Psych the Avengers Out

Surviving Nightmares

The days pass in a blur. Brightness and darkness. The harsh sterile, white light of the operating room and then the dark, austere blackness of a dungeon like cell. It's oddly familiar to her. The cycles of days are all wrong because even though she has dark and light, she never sees the sun. The days are disconnected as a result and she never knows how long they leave her strapped to the table with intravenous needles taped to her arms or how long she spends in darkness, shackled to the wall of a cave-like cell. She tries, at first, to keep track of the passage of time but it soon becomes futile as her mind deteriorates.

She comes up with silly analogies to pass the time. Sometimes she practices the little French and Spanish she learned. Sometimes she does the math problems and science problems she looked at in Tony and Bruce's books. Having something to concentrate on other than the pain helps. The cycles of experimentation are familiar, like an old routine you can fall back into. Her mouth is constantly dry and the hunger pains stab her stomach when she tries to sleep. During the day the hunger isn't so bad and she can ignore it by thinking but at night, when all she wants is rest, the hunger is vicious, eating away at her insides, her hard won muscle and strength. She doesn't ever really sleep she finds. Someone always is coming to wake her up so she never gets a full cycle of sleep. It's part of the tactic they've used with her before. Wear her down by denying sleep and food. It can wear a person's defiance down faster than any amount of pain can. But luckily, or unluckily, she has experienced this before. She knows how to sleep in short spurts and hunger is nothing new.

They must have had the vials waiting in storage because her mind never seems to be at full capacity. They must be injecting her with the drug every day because she can't read minds, can't move things, can barely think on the bad days. And they must have had these experiments lined up for her for years because there is no end to the injections, to the brain wave tests, to the pain that slices through her veins like liquid fire or shards of ice. Her elbows are a mass of scarred tissue and she can't bend them right anymore.

Some days she fervently wishes that someone will come to save her. That someone cares that she is human at her core. No matter what they do to her, she will hold onto that; that she is human, no matter how many alterations they manage to make. On the bleak days, she wishes that they would just kill her so she doesn't have to see the sadistic smiles anymore, doesn't have to die inside a little more each day. Strange things happen to a person when the light of hope leaves their lives. You don't wish for anything anymore. The days mean nothing, just a silly way that people came up with to mark the eternity that is time. She could be a philosopher, she thinks with a hysterical bubble of laughter in her throat. She could write a book and be famous.

There are times when Bradlich comes to visit her. When she has the energy, she spits on his shoes. When his hands beat into her flesh, she counts the bruises and strikes as a way to focus on something besides the agony that it causes in her deteriorating body. She doesn't think of what he does to her when he doesn't beat her.

Sometimes he brings someone else with him, someone who is always asking how she is coming along. She knows she should listen with special attention to those conversations because they are probably talking about something she should know that pertains to her future but she can't summon the effort to care. The person always checks her vitals and brainwave patterns. It's a he; somehow she knows in her bones that it's a man. He never seems particularly frustrated if she doesn't show progress, as if he has all the time in the world to wait for her results to come back positive. Maybe he does, who knows.

The mystery man also always asks if her memory has returned. She never knows what to make of this. Her mind has always been hazy and all she has ever remembered is the life inside the lab as a human freak. She wonders what he means and why it seems so important that she not know these things. It makes her want to remember all the more but her stamina flags by the end of the day when the stranger visits. Bradlich's voice is always filled with awe and longing and a hint of jealousy when the man arrives. Jay wonders if it is because he wears an expensive suit, or maybe he's rich. Bradlich has always been a brown-noser for those who have power so it's not a stretch really.