AN In theory, I should be working on some of my multichapter stories. But why write angst for long standing stories that are close to your heart when you can write NEW angsty oneshots that make you want to sit down a cry because everything in these people's lives is horrible?
Exactly.
Just know that I have had SO MANY RENDITIONS OF THIS STUPID ONESHOT, that I just want to lay down and cry because nothing has worked. But, with some help from Tenebrielle, Red Tigress, Spontaneous Me, and RedBessRackham, I managed to hammer this into something that I really like :)
She had never seen a being so full of power before him, actual kinetic energy overflowing in a leg bounce, a crack of the knuckles, a particularly forceful sigh. He, Number 5, was practically bursting with all of that force, voltage that slipped out of his eyes and words almost as often as it leaked from his cuts and bruises. And that was just the excess, energy that hadn't been spent in scaling mountains and firing guns and parkouring through cities and tracking people from country to country. It was whatever he needed to push out of his system as he sat on her exam table, even as he realized that he could use it to tear the building down brick by brick.
It fascinated Marta, to see him simply exist because she couldn't help but think that there was something fundamentally different about him, some secret crouching in his DNA that not only allowed him to contain such power, but also be self aware about it. The other participants were just as capable as 5, but they were utterly disinterested in using their power for their own means. There were undoubtedly very good reasons for this, but all the other participants were disengaged in other ways, as well. It was like they were asleep, while he was very, very awake.
When the others had to talk, it was to the point. They answered the doctor's questions and asked whatever was required for them to understand the new line of medication or whatever was needed, and that was it. If one of them was feeling especially lively, there might be a dark joke or a few sardonic observations before they died back down. 5, however, cut at the doctors with sarcastic small talk, a few remarks full of crippling rhetoric, and a frankness Marta found absolutely disconcerting. No one in that building was straightforward about anything, especially not on the topic of human testing, and especially not when they were the subjects of said testing.
Maybe it was because he was naturally rebellious. Maybe he was restless, uncomfortable with being wrenched from the front lines and forced to become static so they could draw his blood and scrape his bones. Or maybe, it had something to do with the dregs of ancient sorrow hiding in his eyes. Sometimes it mixed with the power casually falling from his fingertips, clinging to skin, rustling around his veins.
From the beginning, Marta had been struck with his eyes, because they were big and blue and a little boy's eyes, really, if little boys could walk in with the shadows of horrendous injuries and give looks that burned.
No matter where she went in the room, those eyes followed her, except for when he made a point of ignoring her. Even then, Marta was certain that he was absorbing all that she did, ready to pass judgment on her. And she knew it was the harshest, truest judgment she would ever receive, because he was far too cynical and jaded and dead inside to do any less.
In the beginning, Marta wondered if she was the only one who saw this, wondered if she was the only one who looked into any of the participants' eyes with a desire to see more than broken blood vessels and potential nerve damage. No other doctor seemed to care, because to them, the participants were just animals in a zoo, and they their keepers. There was no need to look into a zebra or a leopard's eyes and see more than the hard facts of science.
And yet she kept looking, searching for something in each one of their eyes, something she didn't really understand. Finally 5 realized what she was doing, and then let his flood gates loose, letting the very alive rage and disgust and sorrow tumble out and burn her. After that, Marta learned why the other doctors didn't look, didn't see them as people.
It was just much simpler to see only the scientifically dead eyes of tigers, the muscles and the bones that were so much stronger than her own. Their job was to observe and tend and test and marvel, but not care. Anything else was asking for trouble.
Really, it was just better to stop looking and start working.
"Arm, please," she asked, and 5 raised his arm, practically throwing it at her. Marta gave him a look, but those dead blue eyes didn't respond. They were far too busy looking down on her to care about how she felt towards him.
It's nothing, she told herself, pretending to forget everything else she had thought and felt about them. They're just cells, cells making tissues to build muscles that move and register light as color and send it to the brain. They see, they don't condemn. They're just eyes.
His lips quirked in a way she didn't like, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking, and found it entirely amusing. She couldn't shake the feeling of derision even after he had gone and she had started a conversation with the other doctors.
"Well, we all know 5's not really your average programmable killer, anyways," one of them said, oblivious to the haunting feeling crawling up her shoulder blades.
"How's that?"
