he spoke slowly to explain things. But they berated the old man and swore at him until he moved off, muttering. And how else could it be? How these things end: in confusion and curses and blood. Part of you leaves with him and you cringe at the sensation. Even with the board brim of his hat you can see a look that stuck around for an instant too long; a mutual wariness not for eachother, but everyone else. Graves makes a comment, lets out a practised and fake little laugh, slyly glancing at his watch a little too frequently. Inpatient. The men with him, his Shadows, big one final maybe-joke before they all bump fists, nod, leave. Behind them the door clicks shut and suddenly you are nervous. It was just you and Graves now. Just a man and a wild-eyed monster-fish, best of friends, you could smell the simmering hatred from here. The fact he had managed to send everyone else away was the last thing you’d wanted. For an unknown amount of time he stands there, unmoving, and you stare at eachother in this stiff silence. A tossup on who would be dumb enough to make the first move. Seems he had the same thought. Rather than just striking you down here he walks around, stands at the head of the gurney, starts pushing you along at a leisurely pace. Meandering and in no hurry, like it was a midday stroll around the park. Made you think (hope) maybe he was just taking you somewhere else with normal intentions.The trip was deceptively short — at one point Graves had stopped to pick your tail up because he thought it was getting too close to the ground. Made sure to tuck it up and onto the cart with practised and delicate hands that made your skin crawl; the way he acted so kind while harbouring such obvious resentment and hatred for you. You knew this new (and unfortunately) familiar sensation that you were about to be sick: this time rather from an anxious terror rather than upset guts. Could maybe try to fight him off but you were already at such a monumental disadvantage that you doubted it’d even do you any good. You were going to die here.Wheels you down a hallway, then another, then another. There’s a large metal door that he props open and (mostly successfully) guides you through. It’s a stairwell: one clearly too far out of the way to ever be used practically. All concrete and metal; pale with dust, a shade of figures erased upon a board. Even with your limited vantage you can see the clear set of fresh footprints that darkened the steps ahead. Recent. Someone had been here lately, walked up to where you were now. Scouted the area out. Taken you to where he could hide from god.By the time you realise it’s already too late. Your body contorts wildly to worm your way off the gurney and to freedom but he’s already moving. His wide hands grabbing the leading edge, flipping the entire thing over, easily sending you toppling down the first flight of stairs. With nothing to catch or stop yourself you feel every sharp corner on the way down. The landing has you disoriented but only temporarily — immediately you’re loping, sliding, ambling with your nose shoved to the ground to put any amount of distance between you and him. Feet will always be faster than stomach-crawling; he’s caught up with you in no time at all. It was hard to guess what his next move would be exactly but you can only hazard it will involve more pain. A guess that was not accurate enough. The arc of his leg is wide and dramatic and he delivers the first of what would be many kicks to your core. Pain shoots along the length of your entire foundation, a great electric kite which leaves no nerve ending untouched. Even with the sound being plainly audible, both of you knew he had broken something. An auspicious and easy start for him. Graves doesn’t stop there: alternating freely between kicking, punching; when he needed a break he would just grab a handful of your hair and use it as a handle to bash your face into either the railing or nearest stair, whichever he felt like at the time. When particularly in the throes of it he spoke a name but you never spoke back. Told you he was doing this for his nephew, for himself, for all the men you’d eaten or invariably fucked up during your time here. It was revenge. Plain and simple. Intermittently you could (partially) see and hear the chittering of your knocked-out teeth spraying out the cold floor; little souvenirs for future cleaners that you think would get into every nook and cranny. You could try for a thousand years and still never be able to retaliate — not like this. Normal motions turned into frantic flailing so you can try to coil your tail around any part of him, strangle him out that way. And every time ends in failure. It’s only when you feel that specific tightness behind your neck that you realise you are unable to breathe; suffocating in your own blood. It floods in and out of the thicker, wider gill slits on your neck and clavicle like water at the hull of a damaged ship. To try and preserve sight you close that extra membrane over your eyes, the world now clouded and obscured in thin parts by the webbing of veins. Something that doesn’t serve to do you much good in the long-run. At one point Graves lands enough successive and precise kicks that it actually jostles the belt off your skull entirely. You think he steps back, wary, thinking you might use the opening to fight back. But you can’t even do that. Basic biology dictated you could unhinge your jaw; make it kinetic; eat things larger than your mouth. When the muscle, ligaments, bones themselves had been so thoroughly destroyed that you couldn't even move it if you wanted. And you did — so very badly. It’s so pulverised and ruined that you can see the thing — your own bottom jaw — laying out in front of you out of the periphery of your sightline. Was a wonder the thing is even still attached. Maybe he was thinking the same thing. Content in your inability to fight back, Graves continues. He didn’t stop, not yet, merely moved to a different area. Torso, head, arms; it didn’t make much difference to him, as long as he was inflicting the hurt you had onto him and his men. By now you can’t breathe right. Never want to breathe again. After one particularly dedicated blow to the side of your head you notice your vision is gone completely. There’s muddied areas where you can distinguish light from dark but that was the extent of it. You’re just along for the ride while the one-sided fight carries on for an eternity. How many times had he punted you down different flights of stairs? There was no use or practicality in keeping count. Following an awkward landing he noticed your arms stuck out and away from your body and shifted his attention there. Could he even wear those boots again? Not after they’d be layered in your blood in viscera; not after he brought one down on your outstretched arm; not after you can hear the bone splintering beneath the weight of it, embedding into the sole. The next crunch is wetter. The one after that deeper. Punching through into a darker space. You lean forward, waiver, an insubstantial shape of a person. Just a thing now.Your body was failing; slouched lazily and crying like a beaten animal. Maybe if you could see you’d be able to realise how abysmally bleak of a state you were in currently. The overlapping arches of arterial spray along the walls, ceiling, steps. Hearing wasn’t really something you were capable of anymore but you could swear you heard Graves hunched over you: breathing heavy and ragged, sweat dripping from him onto you. A real workout for him more than anything. His parting act being questionably affectionate — touching his raw bloodied knuckle to your cheek and making a noise with his mouth. Bloodied and spliced up hair clings to your beaten head like a veil and keeps him from touching your bare skin. Split lip jerks and drools; chest rattling in a full-body heave to try and breathe.Quietly you lay in that cratered void, watching the white hot stars go rifling down your blackened vision in the dark. Or sleeping with your alien heart beating faster than it was ever meant to, just waiting to die. You dream, shallow and long, of diving. Sprawled out, free to feel the too-cold water sting your skin for a blink in time before sensation fades. You go from layer to layer, deeper and deeper still, slick flesh drawn taught with the increased pressure. All about lying in shadow. Long buttresses of light fade out quickly enough and the great sleeping god of a scavenged whalefall is the first thing to greet you. Behind you are wet footsteps so distant they could not be heard. Nothing moved. In the afternoon the alarm went off: lights flashing and obnoxious sounds blaring to denote some critical event. Three men set forth first, having been already gathered and talking amongst themselves over the odd behaviours noticed earlier. Major General Cormac was indeed fresh-in but had not spoken to Graves; had no intention to speak to him or Price. In his eyes that was just a waste of time. Not when there were more important people to brief on this whole dysfunctional setup. A crowd of people gather just outside the cafeteria, are herded by another line of men who acted important, equal numbers headed off in opposite directions. Doors are clanked shut, boots stirring on tile, the dull and distant yelling of someone asking just what the fuck was going on. Behind a corner out steps Graves, hand running quickly through short-cropped hair to try and shake any remaining moisture off of it. So fresh out of a shower that he was still not entirely dry but that was much less important. He mumbles into a walkie before addressing the three men from the task force. “I’m going to find Martins, s’the last one to be on watch for the thing. Y’all just…” Pauses, pinches the bridge of his nose in an exhausted frustration. Simon notices the raw, red, still-bloodied flesh across the man’s knuckles but chooses to keep silent. “Try and find it. Holler if you see anything.” He didn’t have to explain how important this was. Embarrassing enough that now their one and only test subject was entirely missing; doubly so that it just so happened when someone actually important