Title: The Monster's Alphabet
Author: alliterator
Summary: A series of vignettes, from Adam to Zookeeper. Spoilers for all seven seasons.
Disclaimer: Nothing is mine; everything belongs to the great and power Whedon.
Ethan Rayne
Takes place after Season 4's "A New Man."
"We're relics, mate. Dusty scraps of a world that doesn't exist anymore."
- Giles in A New Man
In the Nevada Desert Compound, which is designed to hold what the government has deemed "unusual criminals," the inhabitant of cell 247 is a bit bizarre. Even compared to the bank robber with see through skin, the killer who bled venom, and the several reptilian creatures that occupied some of the cells there, the man in 247 was different.
For one thing, he was perfectly polite. When the nurses came to take blood samples, he chatted with them and complimented them on their new hairstyles. He tried to make idle chat with the guards. He never screamed or cut himself or threw his excrement across the room (as the monkey man in cell 221 did).
Which was why the guards didn't mind accommodating his request to have a small garden. They gave him a small rectangular box filled with dirt and some seeds and within a month, he had grown several flowers that he plucked and handed out to the nurses. They smiled when they received them and sniffed the flowers deeply.
On the way of his cell, their eyes suddenly rolled back into their heads and they collapsed, leaving his cell door open. He took some dirt, spouted a few Latin phrases over it, and threw it in the guards face and within seconds the guard was on the ground, his eyes burning.
The occupant of cell 247 was the first prisoner to escape the Nevada Desert Compound. Along the way, he killed two nurses, six guards, and one prisoner that stuck his tongue out at him.
The Compound immediately sent out troops to find him and bring him back, but they had no luck. It seem that he had disappeared into the sand dunes.
Which was, more or less, accurate, since the military found a week later that one Ethan Rayne had checked into the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas.