Sumbuddy

27. She/her. 18+ this is not a space for minors. This is where I keep all the little monster stories that make me happy. Icon, done as a special request, by @ yo-ymmat.tumblr.com

[snowkissedmonsters]

I actually think all fairies are fat, in their natural habitat. The Irish used iron horseshoes to protect their milk and butter stashes from fairies bc they love cream so much. Cream and berries and honey and ale, all day every day. If you see a skinny fairy she is underfed, give her some sugar water like you would a tired bumblebee 🍰

[bucketsofmonsters]

The Past is Prologue

Chapter 14: Lyra

Spike Spiegel x fem OC

cw: medical horror, dissociation, conditioning, depersonalization, amnesia, forced nudity, ivs, restraints, memory loss, torture, sensory deprivation, losing time, loss of sight, unreliable narrator, vomitting, whump

Work count: 4k

Masterlist

Ao3

Lyra passed much of the time in her newfound freedom staring at her stomach.

She’d forgotten all about it the same way she’d forgotten many things, hidden in the lost recesses of her mind. And then Spike had looked at it, had hitched her shirt up like it was obvious that it was there. Maybe to him it was.

It was her insides. She knew that much, could see exactly what was visible through that little clear window. It seemed openable too, accessible. She could touch them, if she wanted. Find out how she worked. See what had gone wrong, inside of her. Find out why she was like this.

She made no move to do so. She doubted she’d be able to understand any of it, even if all of the answers were there.

She also avoided looking in front of Spike. It felt like it was a step out of line. Maybe not breaking a rule but certainly a sign of an inner world, of thoughts she didn’t think she was supposed to have.

She did see, in one of her obedient glances that she had not caught in time, the way he tucked the tubes the doctor’s had put in him as close to his body as he could. She saw the way his fingers lingered on them. She looked away, dread blooming in her at the step out of line.

He didn’t notice. He never did.

He had become nigh on obsessed with ensuring that they drank and ate. It was an unpleasant experience, one she dreaded. Not that she would ever say as much to him.

It was that time once again. She choked down the food. It felt a little like it might suffocate her, the weight of it in her mouth and stomach uncomfortable.

She did not throw it up, though her stomach made plenty of loud noises to make its displeasure known. It seemed to move more, she noticed, whenever she found herself alone enough to look.

She got the sense that it may have upset Spike, that she had managed to keep the food down and he hadn’t. He seemed to take any sign that she was doing something more easily than he was as a personal slight, though he’d never said as much. It was easy to see. He wasn’t exactly subtle, huffing and attempting to storm around, though his difficulty walking and his makeshift cane made the latter harder to do. She imagined that that fact, too, did nothing to improve his mood.

It was harder to know when Spike was there or not than it was with the doctors. With them, they were either in the room or they were not. Spike, however, was almost always there. Physically, at least. He left only to get supplies, returning seemingly as soon as he could.

But there was something else to him. Sometimes he was there but he was not. She could see it in his eyes, the way he was withdrawing in on himself, pulling away. In those moments, she decided, he was not there.

It was in those times only that she allowed herself to be. She still had to fall in line, of course, but there was something freeing about not being observed.

This was one of those times, Spike’s eyes not quite focused on anything, his face blank.

She flexed her shoulders back and then forwards again, testing her bounds, checking how each muscle moved, the sensations that came with it. There was something novel about feeling pain. She had a vague recollection of it being something bad, something universally hated, but it was an almost grounding sensation.

And then Spike looked her way, seemingly not as withdrawn as she’d thought initially. It was disconcerting, to think someone was not there and then find that they were. She found herself wishing Spike would just leave and return like the doctors had. That had made the guessing far easier, a game of listening rather than of seeing. She was not good at seeing.  “You achey?” he asked, his eyes tinged with concern. Perhaps that was what she had mistaken for distance.

Was she? This was just how things had been since her pain had returned to her. It had seemed simply like the way things would be, from now on. A new state of being.

She was well accustomed to status checks. There had been many, back in the labs, just to ensure she was existing in the conditions they wanted for her. Maybe that’s what this was, an assurance that she had not become removed from his command to feel pain.

But then, for reasons she could not fathom, he had seemed averse to the commands.

It wasn’t for her to figure out. He had asked her a question and she should answer it. The thinking just took time and energy that was not hers to expend. “Yes.”

His eyes darted across her body like he might be able to see it. Maybe he could, though she could not fathom how. “Where?”

She took quiet stock of herself, muscles flexing as she evaluated them. Some hurt more than others, certainly, but there was a low-level ache that seemed almost to encompass her. She wondered if that was what he meant or if, perhaps, some of it was normal and came along with being in a body allowed to feel such things. Was there some sort of threshold she should be holding each part of her body against?

“All of it.”

This seemed to displease him, some sort of wrong answer. He seemed to notice her judgement somewhere on her face, flinching back a little. Did she really react so clearly?

“I’m not upset with you,” he clarified, clearly irritated with the need to do so. “It’s not your fault, it’s not wrong or whatever you used to talk about. Things can be bad and not wrong.”

Bad? Was that what she was, then? It felt a juvenile label, but he had seemingly given it to her. Who was she to judge the merits of such things?

“It’s because of how they kept you,” he explained, either uncaring or unaware of her confusion. “You need to build muscle. And stop sitting so weird. It will mess you up if you keep sitting like a puppet with its strings cut.”

The image filled her mind and she pulled herself up, as if strings were holding her. She could manage that much. Despite his insistence that it would help the aching, it seemed only to increase a tension along her back.

She, of course, did not voice this thought. He had given his word and thus she would become.

He ignored it, though she saw the way his eyes lingered on her. She couldn’t read the emotion off of him. “Come on,” he said as he struggled to his feet. “You can stretch with me. It’ll help you build up strength. God knows we both need it.”

She shifted up behind him, an echo of his motion. That was how it went. He moved and she followed, doing her best to mimic him. It was difficult, sometimes. She was not accustomed to being aware of her limbs in the way some movements required. It was something that had faded over time and that was slow to return. She’d spent much of her time, lately, practicing flexing each muscle in turn, watching how it moved. Tiny shifts, things Spike would not notice. Not because she thought it was out of line, of course. She would not do anything out of line. But it was good to not be bothersome. She couldn’t remember why but the fact seemed true to her so she’d tried to make herself small and unobtrusive when she wasn’t being useful.

It didn’t seem to be working, if she was completely honest. Spike seemed irritated with her more when she was small and waiting than anything else. He seemed to rejoice at every push or step out of line from her.

It had occurred to her that perhaps this was its own sort of rule, that maybe he wanted her to adjust in line, replace complacency with disobedience. But that was a step too far for her. She hated to admit it but even if commanded she wasn’t sure if she could do it, like trying to force your body to step off a cliff when everything in your mind screamed at you not to. A habit formed over too many years.

They did not stretch for long. He became frustrated quickly, she noticed, but not at her. All his irritation seemed to orbit himself, how his body could move, how long he could stand, how his balance seemed to teeter even when he was standing on two legs.

She tried to pay as little notice to it as she could. It was no business of hers what he was frustrated with so long as it was not her. She did her best, though, to only mimic movements that seemed intentional, lest she turn his ire on her.

One time, she judged incorrectly, following a movement that had blended between the two, not clearly a stretch nor an expression of anger. At least, not to her eyes.

“Can you be a human for five seconds?” he snapped, and she did not recoil. It was not right to do so, one must remain to properly appreciate consequences.

This seemed only to fan the flames of his anger further, reeling back at her stillness. But she did not know how he wished her to move. He had to know she would follow his commands if he would simply give them to her. And yet, he steadfastly refused.

He tried once more and stumbled, balance failing as he stood most upright on two feet.

They stopped stretching after that.

The way she held herself seemed to upset him more often than not. She’d tried to adjust the way she sat, the image of a puppet lingering on her mind, intent on keeping imaginary strings taut. That too seemed to upset him, scowling at her from where he was lying on the bed. She didn’t know what to do to fix it, could only follow the only instruction he’d given. Like a puppet.

“Can you lay down on the bed like a normal person?” he finally huffed, eyes darting away as if he could not bear to look any longer.

It sounded like it could have been a command, switched around in the opposite of the way she did things. A command inside a question instead of a question inside of a statement. The principle of the thing remained the same.

The motivation could be too, she supposed. Perhaps the orders didn’t fit with the person he was supposed to be and that was why he had to hide them, sneak them by in hidden statements.

It was a kind thing to do, if it was true. To try and smuggle her bits of structure and order despite whatever seemed to be stopping him.

She complied, laying down atop the stained, faded blankets piled on top of the bed, half unmade since the first time Spike had slept in them. Her side of the bed saw the sheets still tucked under the mattress, barely crumpled from the weight of her.

Lying down on it was an uncomfortable sensation. Being horizontal made her feel kind of queasy, like her blood and her meat were sliding to the back of her, dragged down. She fought the urge to check her stomach.

The mattress was too soft, the give to it making it feel like she was being swallowed. She did her best to ignore it.

Spike sighed, like this too was something she was doing out of line. “Fine. We can try blankets next time.”

She hadn’t known that was a part of this. She wished he would just tell her what to do, that she didn’t have to play this horrible guessing game. Irritation spiked in her too, mimicking his own. Perhaps it was what he deserved. Not that she would ever tell him that.

She did not sleep that night, instead staring up at the ceiling and waiting, loath to move in case she should wake Spike. She tried closing her eyes a few times, becoming comfortable in the darkness once more, but it felt a privilege she had not earned. She wished someone would just take her vision away, remove the sense of choice in it all. But now all she had was Spike and he certainly wasn’t going to do it.

