Disclaimer: I do not own Sliders.
(abandoned)
What she was deeply unsure about was why she felt so very certain that she had been abandoned by her cobbled together family more than once when she had no memory of it happening even a first time. This, at least, was not unexpected. There were a lot of things that she could not remember.
But something had to have happened - she had the haze in her head that meant that a memory was missing whenever she tried to think about how they had gotten split apart. And, it was undeniable that she was here in this place with none of the people she considered her family around. She might be iffy on the details, but she knew that she had been here for a long time. No one had ever come to get her.
What other word but abandoned would apply?
(between)
She tried not to think about it too much. In the time between "sessions," her thoughts (such as they were) were her own. She wanted to spend those times on better things than the fact that she might very well be forgotten. Thinking about that was almost as bad as trying to think about what might be happening in the sessions. She did not know what happened when her guard was down. She did not know how it was accomplished.
All she knew was that yet another space in what should have been her memories that was filled with only a haze that she could not push beyond no matter how hard she tried had appeared each time that she woke. That told her clearly enough that something was happening to her in those times that she was not aware. It was the only thing in this place that ever changed - at least as far as she could remember.
(chill)
Everything else was an unyielding constant. For example, either they were ignorant of temperature regulation for standard human norms in this place, or they got some sort of a kick out of seeing to it that their prisoners were every bit as uncomfortable as it was humanly (or inhumanly as the case might be) possible to make them. Wade was almost getting used to the constant chill in the air - not in a manner that made it any easier to tolerate but in the way that she had learned that she should never expect to be anything else. It was not resignation so much as it was a practical allocation of thought processes. It was always chilly here.
She had never once been warm since her arrival, and she was never going to be warm again. There was nothing to be done about it, so it was just as well to not waste any mental effort trying to think of a way to change something that was immutable. Just because she had all this time on her hands didn't mean that she had to waste any of it on lost causes.
(dim)
The dim lighting was not as much of an adjustment as the cold had been. It added to the cave like atmosphere of the place, and the part of her in the back of her head that was still a recorder of words found it fitting. There was no place for sunlight here in this life that she was leading (if it could even be considered leading a life as opposed to continuing to exist from day to day). The dim backlighting never changed - never fluctuated in the least to indicate a passage of time. It never reached to the far corners at the back of the cell (not that the far corners were very far in the first place). She spent most of her time tucked as far away from the bits of light as she could get. She had no illusions of privacy (they had invaded her mind and stolen her thoughts from her so many times), but it still felt better somehow to keep to the shadows where she could, at least, make a pretense of hiding. Call it childish clinging to something she could pretend to control, but there was precious little even of pretense that she could keep to herself. She was not going to let that one go.
(easier)
Sometimes, she thought it would be easier to fall asleep curled up in the cold, dark corner and never wake up again. That, of course, never happened. It was likely enough that she would escape via that means one day, but each day in succession proved to be not that day yet again. She never bothered to determine how she felt about that - it was yet another on the long list of things that simply were.
It might be that she never let herself fall asleep deeply enough for her to just slip away (surely the malnutrition and the chronic exhaustion and the never relenting cold would eventually build up into something that would come to claim her) but not sleeping was the only battle that she had left that she could actually fight. So, fight it she did. It was when she was sleeping that they pulled what they wanted from her head (even if she did not understand why or how), and she was not going to do anything that would make it easier for them.
(forever)
She fought back the only way that she knew how. She stayed awake as long as she could - endless hours rocking back and forth in an effort to keep herself from succumbing to the lure of her exhaustion. She could, of course, not win at that game forever (exhaustion will always be the opponent that one cannot beat forever), but every minute that she delayed was her reminder that as wounded and at their nonexistent mercy as she was, she was not really broken. She might be breaking a little more every time she awoke with a start to realize that another piece of her was missing from her mind, but she had decided that there was a decided difference between breaking and allowing herself to be broken.
Maybe she was the only one who could see a difference, but it mattered to her.
