AN: Woohooo~! Finally the first chapter is done! This is technically Scriv's idea, so this fic is a collab. Thank him instead and also thanks coincidencless, because she had to go through it THREE times! THREE times!
This fic actually bloomed from Scriv's post:
"Now, Pariah, did you remember to brush your teeth?"
"Mother, I'm 38 and in another state entirely! Stop nagging me!"
And now I'm running off and making it into something serious out of it.
Strange Growths
Prologue: Of White Doves and Black Ravens
1999, Vandenberg Air Force.
"How's the subject doing?"
Philip Hayden slightly turned his head when his colleague settled behind him. His gaze moved back to the screen.
"He has completely vandalized his room," Hayden reported, hiding his amusement when he leaned back into his chair.
"Really – do you know how much a pain it is to arrange a renovation with the stuck up Blackwatch?" his colleague grumbled in annoyance.
"It's just a little bit of crayon," Hayden replied lightly with a helpless shrug, fighting back his grin.
There was a light thunk when his colleague jabbed at the TV's screen with an index finger.
"That ain't little!" And sure, it wasn't, for the room was completely full of nonsensical rainbow doodles of every color the crayons could provide. Hayden had to admit, the boy was an artist.
"We have plenty of rooms in this facility to house him if one room needs maintenance."
"He broke the equipment in our last experiment, Hayden." The tone turned growly.
"It broke because he clearly has an obvious dislike. Isn't that a tell-tale sign he reached his limit?" Hayden pointed out.
"He never let us find out about that."
"He never lets us find out about anything. He's stubborn that way. Boys are like that," Hayden replied tiredly.
"That's why we have to push, Hayden."
"Ten years ago, we did push," he began, "To the point, we might have lost any benefits of Project Crusade. To the point, we could've failed." Hayden turned around fully and stared deeply into his colleague. "He's stubborn to the point of suicidal. Don't. Push. Him."
"Besides," Hayden sighed and settled back into his chair. "The point of Project Crusade is to convert him into Blackwatch's use. The original plans from CARNIVAL I were to make super soldier."
"Yeah." His colleague snorted in disbelief. "As if they can make use of a thirty-year-old boy. It's obvious he is another of Hope's failed children. Looks fine on the outside, but obviously screwed in the inside. Doesn't age – no, cannot age. You can't make a soldier out of a child who can't reach his prime mentally and physically. Why else hasn't he shown any inclination towards escaping?"
Hayden was starting to get annoyed by the junior scientists of his group. Say what they want to say but despite the looks, Pariah showed signs of immense intelligence. Hayden knew. Crazy as he was, he had seen glimpses of it in those mischievous green eyes.
"His only use is to be a lab rat for the rest of his lifetime," his colleague continued. "And he doesn't even make a good lab rat. He's not infected with any virus. The results are inconsistent and point at nothing! Even our side-project on mapping his DNA is going nowhere, his genetics is… bizarre—"
"That's enough," Hayden snapped.
"...sorry, sir."
"Just review today's footage and hand in the reports on his behavior," Hayden ordered before turning his eyes back on the screen, on the boy laid in the middle of a bed-less white room.
Pariah had both of his hands up in the air before twisting and doing a strange gesture with it. Hayden just watched – until the footage defocused. The screen went red much to his annoyance, giving a poor visual of the subject. They were almost blind if it weren't for the vague shapes behind the thick red.
"I thought the technician already fix the problem," Hayden told his colleague as he tapped against the screen.
"The other cameras have the same problem as well."
Hayden grumbled as he leaned back into his chair.
White his ceiling was. White were his fluorescent lights. White were his clothes. White walls... White. White. Clean.
All through his years, he had lived in whiteness. In a colorless world. What colors came were in the experiments. Fire and its bright orange-red presence. Streaking blue from the electricity. Deep aqua green from his time in the water. Yellow in surgeries from the glaring lamplight. Pitch blackness of a vacuum room, airless and without oxygen for his skin and lungs to breathe. Gray in the glistening of steel from tools of many kinds. Brown and green from the rare days of the time outside during his childhood.
But red? Blood and red in his rage, in his time of utter despair when his mother would not respond genuinely with life but rather with repetition and brokenness even as primal as she was.
Links, connection, whole – yet she wasn't more than a simple husk whispering the same lullabies of comfort to her only living child. But she was the only family since Hope.
She treated him like her other simple children, brutish children whose thoughts were nothing more than to follow their mother's command out of prescribed devotion and love. The children in the visions and her vast mind, Hope.
She always lingered more on those memories than on him.
He, he did it by choice and that spoke much. Choice was a sign he was more than just a creature of design, unlike his mother. He learned this from one of the simple experiments – of badly named games the scientist offered him to play. The scientist Philip Hayden taught that lesson unknowingly to the mute autistic face he put on.
Confusion had swirled in him, he was his mother's child, wasn't he? The result of nature that was tinkered by man's hand regardless of the consequence. For that, he was a child of science as well. But he followed his mother more because she was his mother. Because he was a child and alone with none to provide intimacy and affection besides her whispering love. So he followed her example. He waited.
But his own experiments taught him he could do things that these white coats couldn't. That he was stronger than them, faster than them, just as intelligent as them and more. So what was it about these walls that kept him and his mother from acting, from unleashing a dream of connection and links?
