When people close their eyes, it's meant to block out all of the light, close off the rest of the world from their perceptions for a moment of rest. But eyelids are thin little things, and light gets through anyway—there's no real escaping the world, just the aspects of it that give the free floating emotion and sensation form. For years her mind has been taking in a blue, distorted tint, water filtered echoes of noise, and a chill on her skin, though she's not supposed to feel anything at all. Bizarre shapes cast shadows over the tank, sceneries change, sometimes vital signs fluctuate, but nothing really through until the one evening everything breaks, a crack over the bubble like a sharp tack on a dry balloon, and here she is with years of nonconscious processing to make up for.
Gravity, sound, and movement come pouring in. There's a shattering in her ears, a horrifying whoosh, and she's falling over broken glass, vision blinded because the room is too, too bright, cords pulling at her wrists and ankles with a fountain of liquid sloshing around her. Her hair is heavy and damp, blonde tendrils plastered over her face and shoulders rather than suspended in silence with the rest of her. The pull of the ground bends her over what's left of the chamber, and she flops uselessly against the broken edges.
Rough gloves brush against her wet skin after a moment, a pressure on her back and sides lowering her down to cold tiles. Everything starts to come into focus and she's looking up at a blurred thing, a creature, or perhaps an astronaut? It hisses and moves in stiff, calculated motions, no face in sight but a definite body shape that looks human enough. She feels naked in her soaked clothes and wishes for a similar shell.
She tries to reach a hand up to its opaque, fogged viewing window, but her arms are weak and only get to its glowing tube infused abdomen before she realizes that there is no air and she can't breathe.
Her body is numb to the burn of oxygen deprivation, but she feels her chest heaving, and chokes out droplets of pale blue fluid that dribble down her lip. The towering—machine?—turns her to her side and suddenly she's vomiting out liquid, emptying her stomach and lungs and she's invaded by the nauseating stench and taste of something like formaldehyde. The air, at least, should be sweet, but it's just bitterly cold, and she's already sick of the gasping and twitching. One of the gloves tries to clear her face and she recoils from the feel of ice on her mouth.
Sensation for the moment is like a flashbulb, she's taking in everything at once. Pain in her joints and spine; distorted synthetic speech looping around her ears, the crackle of broken glass that's sliced her arms and legs-the bitter freeze that condenses her breath, the bright light of the room, the dark shadow trapped in the corner with white slits for eyes. Feeling like she's made of gelatin, drenched, upset, spewing cords, burning alive on her insides, smelling disinfectant and blood, copper and salt already on her tongue when she gnashes and cuts her cheeks in paroxysms of confusion and neurological jolts. The astronaut has to hold her down for a moment, and then everything inside of her goes very quiet.
Her head lolls back a little with the feel of one glove in support of her weak neck, the other under her knees and both lifting her high into the air, cooling her further. She gurgles, working her jaw, managing only to grasp the viewing window with her palm and leave her fingermarks on it before drowning in the encroaching black.
The ice man that looks like an astronaut is courteous enough to close her eyes for her whenever she should fall unconscious. She's not sure exactly how long she's been here now, lying on an operating table with a glazed look in her eyes and an all-consuming lethargy. Time doesn't move at the same pace anymore, with her slipping in and out of something like the dreamless sleep of a coma.
It's a feeling of being pumped full of Novocain all over. The pain is gone, but it's like she's floating around in someone else's body. A few minutes are spent inspecting her arm, looking on in amazement as she controls the erratic, weakened muscles but feeling no sensation whatsoever from the skin. Her wrists are skeletal. Her breath is a cloud. There's an IV in the crook of her elbow. It's fascinating. She's always found the human body to be fascinating. She can lie there for hours flexing her thin, pale fingers, thinking about tendons and nerves with no concern for what is over one foot from her operating table.
The ice man is more scenery than anything else, like a doctor or captor. He has a pair of enormous red eyes and will occasionally pause to stroke her cheek with a gloved hand or whisper something through a poor speaker that makes up his mouth, gazing down at her miserably, but doesn't seem to do much other than work in the background or take notes on her condition. He is slow and deliberate, attempting to maintain a clinical veneer without thought or feeling beyond the task at hand, but she catches him cursing himself every so often when he thinks she's asleep, and decides there is something other than calm on his mind. He's a bit of an artist, ice sculptures of a woman dotting the landscape of the lab, in various poses and outfits, pantomiming many different winter scenes. He improves on them occasionally, almost like in a trance, murmuring to himself. Perhaps most people would be put off by the temperature he keeps the place so they don't melt. It doesn't bother her much. She likes snow. It spoke to her of memories too far out of reach, peace and harmlessness. Besides, she can't even address him when her lips won't cooperate and her mouth is hooked up to oxygen tubes, though she sometimes reaches for him when he's leaning over her. The tactile sensation of his fingers on her arm as he gently pushes her away is noticeably absent.
Her mind is a fog. Or haze? Her legs won't respond, and she can only flex her thin fingers half of the time she's awake now. Various thoughts drift through her mind, but she can't seem to focus on any one idea, concept, or memory, so they all stay about the same distance away from her. There are assorted faces, yes, and abstract fears in the pit of her stomach. It said to her that time was passing, albeit in loops and spindles over any coherent line. Any time the vague anxiety grows, and she becomes too agitated, the ice man comes over with a syringe and a few murmured apologies, and she feels a calming cold spread in her veins through the skin of her neck; the pleasant delirium returns.
