❘❙❚ ISSUE #06 ░░░░ VOL. 1
❛ THE MOMENT EVERYTHING CHANGE ❜ ┆🌹
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Rosie knew the exact moment when her feelings for Ben had changed. She had pointed to a new perspective on her relationship with him and what it really meant to her to have someone who could understand —even when Ben was a rabid, selfish child— the dynamics of a life with superpowers and has grown up on a military base. Since she met him, he behaved in many ways with her, depending on the day he had a better or worse mood, and Rosie reacted skillfully to those changes so nothing bad happened. That tolerance and restrictions for years had made her hate Ben, in silence she wanted them to take him away, but when they played chess she loved him and wished to be together forever. There was no middle ground.
That day, while drawing with watercolors scenes from the fifth chapter of Mrs. Dalloway, recreating everything she could. It helped her imagine the outside world and the characters, she liked to break down the scenes into vignettes, and even added some dialogue to it. Drawing was the only thing she could do; her chess partner hadn't shown up in a month and seven days.
After the soldier carried her on his shoulder to one of the doctors' rooms, she spent an hour traumatized waiting for the arrival of Dr. Stein, who wasn't helpful that day. He asked her a couple of questions and sent her to the bedroom. The next day they divided half of the day for group I and the other half for group II. Both groups filled her with questions and exams, starting with the physicists where they experimented with the disaster she had made with her ability, made her take off a piece of skin from her hand to take it to the laboratory, as well as a piece of hair and blood –which also had to be removed because the needles did not pierce her skin and her own strength was the only thing that could hurt her quickly. They connected some wires to her head and others to the rest of her body, even putting her in a kind of giant box that analyzed her body, or something like that. It was a new technology that used x-rays, Rosie didn't quite understand what the doctors were saying in their technical language. The last tests of those days were similar to those that group I did to test if she was immune to poisons and toxins, in this case, it seemed to indicate her saliva turned into poison. The first few weeks after receiving compound N —as geneticist Frederick Voght had named it— were martyrdom for the girl. She was kept awake for hours and only left four to sleep. The only time she had to clear her mind was two hours in the living room she had used alone for a month and seven days. Where was Ben?
At first, she thought he was recovering from compound N, she assumed having received a higher dose his body needed more time to recover, however, with the transitory of the days she suspected something bad had happened. The boy's presence seemed to have faded from the base. Normally they crossed in the corridors while they were taken to take an exam, sometimes they shared exams or were of dyadic matter, and every day they had coexistence. Coexistence was necessary in the words of psychiatrists, it was driven —especially— by the lack of development Rosie presented and threatened a mental retardation due to the lack of human contact, so the constant company of nannies and another child would help to mature things as simple as walking, talking and playing. The boy's chaotic personality drove away the calmness of Rosie, who preferred to be alone, and if she was given a choice between Ben and nothingness, she chose nothingness... until nothingness became nothing and after a few days she no longer liked nothingness and preferred Ben's annoying. There were no signs of existence. The doctors didn't talk about him and when she dared to ask Dr. Lang, he said:
"Ben is dealing as best as possible with the failures of his ability, just as you have yours, he was affected by some worse failures. All the doctors are trying to help him."
The doctor was not generous to dig a little deeper for Rosie's curiosity and concern and, either, did she feel that he was going to give her a longer answer. The information left her with more questions. Was he at the base? She thought he would be outside or elsewhere in the base. What did he mean by failures? Was that why doctors reduced numbers? After two weeks, the doctors who did daily exams or checkups rambled between two and three, and they were interns.
By the time the month and seven days were done she thought wouldn't see Ben again for a long time. But she was wrong and that day painting with watercolors the boy went through the door by the girl with black hair. Seeing him, it was when she realized she missed him very much and ran to give him a hug, the first hug she remembered wanting to give him.
"Ben?! Where have you been?" She was still hugging the small body she was still taller and, she was surprised to receive arms surrounded her. She had figured Ben would see it as something of a girl and he hated it. "It's been a long time, I thought you had been taken elsewhere."
As they separated, the boy dragged his tired feet to the chair closest to the heating. He rested his body as if he had returned from a long journey around the world. The mood he expressed was very different from how he looked. Rosie expected to see him shattered, with bruises spanning every part of his body, disgustingly concentrating on his hands. God! She had even believed he would no longer have hands! The boy was as peaceful as she was, with no trace of physical abuse, no bruises or cuts, no trace of compound N. The only hint was his sleepy, reddish eyes, the sad grimace on his lips, and the yawns he wavered.