Why did she not respond, act, to save, to break against what held them separate? Why did she not come? He was impatient. Confused by the questions, he wondered… why? He questioned the visions, the future like how the white coats questioned everything. He questioned his mother's dream of the world, her hallucination, something not real, just mere sweet dreams. He had grimaced at that, she was real. She was real, she was not a memory, nor a dream. She was real, he could hear her, and he knew now, knew what they knew, what they hid, what they took. She was simply far, far away.
But the questions did not stop. He wanted answers, and his mother wasn't giving him ones that satisfied him. It could not be that simple.
She never asked. She would never ask because she couldn't.
It led him to reluctantly admit that his mother was flawed. A husk. She was repeating broken meanings that only he could understand. Too simple. Too accepting. Why must they follow? Why must they listen? Why must they wait? These questions swirled in him… but ironically, he came to accept them as his mother had come to accept the binds that she followed.
He envied the simpler days, the days he was young, naïve, when he was easily pleased and interested in everything, and ignorant of the minds hidden behind those masks they always wear around him. Since when did he become so dissatisfied with everything?
He even grew bored of the white birds, the doves that he would visit in his dull humoring of the white coats and black handlers. Once, he was fond of watching them, even itched to touch and stroke their soft feathers. They were pretty thing, so simple, free and beautiful, much like mother… like the visions – until questions ruined those visions.
A part of him wanted to rebel against the flow. It would be easy, he just needed to prove himself, give them what they wanted all along, a weapon, a means to make powerful soldiers, become their best soldier. Become one of them. With patience, things would start to change, would look promising, they would let him out to see the world outside.
And test him to hunt…his sisters. It would be something out of his mother's worst dreams, and there was a part of him that was dangerously curious if she would react to that.
Except that was to let them win. He did not like them winning because it would give them the means to increase the number of experiments, the level of dangers in them, the infliction of pain. He was taught to play games and to win, without realizing they were winning all the time. His young self had learned that and began to play the same game.
If he did become one of them… wouldn't that make it easy to dismantle them? To destroy them?
As they watched him and did their experiments, he watched them and did his own experiments. He implanted his virus into their brains when they were preoccupied even as cameras watched him. He manipulated the virus in the monkeys.
He ruined their results. He gave them nothing. He pulled their thoughts, he planted his, even ordered their bodies into doing things. He made them sick on his bad days, making his virus mimic other diseases in their body. He learned what was in their minds, what their thoughts were on through the hivemind. Small jerks here and there. He did all he could do while maintaining this farce of an autistic boy.
Yet his experiments were so full of limits, he couldn't do much but focus and concentrate on small details else they would learn what he was up to. Control. Improve and control was all he could do. Theoretically, if he could do those in small details, he could do it on a bigger scale. All he needed was plenty of concentration, and he had that as well as his patience.
He was careful not to give them any clues and hints of what he ultimately can do to them, but even he himself didn't know what he was capable of. Perhaps I need creativity, he'd mused in realization at the melted flesh oozing away from the pet dog that had annoyed him.
Of the world outside, he learned from glimpses of their memories.
But memory and experience were different. The pain remembered in memories was not as real when experiencing it. Through Redlight's view, the world was crying out for them, that it needed them. It was splintered and through those visions, it showed a future of a family that were one and complete, of a means to spread and ease the pain. It called a deep part of himself to act, to force change just as the same call that held mother into inaction.
Yet when he looked into the mind of the humans, they didn't seem to need anything. They were oddly simple creatures, content and yet in some amount dissatisfied with their lives. They wanted a lot of things and expect many things. They dislike sudden change, but they also dislike constant monotony. They lived in a splintered world, where part of life was hard, others easy, happy, sad, and each a maelstrom of emotions, and pain was just another part of it. They were alive, and they weren't static like the dreams. They accepted that this was how things were, the human world. Curious, how swapped those views were. Humans accepted, yet mother's views asked for a change.
It was 1999, thirty years of captivity and he was going to be educated and trained even though it was fruitless. Blackwatch would push until something broke.
What mother wanted was a patient son. What Blackwatch wanted was a promising soldier of the future, a weapon. What scientists wanted was the purpose of all lifeforms, of the cure to everything… the answer to the losses behind Hope, CARNIVAL II, to something at least.
And he could be any of those. He could make his body teeming with viruses just like mother's, a churning machine of every known and unknown disease.
The vaccine to all or a weapon that could control these diseases, to incite them on his enemy. The cure for the world's pain... or its inevitable future of incurable disease. Or both. Or none.
He didn't become any of those, and he didn't quite understand why they expected this much from him. He never felt the need to even grow. If they wanted him to reach his prime, they would have to give more food than the proportion of a healthy adult. Food though was enough for him to deal with the injuries of what his surgeries and experiments brought. Two, because he wouldn't. Frustration to Blackwatch, to the scientist and... well, mother lacked any response.
Everyone had given up on him, except for Philip Hayden. That fifty-year-old man hadn't given up, and that told of even stronger conviction than to see how far he could handle their games.
Behind that old's man eyes, there was always a lingering thought of a child separated by a layer of glass, wired with cords and connected to a machine, breathing heavily.
A sick child. A memory of his late son.
Hayden believed in him. Of what? The cure of humankind, of bringing a future that wouldn't have disease to take loved ones away. But he was patient, he did not push unless ordered by the higher-ups.
He was oddly the only one he would tolerate. Pariah hated to admit it, but he was fond of that scientist. The man would often, amusingly, bribe him with candy bars whenever he could, and be present in pleasant experiments that were just to test his mental capacity. The simple games that didn't force him but rather waited for him to move the chess piece.
