Hey everyone! I'm back! I use to be The New Robin in Town but I go by Raven now! Yes fresh start considering I'm embarking on a new path on the road called life! But anyway, to this new story! I am writing, co-writing it, with my good friend LoveSparkle-san! We came together and decided to put our two creative minds together to write an AU BTR (Kames/Cargan) fanfiction! I will write a chapter, she will write a chapter for all of you to read the latest of our genius on my account! Now no more delay, time to go on with the first chapter! Hope everyone who has read my work before gives it a try and I hope this first chapter is pleasant to read from someone who has been gone for so long! Good luck! Oh, real quick disclaimer! Disclaimer: Neither Me or LoveSparkle own BTR, I'm sure we wish we did but we don't! All we own is the story idea, the craziness and magical powers but that's about it! We don't own BTR! Enjoy!
Darkness, he had nothing to see but that.
It was dark, it was cold and he had no idea where (or who) he was. All was dark around him, and…he couldn't feel a thing.
He even had no idea if he was thinking, or even alive.
That is, until something made him react.
"Is he going to respond?" A voice echoed through the cloud of shadows around him, startling him; he was alive after all, but the fact he could hear and not see where the voice was coming from made the hairs on his arms stand on end.
"Hmmm, he should be able to since the electrical currents have reached his nervous system, and the biotech has been able to adapt to his tissues and organs fairly well. Give him an order, sir." Another voice said this one female though.
"Hey dog, open your eyes!" The first voice suddenly boomed. A jolt, a feeling vibrating throughout his whole body before…his eyes fluttered open.
A gasp left his lips, all pale and thin and dry.
A cough, followed by his eyes darting around to see around him, the boy only eighteen years of age.
He was in a big rectangular room, with a high ceiling and walls all in a depressing gray paint; lights were bright and strobe-like over his head, his body resting like a broken marionette on a long, cold steel table.
He was pretty thin and short, at 5ft, 3in; his skin was pale, like transparent glass or a ripe peach, which seemed to glow under the intense light. He didn't know how his face looked like though, sitting up slowly and staring down at his spidery, dull-finger nailed hands.
"Can he talk?" He looked up to meet a portly man with sunglasses and a dark beard standing next to a dark-skinned woman with a willowy figure and soft chocolate eyes. The portly man had asked the question, the nametag on the front of his long white lab coat reading: Gustavo.
"Yes he should be, umm Kendall? Can you understand me, dear?" The woman walked over to the table and lightly touched the teen's shoulder, giving him a kind smile; Kendall? That was his name?
"Y-Yes, my name is K-Kendall?" The woman, whose name tag said she was Kelly, nodded with another smile as Gustavo walked to a corner of the room to come back in seconds with a small mirror.
"Yes, your name is Kendall. I'm Kelly and this is Gustavo, we're your…doctors so to say." She said, hesitating there at the end.
Kendall flinched a bit when Gustavo threw the mirror into his face with a nasty look on, he taking in a deep breath before peering at himself for the first time ever.
Short, nicely cut hair, dirty blonde; high cheekbones and a strong chin; hallow cheeks with a pair of green eyes, deep green eyes. He was stick-like and short like he guessed he was, dressed from head to toe in white.
He looked pretty strong, but still so weak thanks to the blank, zoned out gaze in his eyes.
"T-This is me?" He found himself asking, speaking; Gustavo grunted once more from Kelly's side, arms crossed.
"Well, the most we could do for you; your bottom lip, left cheek, well basically the majority of the left side of your body was trashed, it's a miracle we were able to patch up the large dislocation in your jaw. Still, you should be able to work well, 32KKS."
"What, what's that?" Kendall asked awed by this well of information; if all this they were telling him was true, why couldn't he remember?
All he drew was a blank.
"Umm, that is your identity here. You see, Kendall, you are in a hospital for 'special cases', here your…devotion to benefiting mankind and certain talents are harnessed for medical tests and research. Everyone here is given an identification code, that way we keep track of all our patients. Your identification code is 32KKS, remember it well but don't disclose it to just anyone here, staff or patient; use the name I've told you, the ID code is your life's tag here, guard it with all you have." Kelly whispered to him, brown eyes hard; Kendall could see the fear and seriousness in her expression so he merely nodded back, no words hanging from his tongue.
"Well then since you're now conscious and your vitals say you're in no danger, I will take you on a tour of the institution. You should be given the chance to see your home through a better view. Come on now, dear." Kelly's stony face soon melted into her friendly air once more, waiting patiently as the blonde took his time to swing his legs over the right side of the table and get to his feet, feeling unsteady as if on a tripwire.
