A/N: Not sure if anyone's still reading this—I've been focusing on other fics because this one seemed to be mostly for me—but just in case, here's another piece of the puzzle.
They knew what he was, but he was more useful to them as a ghost–at least for now.
He had been injected with so many chemicals, he wasn't sure there was much of his humanity left anymore.
Had he been a mere human, he would have been long dead.
He'd never thought he'd wonder if that would be easier than surviving this, especially when he knew what was in store for him if they were successful.
The experiments seemed endless. Trapped in a prison of phase-proof plastic, he had quickly realized they weren't going to afford him any dignities his human side demanded. No food, no water, no bucket.
His initial protest on this had reduced him to living in filth until his cage had been cleaned simply for the sake of getting samples for further analysis. Or perhaps they had merely moved him to an identical chamber in an identical lab. By the time they'd deigned to act, he'd been too weak to protest in his human form; survival instinct had forced him to change.
They'd been counting on that. He had no sense of how long he'd been in the thermos, so he couldn't be sure. He hadn't had a real sense of time for ages now.
The fluorescent lighting never dimmed. They'd given him nothing but different cocktails of drugs for—weeks, months, years?—since his capture. The scientists never spoke to him, ignored him when he tried talking to them. An endless parade of unsympathetic drones.
Staying in ghost form had become a necessity of survival, which was of course exactly what they'd wanted.
He was more useful to them as a ghost.
Whenever they needed samples from him or intended to begin another experiment, the cell would become electrified. He'd tried staying next to the walls at first—plastic was an insulator, after all—but the electricity they fed in through the floor or ceiling would invariably arc to him.
It was always painful, but they never blinked at his screams.
He wasn't human to them.
He was just a ghost.
His screams didn't matter.
He had some idea of what they were doing. They tried to keep the actual data away from him, coding files and chemicals on paper and on their computers, but he'd watch them as closely as they watched him. They seemed to have a few goals in mind. To find an easier way to sedate him. To find a way to control him. To extract the properties within the ectoplasm that gave him certain powers and mimic those powers with their technology.
He knew he wasn't the only ghost here—couldn't be—but as he was likely the only halfa, he was the most valuable to them. They might not acknowledge his human half, but they needed it. He was an example of successful ecto-integration.
He knew, if his conditions ever began to improve, that it would be their way of preparing for a new slew of tests. He wouldn't be able to stomach real food anymore—not solids, anyway—but if they started giving him something to strengthen his human half….
That would be when they thought they had sufficient data on his ghost side to begin looking at the transition point.
They would try to force him to change. They would try to take a mid-morph sample. He was all too aware of what measures they might take to achieve such ends, and he didn't have a defense.
All he had was entirely too much knowledge of what would come.
He needed to get out of here, but he didn't know how. He'd analyzed every corner of the lab—everything he could see, anyway—without coming up with any promising possibilities, and no one who came in here seemed the least bit sympathetic, so it wasn't like he could count on help when it came to escaping.
He didn't want to give up.
He didn't want to give in.
But right now, it seemed like continuing to exist was the only way to fight back. Holding himself—his sanity—together in spite of everything they tried. Fighting for that last scrap of humanity within him. Remembering what it was like Before—not just back when he was still free, but back before the world had descended into this chaos. Before the Merge and the lies the Guys in White spread in their effort to climb to power. Before the Ghost Zone was destroyed, before the entire world believed in ghosts, before humanity saw it as an us versus them situation instead of even attempting to coexist. A time when the GiW organization was nothing more than a secretive branch of the government, before they had ever seeded agents across the world in a series of fringe organizations….
They had taken power so quickly.
It had been all too easy for them to whisper that the current heads of government, in whatever nation, were unfit to handle the threat of ghosts, and they had gathered more than enough evidence to prove that they were up to the challenge of handling what they called a new threat. It had certainly seemed that way in the beginning, ghosts all over the world suddenly popping up in places where they had once lived, trying to carve out their own little corner to haunt. Most of them merely wanted to live peacefully, to leave well enough alone and be left alone in return, it had only taken a few fools who blatantly sought power to turn the tide of the already-fearful public against all ghosts. When the GiW had captured these ghosts, people had followed them, and they'd gained power, and—
Sometimes, he wondered if there was more that he could have done to stop it.
He hadn't really taken them seriously. To be honest, he'd thought them fools. He hadn't genuinely feared that something like this might happen.
Pride comes before a fall.
He should have known that he would fall this far, this hard.
He closed his eyes and drifted.
That was better than following this line of thinking to its end.
Waiting, drifting, existing….
The soft shhk of the automatic door alerted him to its closing. He couldn't always hear it—they had a way of selectively soundproofing his cell, a feat he had yet to figure out how they'd managed—so if they were willingly alerting him to their presence, it wasn't time for a surprise dose of their latest chemical cocktail.
Another study, maybe.
Perhaps more poking and prodding or, worse, cutting and sample-taking.
He opened his eyes, knowing from past experience that feigning ignorance would only result in an electrified cell.
He blinked, but the girl who stood in front of his cell didn't vanish.
She was in the same white uniform they all wore. She'd donned a lab coat, carefully snapped shut, and held a clipboard. A pen was stuck behind her ear, and she wasn't wearing gloves—very sloppy, that—and for all that everything fit, it all seemed very…contrived. She wasn't wearing a name tag—they didn't always, preferring to carry their identification in an interior pocket where their subjects couldn't see—but he couldn't imagine that the others didn't know of her connection to him.
Why had they allowed her in here?
Had…had she asked to come?
Had she been furious when she'd learned the truth about him?
"Valerie?" he whispered, his voice sounding thin and reedy. Sickly. He cleared his throat. "What are you doing here?" That was better, sounding more like his old self, but—
"Subject P070504." She spoke quietly, and he knew the steel in her voice shouldn't surprise him, but— "It's time for you to come with me."
