I'm in a weird and vague mood, so enjoy this weird and vague story. I know it's not my best, but this is one of those "I-need-to-write-a-quick-one-shot-just-to-do-it" stories. I won't spoil anything. I don't own Lab Rats. Enjoy.
* * * Abussos * * *
"We need food."
That was an understatement. We had been without food for a while, and our water supply would be gone in a day or two. But neither of my brothers looked up when I mentioned this very important fact. I stood and walked around them, observing their blank faces. I held my arms close to my body to keep them from shaking. My legs could barely hold me upright. Still, neither of my brothers even acknowledged me.
"Did you two numbskulls hear me? We need food. Now."
"Go get some," Chase muttered.
I unfolded my arms and gestured to the cave entrence. "Out there? By myself? What, are you trying to kill me?"
Chase shrugged, his expression never changing. His eyes stayed focused forward on the stone ground in front of him. He seemed completely fascinated with that one spot, and if he ever moved—he rarely did—he would always return, sit cross-legged and stare at that patch of the cave floor for hours.
"Adam." I turned to my older brother. I could—would—be gentler with him. "Please? I need someone."
He shook his head violently, coughed, and shivered.
We would need more water too, if only for him. I'd lost count of how many days his fever had lasted, but it had to have been more than a week, maybe even two. He spent his days sleeping, moaning, and occasionally babbling nonsense.
My brothers had always been polar opposites, but now even more so. Chase never slept, and Adam did only that. I was barely holding myself together, not to mention keeping up morale for all three of us.
Food. We needed food. Adam needed food, and Chase too, and me.
"Chase?" I leaned down to look at him. His eyes left that favorite spot for a moment, glancing into mine. His hair had grown long over our months in hiding, and now it covered most of his face, like an oily brown curtain. "I'm going out. Keep Adam safe."
He nodded and turned back to his spot. He sat with legs crossed and hands folded under his chin, like always. As I stood to walk out of the cave, I heard his faint whisper: "I'm sorry."
I hadn't been outside in a long time, and it never ceased to strip me of my breath and make me want to curl up into a ball, pretending none of it existed. The sky blanketed the earth in eternal darkness, and cavernous streaks of green power interrupted the flow of the land. Our cave was situated in a small mountain overlooking a vast field dotted with trees, so I had a fine view of all Krane's abysmal army had done to our world.
I picked my way down the rocky incline as a silent plane passed over my head. I only knew of its existence because of the slight disturbance in the inky sky: Krane's army had yet to perfect their cloaking mechanism. For a moment I stayed still, hidden by the rocks. But without a properly functioning chip, Krane and his goons couldn't pick me up on their sensors. Chase's idea worked flawlessly, if you ignored the fact that our disabled chips had allowed Adam to get sick and Chase and I to sink to new mental lows.
Yes, Chase might sit still and stare for hours, but I knew he was thinking, devising, strategizing. My mental lows wouldn't produce any such help.
I'd been seeing things where things shouldn't be. I'd even seen people, like Davenport, once or twice. They flash on the edges of my vision, but when I turn my head, they're gone. Or for a moment it will seem like I'm in a different world. But I hadn't mentioned any of this to Chase or Adam. First, they didn't seem likely to believe or care. They each had problems of their own. And secondly . . . I could handle it. Not a big deal. We had so much to worry about, like finding and stopping Krane.
Krane! He'd already destroyed our world. I wanted him to pay. My legs shook with rage under me, and I couldn't walk in a straight line. Krane had destroyed so much. He'd take so much away from us. He'd taken my father, my uncle. My family. He was responsible for Adam getting sick. (I heard Adam. I saw Adam. I feared for his life.) He was responsible for Chase becoming utterly depressed. (Something happened to my baby brother. He broke, and I don't know if he can ever be fixed again.)
