Sing to Life

By JadeRabbyt

Chapter 15: In Captivity

Private log of Director McKinley, Tuesday: Tests on Alex have proceeded smoothly, but the data has resisted standard analytical measures… I can only recall seeing Alex's aftermath in the distant past, but lately I've begun to think that I've seen his face before, too. There may be public records of him. A couple people around here used to be FBI, so maybe one of them can pull some strings and run a check for me.

Alex had woken up exhausted. A headache like an internal laceration had been scored about his skull, and the hurt was in no way improved by the knowledge that something very bad had happened and that this very bad thing was all his fault. Alex rolled his head on his shoulders, not wanting to open his eyes. He didn't want to be awake. He ached all over and he wished he hadn't woken up... WHY would nothing let him just DIE! There must be people who wanted him dead badly enough, of that he felt certain.

But he didn't know why he was certain. The beastly headache and the foggy confusion confounded Memory, and Alex, feeling on the edge of moldy disintegration, was thankful that at least he didn't have to deal with Memory just yet. The only thing he was absolutely certain of was his name, and that, in its own way, made things a little better. Something else that was not as bad as it might have been: the rotted-out feeling, part weariness and part pain, had been muted by something cool flowing around him. Not an ice cold, but a softer cold. He'd experienced it before--once or twice before. It took him a moment, but Alex managed to place it. He was in a plasma tank. Did his eyes still work?

They did, and through a green filter of intervening plasma he saw linoleum floors, desks shoved up against the walls, and wires bound together with duct tape running along the floor's molding. Crisp busy men passed among the desks and their equipment, scribbling, printing, and typing. The room was small; from what Alex could see his tank was the largest machine around. Temporary facilities, maybe. As he watched the people move and write and work, they started to notice them, turning their heads to stare wide-eyed.

They all looked so normal. Busy and nervous, yes, but normal in a way Alex couldn't identify. He could see their excitement in the tremors of their hands and hesitance of their motion. They were excited about him, experiencing the 'thrill of the unknown' or some similar romantic nonsense. Alex shared the room with the scientists, his tank no more than a yard or two from the closest of them, yet there may as well have been an ocean intervening. He might as well have been an alien.

Alex's headache came surging up, and the vision of the lab swam away into darkness.

XXX

A shock of pain brought Alex back to consciousness. His headache seemed worse, if anything, and he curled his hands up and bundled them at his temples, massaging them heavily. The pain faded, and he felt the cool metal floor under his feet and the insistent tug of gravity. He didn't recognize any of it. How--? Alex regretted the question immediately. The headache bounded back, Memory at its flank, bringing a much more unpleasant kind of discomfort along with it. Vlad and the demon-thing, the portal and those damn kids ... Alex groaned, allowing a slow, steady string of curses to roll from his mouth and slide lethargically across the floor, eventually reaching the ears of a group of men standing nearby.

Their shadows fell ink-black across the gray panels of the floor, sharpened and shortened by the intense florescent lights mounted on the ceiling. The floor reflected the beams, bouncing them up into Alex's aching eyes. He raised a hand against them and squinted forward at the people, his voice trailing off as he sought the sharp shadows' progenitors. Images swam, and shrank, and finally sharpened into focus.

They seemed unnaturally thin, sheared at the sides by streaks of crackling blue—the bars of a cage. Alex wasn't sure if that was progress or not, going from a tank to a cage. He figured he should get a look at the men, or scientists, or zookeepers, or whatever it was they called themselves. He sat up from the floor to see them better.

Their beady little eyes were trained on him, not distracted by computers or graphs like the others. There were about a dozen of them, fingers curled nervously about pen caps or cradling clipboards stacked with paper. One held something that looked like a fishing pole, only with a fork instead of a point at its tip and a keypad instead of a reel near the handle. The device that had shocked him awake, presumably. Alex noted the man holding it, a lanky guy with blonde hair and a Roman nose, before moving on.

Two others stood out to him. A man in a wide, orange jumpsuit and a woman with red goggles and a turquoise jumpsuit. Aside from their more or less ridiculous appearance next to the others, who wore only lab-coats, these two gave Alex an unnerving sense of deja vu. They didn't seem to like him too much either, judging from their tightening frowns.

One of the men towards the center of the group cleared his throat and stepped closer to the bars, blocking Alex's view of the two odd scientists. "Did you have a pleasant sleep?"

This was the old geezer who'd been harassing him before—Director McCurly, or something like that. Whoever he was, his manner was much different, stiff voice matching nervous posture. Then again, Alex had tried to fry himself last time they'd met. Nervousness was far from unusual, but somehow, that explanation didn't seem right. A guy in charge of an agency like this should be used to crackpots' stunts. Alex sighed internally and let the matter go. "Your weapons aren't very effective."

The man glanced at him over the rims of his glasses in exaggerated good-humor. Like Alex was a child. "Fortunately for you."

"Oh, you think so?" Alex cocked his head. "I don't think so."

McDoofy or McHarry turned away. "We'll be doing some work on you. You'll be sedated for most of it--"

"Sounds fine to me."

"--so you won't have a chance to do anything ridiculous." He looked back at Alex through the bars, briefly. "You won't be able to get out of this cage, either."

Alex tilted his head up. The iron gray ceiling was low, but high enough to stand. The bars didn't glow all that brightly, and the overhead lights, while irritating, were far from intolerable now that his eyes had adjusted. Something that looked like a bed squatted in one of the corners. Alex stood and glanced back at the man. "You know, this isn't all that bad."

McDooky sighed. "As long as you cooperate, it won't be."

As time went on, the director-guy kept his word. They let him alone, more often than not it seemed. The director didn't come back, and neither did the two odd-looking scientists. Alex slept; his headache disappeared over time, and every once in a while they fetched him out for experiments, and the weirdest thing about the experiments was that Alex kind of enjoyed them, most of the time.