"He talks," the doctor said, shrugging his shoulders and acting as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. The others looked at him, rolling eyes or shaking heads over their microscopes, but he continued.
"No, really. It's weird."
"2's a chatterbox, when he's not drugged to the teeth," a different doctor said, frowning. "Told me last week all about how the ocean's color's really dependant on the sky above, water reflecting the light and all. Talked my ear off, even when I was drawing blood."
"That's not the same," another countered, flipping her hair out of her eyes. "He speaks, but he doesn't say anything. 5, well, it's not idle words coming out of his mouth, you know? You just get that feeling that it's all working towards some bigger purpose that only he gets."
That's because you are too apathetic and tuned out to realize what he's saying, Marta thought darkly. She knew that every word he said was aimed towards dragging down the false reality the clever scientists had built for themselves, skillfully woven together with brilliantly subtle points, but still very apparent. It was ludicrous for such intelligent people to have removed themselves so entirely from reality, she thought to herself, making excuses to the other doctors to just get away.
They weren't half so foolish as her, though. She always understood what he was saying, understood the condemnation and the careless attacks at her serene negligence of morals. Marta just pretended not to, all for the sake of continuing science.
Every time Marta saw 5, he looked different. Depending on the assignment, he would have facial hair, a dark tan, a new hair cut. Most often, though, he had injuries. Nothing serious, mostly the remnants of blood, scabs and some scar tissue, nearly everything on its way out by the time he came in. Sometimes Marta forgot the rule of not looking, and found herself wondering about his appearance, the suddenly blond hair, the goatee, or the strange speckles of scabs on his arms that she guessed could only have come from something smattering into his skin at a very high rate. But then she caught herself, forced herself back onto the appropriate track.
Think of the science, she told herself, the marvel that he poses, how amazing it is that he has taken a week to heal what everyone else requires a month for. Think about what a complexity his body is, how many years of research it took, about what put it all there.
Marta simply couldn't afford to let herself wonder about the chaos of her perfected and toyed with to suit the high ups' needs. The fires lit, the people injured or killed, the slow stripping of his soul that could put the apathy in his voice whenever he alluded to her moral duties, because he had done so much worse.
No, she could not work when something so damnably human crept in.
Still, despite herself, Marta liked it best when he appeared to be himself, with no healing bullet holes, no hair burned off his arms, nothing staining his fingers which tapped continuously on the exam table. She liked it when his hair was short and brown, face clean shaven, skin unblemished. It made her think about him when he wasn't on an assignment, but alone in his apartment, clicking through channels on the TV because he wanted something louder than his thoughts to fill his apartment.
Marta had to clench her teeth whenever she did this, because giving any of the participants lives was almost as bad as looking into their eyes and feeling for them. They were nothing once they left the examination room, she should not care about them. She had to not see what they were on the surface, nor at their core, but look only at the fine middle layer which was just unadulterated physicality.
But she could tell that it wasn't working, willful ignorance had ever much suited her, so she took a different route. She simply couldn't let anything climb inside her anymore, not a word, not a look, not an electric, crackling sigh from 5's wind chapped lips. The only way she was going to be able to survive, Marta realized, was to freeze herself, become so hard that nothing could slip in and tear her apart.
She was good at that, because she was good at being smart and logical and thinking through problems. Not letting herself come familiar with any of the participants allowed her to stay safe. Even if the ice did spread and affect the rest of her social life, it prevented sparks from Marta's work from catching on her conscience and start burning her up from the inside out.
That didn't stop already present sparks from smoldering inside her, though. 5 and his combustible, over flowing personality hit her like a heat wave every time she opened the exam door, tumbling through her bones and warming up his already present embers inside her. He and his sarcastic comments and dead little boy's gaze struck through to her spine and ran up to her head, forcing her to layer on the professionalism, the ice, the distance and even irritation to get him out.
But Marta knew enough about the brain to understand that she would never be able to shake him loose.
He probably didn't even know the effect he had, how disconcerted he made her. 5 probably only bothered with the rebellion to pass the time, make the whole tedious thing a little bit bearable.
It would certainly explain why he was only speaking in French this time round.
Two years in both high school and college of French allowed Marta to understand him, but she was not going to be lured in by his fiery devil's fruit.
"I'm not speaking to you in French," she told him flatly, eyes not leaving her clip board. His report said he needed a quick scan on his cells, to make sure their reproduction rate was constant, as well as a general exam.
