Your Pain is My Pain
By: Eternal Heart
PrologueSam didn't remember much. Sure, there were the burns, the cuts, the tubes, the needles, and the occasional broken bone. But everything else was a swirling torrent of horrible blackness. A blackness that didn't seem to want to go away, even when she was thousands of miles away from the Homicidal Experimental Literary Lab.
Her entire life had been a blur, right down to the part where she ripped through the lab and escaped. Killing almost thirty lab men in the process. But Sam did not feel sorry. She remembered the shockers, the nets, the injection tubes, and the vats. They deserved it, every second of pain down to the point where their lives ended in a flash of claws and teeth.
But most of all, Sam remembered what they had down to her. She was once a normal girl, blonde hair and green eyes that shone like emeralds. Skinny but healthy, hyper beyond fathom and happy…she remembered being happy.
But that was before the men came. They came with guns. They came with knives. They came with eyes full of hatred. They came for revenge. And now Sam was different.
Her eyes were stained red with lack of sleep, erasing the green that had once been there. Her hair, once described as a cascading waterfall of sunlight, was knotted and black with dirt and soot. Her skin was unhealthily gray and her every movement took effort.
Not only was that the problem. Some might have considered her a genetic mutation. A pair of black, bat wings sprung from between her shoulder blades, and her teeth were filed down to sharp points. Along with her fingernails.
Sam remembered the vat. The vat was a tall glass box that usually held and assortment of colorful liquids that burned the skin and screwed the senses. But on that one particular day, the liquid was blue. A shimmering forget-me-not-blue that almost looked pretty.
That liquid was different, it had done something that wasn't right, something that wasn't fair. It gave Sam the power to feed on other people's feelings. Whether it was happiness, sadness, anger, jealousy, or pain. Sam could take on other people's feelings and adopt them as her own.
Sam liked the taste of happiness. It was sweet and wild. She also liked love. It was a feeling that she couldn't categorize. It was in a class all its own. Once, Sam would drain all the happiness she could get her hands on…
But then it struck her. By taking happiness, she was causing other people loneliness and pain. So Sam devoted her life outside the Homicidal Experimental Literary Lab to stealing other people's feelings that they didn't want. She took jealousy, anger, sadness, loneliness, and mostly pain.
And in place of the feelings she took, Sam placed her own feelings of love, happiness, joy, and calmness. Sam made everyone around her happy…everyone except herself. Sam was packed full of bad feelings, she was so full of them that she was falling apart.
Sometimes there were unexplained bursts of anger that sent her on a rampage, or spurts of sadness that would throw her into tears. But as long as she was making other people happy, then she was okay. Wasn't she?
Sam was the sponge of pain, she took other people's pain and made it her own. It happened on one of her anger sprees that she lost control and killed the lab men, only seconds after escaping, her life hanging by threads.
Sam spiraled through the night sky. Her wings screamed with pain as she beat them evenly. Where was she going? She didn't know. What was she going to do? She didn't care. And nobody else cared either. And so Sam flew on, leaving the lab behind her.
She flew until her head spun and her eyes burned. She flew until her wings numbed and her arms hung limply. She flew until her wings collapsed and she rocketed toward the ground. She flew until she reached Jump City.
Chapter One:
Robin surveyed Jump City from where he sat on his R-Cycle. The visor on his helmet made things darker than they really were, but he could still see just fine. Or, at least fine enough to spot the burglars sprinting down the streets toward him.
Robin shook his head. Sometimes it disappointed him how daft the Jump City criminals were. With a slight smile he pulled the R-Cycle into the shadows and took off his helmet. In only a short period of time the burglars got within fighting range. But Robin wasn't looking for a fight tonight.
Robin let loose a bird-a-rang that cut through the air and sent the burglars stumbling. Robin ignored them and darted off on his R-Cycle. Let the police handle it. He thought, Robin wasn't in the mood to interrogate stupid criminals.
He was just about to wrap it up and call it a night when Sam ripped out of the sky. She was practically unconscious, but sill held enough energy to keep her wings out and stop from slamming face first into the pavement.
She tilted and wavered dangerously, the edge of her right wing clipped Robin on the head and made her buck around on the air currents. Robin screeched to a halt and watched with confusion as Sam did an unintended loop and shot off into the city.
Robin shook his head and peeled out for about five seconds before shooting off after Sam. He followed her as she made a beeline across the darkening streets of Jump City. Finally on the outskirts of the city Sam started a nosedive to the ground.
For a while Robin just thought it was some jerk on a hang-glider testing a new way to get killed. But even a jerk would have the brains to pull out of nosedive that was aimed at the blacktop. Something must be very wrong. Robin gunned it and desperately tried to keep under Sam.
Sam watched through blurred eyes as the cement rushed up to meet her. Was it really going to end like this? "No!" Sam screamed and pulled out of the dive, her feet scrapped the street and acted as brakes. Brakes that didn't work very well.
She was zipping down the street horizontally now, the pavement flew by inched in front of her. Sam looked up and felt her stomach fall. There was a four-way intersection up ahead, lining the streets was all kinds of street signs. Was she going to fit?
Sam got her answer as the edges of her wings slammed into the signs and sent her crashing into the ground. She felt her skin grind into the pavement and heard her wings snap. Still she kept going. 60 mph. 50 mph. 40 mph. 30, 20, 10…halt.
Sam had felt pain like this before in the labs. Her lungs screamed along with the rest of her body and she could taste the blood in her mouth. There was a sound of a motor being cut. And then someone shouting.
Her eyes felt like they were on fire. She couldn't see anything clearly, it was all a blur, just like her life. "Move!" someone was shouting, "Move if you can hear me!" Sam twitched her finger. Hey, she could move her fingers! She twitched them again.
But the voice was fading, the only sound that filled her head was her heartbeat. Banging against her skull. Boom. Boom. Boom. She took in a shuddering breath. Boom. Boom. Boom. The voice had disappeared now. Boom. Boom. Boom. Silence.
Sam's last thought was: Is this how it feels to die?