And why had she gone with Spike? She had vague recollections of it, fewer holes in the memories than in most of her past. But she hadn’t thought about it in so long. She had become accustomed to simply doing the things she was told to do, so when her mind became set on it, following along had become second nature.

But it wasn’t just an order, she recalled. There had been something else there, something pulling her along. A promise.

Spike had known who had put her there.

It was hard to understand why that pulled such a strong response from her. She’d liked it there, in the labs. It had been comfortable and safe and the only home she’d ever known. And yet, upon the idea of meeting whoever put her in there, waves of anger and frustration consumed her, their source still hidden from her.

It was a disconcerting feeling. She could see why it had been so buried, forgotten until now, while she was forced to lie.

She wasn’t sure if she should bury it again. It seemed important, critical even. Spike had promised it to her and it had pulled her out of the labs. Surely it meant something.

The promise nagged at her too. He had said he knew who put her there, but he had not spoken on it since. Had he forgotten? It seemed unlikely. Spike did not share her unreliable memory. His purpose had been different.

So why had the promise not come up? It was, of course, well within Spike’s right to lie to her and deceive her, the same way it was within everyone’s rights. And yet, it arose a queasy feeling in her, akin to the one that accompanied lying down or eating.

And so she held onto it, clinging to the question and the memory until morning came and she could decide whether she should ask or not. This, at least, was a choice she wanted to make.

Outside of that decision, she existed as she always did. A reflection. A puppet, though not one that held itself right. She wondered if Spike had realized that he was the one who was supposed to be holding her strings now. She supposed she would never know, he certainly did not seem keen on volunteering the information.

As he rose the next morning, denoted by the light that snuck down the dark alley through the cracked window, she heard him shuffling about somewhere near the head of the bed, behind her in a sort of way. Directions were harder to conceptualise when lying flat. Another thing to dislike about the orientation. She could not see what he was doing, too busy with her lying.

Finally he returned to her field of view. “What is this?” he asked, holding up some wrapped food. It looked like he’d pulled it out from behind the bed.

She had no idea why she was being asked about it, Spike was the one who took care of the food. She shrugged noncommittally, a gesture he seemed to tend towards.

He huffed. “Do you recognise it?”

She looked closer and then realized that she did. Spike had given it to her, some bar of food. Heavy in nutrients, he had said. He’d indicated vaguely that she should eat it, though he never offered the words. But there it was, so she clearly had not eaten it. “You gave it to me,” she said, figuring she’d say at least what she had figured out. “I was supposed to eat it.”

“So why did you shove it behind the bed?”

Had she done that? It didn’t seem particularly likely but Spike sounded absolutely certain of it. Why would she have done that? “I don’t think I did.”

“Well I didn’t and no one else has been in here.”

She shrugged again, uncertain what he wanted from her.

“Listen, we have to get our strength up and the most important part of that is food.”

“I don’t remember it.”

He grunted out something in frustration that she couldn’t quite make out. “You need to stop forgetting things, it will never get better if you don’t stop forgetting things.”

A sharp pain made itself known in the side of her head and she did her best not to display any discomfort other than the tick of her head to the side in surprise. She knew that he had told her not to scream their first night here, held onto that as she pushed it down. “Understood.”

He grimaced. “No, stop, I didn’t mean it like that. Do not take it as an order.”

They contradicted in a way that made her head spin. “I… will try.”

He seemed to realize what he’d said in the face of her confusion, though she hoped her distress was not on display alongside it. “That is not what I meant. I don’t… can I just order you to stop following orders? Would that work?”

The pain in her head was getting worse. “I suppose.”

“What was that?”

She had no idea what he was talking about. “I don’t know how to answer that.” She failed to keep the desperation out of her voice. She didn’t want to be here anymore, didn’t want to have to deal with all of this. Surely no information was worth this.

“That face. Are you in pain?”

“Yes,” she answered truthfully.

He did not seem pleased with this answer. “For how long? When did it start?”

Time was particularly difficult for her, one of the things outside the lab she couldn’t seem to wrap her head around. “Not long,” she decided on, hoping it was accurate enough. “It started when you ordered me to stop forgetting.”

“Not ordered,” he whined. “I told you not to consider it an order.”

“That made it worse,” she added, unsure if it was information he was after but wanting to provide more after her lackluster first answer.

Spike buried his head in his hands. “Right. That’s not good.”

She took note of that fact, unsure what else she should do with it. Surely he was telling her for a reason; she did not need to be privy to it.

“I didn’t mean to do that. I don’t want to give you orders, you just need to… It would be best if you could keep your food down.”

She felt her nose crinkle a bit as he spoke. She tried to imagine what it would look like on his face, nose scrunched at something she had said. It looked like displeasure, in her mind. Was that what it was? She was fairly certain she wasn’t supposed to show things like that.

It seemed to make Spike anxious. “Did I make it worse again? I didn’t even say anything this time.”

“No.”

“Then what’s wrong? You look like someone just stole your shoes out from under you.”

“I just--” He had asked. She was fairly certain she wasn’t supposed to lie but what was wrong was him.

“I think you’d rather not know,” she decided, hoping it was enough of an answer to satisfy him.

It only seemed to make him want answers more. “What does that mean? That’s not the correct answer or whatever, aren’t you supposed to be obsessed with questions?”

“What’s wrong is you,” she snapped. “I don’t know why you were so set on having us escape if this was all you were going to do. You can barely even manage for yourself, let alone me. If you were so against giving clear instructions and you didn’t know how we would be able to eat enough, why would you take me here?” She panted, her body feeling drained of energy from even the short outburst. She couldn’t live like this, not out here, not with him.

Instead of angry or confused or even ashamed, Spike seemed delighted. He had a stupid grin plastered across his face, his eyes wide and shining with excitement. “There you are. A real person is in there. I knew you existed.”

“Do you think frustration defines personhood?” she asked, the words harsher sounding than she suspected they should have been.

He had the audacity to laugh at that. “And a question too, it’s shaping up to be a big day for you. It’s good to see a personality does exist under all that brainwashing and people pleasing. I was starting to worry I’d stolen a robot.”

She had half a mind to throw something at him. The thought shocked her, feeling intrinsically wrong, stirring something in her stomach. She turned around, away from his smug little celebration, and vomited up the little food she’d eaten earlier.

That, at least, put a damper on his smugness. She was almost glad it had happened, if only to make him stop. Throwing up was still deeply unpleasant, the taste of it overwhelming and the sensation akin to that of her being turned inside out.

He shuffled forward, as slow as ever, and began to clean it up, letting out a healthy string of curse words as he went. She settled back on the bed behind her, content to watch him.

“You could help me, you know,” he said, giving her an irritated glance out of the side of his eye as he worked.

“I could.”

“I never know when you’re being annoying on purpose,” he huffed.

She shrugged, far from inclined to give him anything right now.

He didn’t even see the motion, too caught up in his cleaning.

She ran her tongue along her teeth. They too tasted like bile. “May I ask you something?”

He perked up at that, looking up at her with big eyes. “Of course. Always. I’d prefer if you did.”

“Who put me there? In the labs?”

He deflated at the question and she fought the urge to retract on herself. She should have known better than to ask.

“I’ll show you,” he said, voice almost too quiet to hear. “When we get out of here and find my crew. When we’re safe. Then I’ll show you.”

She nodded, wondering if it was true or an attempt to push it off again. She supposed it didn’t matter. She wondered if she’d even remember long enough to find out.

He seemed caught up on the notion for a while, allowing a silence to blanket them long after he had finished his cleaning. She wasn’t sure if that made it more likely he was telling the truth or more likely he was lying.

Finally, his eyes snapped up, like he’d suddenly remembered her existence. “You have to… I would like it if you would tell me if you’re in pain,” he informed her.

“I’m always in pain,” she offered up, worried he didn’t understand the implications of his new, cloaked order.

“More pain, then. Anything new or a sharp increase.”

She nodded. That made sense to her, at least. She added it to her catalogue of cloaked orders, ones she had to focus to follow instead of doing so habitually. It would be so much easier if he would do it right so they could fall into place. But then, who was she to question him? Maybe this was one of her new tests. She supposed it didn’t matter either way, she would follow them all the same.

[bucketsofmonsters]

The Past is Prologue

Chapter 13: Spike

Spike Spiegel x fem OC

cw: medical horror, dissociation, conditioning, depersonalization, amnesia, forced nudity, ivs, restraints, memory loss, torture, sensory deprivation, losing time, loss of sight, unreliable narrator, vomitting, whump

Work count: 3k

Masterlist

Ao3

It had, by almost any metric that mattered, been a successful escape.

They were out. That was the one thing that meant anything, really. Definitionally. The escape was successful because they had escaped.

Even beyond that it had gone well. They had built distance between them, found somewhere to hunker down where the Syndicate seemed unlikely to look. He had access to communication devices, even if none of his useless crewmates seemed to be reachable.

It didn’t feel like an escape though. Not with the way it was haunting them, following them. Spike couldn’t run. He couldn’t even walk, not really. The most he could manage was limping along, occasionally being forced to collapse onto the ground and recuperate. It was a miracle he hadn’t been mugged yet. He knew how he looked. Feeble, weak. Like easy prey.

He’d gotten bare minimum supplies and then fled the streets as soon as he was able, feeling exposed in ways he was unused to.

Lyra was dressed in new clothes, baggy and nondescript. He probably should have gotten some for himself but Vicious’s would do for now.