"At least you understand me. I spoke German last time, and the doc had no idea what I was saying."
"Extend your leg, please. You have a strain there, correct?"
He lifted his leg, nodding and watching her. 5 savored the rebellion, clearly enjoying her pointed refusal to play his game. Maybe that was the whole point.
Doesn't matter, she thought tersely, focusing on his leg.
"What, afraid that they might understand us?" he asked, voice soft and whispery. It sounded like he was handing her a secret.
Marta grabbed a needle from the counter, filled it up with the proper amount of medication, then returned to inject him in the thigh. For some reason his leg hadn't fixed itself, the green chems weren't activating. She had heard that was a problem with some of the other injuries in the participants, and the formula needed to be tweaked.
5's eyes were on her, and she knew he was wondering whether or not she was putting him under for speaking his mind. He didn't move, but that was what tipped her off. It was impossible for such energy to be contained and made to sit still, much less choose to do so. There was a casual anxiety about being sedated there, something about being stripped of any sort of control that inherently bothered 5.
Marta stood up and returned to the counter, shaking off the psychological interest in her discovery. She wrote her medical comments on the clipboard, took a breath to clear her head.
"No," she finally answered, her back to him as she threw the needle away. "I'm afraid that they would."
He didn't speak to her in another language after that. Marta was thankful because it didn't strain the ice she had coated herself with. As if to make up for it, though, the fire in everything else he did doubled. It boggled her mind how a handful of encounters, some mild yet unreciprocated and unmeant flirting and another language could have such an effect on her, could cause her ice to crack and thaw, ever so slightly. She shouldn't care about him, because she didn't care about anyone, and yet she couldn't think how to keep herself distant when his energy reached out and grabbed her.
There was always a slight thrill of interest and a vague whisper of dread whenever she saw the little black five on the top of the exam papers, her reaction having become physical despite all the ice in the world. At this point, Marta wondered why she even bothered anymore, but she was stuck in her ways. She had built glaciers around herself that he had slowly melted as she walked the same circles around him, creating fissures that Marta probably could never climb out of.
It was becoming more and more difficult to keep the distance, to keep her ice potent, but Marta had to keep trying.
Cold and professional, she told herself whenever she saw the list of his injuries. Calm and collected, he was just a tiger in a zoo, she just his keeper.
He was lounging back on one hand when she walked in, the other resting in his lap. His hair was cropped short on the sides, making him look older, more serious. His eyes were still little boy blue, though, completely out of place on a killer's body.
"Afternoon," she said, and he nodded. "You have an injured hand?"
"Yep," he said, sounding so very tired.
"Mind letting me have a look?"
He raised his hand like he had a choice, and Marta swallowed at the roughly shaped wound. Something had sliced between two of his fingers, twisting and tearing at the skin. The scab looked a few days old, but was still new enough to be cracking.
5 watched her closely, eyes emotionless and cool as they took her face in. She glanced back at her papers. The look on his face was a dance with the hell he greeted every time he walked out of those doors.
"Gonna patch me up, or is that left to Father Time?" he asked, voice saying he hardly cared.
"Time. How did you get it?"
"My hand slipped and I got cut."
He said it like he'd been cutting vegetables, and he'd been clumsy enough to garishly hurt himself. Marta clenched her toes to banish images of him fighting some faceless opponent in a deserted warehouse. She was a scientist, not a writer to imagine things, nor a psychologist to study how he felt over what he'd done. Just someone to fix him up and clear him to go back out.
To her surprise, Marta felt some self-contempt at the thought.
Marta spread a soft smelling cream over 5's wound, ignoring the long look he gave her.
"It will speed up the healing process, stimulate the reproductive capabilities of the cells in your hand," she explained, eyes on his broad palm and her slim, clinically glove covered fingers.
"I thought you said time would take care of that."
"It will. You'll just need less of it with this."
The words unspoken between them sounded in both their heads, she could just tell. 5 didn't have the time necessary to let such a wound heal by itself, not naturally at least. Human weapons such as he could not be left idle for a number of reasons.
"Now isn't that a miracle," he said, voice flat. Marta glanced at him, saw the sparks light up his bright blue eyes.
Bright blue light bouncing oddly from his irises. It reflects back to my eyes, that's all, she thought. Science. Cells. He was a beautiful creature, but only because of his cells.
