Mia-Teresa-Davenport: Hello, everyone. :) I'm back with a brand new story! This is AU and maybe just a little bit OCC, but whatever. This is also a Oneshot, and is in no way tied into any of my other stories. This is a stand alone. So uh, yeah. This is kind of depressing, as you can probably tell by the summary. Please don't read if you've ever lost a loved one. Just warning you guys now. Okay, who wants to do the disclaimer for this Oneshot? Anyone? How about you, Leo? Would like like to do the disclaimer?
Leo: "Ooh, yes please. Okay people, here's the deal. As you all know, Mia-Teresa-Davenport doesn't own anything from the TV show Lab Rats that you recognize, like Bree, Adam, Chase, Mr. Davenport, Krane, Eddy or I. She only owns what you don't recognize, and this entire story. Please don't forget to drop a review if you liked it. Warning: This might be triggering, as Mia-Teresa-Davenport said up above."
Oh, and get ready to sit for a while, because this is kind of long.
Leo: "It really is. Please enjoy Numb!"
-PAGE BREAK-
Darkness is all she sees and feels, and it is cold. The darkness feels like freshly fallen snow in negative degree temperatures in December. The darkness is so cold, bone numbing, but at the same time, so soft and very inviting, like soft, cold fingers made of icy, claw like branches from a large, hundred year old tree digging into her numb mind, trying to coax Bree into staying in the dark, to stay wrapped up in the icy embrace of the seemingly never ending (but still impossibly cold,) darkness.
Then, suddenly, the darkness changes from cold and soft, turns into something that makes her feel a bit better. The darkness is suddenly so peaceful and heavy with temptation and she suddenly feels very tired. Maybe if she'd just relax a bit more, she'd slip into a peaceful sleep…
Fear fills her suddenly. It makes her alert of what might happen if she does.
No. She can't do that. Bree can't slip into the inviting darkness. She has to stay awake. Awake. Five simple letters forming one simple word. Awake.
(That's a lot easier said than done.)
She needs to stay awake. She has a family.
A family made up of three annoying teenage boys, and one billionaire who has a large ego the size of the Empire State Building and a sociopath turned good whose ego is the size of the Empire State Building as well, and one annoying smart home system whose completely evil and always will be, and one normal women whose a news reporter and who got sucked into the crazy wold of bionics against her will (but she adjusted quickly,) who is also like a mother to her.
She wants to see her brothers most of all, but she can't move. The thoughts swirl inside her brain. She wants to open her eyes to see if anyone is in the room, but she doesn't have the mental strength to do that simple action. Bree hopes her family members are safe.
She wonders where they are.
Suddenly, warm tears build and burn slightly in the backs of her closed brown eyes. She doesn't know why she feels like crying. She just knows she wants to cry.
With the warm tears still burning in her eyes, she slips into the suddenly cold instead of warm- but still inviting- darkness.
For a few moments, Bree hears soft, gentle voices, hear stuff moving around on wheels that squeak slightly, the faint beeps of machinery. Doors opening and closing softly. Feet shuffling around the room and outside of the room. Papers shuffling lightly. A warm breeze from a window that feels like is on her left moves her hair slightly. The sound of a pen writing on something hard. A clipboard, maybe.
She doesn't open her eyes.
Bree also can hear faint, soft breaths of human beings. Chairs moving slightly from shifting weight. Males. A female. Maybe all males, maybe all females. But still, she isn't the only one in the room. There are humans. Human beings. People. Maybe her family, maybe not her family. All she knows is that she isn't alone. She isn't alone in the room. She's grateful for that. She doesn't want to be alone in the room, all by herself.
Bree realizes that she's still so very cold and she still feels the unshed tears in her eyes. The tears are cold now, dried up, but she can feel them.
Everything echoes in Bree's mind and is heightened and heavy and it echoes to hear and so impossibly loud, like she has Chase's super hearing. It makes her head hurt from all of the loud noises, like someone is pounding at her skull and her eardrums with a jackhammer and won't stop. Her brain feels like it's on fire. Her bones feel like liquid, her brown eyes still burn with the unshed tears. The tears are warmer now, but she refuses to let them fall.
And then she is suddenly exhausted, wary, confused. Tired. Mentally jaded.
Numb.
She just wants the pain to stop. Just stop. Stop…
Bree slips into the cold darkness again.