He pulled a cigarette out of the box. It had been the first purchase he’d made and the second thing he’d acquired, following only the umbrella he’d snatched from a doorway to use as a makeshift cane. Smoking, at least, felt the same as it had before. Thank god for that.

Lyra stared at him in thinly veiled fascination as he breathed out smoke. “You’ve never seen someone smoke before?” he prodded.

“I think I have. But I haven’t seen anything in a long time.”

He grunted out an acknowledgement as he took another drag. “Want one?”

He watched her make her calculation, the one she tended to make after every question. “Maybe,” she decided, though she didn’t sound certain. “Should I?”

He shrugged. “Bad habit. Keeps you sane though.”

“You want me sane,” she said, speaking almost like it was a mantra for herself, words not meant for him.

She watched him carefully, eyes darting down to watch his chest expand and then back up to watch him exhale the smoke. “I’ll try. Why is it bad?”

“It can make you sick,” he explained. “Most things that are worth doing can, though. If you’re too busy worrying about it, you’ll forget to live.”

His words of wisdom didn’t quite seem to land with her the way he’d intended. She stared blankly at him in that off-putting way she was inclined towards and then took a cigarette out of the pack and lifted it to her lips.

He pulled out the lighter he’d purchased. It probably had not been the wisest use of their money. Food and shelter and a potential getaway were inexorably more important than his cigarettes and a lighter. He knew that, had known it just the same when he was getting supplies. Despite that, they’d been the first things he’d picked up. Like muscle memory. At least if he had nothing else, he had them.

Besides, she didn’t know that. He wasn’t even sure Lyra knew they needed to eat and drink, let alone that cigarettes weren’t, strictly speaking, a necessity.

It was probably taking advantage of her, of her naivete and the memory loss that was half his fault. He’d pay the penance for that if he had to, but at least he’d do it with a cigarette in his mouth.

The lighter took eight tries to light. He would’ve liked to have blamed it on it being a cheap piece of shit but he knew better than that. Whatever he’d fallen to, at least he could be honest with himself. He was a mess, his body refusing to move the ways he knew it could. He couldn’t fight, couldn’t walk. He’d thought he could at least light a cigarette.

His had taken him even longer but at least no one had been observing him then. It had seemed more tolerable that way; standing there, flicking a lighter over and over, desperately hunting for a flame.

After the eighth try he gave up, abandoning the lighter in favor of his own lit cigarette. He held it out to her, touching the unlit end of hers with the half-used smoldering nub of his.

It wasn’t perfect but it would do. It didn’t matter that much. He doubted she would enjoy the experience either way.

She held it exactly the way he had, a clear mimicry of him, before a hacking cough overtook her, tiny puffs of smoke coming up with each cough.

“There you go,” he said with a nod. “That’s the worst it’ll ever be. Try again.”

She held the cigarette up again, a perfect imitation of the last time. There wasn’t a hint of hesitation in her. She almost looked like an automaton, stuck on a perpetual, preprogrammed loop.

She coughed up the smoke again, less harshly this time. He worried, too late, that try again had sounded like a command.

“Only keep smoking if you want to,” he tried to correct. Even if it was too late.

She seemed frustrated at that, her fingers tensing, squishing the cigarette between them. “You don’t need to do that. The orders are fine. I prefer knowing what to do.”

“Too bad. That’s not how it works anymore.”

“You can’t decide that,” she hissed at him.

He snorted. “Oh really? I thought you took orders from me.”

She glared at him for a moment before dropping her gaze, eyes darting around and looking anywhere but at him as she tried to reconcile deferring to him with her anger. She brought the cigarette to her lips again as she scowled, almost certainly more to spite him than because she wanted to.

The cough almost sounded wet this time. That probably wasn’t a good sign.

He realized with a jolt that he could probably just check. She had that bizarre window in her stomach for a reason. “Can I take a look?”

She stared up at him for what felt like an eternity before nodding. She’d taken to doing that lately, a habit she’d picked up after the prolonged blindness and incapacitation. Every new bit of body language she had begun to show felt like a poor mockery of him. It was only the low simmering sense of guilt that kept him from snapping at her, telling her to stop mimicking him.

It was an unfair frustration. He knew that. She had no one else to mimic and everything probably seemed new and daunting to her.

This knowledge did nothing to tamp down the irritation.

He shifted forwards, slowly and intentionally. That was the way all of his movements were now, by necessity more than newly procured manners. He hitched up her shirt, untucking the pieces that had gotten stuck under her belt, and looked through the window that had been implanted in her stomach.

She inhaled once more, her breathing stuttering again as the caustic smoke worked its way into her lungs. He watched them expand, could see the stutters of her coughs as he heard them.

He wasn’t sure why he’d wanted to look. It wasn’t like he knew anything about what they should look like. He had nothing to compare them to, was instead just stuck looking at a mess of organs, most of which he couldn’t even identify, let alone evaluate for health.

Looking at the insides of her formed a sinking feeling in him, made him almost feel queasy. He hadn’t even felt sick like this looking at his own insides but he felt it looking at hers. It seemed almost backwards. He was inclined to blame it on whatever codependency drug they’d pumped him with before their escape.

He let the shirt drop again, stepping back and allowing himself to collapse onto the bed, watching the smoke from his cigarette curl up towards the yellowing ceiling.

She sat beside him and took another drag, smoother and easier. She seemed to be getting the hang of it.

His was almost burnt out. He put it out on the small table in the room, already covered in cigarette burns, and moved back to the bags he’d gotten. He’d had his break; it was time to figure out how to survive.

It had been a bit of a startling realization, seeing the food lining the shops and realizing how long it had been since he’d eaten anything. He’d almost forgotten about it, brain preoccupied by the dozens of other things he now had to worry about.

The room they’d rented had a small stove, shoved in a cupboard and unplugged, the flat surface of it no bigger than his palm. He was sure it had seen more drugs over the years than it had food but it would do.

He plugged it in, leaning against the table beside it as he waited for it to warm. He had a feeling it might take a while.

Lyra’s staring was, impossibly, less off-putting with a cigarette in her hand. It felt less like she was studying him so she could crawl into his skin and become him and more like she was people watching. Or, at least, it made it easier to pretend. For now, that felt like enough.

She seemed fascinated by the tiny stove, staring at it just as much as she stared at him. That too was a welcome reprieve.

The minutes passed easily. Her cigarette shrank and shrank and she didn’t seem to notice. He had half a mind to take it from her before it burned too low and injured her before she spoke.

“I smell burning,” she told him and he couldn’t help but laugh.

“That’ll happen when you smoke,” he informed her.

“Not it. You.”

He followed her gaze down to the little stove. His thumb was on it, having drifted when he wasn’t looking. His skin was burning. He hadn’t felt it.

He pulled his hand away, reaction delayed as his brain made sense of what he was feeling. There was no sensation change, no notable difference. If he focused he could smell it, the scent of burning flesh permeating the air.

Lyra took another drag of her cigarette. Spike held out his hand and she gave it to him and he took a drag from it too before putting it out. It was past its end. He wasn’t sure if she understood what had just happened but he doubted that she would voice any thoughts on the matter if she did.

He watched her, face blank in a way that felt put on to him but easily could have been genuine. It was almost impossible to figure out her tells because even her level of awareness at what she was saying or doing wavered.

It was hard to know how much of it was from whatever drug they’d been pumping her with and how much was good old-fashioned brainwashing. She had been so variable, affected by basically any outside stimulus, that it was hard to know what her baseline even was. She seemed lucid, at least. She was thinking and moving and breathing, even if she did turn to him constantly looking for guidance.

He needed to be more intentional in his words. She would make no progress if he just took their place and commanded her around. He had not gone through all this trouble to get her out just to become her new master.

Maybe he could bypass all of this and jumpstart her return to humanity. It was worth a shot, at least.

“Lyra?” he started. Her name seemed to be a trigger, sending her one way or the other. He figured it was best to attempt when she was as lucid as possible. Or maybe he wanted her suggestible, prone to listening. Either way, her name was the start.

She seemed to lean towards lucidity, her eyes gleaming in recognition at the name, seeming excited to be addressed.

“Remember,” he commanded.

She collapsed in on herself instantly, her head banging against the headboard.

He rushed over to her side, or at least he tried to. His feet got tangled on the way and he wasn’t strong enough to right himself so he too went tumbling down.

It took too long to struggle to his feet, even longer to reach her. When he did, she was in exactly the same position, crumpled and lifeless. Her head was leaking blood. He tried to remind himself that head injuries always bled a lot, that this didn’t mean anything, but it didn’t help.

He tried to rip off a piece of the new, allegedly clean sheets to bind her wound with but he was too weak to rip them. He didn’t have time to get frustrated, instead pulling one of the stained pillowcases of the pillows and wrapping it around the top of her head like a bandanna, tying it as tight as he could manage to hopefully cull the bleeding.

He went to pry her eyes open to inspect her pupils only to find them already open. They flicked, minutely, to his face, as if to scan it, and then carefully unfocused again.

She was conscious. That much was clear. He couldn’t fathom why she was lying still like this, letting him manipulate her, manhandle her.

“What are you doing?” he snapped. It was harsher than it should have been.

“I don’t remember why I’m here,” she informed him, voice tentative and scared. “Did I--” she choked on her words for a second, a stunted cough replacing them. She scanned his face once more, briefly, before beginning again. “Did I do something wrong?”

His anger shifted, redirected instantly, away from her and back towards their mutual captors. This wasn’t her fault. She was doing better. He would bet that she had no better idea of what would set her off than he did.

