"I sincerely hope you manage to get some rest, my dear Sameen. You're going to need it."
Shaw remembered Greer's words. She tried to calculate how long it had been since he had said them. But she had lost track of time. Time is an easy thing to lose track of when you don't see the sun rising or setting, when you are closed in a concrete dungeon. In the first weeks she could still figure it out by the meals they gave her. Two per day, exactly twelve hours apart. But that was only when she was recovering from the stock exchange event. That was before they decided she was 'recovered and ready'. Before they took her somewhere else, into another room, black and empty. Only an hospital bed placed at the center and a small cabinet by its side, filled with vials, syringes and a bunch of other stuff.
She remembered how she struggled to release herself from the two pairs of muscled arms that dragged her to the bed when she noticed the chains and cuffs. She remembered she still had some strength that day. Strength she didn't have presently.
She shifted her body slightly on the mattress, scuffing against the heavy metallic chains wrapped around her. Everything in her body ached. She almost didn't remember the strong Shaw she once was. Now, lying in that hospital bed, chained up to it like she was the most dangerous creature on earth, drained out of energy, Shaw just wondered if some day her body would just succumb to the stuff they injected into her veins, to the sensors they put in her head and in her hands and chest. She moved her head faintly to stare down at her arm, the limb shivering involuntarily from the exceeding amount of chemicals in her system. She looked at the different shades of the tiny syringe marks in it, some recent, some old.
She had no idea what they were doing to her. She never understood why they didn't simply kill her.
There was movement on the outside of the room, she could hear it. She looked around weakly and saw Greer on the other side of the huge glass window on one of the walls. She swallowed hard. The only days she had the pleasure of his presence there were the days when it would be worse. The drugs, the convulsions, the fever, the pain. If he was there, she knew it would be bad.
She resisted the first times. Trying to put a fight, even with all the chains constricting her movements. But that was a long time ago. Now she just waited for it to start and end, hoping it would be quick.
A couple of lab-coated men entered the black room, standing over her with their devices in gloved hands.
"We're hopeful today will be the day, Miss Shaw." She heard the oldest man say, his voice whiskey. What he meant by that, Shaw had no idea. She remembered Harold, though. He used to call her Miss Shaw. She wondered if he was still alive. If they were still alive. She wondered if one day the Machine would tell Root where they were keeping her and if they would rescue her.
The men in the room pierced a bunch of electrodes here and there, attached a few wires to her chest and head and connected them to a machine she had never seen before. Then, they exited the room, reappearing a few seconds later beside Greer on the other side of the large window.
She could feel her heart rate increasing in anticipation.
Without any previous warning the old man in his white lab coat activated the machine, and what followed Shaw could only describe has the worst pain she had ever had. And she had had a lot of that in her life.
It felt like someone was skinning her, pouring alcohol on the exposed flesh and ripping her limbs, disconnecting the joints between every bone.
She screamed. She screamed until her throat was sore. She felt a couple of tears escape her tightly shut eyes. She wasn't one to beg, but this was too much to bare. She begged them to stop. But they didn't and the agonizing pain continued for what seemed like an eternity. She was sure that her brain should have collapsed into unconsciousness by now. It's what brains do to protect you from extreme pain. But for some reason her mind was kept very awake, making her feel every second of it. Her body started cringing and shaking, not in her control anymore. Then the convulsions started. But she was still so very awake. Why couldn't her mind disassociate from her body?
As her body shocked involuntarily, Shaw started feeling her body temperature rising. The sweat dripping from her pores.
Her back arched off the bed, against the chains, when the old men increased the intensity of the machine, amplifying the pain even more. Her arms and legs battled against the tight cuffs, drawing blood as the skin gashed in the process.
As the pain increased, Shaw started to feel something else. Something soothing, actually. She wondered if she was finally fainting. That something ran from her chest to extremities of her body, bursting out from inside her as she screamed loudly.
The dark room was filled with a resilient clarity for a few seconds, and after that the pain was gone. After that she collapsed from exhaustion.
A few hours later, she woke up, still chained to the bed. She opened her eyes and found Greer by her side. A creepy smile on his features.
"What happened?" Shaw asked.
"We succeed, Sameen." Greer simply said.
"And what is that supposed to mean?"
Strangely, her body didn't hurt as much as it had for the last few weeks, or should she say, months. She was really tired though. Her eyes wanting to shut again. She forced them to stay open.
"What have you succeeded at?" She insisted.
"Creating an altered-human. Or as we are calling them: alt-humans. Sounds simple and fancy doesn't it?
Shaw lifted one eyebrow at him.
"Sounds crazy to me. You've been watching too much X-Men, is that it?"
He laughed, shaking his head.
"We've been altering you, Sameen." He simply replied.
Shaw narrowed her eyes. She listened quietly has he explained what they had been doing to her.
"Since you recovered, we've been changing your body, in a molecular level. Altering you genes, your DNA, your metabolism. Transforming you."
She chuckled. "And I thought Root was nuts, sometimes. You are in a much higher level of crazy, aren't you?"
Greer stepped closer to her bed and unlocked the cuff clasped around her right wrist.
"See for yourself." He said. She stared quizzically at him, not understanding what he wanted her to do. "Set your hand on fire." He added.
"What?"
He had to be playing with her, trying to mess with her head. This conversation was totally stupid, and she was losing her patience.
"Light it up." Greer said again.
Shaw was done. She was about to ask him to stop with the crazy and leave the room, when the soft sound of something catching on fire startled her. She looked down at her hands and her eyes widened, her mouth open with perplexity. Her hands were on fire. She shook them, trying to put out the fire. But then she noticed that the blue-ish flames weren't burning. She stared at the phenomenon with her chin dropped for a long moment, watching the fire burn, without burning her, from her wrists to the tips of her fingers. She stared back at Greer then, silently asking him what the hell was happening.
