Chapter Text
Bob didn’t want to die.
Or, in a roundabout, more truthful way, maybe he did.
Who else would agree to do this? Sign all the paperwork with his scraggly Robert Reynolds signature, hand over any personal effects (one ratty backpack, one pair of rattier Chucks, a watch he hadn't been able to pawn because it was plastic and flimsy as hell), sit in a doctor's office waiting room with a gaggle of others and wait for his number to be called.
Only when the third person didn't come back through those swinging white doors did he realize…
"This might be a one-way trip," he muttered, mostly to his hands, but also half to the guy next to him. He glanced over when there was no response; the guy next to him was unconscious, maybe dead already, head slumped onto his chest, his lips and the collar of his holey t-shirt crusted in vomit. Bob went back to twisting his fingers together in the corner chair he'd chosen, watching the double doors, waiting for number twelve or number thirty-two or number twenty to come back through.
They didn't.
Number sixteen was called, and the vomit guy next to Bob, bright colored slip with SIXTEEN in prominent black ink clutched in one fist, didn't move. The double doors swung open, but the only people through were a pair of doctors, or scientists, or something. They had scrubs on, and lab coats, and face coverings; real creepy shit that Bob, deliriously when he’d first seen them, figured came straight out of a video game.
It had been so goddamn long since he'd played a video game. Vegas, probably, when he'd whored around a bit in exchange for blow and ended up in that guy's condo. Bartoli. Bob was pretty sure that was his name. Like, ninety-three percent sure. He'd been cool for the most part, when Bob had been doing what he wanted Bob to do, mean the rest of the time, and he had a pretty sick old Sega setup. Bob hooked it up and played in the dark hours of the morning, when he hadn't come down yet and Bartoli, older and fatter and weaker, slept off all they'd done. All he’d done to Bob.
The doctors (or whatever they were) made short work of scooping vomit guy off of his plastic waiting room chair. They took an arm each, and hauled him right back through those double doors. Minutes passed. Nothing. Vomit guy, number sixteen, joining the others.
Bob worried his slip of vibrant blue paper between both fingers. Number five. He thought he'd be called close to first, get it over with and all that, but it seemed they were calling numbers all willy-nilly.
Nothing to be nervous about, the front desk woman, all curves and bouncy hair, said as she slid the paper to him. Thank you for participating.
Like it was some pickup disc golf game. Like it was a grocery store survey.
Like he wasn't going to get taken back through those doors and put down like a dog.
Maybe that's what it was, really, behind these sterile white walls and doctor's office trappings. Pull the undesirables off the streets, get them taken care of where no one can see. Bob rubbed at his eyes with one shaking hand, keeping his slip tight in the other one. He'd been strung out for days. He'd have said yes to anything.
He had, apparently, said yes to anything, because now he was here.
Maybe they'd give him a shot of some good stuff before they got into whatever happened behind those white doors. Maybe that's all it was back there; a big trip with his new pals vomit guy and video game doctors; they'd hold hands and fall into oblivion together. He leaned back against the hard curve of the chair and rubbed his eyes again. The tiny bit of hand sanitizer he'd downed in the adjoining bathroom hadn't taken the edge off of any of this shit, not even a little bit. It still burned in the back of his throat. He wondered if they refilled it yet.
"Number five," droned the speaker above his head, and Bob flinched.
"Number five," he repeated dully, still kind of thinking about a repeat trip to the bathroom. The bottle was still in there; maybe there was a sip or two still sitting at the bottom. The white doors swung open.
He had no idea how he made it through them. The room spun as soon as he levered himself upright, determined to walk himself into hell, not get dragged like vomit guy, and then his mind blanked. He jolted back into consciousness when he was sitting down again. A different plastic chair, a different sour-smelling room.
"Robert Reynolds?" One of the masked doctor scientist men (or women, it didn't much matter at this point, right?) leaned over him.
"You can call me Bob," Bob said, his voice rasping across the remnants of hand sanitizer still coating the back of his throat.
"I have his file here," the other doctor-scientist said.
"Prep him."
The chair whirred and Bob's shirt rode up a little in the back as it twisted around. Metal, then, not plastic; it burned cold on his exposed skin. One of the doctor-scientists prodded Bob's lips with one gloved hand; he opened his mouth without a fight, accepted the soft mouthguard and nestled his teeth into it.
