THE LAST MIDGARDIAN


Knowhere


He resembled a sculpture. The bright sapphire limbs huddled and curled inward, shrinking his impressive height into a deceptively small ball. He remained like that for days sometimes - entirely motionless, barely a whisper of breath to cause his serrated diaphragm to rise and fall like wind through tree branches. She knew he was tall because she saw him stand once...but that was a long time ago. (Or was it? She couldn't remember.)

He was so very blue. She liked to watch the way the shadows danced across his limbs in the shifting light and lose herself in the swirl of scarred patterns on his chest and forehead. Sometimes they became ocean waves or river ripples in her mind. Other times they became butterfly wings or a parrot feather. She liked to imagine those things. They stirred up good times, pleasant memories ...and she had so few of those now.

"This music is called the blues because it is sad. B.B. King is singing of his troubles. He calls it 'singing the blues' because blue is a sad color," her mother once told her, another lifetime ago, when she was a very young girl. She liked the warmth in her mother's voice. It reminded her of melted honey. Her voice was never sad. It must not have been blue.

But he was always blue...and not just in skin tone. There were days he opened his scarlet eyes and they wept with tearless sorrow. They reminded her of the way the waters were painted red when They came. She didn't like red. Red meant empty roads and emptier homes. Red meant change and tears and so many funerals. She didn't like those eyes. They were mirrors of her own grief and the loss of hope that threatened to consume her.

When those flashes of red threatened to burn away her will to fight, she dropped her eyes to his billows of sapphire scars on his chest and thought of butterflies...not the truck-sized kind housed in a display cage of its own, but the palm-sized ones from Earth. Those butterflies reminded her of her first home, the place she was born, and that gave her hope. Hope was gold and warm and filled with butterfly wings and melted honey and spring daffodils and starry nights.

She kept her eyes fixed on him when the doors open and the people came. She wasn't sure if she should call them "people," because at one time, in her native language, she would have called them "aliens." But every people thinks they are the only "real" people and all others are not until they are forced to learn otherwise.

Just as the "people" of Earth discovered.

Then she ended up the "alien," trapped behind clear glass as strong as diamonds and on display for the strange masses of various exotic creatures that came through their dark gallery. They came in groups or tours, by themselves or in large numbers to see all the exotic exhibits in this cluttered, chaotic, living zoo. (Was it a zoo or a museum? She was never quite sure.)

Exhibits lined each hall around her and above her. At one time in her life, she would have screamed in glee and pulled out her notebook to take notes on each and every display in this metallic institution. It defied the extent of even her extensive scientific imagination. She once dreamed of gateways in the sky and the study of other planets. She never once thought she would find flowers the size of parachutes that danced and sang when fed some kind of worm. There were skeletons of creatures that rivalled dinosaurs and more robots and automatons than she could count. An entire wall devoted to weapons towered four stories high. Records of star charts she would have given her right arm to obtain were a daily spectacle now.

Her glass box rested in the hall of live displays. From end to end of the cavernous gallery, tightly crammed cages barely allowed the spectators passage through the narrow walkways. Some of the displays incorporated plants in them or showed evidence of climate control (such as humidity or frost) but hers was entirely clear and empty.

Her vantage point showed her all kinds of creatures. There were bipeds and quadrupeds. Some with wings and some with horns. Some with five eyes and some with no eyes at all. Vaguely humanoid creatures listlessly sat on the floors of their cages while decidedly unhumanoid creatures lay...or floated...or oozed in theirs. The creatures in the exhibits were as disparate in appearance as tuna and oranges, but they all shared the same fate. They all were alone in their glass cage, a live display to tickle the fancies of the curious and provide fodder for the imaginations of the worldweary.

Yes. At one time, she would have longed to be one of these masses of sightseers. Now, she wished she had a way to hide herself from their perpetual gaze. She could still feel their eyes on her when her eyes were closed and her back turned. Their eyes prickled a trail of exposure everywhere they roved and she lacked so much as a leaf or a rock to hide behind for a reprieve.

In her early days, when she woke to her box, she used to scream and bang her fists against the unforgiving glass until bruises mottled her skin and blisters wept blood. The many eyes outside only stared. She used to cry, but she hated it when they watched her so she stopped. For awhile, she tried to smile and wave. Sometimes they'd respond, but she couldn't understand what they were saying when they pointed and whispered. Did they pity her or mock her? Was she an object of derision and disgust or fascination and awe? There were so many. It didn't matter anymore. Here they stared but could not touch. She was not always so fortunate on Asgard. She wasn't sure which was a worse form of prison

The sedative came in the food each day. It kept her complacent and hazy, comfortable and deceptively peaceful. She tried not to take it when she realized where it came from, but then the hunger came...and the claustrophobia and the terror. She tried a hunger strike once. She refused her slightly sweet, unidentifiable grey mush three times before what Jane thought of as a "Keeper" came.

Each cage was tended by a slightly pinkish feminine creature in a short uniform dress. The Keepers always smiled but it was a hollow, automatic smile as if formed by habit and not humor. They were inarguably alive. She knew because she watched one die once. There were no springs or microchips within the alien woman and Jane's nightmares were haunted by that gruesome death for months.

