Rating: M
A warning: This story is classified as horror for a reason. There will be gore. There will be angst. Details will not be skipped. It is driven by logic, but that logic is not nice. Please keep this in mind.

Also, an enormous thank-you to my beta buddy on DeviantArt, JeluiGarak. Without her wonderful feedback this story would have never been published.

This will contain OCs in later chapters, but those OCs are strictly necessary, the only romance is within themselves, and, as confirmed by my beta, they are most certainly not Mary-Sues.

He was supposed to be strong.

He was supposed to be powerful, ruthless, someone who felt no shame or pain or fear, an insurmountable fortress of might. He was supposed to be standing tall, the king of the world as the streets ran with blood and cities crumbled in ruin and his laughter rang through the skies.

And he had been…

But his timeline was dead, torn away from him, his existence continuing only because of a humiliating defeat, and when he'd finally broken free of the container holding him—disoriented, sore and able to add severe claustrophobia to his long list of mental problems—it had only been into another circle of Hell.

He wasn't supposed to underground, chained to a wall, unable to breathe and covered in sweat from the certainty that eternity was closing in on him to crush him.

His oversized core wasn't supposed to be pierced and drained like a spectral battery, the wound around the hated device still streaming ectoplasm down his body even after so long. Said ectoplasm shouldn't have been channeled by the ridged, deep scars marking his wasted torso—permanent reminders of the nightmarish vivisections and experiments.

He wasn't supposed to be too weak to hold up his head.

And he wasn't supposed to be burning with shame and guilt as he sobbed uncontrollably, spasms of pain ripping through him with every sharp breath, tasting his ectoplasm and feeling it soaking his unkempt goatee. He had stopped fighting long ago, lost the strength for it as his fledgling conscience and the emotions he'd locked away began to attack him. He couldn't summon anger anymore, couldn't hide, could do nothing but long for it all to end as he bled and screamed and died again and again and again at the hands of the world he'd wronged.

No solace…no rest, inner or outer. When he wasn't being experimented on, poisoned and ripped apart in the name of science, when his mind wasn't numb with pain it was endlessly reviewing his faults, his wrongs. No matter how much he sought a loophole, the truth he saw now blocked him, cold and hard, ruthless and cutting through his barriers like a hot knife through butter. It left him naked and weak, alone and unarmed before the unending onslaught of guilt.

The nights were the worst. He feared sleep, hated it and the vivid, horrible nightmares it brought forth; visions of loss and terror and tortures worse than the ones he daily endured. Yet waking brought him no comfort, just another endless night of fear blurring into another endless day of pain. Even when he staved the dreams off as long as possible, it was little better. His mind merely brought up memories of his ten-year reign, forcing him to view it with eyes untainted by sadism and insanity, and the hatred he should have been weaving around him like a protective barrier turned inward…instead of soothing his brokenness merely piercing him anew. So long, trying to hold himself together both literally and figuratively; arms wrapped around the open, deep wounds in his chest, sickeningly aware of the sheer amount of ectoplasm dripping down his body…

He shuddered hard and began to cough, a lungful of green liquid splattering his chest and the ground before him. He knew why he bled like this after he'd begun to hack up the raw fluid that composed his being and they'd immediately run scans and tests until he couldn't help but know the verdict. His core was unused to the constant, painful drain on his energies, and apparently it had "panicked" and begun to leech energy from the rest of his body. Even though his lungs were just remedial organs from his unorthodox creation, technically superfluous, it didn't stop their delicate tissues from slowly disintegrating under the strain first, and it didn't stop them from hurting like hell.

He was dissolving from the inside out. Claustrophobia wasn't the only thing stifling his respiration. Each weak inhale gurgled through the ectoplasm in his throat, just before each exhale sent it over his tongue. It pooled in his mouth, drops of it stretching from his lips before falling. Had he really been required to breathe, he would have drowned by now.

Part of him knew that he deserved it…knew just how much he did. Nauseating guilt churned heavy inside him until he wanted to vomit, and many times he had…one of the many reasons he now knelt in a puddle of his own ectoplasm.

The deep, painful coughs finally let up, and while his eyes still watered and his breath was shaky and hitching, at least he wasn't really crying anymore. God, he hated to cry, but he couldn't help it sometimes…

Click.

His eyes shot up to where the sound had just originated. The room he was in, a sort of reinforced glorified maintenance closet from hell, was kept locked. The fact that someone had just unlocked the door did not bode well for him.

The handle turned. The slab of wood pushed inward, creaking slightly, and a sliver of cold dim light streamed in. A hand reached in and flicked the light switch next to the door, flooding the room with harsh whiteness and leaving him blinking stupidly in the sudden assault. His already-sore eyes burned, and he felt a tear slip down his wet cheek.

A white-coated technician stepped in. He wore a white mask over the lower half of his face, but Dan could tell from his eyes that he was smirking sadistically. He was fully aware of the irony that someone wore that expression directed towards him, but he'd stopped reflecting over it a long time ago. Besides, there were more pressing matters on his mind.

He knew this man. He would recognize those eyes anywhere. This was the tech who had more or less been assigned to him. Dan wasn't exactly the poster boy for rational thought, and he knew it, but he still sometimes wondered which one of them was really more insane. He glanced at the thick, protective gloves the man wore, and the corner of his bloodied lips twitched in a smile. No matter how many times he saw them, he always felt a tiny surge of pride and amusement.

It had been a while ago—he could no longer identify the passage of time. The time in the Thermos had confused his internal clock and there were no windows in this godforsaken place. All that he could remember was that it had been a long time since. But he could remember, clearly and with great satisfaction, exactly why the tech wore gloves. He didn't remember exactly what they had been doing, but it had been rather humiliating, and he'd been thoroughly restrained for it. The tech had mocked him ruthlessly for the entire procedure, and he'd been practically foaming at the mouth with helpless rage. So when he had finally, to the laughter of the others, crooned one final insult and leaned down to pat Dan on the cheek…well, it had been enough.

He had moved quickly, striking with the speed of a snake. His fangs sunk bone-deep into the offending hand, flooding his mouth with the hot coppery taste of human blood. The tech had shrieked, his voice at least an octave higher than its normal range, and began flapping his hand around. If anything, Dan bit down harder, feeling his lips stretch into the then-familiar demented smile. Something cracked under his teeth, and the tech's squeals devolved into incoherent blubbering. He felt a sting on his neck, and his vision had darkened.

When he next woke up, he'd been fitted with what appeared to be a muzzle, and the tech had been fitted with a cast. Oh, he'd paid for that one dearly, but it had been completely worth it. When he was conscious (well, conscious and not screaming) he comforted himself with memories of how the tech had screamed like a little girl.

It had lost some of its satisfaction when he'd realized that to him, revenge didn't taste sweet. It tasted like human blood.