Disclaimer: Not mine. JP's.
Please read and review! Flames are welcome. Invited, actually. Criticism helps. So just tell me what you honestly think of it - that's what helps the most. Thanks for reading!! And by the way, this is Max's POV. At The School. In case you couldn't tell.
Ch. 1 – Earliest Memory
I wasn't really able to process everything that was going on at two years old, but I was able to get the gist of it.
And it wasn't good.
All I knew was that for as long as I could remember, I had been stuck inside some sort of cage with two other...experiments like me. People in white coats would often come by to do painful procedures on me, and sometimes they would take one of the two other boys away for periods of time.
The boy with dark hair didn't speak much. None of us did, but he made less noise than anyone else. He didn't ever show pain, and as a result of his stoicism, he didn't really show any emotion at all. He rarely smiled. I liked him, though. I liked his hair. And his eyes. They were both dark. As were his wings. It was nice to have some dark. The walls, our clothes, everything, it seemed, was white. White can get dreary after a while. I liked the contrast of his dark hair and eyes and wings. It helped balance everything out for me. Like we were breaking the pattern of the people in white coats. Succeeding in defying them.
The other boy had very light blond hair and blue eyes. He moved around more, but he would bump into things a lot. He mumbled a lot about heat and loud noises. He was nice enough, but I had less to do with him. Which was still a lot. I mean, you're going to know a person pretty well if you've been stuck in a cage with them all your life.
I also saw other people in cages around us. They weren't like us – we had wings on our backs, though we had never gotten to use them. They weren't like us, but they weren't like the people running the tests on us either. Some had weirdly shaped heads, or scales, or extra arms and stuff. I wasn't able to become familiar with any one of them, though, because all of them stopped moving after a while, and the people in white coats would come take them away.
I had no idea what this meant.
I would get bored a lot. You see, strange as it seems, there really aren't that many fun ways to kill time when you're stuck in a dog crate. Especially when there's not anything you're waiting for after the time passes.
I knew that I didn't like the people in white coats. I would always try to fight against them.
Which didn't always turn out too well for me.
But I wasn't going to give up anytime soon. So when I saw the door open and a whitecoat walk through, it was just business as usual.
"Come here, honey," he said, heading for our cage. I glared at him with all the ferocity a two-year-old mutant kid could muster.
He opened the latch on the cage and reached in for me. I struggled against him, but he won. No thanks to my cage-mates. I shot a look of reproach at one of them. The one with the dark hair. He didn't smile, but he looked unrepentant.
The man holding me forced on a baggy sweatshirt and proceeded to walk down a maze of corridors and hallways and elevators. I didn't like those – they made me uncomfortable. We moved all weirdly in them.
Finally, we arrived at a place I'd never seen before. There were two big, glass doors and a counter with a woman behind it. The walls were white – the same white that I'd grown accustomed to seeing everywhere.
But this was not what surprised me.
What surprised me was what I saw through the glass doors.
I saw green. I saw people who looked like the whitecoats, walking around with seemingly carefree expressions. I saw trees and flowers and the sky. The sky. The vast, blue, empty basin above called to me with all my heart. My whole being yearned toward it, though I hardly knew what it was.
I had fought against all the uncomfortable tests and unkind whitecoats back in the cage, but I hadn't rebelled against our treatment. None of us had. It had never occurred to us there was anything beyond the drab white walls and metal bars of the cages.
And then we were outside.
Suddenly, my marveling at its beauty was replaced by cold, intense fear. The fresh air cut at my face like a whip.
I had absolutely no idea what this place was. I didn't know what could happen here. I didn't get scared easily, but here I could feel myself shaking in the whitecoat's arms.
"You see, Maximum," he began gently – gently for a whitecoat, anyway. "This is what it's like on the outside. This is what the world really looks like."
I stared at him, deeply confused. Why was this guy showing me this? I couldn't speak English perfectly, but I could speak it well enough to understand what he was saying. His tenderness disturbed me – it made me feel unprotected. Vulnerable. Like he was hiding something and it would be that much worse later.
"Maximum – that's your name, by the way," he continued. "Maximum. Because you're the best there is. You're limitless."
He just stood there for a while, and I started to adjust to the different air. It felt...somehow cleaner. Less filtered.
I liked it.
I couldn't help but notice everybody's face out here. Nobody looked upset, or cruel, or in pain. Everyone looked...happy, somehow. At ease with the world. Like I had never felt.
"Jeb, what are you-" a heard a voice say angrily from behind us. Then the whitecoat stopped when he saw me in the guy's arms. Then he threw him an understanding-yet-exasperated look.
Jeb, as apparently his name was, just shrugged sheepishly.
"You should probably bring it back inside before anyone else finds out." His voice was softer now.
"Yeah." Jeb's voice sounded sad. "Yeah, I will."
Slowly, Jeb turned around and headed back for the building. I didn't want to go back. I liked it outside.
He walked back through the doors and into a room that I recognized as one where they did the tests on me. I frowned and struggled harder against him.
Jeb lay me down on the table and brought out a weird mask thing which he put in front of my face.
"I'm sorry," I heard him say quietly, before everything went dark.
That was my earliest memory.