Chains | Percy Jackson

Chapter One - She has a name!

Five was curled up where she usually spent most of her recent days, the corner of the damp room which was her world for now.

The floors were cold concrete, scuffed from years of a previously resistant Five who would cling to anything so she wouldn't be dragged away to be poked and prodded and hurt.

The cold on her was chilling, and with only a thin hospital gown to shield her from the elements she felt painfully cold.

It also didn't help the floor was wet, which was a result of the iron barred window sitting towards the top wall of her cell that was never shut and rain pouring in from the night before.

She was taught that people like her, people with 'abilities' could withstand more. Or, could be trained too.

There were ten of them in the facility, hospital, laboratory or whatever you could call it where she had grown up. Ten of them all suspected of being 'different' or from what Five gathered over the years a half-blood. Half-human, and half-god.

Five was only twelve, young compared to most on the facility yet not the youngest. She had been there since about the age of three, only vague memories of the outside world existed for her - enough for Five to realise this wasn't what life was meant to be.

So Five was sat in the corner, her knees tucked to her chest for maximum warmth as she gently rocked herself - a coping mechanism to help herself dissociate from her surroundings.

In her dreams she was flying high, or swimming in the deepest sea. She was dancing by the fire, laughing with Six.

Six was her best and only friend. She was only a couple years older than herself at fifteen and unlike Five had been in the facility since before she could remember.

Back upstairs in the hospital they had adjoining rooms. The vents connected which was perfect for conversing late at night when they were meant to be asleep. Over the years of late night talking, playing, listening they had a friendship akin to sisterhood.

They knew everything about each other, as they were all they had. Group work wasn't regular, but did happen, maybe as Papa would fear altogether they may be able to overpower him and the staff, or maybe just to keep them as isolated as possible, fragile.

They spent a lot of time together when they were younger, learning to interact with others Five guessed and such. A child would turn crazy if they were completely isolated through childhood but as they grew you would see the others far less as they tried to wean you off other interactions that veered off their experimentations and training.

Five was pretty isolated at eleven, but of course still saw others during group trainings. Other than that she was mainly solitary with only the few allowed items she got in her room from good behaviour. Five suspected it was to keep her weak, or to stop them plotting attacks or escapes as they grew and learned about the outside world.

He already starved them to the point of death and chained up so they never had full capacity over their abilities, so what was isolation on top of that, believing nobody was there to save you.

Five used to believe that. Her father, Papa, was all she could trust, that he saved her from a world that didn't understand her to love and build her up and it was Six who taught her this wasn't love at all. Although Six never went out, she loved to read, and through books and gathering information from older subjects who had lived some years outside learnt the facility wasn't life at all.

As part of Six's deal with Papa she agreed to cooperate fully if allowed books to educate herself. She would often read to Five at night or after painful experiments that left her feeling on the floor in colds sweats, hallucinating and sometimes seizing. She would come around as a crumpled pile on the floor, Six reading to her quietly even though she didn't know if she was listening or not.