And now for some violence you've all been waiting for! Not waiting for it? Too bad, I enjoyed writing it. [said the self-proclaimed sadist.]
Warning: Contains disturbing. You'll see.
As always, review :D
America jerked awake, the weave of the dream coming apart at the seams. When he opened his eyes, vainly clawing up at the threads of color hovering out of reach, instead of the sights and sounds of times square, the gray, bland cell manifested itself around him.
He kind of wanted to curl up and cry, but reprimanded himself. Don't cry, he scolded. You're the hero. Heroes don't cry. He jammed the thick wedge of emotion and wanting down into a pit inside himself, where all the things that made him uncomfortable rotted and festered and crawled up his throat to choke him.
The screen in the wall flickered on, and he turned to it slowly, glumly expecting more bad news. Instead, America was shown an image of a large fleet of all sorts of planes. They filled the sky, and he recognized the flags on several of them. Hope rose from the pit like a ghost resurrected from the dead and blocked his throat. Maybe they'll break us out! But the hope deflated and took him with it as the strange, noiseless weapons of the aliens blew chunks out of the massed armada of planes. Even as missiles streaked forth again and again, unerring in their accuracy, the planes fell from the sky, scattered like so many autumn leaves left to tumble.
America dropped to his knees, watching the carnage dully through empty eyes. Not again. So much death. Not again...
A plane in front of the camera bloomed with light, and the ships cracked and spurted thick green lasers like a lightning storm. Planes fell in the thousands. There were American pilots among the mix; he felt them die. To add to the chaos, words appeared on the screen, bleeding red symbols shifting and transmogrifying into simple, unaffected English. "You see how easily we conquer. You see that you will die here."
The words stung like blades, but the metaphysical pain lifted. Right there...the corner of the screen. A plane, painted black, darted nimbly past the lasers, swerving upwards. Don't hope...don't let yourself hope, they're gonna die...
But they couldn't. Or at least one couldn't. Die, he meant. He could've sworn that the face he'd seen through the windshield was that of Switzerland. A nation. Technically impervious to being blown up. Against his will, rising hope flooded his heart, and America attempted to suppress it, because he didn't think he could stand it if they failed.
He still felt hope when they came from him. The aliens, tall pale wraiths, strode into his cell, held their claws to his throat, and dragged him away.
The hope died a little as he was strapped to a table. Arms, legs, and several bands across his torso. One crossed his forehead, pressing him down. A bright light shone into his face, and out of the corner of his eye he spotted several wicked tools.
He uneasily tested against the bonds, tugging them, and then yanking on them with all his might, but the material held firm. Just as he was wondering what would happen next, the aliens divested him of his clothes, ripping them off and then holding them under some light until the jacket and shirt and pants wove back together. Now stark naked on the table, America was feeling extremely awkward and unsure. "Can I have my clothes back? It's hard to be heroic with no clothes..." In reply he received a smack in the face, and he winced and wisely said nothing else.
America wanted to complain again as some sort of pale liquid that reeked of disinfectant rained down from the ceiling, small drops beading on his goose-bumped skin. An alien walked past and tightened the restrains, wedging a strip of the thick material the strap was made out of between his teeth. Another leaned over his body and began making marks with what must've been the alien equivalent of a pen. One had a clipboard and was writing on it, and the one with the pen finished up and suspended a globe of swirling yellow-green into the air. Enthralled by this new tech, America watched curiously as a clear pipe was hooked up to it and then, with some dismay, realized that the other end of the pipe embedded in his arm. It stung briefly, before a feeling like pins and needles raced over him. The itchy feeling was followed by a sort of numbness, and then one alien snapped at the other and pulled it out, hanging it upwards so none of the contents of the globe fell out. Feeling slowly returned to his body.
America had no time to consider that, for the aliens finished carefully conferring and he felt the point of a blade press the skin in the curve of his collarbone. Sudden fear made him jerk in the bindings, and a small, jagged bead of blood rolled down the side of his chest. He winced. So that's what the numbness was for. He quickly learned, though, that the numbness hadn't completely gone from his system; he could still feel, and when his skin gave under the pressure, there was pain. Not terrible, not blinding, but pain all the same.