Another man is there once when she wakes after a few repetitions of this, with a round face, a puggish nose, receding grey hair and dark blue eyes that glance in her direction every so often, despite his attempts to focus on his work. Occasionally, she is his work, and when he checks her pulse or refills her IV, she fixes him with a glassy stare, the corners of her mouth tilted ever so slightly upward. She's remembering something.
After a moment he drops her wrist and growls under his breath, "Cut it out."
She coughs a laugh into her breathing tube. He blanches. He's clearly not made of ice like her doctor. There's a certain familiarity to him all the same though, so she knows for sure now that there's a life outside the lab lost somewhere in her head that involved other people. But she can't ask him about that, and decides to just stare and watch him react, call to the ice man and ask him to put her under again. "I can't do this with her staring at me like that." The creature nods in his solemn way and obliges, and the thin metal of the syringe kills the memories she'd been collecting so far.
The next time she wakes up on that operating table, it feels like someone opened her skull and did a fair amount of poking and prodding around inside of it with a butcher's knife. Some of her hair is crusted over with blood, and her back is extremely sore—someone ripped open her spine as well. Everything she sees is blurred, and she's looking up into two large, shiny red eyes on a face cast in shadow.
Goggles. They're not eyes, they're red goggles.
The man in the cold suit pulls back somewhat when he sees her awaken. Wordless, he moves out of her line of sight for a moment, footsteps thudding heavily on the tile, leaving her wondering if such a strange, alien figure had really been there in the first place. She pulls up her arm into view and looks over her wrist, feeling the protest of her tired muscles and the twitching of her fingers, having difficulty keeping her mind clear with the spindles of pain emanating from the long chain of vertebrae in her back. She growls somewhere in her cord filled throat and clutches her temples as a fresh wave of pain rolls through her body.
What happened?
The last clear memory is of the condominium that she shares with Victor, going to bed while he's out at work because her legs had failed her again. Everything after that is a confused blur of motion and voices, his telling her something, her feeling cold, tired, a little deranged…
She squints and tries to focus through the slow progression of hyperventilation and anxiety. He'd come back at some point in the night—and it was at night, she'd slept fitfully through the day—and woken her up, told her they were going somewhere. Where? Her memory blurs through the car ride—all she'd known was that she was tired. She hadn't felt right, it was like she was half gone and the piece left behind thought it was a dream. But it hadn't been, because she wasn't in that dream anymore, she was here wherever here was, because Victor had taken her somewhere and told her he'd cure her, and she'd replied, delirious with the pain and weakness of the last few months into her body's decay, that she wasn't sick…
The man (not the product of a damaged brain but real) is putting another oxygen mask over her face, except instead of just oxygen he turns a valve and she's breathing in nitrous oxide.
Gothcorp. Victor had taken her to Gothcorp after the building closed down and there was nobody left inside, he'd been afraid to turn on any of the lights and refused to explain the tears trickling down his cheek. And she had asked, over and over, where they were and why he was so upset. Either he really hadn't answered, or every explanation went somewhere just behind her hearing as she stumbled into him, balance no longer a skill she possessed. …But this place, with the odd ice statues decorating every corner, humming medical machinery and her breath condensing a few inches above her mouth, doesn't look or feel anything like Gothcorp.
Maybe the room could look something like the lab in the basement where she'd ended up that night, if it was smaller with more failed projects in the closet. But none of the employees would have put up with the AC running full blast, especially not Victor because he hated the cold so much though he denied it, he would pretend to love it so he could go with her on her walks, but he wouldn't do that for a soulless company, no...
Oh, so this is why they call it laughing gas. She feels so giddy and relaxed now. The pain is trying to dampen her mood, but it can't touch her. What pain?
But no, no, the composition of the room is all wrong. Where had they gone after the lab? This place doesn't look anything like Gothcorp, and the man running the equipment doesn't look anything like Vi—…Although…
The gloved hands turn her head onto the side while she weakly grumbles in protest, the troubling thought forgotten. A sharp, painful pinprick stabs into the back of her neck, and her muscles shiver reflexively before growing numb. Before losing her ability to move altogether she looks back up at him, face obscured by the angry red goggles and voice distorted so that it almost doesn't sound like he's saying "Sleep well, my love" as she fades in unconsciousness, but something unintelligible and possibly cruel. He looks like something inhuman, but he's smoothing her hair down, brushing it out of her face, the same way that Victor did when she was trembling in fever and unable to even pull of the web of blankets she'd awoken in. He's speaking to her just as Victor did, soft and rambling murmurs of loosely connected poetic phrases meant for her. He's looking at her like Victor did, quietly desperate and adoring like it was the last time he'd ever see her. It was that frequently guilty, self-hating look that she'd always try to smear off of his face with her lips or fingers, the one that surfaced so often when she was ill…
She slips away thinking that he made that exact expression when he placed her inside the cold coffin of glass that night. But this was not then, and she wonders where she's going now so that he has to wear a suit like that and why she needs to be unzipped like a ragdoll receiving repairs.
I originally intended this to be part of a larger story, but until I've figured out what that actually is I guess this can just be considered a one shot.