If all of them were as pleasant as Hayden was.
"Hey kid!" he heard one of the black-uniformed brutes grunt.
Pariah placed his hands down on the floor. He laid in the center of his drawings, where he could feel the tugs of his flesh traced across the floor all around him. It was but small specks against the speckled layers of crayon. Humans couldn't see as much detail on the corner of their sight as he can.
If this worked, it would be but in a minute. Enough for the switch. He needed to be quick though. Activating his virus would release more than billions of chemical reactions in a nanosecond, hence heat. Heat was the biggest giveaway, even when his body would utilize every means for minimum waste.
It was easier to manage in small portions, easier to survive that long despite the food given, but that meant he was close to being catatonic like his mother, keeping his body from changing to whatever he was meant to be. He knew he could do it. He could do it small. Then he could do it big. He was determined to make that true.
"Hey kid!" the soldier shouted down on him, now standing over him.
Green eyes moved to the corner of the room, where the camera watched it all. The thin tiny tendril of black biomass touched the wires… wriggling the slightly loose wires – but not to detach, but to scramble the signal as another layer of biomass covered the lens.
His eyes fell back on the floor, and his drawings moved, whipping out thin-like metallic cords.
"What the—" Coil upon black coil wrapped around the soldier before it tugged hard enough for the soldier to slam down onto his knees.
Pariah was suddenly up, face to face when he jabbed his hand into the neck.
They wanted his virus for the next generation soldier… well, he would give it to them. But not like how they expect.
He could see brown eyes behind the mask's lens widening as his vision blurred and swirled in black with flesh splitting into dark tendrils. Soldier and boy became a mass of tentacles and suddenly, they parted.
Philip Hayden shook the TV again, the screen clearing in a sharp focus, enough to see the boy escorted out of his room with one of the insufferable Blackwatch.
Damn cameras… Hayden sighed then frowned at the drawings on the floor. He leaned forward and squinted.
"Can you read that?" he asked his colleague and pointed at the drawings.
"Mieux… vaut être seul." His colleague leaned forward. "Que mal accompagné."
"What?" Hayden asked.
"La seconde pensée est la meilleure," his colleague continued.
Did Pariah write that? Most of the time he wrote in broken English... a game he usually played to see if Hayden could decipher. Hayden zoomed the camera in. Crayon-version of planet Earth covered the floor… yet again, red always dominant in the landscape. There they were though, the words Hayden picked out, doodled so lazily, almost unintelligible. Sloppy.
Where did the boy learn French? He only had one scientist who was French, but he was in no way part of the group meant to educate the boy.
Driving was not so hard from the memories he tapped through the hive. Learning to walk and get used to a new perspective of being taller than a ten-year-old kid was harder. As he drove away from the facility, he recalled their last words.
"What are you doing here?" The voice muffled through a hazmat suit, broke into his silent farewell.
Philip. Philip, he wanted to chide. But remained silent until he remembered he was a Blackwatch soldier now.
"Just curious," he replied mildly.
Jars, rows of jars amongst other things displayed on the shelf… jars containing... he reached out his hand at one of them, barely touching the surface – containing…
'Family,' mother whispered.
"Don't touch!"
He put his hand back to his side when the scientist came up to him.
"Hope's children. They all came out with defects?" he asked lightly, even knowing the answer.
"…Yes. It's no wonder the boy is… flawed since they all didn't come out… right." He looked at one of the jars. A baby with two heads on one body, conjoined twins.
"They don't share the same virus as Pariah?"
"No. Pariah is different, he doesn't carry any virus at all. Perhaps it's why he was able to survive his third year," Philip said stiffly. "All the other children before him didn't, and they all carried the virus."
He'd seen glimpses from the others' memories. But experience was nothing like memories. He knew they were somewhere in this same base. To see them for real…
There could be others. There could have been others. Siblings. Pariah stared. Siblings that could have been like him. Real siblings.
Except none survived. None came out right. Only him. One.
"Hard to believe he's clean when seeing this." He gestured at the preserved children. "The boy grew in a womb brimming with the nastiest diseases that made children into this," he said nonchalantly.
"How did you have access to this room?" Hayden said accusingly.
"I have access to wherever you go. I was meant to watch over the scientists of this facility," he lied but it was also true.
Blackwatch was there so that their scientists didn't stray too far. The men in mask watched every asset they have on their list. Mother had Gentek, he had a mixed team from different medical company and race.
He could hear a grimace behind the hazmat suit.
"Doctor Hayden. Did you find out the meanings of the French words?"
The black window of the suit paused before turning towards him.
"Best be alone than in bad company. Second thoughts are the best," Hayden answered quietly.
"Never knew the kid knows French. Thought he was a dumbass."
In satisfaction, he noted the hands tightened into a fist.
"Well, so long," he said before leaving the room and the scientist alone with his siblings.
He stepped out of the California hot sun and shut the Humvee's door. In the window, his reflection gazed back at him. A stranger's face stared but with a flicker of black tentacles, green eyes replaced the brown ones and a thirty-year-old man with sandy buzz cut hair faced him.
With a tilt of his head, he examined and then flicked away the excess of the black uniform into the Humvee as with the key. Without care, he abandoned the car and walked off to the horizon where he knew one of the cities was, LA.
Leaving the past of his lab rat times, knowing he had broken a mind of a soldier and shape-shifted his own body against his will… to that of a boy. They would get nothing, not even from his doppelganger.
