TW: Violence, torture(ish) but not really because I'm a wimp.
Everything felt like lead; my limbs, my wings, my mind. I couldn't even get my eyelids to open. I had a numbing headache festering at the back of my head, brain clouded as I slipped in and out of consciousness.
Behind my closed lids, there was a harsh white light. Am I dying?
A sharp sting in the middle of my left arm dissuaded me of that thought, and a pained mewl left my mouth, the sound seemingly distant in my ears. Everything seemed distant, like my body was not my own, strung up with rope and moving like a marionette against my will.
"You're hurting him!" a female voice exclaimed, frantic and fast-paced. Familiar.
"Oh, please," a bitter voice muttered, rough and impatient, but also familiar. My arm felt a little slick, and I whimpered again as the sting returned for a brief second. "It's not like this is the first time we've done this, and he's out cold. He won't be waking up from those tranquillisers any time soon." As he spoke, there was a sting in my right arm, and I wriggled with discomfort. With my movement, there was the clang of chains, something digging into my wrists.
"Trevor, I told you not to hurt him!" The female voice was almost pleading this time, and I groaned, the familiarity of the voice muddled by the fog in my head.
Trevor? Do I know any Trevors?
The name rings a bell, but I can't... I can't think...
"You had no problem taking samples from the other specimens, Harriet," the male voice - Trevor - snapped, the name searing through my brain as I fought against the weight on my eyelids. Harriet. Harriet?
My Harriet?
It can't be.
"Harr... mnh... Harriet...?" I groaned, my eyes blearily opening into lethargic slits. I winced as a bright fluorescent light shone in my face, but I forced my eyes to open as everything began to fall into focus.
Silver-grey walls met my eyes, the metal slightly glossy and lined with matching metal shelving. Most of the shelves were stripped bare, with only the ones on the left wall filled with boxes of what looked like medical equipment; scalpels and syringes for specimen sampling, alongside other more intimidating items, which screamed 'torture' rather than 'healer'.
Dropping my head down, I saw that my top had been cut off, and it lay on the floor by my feet cleaved in half. My lower half was still clothed in the kevlar pants, though they were mottled with dirt and what looked like crusted blood. I didn't know where my mask or goggles were, but I definitely wasn't wearing them any more. My ankles and arms were strapped down with metal cuffs to a metal chair that had been bolted securely into the ground, that too, was made of metal. The room was sealed in with a large door.
It was strangely cold in the room, beyond the point of having the heating turned off in winter. No, the room was icy cold, and I was sure that I would've frozen if my avian-altered physiology hadn't managed to make me impervious to the chill. Though icicles weren't dripping from the shelves, the walls were slightly frosted over, the hardened condensation responsible for the metal's sheen.
I was in... a walk in freezer, of sorts?
Attempting to move my wings yielded no success; like my human limbs, they were tied back. The clang of chains and the way they were restricted in movement made me imagine that they were bolted to the ground in a similar manner to the chair I had been planted on.
"Huh, he's waking up. His drug metabolism is off the charts..." the male voice - Trevor - murmured, the keen tone of interest in his voice making me flinch back into my seat, a spike of danger screaming in my head. A calloused hand gripped my right arm, and I jerked against its bindings, only managing to make the metal dig further into my wrist.
My vision was still elusive and little shaky. My eyes seeming to dart here, there and everywhere without purpose, tried to focus on the owner of the arms, but couldn't seem to look past the large bore cannula being pressed into the fleshy fold of my elbow, above the scar from my once-broken arm. I watched as the sharp metal stabbed into my flesh - once, twice, three times until they got the right spot. A small bead of red swelled from the puncture from the poor insertion technique and my shaking, but I had been through worse.
I've hurt myself worse, I've hurt myself worse. This is nothing. I'm fine, I'm fine.
"What are... are you doing, you asshole?" I groggily growled, arm balled into a fist in retaliation, which only made my blood seep out of my veins and into the glass collection tube faster. At my words, the cannula was forcefully ripped from my arm without care or tenderness, and I let out a grunt of pain. My captor didn't bother to cover the oozing puncture with cotton or gauze, my blood simply dribbling a trail down the side of my arm and pooling on the ground.
