Whumptober 2022 No. 5: "Every Whumpee's Needs" (running out of air)
Hojo had kept Cloud mostly unconscious. Zack had seen the stone-faced lab assistants feed the needles into Cloud's spindly arms, struggling to find a vein big enough, until they'd finally given up and stuffed the needles unceremoniously under the skin. Then they'd taped them down, and the flow of liquid had started. He didn't know what it was that they were pumping into Cloud's blood, but Cloud hadn't woken up after that. Even as the skin around the poorly-placed injection sites ballooned and bruised, and as the mako gas swirled through the tank, Cloud hadn't woken.
He'd twitched erratically. From his tank, Zack could see the way Cloud's eyes flicked and rolled under his shut eyelids, the way he flailed in his sleep, his breathing desperate and quick. Zack had to think of chemically induced nightmares. The naturally present horrors in the deep recesses of the mind, magnified. Worst of all, you couldn't even wake up.
Zack had seen Cloud try. Occasionally, he'd tear out of the artificial sleep, his unseeing eyes glowing green with mako. Then he'd fall back into unconsciouness, his form crumpling against the glass walls of the tank. His knees would hit the mako pooling at the bottom, the greenish gas clouding his face, and Cloud would be gone again.
It was a horrible cycle to watch. The tank would be popped open, Cloud's unconscious form hauled away by lab assistants. And around the corner, Cloud would begin to scream, unable to escape the pain even asleep. Then Cloud would be brought back. Some part of him always seemed to be cut open and uncaringly left unattended. Too many times Zack had seen the wet glisten of organs, the bloody quiver of exposed insides. Eventually the bloody smears on the glass were washed away by swirls of mako. All too quickly Cloud would heal, the body's healing functions driven to unnatural speed by the mako, and he was left a messy patchwork of fresh pink scars. This was all that remained of wounds that should have been fatal, and Zack was reminded that Cloud was becoming the same freak of nature that he was. Despite Cloud's increasing fragility, the tank door was opened over and over, and the cycle began anew.
But it was unsustainable.
It didn't take a genius to figure that out. Zack had noticed it early on. He had seen how Cloud deteriorated, succumbing slowly to the mako poisoning. His wounds healed slower and slower, despite the newfound enhancements. The time between his waking moments stretched longer and longer, even when Hojo reduced the dosage of sedative. It wouldn't be long before he became catatonic.
Zack had heard mutterings from Hojo when he came to examine his specimens. "Useless," he'd hissed. "With a mako tolerance that poor, it's practically a failure already, what use do I have for a specimen like that…" Then Hojo had turned to Cloud, collapsed on the floor of his tank.
He looked at the crumpled figure with flagrant disgust. "The gradual approach clearly isn't working. We'll have to toughen this one's mako resistance more forcefully."
"You." Hojo pointed vaguely in the direction of one of his assistants, who froze up like a deer in the headlights. "Turn off its sedative flow."
Zack, who had been picking miserably at a pus-crusted bit of his most recent stitches, suddenly snapped back into consciousness.
Zack watched as the ever-present flow of liquid through the tubes trickled slowly to a stop. And almost simultaneously, the mako levels in the tank started rise. Zack's head snapped around- Hojo, standing at a valve, cranking it open.
Inside the tank, Cloud's nightmares seemed to have stopped. The horrible constant twitching had stilled, and Zack could tell that he was slowly returning to wakefulness. But it wouldn't be fast enough. The mako was rising. Suddenly no longer just pooled at the bottom of the tank, it now lapped up Cloud's legs, soaking through the thin trooper fatigues.
It reached Cloud's waist, just as his eyelids began to flutter.
Cloud awoke as his head went under. Zack's heart had dropped somewhere into the region of his knees, having known exactly what Cloud would wake up to. A horrible, noxious burning: the feeling of mako passing through air canals. Inhaling pure, liquid mako was like inhaling acid. Zack remembered the feeling: how it'd burned off the hairs in his nose and seared the sensitive mucus glands in his mouth. It had felt like having live fire in his chest.
Cloud came back into consciousness screaming. He hadn't just inhaled mako- no, he'd swallowed it. He flailed, desperately trying to keep himself afloat. His mouth was torn open in abject terror, the mako running out over his lips. It covered his face, leaving a sickly glow in his irises and tinting the whites of his eyes an unpleasant green. By now the mako had reached two-third mark of the tank, leaving an ever shrinking air bubble by the top.
For a moment, Cloud sank. Maybe he'd succumbed to the pain, Zack thought wildly as he began throwing himself against the door of his own tank.
"Hojo!" Zack shrieked. "Hojo, stop it, you're going to kill him! HOJO!"
But as he watched, Cloud kicked off the bottom of the tank and his head broke the surface of the mako once more. His unruly blond hair was plastered down to his head, the rivulets of green dripping into his face and down his neck. He was still screaming, but it was as though he'd resolved himself to fight.
Cloud's fists struck the glass again and again. Zack realized he was watching a man fight for his life. This was a desperate struggle for survival, and here he was, trapped.
He pounded furiously at the door of his tank, screaming Hojo's name, watching in terror as the scientist opened the valve a little more. Across the room, Cloud's air bubble was shrinking. Cloud's energy was coming in bursts, there were moments where his body seemed to abruptly shut down and he sank like a stone, hitting the bottom of the tank. It was in moments like these where Cloud fought all the harder, desperately struggling to the surface of the mako, taking gulps of the rapidly decreasing air.
And then the mako hit the lid of the tank.
The air was gone. And Zack watched as Cloud went absolutely wild, clawing at the lid, pounding at the glass, desperate for that one last mouthful of air.
Cloud kept it up for maybe a few minutes. But his struggles weakened. The lack of oxygen made his movements sluggish and slowed his limbs, and Zack watched as Cloud gradually went limp. His head lolled, his hair floating eerily around his face. Zack beat at the glass, and Cloud's body began to drift slowly to the top of the tank. Zack was horribly reminded of a dead fish, drifting belly-up to the top of a lake.
Across the room, Hojo indifferently flicked his glasses a little higher up his nose. Then he hit a button, the tank door opened, and Cloud toppled out in a surge of mako.
Cloud's not dead I promise :)