The tree in front of me seemed oddly still until you got close, and then you could notice some of the leaves shaking in the mild breeze. A bunny skittered near its trunk, but when it saw me it ran. But it also ran away from the rift in the ground, that gapping abyss from which green energy oozed.
The bunny had only one ear, and the fruit on the tree glowed like the energy.
Still, I picked the fruit, and I cradled it in my arm. Then I turned, and I saw Leo. He stood there, shocked. He had on a dark shirt with some kind of logo on his right side (a dragon, maybe?) and boots that went almost to his knees and covered the bottom of his dark-green pants.
"Bree," he whispered.
"Leo." I could barely get the word out. "Leo, you're alive!"
"Bree!" He ran up to me, and I grabbed at his hands. "I thought you were gone."
"Leo! Adam and Chase are up in the cave. Adam's sick." I couldn't seem to get a hold on Leo's hands properly. I was weak. I needed food. "You're all we have left!"
"No, I'm not. Bree, Douglas and Big D are alive!"
I paused. They were alive. But . . . but I'd seen Krane take them. Had they really gotten away? Did we really have a chance? One happy tear slipped down my cheek.
Then . . . then Leo's face changed. "Bree, why do you see me?"
"Huh?" I grabbed at his hands again. I couldn't.
Leo looked up into my eyes. "You can see me?"
"I can see you!" I assured him.
"Bree, Adam's not sick. He's—"
A loud sound like thunder rumbled through the ground. I dropped to my knees and screamed. The sound seemed to crack my skull in two. It reverberated through my brain and my heart and I wanted to die.
When it stopped, I looked up, and Leo was gone. I screamed his name, but I got no answer. No. I'd seen something . . . imagined something again. Not only that, but it had lasted several seconds. I'd heard him. Maybe I needed to tell Chase.
I stood, and again my legs shook. I needed food. The wind blew through and I shivered; I wondered if it would snow later. I didn't know what part of the world we were in, but it had rained before. Maybe it would snow.
The fruit had fallen from my hands, and I knelt to pick it up. As I stood again, I noticed a figure on the horizon. He walked toward me quickly. My first instinct was to run, but my legs wouldn't do what I wanted. Then, as the figure came closer, I recognized him: Victor Krane.
My heart stopped, and I turned to run as best I could. I screamed. This time it wasn't a hallucination: I knew it. Krane had taken over the world, but he still regarded me and my brothers as a threat. Why, I couldn't say. We'd been highly ineffective without bionics, and now we were physically and mentally incapable of doing anything to him. But still he hunted us, and now, like wounded prey, I was ready to lie down and let the hunter take me.
He came upon me quickly, and I couldn't fight back. My own legs fought me, weak as I was from living in a cave with little food and hardly any water. I fell to the ground. Strangely enough, what looked like soft, close-clipped grass turned out to be hard-packed dirt instead.
Krane hovered over me, and I cowered. I would fight, of course, but that man had taken so much, and I had no strength. Krane leaned in closer, and he . . . he . . .
He said my name. He said it again. But he didn't say it like a madman savoring the terror of his prey. He said it like . . . he said it like a father! My tired, starving brain, tried to comprehend this, and then he leaned in closer, and the whole world changed.
It wasn't Krane. It was Douglas. He put a calloused yet refreshingly cool hand on my head, only to jerk it back. "Bree." He said my name again. "You're burning up!"
Then he called back. He called to "Donnie" as I got a good look at where we were.
Not a field, though if I looked close I could still see the shape of the field. I could almost see the tree and the bunny and the chasms in the ground. Only, they weren't there. There were stars in the sky—I hadn't seen stars in so long!
We were at the bottom of some kind of ditch, and I could hear cars on a freeway somewhere nearby. That didn't make sense: my brothers and I had specifically tried to find a place in the middle of nowhere!
"Wait," I whispered, and for the first time I realized how hoarse my voice sounded. Why hadn't my brothers said anything about that? "Adam and Chase . . . we need to . . ."
"We found them, Bree. You were the only one left. Donnie, she's over here!"