He walked. He could've run, but he walked, basking beneath the heat of sunlight, the feel of outside. He treasured his lonesome time outside, free. Finally free.
He smiled.
As the city grew closer, sounds approached his sharp ears. The sound of on-rushing cars and their honking. The sound of how many thousands of footsteps walking and running on pavements. Of the hiss and rumble of machines, engines. The buzz and hum of electricity in wires. The air itself alive with planes and helicopters. So many sounds he couldn't identify and a whole lot more loud than what he remembered from the memories.
Breaking his long habit of mutism, of his force of habit on slamming any emotion down deep into him, he laughed to the sky out of jubilant.
A slow raspy laugh, tasting the sound of freedom.
His excitement ran out as quick as the wind. The city was a crowded and rowdy place. Ten times, he almost got hit by cars from his impatience to just cross a street. Humans everywhere, invading his space. He was startled and almost hissed through his breath at the next woman who had stood right beside him as they waited for traffic light. But his habit of mutism kept him controlled.
As sour as he was at the small space, he could not help but wonder at all the sights he saw. Bright were the lights at night and as alive as it was at day. Cities never sleep, especially great one like LA. There were always businesses to run; to waste time is to waste money.
For three days, he took his sweet time, walking between the tall buildings. He had gotten lost plenty of time. From the darkest seediest place to the higher up ends of money, he studied these humans in curiosity, in wondering. They were certainly different and more concerned in their life, what dinner to make at home, why the neighbor was acting suspicious, and many trivial thoughts that didn't concern the next stage of science.
He could not rest or hear his own thoughts with these noises and human invading, and that was why he was in some dingy alleyway. Late at night, he leaned against the brick wall. They ignored this kind of place, and he could understand that. His nose wrinkled at the smell of trash. He had given up on keeping a sharp nose and just dulled his senses or else being in a city would have driven him mad with all the noise and smell.
He missed his mother's whispering. He could barely hear her when all his senses were blasted. Pariah slowly blinked and slid down against the wall, shutting his eyes.
He was used to sleeping. Once, it was a means for him to be closer to his mother without being pestered by the daily activities. The day came with experiments, results, expectation, education, training, and of course, needles.
There was nothing wrong with sleeping. It gave him concentration to fix something wrong within him, as he had done for every surgery he had. It gave him focus when he needed to use the hivelink to snoop into their thoughts and know about the world outside.
He could learn things about the virus, specifically his, what he could do without being disturbed.
It also preserved his much-needed energy, energy he needed for healing despite how much food consumption gave him. So sleep was good. Being slow was good. Being almost catatonic was good. He followed his mother in a way. To wait. He had her patience. Plus, it frustrated them, he mused with a smile.
Sleep led him to fall deeper into the hive, embraced by the warmth of Redlight. Despite her flaws, mother still brought comfort. He needed to know if the facility was alerted with any clue that he had escaped right beneath their nose.
He felt the snip of metals despite how many drugs he was under. His body refused to respond to the sedative as they cut him while he was restrained on the table.
They all stood around him, silhouettes against the glaring light. They reached down to grab him.
Pariah shot forward and lunged.
The sound of choking cracked into his reality and he stared at the lowest scum of humanity staring back at him in shock. A homeless man. A hobo.
Decades of being almost catatonic, forced to stay as a child and now awake, his body was still adjusting from the big changes. It was stubborn to just shut down. He underestimated the feeling of… infecting, the feeling of stealing cells to be made into his own flesh, to spread and snatching everything in return. Warm and satisfying. Addictive. Alive. It felt right and so easy, it was what he was meant to do after all. It was the rush of cells entering his body, becoming one with him and just feeling … whole, as his mother would whisper.
It was a miracle he was still able to manipulate during such moments for the switch to be successful. But this wasn't a moment of calculation.
He was scared.
His concentration slipped, and a bit of him was stabbed into the old man, eager to infect, eager to have more. More. Against his control, much to his horror and revulsion, a swirl of black tendrils and the world flash into pain.
I was the guy everyone knew in my neighborhood. The guy everyone would talk to.
My wife did say I had a lovely personality. I knew how to cheer and give people a good time.
But then I lost my job. Things started to fall apart. I didn't give up my gambling, especially on football games. In hindsight, I was stupid, but I believed in luck. It hadn't left me… but now it has. I couldn't afford insurance, so things started selling.
We moved into a dingy apartment.
But everything was going downhill. To make matter worse, my wife left. She saw the warning, the letter that said I was bankrupt.
Fucking hell. The only thing that was there was my dog. Now she... she never left me despite all the hardship. I must be a very sore loser, I couldn't even take care of my own family.
Things grew worse until I had no home. Once everyone's guy. Now a nobody scrounging in people's trash, stealing from people, breaking into people's apartments. But I didn't give up. Fuck up I was, I made a promise to my only family. I would take care of her.
It's not fair she was loyal to me and I couldn't part with her. So all the food I earn, I gave a half of it to her. She was skinny as shit, and I knew she wouldn't last in the street. It doesn't help she became sick soon after.
So here we are, wallowing in the alleyway.
I was reckless and stupid. But I'm not going to fail. Stupid and delusional John, but fuck that. Sass here at least will know her owner loves her. Unlike anybody else in this shit life that promised they would be there.
Now to find an unlucky fella in the alleyway, sleeping, was an opportunity. Never mind the black army pants and boots, there's gotta be a wallet in there.