"Take him to his room straight after your little tour, Kelly, and tell X to send the next freak in. Griffin wants at least five patients' profiles sent to him by midnight tonight." Kendall heard Gustavo say before he and Kelly disappeared through a lone metal door that slid aside to let them leave.
…
"As you can see, Kendall, everyone here has their own room; because some patients are more…difficult to treat than others, everyone has a space to call their own with simple furniture provided by the institution. A meal schedule will be tacked to your door by tomorrow morning, for today you will eat in your room before we have you dine in the cafeteria with the other patients. In addition to being a hospital we are also a school so there will be a times table included with the meal schedule provided to you tomorrow at 5 A.M. After breakfast and before classes you and several others will attend a group therapy session with me, Gustavo will provide the medication you will need to take daily during lunch, everyone has a free period for sports or extra tests to be done depending on their…needs during lunch as well and dinner will be every night at 6 P.M. Don't be late, wouldn't want Gustavo yelling at you. Griffin's the head honcho, but Gustavo is his right hand man. And if you have any questions, any at all, you just call me from the phone in your room and I will do what I can to make your stay a little more bearable here. Now dear, any questions?" Kelly was all done in one breath as she led the blonde down a long, narrow hallway with rooms on either side; the front walls of the rooms were made of glass, the doors metal with bolts running up-down the sides and bars to the small windows.
From what Kelly told him earlier, the glass was bullet-proof and the windows were barred so the chances of their more rebellious charges trying for an escape were slim.
The rooms looked more like prison cells (apart from the beds and wall phones he could make out as he passed by) than what teenagers (for a majority of the patients were adolescents, apart from a few preteens here and there) would call home.
He flinched but shook his head in response, hoping they weren't too far from reaching his room.
Kelly looked at the boy with a sympathetic expression but did not press him; after all, she knew what it took to end up here.
A noise caught the teen's attention a few minutes later though, bottle green eyes falling to a door with a C over it instead of an S; the door number was 13, the name of the patient embedded into the metal like an ink stamp: James.
"Umm Miss Wainwright, what does a C mean?" Kendall asked, slowing his pace; Kelly looked at him oddly for a minute before she saw where his curiosity came from.
"Oh, those patients marked with a C are those considered unstable or dangerous. Remember in your ID code, the last letter was S? The S means you are not a hazard to yourself and others, those who have a C in their ID code however those are the ones that need constant supervision; they may have a history of violence against our staff members who were to treat them or a record of attempted escapes. In short, S stands for 'Simple' and C for 'Complex'. Best not to associate with them, Kendall, they could get you into a big time world of trouble down the road. And you can still call me Kelly, it's no big deal to me; Gustavo is the only one who demands to be addressed by his last name by lower-level staff members and patients." Kelly explained, watching with uneasy eyes as Kendall approached door numbered 13.
"K-Kendall, you shouldn't…" She trailed off as the blonde met the glass wall, curiosity getting the best of him as he leaned in to peer inside the room.
A small bed with a metal frame, thin sheets and only one pillow; the walls bland except for a few tiny wooden bookshelves with thick novels and small atlases, paperbacks and hardcovers all arranged by size, color and number of pages. A black leather-bound book that was mostly likely a journal was on top of the pillow, an ink pen nowhere in sight.
The bed was made and all seemed tidy common with someone with OCD, while a boy about Kendall's age was sitting in the middle of the floor, legs crossed with hands pressed to his temples while he either ignored or didn't notice the eyes scanning him and his room.
He was tall, a bit taller than Kendall and the same age but maybe a few months older; his skin was a warm caramel and his hair, cut short and slightly wild, was a nice cocoa brown shade. His face was flawless: high cheekbones, nicely chiseled chin, full faint pink lips and perfectly symmetrical overall, with a fine athletic built under the all-white clothes he wore. His eyes were closed so Kendall couldn't tell what color they were while his facial expression apathetic to the world around him but pinched in deep concentration on what he was doing.
He was silent, chest rising and falling as he took breath, but silent he was.
"Whoa, and he's a C-patient?" Kendall asked. It was hard to believe, that that calm-looking guy was considered unstable; compared to some of the others the blonde had seen, like that Jett Stetson dude whose eyes were all white or the dude with a guitar who can make himself invisible, he looked the part of an S.
Kelly walked over and gripped the boy's shoulders a little too tightly, shaking her mane of wavy black hair. "Kendall, James isn't one you should judge by looks alone. He has a bit of a record here, been here since he was sixteen; that's the longest time we've ever had a patient at HQ." Humanity's Quarters Institute, Kendall's new home.
Sixteen and he was now probably eighteen like Kendall? That's…three years!