He didn’t understand it, any of it. Some of the rules they’d given her he could undo and some it seemed she could decide to ignore herself, but anything related to her memory was seemingly locked in place.

Except it wasn’t, he remembered. He’d ordered her to remember a way out of the labs and she’d done it. So that couldn’t be it. It was something else.

Realizing that didn’t change that he had no idea what it was and that without knowing, he could make it happen again, accidentally and without intention. One word had done this to her. She was already nursing a head wound, there was only so much one could take. And most people weren’t starting from whatever drug-addled brainwashing she’d been living in for years.

“No more commands,” he said as he watched the blood seep through the thin fabric.

She gave him the saddest eyes in the world, like a scolded animal who’d just been robbed of its new favorite toy that it had fished out of a garbage bin. He was well aware of it, Ein had looked at him that way a dozen times. He usually just gave the dog the trash back. It wasn’t worth the trouble.

The main difference was Ein’s vices didn’t leave him violently bleeding from the head.

“Why?”

“Why?” he asked incredulously. “You just passed out. You’re bleeding.”

Her arms flexed a little, moving a little more than they would have been able to if she were still in that chair. She was always a little slumped, still. Like she was expecting something to hold her up. “It wouldn’t matter if we weren’t both so…loose.”

He didn’t have the patience for this. She should be recovering somewhere that was actually equipped for her, somewhere where he wouldn’t have to deal with her. “I don’t have any full-body restraints on me, sorry.”

She didn’t dignify that with a response.

It didn’t matter. He had more important things to do than argue with her. It wasn’t like he’d been doing anything besides make it worse.

He had been making food. Surely he could manage it without burning himself. He had a lifetime worth of practice.

It was a simple process. Of course it was, it was a near instant meal made on a miniature stove. It wasn’t rocket science.

He handed it to her and she took it without so much as breaking eye contact. And then she waited, quietly, studying.

The second he brought a bite to his lips, she did the same. It was like she was trying to force commands out of him, interpreting every movement as a call to mimic.

He couldn’t bring himself to care about it right now. He just needed to eat, something he hadn’t done in months. He could worry about her later.

He scarfed down half of whatever it was; a cup of noodles and some vegetables, he was pretty sure. He hadn’t paid much attention while he’d been shopping, looking more at prices than anything, and had paid even less while he was making it, more focused on his hand than the food. His newly burned flesh and his continued inability to feel it.

And then his stomach churned. He set down the food immediately, rising to run to the restroom. Standing made the world spin and he fell back into the chair, breaths coming a little faster.

He hauled himself to his feet again, this time leaning against the wall as he made his way to the bathroom. He vomited, just barely making it into the toilet before every single piece of food he’d just eaten vacated his system. They hadn’t even been inside him long enough to pretend to be digested.

It had barely even hurt coming up, more food than bile. He heaved in air as soon as his mouth was clear, breathing in the disgusting smells from the bathroom of their shitty motel room.

Lyra stared at him through the open doorway. She’d walked there unaided, something he was incapable of.

He pulled himself across the floor, too tired to stand, and yanked the phone off the table, dialing Jet once again. It didn’t sound like it rang as much as it normally did before the line clicked off. Had Jet hung up on him? Was it even Jet’s number anymore?

He threw the phone across the room. It exploded into a pile of disparate electronics, scattering themselves across the floor. One ended up by his feet, a piece of a control panel from the looks of it. He would’ve kicked at it if he’d had the energy. Instead, all he could do was stare.

[bucketsofmonsters]

The Past is Prologue

Chapter 12: Lyra

Spike Spiegel x fem OC

cw: medical horror, dissociation, conditioning, depersonalization, amnesia, forced nudity, ivs, restraints, memory loss, torture, sensory deprivation, losing time, loss of sight, unreliable narrator, vomitting, whump

Work count: 5k

Masterlist

Ao3

She woke up warm. It was an unusual thing to be. They preferred to keep it cold; never told her why. It was just the way things were.

The dark had more vibrancy to it than normal, a texture to it that made itself known.

She opened her eyes and with it came sight. Even with her eyes closed, the light seemed to want to permeate inside of her, refusing to be denied.

It was not the light she was accustomed to.

Well, that wasn’t exactly true. She wasn’t particularly accustomed to any light. For so long, the dark had been a foregone conclusion. Being bombarded with sight of any kind was disconcerting, left her malcontented. Only recently had she begun becoming accustomed to the light in the lab, static and cold and unchanging. At least it was something she could get used to, steady in its alienness, uniformly reaching into every corner, steadfastly painting the room a sharp white.

This was nothing like that. The light was warm and shifting, bending into shadows, morphing and creeping through the room. It felt intrusive, ominous almost.

It had not yet reached her. She was on the further side of the bed from the window. The man lay closer to it, tendrils of warm light lying across his chest.

He made a horrible wheezing sound as he breathed, one that made her a little nervous. It almost sounded painful, each inhale stuttering to make it inside of him.

What had he said? It was fuzzy, the memories fading away in a practiced manner. Had he told her to forget? The memories still felt too close to her for that. At the first command, they knew to flee.

Sit normally, he had said. She was fairly certain of that. Ignore that. He’d said that too. Had it been before or after the rule to sit? And what made it normal?

Could she get up? She did not know what was in place. At the very least, she was fairly certain she had not been told to do anything, so she remained seated. Inaction was rarely punished.

At least it had been. Back there, where they had been. Things had made sense there. She didn’t know how things aligned in this new room with new light.

She sat, tall and still, as the morning light crept across sheets, approaching slowly. It coated her hand, the warmth of the room consuming her as it did.

He rolled on his side, away from the light. She wondered if it bothered him the way it did her, if he could feel the sun worming its way under his skin.

Could she move her arm? She couldn’t remember if she was allowed. Rules were harder to remember here, the edges of things blurring together.

The man shifted forward, arm curling toward her, brushing against her thigh, reaching out. The brush of skin against… well, not skin. Clothes, pants, the ones that they had worn. She tried not to think about that, tried to keep it pushed out of her mind, back where the rest of her forgotten things went. It didn’t quite work out. It didn’t seem a part of her she could access; only available to others, never to her.

Maybe the man could help her, could order the uncomfortable feeling in her gut away.

He seemed to stir at the brush of his skin against the fabric of her pants. His face scrunched as he woke, eyes forcing themselves further shut and wrinkles forming along his nose.

As his face smoothed, his eyes finding their way open, his gaze settled on her. She watched as recognition sparked in him.

“Good morning,” he said, something wry and quietly victorious in his tone. “How do you feel?”

He asked it like the answer should be something positive. Maybe it should be. How did she feel? Much the same as she always did, she supposed, though certainly more disoriented. “Fine,” she said, and it sounded blunter to her ears than it had in her head. “Normal,” she corrected, and it fit into place better; sounded more mechanical.

He didn’t react much to either response. Instead, he stretched, his back arching like a cat, head sinking back into the pillows. “You sore?”

“No,” she said, falling comfortably back into old habits. “I do not feel pain.”

He groaned and threw his head back at her answer. She couldn’t help but wince. It had never been an incorrect response before. But then, things were different here. She would have to learn once more.

He watched her still, the displeasure only growing. “Stop that,” he said, and she did not know what she needed to stop. Her confusion must have been evident. “The worrying about your answers thing. You don’t need to, there’s no wrong answers out here. As long as they’re honest, I guess, though I wouldn’t mind you lying every now and then.”

It was a disquieting notion. “I cannot lie,” she reassured him. “It is not what I am.”

“That means you’re under orders, right?” he asked, finally sitting up on the bed to get a closer look at her. “Do you know anything about those? Is it a mental thing? Or did they drug you?”

She looked at him; scanned his face and tried to figure out what he wanted. Surely he was aware that that was not information she was privy to, not something she was supposed to know. He had been around long enough to know that much.

He shifted under her gaze. He didn’t seem to like being looked at. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was doing something wrong, that the blame for his discomfort fell on her shoulders. She just didn’t know what she had done; more than that had no idea how to fix it.

After a while, he seemed to stop looking at her for an answer. That, at least, allowed her to relax, to stop searching for anything that might have resembled something correct. Though, she supposed, that didn’t exist anymore. She didn’t know what the sentiment meant for her but he had said it.

Eventually he seemed to settle on something entirely without her input. It was only when they locked eyes again that she realized he’d looked away in the first place.

When he spoke, it lost its lightness, had a force behind it. She relaxed at the sound of it, at the change in his posture. He became a man she could follow.

“You still take orders from me?”

“I do. Whatever you are willing to give.”

He seemed to mull something over. Not her words, she watched him discard those, but something else. And then he said, “Okay, don’t scream. Feel pain.”

She doubled over almost instantly, her muscles heavy and strained, wrought with years of tension she hadn’t known was there. Something splitting made itself known in her head, the disquieting feeling of the light turning into something sharp and piercing.

She gasped in air, her lungs aching at the intrusion, her throat screaming as the air whistled through it. It was so dry, every breath like sandpaper. She opened her mouth to say something, but instead of words, a horrible, gasping cry escaped her, hoarse and airy and barely audible. She didn’t know how it had so much breath in it, not when she could barely bring herself to inhale. She hoped it didn’t count as a scream.

There was a hand on her back, moving steadily, up and down. It was warm. More than warm, she could feel it, even through the newfound layers of clothes. She could feel the texture of it, the roughness. It hurt, pressing up against her; a buzzing, overwhelming sort of hurt.

It was a stabilizing sort of pain. Her breathing slowed, hurting all the same but steadying itself.