Biggest mistake, I felt the fingers inside me as green eyes glared crazily into me.
Fuck, Sass—
Pariah stumbled back into the alleyway. He groped his head at the swirl of thoughts. Uncontainable, uncontrollable thoughts. Emotions, feelings, experiences and knowledge mish-and-mashed without his guidance.
For so long he sat in the alleyway. Curled up, face hiding between his knees. Mother offered her love… but he swatted in rage. This was his battle and war. He would do it himself as he always had.
A whine cut into his thoughts, and for some reason, he responded instinctively to it. A hand reaching towards the sound. A dog. A brown Labrador with pale fur sat not far from him, staring with beady black eyes. A dirty strip of cloth was wrapped around one paw. She got that wound from a fight… which had led to an infection.
He groped his head and tugged at his hair frustratingly at these uncontained thoughts. The whine called again… and it cut deep into him. He just got up and walked away, only to stumble. The pull to go back to the dog was strong. He just wanted to leave.
He left and walked a few yards before coming back to stand before the dog. Curiously, he tilted his head.
"Sass," a stranger's voice croaked out his mouth.
Unused to those layers of flesh – flesh full of memories and a bag full of regrets. Regrets that weren't his but were affecting him.
Sass. Sasquatch. Sassy sass. A man's cheerful laughter and amusement echoed in his mind.
He hated that. He hated what he couldn't control. It reminded him so much of the helpless time, of when he was young and naïve.
The dog just whined in answer and let out a painful heavy exhale.
He had a pet once. A dog actually, but that one didn't count. It didn't choose him, it was given to him and it didn't like him. He didn't like it either since whatever efforts he put in trying to make it like him didn't work one bit. It obeyed its true masters and tolerated him through them. It would not listen to him, so he tried the way his mother told him.
That was a horrifying mess and it died immediately with just a mere touch. He was fonder of birds anyway.
The first time he saw something close to one was a dove, it was a sample animal used for testing the disease vector. Their white color should have repulsed him, but they were so… small, so gentle-looking. In a way, he discovered the meaning of beauty when the bird set itself to flight. Unbound. Free to go and do whatever they wished to do, but they were caged creatures that would never fly the skies. They lived and died for the lab. And then, he learned to infect, properly this time.
Mother had said it would make it all the better. It didn't. It made it ugly. It wriggled and struggled as the pustule tumor grew in seconds. Bind by such mess, they were grounded, they weren't free, yet they were alive at least. He wasn't sure that was better. He never wanted to infect again, despite mother's whispering. Until… the urge became too irresistible. And he wanted to know. He was tired of losing. And mother would be quiet.
The monkeys the scientist used to hold the Hope's children virus; nothing but tools for him to learn what he could do. He could kill and make them sick… he could stop the infection. Or make them stronger and smarter then dumber than ever. His learning resulted in irregular results in the scientist's records.
He never cared for any of them.
The dog sniffed its master's shoe. He could… he could, the alien thought whispered. He could make her better.
He could cure her.
Pariah crouched down before her and reached out.
She would be of use. He could use something like a dog, if memory served him right about what they could do. She would be able to run and be happy again instead of this shit – Pariah quietened his thoughts with a small crease between his eyebrows.
Links… whole… everything for the better.
The dog whined when he touched her.
For the better.
But death could also be for the better. It was called mercy.
He was an imitator. A great imitator. The same as how his virus could imitate other symptoms of other diseases, so was he able to imitate other people… by simply watching, listening. It would take a few practices and then he was completely someone else with face and voice. His time learning and trying to understand his human captors paid off.
What was left missing was memories and his target's DNA running in him. But he could easily steal both of them without tainted by their regrets and emotions, and none of them the wiser. He would make himself forget before the feelings from those memories truly settled in. It was the same way how he dealt with countless of pain during his lab time. Simply switching off a part of him.
Watching and listening into minds was different to carrying them. For one, it was less troublesome and not a nuisance nor intrusive, and most of all, he could stop listening. To have another's was so strange and confusing. It made him angry. It made him frustrated. He wanted to tear something up, he wanted to tear himself and get these thoughts that were not his out of his head.
Love for another besides his mother was an alien concept. He didn't give much care other than his own desires and that of his mother's. He taught himself never to fulfill another's unless there was something in it for him, hampering any growing empathy he had for the humans. Even made him independent despite his mother's love.
He did not flinch when he snapped the woman's neck as his body snatched her cells while breaking down her brain. Her own – but now his – mutated cells cannibalizing and digesting its own. He could consume without the trouble of assimilating another's brain, without losing any precious mass for missing out the head. As long as his virus didn't infect the brain, the cells would just break it down like food in a stomach, albeit quicker.
All they would bring was nothing but trouble if he didn't. They knew so little too, so many meaningless things, so ignorant of what others knew, what he knew and what Blackwatch kept from the public in general.
They were sort of like children in that regard, concerned in their own world that had nothing to do with virus, truth and the reason, and they made the vast amount of the majority on this Earth. Apparently, numbers meant nothing when broken into disconnected individual pieces.
He could not see why mother loved them.
They were, at their worst, capable of being nothing but monsters. Monsters… what did it mean to be a monster? Was it hurting people, was it scaring them? Pariah recalled the time when he was young, when the men in mask would come and always bring bad, bad memories of awful experiments.
