AN: Fic is for nathan-p. It's also very, very late. I apologize. XD
"I feel so irrational, so confrontational. To tell the truth, I am getting away with murder."
- Papa Roach
He is the one to speak the first words.
"Would it be possible with the recombinant DNA technology we have now…to combine two viable life-forms, such as a bird and a human?" he asks hesitantly. In front of him lies a sheet of paper with complex theories and equations scribbled over it. He taps his pencil against the side of his head, a nervous habit that he has acquired over the years.
He swings his legs underneath the table. The chair is too high off the ground and his feet do not reach the floor, though that may have been due to the fact that he is seven years old and not due to the height of the chair at all.
The group of scientists around him smiles at the same time—a synchronized movement that seems to have been planned beforehand. Their faces look creepy and they remind him of something he cannot quite put his finger on. Someone writes a few words down on a sheet of paper on a clipboard with an expensive-looking gold pen.
They smile at him again.
He shudders.
"Very good idea. Now, would you like to think of how we should do this?" a woman with big red hair and bright pink nails asks him. She brings her coffee cup to her lips, drinking from it calmly.
And he begins speaking, spinning words into plausible plans, plans that would work—that had to work for him to stay useful to Itex. He never knew words could have such power. And as he speaks, the scientists nod, self-satisfied smiles on their faces. There is an undertone in their facial expressions that says, "We picked the right boy for this. Pretty damn smart kid." On the outside, the boy is calm, seems like he knows exactly what he is doing.
Underneath the table, he is busy playing with a Rubik's cube that had been the toy of one of the scientists' children, who had outgrown it.
There is something calming about playing with a Rubik's cube. As the boy twists the faces to try to make each face monochromatic like it had been before, he contemplates this. There's just something so satisfying about putting something back in order again when it's been confused, messed up. He smirks as he solves the puzzle yet again. Only one minute this time, a new record, he thinks.
"There's only a small chance any of these experiments will survive," he points out.
"This is the price we'll have to pay."
They tell him the mutants have been made. He has given them two ideas—one to graft the wings onto a human's back when he or she is grown and another one to inject bird DNA into human embryos. It has taken the team of scientists and the boy six years to make mutants that will stay alive for more than a minute. Six years of toiling, looking over plans, plans and more plans.
He asks if he can see the mutants—which are, of course, in part his creation. He figures that he has a right to see them.
They say no.
He decides to sneak into the room where they are kept anyway. The condescending looks the scientists give him are too much for him to bear. It is they like treat him as less of a human being than they are.
Sneaking in isn't hard. All it takes is for one of the scientists to slip up and forget the code into the room and for his friend to tell him what it is within the boy's earshot. The room isn't kept under very tight security—after all, the entrance to the facility is secure, and almost everyone who can get into the institute in the first place should have access to the mutants. All except the boy. He expects that he will be proud of his creations. They are the mind children of a boy genius.
He punches in the code and walks in. One thing he forgets is to mentally steel himself for anything he might run into.
He forgets that he is little more than a child.
He glances around the room. Everywhere he turns, he sees cages. Inside those cages are mutants. Most of them are at least part human—a small girl with red gills, a teenager with a sullen expression and a seal's flippers.
And then he sees it.
A young woman with a tan. At first glance, he looks perfectly normal, albeit with a small bump on her back. Her face is screwed up in pain. She looks to be around 19 or 20, exactly the age he believes that a wing graft would be most effective around, since the body has stopped growing. She used to be pretty, he can tell, but she has bruises lining the entire left side of her face now. She is wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt and he can see red spots on both arms, so that her normal skin color is barely visible.
He didn't know that it can affect him this much.
Her body looks beaten up, but it is her eyes that scare him the most. They are only blank, as if she doesn't care. He avoids her eyes, and he doubts that she can even see him. Finally, he coughs, bringing her gaze up to his.
She looks at him with utter loathing, and he cringes back in shock. To her, he isn't a person at all. Just another nameless scientist who has caused her pain. It doesn't matter that he's younger than the others and therefore possibly more innocent—he's just another nameless bringer of hurting in her mind. He is just like the others. Corrupted before he's even had to live life fully.
Beautiful.
And he realizes he doesn't know what her name is either. He doesn't want to know. Because it will make it even harder to hurt her if need be.
Seems like knowing names isn't necessary in this business.
His fingers move unconsciously, and he longs for the toy that he doesn't have in his hand right then. It has always been a great stress-reliever. He is too scared to take it out of his pocket.
The mutant's eyes glare at him accusingly, losing their muddled expression from before. Then, she falls, her body going completely limp. Dead. He backs up until he bumps into someone who has been standing behind him all along.
"Jeb, you did well. This girl survived for a week, far longer than any of our other experiments." A hand pats his shoulder and he can feel long fingernails poking through his shirt. He tries to shy away from this woman, but her grip on him just tightens. He wonders why she isn't mad that he has decided to let himself in. He looks at her satisfied smirk and realizes that she has wanted this all along. Wants him to find the result of his brainwork by himself, without anyone forcing him to.
Wants him to hurt himself.
A week… Just a week…
How could they be happy that this human life has been cut down so short?
