𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐬

𝐄𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓.

𝑭𝒂𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝒊𝒔 𝑳𝒐𝒔𝒕
____________

That was the last time you saw him.

Before that, it wouldn't even have occurred to you that there would be a last time, but there you were in a silent morgue without the rumble of the STEM or Ruben accompanying you in the darker hours. The hallway felt empty, the whole place did.

There was a shift in the atmosphere once he left. One that was slow, steady, crawling slowly into the air and contaminating your thoughts, but once you noticed it was impossible to forget about, or ignore. You felt like Dr. Jiménez had something to do with it.

You couldn't even imagine how true that was, and to what extent.

With Ruvik gone, Marcelo had free reign with the machine, with the patients he experimented in, with who managed what. MOBIUS stayed and dug, deeper than they had ever been, intermingling with Beacon's very being, and it eventually showed. New personnel walked the hallways with the confidence of a local, patients screamed louder, food became bland and scarce. You did few work now, and couldn't even call the families of those deceased anymore, Gertrude Barnes had been fired from the position she'd held for half a century at the records office and had been replaced by a bulky man that didn't let you past the entrance, even Mila stayed more silent, never accompanying you anywhere, growing cold and distant. Everywhere you went felt like you were being watched, and it wasn't hostile and depressing like hospitals always were, it was corporate and cold like a superstructure stagnant yet growing, ready to consume.

One time you had heard the STEM machine once again, you ran towards the place you knew it was at hoping to find Ruben standing in the middle of the dark room, waiting for you with those intense, knowing eyes. You only found Jiménez, Leslie and two strangers that looked at you like they've seen a ghost. You'd never forget Leslie's pleading eyes as they placed a needle right into his spinal cord.

You avoided anyone and everyone after that.

Something pushed you to stay, however, the overwhelming sense that both Eleanor and now Ruben still lingered in the air, so instead of abandoning the place you continued to look for answers, even if your investigation –and that of the police, too– had gone suddenly cold.

It didn't, however, prove fruitless.

Months later, Dr. Marcelo Jiménez published a paper. A scientific paper on the mind of patients, a paper that talked grandiosely about the effects of a very familiar machine on them, and he published it with his name, and his name alone. You saw red.

Waiting became tiring, but you needed time to find a perfect moment to act. You memorized the guard's schedules and their personalities, you watched Jiménez from afar and figured a way and a time where you could get into his office. You knew he had something to do with it, you knew answers to what happened to Eleanor and Ruben were behind the tightly locked doors of Jiménez's office, you just had to get past them, unnoticed.

Soon, you figured Marcelo always left his office at 3:00 p.m. every single day, locked himself in the STEM chamber for the rest of the day, until 7:30 where he returned to retrieve his belongings and went home for the day. It would've been easy if his office wasn't in a place often crossed by a great number of people, that could easily see and report you. But you managed through, found a blind spot and an exact moment, and you were in.

Jiménez's office was surprisingly decorated and homely, he had books and coffee cups on his desk, in a mess that wasn't overwhelming but common, humane. The way this whole place was set up with pictures of his family and candles and paintings of trees made the man appear way more alive and human than you ever conceptualized him before. You almost felt weird, wrong while traversing this place in order to look for what you needed to, but now you couldn't back down.