She felt real, in a way she hadn’t in a long time. She leaned into Spike’s touch, his hand pressed against muscles she hadn’t even realized she was tensing. The pain proved a quiet reminder of their existence. It extended her out, her limbs all connecting back to her. She flexed her fingers, feeling them stretch, knowing she could move them.

“This is not what I am supposed to be,” she informed him. It wasn’t scolding or knowing. Just a fact.

He seemed to understand that much, at least. “It is now. It has to be. There’s no room for you to be what you were. Not out here.”

“What will I be then?”

He shrugged, hand withdrawing from her. She felt heavier without it. “I can’t decide that. That’s on you now.”

She reeled back, almost tumbling onto the floor. Spike’s hand shot out, grasping at her, keeping her steady.

“I can’t,” she informed him desperately, willing him to understand. “I need to be told.”

“Tough shit. No more commands, you need to figure things out on your own now.”

She didn’t know how to react. What could she do? Certainly not lash out, she still had to stay in line. But what did that even mean anymore? He had just said that the lines themselves were going away. How would she even be if that were truly the case?

He seemed entirely unaware of how thoroughly he’d torn her world apart, almost instantly shifting his focus away from her. She didn’t mind that part, she was accustomed to being ignored. That, at least, she knew how to handle.

So she sat, as she always did, waiting for her to be needed once more.

The clothes were a difficult adjustment to make. She imagined it was easier to adjust this way, with them coming alongside so many other changes. Now there was movement and sight and pain. The temperature was different, the frigid air swapped out for something warm and muggy. It was a deluge of changes, something that made the smaller things easier to digest. The sensation of cloth against her skin was hard to focus on amidst it all.

The clothes were not entirely unobtrusive though. In fact, far from it. There was a persistence to them. Even forgotten for many hours, eventually the fabric would rub the wrong way and she would be reminded once more that she was engulfed, consumed completely.

She opened her mouth before clamping it shut once more. Was she allowed questions here? Spike had yet to get upset. She had foggy ideas, even, of their first meeting. Of bombarding him with questions early, before her lead had been drawn quite so tight.

“Do I have to wear clothes always now?”

He gave her a look, one that made her feel as if she’d done something wrong. She wasn’t sure if it was the question itself or the concept of it. “Yes.”

She hummed, an acknowledgement of her internalization of the new rule. Another question began to edge its way towards her mouth and she deliberated swallowing it down, refusing to push further and risk upsetting Spike.

Then she looked down at herself and saw the white ensemble she’d only ever seen under the harsh, cold light of the labs. “Does it have to be these clothes?”

That seemed to give him pause, making him look up at her. “Shit. No, it doesn't. I’ll get more when I go out. I should… We haven’t eaten. Shit, I forgot about eating.”

She, too, had forgotten about eating. She knew of it, intellectually, but it had never been something relevant to her. She knew humans could not survive without food but she did not think she had ever eaten and here she was. Was she human? She couldn’t recall.

As she considered it, Spike struggled to his feet, stumbling his way to the door. It seemed an incredibly strenuous feat but there was nothing she could do in regard to it other than to watch him go.

Things settled after that. The waiting was easier. It was a simple thing, to let the strangeness fade away when she was on her own. All she had to do was sit and wait. She was good at that.

She wasn’t sure how long she sat there, waiting. The passing of time was a sense that had long since faded. It was easier that way, to sink into the monotony. It turned the waiting into something else, something without expectation. Without time, there was no waiting, not really. Just existing.

When he came back, he was leaning on a long, closed umbrella, the handle wood and the closed fabric of it a deep blue. In the other hand was a bag, one that he was holding at his side, arm fully extended.

“Food,” he explained as he let the bag thud to the floor. “And clothes. I didn’t know your size.”

He picked up a wad of fabric and threw it at her. The clothes, she assumed. They pooled in her lap and she stared down at them, remembering the way he had put the clothes on her not so long ago. When she looked back up, he was staring at her expectantly, clearly waiting for her to do something, so she began to sort them, trying to reference the various fabrics in front of her with what she had seen.

Some of it was inherent. She knew what a shirt was when she saw it, knew where it went, but there was something daunting and unknowable in the how. She could not remember how to put clothes on, could only remember the vague shuffle of being dressed hours before, and likewise of him struggling to support himself while yanking the other man’s clothes over his form.

She gained nothing by waiting, though, and so she began. As she began to pull off the familiar doctor's gear, Spike turned away before freezing and turning back, seeming to remember how new the development of clothes was to her, how there was nothing secretive or private about her body to him anymore.

She almost wished it would stay that way. It was simpler that way. She did not know how testing would happen now, most of her ports and access points hidden away by fabric. Maybe there would be no testing. She wasn’t sure how to know.

He seemed resentful of the struggle she had with the fabric, of her knowing intellectually where the clothes needed to be and yet having a difficult time putting them there. It felt like failing a test. She tried not to focus on it overmuch, every time she did she only seemed to falter more.

She wondered how often she would have to do this. Some instinct told her it would be often, though she hoped it was not true. Having to see him look at her like that, frustrated and irritated and like she was wrong, seemed an insurmountable task. Perhaps it would get easier, her limbs beginning to remember how to do it. It seemed unlikely, and she did her best not to hope. It had never led her anywhere she should have been.

The clothes, for their part, were massive and clearly used, worn at the edges. The shirt left her dwarfed, hanging loose on her sides. An equally oversized jacket accompanied it, thick and warm with patches on the edges to cover thin spots from wear. The pants fit her a little better, though they still hung loose over her hips. They were all different shades of dark, none quite managing to match with each other but each working to create a shadowed silhouette.

She lifted her arms as she finally felt the last of the fabric settle into place around her, presenting herself to Spike for approval. His head tilted ever so slightly as he took her in. She felt the pants slip past her hips again and tugged them diligently back up. They began to creep their path back down again.

“Those fit?” he asked, watching as her hands settled back at her sides.

“No.”

He hummed, hands falling to his own waistband, loosening the buckle on his belt and pulling it out with one sure tug to the end of it.

He walked up to her, still leaning heavily on his newly acquired umbrella. He hitched her shirt up, tucking the side of it into her pants to give himself better access, and slid the belt through her belt loops one-handed.

It was a decidedly slower process than the removal of the belt had been, especially one-handed. She just stood and watched. Occasionally his hand would brush against her, through her newfound layers of clothes, and she would have to fight the urge to lean into it. It was so new, one of the only new things in her life she didn’t have to fight the urge to shrink away from.

She supposed she was accustomed to touch through a barrier, in a way. The difference between touch filtered through the fabric of a shirt and touch filtered through cold medical gloves felt minimal. And yet, somehow, this felt monumental in a way nothing with the gloves ever had. That was routine, mundane. That was meaningless.

Eventually he managed to secure the belt on her waist, the buckle taking a few minutes and more than a few swear words. It occurred to her that she might be of use in fastening it but Spike didn’t say anything and so she waited.

The belt left her pants tight around her waist, snug and almost restricting. She could feel the tight band of it with every expansion of her stomach as she breathed.

He seemed unconcerned with her, shifting his attention back to the bags as soon as her pants were no longer at risk of pooling back onto the floor. He unpacked various boxes, all of them absolutely riddled with bright colors and words. She could read them, she suspected, but it was likely best that she not unless guided to. She could not remember the last time she had read something so it seemed outside of her domain.

He froze in his unpacking, turning to her wide-eyed. “I haven’t drunk anything since we left.”

She could not find the major significance he seemed to in the statement. She remembered drinking, vaguely and distantly, the way she remembered some of the mundanities of the past they had otherwise removed access to. But it had not mattered in so long; surely it did not warrant such urgency.

“Neither have I,” she added. It seemed the sort of addendum he might appreciate. He seemed disoriented by her when she allowed herself long stretches of silence.

He made a displeased, almost gargling noise. “I didn’t think. I’m so used to feeling dehydrated that I just…” Another irritated groan escaped him as he continued his slow shuffle over to the counter, grabbing the poorly washed glass sitting in the room, filling it in the sink, and downing it, water dripping down his chin as he swallowed the last of it.

“I’m sure I just drank half a dozen parasites,” he said with a grin. She couldn’t tell if it was genuine or not. “And remnants of some unsavory things on the glass. This place is such a shithole.”

He filled the glass again and drank it down, still completely but a little slower this time. Then he filled it a third time and extended his arm out to her.

It was clear what was expected of her. She took the glass hesitantly, cupping it with both hands, staring down at it.

“You have to drink it,” he informed her.

She was, of course, aware of that. The urge to snap at him rose in her, unbidden. She pushed it back down and raised the cup to her lips, downing the whole glass in an imitation of Spike.

It all felt wrong; the contractions of her throat, the liquid sloshing inside her mouth, the way it sat heavy in her stomach. A sort of cramping blossomed in her sides as the water pooled inside of her. She gave the cup back to Spike as she finished, willing the water to still inside of her, for her body to accept it. It did not seem inclined to do so.

And then there was a spasming inside of her, her throat constricting once more as her insides churned. Before she could really panic and try and figure out what to do, the water was coming back up. It hurt this way, not the dull, unfamiliar ache of drinking but a burning, insistent pain. It splattered against the sheets, looking exactly the same as it had in the glass. She wasn’t sure how it had changed inside of her but certainly it had. She did not know how it had suddenly felt like liquid fire otherwise.

The pain did not go away when the liquid did, though it did dull, fading ever so slowly. She just stared down at the new wet spot on the bed as she felt it, the time passing unbidden.