"You were scared, right, Pariah? It's okay to admit it. Now on the scale from one to ten…"
He even remembered the times from before, of Hope, what they have done to mother, when they took away their family. Frightening. They were the monsters. He didn't like them. He hated them. What they have done, he would never forgive. It infuriated him in a way that they expected him to feel sorry for the deaths he caused. They had taken their family, had hurt mother, but didn't feel sorry for one bit.
Something cold dropped on him, and more soon came. He looked up from his sour mood and stared at the gray cloudy skies.
It was raining, and a flash of lightning streaked across the skies. A boom soon followed.
Cold tears of the skies dropped on his face as he looked up, staring in wonder. This was the first time he felt rain. So wet and startling cold, gentle not like the hot jet waters from the lab. Memories were mere windows, experience was for real. He slowly smiled and cherished such moment, made it his.
There was a sound of barking and he sat up straight from his lazing on the rooftop.
"Sasquatch!" he yelled hoarsely, not use to talking but sighed when not a single frantic footstep of frisky paws came.
'Sasquatch!' he yelled into his tight connected hivemind.
He was replied with an overtopped joy. Are dogs so easily that pleased? A burst of black feathers smacked into his face, but he immediately grabbed the wriggling creature. Black feathers quickly turned to fur, and the big Labrador was rolling on top of him before settling its muzzle on his lap.
He stared at the dog… well, not dog so much but strange esque of a creature who tries to pull a bird sometimes. It would explain its short attention span it has. Sometimes it became a cat just to annoy the other neighborhood feline, only to be bullied by them. It was strange such creature bigger and stronger acts like a chicken when a smaller one fights back.
Sasquatch just stared with her beady black intelligent eyes as rain fell on them, her black fur glistening from being wet. Pariah just scratched the hair beneath his beany, puzzled by this dog's frisky behavior that alternated to an obedient child who wanted her parent's approval to an energetic troublesome one.
"You ate another bag of trash, didn't you?" Pariah stared accusingly at the dog.
Give a virus that gives the ability of cells to breakdown everything — metal, bricks, glass… And a dog would use it just to be filled with trash.
"You're going to have aches for that. Don't blame me when you're in pain," he told the dog.
She was smart. She understood now more than she had and whined at her master's coldness.
Good. She was listening. Because she didn't listen when she had burst into a black blur after he had just cured her and given her the means to be stronger.
Cue a homeless man running through the streets, shoving other people just to get his overeager dog.
The first thing she did was eating a whole bag of trash. From the smell and noise it had made, it wasn't something organic. Or pleasant.
Sass has a thing for metal cans. It was one of her favorite things. Pariah couldn't understand why such thing could give great happiness. A dog's mind was a whole lot different than a human's. Befuddling, a puzzle, and puzzles made him curious… and obsess. Hayden had noted this trait of his aloud in one of their experiments.
Hayden… Pariah thought grew somber when reminded. He… sort of missed that intriguing scientist. Hayden's probe on his psyche and mental capability was amusing, it also taught him to stretch his conscious.
Too bad he was going to be retired and Pariah was not sure he had enough patience to deal with a newcomer or any other current scientists. The last one decided to pursue the kind of experiments he disliked like how fast he could heal.
So he left, and really… he wanted to visit his mother. Pariah looked up in the rain, his head facing east, towards New York City. She was there, she was real, so far away, waiting.
Why doesn't she respond? Why doesn't she act? The age-old questions came. He grimaced at the thought.
Perhaps if he was there for real, she would respond. Perhaps she was actually waiting for him, all this time. For him to save her, she just didn't know it. How could she, how would she know better when she was a husk?
When he was seventeen, he was ready to break out. He was tired and so angry at his captivity, rooms were thrashed, bedframe smashed into concrete and a lot of animals from the side-experiments ruined that day… but mother quelled him. She tried very hard to keep him from acting out against them. Why did she ask him to be calm? Why do they have to wait?
He had learned why as the soft emptiness smothered him and all his anger, his emotions swept under beneath.
Love. 'Not anger,' mother had whispered.
Humans with all their flaws, she still saw them as children who needed their mother. Did she confuse them as her Hope family, their family? He wasn't even sure if she could tell the difference between one human against another.
He didn't know.
He scratched Sasquatch's head, deep in thought before standing up. He looked down at the cheerful black Labrador, lolling its tongue out.
"Wanna go to New York?" he asked. He didn't know why he was asking a clearly lower intelligent creature, but it was nice to know how they feel about it.
Sass stood up on four legs and woofed. He smiled and dash into a sprint, cracking the concrete behind him. As the roof's edge grew closer, his body flex and release, launching him through the air, smiling softly as he felt the rush of air and cold rain trickling past him.
A black blur passed him, Sass sprinted ahead, woofing happily as he raced after her.
Freedom was never this sweeter.
A brush of shoulder and a grunt, he slightly turned and murmured a, "sorry."
Pariah walked away, smiling when the Gentek scientist walked into the gate. Now all he needed to do was wait for his virus to spread amongst the staff like the common flu, riff through their head, pick some poor fella with the highest access, and take his place.
Easy, but what to do in the meantime. He stopped and stared at the surrounding tall buildings. It was New York, the city that never sleeps. It wouldn't hurt just to have a walk around.
He sighed in his gazing, he did not feel a single jerk from mother even if he was here. What's stopping her? He turned his gaze to the building behind him.
Why wait when I'm here now? He was not angry. He was not here to hurt anyone. Yet she still didn't respond besides giving her usual soft assurance.
He did not want assurance. He wanted a respond.
Restless, he walked. He itched to draw his frustration into a splattered mess on white.