happened to be visiting. Their understanding was mutual and without another word, they were off. Simon looked around the facility without interest. No, he had one path in mind. Knew where to start. It was glaringly obvious that Graves knew more than he let on but now was no time to throw accusations. But he was already half-jogging forward, hugging the wall, stalking his way to the radiology lab where he knew — had seen you be escorted in and out of earlier. He studies the empty room and begins a laborious inspection of every surface, every tile, every inch. When done, he looks at the only other exit. Hallways, neglected and forgotten supply closets, office spaces delegated for seasonal unpaid interns. A wing of the building that seldom saw any real traffic. He didn’t know what he was about to walk in on. The lieutenant's face had clouded, he groped blindly about his shouldered comm and leaned down, as if afraid of what he’d see below if he opened the door. He presses the button down but doesn’t speak, just lets it chirp to life. No, not yet. A phone is fished from his pocket, unlocked, held up to his ear. “Soap. Price. Stairwell 4E, east end, the first door on the left.” It was faint and smudged but still very visible. A dried purple palmprint on the bottom of the doorframe; like someone had grabbed hold to pull themselves up using their own body’s motion from within the stairwell itself. The signs were glaring that something was not right here and it all made him glower. Standing solemnly he draws his sidearm, kicks the metal door open, floods the dimly-lit maze of stairs with new light. The giant man scans from the top-down, never once moving from that initial first step inside. He commences to take purposefully short, tactical steps forward once he notices the large swashes of blue that painted a miserable line down to the lower floors. He continues on. The further the descent the more things replay before him. Old remnants of torn hair, shed scales stuck in place with clumps of dragged flesh, teeth rigid and glaring in the beam of his drawn torch. Simon lumbers horribly onward into the lowest floors where he peers out into the wrathful blackness. Now he stands staring at the crumpled corpse while above him backup arrives. There was a disquieting female-ness in you; fixed and familiar.Within the scene you wore a scarf of cobalt blue made from your own spilled and dried blood. Long and crumpled forme so slathered in gore it looked like you rolled around in it like a dog. Your ribcage curved unnaturally back upon itself, flesh his boots and fist cleaved open so easily like it was fresh clay. Dust stanched the bloodied-wet and naked body of the monster who, with limbs broken and scattered out at impossible angles, was clearly dead. When he arrived Soap was smiling affably but that all vanished as soon as he caught up. Simon was smoking. He was watching. Someone else had followed Johnny in and Simon’s eyes shifted over the company. “Oh, goddamnit.” A pace hurries, hand routing over his eyes as if the scene was too much for him to even process. Graves had wormed his way into the footsteps of the Scot’s path, kept such a close eye on him the entire time and quickened his step when he caught wind of just where he was headed. The last few steps don’t matter and instead Graves hops down onto the landing the instant he was close enough.“What the fuck happened here?” He demands, eying the two men warily. The time spent squatting on his heels; bent and low to get a better look at your motionless body, was brief and now he rose and spat. “Well,” he said, “Are there any witnesses? Any techs who saw anything ? No way someone could just walk off with the thing in a place like this.”You lay on your side in the dust of the stairwell. With your skull broken in a pool of blood — none knew by whom. A third one came to be with them: it was Price: he had been holding his hat in his hands. Now set it upon his head again, he turned, went out the way he had come, no words spoken. Unshed tears burned his eyes. The entire time Graves had tried to get his attention and when he got no response, jogged after the captain. Johnny spreads his arms in a gesture of uncertainty. Simon snatches his attention away, puts his sidewarm away and pauses. The pair share a sharp sigh and Simon steps away to make the call to alert they’d found your body. Thinking he sees some drift in your lounging cadaver, knowing it was just post-mortem something , Johnny steps through the low puddle of half-dried blood, gets closer. As if beyond will or fate: you move. Ruined body floundering, gasping, sticky-clogged gills flaring open. You shriek woundedly, slink forward maybe half a metre, cave back into a sunken lump after one last push. The explosion of noise filled the whole hall with a most awful sound. Faces that had been watching from flights further up dropped away like puppets in a galley before the slow sweep of their eyes. Simon pulled Johnny in a shove backward and he leaped from the ground. He sweeps a trembling hand through his mohawk, strode about with strange posturings. Simon stumbles to grab for the comm at his shoulder again but doesn’t acknowledge it. He was standing like the others with his attention to you and raised his head back to look up. Your path down here was obvious; even from here he could trace your route. Johnny holds up his hand, points over at the nearest herd of Shadows quickly making their way down. What did they want? How much money had Graves paid you, he wanted to ask. He turns and makes a gesture with his head to Johnny. With his help they (as carefully as they can) lift your body up, work together to keep you grasped with both hands as they pass a growing line of men. They step quickly and measure their way up blindly until someone else is wise enough to shout them directions. Made their way through the narrow-walled maze that was the facility until they reached a makeshift operating room. The huddle of medics looking at the men, at you, back to the men; unsure if they were supposed to save or autopsy you. In no time at all Graves appears, shouts at them to do their job, to ‘figure out what the hell happened’ and ‘fix this shit.’You had no idea how long you’d been down there among the darkness and silence, but you were cold. The long echo of Grave’s voice is the last thing you hear.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Time leaks onward with you there: on your back; body covered in strategically placed wet rags; already broken ribcage cracked open so that delicate interior work could be done: all around you covered in that still-vibrant cobalt dye of your blood; medics working with trained yet unguided hands just to keep you alive. Any outside observer would think they’re preparing a foreign animal for slaughter. Maybe they were — still too early in the day to tell. Still plenty of time for that. Infrequent as it was, one of the surgeons (thin, lanky, with arms that were too long for his frame) would habitually sidle over, lean down, place his ear right over your still-being-repaired mouth. Never once did he ever tell his coworkers why; it was just something he did. An unknowable pull that he kept up whenever he had more than ten seconds of free time. As of maybe a day later they were up to two full teams: composed of overqualified surgeons and doctors, most of whom looked perpetually confused, unsure. The excitement to try something new — to be able to root around elbow-deep in a creature previously thought to not exist — was absolutely there. But so was the fear of failure. No one wanted to be solely responsible for killing the only specimen they’d been able to keep alive this long. So whenever someone ‘important’ would come within view, things got tense. Uncomfortable. Graves had this notion that they (the ones tasked with keeping you alive) were, in reality, conspiring. One or two (or ten) times he had walked by the windows along the south wall, watched with utmost attention all of the individual hands at work, took note of who was where, doing what. Not this time though. He walks with visibly stilted steps through the maze of rooms in the way; washing and becoming as sterile as possible when in a hurry, struggles to fit the shoe linings on over a new ankle brace and eventually gives up on the effort all together. Gloves, a frock, a mask, would have to do. It’s the smell that hits him first: that foul stench of spilled blood, opened guts, internal things that were never meant to be exposed. The first gag escapes but the ones that follow are miraculously buried. “How’re we lookin’ boys?” Was the announcement of his arrival and not a single person spoke up or even looked at him. “Girls…” Still nothing. “ Team .” Tried to over correct, failed, resigned to awkwardly loiter in a corner near the front of the room. The place was quiet, efficient, inexplicably tight. Like it was now two factions competing over a shared — and limited — space. “You know this thing speaks, right?” The surgeon with too-long limbs speaks: currently working on a grey blob of an internal organ, tool of choice making cuts too small to be seen from where he was standing.Nothing moved in that artificial and hygienic wilderness save the circulating air. No one spoke. “What?” Graves is thoroughly unamused by this accusation . “Aye, once we got the jaw mostly reset.” This doesn’t earn an immediate response. Instead Graves shifts his weight to the opposite foot, changes hands he was using to hold the mask up to his face (he couldn’t be bothered to just put the thing on), takes out his phone and fiddles with it in play-acting like he had just received something worthy of his attention. The smell was now more putrid. Even as thin as they were, the neoprene gloves got in his way just enough to be annoying. “You okay, sir? Do you need to sit?” A surgeon asks him, head nodding in reference to his injured ankle. “That so? Didn’t go spilling secrets, did it?” The additional question is ignored entirely. What use would there be in a lie about a fake PT injury? As if stating he’d sprained it from kicking you too hard too fast was embarrassing to admit.A different man drove a mètre-long greased thread through the lengthy sheared flesh above your ribs and hauled it taut. Everyone in the room hated how loud and shrill the sound from the act was. A collective and in-sync full-body cringe waves through everyone present in a clear line. The surgeon ( ‘I know your name’, Graves suddenly recalls) looked at him, holding eye contact. “None of us knew it could do that.” He bent to his mending. “And what did it say?”