Chapter Text
The barrier of thick glass that encapsulates me does nothing to combat the smell that has managed to seep in. Thick, metallic, and rotten. The source of this smell is on the exam tables, in glistening pools on the floor, splattered on the walls, and saturating the Doctor himself from head to toe.
I wonder who the unlucky guinea pig is this time. He too, like the Doctor, had a penchant for liquor. The lips that had been enthusiastically downing the contents of a whiskey bottle now lay hacked off in strips on the floor. The front of his face, below the empty white orbs of his eyes, are completely void of flesh and tissue, rendered to exposed muscle and a jawline of deteriorated, stained teeth. The Doctor almost always mutilates the face, removing the most distinguishable characteristics of the individual. It’s his little idiosyncrasy.
He finds it all so amusing. He laughs as he pushes his hand into the vivisected breast of the still-twitching cadaver and rearranges its insides, one by one. He laughs at the body’s spastic contortions as he introduces the electrical stimuli. When he sees me cover my nose from the stench of it all, he bursts further into laughter, doubling over and clutching his stomach.
He just laughs and laughs before he keels over on the floor and begins to cry.
“Cyril was feeding that vagrant my bread and my booze,” the Doctor later says to me, speaking through the glass. “That goddamned fool was always trying to run this place like a lunatic asylum behind my back. I hired him as a groundskeeper, not a caretaker!” He leans forward, as if letting me in on a little secret. “There’s a lot of those tramps out there, prowling about on my property. They’ve been easy prey…easy prey.”
A peculiar look comes across his face. “You know, that’s all these people do. That’s all everybody I know does. Take. Taking my ideas, my belongings, my family, my future, my goddamned soul and will to live. Take, take, take, take, take.” He takes a small sip from the bourbon bottle, grimaces, then throws it across the room and watches it shatter against a table.
“It’s not worth it anymore.”
The green chiropteran humanoid stares at me through the redness of its thermal goggles. It is no longer naked, now garbed with black strips of tight fabric, doubling as bandages for wounds that won’t heal and as non-penetrable armor. It’s speckled with bloody crescents of nail and bite wounds, all of which appear human.
It grinds the mandible and maxilla of its beak as it finishes enthusiastically gulping down the hunks of flesh the Doctor has just fed it, as a reward for successfully executing his tasks. I think it knows how disgusted I am by it, and it almost seems to be reveling in it. It lets its bloody tongue loll out and opens its mouth, as if it’s smiling.
The Doctor pets its head. Its his good little pet. It does anything and everything he asks without question. I would not be surprised if it is now the Doctor’s favorite toy.
I look away.
The Doctor glows white amidst the shadows of the darkened laboratory. He stands with his head pointed up towards me, eyes closed, the palms of his hands pressed together. Trembling in place, ashen and disheveled; the lashes of his rheumy eyes and stubbled cheeks speckled with fresh teardrops, he murmurs the words of a quiet prayer I can’t interpret. He looks like death, standing there pale, thin and shivering.
He finishes his solemn orison and steps up to my incubator, reaching out to gently touch the glass, but then stops in place as if running into an invisible wall. It’s like he wants to touch me, but can’t make himself do so, out of fear of breaking something sacrosanct.
He looks up at me, suddenly, and opens his mouth. A trickle of fresh blood bubbles out from the corner of his lip, oozing down his chin and leaving a glossy string of thick red saliva on his starched lab coat. He emits a low rumbling choke and coughs up a mixture of blood and bilious green sputum. With a groan, he slowly wipes his stained mouth with a clean part of his sleeve.
I know not if he expects my sympathy, or if he wants my warmth to comfort him. There’s nothing I can, or wish, to offer him. He looks smaller than I remember; uncertain and fragile, like he could be knocked to the floor by a breeze. I look down at his gloved hands. They, too, are sanguine with blood, but I know that it is not his own. The freshly eviscerated corpse of the mansion gardener lays on an examination table behind him, the ribs of his open chest cavity gleam beneath the fluorescent light above. Of course he’s far from being the Doctor’s first, and I would normally assume that he wouldn’t be the Doctor’s last; but judging from how rapidly his own disease is progressing, I’ve begun to feel uncertain this might not be the case.
