tiles are cold. biting. they dig into knees and the softer parts of shins where the muscle hasn't almost entirely deteriorated from lack of use over — how many years had they said it had been? three hundred something? and now, she is further in the drowning depths of being a lab rat than she had been even when the tune had shifted from military volunteer to augment.
head hangs low as it can with her wrists bound up to the tile walls by solid metal cuffs and chains, her shoulders leaned forward and body slumped. nala cannot tell how many days — or if it's been weeks, months, years — since she had originally been placed in this cell, but she does know that the man with white hair is coming, and that he will bring with him endless pain. extended suffering that pierces through the walls built up over nearly a decade of intentionally causing herself harm alongside brothers and sisters in order to craft immunity to everything they believed could be thrown at them.
but this is different. they use the fallen of that family to pick and prod and peel back the flesh of wounds they cause to see if there is anything they can manage to utilize for themselves.
who they are, she does not know.
the men that come into her cell always wear either a uniform of some sort, though, so she assumes military, even if the medical staff that draw her blood and commit the atrocities themselves at the behest of the uniformed ones wear scrubs and whites. perhaps, she wonders, they had come full circle and made it all the way back to earth.
though it has not been home for longer than she can remember.
the heavy, creaking door opens, that sound rousing her from the near delirium she's begun to fall into thanks to lack of sleep, food, and water. head lifts, silver hair parting around face that's gone pallid, and she swears she must have died.
her captain — @deficd. the man that had vowed to be with them all through everything. he stands before her in the last thing she recalls him wearing before they were forced into isolated cryosleep. a black long sleeve she swears she can smell, black trousers, bloused into his boots the way that he had taught her to do so when they first entered the augment program together.
her body shivers, lower lip quivering in the seconds it takes him to step closer, to kneel in front of her and take her chin in his hand. place a finger to chapped and torn, busted and bruised lips. "hush." his voice, as if it has not been a day since the last time they spoke. "say nothing. give nothing." it is an order, despite the kindness that laces the tone — the way he pulls finger back from her lips to allow that hand to assist in cradling her head and keep it aloft.
"it is not your fault," he whispers, and it is gospel. it is the vaccine for the guilt that had begun seeding itself in her belly when she had seen their fallen brethren's bodies; photographs in a strange device shown to her by the man with white hair so she could see just how many of them had been cracked out of their tubes and used before she had the honor of being revived, giving them the bulk of the results for their research. the blossoming tree it had begun to grow into withers with his words, repeated, again in a harsher tone that echoes not the adoration she places on him, but the command he possesses over her.
his hand comes across her cheek. rough, fast, painful. her head jerks to the side, and she's hovering in that position for a moment.
her head returns to the previous position, and her commander? her captain? the only love she has ever known herself to possess? is gone. whatever fragmented part of her brain had summoned him has deemed the job done, and so she spits blood to the side of herself before pulling her wrists towards her center, using that leverage to haul herself to her feet, bare and as bruised and broken as the rest of her body.
jade stare sets on the pane of glass thirty feet across the plain white room from her. on the door that had never actually opened. her chest aches with the realization that captain khan noonien singh is likely dead, and yet the figment bolsters her still.
"bring to me the man with white hair."
a demand, made by the minuscule woman that had once commanded a crew more powerful than these whelps can understand.
"let him pay for what he has done to us."
