Warnings: This is an alternative view on Jak's stay in prison. Baaaad things happen to Jak. All implied, but still. Bad stuff. Also, written while crazy, or at least veeeerry sleep deprived, in a perspective of someone going crazy. If it gets weird, don't worry, it's on purpose. Dunno if that'll help, but yeah. Read at your own risk!
Random Author Babble: Yeah, so I've got this amazing thing going where I write for fandoms that have little (or no, but that one was taken off anyways) traffic! Spectacular! I kid. I was playing through the games again (cuz I could, and I remembered how much Sig rules,) and this just kind of popped up in the way these things tend to, probably because these games are so wonderfully open and chock-full of things that aren't quite said. Is a one-shot, because it is. And I'm lazy, but I'm sure I covered that somewhere. Also I beta'd it myself, because I have no friends... who want to... because they think I'm crazy. *Twitch* I think I caught everything.
Disclaimer: Not mine. I swear.
Reviews and constructive criticisms would be greatly appreciated, because warm fuzzies are nice feelings. Like hugs without all the touching and the germs! Yay!
Sometimes, it was hard to remember.
He didn't quite know when they had started to fade, but the memories were old now, stale, burned on the edges by raw hands that had reached for them far, far too many times. Sometimes the salty air soured, or the trees withered without warning, fouling air curling around his body with something that was too sweet, to sickly to be that-which-was-but-wasn't. Voices warped, like with the communicator that one time (remember?), or kept going when the pictures stopped, when all he saw was another suit of armor lumbering towards him, bruises popping up like posies on that one hillside that he just couldn't remember where. Sometimes he sat in his cell, time passing without him even knowing it had passed at all, or at least not here. While he was in the not-here everything was… better, different, something else that he knew once but had forgotten after too long, far, far too long, in a cage, with needles and screaming, and... Violent, laughing, laughing, laughing all the time and it was so hard to get rest sometimes without hearing it scratching in his brain, tiny maggots with claws. Hah. Haha. It was almost funny. That's why he was laughing, it was funny! He never looked the others in the eyes, he liked laughing too much.
That's usually when the guards in their red armor came, and the meager light went dark. Starshine from perfect things, sharp things that ate and tore and pushed until he burst like overripe fruit under their fingers, juice swirling across a blurry face that was one way for one heartbeat, and another the next but it was always that face, familiar, he knew it, same thing, different package.
He must have said something once… he could almost recall a notion slipping past his lips, something the metal-men didn't like because after it was just pain, twitching and skirting across his memories jumping and crashing together like static until it was all just white noise on a blank-black screen.
He could barely remember names sometimes, names of simple things, oh he knew these things, now, occasionally if he really tried, but before… was there a before, or did he just dream it? No, no had to be real… had to be. Faces he had held so close were smudged, blurred oddly, threatened to crumble if he held them up in the scant moments before he passed out again. So he locked them up tight, nothing in nothing out nothing in nothing out. Occasionally he touched the knob in his on head as if to try and bring them back, but seductive stole him away before he could steel himself to do it, useless, stupid, dead weight, diediedie!
He didn't dream. He couldn't. If he dreamed then the little rolls of filmy nothing-but-something could crawl through and dissolve when we wasn't watching where we were going and silly little friend Daxter had to fix flying falling heated wind brave boy hope…
Nothing.
After a while, he got used to waking up growling, crouched in a corner. The exercises weren't so bad, and he wasn't useless for a while, wasn't bad, didn't need to be punished, could stay in the quiet where he laughed with his friend until they fed him or took him… he didn't remember much when they took him other places. He would ponder the red under his nails or the slickness in his mouth, random aches in places he knew hadn't been used before, but then the laughter would start and it was just so funny! Even the one clear face that had stayed with him (or was it two faces? He couldn't really tell anymore, and sometimes it was half of one on the other, like some silly faceplate over a cold voice that told him to roll over, hands up…) would laugh and they would have a jolly good time, even past the time when all the other screams had gone silent.
It took him time (he didn't know quite how long, it was hard to measure without the sun… what did the sun look like? He didn't remember and he didn't understand why that idea made him so sad,) to realize that his body hadn't slept in quite some time, and the only reason he even realized it was the fact that the bullet went through him and not past him like it was supposed to. That was usually how these little dances went. But he had slept? Hadn't he? With wide open dreaming eyes and the obsidian that stretched across his vision that played out wonderful puppet shows from those last remaining clips. Sometimes it was things he didn't think he could remember anymore, and other times it was improvised with wonderful gushing fountains, water flowing everywhere while they played in the fountains and laughed and laughed until the stitches in his side flew open from the force and while the doctors screamed at the enraged guard, he choked on a laugh (the hurts had not been funny!) and returned a blow that smashed the faceplate inwards and when the man stopped moving, he watched as they pulled the helmet off and tried to scrape the glass from his flat eyes best they could. Why was the man crying, he should be happy! But he had never seen tears that shade before…
Sometimes when he played with the others, later on and just like how his friends told him to (with words that weren't really words, that was just what he called them really more like fleeting impresions and second guesses when he was already halfway through the motions,) he made sure, the white-men squawked, flailing when the others played back. Other times, they'd shake their white heads at a man who shone under the dull yellow glow, cringing and fleeing when he raised his voice.