-PAGE BREAK-
She hears different voices. Concerned voices. The voices are worried, hushed, soft, as if they are in some church, and they can't speak too loudly. The voices and the words echo in her mind, pulling at her heart strings, pulling at her brain and demanding some form of attention. She feels like she's supposed to know these voices- the people that home the voices- somehow. But Bree doesn't know exactly who they are. All she knows that she feels like she should know them.
Bree wonders who the voices belong to. She can't depict them properly, can't make out the words the people are saying. They're all just a jumbled mess of words and sounds that don't make any sense to her.
She doesn't know who those voices belong to, but there's a tugging sensation pulling strongly at her gut, taunting her, teasing her, and, like her brain and her heart, demanding her complete attention now. She feels like she's supposed to know who they are, but she can't put the puzzle pieces together. It's like there's a piece missing, a piece of the puzzle that doesn't exactly fit with the others.
Bree only knows one thing.
Something bad has happened.
Something numbly scarring has happened to someone, maybe a few people.
Someone has died.
-PAGE BREAK-
Bree can't feel anything right now. She's numb. The voices are still so soft, too jumbled to make anything out. But she feels like she knows those voices. They are familiar to her. She knows them. Knows these people. She knows them, but she cannot remember who the voices belong to, who those people are.
She can't think about anything right now. She's so tired. She decides that she will sleep for a while now.
As she slides into the cold darkness again, she can only form one single observation, one that makes her heart hurt and makes icy fear strike through her veins with the power of fifteen horses.
She doesn't hear Adam and Chase's voices.
-PAGE BREAK-
She wakes up for real this time, her eyes opening and closing slowly. A soft moan escapes her parched, dry lips. Her throat burns lightly. She wonders why her throat burns.
She feels warmth spread through her fingertips and her hand, slowly warming her cold body. She can't breathe for a few simple moments. But as desperately needed oxygen fills her lungs, she feels a bit tired.
"Bree? Bree, sweetie, can you hear me?" A male voice asks. She knows that voice, but she can't put a face to his name. It's frustrating, to say the least.
Her eyes squeeze shut and slowly reopen. That simple, small response takes too much energy. She can literally feel her energy sap away from her body, getting sucked out of her body and never coming back. It drains her completely.
"Bree, sweetheart, if you can hear me, please squeeze my hand. Give me a sign, please, Bree. Please give me a sign." The same voice says again, gently, begging even, persuading her to do as the voice asks. She can't remember who the voice belongs to.
She does as the voice asks her to. Some strength comes back, but Bree can feel unconsciousness flow like a stream and chip at the corners of her mind again. She tries to push the sudden feeling of tiredness back, tries to shove that feeling away. Thankfully, it works for the time being.
Someone sniffs.
"Good, good. That's very good, Bree. Good job, sweetie. Can you try and open your eyes for me? Please don't fall asleep again." The voice begs to her again.
Bree does as the voice asks, and obeys the second request as well as the first one. She doesn't fall asleep, doesn't fall into the peaceful darkness. She won't do it because of what the voice asked her to do.
Her brown eyes slowly open. She has to blink a few times because of the harsh light that shines down on her face. Involuntarily, she whimpers.
She waits for a few moments to open her eyes again. Her eyes slowly open again to reveal a middle aged man sitting next to her in a chair. He has worry lines on his forehead that look wrong on his skin. His hair is spiky, just like someone she knows likes it to be. She can't remember who he is, but he looks familiar. He has tears in his brown eyes. The skin around his eyes are raw and puffy and an angry shade of red, with tear tracks dried up on his tan face. Why does it look like this man has been crying?
But suddenly she remembers who he is.
She knows him. That's her father. Her real father. Douglas.
What is he doing here?
"Daddy…" Bree mutters, her head hurting from that one word. Her voice is scratchy and thick and burns. She wonders why that is. She doesn't know.
She doesn't know why she just called Douglas 'daddy'. (Because Mr. Davenport has been with her, Adam and Chase since he took them away when they were very little toddlers, babies, even. Adam was about two, Bree was about one years old, and Chase was just a little tiny baby. He did that to protect them from Douglas's evil plans he had in store for them. Douglas hasn't been in their lives for the past fifteen years, because they have been with Mr. Davenport all that time, for fifteen long years. They'd only learn that Douglas was actually their father about nine and a half months ago.)
When Bree calls Douglas 'daddy', it does something to him. Whatever it does to him, it breaks him into a million pieces.
He starts crying for real this time, saying 'Bree, sweetie, Bree, oh my God, you're okay, you are okay, thank God,' over and over and over again, like a song on repeat, or like a broken record.