After a while, she had no idea how long, a new glass of water was being presented to her. Or perhaps it was the old one. They looked the same and she could not recall where the one she had drunk from had gone. She hoped it was not the same one, though she imagined it was the water and not the glass that had done this to her.

“Sip,” he said as he handed her the glass. Then he winced, shoulders hunching in a little. “I mean, you should sip. It’ll make you feel less sick.”

She didn’t really understand the purpose of the correction. She supposed it turned the order into a suggestion but surely the order hadn’t upset him. He’d done it plenty before, even if he was showing a newfound aversion to them now.

And then he left. She stared down at the mess she made, some instinct inside her telling her to clean it. She ignored it, sipping at the drink she’d been presented with.

Spike came up with an armful of sheets, half stumbling his way into the room. He dumped them on the floor, gesturing for her to move. She shuffled off to the side of the bed and he began to sort through the new blankets.

“They said to be more careful next time and that we don’t get any more sheets. I think they’d have an aneurysm if they saw the actual state of them. They definitely think we’re screwing by the way.”

She hummed, taking another sip of water. The acidic taste of bile in her mouth was beginning to abate.

He pulled up the sheets off the bed and they almost looked like they were floating, air bubbling under them around her. He nodded his head at her, something like intent in his eyes. “Come on, off the bed.”

She shuffled off, still holding the glass. She wondered if she was supposed to sip again but he had said nothing and he decided she would rather not.

She watched as he fixed the sheets, occasionally keeling over and lying on the half-made bed, resting and steeling himself for the next movement. It seemed more like a battle than it did a task. He looked different in the warm, shifting lights. Everything looked softer this way. There was something in the back of her head, asking to come out; the light tugging at memory. She ignored the instinct to follow it, to see what the hint of recognition might lead to.

She tried to evaluate him as he keeled over onto the bed once more. Was he injured? She was fairly certain that it was more dangerous to be injured here than it had been back at the labs. That was the trouble with being out here: you had to worry about things. She’d never had to worry about anything back there. Everything would always turn out how it was meant to.

“Are you hurt?” It had a chance of upsetting him but she was worried that he might be and it might go unaddressed if she didn’t ask. What would happen to her if he died? No one knew where they were. No one would come to get her. There was only one thing she knew with complete certainty, she would not be able to go on on her own.

He huffed from his spot on the bed, trying to tuck the sheet under the mattress below him before promptly giving up and letting the sheets just pool across the mattress. “I mean, I have half a dozen tubes sticking out of me and I can’t walk, so I wouldn’t say I’m doing great.”

She stared for a while, trying to understand the answer. It was spoken like it should have been obvious. She was sure it probably would have been, to someone else.

He looked up at her, head upside down from the way he was lying. “Nothing life-threatening, if that’s what you’re wondering. At least I hope not. Certainly nothing we can fix here.”

Something that could be fixed somewhere else then, from the sounds of it. She wondered if it was one of the things he’d listed. The walking, she supposed, was important. She could see how frustrated he was by his inability to move, could see the irritation that she could walk better than he could. She thought, privately, that perhaps if he had been better behaved, he would have an easier time moving around. Surely some of the blame fell on him; there was a reason she’d left there in better shape than he had.

She, of course, did not voice this opinion. She had a feeling it would not be well received.

He studied her back as she studied him. She supposed that was what she was doing, with her looking and her thinking. It felt odd, made her feel like them. But he did not tell her to stop and did not seem displeased so she made no real effort to cease the behavior.

“Do you have any family left?” he finally asked as he studied her. She wondered if he found what he was looking for. “Anyone you could go to?”

“No.” She knew it was true, unequivocally.

“Are you sure?” he prodded.

She spent a little longer thinking on it, trying to pull up faces or to find the source of that certainty. She had nothing, she just knew. “I am sure.”

“Yeah,” he said. He sounded sad. She wondered if she had made him that way. She didn’t think she was supposed to wonder. “That makes two of us.”

[bucketsofmonsters]

The Past is Prologue

Chapter 11: Spike

Spike Spiegel x fem OC

cw: medical horror, dissociation, suicidal ideation, flashbacks, conditioning, depersonalization, amnesia, forced nudity, ivs, restraints, memory loss, torture, sensory deprivation, losing time, loss of sight, surgery, unreliable narrator, whump

Work count: 8k

Masterlist

Ao3

He could feel the drug doing its work, could feel something overwhelming and fond blooming in his chest. They weren’t sure if they could control him; that much was clear. She was a tether.

It was, of course, working. Knowing it was happening did provide him some sense of awareness but it did not counteract whatever chemical they had pumped into him.

He could not help but wonder how thoroughly it had been tested. He knew he was a guinea pig, but it was clear to him that they had bigger goals for him. Surely it had been tested at least somewhat, to ensure it did not kill their new favorite pin cushion.

It was almost certainly because of his past here that this was being done. Some vendetta someone had against him. He certainly had no shortage of enemies, especially those within the Syndicate. And here he was, dropped into its lap.

No, they wouldn’t give him anything they thought might have a chance of killing him. They would not let him out of this so easily.

It didn’t matter. He could work around whatever chemical closeness they had begun simulating in them. A tether worked both ways and besides, he had no intention of leaving her here. Not now, not after being the one who put her here in the first place.

They had miscalculated. He had to believe that, if he didn’t it meant he was missing something.

That was the fact that loomed, now more than ever. The longer he spent here, the more of his sharpness he lost. He could barely move, barely stand, but that he could manage. Without his mind, there would be nothing left for him.

Not for the first time, he let his thoughts drift to the needles he had hidden away. The syringes that held the fluids they injected into them, a tool to be used. He could escape here. He was living on borrowed time anyway.

But it could not come to pass, not now. He had to get her out. Or at the very least he had to try, really try. It was different now, knowing everything. This time it mattered.

Before he could decide on anything, the doctors were back. They always seemed to be here lately. He supposed it was more likely that his brain was beginning to adjust, switching itself half off during the times when nothing was happening, making the time feel shorter. It was not a comforting thought.

The doctors did not follow any of their old patterns, sitting beside him and messing with something near his head. The more their different tests and tortures varied, the more he worried about being able to escape. There were only so many parts of him they could break before he could no longer function at all.

He couldn’t turn his head, couldn’t see what they were doing. It was almost worse, with the lights on this way. He should have been able to see it, he could see the rest, the tools and elbow maneuvering right next to him. At least fully in the dark he hardly would have known anything was going on at all.

He would have known something, though, because there was an oppressive pressure building in his head. At first he’d thought he might be imagining it but as it built and built it shifted into tangibility.

And then the noise began, a ringing in his ears, high and piercing. It seemed to come from the pressure, worsening the tension in his head.  

He tried to move to no avail, head already pressed into the metal restraints as far from the doctor’s steady hands as he could get. He considered jerking around in the little space he’s been given but he supposed sudden movements were more likely to hurt him than they were to stop them. Anything he could do to foil them would just cause him more injury. It wasn’t worth the brain damage.

The ringing was so loud, so all encompassing, that it was hard to think, his thoughts getting lost to the ocean of sound. He wondered if he would be able to hear anything else, if he was to be deafened as well as blinded.

And then the doctor moved, shifting the many fabrics coating him, and Spike could hear it fine. It drowned out the ringing like it had no volume to it at all.

It’s a disorienting thing, realizing this sense too could no longer be trusted. The sound had been everywhere; how could it be so easy to penetrate?

They continued to do something at his side, unhindered by his quiet crisis. It felt almost wet, though he wasn’t sure if it was a real sensation or his mind searching for anything to latch onto.

Everything went black.

The sound got worse in the dark.

Not in volume. The ringing stayed consistent, never wavering from its shrieking. It just became harder to overpower, less willing to fade behind other noises. Maybe it was because he had less to latch onto without his sight. Maybe he was just getting lost in it, a creation of his own mind.

It took him too long to realize Lyra was speaking to him, too caught up in the new state of things, in the new sense they had altered. The realization came slowly, a distant patter that took a few tries to realize was her speaking. The doctors were almost certainly long gone; she never would have risked using her voice unprompted otherwise. He was lucky she hadn’t given up on him in the meantime.

She sounded real in a way she almost never did anymore. She had when he’d first arrived here but he’d ruined that.

She did get more lucid sometimes. When she saw him or touched him she came back to herself a little more. So long as he was starting from somewhere decent, they had a shot at something. It was what he had been banking on. Even more so now. She didn’t need to be firing on all cylinders; they’d already trained docility into her. She just needed to be aware enough to follow his orders.

But it had to happen soon. One of his senses was already lost to him, his sense of touch seemingly almost irreparable now. His sight was taken from him most of the time and now his hearing had begun to degrade. They were draining his capability out of him one piece at a time.

It would only get worse. They would not let him regain anything they had taken. They would just take more and more until there were no pieces left of him to give, nothing left to save. He needed to move quickly, to move now.

“What did you say?” he prompted, trying to figure out the state of her.

“I didn’t… I… You weren’t talking,” she decided on, which he supposed was true. It almost certainly wasn’t what she’d been saying.

“Tell me what you were saying.” It made him feel dirty to do, to command her like this. But they needed to get out he didn’t have any more time. There was no room left for the luxury of kindness.

“I was calling your name,” she admitted, sounding like she was pleading guilty.

“You know my name?”

“Yes.” It came out more like a wounded noise than a word.

It was as lucid as she ever got. He didn’t push, terrified to nudge her into one of her confused, desperate states caused by asking the wrong questions at the wrong time.

He had the syringes, the layout of the room. He had the lock jammed, still unnoticed by his unconcerned captors. He had all the tools he was going to get. He had her. It was time. If he waited any longer, there would be no escape for him.

