212

More Human Than Human

I'm numb inside and heavy. Can't feel my fingers or my toes. Can't tell if my heart's still beating or if it has decided to just curl up and die quietly inside my chest.

Well, I haven't dropped dead, so I guess it's still up and running.

Paz. I didn't know her much. After all, I'd only caught her on the tail end of her bout with sanity when I first got here. Still, the memory of her is seared into my brain, buried deep inside the gray matter like mitochondrion inthe belly of a cell. It's all that's left of her.

Memories. Of a brief life lived and snuffed out all too quickly.

The Dragons made good on their feast, even lapped at the coagulated blood clinging to the floor afterwards. Waste not, want not.

"Come on, Sarah. You've got to get up."

It's Doug and he has softened somewhat from the primal animal he'd been when Paz took her last breath; back to his regular 'ol Captain America self, his brown eyes shiny with hope, skin and muscles and blindingly bright smile still attached to his body in all the right places.

"Come on. Get up!" He has no patience for my sorrow, even less for my helplessness, and no qualms showing me exactly how chafed he is about both. He'd risked life and limb to drag me back out of my pod when I sank down into its refuge after the last bits of Paz were loudly swallowed. He'd all but broken my teeth when he and Mel teamed up to shove Trays Eighteen and Nineteen down my throat. And now, after ripping the piss-stained overalls off my back and tearing them to shreds, he stands like a prison guard keeping watch over his rotten flock as I lay, fetal and powerless, beneath the waterfall at the back of the Cage.

"Get up!" he growls down at me. There's an edge to his voice, sorrow wrapped in determination and a tinge of desperation sprinkled in. "Don't let them see you like this."

"Who gives a shit what they think?! They ate her, Doug!" I bawl into the flowing water. They. Ate. Her.

Survival of the Fittest. For the last three Trays, that's all he's been saying. Don't be weak. Don't let yourself get picked off for the hunt.

"I don't care anymore!" The mirror's shimmering waterfall takes my tears and my words and washes them both down the drains hidden so perfectly within the design to make them almost invisible. "Let them come!"

"Is that what you want, Sarah?" I can feel his warmth pushing through the cold waterfall as he bends low enough to my ear, "do you want to die like that? Like Paz?"

Survival of the Fittest.

"I'm not strong. Not like you or Mel."

"You've lasted twenty trays and you'll last twenty more, if I have anything to do with it."

"As if you can do a damn thing about that!" I cry. "You couldn't save Paz."

The air around him goes limp for a split second, for one lousy bat of an eyelid; shoulders sagging with guilt, brown-eyed hope muddying with shame for the briefest moment. I can feel the agony bleed from his skin, can see it get washed down the drains as mist and wayward droplets splash against his face. Fear and desperation like musk stinking in my nostrils. But Captain America steels himself because he knows, as well as I do, that their eyes are always watching − the Cage Masters, the Dragons. They're always watching.

But that's the difference between him and me. Superhero Doug's got something inside his veins. Not blood or a fleshy heart beating timidly inside his chest. No. Inside this brown-eyed, strong-chinned man of ultra-high-carbon steel lies something unforgivingly unyielding, like 30-Grade concrete hardened and made immortal with Grade 150 rebar. Me? Sadly, my heart's still working. It's still too fragile to stand up against anything more invasive than an alien's cold, hard glare.

"No. I couldn't save Paz," he growls between clenched teeth. "Not Mira or Werner..."

Names reel off his tongue without pause.

Zhou. Baban. Felix. Trevor. Beate. My heart breaks when every one of those names crash against my eardrums. Cherry. Haru. Kaye-Marie. Olusesi.

"No. You're right, Sarah. I can't save any of you," he sighs, "but that doesn't mean I can't keep trying. And I won't stop. I won't keep adding names to that fucking listen, you hear me? I won't!"

He turns those hopeful brown eyes back on me again, and that's when I see it – something so earthy and solid woven into the irises – like a big, warm hand proffered for support. Get up, it seems to say. Rise above all of this, Sarah. Change. Adapt. Evolve.

Be stronger. Be better. Don't just be simply human in this place. Humans are too delicate to never survive in the Cage, too hung up on the descent of man to ascend the ladder built by Darwin's Golden Rules and become something much more.

Survival of the Fittest.

"My God, Doug. How? How do you do it?" How does anyone live through all of this and still keep going? Tray in. Tray out. "How do you find the strength to not just...give up?"

Those big, broad shoulders of his shrug. "Because I have to," he says. Just like that. It all sounds so easy, doesn't it?

And it's that thing I see in his eyes which pulls me up, slowly, steadily, to my feet. It gives me the power to push Paz's memories aside and bury them deep inside where they have no hold on me.

Adapt. Evolve. Put that ultra-high-carbon steel in your veins, Sarah, and become more human than human.

A/N - Ok. It's a short one today, but enjoy it all the same :D