When does it end? And when it does, how will it all take place? The last time the Doctor spoke to me, just a few days prior before his afflictions began to manifest more obviously, he told me that if it were to come down to it, he would much rather go out with a bang instead of a whimper. I wasn’t certain what he meant by that—and granted I am still unsure—but seeing him behold me so acutely, pale as a specter and slick with his own and others’ vital fluids, my mind wanders to unpleasant conclusions.
His words from a near past echo in my mind: “Nobody is going to leave here alive. No one.” I realize now that he was most likely including himself in that statement, and perhaps, even me?
No, no.
He wouldn’t do that to me. Though he vacillates between narcissistic benignity and sadism, it is his own ego, ironically enough, that won’t let him destroy the being he has monikered his “crown jewel”. I was no easy feat even for an esteemed geneticist such as he (I only know this because he won’t stop telling me, using these exact words). From my very conception under the scrutiny of a microscope, spliced, sliced and assembled into imagery to fit his esoteric convictions, manipulated to be his idea of perfection, and constantly monitored under his watchful eye, the last thing he would do is destroy the very thing he created as an incubator for his son’s cure. Next to Daniel, I am his pride, his joy—
—but ultimately not his reason for living.
My heart skips a beat.
My blood has already been extracted and used as a transfusion for Daniel, before he was taken away just days later. Seized from the Doctor’s care by his very own employer who made him sign over guardianship. I don’t even know if I’ve cured his son. I don’t even think the Doctor knows, himself. He has said nothing to me about it.
I feel cold.
My purpose…
my fundamental reason for existing…has already been utilized.
The Doctor stares at me again, having just coughed up another blob of mucus, and slowly gives me a beastly grin. His teeth, yellowed with decay and alcohol, flash obscenely in the lab lights. My heart is starting to beat, faster this time, burdened with the knowledge that I am alone with him with no possible incentive of being kept alive; and with Caleb Goldman seeming to have disappeared from the picture, there is now nothing to stop him from his downward spiral of self-destructive megalomania.
Despite knowing that I bear great power he has not even fathomed, I feel so vastly unprepared for a future I can’t predict.
His creations tear the living apart. Limb by limb as they scream, being eaten and dismembered alive. Humans, dogs, monkeys, cyborgs, parasites, winged mammals and mammals that should not be winged. The Doctor, meanwhile, will give me a knowing “look”, as if he is indicating “you’re next”.
The screams become my white noise.
A heartbeat.
Slow. Resounding. Gentle.
I open my eyes. I’m laying down in a room. A large and very dark room. The walls are a blackish red and foiled with gold diamond shapes. These walls surround me. Four black-red gold walls. There are bookshelves full of books. Sheets of paper are stuck onto the walls and clipped on pieces of string that hang across the room. Colors of various pigments are crudely swirled and scribbled onto them. They are obscure to me. In one corner are pastel soft-looking round shapes piled on top of each other. Some of them look like animals I’ve seen father experiment on. Dogs. I think that’s what one of them is. All of them rest next to a wooden dresser of some kind. Some of the smaller ones sit on top of the dresser. They’re all smiling and their unblinking frozen eyes look directly at me.
I wonder how I got here. Wherever this may be. It’s not the lab. Perhaps it is near the lab. Father must have brought me here. When I was asleep. It’s strange I didn’t wake up.
There’s something soft beneath me. I shift myself. Wherever my weight sits it sinks beneath me. I move my hand to where I rest. It’s very soft and pliable. I look down. It looks like an exam linen of some kind. But it’s puffy and much more comfortable. I feel beneath it. It’s malleable and sinks wherever I shift my weight. This is the strangest and most comfortable exam table I’ve ever felt.
I am pulling this linen on top of me. It’s comforting. It’s heavy and warm. Like I’m being swathed by my incubator. But better.
Father should be back soon. He’s probably having me wait. I wonder what he wants from me this time. I don’t like it when he makes me wait. I just want him to get it over with so that I can be alone again. Like right now. But I know that if I want him to get what it is he wants over with I will have to leave this room. I like this room a lot. I would love to stay here under this puffy exam sheet and sleep.
Maybe Father will leave me alone if he sees that I am asleep.
I bury myself further under the sheet. I’m covered almost entirely. Like I’m making myself not exist at all.
I turn onto my other side. I am face-to-face with Daniel. He too is laying on his side looking at me. He is so small and pale. His face looks like death with a pair of icy blue eyes that resemble father’s peering out from the sunken dark sockets.
