Brave New World
Chapter 6: Heart-Shaped Box
Cosima blinked rapidly as a harsh light broke its way through the veil of her eyelids. Her head pounded. As she rubbed her temples, she wished she could just go back to sleep. She screwed her eyes shut as tightly as she could; opening them even a crack caused her pain. The throbbing inside her skull was unbelievable. Her hands grasped at her head. Cosima wondered what she could possibly have gotten up to that would have caused this maelstrom of a hangover.
She curled further into herself until memories rushed into her brain and she sat straight up with a gasp.
Her eyes flew open, and she took in her surroundings as her eyes adjusted painfully. She sat on the floor in what at first appeared to be an infinite stretch of white emptiness. When her sight returned to its normal resolution, she realized that it was a small room. Its walls, floor, and ceiling were all white; they seemed to be tiled, each immaculate square illuminated by an unknown source of light.
Cosima's arms flew out to brace herself against the walls of the corner she'd backed into. Her breathing became labored when she realized that the wall to her right was in fact not made of the same tiles as the rest, but rather of a large sheet of what looked like glass. She looked harder at the clear pane and noticed the sharp glare a light from outside cast onto it. Realization hit her hard in the chest, and tears borne of fear and panic stung her eyes. She was sitting in a ball on the floor of a cell.
She was trapped in a cage.
Cosima glanced down at herself and was relieved to find that she was still wearing clothes, though her feet were bare. The relief slipped away as soon as it had come, however, because the clothes that covered her body were not her own.
She stood carefully and regarded her new attire. She was clad in all gray, simple sweatpants and a crew neck sweatshirt that made her feel as if she should have been running up the steps to town hall and throwing a fist in the air. She shook the thought from her mind. If there was ever a time not to feel like Rocky, it was then.
Her legs were shaky, weak, as if she hadn't used them in some time. How long had she been out? There was no way for her to tell.
She tried to breathe deeply. She inhaled slowly, expecting to get a noseful of that familiar chemical, sterile smell that was the trademark of every scientific facility she'd ever worked in. What she smelled instead was subtler, faint enough that it was hardly there at all. It was familiar, but she wasn't sure where she knew it from. The coffee shop, maybe.
Her instincts were falling all over themselves, firing off insane demands that she throw herself against the walls, that she let herself wallow on the ground, that she scream, that she kick her way through the glass and make a run for it.
She balled her hands into fists and grounded herself. She had to get her bearings. She had to figure out what the hell happened to her.
Cosima closed her eyes again and detached herself from the situation. She looked at it with her scientist-eyes, rather than her regular-person-eyes. After a moment, she rolled her sleeves up and examined the creases at the joints in her arms. The little spot on her left arm confirmed her first suspicion: someone had put a needle in her arm. Whether it was to draw blood out or pump something in, she couldn't be sure. It was probably a little of both. They must have given her some kind of sedative to keep her unconscious. Whoever "they" was.
She licked her lips and stepped cautiously toward the glass. What she could see of the hallway was composed of the same white tile that made up the inside of her little room. She leaned forward, tried to make her gaze as parallel to the glass as she could in order to see further to the side what lay beyond the section of the hall that she could see. When she pressed her fingertips against the glass, she heard a loud zap and jumped back as her hand was jolted by an electric shock.
She gaped at the pads of her fingers as they flushed a light pink where they'd been in contact with the transparent barrier. "What the fu-"
"Hey, look who's awake!"
Cosima jumped again as a woman in a lab coat came into view on the other side of the glass. The woman flashed her a smile as she pulled a cart, covered in various medical supplies, up next to her.
Cosima, a little perturbed by the woman's chipper attitude, hugged herself around the middle. The woman, who had pulled a sterilizing alcohol swab and a tourniquet out of the cart, noticed the action and stopped her rifling through the contents of her trolley and faced Cosima with a sympathetic expression.
"Oh, don't worry. I'm just going to draw some blood, okay?" Her hair, which was cut short in a pixie cut, bounced as she nodded her head.
Cosima pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt down over her hands and clutched them tightly. "Um, not okay." She regarded the woman warily. A nametag was clipped to the pocket in her labcoat, and Cosima leaned forward to get a better look at it. "Listen… M-"
"Oh, you can call me Dr. C. Everybody else does."
Cosima stared at her incredulously. "Doc, I don't really care what everybody calls you. I don't know who you are. I don't even know where the hell I am or what the hell is going on. I woke up two minutes ago in a cell. You're not getting anywhere near my blood."
Dr. C. sighed. "I'm sorry. I'm sure this must all be very disorienting."
Cosima actually found herself barking a laugh at that one. "Yeah, that'd be putting it in the lightest terms you possibly could."
"I get it. You're alarmed. It's perfectly understandab-"
"I'm beyond alarmed! I'm-I'm pissed!"
Dr. C. set the swab and tourniquet carefully onto a metallic tray she had placed on the top of the cart. With a small step forward, she clasped her hands and lowered her voice. "Look, I'm really sorry that you're stuck in there, but I'm just an employee here. In all honesty, I don't like it any more than you do." She shrugged and her nose twitched a little. "I need this job. There's nothing I can do but take your blood and run the tests."
Cosima bit the inside of her cheek. "What exactly are you people doing to me in these tests? Am I some kind of lab rat for new pharmaceuticals or something?"
"Oh, no, we aren't doing anything to you! Not in that sense. It's more of a take-samples-and-see-what-they-tell-us-about-you kind of operation."
Cosima crossed her arms and adjusted her stance. "Yeah, I don't think that's going to happen anymore. See, I know someone in law enforcement, and I can confidently say that kidnapping and performing medical procedures on someone without consent constitutes a whole slew of ethical violations. When the police get word of the shit you've got going on in here, you'll be shut down faster than that kid who tried to kiss Molly Ringwald in 'Sixteen Candles'."
She saw Dr. C. take a breath and spoke again before the woman in the white coat could get a word in.
"What do you want to know about me, anyway? What is it that you're looking for in my blood, huh?"
"I'm not at liberty to say-"
Cosima let out a short scream and punched the glass. She hardly winced when the electricity burned the side of her fist.
Dr. C. considered Cosima. "Ms. Niehaus, I'm afraid you're very unaware of the way things work around here. You do not possess any authority within this facility. When you are eventually released, which you will be, don't worry, you will have no desire to take any action that would harmfully affect the organization." She turned back to the cart and picked her supplies up again. "Now, either you're going to cooperate and let me do my job, or I'll have to call in someone from security standby to restrain you, in which case you'll be given another sedative and you'll sleep for another several days. None of us want that."
Cosima swallowed thickly. The weight of the situation she found herself in felt as though it was crushing her chest. Her powerlessness hit her with the force of a cannonball.
Dr. C. then looked at her pointedly. "Now, are you going to let me take your blood without a fuss?" When Cosima bit her lips together and nodded slowly, the doctor grabbed her nametag, which extended from its clip on a bungee string, and swiped it through what Cosima assumed must have been a keypad. She punched in a code, and the glass door slid open with a hiss.
When Dr. C. entered the cell and went about drawing Cosima's blood, she uttered the phrase that she would come to repeat every time she was ordered to take samples from Cosima in the following weeks.
"I'm sorry. I just work here."
Cosima was in the cell two weeks when she noticed a slight tickle in her throat.
She was in the cell three and a half weeks when her breaths began to rattle her chest.
She was in the cell four weeks when she started coughing.
Author's Note: I snuck a thing into this chapter. If you figure it out, let me know. Also, if you got some season 4 Buffy the Vampire Slayer vibes here, that is where the inspiration came from.