The woman glances down at him again, and he finally recognizes the look on her face—the one all the scientists give him every time they look at him.
Like he is an experiment, without thoughts, without feelings. Something that can be used for their own benefit only, without thinking of the repercussions it can have on that one person. It is the look he has been giving the girl unconsciously—a condescending look that implies that she is just property.
An experiment.
He moves suddenly, as if to get away, and the Rubik's cube that he cherishes so much falls out of his pocket. The woman leans down to pick it up, teetering on her high heels. Jeb briefly wonders why she wants to wear those death traps in a laboratory where death is already in wide abundance.
The woman holds the small toy at an arm's length away from her, as if it has a contagious disease that she would rather not contract.
"Why do you play with this? It's a toy," she says disgustedly. Jeb glares at her but does not dare to speak out. He has never spoken back before, and does not wish to start now. Fright is as good of a cause for silence as any.
"It undermines your intellectual capability," she continues. He wants to tell her that he is only thirteen. The age where boys awkwardly go through puberty, spend massive amounts of time playing video games, and start to stop thinking girls have cooties. He is just thirteen.
The woman rolls her eyes at him again. "Now, come along. We need to find out what caused this experiment to die."
She puts the Rubik's cube in the pocket of her jacket so that he is no longer able to get to it. His fingers twitch with the lost memory of his toy—the memory of the childhood he never had. When she sees that his feet are locked in place, a confident sneer lights her lips. "You don't want to leave, huh? You want to see the experiment die." She walks away, patting Jeb's shoulder on her way out the door. "Have fun, Jeb, honey. This is your life now. Get used to it."
He stands stock-still for a moment. He hears the heavy door shutting behind him. He turns halfway around, as if to leave behind her, but changes his mind at the last minute.
He walks up to the cage again. The girl is in a crumpled form in the middle of the cage. She is close enough to touch with his fingertips. His fingers move in closer, closer, until the tips are only about an inch from the girl's dark wings. He hesitates. Jeb doesn't want to touch her, to confirm that she's dead. Maybe if he doesn't feel her cold skin, he can delude himself into thinking that she is just sleeping—in fact, she looks quite peaceful this way.
Jeb turns and begins to walk away.
"Kill me now," a voice rasps suddenly. It's shaky, and the soft voice sounds like it's having difficulty managing these few words. Jeb resolves not to turn around again, so that he can't see the sight that awaits him. "Please," the girl begs again.
Jeb doesn't know whether to be exulted that she is still alive or disappointed because she is about to die very, very soon. She must have only come close to dying before, and they had mistaken that for actual death. There is a small part of him—the dominant scientist part that he tries to suppress—that marvels at his creation. He is already calculating on how to make his next experiment better—so it can last longer than this one. That part of him is thinking about this human being as an expendable experiment.
"And why should I?" he asks. His voice comes out more unsure than he intended for it to.
"It hurts. It hurts really bad," the girl groans. Jeb can hear rustling clothing as she moves inside the claustrophobic cage. He shuts his eyes and is about to place his hands over his ears to just walk away when she says something else, the clincher.
"You helped make me, at least have the decency to kill me," the experiment pleads.
Jeb wants to fall back on the cushion of denial, but instead he lets out a resolved sigh.
"Fine, just tell me what you want me to do," he says, giving in. He turns around, but still keeps his eyes shut.
"I don't know what I want you to do. Just fucking kill me." The girl gasps as pain shoots through her body and she shivers violently.
Jeb suddenly remembers the box of emergency injections the whitecoats keep in a case in one of the cabinets lining the perimeter on the room. He walks in the general direction of it—or at least, what he thinks is the general direction. As his eyes are still tightly shut, he bumps into tables and nameless objects along the way. Finally, he bumps into what seems like the approximate shape of the cabinets. He opens his eyes, careful not to glance in the direction of the cages. He opens the door and glances inside.
The case is near the back, labeled "Emergency Only". They are supposed to be used when an experiment has escaped and a scientist needed to kill it. Jeb doesn't know why they do not place it in a more convenient location—lack of forethought, perhaps?
He takes a needle out of the case. He turns around, heading back toward the cages. He tries to shut his eyes again, but gives up, knowing that that will just cause him to acquire more bruises. He walks back to the cage, keeping his eyes on the ground so that he knows where he is walking, but does not have to look at the mutant.
He stops in front of her cage, wondering how the hell he is supposed to inject her with this while not looking at her.
"Why are you staring at the ground?" she asks him. He doesn't answer. "Look at me," she commands authoritatively. He doesn't. "You need to see what you've done."
And he does.
He shudders when he sees her face. It is resolute. Her body writhes in pain, but her face betrays no sign of that. "Are you sure you want me to kill you?" he whispers.
She nods.
He plunges the sharp tip of the needle into her arm and injects the lethal liquid inside her body. After a few moments, she stops breathing. She slumps down on the floor of the cage. Her heart stops beating, but there is a smile on her face.
Jeb feels nothing. He has already killed her when he decided to mutate her. This is just a formality. He has just murdered. Murdered. Then why isn't he dead for committing such a sin? Why isn't he? Murder is evil, isn't it?
And maybe feeling nothing is the worst part of it all.
AN: Review?