Icy.
He’s cold. Very very cold. I can feel it in waves just from his body alone. It’s uncomfortable. Without thinking I am putting my hand on his cheek. He shudders. I rest my palm on his cheek and I can feel the heat transferring from me into him. The blue of his face starts to change right before me. It is like I am working some kind of magic on him. I let the heat continue to warm him up. His cheeks bloom a rosy pink. His lips turn from purple to pearl. The gauntness of his face fades as baby fat rises to take its place. He doesn’t take his eyes off me while this is all happening. I feel his breathing increase just beneath my hand.
“You’re warm.”
His voice is so much like Father’s but if it were softer. He looks so much like Father. Like a small clone of him.
I try to remove my hand but he grabs it and presses it desperately to his face.
“Don’t go. I’m cold.” He doesn’t feel cold to me at all anymore but I don’t say a thing.
He curls himself alongside me. He nudges his forehead right against my heart. I spread my fingers onto his face so that heat can travel further. Until a large hand suddenly clutches the top of mine. I look up and there is Father glaring down at me. He looks so much like a clone of Daniel. Only larger and stronger and meaner.
Now I’m cold.
I look down. Daniel is gone.
“There’s no way out, Curien!”
A stentorian voice bellows outside the fog of my sleep. It must be one of the Doctor’s subordinates who’s had enough.
“I must admit…” it’s now clearly the Doctor’s voice coming through. “…respect your consistency.” Oh, so it was a dream. I always think they’re real.
I try to wake up.
“…never, ever defeat me! Say Hello to my masterpiece!”
Me? Is that me he is referring to—
The sound of whirring suction fills my ears, I hear the glass around me lift, and I am immediately enveloped by the cold of the laboratory. It pulls me from my hypnopompic state and thrusts me into the present, wrenching a gasp from my strained throat. I intake the cool air and instinctually throw my arms around myself. I open my eye.
Standing below is the Doctor, staring up at me with that twisted smirk of his. What does he want me to do? He is waiting. Anticipating. Hungering for a reaction from me. Lingering in the distance behind him are two men. One is slender, with a stoic face and slanted brown eyes that look me over with calculated resolve, the other stands a foot taller, with tawny hair and squared features, whose piercing blue eyes glance between me and the Doctor in shock. He is tensed, his arms bent and lifted from his sides, his jaw gritted and brows furrowed either with anger, perplexion, or both. The duo couldn’t be more dissimilar, only seeming to bear likeness in two unremarkable ways: they both hold the same silver, barrel and cartridge-like object in their right hands, and they both wear lacquered white tags pinned to the breast pockets of their suits, which say—
Agent Thomas Rogan…Agent G…A.M.S
AMS
The ones that the Doctor said would try to kill me. Who Caleb Goldman said would try to capture and torture me. Who were going to come and take Daniel way. Perhaps they’re the ones who took Daniel away? How could the Doctor do that to the son he so loved? Perhaps the Doctor didn’t truly love him. Or perhaps they came seeking his son and they’re too late? The Doctor said he would rather go out with a bang, I wonder who called them and why, perhaps…
The Doctor is still smiling at me. Drooling. Chuckling.
Oh. He’s trying to kill me.
He knows I have little chance…no, he thinks I have little chance. This is a game to him. He must have called the AMS. He thinks this is all so funny. I knew I never appreciated his sense of humor and now I know why. You couldn’t just kill me and yourself quickly and be done with it, could you? No, your preferred method is torture. You love this. More than you loved me. You never meant a word of it. You brought me into this world, only to hold my hand and lead me to my execution. You wanted me to be your servant. I bet you realized I’m smarter than you thought, that I can’t be your little golem anymore. I bet it angers you. Consumes you. You have failed, and now you want to watch it slowly crash and burn.
Well, as you so like to say my dear Father, two can play at that game, you son of a bitch.
I lock my eye onto him. Heat rises into my chest and pools into my upper extremities.
“Who ARE you?” I bellow, in a voice that I have never used and that he has never heard. My throat is already screaming for me to stop, but I grit through the sting. “Nobody gives me instructions!” Not able to hold back my ire, I say, without thinking “I…shall…destroy…EVERYTHING!”