"Trevor!" the female voice yelled, and I drew my head towards the sound. The face was blurry - Harriet's face was blurry - and I didn't know if I wanted my vision to clear. It was her voice, I'd recognise it anywhere, but maybe it was just the drugs working their way through my system, the head ache, or the fact that I had no idea what was going on.
It couldn't be my Harriet, the Harriet that looked after me when my parents went away, that changed my nappies when I was a baby, that made me vegan food that didn't taste like rubber, that gave me sex education when my mum was too embarrassed to do so by using bird analogies and making me cackle when she showed me how ducks reproduced with their corkscrew cocks.
It couldn't be the Harriet that was my second mother, the Harriet I trusted. I didn't want it to be. I'd rather it be any one but her.
But it was, that was clear when she pushed Trevor - oh, it's Professor Brakel - out of the way to kneel beside me, pressing a swab of gauze over my bleeding arm and applying pressure. I stared at her, in betrayal and disbelief and maybe a fraction of hope, but the woman I thought I knew couldn't meet my eyes.
I could barely recognised the expression on her face now, seemingly a mixture of shame and fear, but with other things I couldn't place. Her blonde-grey hair was completely undone and dishevelled, the waves stunted down her back in unkept clumps. She was wearing her lab coat, but underneath she wasn't donning her usual bright attire, instead clad in all black. There was some blood speckled on her white coat - my blood, or maybe someone else's - and instead of my Godmother, she looked more like a deranged scientist.
"Harriet?" I asked, my voice small, the sound of her name raising all of the questions raging in my head. Harriet seemed to pale, pulling the gauze away and checking to see if my wound had stopped bleeding, before getting up. Harriet hobbled, her chronically injured leg almost dragging behind her as she forwent her walking stick, throwing the bloodied cotton into a bin in the corner of the fridge.
"Let me go," I said, staring at Harriet, who still did not look at me. The woman held herself up by gripping tightly onto a chilled shelf. "Please, Harriet. It's... It's me."
"I..." Harriet tried to speak, her voice choked and gritty like she was trying to speak around a mouthful of rocks. "I'm sorry."
That was it. That was all she said, as Professor Brakel moved to stand in front of me, swirling a fistful of glass vials filled with my blood, crimson and thick.
"Oh, there is no way in Hell we're just going to let you go, Mr Fleet. Not after all of our efforts to find you," the Professor sneered, the lighting above his head casting menacing shadows in the wrinkles of his leathery-skinned face. His glasses gleamed, but no more than his eyes, which were alight with manic obsession and excitement. He smiled like the cat that ate the canary, topped with an edge of insanity.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked, the blood-letting, adrenaline and time allowing my body to finally clear the drugs that had been injected into my system. Now, the only ringing in my head were the danger alarms my birdy senses were feebly throwing at me.
"For science," Professor Brakel said, as if it were obvious, and I couldn't stop the derisive snort escaping my lungs.
"For science?" I parroted incredulously. "Kidnapping, assault, murder? That's not science, that's madness!"
"In the past, they used to call what we now consider basic science madness, magic, witchcraft," Professor Brakel said, smile widening, like the cheshire cat. "What we're doing is simply the science of the future. We're paving the way for evolution. No, we are evolution."
"What you are is a whole load of crazy, dude," I spat, wriggling in my chair, muscles flexing as I tried to break the ties binding me. The metal groaned, the bolts flexed, but they did not give. My wings just pulled the chains taut, but they did not snap. I growled as all six of my limbs slumped in defeat and strain, Professor Brakel barking out an amused laugh.
"It is alarming that you, the being that is the most evolved in the universe, can call this crazy. Look at you," Professor Brakel continued, face awed as he reached out to grip my chin, almost reverently. I reeled from the touch, fearful and disgusted, but the Professor did not look annoyed, only stepping around me to stroke my wings. Maggie and Piper bat at his hands desperately, hating his touch as much as my humanoid flesh did, the chains clanging loudly with the scrape of metal against metal.
"You are a sign of success. Those other specimens, they were failures. They were not strong enough to evolve, to become more. But you, you are special. Somehow, you ascended, and we need to figure out why," Professor Brakel said, speech picking up in pace, words tumbling over themselves in his passionate lunacy.
