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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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.