“Asked where it learned how to do that — to talk — know what it said?” Graves was now deeply, furiously suspicious. But he plays along. “No. Let me guess. Was it… From whatever dumb shit the interns are doing?” A pointless throwaway answer. The surgeon’s name — ‘ Votto,’ he remembers — the outline of those letters trace across the back of vigilant eyes. “No.” The surgeon sniffles, pauses, temporarily stands upright so he can actually see all of Graves now. Judgement crept well-hidden behind his eyes over the overall lack of ‘proper’ PPE. “Said they learned it from a ghost , you believe that?” Even with the face covering, it was obvious both men were grinning — just for completely opposite reasons. The surgeon laughs, Graves laughs, everyone shares in on the sheer absurdity of it all. “A ghost , huh? Should tell that to Lewis, he keeps trying to…” No, my nephew is dead. The realisation of his slip hits hard and is an immediate dour on the collective mood. No one wants to say anything; not even Graves. The words escape him, eaten by the void of silence that hangs heavy in the air. ⋆⁺₊⋆☾⋆⁺₊⋆ “Are you really insinuatin’ that?”Graves exhaled slowly through his nose. Their prolonged eye contact held fast.“So,” said the Captain. “S’like that.”The man of importance, Major General Cormac (who had been here out of an annoyed duty to keep things on time and under-budget), raises his hand up as if to quell quarrelling children. His light hair that might have once been brown is swept back, scratched, sticks close to a dry scalp. “He’s got a point.” Wrinkled hands thumb idly through a stack of reports in a manilla folder that lay exploded out before him on the table. “According to this first one, you three… ‘Sustained heavy injury to personnel and damage to the facility resulting in an attempted escape by Y—5342.’ This does not include all of the other… incidents. ” A polite label for staff deaths by your hand. The two men sit silent and waiting opposite of the trio from 141, facing the task with shared expectant expressions.The amount of self-restraint administered by those three could never be measured; but that echo hollow in Price’s voice was a sign unto itself. “Well, sir.” He spoke slowly and with the trace of a suppressed accent. “I’m sure it mentions in there that an… officer was the one responsible for that escape attempt. S’reason to suspect the plan was heavily premeditated—” Inhales sharply, holds it, clear eyes snapping to Graves momentarily. “—With possible internal collusion. Aye, it happened. But it shouldn't've.” This gives both Cormac and Graves pause. There was that specific way his eye twitches for one singular instant in time: Graves’s tell only a few would be able to decipher. But Price had already initiated the end of it all the second his team landed. So he pushes. “And I suppose you blame us for—““Yeah, you’re damn right I do—”“—Ye cannae say there’s no’ a reason that all—“ Soap answered the call, got to his feet, loudly swung his hands down on the cheap table. Graves can only mirror his actions, Ghost kicks away from the table and slides his chair back, Price looks over to Cormac with the stare of a snarky parent aware that a fight is going to break out: eyebrows raised and lips pressed into a wide, thin line.“—Maybe if y’all weren’t so concerned with playing dress up and feeding that thing shit from the vending machine, we wouldn’t be in this problem!” This catches the General’s attention. It’s sheer pandemonium: there’s yelling, mad gesturing, throwing papers, grandiose displays of integrity and strength via shoving and posturing. All in one messy, tangled bit to prove who was right. And neither side wins in the end. The cost spent on this little experiment is no longer justifiable, is documented, is agreed upon and signed off on. You’re now formally one more incident away from being liquidated. ⋆⁺₊⋆☾⋆⁺₊⋆ There was a figure seated at the rim of the far doorway. This figure walked and stood warped in the quaking lens of your world and held out one hand — in welcome or warning, you had no way to know. One of the men gave a low and sharp whistle in invocation to whatever god had dragged you back from death. The three of them stood watching, and waiting. Blood roils through a concussed brain in arteries so narrow you swear you can feel it — you just need to force your vision in focus. Why did they linger around you? It was the trio you’d maimed back when you were whole. They were all of them silent and they neared through the emptied room like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world-at-large. Their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things whose very portent renders them ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.The three now at your side watched mutely this transit out of the waking rest of the world — and even though there was no longer any question as to what it was that happened — none would name it. Your skin was mottled sapphire and looking leperous; your mouth cracked and tongue swollen. Perhaps they didn’t think you able to retaliate or fight or exist unsupervised, but your limbs were (mostly) free. You could (with minimal hindrance by the needles and tubes stuck in your free arm) reach out and caress and place unnaturally affectionate touches on anyone within range. No one would know for certain if it was the blended mix of painkillers or head trauma that was now making you docile. Truth be told you weren’t entirely sure either. Can’t even keep your head upright; just let it roll and lull from side to side on the too-hot hospital bed you now occupied. When you shift you notice that your arm — the one Graves had stomped in and destroyed — was fixed in position and stuck to your torso. Some bizarre mesh cast kept the limb bent at a right angle and fastled close to your abdomen using a cloth-wrap system. Seems they didn’t want you moving it at all while you recovered. One eye, one arm, kept alive by heavy wet rags over your gills. What purpose did keeping you alive even serve at this point? Fun? Exhibition? Sport? Frustration and lack of understanding is a rat that chews at the last thread of your resolve. How hard and fast your heart is beating takes time to truly feel — to the point of it being uncomfortably painful. If you were lucky it’d explode, give out, free you before anything else can happen. The north of the sprawling facility was all rolling waves where one of your kind might lie in hiding. But there was no place the sun would not find you — only the waters could hide your tracks. Maybe they’d toss your body there. Your visitors talk amongst themselves using hush voices out of the unfound paranoia you’d somehow understand what they were saying. You were such a mess. If you’d heard them directly talking about a plan to bash your skull in you’d give no reaction. So weak that again and again you slipped from it, and you hardly had the strength to pull yourself back to wakefulness. Breathing was an effort of agony; slumped inertly in your bedding, you learned to snuffle a little air through your gills and to exhale it quickly, and to wait several seconds before you could repeat the process. Sometime during all this you discovered that your mouth was open and that you could not close it. There had previously been rows of tape that kept your lower jaw in place but it was no suited for how scaled your skin was. Your tongue pushed between your teeth, and when you tried to bring them together a dull dry pain spread in your mouth.One of the men coughs and calls for a nurse to replace and re-wet the canopy of rags and washcloths that sporadically covered you. Seems you could (technically, but not practically) in fact exist out of water for longer periods of time, just keep your gills and skin wet. This was not something you had thought to try previously. A shame you’d never be able to use this knowledge. On their way out the nurse steps on the thin webbing of your tailfin, almost loses her footing, slips and slides a bit before somehow regaining balance. That was the issue with you: always too big, too long to comfortably store anywhere. Even now only half of you is able to fit on the bed, the other half draped down and across the floor in a crooked line. An inconvenience at every turn. Someone moves and walks away — previously occupying the new blindspot where your vision was now missing. There’s movement, sounds of wheels on cheap tile, metal shuttering. Still your body is robbed of strength and muscle weakness dictates you can only flop your head to the side to try and see. You think you can hear him explain it, this new setup: a short little metal cart cleared off, moved over, a pillow sat upon it so the rest of you could be up and off the floor. Oh, how you want to embrace this man, Price. Mind choosing to be delusional and telling yourself he’s doing this out of kindness rather than an ulterior motive. The men get back to discussing. Rest your eyes and when you reopen them you are alone again. Action is repeated and now there’s a sleeping figure slumped in one of the cheap chairs to your left. Ghost.He had not been there, and now he was there. You deem it safe to sleep again. ⋆⁺₊⋆☾⋆⁺₊⋆ When he awoke this room was dark; the cloth screen that cordoned you off let in a flickering brightness from the space beyond. He got up abruptly and sat on the edge of his chair. The fabric rustled beneath him; he relaxed, ran his fingers over his covered hair, down over the back of his head and neck. Stretched his head backward, welcoming the soreness that warmed pleasantly up between his shoulder blades.The surgeon who snuck in during his rest, Votto, turned questioningly toward Ghost as he sat down. His pen scribbles incomprehensible lines in neat boxes, keeping the clipboard and thin stack of papers close to him at all times. “Missed you. Much.” Cadence was dramatically broken, slow, succinct; each word its own sentence. “My love. Missed you. Gh-ost.” You don’t have the necessary parts — the internal structures and formations that those who could speak possessed — all you can do is mimic. Words with more than one syllable only being extra emphasised. “Did you now?” Even without seeing his face it was his tone that betrayed the surprise of your proclamations.