fridgeflower | (no subject)

Right now, it was the waiting that was getting to Laurie more than anything. It was the hunger and thirst, the inability to move. Everything was aching. She'd long given up on trying to escape the cage, trying to find some weakness in all of this to exploit. There were no cracks, no weaknesses, nothing. Just waiting.

The last time the train came in, she told Julian that she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. The throw-away comment had played over and over in her mind for the past few days, since she'd woken up trapped. She regretted it so badly, saying that, as if not saying it would have made any difference. Who knows, though. Maybe it would have.

None of it really mattered, though. The aching, her inability to help herself, her stupidity... It didn't matter, because it was nearing the end. Her anger and determination had crumbled into fear, then slid down into a kind of hollow hopelessness, and now panic had surged up from under her exhaustion. COMPASS felt none of it. They had started grinding their captives down one by one, displaying them in scenes of torture, and there was no way out of it, and there was no way she wasn't next.

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The wait.

The interminable wait over three days, while others had been tortured, perhaps even killed, had been deliberate on COMPASS' part. The white coated figure would scurry through at irregular intervals, it's eye-stalks studying Laurie and making notes on the clipboard but never once, in all that time, did it speak to her.

As time passed, Laurie might have noticed that where originally she could possibly have seen others moving around, slowly, in the past half a day (if she cold still measure time) the scenery beyond the Void had taken on an empty appearance. Voices had been cut off, people no longer passed her view and any scenery she may have seen was gone gray and indistinct.

This time, the white coated figure breezed up near her cage, it's eye stalks waving in an excited manner.

From somewhere near the collar of it's coat it's voice came. "The others, your friends? They were given the chance to leave. We explained that we had what we needed from the experiment and we sent them on their ways."

It was lying but the words were uttered with complete conviction, supported by the blank, empty space just beyond where Laurie could see.

"We've decided to keep you though. After all in your world there is no one to miss you, no existence as it were. You are nothing to them anymore, dead I believe you call it but you're still useful to our needs; for now."

The disappearance of the campus and everything else around her had only proven her right, that it was her turn. She wasn't sure what she'd been expecting, either, if anything. There was horror in this place. There was always something to run from and always something that might kill you. She expected pain or death, but not... Not that.

Laurie had the bars of the cage in a white-knuckled grip, physically swallowing down the fear that threatened to bubble up in screams or pleading. The figure in the lab coat (she assumes the Project Head), was unsettling, even more so up close, even more for what it said.

She wasn't sure how she was meant to reply, nor could she get her mind around the idea. Gone? Everybody else, gone? Just like that? She opened her mouth to question, if she could get the words up, whether it was as simple as all that. The pause in explanation is brief, however, before she's made to remember her circumstances. She doesn't fit in her world, anymore. COMPASS restored her and brought her into their watch, and--

"Why?" She managed to choke out the question, immediately very aware of how raw her throat was. "Why did I even have to come here? I didn't even... I never did anything bad to anybody."

"Good and bad are merely moral concepts," the white coated figure said in a tone that dismissed her argument entirely. "You were defective in your world, correct? That is why you were killed?"

The eye stalks moved from the clipboard, as if it were reading off this information, back up to Laurie's face.

"Defective? I--" She cut herself off, implication of the word catching up with her. Defective... Broken in the mould. She had that genetic difference that rendered her something other than human, which was defective in the view of some, and it was why she was killed.

So when she spoke again, it was with security in that knowledge. It wasn't a comfortable admission. It wasn't a thing that she agreed with, but that had been the reasoning behind it. The COMPASS employee was right about that.

"Because I'm a mutant."

"A mutant, yes and your mutation caused you to be undesirable to the whole of your species," it spoke the words not as a question but more a statement.

"Even among other defective types, you were still on the outside as they would harm you without thought because you were not worth the consideration to them?" This was a question but it came with something more.

This time, instead of just the words, Laurie would feel the agonizing pain of her hand beginning to slowly wither.

"How many times have you been so thoughtlessly harmed and killed?"

As it was on the morning of M-day, Laurie's reaction to the sudden pain was to scream. Her argument against the question died on her tongue, mind going blank in the face of terrifying sensation. She almost missed the next question, now writhing where her knees had buckled, but it registered after a moment. She sobbed briefly and tried to breathe and searched her mind for an answer. Maybe it would stop if she could just answer!

She couldn't tear her mind far enough from the pain, however, to rattle off a number. It was just the memory of her injury at Kevin's hand that burned white-hot in her mind. All she managed to get out, loud and strangled, was, "He didn't mean it! He just--"

Kevin had just wanted to touch somebody. That's all. She'd played that excuse over and over in her mind to stop herself from being so angry that he'd done it, that he hadn't tested himself before grabbing her. It would've been such an easy thing to do, but he was reckless, and he'd been opportunistic, and maybe he cared more about the wanting than he had actually cared about her.

The other times, though... The time she very-almost died and the time that she did... "It was just-- They couldn't have done anything! Please!"

"And now?" The white coated figure pointed out with merciless flatness. "What about now? You have once again been left behind to suffer, isolated from even your own species. But nature is cruel that way is it not? It isolates and destroys the defective specimens."

The words were carefully chosen and intoned in time to what was happening to her hand.

Laurie wanted to impulsively argue against that, to be sure that she wouldn't be left in this place. She couldn't be assured of the truth in that, however. The people that she knew here now were people that hadn't been her friends before, who hadn't understood her and still, largely, didn't. Even when Josh was kept under COMPASS, too, she'd been left alone on the Charon.

So her captor was right, wasn't he? She was really alone again, suffering, and now-- She let out another sob and released her left hand's grip on her decaying arm, reaching through the bars of the cage to grab at the figure's lab-coat.

"Please! Please, stop! I don't want to die!"

The figure deftly twisted away from her reaching hand and an eye stalk peered, imperiously down at her.

It didn't say anything further, merely walked away, scribbling notes furiously on it's clipboard as it too, now abandoned Laurie to her fear and misery.