"As I was saying," Greer resumed the conversation, "You are an alt-human now. More specifically, you are a pyrokinetic. You've been given the ability to create and control fire. Well, we still have to work on the controlling part."
Shaw closed her fists and the fire stopped. Intrigued, she reopened her hands to see if the fire would start again, but it didn't. She was speechless. How on earth had she just created fire with her hands?
"You've also exceeded our expectations, Sameen. As you noticed, the flames you create are blue and not orange. That means the temperature of your fire is particularly higher than a usual fire. You almost liquefied the glass of that window with your fire blast earlier."
Shaw listened to him while she kept attempting to form the flames again. After a few tries, she did. With a swift gesture, a small ball of blue fire appeared at the center of her palm, spreading all the way up to the tips of her fingers and to the back of her hand.
Her lips turned up in a grin. They had put her through hell for this, but staring at the flames enveloping her hand, she had to admit that this was pretty cool.
She closed her fingers again and the flame disappeared.
"You seem to be picking it up rather quickly." Greer denoted. Shaw ignored his remark.
"Have you created more of these... alt-humans?" She was curious now. If this was part of Samaritans plan, it meant trouble. She could think of a few reasons why the AI could be investing on this. To create a new human species, more advanced and powerful, under it's control. Or maybe simply to form a super-army for itself. She didn't know. But either way, although she was pretty much enjoying her new skill, this didn't sound like a good idea.
"You are our first successful case. We've been trying with other subjects, trying to give them other kinds of abilities, but unfortunately... you know how hard the procedure is."
Subjects. She pursed her lips at the use of the word. They were using people as lab rats. They used her as a lab rat. And by what he had just said, their lab rats were dying from the experiments.
"I always knew there was something special about you, Sameen. That's why I ordered Martine to spare your life. Although she pretty much insisted on killing you."
That didn't surprise Shaw. She hated Martine herself. If she had the chance to put a bullet in her head, she would insist on pulling the trigger too.
"What other kind of abilities have you been trying to give people?" Shaw asked.
"Telekinesis, enhanced strength, super speed and the control of other elements besides yours - electricity, water, air… Everything you remember reading on comic books, it can be real. We are making it real." Greer taught her.
"By experimenting on people and torturing them to death?" Shaw asked, her expression deadpanned.
"The body needs to be put through it to activate the genes. And it doesn't always end in death, you are the living proof of it. We are still perfecting the methodology."
Shaw shook her head. It wouldn't lead her anywhere to start arguing about ethics with Greer.
"We'll have to move you into a new room, for your own protection." He said. It wasn't for her own protection, truly. It was because that room had a window. A window that her fire almost melted. "We also made a one-piece suit for you. The fabric can sustain high temperatures without being damaged, which will avoid you from burning your clothes in the moments when you lose control of your fire, like what happened a while back."
She gazed at him, realizing that she had probably burned down her clothes and had been naked after the fire blast, the old creeps probably watched her. But she was redressed now, in the usual hospital vests they kept her in. Who had redressed her she didn't know, and she didn't want to.
Three men, covered in full body dark grey suits and heads protected with masks, entered the room. Shaw knew they were there to take her to wherever the new room was.
It was her window of opportunity.
As the men unlocked the chains that restrained her, Shaw thought about how she could easily escape if only she knew how to control her fire, and as Greer had pointed out, she was picking it up quickly.
Once the chains were dangling towards the floor, Greer was already gone. The men prompted her up and pushed her towards the exit and through the cold corridors of the building.
It was now or never.
She had to try it. She had to escape or die trying.
As the adrenaline started rushing through her body, she could actually feel it running in her veins, like a wild fire spreading quickly. Her body didn't ache anymore, and the tiredness was being repressed by the adrenaline.
She tested it, opening her hands and watching the fire staring immediately. The guards were startled by it and it gave her the fraction of a second she needed to jolt away from their grip. She punched two of them in their lower ribcages and throats, causing them to fall to the ground. The third one was showing to be harder to handle. They fought with bare fists. The fire of her hands not causing any impact on his grey suit.
As the sirens started buzzing, Shaw knew she was running out of time. Her heart rate increased, making her blood flow faster, and she started to feel something building up inside her again. Not really knowing what she was doing, Shaw stretched her arm out at the guard in front of her, her palm open with the fingers spread. A giant flame launched from her palm. The blue fire hitting the man and knocking him over.
Shaw heard more guards approaching. She looked around, trying to figure out how she could leave the building. But then she saw something on the room they were taking her. The suit. It was a no-sleeves matte black catsuit, with a zipper on the front, from the neck to the wide black belt on the waist, and Decima's logo on the left chest side.
"Cool."
She ran into the room and grabbed the suit before resuming her escape. But the guards quickly surrounded her, guns pointed directly at her head. Stupidly though, they weren't prepared with suits like the others.
Shaw's lips crocked up in a smile as she felt another fire blast ready to burst out of her, and she let it, aiming the flames at them like her own arms were flamethrowers. The men cried in agony as the flames consumed them and Shaw started to run again, burning down doors and everything she found in her way. Eventually she reached the exit of the building, the cold air of the outside world against her hot skin. She glanced behind her shoulder, as she kept running away, and watched the building being consumed by flames.
Harold wouldn't like it. Even John and Root would scold her. But she hoped Greer was still inside. That he'd burn in her flames.
A/N: Hey guys. This was made for a tumblr prompt given on therootofourproblem blog . As I read the prompt, my Heroes-fan-feelings emerged and I had to pick it up. It's not much and it will for now remain a one-shot. But I hope I made it justice.
Good or bad, don't forget to review :)