“My love. Missed you.” “So I’ve heard.” He notices that your ‘good’ eye is barely open. Are you even awake?“Missed you. Gh-ost. Love.” Votto narrows his eyes. He chooses his next words with careful precision, steps closer, a cautious hand reached out towards Simon to denote ‘wait .’ An experiment. “Do you know where you are?”“Fe-eling home. Missed. Love. Gh-ost. When we leave.” Not a question, but a statement.“How are you feeling?”“We when leave. Oh, my love.” You stop responding after this.Votto clicks his tongue and shakes his head. “Sorry lad. ‘S just repeating words, best I can tell.” He wants to note it’s probably phrases you’ve picked up from the kid you ate, but refrains from saying that aloud. The slap of disappointment hit him hard and fast and the surgeon resumed his seat nearby; posture slumped and defeated. It meant he was no longer special. That the words and sweet nothings whispered to him beneath the ether waves of surgery meant nothing.The surgeon looked at him steadily for a moment, then nodded.“ ‘No man is given leave of that voice.’ You… uh, ever heard of that?”“Haven’t heard a voice,” Ghost said. Even when unsure as to why, the lie came easy.“When it stops,” said Votto. “You'll know you've heard it all your life.”“Is that right?”“Aye.”Purposefully shrill beeping comes from some monitoring device but is gone soon after. Attention is pulled back and away from you. “You’ve heard it though. The singing.”This makes Ghost sigh audibly and annoyed at not being left alone. “No. Haven’t heard anything.” Habit and coping mechanism meld into one and he unsheathed a knife from his hip, held it out from himself in silent inspection, set it flat on his thigh.But the surgeon doesn’t give up his inquisition. “I see it in your eyes, clear as day. It’s okay. I know.”“Already told you, haven’t heard a voice.” There was some grime buildup along the guard of the knife that would’ve been discernable to anyone else. He’s no longer even looking at the other man. “Aye, I know you’ll hear it again. And you’ll be back; but you won’t be the same. You won't be so young; will become like all the others.”Cryptic words from a clearly disturbed surgeon garner no response from his reluctant audience. Ramblings of a madman; overworked and sleep-deprived.The soldier turned the knife in his lap. The surgeon watched him. And like this, in a mutual silence, they sat. Fatigue wore heavy on the surgeon; frail and shelled with rot that wouldn’t be known until it was too late. In due time Votto smiled and got to his feet; addressing Ghost with disinterested (and polite) apathy.“You still can’t smoke in here.”“Aye.” But he still would, until finished. Only then would he turn and tap the dead cigarette on the sole of his boot. The motion acted out so many times that he did not even have to look at the trashcan he threw it into. The surgeon was long gone by the time he finished. ⋆⁺₊⋆☾⋆⁺₊⋆ He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. Graves can neither think nor focus and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. The decline meticulous, planned, slow enough to not let prying eyes catch on. Solitary vices that only came out at night as to be witnessed by none. During particularly bad days he would dig out that pair of ruined boots from the box beneath his bed. Get hit with the sight of unfiltered ruin caked across every surface. It made him think of peeling skin from a healing sunburn: the way thin flakes of your dried blood would shed off, drift aimlessly on the way down. Each and every bit was a souvenir — a sacred memory to be retained and built upon as an altar for later. The knowledge of what he’d done and what had been left undone. Of what was yet to come. Remorse had been a gesture brief as flintspark. Something once lost stirs within him and the heavy coat of dormancy is shrugged off. Vengeance was not the label he tacked on; this was righteous. Justified. Direction more clear and linear than anything else in his life. And now he was on his feet, swaying, one swift kick sliding his shrine back into where it could be perceived by no man. There was an unplaceable kindness in the act that made him think he would see the contents of the box once and never again. And now he’s just standing there staring at the floor of his dwelling with an expression blank and unfeeling. Strangely quiet. Gradually he came to look upon his frequent and desperate hauntings of you as if they were performed by someone else. As if from a distance, sightlessly, he observed himself and his sensations as he fulfilled his needs upon a body to which, meaninglessly, he attached a label. Did it lurk hidden in everyone? Waiting to spring out, to devour and rend, until there was left only the blankness he had seen in the obsidian stare that you now had to give the world? Something was wrong here. His mind gets to work replaying his day to pinpoint what exactly was weighing down his stomach. Woke up, emails, a quick call, stopped by the improvised operating theatre—It came to him that he had turned away from you not because of a womanish nausea at blood and stench and spilling gut. It came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his shock at seeing the monster — a few moments before proud and noble and full of the dignity of life — now stark and helpless, a length of inert meat, divested of itself. Or his notion of itself, swinging grotesquely, mockingly, before him. It was not itself; or it was not that self that he had imagined it to be. That self was murdered by him; and in that murder he had felt the destruction of something within him, and he had not been able to face it. So he had turned away.For another night in a row he lays wide awake in bed, unwillingly evading sleep. The ceiling holds no distractions, per usual.Once again, in the darkness, his hand came from beneath the covers and moved across his face, sought out the cold, rough bulge of his forehead, followed the nose, went across the chapped lips, and rubbed against the incoming beard, searching for his features. When sleep came upon him his hand was still resting on his face.He came to have an image of you that persisted even when you were not in his sight. He saw your face: pointed and dull in murky water, your off-white teeth clenched behind your stretched-out leathery lips, and your eyes — black and shining in the slit whites of those pupils — surrounded by a flaming blue line of irritated lids. Sometimes this image of you came into his mind at night in his dreams. And more than once he came awake with a start and thrust himself upward out of his bed, found that he was breathing quickly, shallowly, as if in fear. As the sharp image of those eyes upon him dulled and faded and died in the darkness around him. Once he dreamed that he was some kind of animal who was being pursued. He felt a relentless presence that chased him from cover to cover to cover, and at last penned him in a corner of blackness from which there was no retreat. Before he awoke in fear (or at a dreamed explosion of violence) he thought he caught a glimpse of your eyes burning at him from the darkness. ⋆⁺₊⋆☾⋆⁺₊⋆ “Et in Arcadia ego.” Graves strolls on in from an unseen spot behind them all. A hallway (which, at this hour) no one else would reasonably be in. The shape of the man advanced elongated before them — like strands of the night from which he'd walked, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come. With the greatest satisfaction in the world he looked around the room; as if everything had turned out just as he planned and the day could not have been finer.“What’re you on about?” Ghost asks. Kept his head down, faceless under his balaclava. The other man was equally lost yet did not show it.“Christ, go read a book sometime. Might do y’all some good.” Graves passed through the trio, doffing his head to folk whom he intended murder before the week was out. But he keeps his eyes fixed on you: still methodically laid out like a doomed animal. He crossed the space and waited stoic and stern beside Ghost.“What’ye want, Graves?” Price picks idly at the small tray of what could only be technically classed as food, the cheap plate holding his full attention.“I ain’t allowed to sit amongst friends now? And here I thought we had something special.”“Nae reason tae.” Soap regards.Price ate slowly; the beans were lukewarm and tasteless even with salt, and the hominy grits were mushy and barely warmed through. But the coffee was hot and bitter; it numbed his tongue and made him pull his lips tight along his even white teeth. He drank it all, as swiftly as the heat would allow him.