There were no white walls here. Just red bricks, gray concrete, tinted glasses, and metals.
No petty Blackwatch. No petty white coats. Just—
'Bird!'
Sasquatch. Pariah glanced down on the black dog standing by his feet, beady black eyes gazing at the skies in wonder.
She hasn't eaten a proper meal for a week now. A few trashes, a branch, birds, cats, even rats. But no humans.
No exact sign of aggression or primal instinct of a hunter. He simply healed her from infection and made the virus assimilated, other than that, he left it to nature. Didn't touch her mind… if converting her brain into brain matter didn't count.
'Ball!'
Pariah blinked at the image of white sands and a red ball thrown so far… What did her owner do to bond with her or waste time? What was fun for Pariah? He skewed his face at the thought. He sounded like Hayden just now.
The answer was nothing. He always grew bored of the games Hayden introduced and he wouldn't let them see more than he wanted to. He had to play the autistic child after all.
'Ball!' Sasquatch interrupted his thoughts again as she paced back and forth excitedly in front of him.
He sighed and just drawled, "ball."
At the immediate statement, she burst into running, disappearing behind the numbers of pedestrians. But not at a frightful blurring speed, but of a normal dog's.
He followed her, using the tug in the hivemind that was clearly belonging to a jubilant dog.
It wasn't far. She led him to New York's Central Park before running around in a circle like some wild energetic spastic child. He just stood there and watched long enough for her to calm down. Sass wisely did and sat down on the green grass, waiting.
How the hell she knew where to go amazed him… or maybe she was using a bird's memory.
He stood there and realized he didn't have a ball. The hobo in him just answered steal from one. The lab rat though… he creased his eyebrow.
With a quick glance around, he looked at his pale hands. A flicker of tentacles and a ball was on his hand. It was a red rubber ball. The solid ones that bounce so easily. He had one when he was fourteen just like the one he was tossing up and down in his hand… until he decided to throw one at a psychiatrist's head, cracking her skull and broke her neck on impact. Not to mention it was in her head.
Biggest whoops, because Hayden was pissed at him when that happened. He made him feel guilty with that passive aggressive thing Hayden likes to pull for no absolute reason at all. Amusing in hindsight though. The psychiatrist was annoying, and she was close to discerning him. Everything she says Blackwatch would take it as true. So if she said, 'not autistic', everything goes down the shit hole. She was a threat. Threat had to be eliminated.
Sasquatch woofed at seeing the magically appearing ball. He tossed it a few feet only to take few seconds for Sasquatch to shove it back into his hand.
Pariah stared at the dog and Sass just gazed back at him. A challenge, eh? He smirked at the dog before arching back. He aimed and threw the ball in an arch… right into the distant lake.
"That was a dick move," a woman's voice commented behind him.
Well, you can fuck off, the alien thought snapped while Pariah just silently curled his lips into a snarl. The nosiness of humans.
If he really was a dick, he would've thrown it in a straight shot into someone head just to see if Sasquatch would eat the body first before bringing the ball back.
Something wet nudged his hand and he looked down to see a very wet black Labrador with a red ball in her mouth. It... only took her a few minutes.
He wondered if he threw it halfway across Manhattan would she able to get it back. After a brief staring and soft riffing through her head, Pariah realized she was one hell determined dog. She would probably cross Hudson river if he happens to throw the ball across it.
Getting the ball back was her pride and joy. It was like every time she got it back, it was some major accomplishment that made the world better tomorrow. Dogs were simple, they loved playing, bonding with their family.
Family…
"You don't need to do that," the words popped out of his mouth without his knowing.
That broke his mood.
"I'm not him," he said flatly to her.
She just stared at him. Weren't dogs loyal? Couldn't they tell the difference between their owner and stranger? What was he to her?
Hopefully not some father figure, Pariah balked at such thought. He didn't know it was his thought or the hobo's. To distract himself, he tossed the ball only for her to jump straight up in the air and snatched it, seemingly pleased when she handed it back.
Pariah stared at Sasquatch for a long time. He needed to teach her how to control else he was going to get into heaps amount of trouble.
He wasted no time and activated his virus. From his view on the rooftop, he could see through the apartment's window, of a man stumbling onto the floor before collapsing altogether. The most mind-splitting migraine tended to that.
He was a perfect candidate. Level A access, no current relationships or close contacts. No one would be bothered if he temporarily vanished.
"Wait here and keep watch," he commanded his dog who obeyed immediately by sitting down on all fours.
Pariah took his time before pausing at the locked apartment's door then at the gap between door and floor. Risk the chance of frying the guy's brain just for him to open the door, or… Pariah squeezed his eyebrows together in concentration. He unraveled into a black pool of biomass and slid under the door before reweaving back into form on the other side, stumbling drunkenly and clutching his head right after.
That was… a first time he did something like that. Completely losing most of his five senses only to have one changed and extrapolated into extremely sensitive. It was strange for one to just feel their way in.
He was never going to do that ever again.
He blinked rapidly before gazing at the collapsed body not far from the exit. Marching over, he crouched and pressed his hand against the neck.
The Gentek scientist was slightly breathing. Rolling over the body, Pariah paid attention to the details. The face, the way he dressed. Habits though would come later. Again, with a tight squeeze from his eyebrows, he re-weaved his body. Feeling the uncomfortable weight distributing different part of his being, Pariah got up and stared at his faint reflection on the window's glass.