"But . . . they're in the cave . . . Adam's . . . Adam's sick . . ."
Douglas furrowed his brow. "Cave? We found them next to a payphone trying to contact us. You're the one who wandered off into the middle of nowhere."
But this wasn't the middle of nowhere. We had been in the middle of nowhere, because we had to hide. "Krane—"
"I'm here!" Mr. Davenport galloped down the side of the ditch, kicking dirt onto his pants and not seeming to care.
Mr. Davenport and Douglas began to talk, and they kept looking at me. My brain must've turned to mush somewhere along the way—maybe Krane did it. I couldn't think straight or pay attention to what they said. I picked up a few of their words: "fever," "glitch," "missing," "finally lost it." Those last words came from Douglas.
Then they reach down to pick me up, and the world morphed again. Krane had me in his arms. I kicked and screamed as the green energy swirled around us.
Both Davenport and Douglas tried to calm me down, and I did. They had me. I was safe. But as I looked up, the stars fell out of the sky and that dreaded darkness returned and swept me away with it.
The two elder Davenport brothers emerged from the infirmary to update the victim's brothers to the situation. Adam, Chase, and Leo sat in silence as Douglas and Donald explained Bree's precarious position.
Not only had Bree developed some kind of illness after getting lost during the mission the week before, but somehow her chip managed to malfunction to such a degree that it messed with her nervous system. The older Davenports assumed that the result had been hallucinations of a wide variety, including visual, auditory, and tactile. They didn't know what she had seen, but at least they knew why. She was resting and recovering, which she would do for a while. The combination of illness, dehydration, and glitching would keep her low for quite some time.
Leo took a moment to ask why Bree had been separated from her brothers during the mission. Adam and Chase recounted some of the details they remembered—both had sustained injuries themselves and at the present had a difficult time with memory—including that after the mission had gone wrong, their transportation and means of communication had been destroyed, and they had gotten themselves hopelessly lost in the no-man's-land around the mission site, Bree had wandered off—perhaps she was already delusional—and they couldn't find her again. They'd continued on to find help, hoping to use that help to relocate their sister. And in the end it had worked, but not before Bree went a week wandering aimlessly with no food, water, or mental stability.
Adam and Chase had been excused from their duties around the Bionic Academy, but Leo, Douglas, and Donald still had things to attend to. So they left the victim's brothers sitting together in the waiting room, contemplating when would be the right moment to go in and see their sister. Once they were alone, they looked at each other. Adam coughed, and Chase shifted his gaze to one particular point on the stony floor.
Originally this was going to be another random one-shot about "what if Krane's plans succeeded?" but then I wanted to play around with the unreliable narrator trope. I guess this was more of an experiment than anything, so my apologies if it wasn't that good. I just needed to write something. Nonetheless, let me know what you thought, and if you thought it was awful, give me criticism. Please.
Yes, first part of the story is first person, and the final part is third person. Because I thought you guys deserved some semblance of an explanation.
Also, World of Warcraft released Legion (the new patch) on Tuesday, and I finally got to play a demon hunter a few days ago. There's a lot of "fel energy" (which glows green) and rocks and darkness, so . . . that may have influenced some of Bree's hallucinations. Yeah. Fun fact.
I'm leaving for vacation on Monday and I should be packing. Or at least cleaning my room. And instead I spent an hour and a half on this. Blergh. Sorry for such a long absence guys, and let's be honest, it's not really over. Blah blah blah, original fiction, blah blah blah, extreme murder mystery Zootopia story I want to finish before publishing, blah blah blah looking at colleges and yikes I'm getting old, etc. :) Yay excuses!
So anyway, reviews are appreciated but not required, and if you do review let me know what you thought. How'd my first attempt at unreliable narrator go? I for one rather enjoyed it, even if it was a strange story and probably way too jumpy. Thanks for reading and I'll see you all . . . eventually. Bye!