He was woefully unprepared. At the very least he knew that much, he wasn’t going into this delusionally.

He hadn’t even had a chance to look at the doors, his vision rarely on when anyone entered. It had been before, but he hadn’t been paying enough attention. He’d allowed himself to become inattentive, passive.

Fine. They’d have to do it with someone in the room. If they could get out, he could manage it with them present.

In his normal state, he had more than enough resources to incapacitate someone. But now, he was barely able to walk, his litheness robbed from him by forced motionlessness.

Lyra could walk though. She’d been here so much longer, should have muscles that were far more degraded, and yet she seemed able to move far more easily than he was.

She would have to do. It would just have to be quick, would have to be before they could sound an alarm or give her an order. He was almost certain any order they gave her would override anything he said. So he would simply have to speak both first and last. He could do that; he could make it work. He would have to. There was no other choice, not now. The ringing in his ears was more than enough of a reminder of that.

There were certainly benefits to using her. They seemed to understand the danger that came with him; that he was a flight risk, that he was a resourceful, dangerous man. The same caution was never extended to her. They had come to rely on her complacency, giving her freedoms, disregarding her when she wasn’t relevant.

If he could make her act, it was a perfect setup.

He eyed the door nervously. There was no way to know if or when someone might come in. There was nothing to do but to move. He clicked his restraints open, the ones they still had not bothered to check after his many escapes. The disregard did not bode well for their odds but he tried not to think about that, it wasn’t a productive train of thought.

Discarded IV poles were still his best way of getting around. He knew better than to attempt walking on his own, there wasn’t time for that now. It wouldn’t work anyway.

The journey across the room was slow and laboured, his muscles refusing to listen to him. They probably ached, protesting the sudden uptick in use, but he could not feel it over the ever-present hum of agony that lived inside him now.

Eventually he made it to her. That was what counted in here. Out there was where they would need to move faster but that was a matter for later, no use worrying over it now.  

He took out her contacts, carefully watching her gaze as she blinked her eyes, getting used to the light. This time, when she saw his face, there was no blooming recognition, no deep-rooted resentment nor a return to herself. Her eyes remained just as blank as when she had been blind, seemingly only serving to make her more disoriented.

He clicked her restraints open, picking the locks one after the other. It didn’t matter which he picked first, none of the newfound freedom inspired her to move. She remained perfectly in place by the ghosts of her restraints. He supposed it was better than her collapsing in on herself. At least she remembered how to contract her muscles, keep herself upright.

Her gaze was still distant, focused off somewhere behind him. He didn’t look to confirm but he would have bet it was the dark corner she was staring at. She had no idea what they were doing, no lucidity left in her. He needed to push her towards something resembling functioning, even if she was not capable of personhood right now.

“Can you get us out of the labs?” he demanded.

A little wrinkle formed between her brows as she thought. “I don’t know.”

“Remember how to get us out of the labs.”

Her face lit up, breaths coming faster. “I… He would let me out to talk to me. In the room. It was too cold, it wasn’t like here. Real people were in there, not only the doctors.”

It didn’t sound like outside, not fully. Likely just another part of whatever Syndicate building they’d been shipped off to. But at least it was something. With any luck, he could put on some clothes there, could limp around without arising as much suspicion. It was a long shot but then, all of this was.

“Hey, listen to me. I need you to remember this.” He paused for a moment before continuing on, putting more force behind his words this time. “You’re going to remember this.”

“I will.” Her voice was level, almost trance-like. Obedient.

“Next time a doctor comes in here, you are going to attack them. You’re going to kick and claw and bite and do whatever you can until I tell you to stop.”

The color drained from her face. “I am not supposed to do that. That’s not… I can’t…”

Her eyes darted around, panic blooming on her face. They had likely commanded the opposite, the contradiction fighting inside her to make her sick.

He needed something more, something to get through to her.

The idea he had made him feel ill, even worse than becoming some sort of puppet master had. But they were working with limited time; he needed her to understand, to be able to move without hesitation.

Her personhood and dignity could come after freedom.

“I know who put you in here.”

A flicker of recognition in her eyes. She spoke hesitantly, doubt coloring her words. “I am meant to be here. They make me into what I must be.”

“No, not them. Not the doctors. I know who put you in here, who took you out of the world and gave you to them. I can take you to them. You just need to do this, to listen to me.”

Her face morphed back and forth, from fear and obedience to something else, something that resembled anger.

Good. Anger made her lucid. Anger made her listen.

“You know them?”

“I know where to find them.” It wasn’t a lie, technically. “And I know who they are.”

“How?” She whispered it, so low he almost couldn’t make it out, like the question didn’t count if she was just quiet enough.

“I know lots of things. I’ll tell you about it once we get out of here.”

“Do you know about me?”

“Not as much as I should. We’ll figure it out together.”

Her gaze flickered between both of his eyes, like she was searching for something in them. It seemed like she found it. She nodded as much as she could in her now faux restraints.

“Alright,” he said, giving her arm a gentle squeeze before stepping back and collapsing back into his own chair. Even standing with support like that had winded him. “What are you going to do?”

“Kick and claw and bite. Fight them.”

“And when are you going to do it?”

“When you say now.”

He nodded, sinking back into his exhaustion. He should rest now, while they waited. He would need to use the little energy he had left if this had any chance of working.

And then they waited. It seemed his mind had begun filling in blanks, making the waiting feel shortened because now, full of dread and anticipation and adrenaline, the waiting felt like an eternity.

His whole body tensed as he heard the hiss of the door. He tried not to let it show, to ensure he didn’t give whoever entered any notice that things were not as they usually were. There was only one doctor, a man if Spike had to guess. He fiddled with something off to the side for a while and Spike wondered if he hadn’t been able to see, like they’d likely intended, if he even would have noticed the man's presence. He’d like to think he would have but wouldn’t put money on it.

Finally, he approached Lyra, some sort of syringe at the ready, pulling something from a sealed medicine bottle to give to her.

“Now.”

Her knee drove right up into his crotch, something he hadn’t instructed her to do explicitly but certainly an effective strategy, her hands rising from their position at her side to sink into him, clawing and ripping at him just as desperately as he needed her to.

He nudged his restraints open and stood on heavy, clumsy limbs. He moved as quickly and as quietly as one could when weighed down by what was probably months of ill use, tucking one of his contraband syringes into his hand and leaving his thumb ready, over the plunger.

Lyra wasn’t giving a particularly devastating performance. She was stronger than he was, clearly allowed to move more, but the element of surprise did most of the work for her. The doctor spent invaluable seconds stuck in confusion.

Spike shifted forwards, more a slump than a strike, and jammed the needle into his neck. Whatever mystery fluid he had syphoned into the syringe drained into the man before him.

He jerked around, eyes frantic and arms out in some ill-practiced facsimile of a defensive pose, likely more instinctual than intentional. The needle was still embedded in the meat of his neck.

For a horrible second, they just stared at each other and Spike thought it hadn’t worked. And then the screaming began, Familiar screaming. His own screams, the same color as these, had painted these walls dozens of times since he’d gotten here. There was a smug satisfaction that came with hearing them come from someone else.

But there was no time for smugness. He scooped up every syringe left in the room, those he had hidden and those that had been brought, clearly intended for the two of them, and took stock of things.

He couldn’t move. Not like he needed to, not in a way that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. He could just barely navigate on shaky legs with the help of an IV pole or some other cane substitute, but it was too conspicuous.

He gestured towards the doctor. “Put those on.”

She looked up at him with the frantic look she got when she thought she’d been asked some sort of trick question. “Put… The man?”

Christ. “His clothes. Take them off of him and put them on you.”

Still she stared, eyes darting between him and the man on the floor, who was still writhing and whimpering in pain.

He waited for another question, or perhaps one of her oft-occurring non-questions, but she seemed perfectly content to just stare.

Finally, he took the initiative, not bothering with leaning on something and instead letting his limbs collapse as he shifted to the floor next to the doctor.

He wrestled with the man, or at least something that likely resembled wrestling from the outside. The doctor was less trying to get away from him and more trying to escape the now ever-present pain that was now worming its way around under his skin. Or maybe it had been too much altogether and he’d had some sort of seizure. Spike could only hope.

Normally he’d be able to hold the man steady and get the clothes from him with little fanfare. Right now the most he could do was shuffle the clothes off, barely keeping the strength to hold himself up and maintain a firm grip on them.

Eventually, after far too long, he got them off, piece by piece. Lyra was still watching, just staring at him like she was still trying to comprehend his last order.

He pushed the clothes in her direction. “Put them on.”

Her eyes grew even more desperate as she took them from him, staring down at the protective, white fabric and then looking back up at him as if for guidance. “How?”

He couldn’t help but snap at her. They needed to move; they didn’t have time for this. “You don’t know how to put clothes on?”

“I don’t remember. I don’t have any memories left that aren’t from here. It’s not-- I’ve never had to.”

It was absurd and frustrating but expressing that was wasting time they didn’t have. He instead focused on dressing her, on manipulating her limbs clumsily until she was poorly dressed in wrinkled clothes. She was, at the very least, a pliable mannequin, doing exactly as he had indicated with every word or nudge of his hands.

Even so, it took far longer than it should have. It didn’t help that she seemed overwhelmed by the sensations of cloth against her skin. Any time he was not giving her direct instructions she instead spent staring at her own arms like she had never seen them before and bending her limbs ever so slightly just to watch the fabric wrinkle.

Eventually, they did manage it. He collapsed back into the chair, exhaustion washing over him. He didn’t have time for that either.

