Disclaimer: X-men are not mine, I do not own them.
A.N.: So, hello again. The darker side of my mind continues. Reviews are still welcome:-)
A Cut of Cajun: Chapter Three
Maria woke up. Her hands were chained to the wall beside her, she had no shoes on. She was in a lab.
She looked across the room to see a smallish girl chained in a similar position.
The girl had shoulder-length brown hair with bright blue and green stripes running through it. She was also dressed in a tracksuit with bare feet.
The hours wore on, with neither moving. Finally the girl across from Maria shifted, then opened a pair of coffee-brown eyes.
They acknowledged each other with the briefest of nods in each others directions, then seemed to slip back down into whatever void they had been residing in.
Maria flipped her hair in front of her face and used it as a shield while she bit down on her lip as hard as she could. She hunched herself up, putting her knees close to her chest so that she could hide the trail of blood.
She felt indifferent while the blood dripped down. It didn't matter if she was in this place forever, or if they chucked her out eventually. She let her mouth well up with blood. What mattered anymore?
The nurse with the blue eyes walked in with a pair of scissors.
She knelt down next to Maria, pulled her hair back and neatly began to snip it off. The hair whisked down onto the floor, until all that was left was a wavy mop.
Then the nurse carefully swiped the lip, put a mild anesthetic on it and a piece of plaster.
"Em Vic?" broke in a voice from across the room.
Maria frowned at the girl. What was she saying, anyway?
"Can I go now, please? You can tell him I'm not going to do it for a while. Not for a long while." The blue-eyes nurse nodded. "Yes, Kitten, I'll tell him that."
Two aides came in presently and took Kitten away. Then the nurse unlocked the cuffs that bound Maria and helped her up, leading her to a shower-room.
When she was dressed the nurse led her down a hall, up a flight of stairs and to a large, oak door.
"Listen here, I do not know your name, your age, where you come from or exactly what you have done, but look at me," she pulled up her white sleeve and showed Maria a mark on the inside of her elbow. "I did drugs too. And you know why? To get away from reality. But what I needed, more than anything, was to get away from the nightmare I was forced to live and into reality. You must too now." She sighed, her hand on the doorknob. "Just remember to be as polite as you can and—" She turned away and rolled down her sleeve.
"You said that the others loved life… what had Kitten done, then?"
The nurse looked up, a sad smile on her face.
"Kitten loves life, a lot. In fact, too much. She wants to be as close to it as possible, experience it in every possible way. That is why she does stupid things, because she thinks that if she is two steps away from death, then when she returns life while be brighter, fuller…"
"Of course, the problem is that one day, she will not return."
"What did she do," Maria asked hesitantly.
"Oh, the usual," said the nurse. Then she narrowed her eyes. "Don't go getting any ideas. What you do is bad enough, without me inspiring you." She turned her back on Maria.
"At least Kitten does it to be connected with life, to strengthen that connection. But you don't do that to be close to life, but to be close to death."
"Death is…numb."
"Of course it's numb, but," she turned around and took one of Maria's hands. "What you have done here, on your arm, to your face, that is not numb. That is not done with feeling, either. That is madness."
"Without it I am mad."
"No…no, you're wrong, it's pain that drives us crazy."
"Yes!" Maria shouted suddenly. "It's the people that spit in your face, the sting of their words. That's the pain. What about what they do to you—at night, when you want to sleep, what about—" she stopped, because she was crying.
The tears were puzzling, unreal. She never cried. She cut, she screamed, she swore, swallowed pills, drank, lit matches on her skin. But tears…they were new.
Slowly, she felt as the pain began releasing itself onto her cheeks.
The nurse wrapped her arms around the girl's thin body, held her as the tears continued, the strange new experience.
As Maria tried to gulp in air, she realized that it was almost as painful as cutting.
Almost as good, too.
Almost.