Disclaimer: Nothing "Lost" is mine, alas.

Author's Note: It may help to run certain certain French phrases and terms found in this story through an Internet translation. I have tried to give embed as many layers as I could into this story, because I think it becomes more enjoyable to the reader that way (and it was fun). I don't speak French either, but Google is my best friend.

Forever Fan: Eternal gratitude. You are my new Muse.


Sickness

I am different. They have changed me.

I am... strong. I am light, and swift, and endurant. I leave footprints only at my whim, and I can dissolve into the merest specter at half a moment's warning.

I have not eaten in one week, but I feel no hunger. My body is ravaged by the sand and sun and surf, but there is no pain. Not numbness, not emptiness, just... nothing. And every day, my memories seem to fade further into the shadows of my mind, where they are lost.

I want to be angry. I want to cry and storm and rage, and plunge within my mind to scrape free the last of my past and guard it forever from this silent assault. I want...

I want to feel.

I don't think I am truly living anymore.


I cannot remember daytime. My living is locked into night.

When the sun sets, they rouse me from my sleep of death. They bathe me in their icy, bitter breath, and dress me in their rags of cruelty and possessiveness.

I cannot resist their vindictive intentions. I cannot escape from this whirlpool of such powerful evil. How long will it be before I drown, irrevocably captive in this forsaken quagmire?

Every night after they have amused themselves in my utter helplessness, I am again sent away to the bunker.

The numbers of my living once-comrades have fallen drastically. My masters scavenge daily now. I sense their perverse pleasure as they swell their ranks with men and women who were once of science, were once mothers and fathers. Who were recruited for an elite mission, and set out so misguided from a place I do not remember, for a reason that seemed of such vital importance at the time.

No. I am clean of their deaths. Let my benevolent masters take that burden upon their own backs.

But Alex...

Alex is my sin alone.

Every night, I am sent to him. Every night, I steal a thread of his soul and present it to my masters. Every night, they strengthen their terrible power over him.

And every morning, Alex has died a little bit more by my hands.


There is some more to come, I believe.