At the end of his spiel, Professor Brakel roughly grabbed onto a patch of my feathers, not hesitating to rip them out. I cried out in pain, eyes squeezing shut as I forced myself to breathe. Professor Brakel dropped my glossy ebony wings into a specimen bag, and I whirled my head to Harriet, who hadn't said anything, frozen in place and not looking at the two of us.
Professor Brakel looked betwee the two of us, eyes narrowed.
"Ah, yes. And what a small world this is," the madman chimed, tucking the samples into the large pocket of his own lab coat, moving to the door and unlatching it. From the opening, I could see that it opened into the back room of Harriet's lab, the chorus of screeching, caged birds solid evidence of that. "To think that you knew each other beforehand. Fate? Providence? I'm a man of science, but I do appreciate the power of coincidence. Now, I have many samples to process. Harriet, I expect that you to join me after you, ah, calm down our little birdy here?"
Harriet nodded stiffly, and I grit my teeth. Professor Brakel looked satisfied, stepping out of the fridge and closing it behind him.
"Harriet ," I called out, voice strained. "Why are you doing this? This isn't you... I know you... I thought knew you..." I don't know you at all.
"I didn't know it was you!" Harriet finally said, voice shaky, eyes finally turning to me full of tears. "It was never supposed to be you, I don't even know how... God, Culver, I wish it wasn't you! When they took Milo and Lark, they were about to take you too, but I stopped it. But then... Black Dove... It was you... I never wanted to do this to you!"
"To me?"
"Yes! You're my Godson, and I love you, and I never wanted to hurt you but..."
"But you've hurt more people than just me! You say that you don't want to hurt me, but look at me! And you're not showing any remorse for hurting those other victims... the... the..."
Harriet was unravelling in my eyes, my mind, my heart. Everything she was saying was twisted, and I ached all over, my mind screaming. My head drifted back to that day at her house, when we were eating lunch and the TV was playing in the background, reporting on the mysterious death in the river, and the abducted homeless. Harriet had said that it was disgusting, and I thought she was talking about the crime.
Was she not talking about the crime?
Was she talking about the victims?
The Frankenbirds they released against the police - when was that? Yesterday? Two days ago? How long had I been here for? It all clicked into place. The missing homeless, that's who those Frankenbirds had to be; people Harriet thought were disgusting, and turning them into the monsters that they never were.
Human experimentation in the name of science. Of evolution.
"How could you?" I said, voice low, anger simmering as the images of the dead bodies, the homeless man's relieved face when I saved him, Milo and Lark tied up and beaten swirling in my head. "How could you do that to those innocent people?! To me?! To my friends?!"
My boyfriend.
"Was that why you were so keen to talk to me about Lark and Milo the other day, when we had lunch after I came to this lab?" I asked, straining against my metal bindings as the rage built. "You said that you didn't know it was me, but then why would you go after them?!"
"I didn't know it was you, I swear," Harriet said, missing the point as she leaned heavily against the shelving. "The reports said that Black Dove... That you had a girlfriend, and I knew from the pictures that it was Lark. I knew you'd broken up, though, so I didn't think that it would be you..."
"And Milo?" I snapped, Harriet blanching even further, her cheeks not even rosy in the cold of the walk-in refrigerator.
"He was collateral..." Harriet whispered, eyes wide with shame but lacking remorse, as if she thought her actions distasteful but not wrong. "It was necessary... we just wanted Lark, to lure you out, but he was there..."
"Harriet, are you hearing yourself?!" I gasped, sucking in a pained breath as I continued to fight against my bindings, which still didn't give no matter how hard I beat my wings and twisted my arms. The metal cut into my skin even more, and I was sure my wrists were bleeding, though my bound ankles fared better since I was still wearing my pants and boots.
Harriet didn't answer, moving to the door, as if she couldn't bear to be in the room any longer.
"Harriet!" I screeched, the rattling of metal mixing with the panicked squawk of birds as she opened the fridge door. "Harriet! This is insane! Let me go! Let me go! Don't do this!"
I screamed and screamed, even after she had closed the door without looking behind her, my words that tried to change her mind just falling on deaf ears, much like how my body was useless against its metal confines.
A/N: Not much left to go now, folks! Thanks for sticking with this story :)