Disclaimer: I own nothing anyone recognises.
A/N: spoilers for Fragile Balance, as per usual. This is basically a prequel to my fic False Memory Syndrome. It might be better to read that first, although it is shorter than this one. If any confusion is experienced while reading this regarding contradictions within the story, well, um, doublecheck the title of the fic.
Falsehoods
The lights are never turned off. By now, he's used to sleeping – when he can – in constant, invariable brightness. The stark illumination of the room's close confines allows him no illusion of privacy. It allows no understanding of the passing of time. The lights never dim, and never suggest when it might, outside, be night-time. He could have been here almost forever. Almost.
This room, and the unchanging lights, has become his existence. He can still remember another life, but not clearly, and it is quickly fading to insignificance. There is the room, and the lights, and the utterly impersonal men and women who pass through his days, interchangeable and emotionless. Anything else seems to be something of an irrelevance.
He would wish that he could escape, that he could be broken out, that they would let him go. He had, before. But it feels pointless. He can't escape. He isn't given any opportunities he could exploit and even if he ever was he isn't sure he could still manage to do so successfully; he tries not to dwell on why that is so, tries not to dwell long on anything that happens here. He won't be broken out. No one knows he is here.
And they're not going to let him go. There are too many reasons for them to keep him here, even if some of them slip through his fingers now. He knew the reasons once, could list them until he screamed at himself to be quiet, because he had known he couldn't leave and had hated it. Now he is resigned. He isn't going to be permitted to leave.
He doesn't think a charge of kidnap would be any more than a trifling nuisance to the people who had taken him. Not worth bothering about, if it can't be proved the victim exists. And on some level, he doesn't exist. His life has been worn down to endless cycles of routine determined by faceless, nameless entities.
They don't see him as human, don't believe him to be worthy of any rights. Right now he thinks that their opinion is the one that holds sway over the universe; it is they who force reality to mould itself to their thoughts. His continued presence is determined by they alone, and he can do nothing to alter the decisions made, even if he knew what those decisions were. He is only sure of the outcomes, of the pain and the hurt and the violation of every human right he has ever known.
He tells himself that he won't break, that they can't break him, because it's never happened before and it won't now. He refuses, steadfastly and adamantly, to give away the knowledge he holds in his mind. He tells himself that, repeats it, even while they take his blood and his body and use both in obscure data-gathering experiments he does not understand and will never be able to prevent. He repeats it even as he closes his eyes against the phantoms that have stolen out of his nightmares and now haunt his days as well.
He won't break, he says, and they can't make him; he neglects to mention that they don't need him to give in. They don't need him to talk, because their data can be gained in other ways and his refusals are rendered irrelevant. He tells himself otherwise. To believe that his choices affect nothing would be to collapse, to willingly accept his failure. And so maybe his choices do help, if only within his own mind. His mind is all he has left to him and him alone, although sometimes, or so he thinks with increasing frequency, he cannot control even that.
He shudders every time he sees a needle, and every time he hates himself a little more. But somewhere in his mind, needles equal pain, and more than pain. And every time, every single time, that bone-deep knowledge is reinforced. Every time his body reacts without consulting his mind, flinching away involuntarily with everything he has.
Everything he has isn't much.
He doesn't know what they're trying to do, with the needles, or the tests, or the times when they drug him for long hours and the only reason he knows they do it is because he wakes desperately hungry and woozier than ever. He doesn't know what they are managing to do, either. It doesn't matter much. They'll keep doing it, whatever they're doing, whether he understands or not. Whatever it is, he wishes it could finish, come to a conclusion, finalise the results.
But of course, he thinks that might have happened already. He just can't remember it happening.
He has the niggling suspicion that isn't the only thing he's forgotten.
But he can't be sure of anything anymore; not of what he can see, or hear, or touch, and that only leaves his mind to try to guess what is real and what is not. He can't tell if he guesses correctly. The disembodied whispers feel as true as the impassionate scientists with syringes for fingers, or the man with dark blood streaming from his eye sockets, or the putrid decay that creeps across the walls.
He can't remember if he ever was sure what were illusions dreamt up by his own mind and what were not. He thinks that he might have been, once; but then he might be imagining that, also. He exists in a reality built on unreality, and who is to say if anything is true? His present is a myriad of mirrored and overlapping lies he cannot distinguish, and he can't know if his memories of his past are any different. He is almost sure that the glimpsed snatches of his future are only hallucinatory.
He keeps the secrets of what he sees to himself, hopelessly safeguarding the knowledge no one wants anyway. No one can tell him what reality is. If they did he wouldn't trust their words any more than he does his own judgement. And his judgement, he knows, is irretrievably flawed; once-solid truths shift underneath his feet and he loses his balance to drown in a world that may, for all he knows, be entirely a fabrication.
He doesn't choose to instead lose himself in memories, to will away acknowledgement of the pain and indignity and helplessness by focusing inwards. The memories he can find, he thinks, are not guaranteed to be any better than the reality he wishes to avoid. At best they are bittersweet reminders of what he does not have, can never again have because he never really did. And at worst they provide a constant aching pain that is no improvement for being wholly in his mind.
He chooses blank unconsciousness over the memories, every time. Every time he is given the choice, he chooses the oblivion of dreamless sleep, and the drugs help him on his way down. Every time he does, it becomes harder to convince himself to wake once again.
And when he wakes, he wakes to a room that is unchanging and identical in every detail to every single day before. If he counts it up, numbers the days since his creation, he believes he will find he has spent most of his life in darkness. He can't be certain. He doesn't know how long he has been without light and is unable to count the days or the nights. He doesn't know much at all; not why he is here, or what they do. He might be able to guess at who has him, because what other shadow government organisation could find these resources, or could know of his creation?
He doesn't know why or how he finds himself mouthing scattered syllables of languages he has never been able to speak, or languages he doesn't mean to use. He doesn't know why he can see surreptitious whispers of sharply glistening blood when he can barely see his hands in front of his eyes.
He doesn't know if he will ever know.
He doesn't know what will become of him.
Maybe he'll be broken – like a windup toy with a lost key, like a scratched record, like a burnt out soldier – forever and always.
The idea doesn't appeal to him.
But he doesn't have anything else to do.
-end-