disclaimer; I do not own lab rats
an; check out my profile page, I have a question for you guys. Ensia
Two Promises
Two years. He was trapped in that place for two years. A part of him thought it had been longer, somewhere closer to two hundred years, but then again he could remember the day he was caught like it was only yesterday.
He remembered eating the poor excuse that his captors dared to call food and then blaring alarms. The next thing he knew he was staring up at a white ceiling from a hospital bed. The scene was familiar to him but it was vastly different. For the first time in a long time, he smelt clean. Once upon a time he would have hated the smell, but now it was just a relief. He arms and legs weren't restrained by anything except excessive bandages covering most of his abused flesh. He wasn't in any pain that certainly was a new one. His captors had some weird obsession with pain. There was one captor who would always say, "The only constant in life is pain and the only certainty is suffering, either live with it or die from it, in the long run it doesn't matter anyway, in the end we all die." Adam would never forget those words as they had been engraved into his very soul; that voice would haunt Adam until the day he died. Calm and slow as he told Adam how he would suffer that day.
Time had long since meant anything to Adam, but he assumed that he wasn't awake long before a middle aged man unfamiliar to Adam in some sort of uniform he couldn't place came into Adam's room and sat down on one of the chairs by his bed. Adam saw his lips move but the sound had a hard time registering for Adam. Adam could only slightly comprehend a little less than half of what the man said. After all that had happened, men in uniform made him nervous. The only thing Adam really picked up on was one word, "liberated," Adam remembered that from once upon a time when Chase tried to tutor him. He was free. Adam was free of that prison. Waves of relief washed over him. He wanted to cry out in joy, but something stopped him. He faded back in and tried to actually listen to what the older man was saying. The man said something about contacting his family and Adam faded back out again. He was happy, he could go home, see Leo, Mr. Davenport, and Tasha, and eat some real food. But there was something missing in all of that. Adam's mind was never filled to the brim with pressing thoughts and this was no exception. In fact, there were only two things occupying Adam's thoughts, and he couldn't wait any longer, "Can you tell me where my siblings are?" His voice was hoarse from disuse and even Adam had to admit, lying in a hospital bed thinner than he has ever been and covered in bandages, he didn't command much attention anymore. Not even a mummy joke could fix this. Only the knowledge of his siblings' wellbeing could help. If they were okay, then whatever might have happened in the last two years didn't matter to him. He hadn't seen them since the day he was captured and the last time they were together, well it didn't look good. The only blessing was that Leo wasn't with them, he was safe.
The man stopped mid-sentence and stared at the twenty year old man in front of him. Adam had listened to Chase's and Mr. Davenport's techno lingo enough times to recognize confusion when he saw it, "Excuse me?"
It was hard for Adam to breathe, and the mounting frustration made it hard for him to remain calm, but he pushed on, "My little brother and sister. They were captured at the same time as me. If I'm free from the compound, then they must be too. Where are they? I need to talk to them."
The confusion on the older man's face shifted to pity. Adam hated that look. His eyes burned, though with tears or his heat vision, he wasn't sure. Though the other man's eyes not shifting to fear and the fact that he hadn't been able to use his bionics in a long time lead him to believe the former. The man in uniform sighed and reached out to touch Adam's shoulder. Adam flinched back at the contact and the other man took his hand back, "I'm sorry son, there were no female captives. From what we have been able to decode from the main computer, the people who kidnapped you were even harsher to the females they captured than the males. I'll spare you the details, but it's a miracle a healthy young man such as yourself lasted as long as you did. You're sister probably wasn't as lucky."
Lucky. That's the word for it. Adam knew how cruel of a word that was. His eyes blurred as he tried not to break down in front of this stranger, Adam didn't catch his name. Bree wasn't lucky enough to last two years in that hell, wasn't lucky enough to be tortured and experimented on, starved and forced into backbreaking labor or isolated from the people who cared about her for two seemingly endless years. No, if Bree was treated even worse than Adam, then maybe she was lucky, lucky enough to… "No!" Adam clenched his fists, but the weakness of his grip only made him angrier. The stranger looked startled at his outburst but settled down and continued to look at Adam with that hated look of resigned pity, "No, you're lying! She can't be gone, she just can't be. Please, no, she's not…. Please no." What little strength he had left him, tears ran down Adam's cheeks as he practically begged the man in front of him to tell him that it was just a cruel joke and his siblings were fine. A lump that was heavy for eighteen year old Adam settled in his throat. Of everything he had done in his relatively short life, there had never been anything he had wanted to do less but he needed to know and he barely managed to choke out his next question, "And what about my brother?"