The knife was dragged downwards, and the pain increased in a gradual crescendo until it was screaming by the time it reached the spot just below his belly button. Blood splashed out, heat warm on his sides, and he clamped his teeth down on the cloth.
Some of the aforementioned blood was caught in several vials and just as many aliens as vials broke off from the main group to study it. Then, in a process that seemed to go on forever, each individual blood vessel was treated with some chemical, a brush from a dropper all it took to do...something. America didn't know. His mind was recoiling from this ruthless invasion of his personal space.
This is like a movie, thought America dizzily. The human is being studied by the aliens to determine their weaknesses. At this point the hero would jump in and save the day.
But I'm the hero, he thought with a sinking feeling. Who's gonna save me?
America felt a tool slide through the slit in his skin, cleanly severing the muscles and the traceries of the veins from the upper layer. Another long slit was made horizontally - America felt tears come to his eyes - and his skin was peeled back like that of an orange.
He let himself drift into sort of a daze, interrupted by the jolts of pain whenever the scalpel was used again. If he looked down, he could see the purplish blood vessels and the clips holding the intact ones far above his body, and the layers of muscle and fat braced on a skeleton frame above him, and a few webs of gore clung to the capillaries.
Absently, he noted when the tube was stuck back in his arm, and the oh-so-anticipated relief came, drawing off some, but not all, of the terrible, debilitating pain. His mind snapped into a sharper focus as the horrors continued to unfold.
The cold blade rummaged around inside him for a moment - America couldn't look down to see what they were doing in him - and then, surprisingly delicately, the alien reached in with bloodied hands and lifted out a pinkish-gray bag, connected by several strings of human pieces and other organs to the rest of him, and it was his stomach, his very own stomach being held above him with the loose coils of intestines dropping back into his torso.
It dripped pinkish red, and America, in shock, could only stare at the organ as something was unwound inside him, and his stomach was set gently in cold hooks, the intestines have being unraveled a bit so nothing would tear. The shock slowly changed to horror and bile rose in his throat, but he was unable to tear his eyes away from it. I'm going to throw up... he thought dizzily, and then felt another strong wave of panic as he watched the muscles in his stomach ripple and convulse, the tan, pulpy strand of his esophagus flexing, and the blood vessels around the area swelling as more of this ever-present blood was pumped to the area to help.
That was enough for America. Unable to take the shock of seeing his organs outside his body, and unable to stand the still-growing pain, he let himself pass out. It was dark and peaceful behind his limp eyelids, and he wish he could've stayed that way for longer, but it couldn't last. A dull pain like a hammer blow throbbed in his ribs, and the nightmare that was eating the peace would wake him up anyway.
Light reasserted itself slowly and painfully. America blinked groggily, and then to his horror realized only one eye was blinking. He lifted a hand up to feel it, and felt the restraints digging into his wrist, as well as another surge of pain. Come to think of it, he was sore all over. Not sore, really, more of the feeling that his bones had been replaced with spiked constructs tipped with acid.
America strained with all his might, moving his head a few fractions of an inch forwards, trying to see what they were doing to him. The effort was futile, and he slumped back down. Only then did he realize there was a screen suspended on the ceiling above him, and the grotesquely mutilated form within it made him open his mouth to scream. The form on the ceiling did as well, a distorted mockery of his panic.
And then the realization hit him; it was not a screen, but a mirror.
His entire body had been sliced open, clear tubes connecting the network of blood vessels, suspended from an even higher framework, and the same tubes connected the organs, which were arrayed around him, some suspended in a compound that apparently preserved them and kept them from drying out. There was his ribcage, a clean split down the center of his collarbone, and his lungs unfolded from the surrounding bones, inflating and deflating at a rapid pace...and there was also his heart. The size of his fist, a slick, pulpy mass of dark-colored muscle. Beating at an incredible pace that only sped up as he stared at it.
His gaze was inexorably drawn upwards, past the fold of skin that revealed his windpipe, past the metal tech that adorned his throat to keep him from choking on his own blood, up to his face, and his eyes.
His eyes, or should he say eye. Half his facial skin had been delicately removed, and the cold air stung on the exposed muscle. His right eye looked so big, an island of white and blue in the sea of reddish-pink. His nose was still covered in skin, and he found that his teeth were visible through a carefully inserted window of sorts embedded in his cheek. There was something draped on a skull-shaped frame to his right, and he was afraid to look. Curiosity won out, though, and he strained to glance at it.
