(Reyes/Reaper x Reader — Part II) (Previously?)
Moving first in small increments, you make a full visual sweep of the area; there’s the usual equipment and sterilized surfaces, a perimeter of clinical white walls, lights blanching everything beneath them. Glass, chrome, and stainless steel in abundance.
The stillness kindles a fear, one feeds the other.
“What do you want to show me?”
An inhale breaks. His. Shallow and rasping, fighting for air. Then, speech: “Find me…” You can’t see a mouth, let alone a face or a body, but you don’t need to; his smugness is all too evident.
“If I find you,” your thoughts suspend with an uncertain halt, resisting the urge to turn in the direction of his voice, “will you go back to your room?”
“You… want to make a deal?”
You don’t like how he sounds pleased with this, so, you clarify. “Not a deal, just a game.” A less threatening concept. Unfortunately, still competitive. The win-loose element provokes.
You take his non-response as agreement before announcing you’ll start looking, checking the most obvious of places first. Inside cabinets and under desks, graduating to cupboards and drawers. Impossible hiding spots.
Having exhausted the room, you stand defeated and lowered to the point of paranoia, not without the idea that he had cleared the laboratory and was traversing the base, moving further and further away.
“Is our… little game… over?”
This time his voice hits your ear, spilling over onto the vulnerable flesh of your neck. It coaxes a tremendous shiver from your core to the surface of your being. He can see you shake and it makes him laugh.
Hands—no, not hands, though it feels comparable—move over you.
Looking down, oil-black smoke wraps around your waist, rendering you motionless. It slides, grips; these are sensations you quickly lose track of.
And once again, everything goes dark.
You wake to O’Deorain hovering as you’re sprawled out in a swivel chair, all flailing limbs as you come back to consciousness.
“Well,” she pulls back, “a continuous surprise, you are.”
Cognitive pile-up welcomes you, disorientates. You try cataloguing the last events you can remember—the subject freeing himself when the power cut, agreeing on a game for his compliance, searching, losing—then, a nothingness. A loss of light, ripped away from you like a tablecloth, timeless as a blink.
As you summon the courage to admit that you had accidentally done something you shouldn’t have—interference at its finest and most blunt—a door at the far end of the room slides open.
“Gabriel,” O’Deorain says, prick-eared as a cat, knowing before she checks. “You’re early.”
“For once,” comes the reply, not without a scoff.
Peering around the geneticist, you find the subject, Gabriel, has let himself in. There is no residual smouldering, no ink or shadows. Even his voice is different, less guttural.
With a half-smile, enduring the wild-eyed stare, he makes a point of speaking to you directly: “Hey.”
You know you mouth ‘hey’ in return but you can’t hear yourself. You can hardly make sense of what you’re seeing let alone pretend.
There’s an awkward parenthesis of nothing where you assume he’ll say something about yesterday, if only to help you fill in the narrative for O’Deorain, but he doesn’t. In fact, he tips his head back, focus anchored, then says, “I don’t think we’ve met yet.”
“And we’ll keep it that way, if you don’t mind,” Moria says, giving you both a kind smile. You’re introduced as her assistant but he does not get your name; this is not out of rudeness, this is her policy. Formal dynamics you are obligated to follow.
Still, another moment passes where he seems to consider something, then it leaves him with a shrug. “I mean, I’m not the one in the lab coat. This is your domain, I’m just passing through.”
Social convention out the window, you continue to scrutinize; it’s beyond you how he appears so remarkably human. Nothing like witnessing the impossible, scientific or paranormal, to make you forget how to behave. As far as you were concerned, the world and everything in it had irreversibly departed from normal last night. All that was left was to gauge just how abnormal things has become.
“Nice meeting you,” Gabriel says before O’Deorain ushers him away. You watch the two leave, falling prey to your own questions that will go unanswered.
Like how, for whatever reason, the subject is set on keeping up his convincing act as if he doesn’t remember who you are.
Unless, he really isn’t acting.
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