(guards)
She never actually saw any guards. She could not remember any longer if she had ever questioned that piece of her reality - that like so many details of so many things was nothing but a haze in her head where she knew that the answers used to be. There was likely no need for much in the way of a garrison in this place. While she no longer knew exactly how large the location was (which she knew by the hazed over space in her head that she once had) or how many people might be imprisoned (which was just not there so she had probably never known to start with), people in her condition were not likely to be a hotbed of resistance.
(help)
Further, help was not coming. It was not a bit of propaganda forced on her by her captors - there was no need for them to go to the trouble. She just knew - had from the first time she woke in this barred little space in the semi dark and felt the chill in the air working its way into her bones and realized that she knew where she was and had the vaguest sense of why she was there without knowing any longer how long she had been there or how she had arrived that this was her constant now.
There were not going to be any daring rescues. She was lost. She was left. It just was. She may not know why or how she knew, but that did not change the fact that she did. Why waste resources on guarding the forgotten?
(imagination)
She imagines they have other uses for their forces - what with the world conquering and all. She used to have a good imagination. She reckons that she still might in some ways. She certainly tells herself enough stories in the seemingly endless hours that she keeps up her back and forth motion that serves the dual purpose of keeping herself awake just a little bit longer and mitigating in just the slightest bit the pervasive chill. Mostly, she tells herself stories about how things might have been different. Dwelling on might have beens may not be the most emotionally or mentally healthy of practices, but what harm is it really going to do her now?
She has to think about something, doesn't she?
(justification)
Since she never interacts with anyone, she never has to listen to any sort of justification for why it is that they are doing what they are doing to her. Her mind tries to fill in the blanks sometimes when she has come to a pause in her stories of different choices and the spiraling effects that they would have had on them all.
She has acknowledged that as bleak as her little world in the confines of this cell in fact is, there are worse things that could be happening to her. She knows the fact that they are not is only because they want something from her. She does not know what it is or understand why it seems to be causing them so much trouble to find it, but she knows it must be something. She wonders, sometimes, if she even has whatever it is that they want - maybe someday they will have pulled every last bit of memory from her head without finding whatever it is.
That might even be morbidly amusing if only there would be anything left of her to enjoy it.
(kept)
She wishes, when she is pondering that possibility, that she could have kept her journal. She thinks it might be nice to be able to compare what she still thinks she knows and what she guesses about the hazy spaces in between her memories with the written in her own hand account of how they actually happened. There are other times that she thinks it might be worse to know instead of merely guess about everything which has been taken from her.
If she had more clues at her disposal, then she might figure out what it is they are looking for in her mind. The question is whether or not her knowing would make it easier or harder for them to find it - she supposes that it is just as well that she does not have the option. She might end up spilling things that should be kept locked up tight.
(lucid)
After all, she isn't certain that she is actually lucid anymore. Who knows what she would write in a journal if she had one. As for communicating something so that someone else would understand it, she isn't even certain how she would begin. There is no one else to speak to, so she cannot judge exactly how off she would be in an attempt at a conversation at this point. She feels like it would be very difficult for her to focus on another person. She has gotten so used to being lost in her head - to following whatever bunny trail it occurs to her to wander down at any given moment that trying to make space for the back and forth of conversation with another human being might leave her hopelessly lost and incurably awkward.
She remembers awkward.
It's just as well that she's alone.
(mud)
There is mud under her fingernails when she wakes. This is new . . . and unexpected . . . and it is a piece of information that she does not know how to process. There is no mud in her cell. The floor is concrete as best she can tell. The walls are the same (and it is too dim for her to say with any certainty what the ceiling might be comprised of - she is short and she cannot even remember if she has ever bothered to stand up and try to look more closely at it).
There is certainly dust all around her, but mud is something entirely different. It's a change - an actual environmental change as opposed to the changes that are only in her head. She does not remember anything changing before. When she tries to think of how she would have gotten mud under her fingernails, she does not encounter the haze to which she has become accustomed. Instead, she feels as though she has walked straight into a wall - a wall of blankness that just ends her train of thought and sends her ricocheting backwards into a random confrontation with a list of things she no longer knows.