She's confused. She's fine. She feels okay, despite the fact that she's tired.
So why exactly is he crying so much? What happened?
She sees Leo and Mr. Davenport and Tasha in three out of the four light blue chairs that are pushed against the white wall directly across her small white hospital bed. Douglas is sitting on a white chair that's placed next to her, and he has tears running down his face now.
Leo and Mr. Davenport and Tasha all fill her field of vision next, all crying softly and hugging each other. Tears glisten in their eyes.
A small tear runs down Leo's face and drops down onto his jean clad leg. He reaches for Tasha's hand for comfort. His mother squeezes her son's hand and together, they stare sadly at Bree. Mr. Davenport has tears in his eyes that begin to pour out of his eyes. They are all crying.
Except for her.
What happened?
Bree's eyes focus on Mr. Davenport next, who winces slightly, making her frown, becoming even more confused than she already is. Why would he do that?
Her head hurts as she opens her mouth. Her head feels like someone just threw a brick at her head and it made a direct hit. Pain knocks harshly at her skull. Her head throbs, and every single bone in her body yells in pain, making her a bit dizzy. She runs her tongue across her top and bottom lip, wetting them so her voice isn't too dry when she finally speaks a complete sentence.
She speaks for the second time in less than five minutes. Her tone is confused, scared and broken. She doesn't mean her voice to sound like that, so broken and so scared and so confused, but she's so very lost right now. She feels like she has a right to be this lost. She doesn't remember what happened.
"Where… Where are Adam and Chase?" She asks softly, blinking. She stares at her family members with confused brown eyes.
Nobody speaks for a long moment. Tension is thick in the air. It buzzes around the room, greedily lapping at the air and the people that occupy the room, like how a dog would lap up cold water from his bowl on a steamy summer day in the middle of July or August.
Her family members look at each other and don't meet her eyes directly. They stare at anything but her. The walls, the floor, each other, the window, the door.
Bree feels like if she had enough energy, she could reach out and hold the tension in her once tan hands, her tan hands that look too pale and too small on the white sheets of the hospital bed she's laying on. The only sounds in the room are the machines beeping that are connected to her by some wires and their breathing. Quiet sobs emit from her family members.
After a few moments of silence, Bree gives up on waiting for a straight answer from her family members. She's so tired, so confused, so hopelessly lost. Being awake for this long makes her very tired and she hurts everywhere. She wants to sleep for a little bit more.
Nobody speaks a word to her, or to each other for that matter, so, giving up and letting the question echo in her mind and pushing back some very scary thoughts that now crowd her mind, she slips into oblivion yet again.
-PAGE BREAK-
No one talks about Adam or Chase.
-PAGE BREAK-
The news comes to her like a slap to the face.
Bree is completely awake now, she had just finished eating all of the food that was provided by the hospital, which is made up of some chicken and soup and a few oyster crackers in a small plastic bag and a bottle of cold water and a chocolate chip cookie.
She munches on the crackers, feeling a bit better now that she has some food in her stomach. She drains the soup from the bowl and sets it back down on the brown tray that's next to her on the side on a portable table. She reaches over for the water bottle, feeling her pale fingers close over the said bottle. The coldness of the bottle freezes her hot fingers, and she's grateful for that.
She opens it and takes a drink of water from the small water bottle before sealing it up and placing it onto the tray, next to the soup bowl and the spoon that rests on the tray.
Bree stares at Douglas, and he finches, swallowing thickly.
"Bree…" her real father's words are chocked up and choppy and thick with emotion, which scares her a lot, because she has never seen him cry before.
"Bree," he tries again, his voice hoarse, "do you…" he cringes and reaches for her hand with his right hand. "Do you, um, do you…"
He breaks off to wipe his eyes with the back of his left hand before he obviously tries to muffle a sob. This isn't the egotistical man she knows now. This a man with a broken heart. He's trying to be strong for her. The key word being trying to 'stay strong'. "Do you remember what happened?"
Bree shakes her head, frowning at that odd question. She begins to pick through memories that are stuffed inside her brain, shuffling through anything that might help her remember what he's talking about.
A small part of her wants to try and sift through the jumbled mess of memories to try and are sense of things that had happened before she woke up inside of this hospital, but big part of her does not want to try and remember. She thinks that could be bad. She desperately tries to stop searching her brain, but it's too late.
Bree remembers everything.
-PAGE BREAK-
She remembers the shattering glass. Screams of shock and fear from her brothers, from her own mouth as well. She remembers the painful sound of tires screeching against icy blacktop. Heard glass breaking loudly, saw flashes of saber toothed shards of glass headed her way.