“This is my project. Sorry to hear y’all ain’t enjoying yourselves here.” He says sorry, portrays some sadness in his tone, even gives a sympathetic back pat. Yet the entire time he still smiled. A chair is pulled up so he can before them with his hands resting palm down upon his knees. His eyes were empty slots. None among his company harboured any notion as to what this attitude implied. Even so, they grew cautious and spoke with circumspection among themselves — as if they would waken something that had better been left sleeping. None of them addressed Graves directly, let alone acknowledge his presence here. His (unofficial) second in command, Corporal Brown, enters the room not long after. Not by choice — the boy makes a beeline for Graves, crouches to hurriedly whisper unwanted news in his ear, departs immediately. Whatever was said was enough to visibly bother Graves. He sucks his lips in and lowers his head in unspoken reverence. His eyes were open but they weren’t truly seeing anything. “Well.” He abruptly announces and he gets to his feet. “I assume you’ve seen a surgeon around here.” Here Graves paused. He had been looking into his phone, raised his head, looked around him. None of them answered but he decided they had anyway. They knew something but chose not to speak up. And now a man is dead. The man you had sung to, who’d spoken with Ghost, had leapt from the roof of the facility to his death. It was tragic and heartbreaking and the entire time Graves would insert emotional language about the dangers of this world; of you. This was not some random passing: the clear only answer (to him) was that it had been your doing. Some mystery of manipulation not yet understood that you used on the poor weak-willed surgeon.His narration was much in the manner of a recital. He had not lost the thread of his tale, and smiled at the listeners.Corporal Brown returns and with him, a small group of faceless and nameless Shadows. Any remaining medical staff are herded out and away, the same treatment given to the Task Force men. Dumbly and without resistance, you let yourself be pulled around, and did not even show interest in why or where these men were hauling you off to. Any sense of self-preservation is tarnished by your delirium. Like the part of your brain which moderated logical thought has been permanently disabled so now you’re like this. Those Shadows seemed journeyed from an apocryphal world and they left behind a strange tainture. An afterimage on the eye; the air they disturbed was altered and electric.“When there’s doubt, there’s no doubt. If you think you could be in danger, you’re in danger.” Was all Graves would deign to say when asked where they were going. Above you hovers his face and he walks beside you the entire route; his expression a look that said ‘god will not love you forever.’ ⋆⁺₊⋆☾⋆⁺₊⋆ Time spent under the ephemeral veil of sedatives was precious and something to be held onto. In here — the aware recesses of your consciousness — you were back home. Where the water was quiet and dark and flattening every surface beneath impossible pressure. A perfect embrace. The sensation was comforting. Something you didn’t know you missed this badly until you’d gone so long without. It was only in your dreams you were free to exist. So deep that light only occasionally poked through; pinholes in the ceiling of your universe. Pitch black nothingness was everything and everywhere, you could not be happier. This was for comfort above all else. A naked body: your wounds like the victim of surgical experimentation, lying in this new pit, gaping sightlessly at your tiled white sky as the dry air burns through your skin. You woke in a dark little cell unmanacled and crazed with thirst. You’d been left a pan of water from which you drank like a dog — gagging because it seared your dry tongue and throat as if a torch had been thrust into your mouth; when you ran a tongue over your cracked dry lips, it burned with a pain that lingered for many minutes later — and hissed at the booming noises of distant doors until you were mute as stones. Were they finally leaving you to die? Filthy, dishevelled, wrapped in a mantle of free-flowing cloth that was more interested in sticking to your still-oozing wounds above all else. All that day you would sit idle and huddled. The first thing you did was disappear into the shadows of the corner. Even now you weren’t any less bound or indentured as you had been. By dark, your water was gone and you laboured on heavily beneath the slow wheel of stars; slept shivering among the darkness, rose in the dawn, went on again. Whether out of modesty or pity, you were just happy to have something to hide beneath (even if it was only a thin sheet barely long enough to cover half your length). The heat throbbed against your body, and your head pounded painfully with the beat of your pulse. Already the flesh on your upper ribs was tender from rubbing against the fixed wrap, and your hand was numb on the hard material of the cast. Never before had you laid about for more than a few hours at a time; winced at the thought of the pain you would feel at the end of the day. ⋆⁺₊⋆☾⋆⁺₊⋆ The hovels were tall enough to be stood in, having been repurposed temporary holding cells. Recessed lighting tucked into the ceiling, no windows, limited space, no furnishings. Just a grated metal door which ran floor-to-ceiling. It was no different from anywhere else you’d been held; temporary or otherwise. The one thing you noticed immediately was the pre-existing covered drain in the centre of the floor. All traces of your destruction would be erased and washed away.The last one in the row Graves and Brown stopped before was defended by a sewn-together you. Brown drew his belt pistol but Graves stopped him. He dropped to one knee and spoke to the animal. You crouched against the rear wall of the space, bared your remaining teeth (as best you could), swung your head from side to side, the thin webbings for ears flattened alongside your skull. “It’ll bite you,” said Brown.“Get me something soft, maybe liquid. A fruit or somethin’.”He crouched, talking to you. You watched him.“You won't tame that thing,” said Brown.“I can tame anything that eats. But I ain’t aimin’ to. Just get me what I asked for.”When Brown came back with the requested food, you were looking about uneasily. Still you slump languidly against the opposite wall. Hardly more than a shadow yourself.“Watch’er sir — she bites.”“With what? Gums?” Graves laughs. The man laughs. You don’t.Brown is quickly dismissed and the trend continues: rooms were evacuated as if by fire whenever Graves came around.“Don't be afraid,” he said. “I'll speak softly. It's just us. Let me see you. Don't you know that he loved you?”He sat down on the cold floor and reached through the bars. “Come here,” he said. “Let me touch you.”You move and press your back to the cold concrete of the wall in hopes of melding through it. “Come here if you're not afraid,” whispered the man who would kill you.Suddenly you’re unable to express the knowledge gained out of your time. There are no words that you know to convey how you feel. Graves smiled. He spoke softly into the dim space. “You were right,” he said, “to take part in this. I couldn’t give a shit about any of it, really. But s’what I signed up for. We all did. Only… one did not. Now who could that be?”“We,” mimicked your soft, staccato voice. “You.”Graves watched you through the bars, he shook his head. “What joins men together,” he said, “Ain’t friends; it’s enemies. But if I was your enemy, then who’s your friend? Price? The ‘ghost’? Where they at now? Hey, you. Look at me when I’m talking to you. Our animosities were formed‘n waitin’ before we ever even met.”
Yet even so you could have changed it all.
“You,” lilted the pathetic creature before him. “Go.”“It was never me,” said Graves. The thin veneer of self-control was waning. “You dumb fucking animal. Don't you know everyone else — they would've killed you? They want to, still will. But that boy. He loved you. And you ate and spit him up like week-old shit.”The unwilling and singular audience seemed unwilling to reckon even with the idea of a dialogue. He rises into a squat and pressed against the metal grating with his arms folded. A stomach that was beyond empty threatened to physically jump up your throat and out your body. You were a sheet folded, a paper tiger caught in the eye of the hurricane that was this sickness; this amalgamation of suffering calling itself ‘Graves.’ Maybe at one point his expression could’ve been classified as a grin, now just a row of suspiciously white teeth curved in a shape he’d copied from you. From when you’d bare a cheshire smile if he (or anyone else) tried to lay hands on you. The fact things had become so perverted and backwards was plainly disgusting.The distant man walked and a faint drift of smoke passed over them. They moved on up the deepening shade of the hovel floor, leaving behind them the shapes of mortal men who had lost their lives in this place. He watched all this pass below him, mute and ordered. Senseless until the line of Shadows were present in the sudden rush of dark that fell over the area. All that land lay cold, blue, without definition. The sun shone solely on the high walls that he now stood beside. He moved on and soon he was in darkness himself. The wind came up off the outside grounds and frayed wires of lightning stood again and again along the western terminal of the world. Each and every strike makes you jump from your skin thinking that he would use the sound to cover his own meddlings. Above you drips the slow leak of rainwater through the poorly-fit light fixture; something in your mind gives the insight to set the empty pan you’d be left with beneath it to gather the precious moisture.The hovel was a single room with a hole in the ceiling where a trunk of sunlight fell through onto the sloped floor. Figures crossing the room steered with care past the edge of this column of light as if it might be hot to the touch. The lieutenant circled this reeking solarium and stood before the withered you. None approached you but instead stood by, one on each side. Near. Proud as even, Graves does his slow walk of triumph to plant himself before you.All history is present in that visage. And passed him in a sea of deep juniper-green hair smeared with blood and a reek of carrion and the rooty smell of the creature itself — is you. Poised, posed, prepared. Missing teeth enough to make your smile look like a punched-out chessboard when you greet him. It didn’t matter anymore. Didn’t matter that you still couldn’t really even open them enough to take a full breath. Didn’t matter that you were held in place by the simple fear of what had already changed. Didn’t matter that when you closed your eye you were back in that scratchy plaster-coated pool. Sustained and maintained by a pervasive sense of defeat and melancholy. All that time, as you now understand it, for nothing. You would not be allowed to leave here alive. Now you were the bones of something which once existed — but no longer did.Captured and tortured for the crime of being present. Wrong place, time, features.
You would not have lived anyway.