I don’t register his reaction. That liquid warmth is now flowing through my wrists, past my ulna, gathering into the cleft of my palms. I initiate a target sequence. My fingers curl over my carpal ligaments, and the heat that gathered in my hand flicks hesitantly through the creases of my palm, before igniting immediately with the open air. I unfurl my fingers away from my palm to contain the infernal globe of pulsing white energy, whip back my arm, and launch it forward.
In the same motion I turn away from the impact and fly over to the concrete wall behind my incubator. I hear it. A shrill and penetrating scream that pierces the recesses of my eardrums, shakes the walls and rings around the entirety of the laboratory. My breathing hitches and heart flutters.
I hear his voice then, croaking softly. It’s too cracked and guttural for me to understand what he’s saying, yet I know he’s addressing it to me. Then, just as quickly as it started, it too stops, and all that remains is the lull of machinery, and two pairs of footsteps making their way over towards where I stand.
In a hurry, I stand back from the wall and hurl a ball of fiery plasma towards it. The force of the collision smashes a hole right through the concrete and melts the alloy of the foundation, which goops hot onto the floor. I dart through the cavity, seeking to get away from the chill of the laboratory—only to be hit with a frigidness far, far more acute.
This foreign cold spell is not the only thing that hits me. Laid out before me, in its vast irregular glory, is an environment so alien I involuntarily freeze in place to take it all in. Beneath where I levitate, under the patio, is a mass of white; completely flat, with dots of scintillating crystal that glint under the new sun. Sun. I know that word. I look up, to the firmament. It is purple-blue, like a fresh bruise, yet the further I glance out, a pale orange is emerging gradually from the distance, behind…those jagged peaks covered in the white that’s on the ground below, seeming to be an accumulation of the little flakes that are cascading down from the dark gray puffs of…smoke? That doesn’t seem right. Smoke has a smell.
The particles land on me and evaporate with little pops of steam, minute drops of moisture trickle down the fleeting warmth of my body before dissipating. They feel…aqueous. I see another object up in the sky; a round, silvery orb with soot-colored blotches scattered across its surface. Moon. That’s a tarot card, too. I can hear the Doctor’s voice saying it clear-as-day. Day. What’s the Moon doing out during the day? I thought it was an object of the night. That and those delicate twinkles sparkling across the fading semi-dark gloom. Stars. The Star is also a tarot card.
A crystal flake deposits itself on my eyelash, and everything I behold becomes a blurred spectrum of kaleidoscopic, blending consistencies.
Sun…day…moon…night…stars…
I hear their footsteps approaching behind me, slowly.
I turn around and blink away the speck. My vision corrects itself, back to the painfully grim present. The wonder I briefly felt leaves me.
They stand there, shoulder-to-shoulder, the “Rogan” man has his silver cartridge-and-barrel object pointed up at me, whilst the composed “G” hurriedly flips through a book. “Rogan” doesn’t take his eyes off me, until the other Agent looks up from his book and nods his head, pointing at a particular page for “Rogan” to see, shooting glances between me and whatever is written inside the little journal. When the two Agents look at the page together, I decide to make my move. Levitating in the air, flying at a speed nigh-incomprehensible, I dodge immediately to the left, conjure up a searing ball of energy as fast as I will it, and lunge it at the two Agents.
The ”Rogan” lets out a shout and, blocking “G”, raises his silver thing to eye-level, pulls the trigger, and with an ear-earsplitting bang causes the fireball to burst into sparks. The sound startles me so much I nearly fly backwards, but instead I soar immediately off to their right, generate another fireball in my palm, and race immediately over towards “G”. The Agent, still displaying calmness but with an alertness in his eyes that was absent before, immediately dodges backwards, rolls onto the ground, kneels up on one knee, and with both his hands on the trigger he dislodges a similar discordant bang from his device, which tears my fireball and—
Oh, Jesus, Jesus Christ !!
It hurts. It hurts.
A fiery, tearing pain penetrates through the exposed wires of my thigh and travels immediately through my muscles and my nerves. That goddamned bastard! I lunge for him with a fireball ready in my hand, hoping to catch him off guard, but his reflexes seem to anticipate my reaction, immediately dodging to the right and aiming once again in the same place. This time, I see a small, bronze-colored, torpedo-shaped object leave the cartridge before—
it hit me. My thigh. Through my muscle, my nerves, lodging into the femur before shattering the bone.