(name)
She cannot remember the name of the store where she and Quinn used to work together. She is stuck on this fact, and it is bothering her in a way that she has not allowed the loss of memories to bother her for a long time. Every time she looks down at her hands and wonders why she has mud under her fingernails, she hits that blank wall in her mind and suddenly finds herself wondering instead why she does not know where it is that she used to work. She knows that trying to push beyond the haze does her no good, but it is such a strange thing for her to have forgotten.
Why would they care to be pulling information from her from before she even started to slide? She can still remember working there. She remembers lots of details about those days, but the name itself is gone. It makes no sense. But, then again, very little of any of this makes sense. If they can see inside her head, why aren't they just making note of the things they want to know? Why are they seemingly removing the memories as they find them? Why does it only happen when she is sleeping?
She has so many questions. She always has so many questions. The thing she never seems to get is answers. It's frustrating. She hasn't felt frustrated for a long time; she hasn't let herself. She has spent so much time just trying to keep awake and ignoring anything that doesn't help with that, but that's not right, is it? She's done other things, hasn't she? She can't remember. The mud is still there under her fingernails taunting her with the fact that everything that she thought she had figured out may not be so.
She blows out a breath and is momentarily distracted by a piece of hair that falls across her vision.
(odd)
Her head feels odd when she reaches up to brush the piece of hair behind her ear and her fingers search out the source of the strangeness until she realizes that what she is feeling is a braid. Her hair is braided, and she has so many more questions that the sudden rush of wanting to know things leaves her a little breathless. Why is her hair braided? Did she do this herself? When? When did her hair even get long enough to allow for braiding?
The same sense of coming up against a wall of blankness overcomes her as she tries to focus, and she feels herself being shoved back into the gulf of not knowing that occupies so much of her head. The Professor had a first name. Everyone has a first name. She didn't call him by it, but he had one. And she had known it, hadn't she? She's sure that she did. The haze when she tries to find it assures her that she did. Why doesn't she know it now? Why would they take that?
(puncture)
She finds herself rubbing at the puncture mark on the back of her right hand as she tries to gather her thoughts. It's always reopened when she wakes - she figures it is the reason that she hasn't died of starvation and dehydration yet (she cannot remember them ever feeding her). She usually ignores it, but she realizes that it hurts. It never hurts, but it does now.
There is a huge bruise and a jagged tear in her skin - as if the needle and tubing that she knows has been inserted there repeatedly have been jerked out rather than properly removed this time. It is just one more different thing in a world where she has come to expect never ending sameness. She feels like this means she should be doing something, but she doesn't know what.
Everything has changed but nothing has.
(quickly)
She finds herself pacing rather quickly from one side of the small space to the other in her agitation, and the sudden sense that something is deeply wrong (even more wrong than it usually is) stops her movements cold. She is walking. There is no place in her memories of being in this cell where she is walking. She always sits. She sits in her corner and she rocks as she tries to keep herself awake for as long as she can. She does not remember ever walking in all the time that she has been here, and that means that there is something else wrong with what she thinks she knows.
She knows it has been a long time - it has to have been. How did she start walking so casually? Her muscles should be atrophied. She should not be able to move with the ease that she has managed in her agitation. These things she thinks she knows cannot all be true. Nothing about any of this has ever been right, but which part is the part that is most wrong?
(reminder)
She is really starting to hate that wall of blank. She used to think that the haze was bad (before she had found it a comforting reminder that there used to be even more of her that had existed outside of this captivity). She knows, at least, that the haze marks something that is missing. The wall of blank is just that - blank and a wall. There is nothing - not even a sign that there is something missing. She pushes and pushes and pushes as hard as she can (she can remember it proving futile back when she used to do the same against the haze even if she cannot remember actually trying it), but all she gets for her trouble is a pounding headache as she is shoved back into the sea of things marked by haze after each attempt.