Eventually color returned. He knew that color! Everything would be…
No. No no noNONONO! STOP, please... STOP!
WRONG! ALL WRONG!
Not right, too much orange, too many teeth, smile too wide, those weren't the words not the things to say why did he do that?! Best friends, what had that meant, it was important, but what the hell had it MEANT?!
One could almost hear it when he shattered, scattering all across the floor, far beyond his naked body and the pool of blood that was stretching for the he-that-had-been that now was in sharp pieces, all jagged and warped. They'd never fit back together again, not the same. Too many to count, too many to save.
So the boy-who-was-no-longer-a-boy slept in perfect stillness, absolute hibernation, unmindful of his body being kept in the routine injections, or tossed haphazardly into the training grounds with wide open eyes and crooked smile. The guards whispered about it, shuddering every time they had to touch this creature that had been so profoundly torn apart.
When he snapped the arm of the poor bastard that tried to drag him out of his cell five days later, the entire team of doctors and scientists were puzzled. He should not have been able to revive like that; he should not have come back. Nevertheless, he was a better test subject now, so they continued, despite the fact that he was fighting now, with tooth and nail and every muscle he had, and he was doing it consciously. The Experiment (he learned that was the name the scientists called him, everyone had their own name for him, but none of them ever asked his real name. Didn't want to know, didn't care, didn't want the guilt later when they went home to other people. And he was no longer people, he could feel it, no one had to tell him a thing, and they never did, well, at least other than the fact that he was going to die.) Oh, he became well aware of the shining man, the one who had ordered the non-Daxter (he would never forget that name again, he swore,) to join their little project, to see what he could do with their meaty little toy. He bared teeth every time either came near, violence promised in every movement, restrained or otherwise (and he was almost never without restraints. Sometimes they even muzzled him if he had "that look in his eye.") He knew he was making them angry, he hadn't… done anything. Whatever it was, they were getting fed up with him and it was only a matter of time before they simply would wash their hands of him and move on to another person, another one to break, another creature to create.
The memories came back, still sharp, still fragmented, but clearer, fused together with something stronger now, something that even madness could not take and shred until there was nothing but dust to dance in.
At night he played a game before he let himself nod off on the cold steel of the floor. Names, things he had a hard time remembering from before came so easily, but the pictures were slower in coming now. He would spend hours trying to associate the words with the things, falling asleep to sounds that were so unfamiliar that they were comforting, simply because he did not know them, and anything that was not in this lowly hell with him could only be better than the things that were. Occasionally Errol (bastard sonovabitch would meet death at his hands and no one else's) would come to taunt him, believing that he was attempting to figure some way to escape (but he didn't need to, he had already figured a way out, just not corporally… at least not yet.) Every time he went back to before, it got easier, clearer. He could stay there through the injections, through the test runs; he could look at the blood on the ground, fresh oozing thickly over the already dried stuff, and pretend it was a tide pool, like the ones he and Daxter used to poke tiny toes into when they were young. The shrieks of the other "subjects" were nothing more that the background noise of birdsong; the marching boots were nothing more than raindrops on a stormy day, Daxter hiding under the covers while his larger friend sat, glued to the window, watching the lightning play amongst the clouds.
That day, he ignored the Baron's thunder, and Errol's venom. He was lying on the beach, and Daxter was saying something, something silly that twisted and then the dark slammed across his vision. Rage bubbled over; words he had not meant to say frothed amongst the screamings of a beast that had been wounded one too many times.
Fur against flesh forced it back. Daxter, ears pressed back and eyes impossibly wide, looked up searching for something, something that would let him know that Jak was still Jak, that they hadn't killed him off before he could be saved. Blue clashed and immediately Daxter smiled, still there, whole. Unbroken.
But he had been broken, cruelly and completely, the scars on both his body and his mind (terrible long furlongs where the bugs had gotten in and died, leaving behind gaping spaces, chasms that festered with something just past alive and right before dead,) and that dark, dark pit they had forced into him proved it. He was no longer the boy Daxter had come to save, not by any stretch of his friend's wishful thinking.
Jak only hoped that when Daxter finally came to realize that, there would still be enough left behind to convince Daxter to stay.
Huzzah! Angst! And crazy!
So I don't have a whole lot to say otherwise. Punctuation was heartily abused consciously, for obvious reasons. Hope you weren't too confused!
Review please! (Holds out jar and does a friendly jig.)