America looked away just as quickly, for he never wanted to see half his face without himself behind it ever again. A sad, empty, sagging mask, pulling his features out of shape. Around his left eye socket, the skin side, there were several slits and then the optic nerve drifting like a ghost above his face, cumulating in his eye. The eye spun wildly in the bubble of liquid, and it eventually turned to look at him. America shuddered and averted his one remaining eye; he felt as if the other were still staring at him, looking into the back of his skull.
Or, America realized, through his skull, as the back of it had been removed, and there, there was his brain, like a great ominous cloud hovering slowly near him, brain stem connected to the maze of tubes that miraculously kept him from dying. There were the small electric pinpricks of his neurons, and was he seeing himself think...?
He couldn't bear staring into the mirror anymore, and instead focused his wild gaze on the aliens observing his brain. Their faces were impassive, and he couldn't read them, couldn't tell what they were thinking as they prodded the delicate organ with their tools and took careful notes, as he assumed they'd done for the rest of his body.
America wanted to scream, or yell, or thrash in the restraints until the clear tubes came loose and spilled their contents over his slowly emptying corpse. He'd rather die than have to go through this any longer. Get it into the alien's heads that this was a bad idea, so they wouldn't do it to his friends [and enemies] and he'd be the hero one last time. But he did none of those, for overwhelming his desire for death was his desire to live.
So he closed his eyes - eye - and endured, right up until the moment that the orb leaching the pain away from him turned a darker and darker shade of gray, until it was black, and the black mixed with red, and then throbbed like his heart, and then burst.
The pain was like noting he'd ever experienced before. Forget the scalpel sliding down the inside of his torso; that was a paper cut. Disregard the painful shriek of his bones; perhaps a finger, pinched in a zipper. Not even the death of his people in the World Wars could even hold a candle to this, the raw edges of skin, the barely attached muscles, the tendons and ligaments, his organs and his bones, howling in a hellish choir in his ears and up to his mind. Each and every cell in him had its own complaint, and there were a thousand needles piercing out of his swollen bones, emerging like daggers from his flesh in a spray of blood and -
America almost could see the nerves crackling as a fresh wave of pain ricocheted from his mind to his toes and back again, growing larger every time until a veritable tidal wave of agony raced up the length of his body faster than it took to blink, threatening to wash him away.
And it hit, an explosion; scattering the non-existent daggers through the air, where they landed point-first back in him again as he arched his back involuntarily, and he couldn't hold it in anymore and he screamed, the end of the stiff cloth gritting against the skinless half of his face as it fell. It was a scream born, obviously, of agony, and terror, and contained every ounce of his suffering. He screamed until his sliced-open throat was ravaged and red, and the silver plate allowing him to breathe was joggled out of place. It flopped down the side of his neck, leaving a moist trail, and blood slid up into his suspended lungs. He gagged, coughed, and gagged again, the scream drowned in his blood, and he couldn't breathe...
America drew into himself, taking everything that made him who he was inside him until there was a little ball of pure America inside of him. His mother had taught him how to do it, though she'd never said why. The memory of her face made him squeeze all the tighter, a fragile, temporary barrier towards the pain. This is who I am! This is me, and always will be...
And as the pain wormed its way through his defenses, he let go.
Behind his eyes was a light. Well, not really a light, but more of a pale, ethereal glow, a soothing blue. He was entranced by it, and it reached for him, projecting the most profound sense of peace that it was unbelievable. To the tired nation, the entire thing was simply impossible. The light cradled his soul, and he let himself go with it, just for a moment, before remembering the stern countenance of a German. "Do we all solemnly swear to try anything to escape?"
And his own reply: "Of course I can, I'm the hero!"
NO, he said to the warm light, and the surface underneath him melted as the light suddenly couldn't touch his soul anymore, and he slipped, plummeting seemingly forever into a cold gray sea, sinking under the water before bobbing back up like a cork. Half in the cool water, and half in the warm light.
America closed his eyes and floated between life and death.
I can't go on. The hero is done. It's your turn now.