Without intention your body is already moving: obeying a deeper-buried and primal frenzy.Your dry skin is on fire when you shift; the muscles that control your torso flexing and snapping with minimal exertion. It made you slow. Predictable. Practically telegraphing ‘I am going to eat you’ to the very man you were after. Considering how battered you are, the staff hadn’t thought it necessary to go with the usual restraint system. Settled for your injuries and twilighting drugs to do that portion. And to their credit it had worked. For a time. In the end your willpower overcame the impossible task that was making your final gambit. Your bones were glass and your muscles sun-dried leather; too taught to move and when you did it hurt like hell. Maybe that was why you were crying. Hard to tell; the list of reasons too jumbled and unimportant. All that mattered now lies before you. In truth there was no real desire to try and get your jaws on him — he’d done a good job relieving you of too many teeth for it to ever be more than an unpleasant pinch. Your attention was focused elsewhere. Like that sweaty head of his. Square down his centre forehead ran a vein as if to say ‘ aim here, this is the point .’ The slow leak of hope had become a light drip, and now nothing. A wellspring now dried and empty. What else was there for you now? Something was happening and your body acted automatically without prompt. Your ruined body retreats closer, coils, and you launch yourself with surprising speed at Graves. His eyes cut across to you and he read you as if you had your entire plan written across your face. Which is just what you wanted. He did not look up. Just kept even and waited for you to come to him. Movements of a striking serpent — rather a sad attempt for one. Injuries were still fresh enough to make you howl even with minimal strain but you would not let that stop you. Your singular dark eye keeps fixed squarely on Graves’s when you make contact. A company of readied men — of Shadows — were already on their way. An overlapping wave of sound from weapons being unholstered. Graves rears and screams, confused. There’s no moving now. Pistols are drawn, readied, uncountable and their barrels in two close dotted lines just beyond the iron bars. “How far you wanna push this?” Graves asks a question he already knew the answer to. “How far?” Normally cocksure voice cracks from either emotion or something not yet realised. You keep fixed and unmoving. Someone else calls for you to surrender but you level your gaze outward. Long body was completely wrapped around your enemy: your aim had been too slow, too inaccurate. Despite that, you’d done it. If they didn’t know any better they’d’ve taken you for a serpent. A constrictor: wound tight around its meal and smothering the life out of it one breath at a time. But you’d sunk your remaining knocked-out teeth into him, found purchase on half his forearm. If you were lucky it’d draw any amount of blood. More importantly, you felt the slow ooze of venom running down where you’d pricked his wrist. Someone behind him notices it first: the pair of needle-thin fangs entering one side of his joint and poking out another. Your final weapon, your last bid, the last ace up your sleeve. Maybe if they’d looked harder they would’ve seen the two slits that kept folded to the roof of your mouth this entire time. The pair of delicate fangs you refrained from using due to them being fragile and taking too long (in your opinion) to grow back in.Does not take long for him to become uncomfortable in your lax grasp. While you had released your grip with your jaws (now just awkwardly hanging on and fixed in place by gravity), you kept wrapped around him. There was so much yelling. Conflicting commands; warnings; swearing; questions; calls to just put you down now. Your dead-black eye that cut among the Shadows studying their weapons, the sclera bloodshot and opaque from too much damage.Grave’s eyes in their dark sockets were burning centroids of murder and he and his wearied men stare balefully at you. As if you were no part of this — being so unlike them in wretchedness of fate. There was no expression to your face yet you seemed a creature beset with a great woe: an untold suffering kept only for yourself. Your jaw goes slack, falls open painfully wide, makes you hiss in pain at every nerve stretching, firing at once. A body no longer solid, composed of dried and splintered kindling just waiting for something to happen; for something to cause the entire structure to collapse. All he had to do was shove his thumb into your ruined eye to get you to release completely and without fight. Bodies swam you immediately. They turned you over on the solid ground and your jaw moved, a bloody spittle formed along your lower lip. Your eye was dull, there was despair in it— and there was something else. There’s what you assume is shouting that you can’t hear; having gone deaf from fear. He looked at the y0u and at the slow gouts of blood dropping in the puddle beneath you, like roseblooms, in how they swelled and were made pale. Your side had begun to bleed from torn staples and you lay soaking it in the cold water from your now-spilled pan. The marblings of blood that swung from this freshly-torn-wound were like thin blue leeches in the crawling current as it raced to the drain.Someone hands Graves a pistol and he gratefully takes it, pulls the slide out and back in, sets the hammer back. His arm straightens and aims directly between your eyes but something stops him. He looked confused. Air is sucked in and he makes a noise of pain while you lay there curled and cowering. No much longer he can’t even hold the weapon and the thing falls uselessly to the floor. You don’t make a move for it. Stumbling steps carry him away once, twice, and he’s now flexing his hand. Inspecting where you’d bit him; at the site of rapidly darkening flesh where you’d sent your venom. While the blood was running between your fingers Graves and his men gracelessly made their exit. He was now speaking hurriedly and by the time he was beyond the door he was crying out, doubled over. The last of the men, Brown, runs back into the space, grabs frantically at the dropped weapon everyone but him had forgotten about. You share a glance of mutual fear and hatred and he is gone, the door clacking locked behind him.It was cold and you, in your rags and your collar of blood, hugged yourself in a tight ball. ⋆⁺₊⋆☾⋆⁺₊⋆ “The information gathered here has been invaluable and will no doubt help improve the lives of countless future soldiers.” Cormac pauses, out of habit reaches to shake the man’s hand. When he remembered the stump — where Graves had to have his arm amputated at the elbow after being bitten by something there was no antivenom for — he awkwardly rescinds the action. “Thank you for your service… on this.” His features are pale, sunken in. He’s tired. Yet still Graves accepts the thanks and praise being thrown his way. Both men rise to their feet at the same time. “Major General, if I may.” “Anything, Sergeant.”“I want to be present. When they destroy the subject.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
He’s silent now: eyes closed and body unmoving. The space is cramped and too warm: whirring machinery a quiet background hum to keep him grounded. Ghost was not fond of small cramped spaces; even when medically necessary. In his mind he is anywhere else and he envisions being back on base. Someplace familiar -- a mirage of home. Whatever is spinning behind the walls of his plastic coffin whine into a slower pace before stopping entirely. Like a body being retrieved from cold storage, he is moved back and out of the oversized tube and into the oversized room. “Give it a second for this to load.” Some unnamed nurse tells him. He doesn’t hear though, too busy trying not to sweat. Said the contrast they injected him with would make him feel hot and it’d be temporary — miserable. Makes him feel like he’s two seconds removed from wetting himself. Just because others affirmed this was a ‘normal’ reaction didn’t mean he had to like it. God, what he wouldn’t trade for a smoke right now… This then, would be the part where the medical staff tell him of the irreparable damage done to his brain and body in years past. Too many head injuries, unhealed wounds, the occasional bit of ignored shrapnel buried in an area too inconvenient to get to. “It’s thinking.” One of the staff speaks in a hushed tone to one of the nurses. Just something to fill the space.Simon drags himself into standing and rubs at his half-covered and scarred face. A creature of habit above all else, he begins pacing, stops, resumes, observes the stains on the cheap ceiling tile, goes back to pacing. What did they see? Outsiders viewing the blatant outstanding injuries to judge and tell him he’ll have issues down the road; the same explanations on loop forever. Shadows of care from strangers he’d likely never even meet again. He skated to the door in a long glissade, stopped, pushed back his sleeve, gripped the metal knob. “We done here then?”There’s silence. A brunet man –– some doctor he did not remember the name of –– shyly steps forward, gestures for Simon to approach. A glove snaps during removal, the other nurse seated nearby reaching to grab the man’s arm and cancel the beckon. “You can’t show him that .” She leans in to whisper-hiss, voice not as quiet as she would’ve hoped. “We can’t just––”“––Jay, you know he won’t let that fly––”“––We can say he just… saw it on his own. That we… left a window up.” “Well I’m not bringing that up.”This makes the doctor silent with thought. The nurse shoots the fiercest glare at the only two men in the room with her. She brushes something unseen from her hairline, swears under her breath, stands up, leaves. And, in time, Simon takes her seat. Runs his hands over the rough denim of his own pants. Waits.
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“So what’s even the point?”The three men linger in silence, sitting facing eachother, all distracted. “You ever been to a slaughterhouse?” Price asks (to no one in particular.)“Aye, believe so.” Soap (almost) reluctantly answers.“You’d know if it if you had.”“‘hink I went once, when I was a bairn.”“Funny place to take a kid.”“‘hink I went masel’, snuck in.”He sat at the corner of the desk and waited a minute for the captain to continue. Ghost didn’t. In truth he was not even here: eyes unfocused, looked up at the men with no great enthusiasm, squinting through the smoke infrequently with the slow rolls of his own thoughts. Price pulled at his cigar almost reflectively, shook his head as if in sadness. “Wish we’d never taken this contract,” he bookends. Frustrated. An unmistakable shitshow. Soap sniffles, coughs, leans back in his chair to stretch out. Offers Ghost a cigarette and of course he obliges (not after receiving a gentle kick to get his attention), borrows the smooth-worn lighter, takes one long inhale, slides the lighter back over. The lit end splits from one column of smoke into two, back into one. He closes his eyes, draws an inhale, holds it in until it hurts— “—and if there ain’t somethin’ there, you’ll just add somethin’ yourself.” What? His eyes open but the other two men were gone. Just Graves speaking at him and loitering nearby. Where—The cigarette had burned down to a pathetic end of remaining filter and ash in his hand; just a little pile now. He’d only blinked, now burying the rising panic of apparent time lost beneath his usual stoic demeanour. Graves reached, got the coffee pot, poured his cup. put the pot back. “This whole thing could just go away, you know.”“Wouldn't that be nice.”“But you dont think it’s going to be nice.”“Probably I don't.”“Let me ask you a question.” Graves pauses and takes a purposefully shallow sip from his cup. Eyes wander their way over to Ghost’s as if wanting permission to continue.“Go ahead.”“What the fuck do you care? Did you see any laws being broken?”There was a long wait (and only one thing he could be referencing). “No.”“Because that’s policy. My policy, for that matter. If it looks wrong, we all walk.” Maybe we should’ve — from the very start. “Yeah, well, it looks wrong.”“So? We’re out of it. Forget it.”Ghost (literally) bites his tongue to avoid lashing out, to avoid leaping over the table, shaking the man furiously, screaming: ‘If I think about things that I just don't want to know about they’re all things that I do know about. And I’ll always know them. Too fucking bad.’ But he wouldn’t. Couldn’t. So he sits, silent. Graves sighs and pours more coffee for himself. “What’s done is done. It can't be helped.”“It’s not much consolation, though. Is it?”A shadow loomed at the corner of his vision. Ever-willing to prove his point, Graves gives a lecture — and in this lecture Ghost hears things he had once known but now forgotten. Graves’ little lackey, Brown, appears and strides over. And together they sit themselves down at the table with a chronically unhappy Ghost. Graves slowly raised his right arm, and suddenly thrust his forearm across the table. The limb ended at the elbow in a white nub that was neatly puckered and scarred. Involuntarily, Ghost drew his own hands back. Graves laughed; his noise was an almost soundless wheeze that seemed forced from his thin chest. With his good hand, he grasped the edge of the table so tightly that the knuckles showed blue-white against the pale peach of his skin.Graves grinned through his short (and new) facial hair. He put the stump of his hand on the table and inched it toward an unassuming Ghost as he spoke. “Brown and I thought it was just hives. Allergic reaction or somethin’. Honestly, it didn’t really hurt at first. ”“I’d been chasing down med staff nearly an hour,” Brown said.“I must’ve fucked it up more trying to self-treat it,” Graves continued, “Because my hand was bare and it was stuck stiff. But it didn’t hurt. It just kind of… tingled. I yelled at Brown, and he come over, and he found someone to help.” He pauses to chuckle; bizarrely amused by all that had transpired. “I looked at that hand, and it was black, a real dark blue. Never seen anything like it. And then it started to hurt; I couldn’t tell whether it hurt like ice or whether it hurt like fire; and then it turned red, like a piece of fancy cloth. We were there one, two hours, and the pain didn’t let up. Then it turned blue again, almost black.”“It got to stinking,” Brown said, “So I knew it had to come off.”Graves laughed with a wheezing, cracking voice. “They kept telling me it had to come off, but I wouldn’t listen to him. We argued almost half an hour about it, until they finally wore me down.” He never would of talked me into it if I hadn’t got so tired. “Finally I just laid back and told him to cut away.”“Unfortunate,” Ghost said, his voice flat and barely a whisper.“It wasn’t as bad as you might think,” Graves said. “By that time the hurt was so bad I could just barely feel the needle. And when they hit bone, I passed out, and it wasn’t bad at all then.”“Graves got careless,” Brown said. “Underestimated the enemy. Guess we all did. He ain’t been careless since, have you, Graves?”He laughed, jostled by the firm pat to the back. “I been mighty careful since then.”Without another word (and while Graves was still espousing truths and retellings) Ghost rises and unceremoniously exits to head back to his quarters.