"Get lost in my big ocean blue eyes?" he asked, sounding jaded and unamused. She didn't answer, thinking that this was a knife wrapped in banter. He knew what she saw every time she looked at him, and he hated her for it. 5 wanted her to suffer for it, to suffer for every drop of blood drawn, every inch of needle pushed past his skin, wanted her to see that he was a person, that he had likes and dislikes and had things he cared about, that he wasn't just nerve endings. But she couldn't, not if she wanted to get through the day, and each one after that.
"Could you please take off your gown, please? I need to look at your back. And then lay down, please. On your stomach."
The hospital gown he was wearing crinkled as he shook his head, shrugging out of the gown and letting it pool around his lap. 5 laid down on his stomach, head turned to watch her work.
She picked up a small tub filled with disinfectant and cotton swabs, opening it with a quick turn of her wrist. Marta carefully pushed aside the edge of the hospital gown to reveal his lower back, and swabbed a small patch over his spine. The solution was the first part of a chemical that would send his cells into a state of hyperactivity, as required by their current branch of testing.
"Be still," she said, more for her sake than his. He was now a living statue, frozen except for his heartbeat, lungs and eyes. They followed her actions with a measured distrust.
"Aren't you even gonna knock me out before pulling out my spine?" he asked, voice gravelly and tired. The quiet resigned quality to his words stopped her short.
"I'm not performing a lumbar puncture today," she said, surprised. If she trusted her senses, Marta believed that there had been a layer of… fear, not cynicism, not judgment, not anger, in his voice. Simply fear, just as with being knocked unconscious.
She set down the small tub, searching for the tool that was to gather his skin cells. Out of the corner of her eyes, she could see him give a rueful smile, shake his head.
"Yeah, that's what they said last time, and I couldn't walk straight for a week," he mumbled, making Marta grit her teeth.
"I'm not. Just examining cells."
"Okie dokes," he said, light and mockingly nonconfrontational and completely disbelieving.
Marta carefully gathered the cells, trying to keep her hands from shaking. 5 closed his eyes, waiting, waiting, waiting. When he left, a part of her wanted to stop him, ask if he had believed her, even a little bit.
But then she made herself turn around, read the next paper on her clip board, stay cold and clinical and heartless. She wasn't supposed to care about what he thought. She was only supposed to care about how his body worked, the science. The clean, removed, unemotional science.
The last time she saw him, Marta could tell something was wrong. A part of him was off, his fire was broken. When he smiled, it was tight, unhappy, sick. When he spoke, he sounded cold. Not hostile, not antagonistic, simply cold, like he had let his insides freeze. Marta wondered if she looked that way as well, because she had done the exact same thing.
When she checked his eyes to make sure all was well medically, the emptiness leaped out at her. It wasn't that they were dead, just empty, like someone had knocked his insides and his values and his ideals loose and let them turn to ash. She wasn't looking for it, she really wasn't, but the haunting nothingness just stabbed out at her, so very different from the steady sorrow and vibrant anger that she had previously seen.
But now, she had wisely made the decision to not care. Though she couldn't help but feel curious.
"Hi there, Doc. Gonna fix me all up?"
Marta didn't answer, because she couldn't fix his insides, whatever it was that had set him all askew and burned out his unfaltering passion.
He had cut his hair, a slight sunburn dusted his forehead and cheeks, and the back of his hands were bruised and laced with scratches. Marta guessed that they were about two, maybe three days old.
She got through the bulk of the general exam, telling herself not to care, not to wonder, not to let her ice melt even when all of his creeping energy had stopped. There was still friction between them, which was something, but this time, it didn't come from him.
"Now, can I see the hand, please?" she asked, and he raised it. Not a challenge, not a taunt, just an action.
"Oh, that has healed well," she said, surprised as she ran a glove tipped finger over where they had been a gnarled fright of a scab, just weeks before. There wasn't so much as the whisper of a scar where it had been. Her awe at his healing didn't quite manage to stifle her discomfort at his nothingness inside, though, but she bit it back, focused on her job, focused on the examination.
"Any diminished sensation?"
He shook his head, gave a soft "Nope" as she turned to write his recovery down. Marta could feel his eyes boring into her back, something starting to flare up in his ashes.
5 shifted and sighed, fidgeting like his old self as she prepped a needle, once more the tiger unhappy with his cage. Something was coming, she could tell.