When the Keepers daintily shuffled through the museum, they pushed carts of multicoloured containers of food. These were deposited in small slits near the floor of each cage and collected when empty. A small, self-cleaning hole in the corner of each cage was set up for waste collection and the cage itself underwent routine, automated maintenance to ensure the internal environment remained clean and inhabitable.

Jane discovered that when she tried to pull a "Finding Nemo" and see if she could escape if her cage was dirty. She could not make it stay dirty for more than five minutes before the cage cleaned itself. Similarly, she could not skip more than three meals before a Keeper appeared and inserted a tube into her cage which filled the space with some type of gas. She was unconscious within thirty seconds and when she woke, her hunger was gone. The hazy, deceptive aura of well-being filled her and she would have cried in frustration - if she was not so very comfortable. When her subsequent three hunger strikes ended in the same way, she finally gave up.

When the unceasing noise of the visitors stilled, another set of footsteps echoed through the metal hall. They were heavier than those of the Keepers and much slower, as if time itself was an endless commodity. Only after all the others were gone did he come. Their Owner.

It was his hair that first caught her attention when he arrived on Asgard. It was so white it could have been made of cotton. It was the hunger in his eyes that made her forget his hair or the shifting, mechanical way he moved. If she still wondered whether he was man or machine, his eyes gave it away. They burned with an insatiable greed worse than even the worst of the Aesir and when fixed on her, they wrapped her in steel chains and stole the breath out of her lungs.

After hours, when all that could be heard was the metallic groaning of the walls and the soft whimpers of the captives, his footsteps reverberated like a bullhorn in a library. He walked through each aisle and past every single display. His hungry eyes ate in whatever he passed and Jane new without a doubt that he remembered every last relic or creature contained in his museum. This place, these things, these beings were not just his hobby. They were his obsession.

When his shadow fell upon her cage, she internally cringed every time. He never smiled or spoke or made any show that he acknowledged her existence. He only loomed over her in his silent, clickish way, and burned her with those insatiable eyes before he continued on to the next cage.

She hated looking at their Owner even more than she used to hate meeting the disdainful eyes of the Aesir nobles. She preferred to stare at the blue man in the cage next to hers. He helped her forget, though he never even noticed she was there. She watched the listless, burdened rise and fall of his chest. He reminded her to keep breathing...keep fighting...keep going. She would not give up until she could see blue again - whether it was the blue of an ocean or an atmosphere or an old t-shirt, she didn't care. She would get out of this place and see something other than glass walls again.

How long had he been trapped here - slowly shrinking inward on himself until he forgot there was an external world to interact with at all? In a hall without windows or clocks, she could not grasp the passage of time. Was it a day or a thousand years that had passed since she first arrived? She didn't know and there was no telling how much longer the blue man spent trapped on display.

He never cried. She wondered if he was biologically incapable of producing tears or if he had forgotten how after all his tears were spent. He shouted once. In an unexpected burst of movement and emotion, he stood tall and let out a guttural shout of rage and despair as he tore at his head with his hands. That was the only way she knew how tall he was or that he was not frozen and mute as she had thought before. He pounded once against the glass and fell back into unbroken silence.

After that, she wondered if he missed his home and which planet he called home. Did he have a family and a name? Who was he before this? Before he became a living symbol of a distant, little-known people existing for the intellectual consumption of others.

She wished she could ask him. Did his world have a sun and did he miss it as much as she missed hers? She wished she could feel the warmth of the sun's rays on her exposed face. She wished she could be truly alone while at the same time she wished she wasn't so truly alone. She now felt her enhanced genetics were a curse which prolonged her captivity and robbed her of some of her escape options. Extended lifespans had once been welcomed as a lauded gift by the naïve inhabitants of Earth. Jane knew it was like all the other "gifts" the Aesir had brought them - sweet to the taste and bitter to the stomach. Earthlings paid for every "gift" tenfold before the end.

Thoughts of her beloved Earth left her so homesick she could feel the weight of it beneath her deceptively sedated mind. She was cogent enough to know she missed her home with every fiber of her imprisoned body. The dreams made it worse. Sometimes they felt so real. They reminded her of a past she could never return to and a place that solely existed in her memories. She would never be able to watch a baseball game or a ballet again. Who could appreciate her awe of the discoveries of Marie Curie and Albert Einstein with? Who could sing Christmas carols or eat Thai curry with her?

She was alone.

She remembered going to a zoo as a child. Her grandfather bought her an orange balloon and let her pet a boa constrictor. It was that day that she gained a fascination for the snow leopard. He was so beautiful and noble as he warily paced his small cage.

"There are so few of them left in the wild. They may soon be extinct," the zoo keeper sadly told them.

Sad it was. Did the spotted, furry-faced predator know he was one of the last? Did he care? Was that why he paced so restlessly to and fro along his faux river, staring at the walls of his cage as if he could sense the freedom that lay beyond?

She never, not in a million years, thought she would become him...one of the last of her kind, the dwindling remnant of a vanishing species, preserved for posterity only in captivity.

But here she was - pacing the length of her cage just like the snow leopard.

One of the last of her kind. Maybe the last. She didn't know for sure, but on Asgard they told her she was the last Midgardian.

ooooo

Author's note: Did anybody else get totally creeped out by Taneleer Tivan's Collection in Guardians I, Thor: Dark World, and Infinity War? Yeah, I did.