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It wasn’t that you had your flesh irreparably maimed; it was that you had your soul torn from your body.You grew to hate the sun. Each day it boiled your skin and each night you got to suffocate beneath the dry air trapped behind. How did anything live up here? No longer were you delusional over your fate: knew you’d never return home. You’re going to die up here in the truest and deepest act of heresy. They’d stopped collecting samples. Stopped everything altogether. You’d skipped it all and gone straight for the end stage: the part where your use has finally run out. Somewhere you knew; understood that they were waiting for the most convenient option of you ‘suddenly’ dying. So they wouldn’t have to deal with what you’d done. What they’d incited. All easily wrapped up and taken care of in the nice short way dreadful projects are. A bookend, a brief paragraph at the end of your file describing how despite best efforts you’d perished unprompted and without warning. Such was the way of this particular work. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just an inventory number to move around and zero out.Your mouth held the dryness of a desert march. Coarse and uncomfortable and reeking.Foot traffic thronged the unfinished concrete floors and was the habitual pull that dragged you from being comatose. You despise your own thoughts. Such vacillation in anyone else would’ve aroused your anger. Rage rooted in boredom flickered and simmered deep within you: nurtured by decisions which couldn’t be avoided.Once, long ago, you’d thought of yourself an inventor of perfection. but that core trait within you had fallen into old patterns — like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory: shape it any way you wanted — but relax for a moment and it snapped into its ancient forms . Forces at work beyond your reach in human minds eluded and defied you.Frustration tangled you. You felt the pressure of tender mistakes, that burgeoning sweep of humankind across your universe. They rushed upon you with a force like a gigantic tidal bore. You sense the vast migrations at work in human affairs: eddies, currents, flows. No dams of abstinence, no seizures of impotence nor maledictions could stop it.Your existence was less than an eye-blink in this larger movement. The men who stole you swimming in this tide, that corporate entity trading in genes, was trapped in the torrent as you were. Visions of your discarded and bloated corpse must be measured against other legends. Other visions in a universe where even the seemingly eternal stars waned, flickered, died . . .
What mattered you in such a universe?
Far within your unclean hovel, so deep within that the sound sometimes lost itself in the flow of general noises from above, you whine out through a jaw still strung together with wire and bizarre meshes. Dry eyes drag and stutter closed in a deep-brain, unfightable behaviour to try and preserve yourself.
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The sensation almost sounds painful. Your body is automatically reacting while your consciousness lags back to the forefront of your mind. You’re sitting in your seat, slumped against the wall: your hair floating, your mouth open, your eyes devoid of speculation, your limbs hanging down like an enormous marionette. Soap kicks the spongy towel into the centre of the room, stomps it down against the single small grate on the floor, crouches to inspect his work. He turned and studied your eyes: those pitted, jet balls without expression. What visions did those eyes see? Creaky joints announce you’d turned away, stared at the unfinished floor’s distant scarp, saw slow-running water and barrenness, terrible mimicry of your home. Even nature within your captivity plays a joke on you: ‘See what I can build!’ You recognized a slash in the distant massif, a place where water spilled from a crevasse, and thought:
Men always fear things which move by themselves.
You begrudged the burdens captivity had imposed on you: the aching joints, responses not as quick as once they'd been, muscles not as elastic as the whipcords of your youth. A long day lay behind you and a long life. Had spent this day with the stale air in a fruitless search for some clue to your own fate. But the revelations were sluggish. A shadow. The Scot cautiously tipping over two large buckets of water and details impressed themselves upon you. It was cold. The drain covered means there’s a growing pool of shallow water lapping against you. The whole room was pulsing slowly, an odd smell in the air like some foreign cologne — a medicinal edge to it. Everything is humming.Soap slowly eases back into his squat until his feet are flat in the settling (oversized) puddle. Hands rest on his hips and casually thumbs the handle of a blade in his pocket. There was nothing that could happen that wouldn’t surprise him. You felt as if you weighed nothing. Felt as if you were floating. The man wasn’t even looking at you. He seemed oddly untroubled, like it was all part of his day.Bones try to articulate into speech and fail; just a huffing grunt that ended in a pitch. This man turned his head and gazed at you.Blue eyes. Serene. Odd hair. Something about him faintly… exotic . Something beyond your limited experience.“You. What.”He didn’t answer.Your body (painfully, to the point of being near unbearable) arcs across the room, swung closer, pushing off the wall using wraps of muscle in your tail. Soap didn’t even seem to notice; his thoughts seemed elsewhere. He had a feeling he'd taken more chances than he'd had coming but just crouch-stepped backwards one pace. The look in his eyes tells you he wanted you to back up but something told him it didn't make any difference where your hands were. He didn't know where this was going — he hadn't thought that far ahead. A quietness seemed to rise from the scene; it was the quietness, the stillness, the absolute calm of a setting where no human had touched. Soap found that despite his exhaustion he was holding his breath; he expelled the air from his lungs as gently as he could, so as not to disturb the silence.The water was maybe three fingers at the deepest point but it was enough, better than nothing, a very welcomed offering. Your massive reticulated body rolls, turns, wanting to cover every inch of cracking dried skin in moisture. It makes your limbs feel loose; a rolling shutter starts at your head and ends at the very tip of your tail like you were forcing yourself to readjust to the world. And you ignore your spectator entirely. In the past you’d snapped his leg and tried to squash his skull in but this single act had earned him an unknowable loyalty. The real issue is that every line is a broken line. You retrace your steps and nothing is familiar. So you turn around to come back only now you’ve got the same problem going the other way. Every worldline is discrete and the caesura forms a void that is bottomless. Every step traverses death. So why keep fighting? Grace is given and graciously received by both parties alike. Your one mobile arm gestures to yourself, to him, back to yourself, back to him; making a point to lightly jab your fingers at your own throat. You don’t know the word for it but maybe miming out your own physical, native language would bridge the vast gap in communication. He says nothing, watches. It’d be easier if you didn’t still have your crippled limb fastened to your waist but how much more direct could you get? Impossibly wide lips narrow into a solid bumpy line over a mouth filled with (still) too many teeth. “You. Give.” More arm movements between you two, this time ending with your hand ghosting the surface of the water. Charades miraculously work and you think he is finally understanding your meaning. “Aye, well, ah couldnae just sit an’—”No, he was speaking too fast, words too foreign again. “—Good.” You interrupt him, raise a pair of clawed fingers to point at his throat. “Good. You.” You think he takes the compliment, the new label, because he makes that same ‘chuffy’ sound that Louis used to make. Which was always a good thing because it corresponded with a smile.