"You tryin' to put me down, Doc?"
Marta made excuses about missing a few drops and their now needing to do a full work up as she picked up his chems container. She ignored the way he said "Uh-oh" like he was hardly surprised at the upcoming discomfort, and gave a soft sigh as if making a decision.
"Another one? Why, is it 'cause I missed a blood drop?"
The cynical rhetoric was back, and Marta hated the way it lifted her heart, just a little bit, because it meant he wasn't permanently broken.
"So…how do you think it works, Doc? That we can just call a time out, you can pull your samples?"
She smoothly asked him to lay down, an order for him to stop talking, stop clawing at her glaciers. Marta was glad when he showed a bit of fight, yes, but she didn't like this, didn't like how he was gaining traction, hitting his stride. She couldn't help theorizing, thinking how maybe he hadn't truly been dead inside, just climbing up a treacherously steep hill so he could sprint back down the other side.
He shifted and glanced at the exam table, which only seemed to agitate him more, give him more strength.
"What…what do you think we do out there?" 5 asked her, and this was where she slammed down her doors because she knew exactly what he did out there, she just didn't care for the details. Furthermore, this was not how she stayed removed, made her ice work. This was how she fell down a pit and got caught on the burning spikes below.
"No, I…" he began, as if truly curious as to what she knew, what she was keeping herself from learning. But then he caught himself, said she was just a doctor, and Marta couldn't help but snap.
"You know we're on camera."
"Really. Is that why you make such an attractive appearance?" he asked, and suddenly he was the old 5, war torn, fractured, but still fighting, still trying to stay awake. The change was fast enough to make Marta's head spin, and she tried to claw them back to familiar ground.
"Okay, why don't you count back from a hundred. Please," she tacked on, begging him to let her go, to allow her to maintain her fragile walls of security. Surely he had to respect that this was just her job, and someone had to do it.
She set a hand on his neck as she prepared to inject him, if only to shut him up, her heart rattling in her chest.
His eyes were tired now, as if the effort had worn him out as well as her. The moment dragged and stretched itself as he looked at her in a way that threatened him refusing, like maybe he would push the subject and become unruly. But then slowly, slowly, he began to count. It was in Russian, he was still fighting, refusing to comply with the expected.
He looked at her when she injected the sedative, and Marta let herself look, just this once. She shifted and set the needle aside, because his gaze was not the cold, haunted thing she had first assumed. His fire was not broken, it had just turned inside, all of the hate and anger he had ever given her and what she stood for now directed at himself for some strange reason. It made Marta's mouth go dry, wondering what he had done to make himself so upset.
5 turned his gaze away as if he knew it was like the sun to her, too powerful for her to stay under without the protection of ice or shallow self righteousness. Not when he had the power to shed light on too many uncomfortable topics.
He slowly counted down to zero as she shifted her other hand to his neck, listing off numbers in a sad, dark language. Marta held her breath, wanting to think about how long it took for the vibrations produced by his vocal cords to be turned into sound and then reach her ears and be processed into words. She wanted to think about how long it would take the cuts on his hands to heal, or how well his blue, blue eyes could see in the dark. She wanted to think about the science, because she didn't have to feel anything about facts and discovering, didn't have to feel guilty or sad or helpless. But Marta just couldn't let herself.
For some reason, 5's cold, aloof and disgusted shell had been cracked, jagged shards sticking out of place to reveal a softness he still had inside him that was bothered by something he had done, and was suffering for it. A part of Marta was relieved to see this, because if he still had it, that meant she must have it as well.
His counting was even softer now, eyes hazy. Marta waited, his head held in her hands, ready to hold him up when he fell from consciousness, an Icarus betrayed by his internal heat, rather than the sun. That was how the other scientists viewed themselves, as helping hands to support the people they had made into something better. If she were honest with herself, Marta saw it as propping up the person who was splintering apart because she had made him into something the government could use.
His eyes were flickering, fading, fighting to stay there. All attempts at professionalism were on the verge of being lost as Marta opened her mouth, intending to murmur something of comfort to him. 5 seemed to realize this, hazily turning to look at her, waiting as he kept mumbling out the numbers.
Marta took a breath and closed her mouth, looked away. Her well practiced ice wouldn't let her.
Plus they were still on camera.