She remembers Adam and Chase's panicked looks, the way they looked at each other, and then she remembers Adam covering her petite body completely with his easily, and she remembers that Chase activated his forcefield to protect her before hurling it at her to save her life.
Bree remembers feeling the blue ball encase her entire body, and felt Adam's weight up against her with his arms wrapped tightly around her, and the two things combined shielded her from what might have killed her instantly.
And she also remembers the most painful thing of all.
Chase hadn't been able to protect himself, and Adam was defenseless against the other car speeding towards them.
Adam and Chase hadn't been able to protect themselves.
They died protecting Bree.
-PAGE BREAK-
Bree's brown eyes grow wide, and the tears she's been trying so hard to conceal flow down her face, plopping down on the sheets of her small white hospital bed. She starts breathing heavily, uneven.
It's her fault.
"Bree…" Leo says, his voice breaking like someone is throwing heavy rocks at a very thin sheet of glass, and as tears run down his cheeks, Bree could tell from a mile away that he's trying to be strong for her sake but he's failing epically, at it which makes her heart crack like thin glass.
"Adam and Chase are dead."
-PAGE BREAK-
At first, she didn't believe it. She thought that they were fine, they were in the hospital, in another room, sleeping quietly.
She thought they were fine.
She is in shock now, but the truth came crashing down on her like a tidal wave.
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It's not long before she starts screaming at the top of her lungs in pure agony at the memories, after the shock wears away quickly. Her entire body shakes with sobs and she screams and screams and screams.
Leo, acting fast, jumps up and jams the 'call' button that's located on the left side of her bed, pushing it repeatedly until a bunch of nurses and doctors storms into her hospital room with the speed of a bullet or a rocket, a speed that matches hers, which is ironic, because she's the fastest person in the world.
Instantly her family members shoot up out of their spots while the nurses and the doctors begin to shout orders at each other.
The nurses and doctors had to restrain her and usher her family members out of the room while they inject some type of knockout drug into her system via a needle that goes into her left arm.
She knows why they do that to the hospital patients, why they did that to her. It's so that she can't hurt herself or her family members or anyone else in the room in anyway shape or form.
Bree is sucked into darkness almost immediately.
-PAGE BREAK-
Bree woke up about twenty five minutes ago after her little panic attack, alone in her room, her family members not sitting there in those blue and white chairs anymore. She is crying heavily now, breaking down while she's all alone. The salty tears don't stop flowing down her pale cheeks. Her eyes hurt from crying so much. Her heart feels like someone just stomped on it a million times and then re-shattered it completely.
And now she is cold all over, despite the warm California sun filtering through the window of her white walled hospital room.
Bree bites back a sob of pure pain, trying to be strong for a little bit. But then white hot spikes of pure agony washes over her body, making it hard to breathe and function. She can't stop thinking of her brothers. They are on her mind constantly.
She just wants to slip into oblivion and fade from existence, but numb anger pricks through her veins. How could they do this to her? How could her brothers leave her behind and leave her so alone and broken? How could they leave her, leave without even saying goodbye, and then just leave her so dead inside? How could they leave her, and leave her so very numb?
Bree's cold. Mentally and emotionally numb to the bone. Everything in her body hurts right now. Her heart most of all.
She just wants to die. She would join her brothers then, if she dies. She just wants to see them again. She would do anything to see them again, but she knows she can't, no matter how much she wants to.
Because her brothers are gone, and they are never coming back.
-PAGE BREAK-
She can't keep living like this, knowing she killed the two people she cares about. She's in mental and emotional pain right now. It's her fault her brothers are dead, her fault that Adam and Chase are dead. Her fault. It's all her fault. She's a monster. How can you live with yourself knowing that you killed someone?
It's painful to know that you killed someone. Guilt claws at her stomach and she cries harder, the tears continuing to run down her face.
She killed her brothers.
-PAGE BREAK-
"Bree," Mr. Davenport says gently to her nine days later after she found out the earth shattering news, "Bree, we can go home now."
She doesn't know what home is. Home is with her brothers. Home is cuddling up on a Saturday with her brothers, being happy.
She doesn't know what happiness is anymore.
Bree nods automatically and shuffles out of her bed, sighing lightly.
With one last look at her hospital bed, she stifles a sob, biting her lip. Mr. Davenport walks out the door, and Bree walks out as well, shutting the door behind her.