"This is going to pinch," came a different voice, and then a familiar sensation. The needle entered his arm like it was meant to be there, releasing whatever it held into the crook of Bob's arm, into his blown out veins and quivering muscles. The relief was immediate. Bob relaxed into the metal chair as his head was fitted with some sort of cradle, as his arms and legs were strapped down with cuffs. He was on a cloud. Fuckin’ beautiful.
Just keep that coming, he slurred around the mouthguard, or attempted to, at least. He wasn't even sure he knew English anymore.
The fluorescents above him strained and hummed, burning themselves onto his irises as the doctor-scientists bustled around his chair, lifting his arms to rest on different machines, spreading his legs, raising his head so his back, now bare —when did that happen?— was exposed.
All he could see were needles.
Sprouting out of every opening on these new machines, hovering an inch or so away from his skin. His pale, goosebump-covered skin, every hair standing on end as he tried to let his head loll. Impossible, thanks to the cradle. He was kept upright, no matter how much his body wanted to fall to the floor.
Each needle was attached to a tube, glowing blue even in the brightness of the room. Panting around the mouthguard, Bob tried to move his arms closer, closer to the tantalizing sharpness hovering so close, but his restraints were too tight.
He wanted it. This was why he was here, deep in Malaysia somewhere, and not dead in a ditch back in the States. This is what kept him going— the promise of the next high. More and more and more. He spat out the mouthguard, strings of saliva dangling from his lips as it fell somewhere unknown.
"Come on," he rasped through his fucked-over throat and sore gums and dry, bumpy tongue. His voice echoed, tinny and small in his own ears. "COME ON!"
Every single needle dug into his skin at once.
Up and down each arm and leg. All across his back. In his neck, in his chest. Sprouting from the cradle, dug deep into his forehead, his temples, the crown and base of his skull.
He sucked in a breath, the sudden pain jolting him awake and cognizant for the first time in days, and screamed.
He screamed and screamed as the blue gunk, whatever it was, shiny and taunting, was forced under his skin, into his veins. This wasn't a high— it was nothing like he'd ever experienced before. It burned like fire, like razorblades scraping bone, like teeth in his flesh. He screamed until his throat was flayed and raw, screamed until tears pooled in his eyes and made tracks through the dirt on his face.
The lights burned, harsh and unrelenting, under his squeezed-shut eyelids as the pain finally ebbed. He gasped in one breath, and another. Whatever drug they'd given him at the beginning, the floaty cloud, was gone. He was tied to his body, it felt like. Irrevocably arthbound as every bone, every muscle, every hair follicle throbbed on beat with his heart.
"That's all, right?" He was surprised his voice even worked. "I can go?"
Let me go. I learned my lesson. No more shady medical treatments, no more back alley deals. I'll find my highs the good old fashioned way from now on, promise.
"Round two," a disembodied, metallic voice echoed through the lab, and the needles whirred. Bob flailed in his restraints, but they held fast. He couldn't move.
"No," he panted, the word hitching upward into hysteria. "No, no—"
No one listened. The needles found their homes in his skin over and over again, injecting him with round after round of pain. He sobbed and screamed until his voice was gone. He begged them to stop, he begged to be let go, he begged to be killed. When none of that worked, he cried for Annie Reynolds.
Strapped to that medical table, halfway across the world, delirious with pain and pumped full of experimental drugs, Bob begged his dead mother to save him. He begged her to take him in her arms again, to hold him close, to make everything go away. He begged her forgiveness for all of it, every damn bit of it— for every time he was a bad son, for every time he antagonized his father, for every time he brought Robert Sr.'s wrath down on her, for every convenience store robbery and every lie and every drug he'd ever taken, even when they were from her own hand. The words were incoherent at the end, the needles in his brain garbling everything from his thoughts to the swollen, bleeding tongue in his mouth, but he still begged.
Until the machines powered down.
Until the blue serum was gone.
Until they closed his eyes with gloved hands, until his file was marked complete, until he was placed in the cradle, another subject depleted with no result.
Unsuccessful, read the only line handwritten on the bottom of the lab notes for subject five, R. Reynolds Jr.
Weak.