My brain is screaming.
“G, look out!” I hear the redhead Agent cry out. His voice is authoritative, like the Doctor’s, and just as afraid. They encircle me, like predators, wide-eyed and perturbed, but the “G” does not seem frightened. I dodge and attack, and they continue to hit me with those agonizing pop, pop, pops of their hideous weapons. I do anything I can to dissociate from it all. I want them dead. They came here to kill me. Fate has always been decided for me by outside influences. I have finally, after years of being a goddamned plaything for a pathetic man to objectify and infantilize, finally managed to liberate myself…and these bastards wish to replace him. I can imagine what they’d do to me, only there would be two of them to torture and degrade me. Me. Goddamn it! They dodge and hit me, why am I not able to hit them? Why is the “G” agent not afraid of me? Fear me, you damned fool! Don’t you know what you’re facing against?!
Deep inside I know he does know. His “Rogan” partner is not a man of subtlety. With every successful hit he gives out a triumphant whoop, whenever I get close to injuring him he loudly curses and fills me with lead. Yelling, angry, vengeful for something or someone. The “G” is the opposite. He is calm and meticulous, even though I target him more exclusively. He doesn’t yell or cry out. He is nimbler than the other Agent, and quiet. It is as if he can anticipate my actions before I, myself even plan it out, like he’s detecting a pattern in my behavior. How is he doing that!? The way he moves seems so calculated. I am watching him, my eye fixated on him, and he does the same back, whether he is maneuvering himself, dodging, or firing his weapon at me. He just stares at me with that peculiar look of unidentifiable nature.
Why is there something about him that is so strange, and yet so resonant?
As I move once again towards him, my eye glances off to the side where the book drops. There, in clear view, is a diagram of my form, with the title above Magician, Type 0.
The Magician? That’s also a tarot card—
A bullet shatters another bone, this time in my bicep. I must have been hit one hundred times at this point. I don’t count and nothing I think about or focus on relieves me from the anguish that is taking over my entire body. I fly up, towards the firmament, and look down at the two of them. They watch me, silent, waiting for my next move.
There is no way at this point that I will be able to function without constantly being in pain. I can feel the rivers of blood flowing out of the wounds where the bullets have penetrated. Wet and sticky. Hasn’t been the first time I’ve felt that sensation.
I am tired, but I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t
Yielding what little energy I have reserved inside me, I raise my arms upwards, flicking my wrists through the ether, then I position my hands flat and upwards, like a bowl, and in this pocket of air the flames dance upwards from my palm and whirl into a powerful, blinding blaze. Utilizing the ether around me, I throw my arms downward towards the Agents, and throw down not just a single ball of fire, but a whole cluster of reeling flames that hail down upon them like the wrath of a violent God.
Yes, that is who I am.
The Agents scatter and shoot down my projectiles, and even when I am sure one is inches away from hitting them they still evade my at the very last second. I do it again. And again. And again. They continue to hit me. Again. And again. And again. I come down, kneel before them, and attempt a similar tactic, this time by throwing the projectiles in the air, and in a distraction from being hit by the flames I attempt to attack them.
Of course it doesn’t work. Of goddamned course. The “Rogan” bastard shoots them all and “G” puts his focus on me and blasts me like a goddamn target board.
It hurts. It hurts so much. It hurts and I feel every single limb and every single body part burning inside like I’m being ripped apart. Like I am coming apart and all that holds me together are stubborn threads of nerve that are on the verge of snapping. All this work. The Doctor put all this work into me only for it to all go to waste. It would be hilarious if the joke wasn’t on me, and I wasn’t the one who was dying.
Oh, well, perhaps like Curien’s other creations, I too shall cheat death. I am not sure if I will like it, but as his superior Goldman likes to pontificate, there is always hope. That man seemed to take a special interest in me. If he has something in store for me if I do theoretically come back, I do wonder what it could be.
Maybe…maybe the joke isn’t on me after all.
I could laugh. Only it hurts too much and I’m pretty sure my lungs are filling with blood. I’d cry but there is little time for tears. Quaking, in my own gore and bodily fluids that managed to vulgarly secrete themselves during this whole ordeal, I lock my eye onto the other Agents, and with the absolute last resolution of strength, I smirk and point to them both.
“You…haven’t seen…anything yet.”