There was a moment where Adam thought the man wasn't going to tell him. "I don't know for certain. We have a lot of young men who have yet to be identified." Adam's heart soared with hope for half a second, "But I won't lie to you kid, if your brother was captured with you, the odds aren't good." Adam's heart dropped back down and an overwhelming feeling of despair engulfed him. "I'm sorry, son, but I promise you we will do everything in our power to get you the answers you need to move on."
"It doesn't matter anyway" The words scarred into his brain came to the surface once more, "I'm the oldest. I was supposed to protect them. I failed and now? I'm fine and they're…" once again Adam couldn't say the word. How could he possibly tell Mr. Davenport? Leo? "No! They can't be. If anybody could have figured out how to survive, it's my siblings. They're alive, you just haven't found them. There must have been another facility. They must be there. Go there and save them." Adam knew he was grasping at straws, but it was all he could do. He wasn't strong enough for anything else. He didn't want them to be alive, he needed them to be. There was no other option for him.
This time the man didn't flinch at the broken boy's outburst. He did however turn his gaze away from Adam and rub the back of his head for a brief moment before facing Adam once more, "There was another facility. About six months ago one of their experiments went wrong and the resulting explosion caught the attention of the local authorities. They saved who they could, but whoever was in charge didn't seem to have a problem with ensuring that there were no living witnesses. There wasn't much left over for us to salvage, but what Intel we could collect brought us to the facility where you were." He took a deep breath, "I looked over the information collected myself but a lot of it was lost during the raid. I talked to most of the survivors personally. To the best of my knowledge, there is no Chase or Bree on any of my lists nor is there any record of what happened to them in the scraps of Intel we gathered."
"You're wrong." Adam's jaw was set, there was no mistaking the young man's seriousness. 18 year old Adam had never been this serious, but 18 year old Adam was long gone. "You must have over looked something because you didn't know they needed to be found." In all his years including the last two he had never felt as much pain as he did now, "It doesn't matter anyway." Adam made to sit up, "I'm better now and I'll find them myself."
Adam made to get out of the hospital bed but was stopped by a firm hand on his shoulder. Two years ago, he would have been able to break out of the grip without so much as a passing thought, but now after two seconds fighting it, Adam was dizzy and had to lie back again. "You can't expect to be at full form in just a couple of days after everything you've been through, especially when you've spent that time unconscious. Rest. The entire staff here will do all it can to get you back on your feet as quickly as possible. But that will only work if you cooperate with them. Meanwhile, I will be doing all I can to ensure that the people responsible for this will be brought to justice." Seeing that Adam was no longer fighting him, the older man released his hold. "I know this is a lot to take in, and beyond unfair, but you need to stay with us." Adam didn't respond, "I have to go and talk to some of the other patients, can I trust you to stay put for the time being?" Adam numbly nodded, he didn't think he had any fight left in him. The man gently smiled, "Atta boy." He reached into his one of his pockets and pulled out a white card and cave it to Adam, "Here is my number, call me if you need me, or are ready to talk. Any information you might have could be of great help" Adam could only nod and numbly take the card that was handed to him.
All he could feel was pain, sad considering he thought he just got rid of it. The only constant in life is pain. All he wanted to do was rip out his heart and chuck it across the room just to end the agony. The only certainty is suffering. But deep down he knew he wasn't strong enough, not now at least. The other man bid him farewell and left, but once again, Adam wasn't listening.
Gone, they were both gone. Adam couldn't wrap his head around it. They had close calls in the past, but they had always managed to pull through. But this? This couldn't be reality. Adam didn't think he could ever accept this as reality. The days of his captivity had long since blurred together in a never ending cycle of pain, hunger and loneliness. Either live with it. Without hesitation he would do it all again and once more, just to have them with him. No kind of pain his captors could ever dish out could hurt as much as this. But the cold cruel truth made itself known. Was it right for him to have wanted them to suffer as he did for as long as he did? Bree and Chase were strong, but not nearly as strong as him. What it came down to was that, Adam was trapped between wanting them to have died to avoid suffering or suffered to avoid dying. It tore him apart. Or you die from it. Tears raced down his face, but Adam wasn't sure if they were from sorrow or anger. In the long run, it doesn't matter anyway. Adam couldn't change what had happened, but what he could do was make the people responsible pay and pay dearly for what they did to him and his siblings and all the other innocent people they captured and tortured and killed. He didn't care if it took him two or two hundred more years. He would do it. His next words albeit whispered filled the silent room, "Bree, Chase, I'll get us justice, I promise." and that was a promise he intended to keep no matter the cost. In the end, we all die.