First they'd call Alex over the PA system, warning him not to struggle. Then they'd run something through the room--Alex could never figure whether it was a gas or some kind of plasmic electricity, but it knocked him out cold at any rate. The first time it happened, he sat on the edge of his cot and let himself pass out. He didn't wake up, not exactly, but his mind started working independently of his body after he had been out for an inestimable time. The first time it happened he was afraid that the blackness had come back, that he was hallucinating again, but a moment passed and nothing spoke or tried to hurt him. Alex was dreaming, thanks to the experimentalists, for the first time he could remember.

That dream and every one that followed after it during the subsequent experiments told him of nothing and everything, a sea of emotions and sensations too tangled to ever be sorted out. The sea was black and murky, the memories ebony black and goopy with wretchedness. Alex liked to see it. Individually the memories were unbearable, but tangled like this, so that he could just float over them and watch, they were almost reassuring. They reminded him that no matter how much he'd suffered, everything would be over soon. Occasionally, something would give a tug on a particular part of the tangle, trying to cut it loose and extract it. Alex tried to stop it, but there was really no need, since they never succeeded in getting anything anyway. Then he would wake up, back in his cage, feeling a little light-headed but otherwise perfectly fine.

Whenever he could, Alex slept. He thought too much when he was awake. He could feel the darkness spreading in the world outside, and though he didn't dare try to bring it out again, Alex didn't doubt that it would be far easier to produce than before. Not that rubbing his finger on an armrest was much work to begin with. The stuff was invisible but thick, and it got thicker when people were around. He didn't like it when researchers came to take notes on him. The blackness hung around them like a bad smell, and it made him nervous. Alex got the sense that it liked clumping near him if not on him, but personally, he hated it.

When Alex wasn't sleeping or worrying about the black stuff, he was remembering, and every memory was a disaster. He vaguely recalled the face and an acute hatred of that Danny kid, but Alex could never remember from where. The memories were too fuzzy to be placed. He recalled sucking the souls out of people, getting a drugged rush from seeing a life die under nothing more than his gaze. Sometimes his victims had fought. Usually they didn't. They could kick and scream all they pleased, but his eyes always beat them. Their mouths would hang open and their arms would go limp; the blackness would pour from his eyes, smothering the light in their own and leaving them empty, hopeless, and worse than dead. Free of the darkness and caged in a lab, Alex hated himself for those things he'd done.

He lost track of time. Experiment and sleep mingled under the constant glow of the lights, but once, a new kind of scientist came poking at him. A head-meat scientist.

"I'm Dr. Keller." The neat man folded his hands in his lap, reclining in the metal fold out chair near the glowing bars of the cage. Alex reclined on his bed, directly across from the man. He frowned and waited for him to continue.

"I'm a psychologist."

Alex laughed once. "You're shitting me."

The wiry doctor straightened himself in the chair, his slicked-back hair looking like black furrows across his skull. "No. I'm not 'shitting you.' I'm here because we want to make you more comfortable. We thought that if you tried to work through your issues--" The man stopped and straightened his suit. "What's funny?"

Alex shook his head, arms folded across his lap, completely unable to speak. He could hardly keep himself from falling off the bed. He was probably the first genuinely, innocently uproarious thing he'd heard in his life.

"I'll wait," the man said, not annoyed or confused, but patient. Alex found that even funnier. When he eventually caught his breath, the man continued. "I realize you've been through some things, but we don't think you're beyond repair."

Alex grinned. "If that's true, then you're more fucked up than I am. This whole frickin' planet is doomed."

"Really? Tell me about that."

"Well--" Alex stopped, a surge of doubt blanketing his good humor. "I don't want to tell you."

The psychologist looked concerned, a fake, pretentious concern made of gestures, not emotion. "Why not?"

Alex shrugged.

"Are you afraid?"

"No."

"You can tell me if you are."

Alex gave him a sharp look. "I'm not."

"Alright." The psychologist folded his hands and leaned back. "What are you, then?"

Alex flopped back on the bed. I'm a goddamned yellow-tail tuna, jackass. Somehow he didn't think that this was the answer the shrink was looking for, but on second thought... He smiled and sat up. "I'm a goddamned yellow-tail tuna, jackass."

The psychologist har-rrumphed. "Well, why yellow? What color does yellow mean for you?"

Alex hadn't seen that coming, but the shrink hadn't skipped a beat. He'd have to be a little more careful in this game. "Yellow is like fecal stench of my home planet. Plasma looks like a snot-shake, drunk by the foreign people of Nerdovia." Pile it higher and deeper. That should do it.

Mr. Shrink licked his lips. "Alright, then. What planet do you come from?"

"Mars." Alex had popped off the first phrase that came to mind, but it actually kind of made sense, even if it was bullshit. This was a fun game, in its own strange way. "My people are the rock lords of the shiny desert sands. They tango all night and boogie all day."

Mr. Shrink blinked. "Oh."

Things went downhill from there. As a last pitch, the psychologist explained Alex's recent history, including his run-in with Sam, Danny, and an ambiguous time under the keeping of Vlad, but it was nothing that phased him. It sounded dimly familiar, if not crystal clear, to Alex. Something he would have remembered eventually. They didn't try a psychologist on him again.

Alex slept and dreamed and worried and maligned himself. He didn't try any escapes, and nobody hurt him. All things considered, Alex thought he was having a fairly good time.

A/N: Celebrating 101 pages! Many thanks to Sakura for the no-review situation explanation. Thanks also to Cheerin4danny for her enthusiasm, and to the two new names, Rakal and Alleycat-2006, for their distinguished taste in fanfiction and their much-appreciated encouragement. :)