Good enough, he would fix the details later. Now though… he needed the memories. He reached down to the neck again before shutting his eyes.
Take his memory. Get access into the lab. Set everything up. Then take his place when everything is set up… after leaving the guy comatose in his apartment for a day, of course. Can't leave a missing scientist without raising some eyebrows.
'Mother.' He pressed his gloved hand against the glass wall that held her.
A week… a week of toying the security cameras, he was now here… in front of her.
'Mother,' he called out again softly into the hivemind, at the woman sitting in the middle of her prison, haunch over. Her head partially bald as if she had ripped tufts of her red hair in frustration.
She looked so frail… so weak… so vulnerable sitting alone. Anger flashed in his mind.
Warm assurance embraced him and shame washed down. Here was his mother in flesh and blood, who needed him, and all he could think was turning around for some meaningless reasons. He felt like he had insulted her… even though she did not rebuke.
Slowly, he tapped into the code before walking into the room. Crouching down before her, he reached out slowly and grasped her shoulder.
'I'm here now. Just...' He grimaced and said the words he would often repeat desperately in those days he wished he was far, far away. 'Just respond, please. All you have to do is just say it and I'll get you out.'
Elizabeth Greene looked up, her green dull eyes stared… stared through him. She reached out slowly and grasped the hazmat mask with her bare hands, spreading red vein-like webs across its screen. He waited. He felt like he was teetering on the edge of a cliff.
'My son...' He felt her warm voice in his head.
'Mother,' he answered back. 'We don't have much time. Do you want...' He paused and stared at his mother who was now again lost in her thoughts. Thoughts about children, of the future, of the world crying around her… of the humans. Of her son saving them all. A son to love them all.
Pariah seethed at that last part. Save them!? Save them!? He stood up immediately.
'No,' he snarled. 'I do not care of their future. They brought it upon themselves!'
Greene flinched and covered her face with her hands, but he knew no tears fell from that face.
He still regretted it.
'Why do you love them?' he pleaded. 'Why!'
Was he not her son!? Wasn't he more real than the children within her mind! More real than them who only brought misery and pain, just more experiments and constant needles! So why does she act so… indifferent.
Like he was just a mere memory, and not really there for her.
His mother grasped and clutched his hand and for once she stared with her dead green eyes. 'Do not destroy,' Hope whispered.
He tightened his fists together before looking down. 'I won't,' he promised, but he gave an angry glare. 'But I won't save them. I won't help them.' Softening, he gazed back at his mother sadly. One last time… 'You do not want to come?'
She did not answer, she couldn't answer. Her thoughts circled around him and the world. Him and the world. Him. The world. The Family. He sighed. Does she love them so much that she stays? Or was it just her brain totally fried of logic? One side of him, the angry rebellious child in him, spits and hiss of such former thoughts in envy and jealousy. The other… the calm part of him, spoke of the latter.
There was another voice in him, the one that wanted to violently pull his mother out of her state, to shake her, scream at her mentally... that would've hurt her without care. That selfish voice.
He backed away. He hated his thoughts. Why couldn't he just accept? It was so simple. Accept his mother's will, the hivemind's. The image of a white dove flashed, of being bound tight in pustules and mutated ugly flesh. Grounded… not free… flightless.
10 years later. 2009, St Paul's Hospital.
The sun was dying on the horizon, casting a soft flame of orange onto New York. On the rooftop, a group of Marines carried the hospital cot contained in a see-through plastic frame. They lifted it up with the patient contained in it and disappeared into the helicopter, followed with a doctor and a soldier.
That soldier paused before entering, staring at Manhattan one more time at its tall buildings. Signs of the apocalypse that had happened could be seen from the holes in the buildings. No doubt caused by the military shelling, people's suicidal tendency and infected Hunters that make use of pummeling everything, even through the buildings. Other than that, cranes from building construction and repair now dominated a broken Manhattan.
The quarantine was lifted. The infected were gone after much ruthless stamping. Blackwatch was facing a heavy slam from the government.
And Alex Mercer, killer, monster, terrorist, just wants to get the hell out of here and get his comatose sister to safety. For that, he had to handle the company of Marines for three days. He growled beneath his mask.
All of New York's hospitals were full, plus with Blackwatch still there, he was paranoid. Dana was everything they might need to restart the whole thing again with Elizabeth Greene. He wasn't going to let that happen in a million years.
She needed a team of scientists to work on her if they ever want improvement on her condition. So Philadelphia was the answer. Ragland's family lived there, and the doctor was clearly hinting for him to do this favor.
Convenient. He didn't care where they went as long as Blackwatch didn't know and couldn't get their sticky hands on Dana. They could even go to the moon if they had to. He wouldn't mind… well, actually he would mind. A lot.
Because there was one thing Alex Mercer didn't like, and it was losing sight of any dangerous factors. He liked to keep anything that proved to be troublesome in his line of sight.
To leave Manhattan felt like losing sight of what Blackwatch was up to. What informants he had were from the military radio he held in his biomass and from memories of how many thousand men. He had no patience to hack as he always took granted the information that came from consuming.
But soon, information would be old news unless he adapted and found a new way on what Blackwatch plans to do next. They say stress is a great factor to force adaptation on the subject. Well, he didn't like it. His guts tightened as he stepped into the helicopter.
But it was for the better.
He repeated that like a mantra as he stared at the pale body of his sister who was now under a different name.
Ragland better not lie about the company he keeps. He stared daggers at the doctor who took it calmly.
This was going to be a long journey.