"Outside," he replied. Rosie had been right in one of her theories.
"What happened? The last thing I remember is seeing the soldiers stop you by putting mask on. Did they put you to sleep?"
"That's right, the only way they could stop me. I couldn't stop beating, I wanted to stop, but I just couldn't. My body forced me to hit, but it felt good. Do you know Rosie? as if all my problems had gone away, I felt a relief... an infinite one," he concluded exasperated. "But I don't want to be hitting all day, I want to do other things. What happened to you? I have seen that plants drowned you."
"Something similar, I lost control of them. If I approach the earth, plants grow out of thin air, giant, heavy and poisonous. They do what they want, and now I have this poison."
Ben opened his eyes.
"Poison?"
"My saliva is poisonous now."
"Let me see?"
"I don't have green saliva, Ben, it's just that. It is dangerous for humans, it causes irritation, vomiting, violent seizures and pain in general, the doctors told me. Now they don't want to be close to me."
"Hey," the boy took his sight to the window where the psychiatrists were supposed to be. "Where are they."
"I don't know," she replied. "Since all happened, I haven't seen them, I've been alone in the room ever since. Do you think they won't spy on us anymore?"
"They need everybody working on the compound N and on us," suddenly, Ben leaned over to her and with a nod of his head urged her to get a little closer. The countenance changed him to a more serious and darker one. "Compound N is a failure. It went wrong and now it's a huge problem. I heard Dr. Stein talk to Dr. Fisher, they don't want to tell me anything, they try to keep it a secret, but I listened to them and I heard if they can't counteract or get rid of the failures, our ability is going to end up killing us. It did something to our brains, especially the part that takes care of controlling our ability, it is "eating" it little by little and when it is over, our own ability will kill us."
Rosie hadn't bothered to refuse or make up an excuse to justify the doctors' actions. At that point of experience in the military base, having a great knowledge of the interests of the doctors –who were never going to be on their side– it would be strange if they had not been injected then with the compound.
"I thought they tested these things on rats," she blurted out angrily.
"We are the rats so the next rats don't suffer the same failures."
"So we're going to die?" Rosie's question was an attempt to calm her own concerns by asking Ben to give her some relief.
"I don't know, they're working. I've been given pills to control my desire to hit, isn't it something, isn't it?"
Both children were scared. The figures of a father and a mother should exist in their lives to provide them with security against the invasion of the storm of the real world, which was hostile and cruel. Neither of them had someone to shelter them under their mantle or come to take the pressure off their breasts that no child should feel. Ben admired Colonel Fort as a little boy admired a father, seeking his constant approval; instead Rosie had no one, only Mary in her heart and the angels watching over her.
"I think so, they don't care about us, don't they? Not a little bit, we are just lab rats to be the next race of humans, but we have no idea what it is like out there and to save a war of which we have no idea. So why do we have to be here? How about we escape?"
"Are you crazy? where would we go? I think we are better off here, there are the soldiers and they would chase us anyway. They are not going to leave us free, even less being some failures."
"You like it here because you're going to be a soldier, the best of all. Here I have nothing, if I run away I'd be better off under a tree than here."
"I'm not going to let you escape, I don't want to stay here alone. It's like chess, the king has his whole army: he has the knights, the bishops, the rooks and the pawns, and the most powerful piece is the queen. I need my queen too."
That day things had changed in Ben and Rosie's relationship. As time progressed and the little girl became a teenager, she became reflective about the world around her –helped by great thinkers such as Virginia Wolf– she began to understand the dynamics fulfilled in the military base and her duty granted to the world. A thought that began to be explored in its moments of rebellion and maturity, go together with by the exploration of the world beyond the military base. Her ability gave her a power above the rest of humans and with all the signs of becoming the queen of queens, the piece with which Ben had proclaimed himself, little by little, in a parsimonious and Machiavellian tactic, stole her heart and, along with it, the construct of her individuality. Like chess, all pieces could die, except the king. If the king fell, all the pieces lost their purpose. All the pieces depended on the king, and the queen, no matter how powerful she was, no matter how brave she was to fight while the king remained locked up and protected, was no one without the king.
💬 !▬ author's note
please vote and comment it helps a lot
this is the end of vol 1!!! did you like it??? are we hating ben already ahaha?