"Go away…" Kelly trembled and Kendall jumped when he noticed the boy was now on his feet and glaring hotly at them both from the other side of the glass wall, his eyes, deep and probing in a hazel-green, narrowed into slits like a snake's.
He was more beautiful up close.
Too bad the ugly scowl didn't flatter him.
"Umm, excuse me?" Kendall didn't mean to sound so defensive, he was the one sticking his nose where he shouldn't be but that didn't mean he had to be scold at like a little kid.
"Did I stutter, moron? I said to go away or do you not understand English? Oh you're a new face around here, huh? Well I hope Miss Witchy-Witch here told you all the rules for this place, because here she and the fat turd do what Griffin wants them to do with us and when we're not useful anymore, they do us in for good. Better pray that you're a favorite to him, he never experiments on his favorites to death; just ask his daughter two doors down." James growled; his voice was a rich soprano, alluring but sharp at the same time.
His words sent unexplainable chills down Kendall's spine.
Even if he didn't know him, the brunette's words didn't sound like a lie.
"James, remember what we discussed in group", Kelly began but James cut her off with a wicked grin.
"Oh, to not disrespect my superiors and always be polite, Miss Wainwright? That I'm not to lose control over my emotions, my temper or this place can become a barren wasteland? That the reason I'm a C is because I can kill you and everyone else here with just a word? One small simple word and you die, is that why you don't want me to tell Green Eyes here why we're here? Because we're dangerous but also lab rats for your sick little tests?" James growled back, his teeth looking menacing as they seemed to grow and sharpen to those of a canine's.
Kendall felt another chill; a natural reaction from his skin but…inside he felt nothing.
All he could process was observation, no emotion to the situation or the steeliness of the other's words. It was like he was lacking an empathetic tie to the world around him.
"Your words don't scare me." Even his tone was…dead and zombie-like.
James' eyebrows, slender and annoyed lines over his eyes, arched up slightly in mocking respect. "Ha, so I guess the new guy is a little different from the rest of us. That would explain why the inside of your eye is turning red."
Kelly paled and turned Kendall around so that their faces met, biting her lower lip to see that James had spoken the truth; the blonde's left eye, wide yet still dazed somewhat, was slowly but steadily turning a maroon red. It was like the light of a laser, piercing and striking the whole hallway with a stark, heavy glow.
Kendall reached up to touch his face, the pads of his left hand…sizzling and burning away to reveal small peeks of metal underneath.
What the…?
"Kendall, I need to take you to your room; I'll phone Gustavo to give you your meds today instead, you are to take them shortly after dinner. James, I will see you with the others in the cafeteria tonight at 6, don't be late. You need to eat, you skipped lunch and skipping meals won't make taking your meds easier."
"I'll let you know when I go stupid to take those meds, Witch. Don't you have enough restraints on me without the need to add drugs to the mess?" James asked, rolling his eyes. Kelly merely sniffed.
"Like I said, dinner at 6 and don't be late. Group in the morning before classes, and your next appointment will be in a month or so." She said, James grinding his teeth in frustration but that left unseen as she steered Kendall away and down the hall.
...
"I hate being the one to tell the patients about the tests coming up for them, but the only way to tell James to stop talking is to do just that. I think you can see why he's considered one of the most dangerous of the C patients here…" Kelly grumbled to herself, soon stopping at an empty room; it was barred at the window and front wall made of bullet-proof glass like the others, the number on it: 10. It seems the numbers drop and rise randomly here, to confuse the patients probably.
Kendall's name was on the door, a fresh imprint but looking as if it has been engraved in the metal for years.
"Here we are, dear. I'll bring you your dinner tonight okay and there's the phone if you need me." Kelly pulled out a long loop of keys from the outside breast pocket of her lab coat and shoved one jagged-toothed one into the cold lock; the metal door flung back and they stepped inside, Kendall's legs taking him right to the bed in the far right corner while Kelly made for the phone.
"Let's see, wires all in order and everything seems to be working. Make yourself comfortable dear; I'll be back in an hour or so." From the light of the screen of Kelly's personal cell-phone, Kendall could see it was a little over 4 in the afternoon.
"Kelly."
"Hmmm yes, what is it Kendall?"
"What am I?" The blonde boy asked, sitting on his bed and looking up from his hands on his lap to her startled eyes.
"I know I'm not normal, and I know you know that too. So just tell me, what is 32KKS here?" Kendall repeated the question though with more detail, expression unfathomable.
Kelly sighed as she walked back to the door, hand on the handle yet taking a pause to answer his question before she was to leave him alone.
"32KKS…is an android, the first bio-tech android here at Humanity's Quarters Institute."