(scream)
Each try pushes yet another seemingly random fact that she can no longer recall to the front of her attention. She already knows there are hundreds of things - maybe thousands by this point - that she cannot remember. What is her mind trying to tell her by pointing it out so forcefully? (If it is even her mind that is doing the redirection that is.)
No, she cannot remember the name of Rembrandt's old singing group. No, she does not remember the day of the week when she first met Quinn's mother. "What does any of this random information have to do with anything?" She wants to scream at the empty room. She doesn't. It won't do any good. All the things that are most wrong are still inside of her head.
(tickle)
She doesn't even know why she is suddenly fighting so hard against this new twist in their wrecking of her mind, but it feels important enough to be worth the trouble. She keeps at it to no avail. Nothing changes. Nothing gets clearer. Nothing lessens the desperate feeling that she is supposed to be doing something.
It's the tickle from the blood dripping from her nostrils that breaks through the cycle of push against the wall, get shoved back, add another degree of pain to her head, and repeat. Her head feels like it is going to explode, so it seems only natural that she has begun to leak from the pressure.
(useful)
She finds herself staring at the bit of red that rests on the tip of her finger where she reached up to touch. It is the brightest spot of color that she can remember ever seeing in the dimness. She has gotten used to being surrounded by grey and brown and black. She shakes off her sudden compulsion to dwell on color and refocuses on her still dripping nose. The sleeve of her shirt is the only useful item at her disposal for dealing with the slow seep, but she pauses as she gazes at it and realizes that the stains across the fabric imply that this is something that she has done before.
(variation)
She inventories herself just to try to find some sort of a center (the pounding behind her eyes is not helping in this endeavor in the least and is, in truth, a variation in her routine that she would have been perfectly happy to do without). She creates a checklist and runs through all of the differences that she has noticed during this period of wakefulness in turn.
The mud under her fingernails remains. She wants to pick it out, but there is a part of her that is afraid that doing so will leave her without any proof that it was ever there in the first place.
(welcome)
The bruise and tear in her skin remain a testament to something both harsh and recent, but that does not help her define what it might have been. She takes a couple of steps to reiterate that she is every bit as mobile as she thought she was a few moments before. Her headache is not dying down in the least. These are all filed away under the heading of not her normal. She does not know if that makes them welcome or unwelcome developments. She does not know what to do with any of this. For the first time in a long time, she wants to let herself cry (and not just because of the pain).
(xenogeneic)
She feels lost and terrified and completely out of control. She wants to go back - way back to the long ago before walls and bars both inside and outside of her head became things that defined her. The xenogeneic memory loss problems that plague her are unraveling all the threads that make up who she is (or maybe was . . . maybe the Wade that first came here has already disappeared beyond the haze).
Would she even know? Would she even understand if she lost enough that she was no longer her? If they are going to keep stealing pieces, then why haven't they already stolen all the pieces that make her still care?
(yoga)
She dabs under her nose and tries to think of any time that she has had a bloody nose in the time that she has been in this cell and goes slamming into that blank wall again so hard that she finds herself dizzy and on her knees with her throbbing head resting against the concrete in front of her in some demented facsimile of a yoga pose.
She thinks that maybe she won't move for a while. The chill seeping into her forehead is actually a comfort for once. She wonders how long she can stay like this and not fall asleep. (Does that even matter? Is she even accomplishing anything? Is she even slowing them down?)
(zero)
She'll do it anyway. She doesn't know why. She doesn't know a lot of things. That's okay. That's normal. She has gotten used to not knowing. She still knows that she is supposed to fight. She isn't sure what she is fighting against exactly. She just knows that she is and that it is necessary, and maybe the next time she tries to figure it out the pain won't be as bad and the bleeding won't start so soon. How does she know that will happen? How does she know that it already has?
Oh!
Oh.
That's what they didn't want her to remember.
It's just too bad for them that she's getting better at this.
She knows that it will start all over again the next time that she wakes up (really wakes up), but that's okay. She has all the time in the world, and they have a time limit that is rapidly approaching zero.