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He wore a balaclava but Ghost could feel the cold in his head. A sharp pain — like eating ice cream too fast. He descended in total blackness and the bottom of the stairwell was suddenly there. Sooner than he would have thought. He almost lost his footing. He put one hand down to steady himself on a rusted railing on his right.When he arrives you're leaning against Soap’s shoulder, both seated and resting against the far wall. And wearing his jumper — was it…wet? Angry steps carry him into the room and he stops once he hears, feels the remaining water be kicked around at his boots. Maybe a centimetre or two deep. A sopping towel bunched up on the floor is enough to almost make him slip, convinces him to stop until he can parse out what the hell is going on. He thought you were asleep but you were suddenly looking out at the open door. Dark and bottomless eyes which were too empty to denote your true focus. That lengthy tail of yours was (he didn’t want to use the label ‘comfortably’) draped over Soap’s outstretched legs in loose waves; like you were some casual domesticated pet lounging around. Not a hint of malice present considering what you’d done to him previously. Now it was more… “Johnny.” Ghost warns, tone low. This incursion draws a quiet hiss from the back of your throat, body instinctively curling in on itself. Which now includes drawing this new comrade in. Your torso remains fixed, cautious, hyperaware, a phantom of grace. Too-dry skin is heard crackling like aged wax paper with your every movement but you keep your attention low. Unthreatening in your mottled and looking-leperous body which was still layered in bruises.“Didnae get grannied by the ‘hing—” His explanation is cut off by a deep yawn, his eyes watering at the corners when he forcibly blinks. The man entirely unbothered by his setting acts like it’s the most normal thing in the world and all he’d done is woken up from a nap. Leans over, gives a wet slap of confirmation on a meatier section of your tail to denote ‘it’s all good.’ All the while you were still cagey, aiming to shrink in on yourself in the far corner. “Is that your fuckin’—”“—Aye, just soaked it in the water so—”“—So you flood the place and get it comfy?” Soap looks entirely nonplussed; what was there not to get? “No’ sure what ye were expecting, L.T.” He looked out over the thinning remnants of a faux sea. He could taste the salt on his lips.Ghost, obviously, is not amused. “What I think has got nothing to do with it. Can we move it along here? We’re going to get wet. Christ.”
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More waiting. Sitting. Watching them write on their pads. Reality didn't really seem to be their subject and they would listen to his comments and then move on. That the search for its definition was inexorably buried in and subject to the definition it sought. Or that the world’s reality could not be a category among others therein contained.“You get cold don't you?” The same doctor from earlier — named Jay — said.“Aye. My head gets cold.”“Yeah. There’s a certain level of cold that after a while it’s hard to get warm again. You ever experience that?”Ghost nods. His posture straightens and he further zips up the front of his jumper to trap more heat inside. When he looks back up he’s no longer in the medical bay, but sitting on his bed. It is now 2:20am. He put his bare hand against the cold steel of the wall to confirm that it was real. It was. A feeling of unease makes him stop his scan of the too-cold room. There was an empty coffee cup over on the table. He didn't remember seeing it there before. Would he have noticed it? It must have been there. He got up, went over, took hold of it — but of course it was cold. Eyes narrow with focus and he can feel his muscles vibrating. The numbness of his legs intensified and suddenly they were numb no longer: he felt that hundreds of needles were pricking into his flesh and that the needles warmed: became white hot and burned outward from his bone to his flesh. He felt that the sockets of his bones, ankle, knee, hip were being crushed by the weight they impelled forward. Blood pounded in his skull throbbed against his ears until even the sound of his own breathing was submerged and a red film came over his eyes. He could not see before him he pushed blindly his will, supplanting — his strength becoming his body — until his pain submerged him.Simon wakes up, smacks his gums, scratches his scalp, treasures the feeling of warm bedding against his skin. It takes time for his mind to centre. When ready he rises and sighs and takes one singular step before there’s a knock at the door. Of course. Locks are disengaged and Price leans in for his greeting. The man stood there and sipped his coffee.“Simon?”“No.” His freshly-awake snark doesn’t go over too well. John studied him. Looks are deceiving .“I don't think this place has been too kind to you.”“I’m doin alright.”“You’re doing all right?”“Yeah.”He turns and leads his captain into the small living quarters and sits on the singular chair he had. Calloused hands rub into his eyes until he can hear his sight. Takes a break from that to slip his threadbare and well-loved jumper up and on. He’s in the process of pulling his covered head through, shuffling forward towards his seat — the floor gives out. Had he been taking full steps he’d be on his way to the ground. Now he’s standing on the roof of the compound: having thrown himself backwards to avoid falling to his death, sweaty, shirtless, back in his socks and sleep-shorts. Just what kind of sleep deprivation did this?Make him walk to the roof?Make him take his clothes off?He sat listening, watching the strip of light from a line of tethered buoys far off beyond the coastline.Is he compromised?For what?Would he wait for the lights to disappear?He could bring in food and water and then barricade the door. Keep his sleeping-self safe by force if necessary.Maybe.He knew he would do nothing.The first spits of rain fell.
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“There a reason you hunted all us down, led us all the way down here? We’re a bit busy.” Price (politely) starts. Soap stands at his side and shoots the doctor an impatient look with eyebrows raised. Ghost just haunts the hallway right outside the door.Jay affixes his eyes to a misaligned tile on the floor. Was he really going to dig his grave that much deeper? He could withhold the information, roll on plausible deniability, work with the other staff to come up with a uniform cover story. Was told to keep the information under wraps considering what happened… The doctor refuses to make eye contact and fixates on the lid of the open energy drink being rolled between his palms. He was no good at lying to others; part of why he chose medicine. His voice is hushed with secrecy when he does finally speak. “You, uh. Remember that surgeon? Jumped—Fell off the roof?” “Aye?”“Votto.” Price adds, only faintly remembering the name. It’s now that the doctor looks infinitely more nervous. Eyes habitually darting to the half-open door to the little label he had been sequestered away in; watching the way shadows were cast on the floor to denote anyone approaching; listening for any noise against the tile. He unfocuses his eyes, rapids taps the lid to the can five times, pulls his phone from his pocket, gives five more taps, unlocks the device. “Look. You…” His voice trails off and gets lost in the focus. He’s rapidly scrolling through his photos. There’s a deeply visceral photo of an uncapped skull viewed from the side and he impulsively decides that’s too much — thumbs up to the next image: a photo of an MRI scan. “That surgeon, he had these… lesions. Prefrontal cortex.” Lifts a hand and pokes at his forehead to vaguely denote location. “It uh, was all over BA24 and 25. ” He zooms in on a section of the scan but it does little in the way of clarifying.“English, please.” Price gruffly adds. “Okay, it’s uh. Like a… mental sketch pad.” Jay squints his eyes to try and pull long-buried study notes out from the pre-residency pile in his mind. “So, like, action, emotion, stopping uh, inappropriate thoughts .” Gives pause to take an awkwardly long swig from the energy drink. He keeps looking over at Ghost.The explanation makes the two other men lean a little closer with anticipation. Loose strings of theories were there now but they needed confirmation. “You’re telling me that surgeon, what, jumped because he hit his head?” “What? No, it means there was… new damage—”Somewhere in the distance a door closes and the man nearly jumps out of his skin. Even seated comfortably apart his heartbeat was up in the front of his throat. Panicked. Price and Soap both take a half-step closer, denoting the ease and necessity with which to speak in quieter voices. The man too skittish to keep focus; he was one more noise away from fleeing altogether. “Focus, lad.” Soap gives him a comforting pat on the shoulder that hardly changes things.“There’s, okay, there’s rumours that… because he got too close to the thing, I mean, apparently he was talking to it the entire time of that initial intake, I know—” He doesn’t want to name names. “— Someone said they heard and saw him just… listening and whispering to it? The entire time. And then… He, well. And then his brain turns out to be rotted to shit…”Soap sighs and does his best to hide the stress and frustration of it all. “And what else?”Price makes a quizzical noise and is glad there’s no resistance when he grabs for the man’s phone. Immediately gets to work zooming in on the image hoping to gain some hidden knowledge from it.“All I’m saying is now there’s spots on the same areas, and when the guy came in—”“—Wait, so, the man died and the first thing you thought to do was give him a brain scan?”“What? No, this MRI isn’t from Votto.”No one spoke. Price makes a face, disbelief, brings the screen closer in a desperate hope that he’s wrong, pinches to zooms in on the bottom corner.Soap just wants an explanation. “So who’s is—”
“Simon?”