“You remember the doctors? How they’d move you around?”

“Mmhmm,” she hummed in recognition, fingers running absentmindedly over the stiff fabric that now coated her torso.

“Good. I need you to do that. Be them.”

That seemed to make more sense to her than putting on clothes had. She moved resolutely behind him, hands settling into place on his chair.

She moved with a sureness he had not expected of her. It really did seem as if her only real hesitation stemmed from a lack of instruction as she waited to be puppetted.

The door out into the halls of the labs didn’t even have any security on it. He kept waiting for some ID he needed to scan or to need to cut off a finger of the doctor’s for fingerprint recognition, maybe pull an eye out for an ocular scan. Wouldn’t that be karmic.

But instead, there was nothing. Not so much as a lock on the door, just a button to hiss the doors open and lead then through a decontamination chamber and then, with one more hiss, outside. It was as if they really were relying only on restrictions on their movement and independence to do all the work.

It was hard to know if it should be concerning. Everything inside of him wanted to consider it so, wanted to see it as some kind of trap, but then again, he didn’t exactly cut the most imposing silhouette right now. It was barely even an underestimation to consider him useless in his current state. Even less so Lyra, who he was sure would never have escaped without prodding even if she’d been left unrestrained consistently. He supposed that was probably why she could walk and navigate them out of the labs while he remained stagnant and incapable.

As they walked by their first bystander in the halls, one of the doctors by the look of him, he prepared another one of his syringes with as little movement as he could in his lap, this one from the supplies the doctor had brought into the room before they’d incapacitated him, shifting the restraints to look properly shut to an unsuspecting onlooker. The rest had been moved out of the deeper mechanisms of the chair where he’d been stashing them to being tucked behind him for easier access. It might have been suspicious to someone who was really looking, but Spike intended to take out anyone who got close enough to notice anyway so it was no great loss.

The doctor didn’t so much as look.

They drew surprisingly little attention. Barely anyone seemed inclined to so much as give them a second look. It did nothing to stop him from being on edge, coiled and ready to spring on anyone who seemed even the slightest bit suspicious of them.

And then, instead of a doctor or two walking by, someone walked by with another victim. They were in the same chair he sat in, the same mechanisms and restraints he had fiddled with in his attempt to find a way out. His eyes were distant and clouded and empty, likely blinded. Every now and then he twitched, banging his limbs into the restraints with the little freedom he was provided.  

His neck was split open, the skin almost entirely absent, replaced by dozens of tubes, pumping fluid in and out of him, burying themselves in his sternum and winding down into whatever reserves were buried in his chair.

And then they wheeled him past them and Spike could see them no longer, incapable of turning to look without giving himself away.

He couldn't help but wonder if Lyra had looked, had stared at this man, had felt a kinship with him. Maybe she wished he too could escape, felt a guilt at trying to get out while inevitably leaving so many behind. He wondered if she’d felt anything at all. Maybe she had been envious even, wishing she was still bound, not forced to think or do, just exist blindly.

But he could not turn and look so he supposed he’d never know.

They strolled past dozens more doctors, none of whom seemed to notice anything, eyes skating easily over the pair of them.

He also saw the second a pair of eyes didn’t, one of the doctor’s eyes seemingly catching on him, lingering for a moment too long before darting down at the paper he was holding.

Spike was up before he had a chance to so much as think, lunging across the few feet separating them with all the strength he had and plunging a syringe into the side of his neck. As he emptied it, the doctor hissed in pain and reeled back but remained standing, disoriented and in pain with the needle still embedded into his skin but still more than capable of moving.

He stumbled back until he was hitting something solid, collapsing back into his chair. He groped at his hiding place, fingers fumbling for another syringe. He could see Lyra from his peripheral vision, just standing motionless, waiting.

He shifted forwards again. This time the movement was slower and jerkier, too much of his strength used in the first attack. The doctor, still slow from the shock, was reeling back, instincts telling him he needed to get away. Even as dazed as he was, he almost moved faster than Spike.

Almost. As soon as he got close enough, Spike used gravity to propel him forward, falling into the man and letting the second syringe embed itself between his ribs, the weight of the fall sinking the plunger down and sending the fluid inside the man. He needed this one to work; he knew he would not have the time nor energy for a third attempt.

Seconds after they both hit the floor, Spike felt the man go rigid below him, beginning to jerk violently as the medicine began to pump through his body. Spike struggled to his feet, allowing gravity to take him once more as soon as he was close enough to settle back into the chair. The tool of his imprisonment provided more comfort than it should have.

Lyra stood motionless through it all. “It’s suspicious,” she finally said, proof she was a real girl instead of a mannequin, staring down at the undulating body on the ground. “He should not be left out here.”

“We don’t have time to hide him,” he insisted, frustrated that she was more lucid than she had ever been and that she was right but that it didn’t matter. “We have to keep moving.”

She nodded, hands settling back onto his chair, head directed forwards once more. He stopped her before she could keep walking and slid one of his siphoned syringes full of a mix of chemicals behind a dirty needle into her hand. “If anyone but me tried to touch you, stab them with this and inject it into them.” There, now at least he had something resembling backup. Frankly, he missed having half-competent people behind him, being able to call up Jet or Ed or even Faye. He was so tired, he could barely think and the only support he had was a shell of a person that he had to puppet around.

For not the first time, a resentment boiled inside of him, rising in line with his frustration.

He pushed it down and gripped the makeshift weapon of his syringe tighter.

Lyra never stopped moving, propelled forwards by his commands, her own newfound weapon hopefully at the ready.

She finally reached their destination, whatever room she had recalled that seemed different from the rest.

It was a morgue. That fact was immediately clear to him.

Why would this be where they brought her? “Do you remember what you did here?” he asked hesitantly as he oriented himself, taking stock of the potential exits.

“They let me stand here sometimes. The man likes it here.”

“The man?”

“Not a doctor. Not like us. So it seemed like it’s not part of the… this place. The labs.”

It did seem different from the labs, less sterile and impersonal. More legitimate. There were signs and a map on the wall, a door that said staff only. Illegal Syndicate labs didn’t need to tell people what rooms were staff only. Everyone inside who was allowed to move already knew.

They were underneath a real hospital, or at least some sort of medical building. The morgue seemed tacked on so it was not the main feature, delegated off to the basement. He supposed it could be some sort of police station but hospital seemed most likely. It looked, for the most part, like every other morgue he’d ever been in. He hadn’t been in many, though probably more than most people had. It was usually to tie up loose ends, to find some evidence left on a dead man and threaten anyone who had poked around before he’d gotten there and seen it. Or worse, depending on their attitude. They had been convenient locations, certainly. Lots of places to hide a body until he was long gone.

And there, amongst the closed-off, cold, impersonal boxes of metal, was Julia. There she lay, in front of him and perfectly preserved, frozen in some sort of tube.

She was clearly dead, her skin pallid and lifeless, looking like it had made it through the early stages of decay before someone had managed to get her here.

A door swung open, not the one they had entered through but one on the other side of the room. He locked eyes with the newcomer and suddenly Spike remembered what he had forgotten. He recognized the man.

He was so hollow. He didn’t have it in him to get angry or taunt him. He was just tired. “You died.”

Vicious sneered. “I could say the same about you. Although I seem to be in decidedly better shape.”

Spike had grown accustomed to the cold exposure that the lack of clothes afforded him. It had almost been easy to ignore it, with the dark and Lyra and the doctor’s identical, anonymizing outfits.

Now it rose to the forefront of his mind again, his shoulders curling in as if that might hide some of him from Vicious’s gaze.

Vicious noticed the action, a demeaning huff of laughter escaping him. “Cold?”

Spike’s eyes flitted to Julia, to her corpse, kept and lifeless. That seemed to pull something from Vicious, morphing sadistic amusement into genuine anger.

“Don’t look at her. You ruined everything. I would kill you if I didn’t think that was exactly what you wanted.”

“She would hate you for this. She did hate you.” He didn’t know if it was true but it didn’t matter. It got a rise out of Vicious all the same.

“You’re the one who got her killed. You’re the one she would hate.”

He couldn’t have this fight. Not now, not after everything he’d been through. He didn’t have the energy for it. “You can’t keep me here,” he tried instead, his jaw cracking as he spoke when he dared to open his mouth just a little too wide.

“Can’t I? What does it look like I’ve been doing?”

“And how does that seem to be going for you?”

“It doesn’t matter. You can do nothing. You clearly couldn’t do it on your own.” His eyes flitted over to Lyra, disguised under layers of medical equipment. “The traitor will be dealt with. You always were a smooth talker. I’ll have to vet the doctors better. Reassure them of the consequences of crossing me. How helpful of you to provide me with someone to make an example of. You won’t get this far again.”

Traitor. He thought Spike had gotten help from a doctor. Of course he did; how would two completely incapacitated people find their way here? Spike did not correct him. “You’ll never keep me here. You never were a match for me. Not when it counted.”

“You can’t fight me,” Vicious growled, drawing a gun. “You’re weak now. There’s nothing you can do. You’re mine, and I swear, I will make you feel worse pain than anyone has ever imagined. And then you’ll be useful to me once more.”

Vicious shifted forward, moving past Lyra. They barely touched, their clothes only just brushing.

That was all it took to goad Lyra to strike, the syringe she’d been holding embedding itself deep in his shoulder.

She did exactly what he’d told her to do, depressed the plunger into him and then retreated, still clutching the now empty syringe tight in her hand, knuckles white with the force of it.

Vicious went down immediately, an animal scream escaping him as he folded in on himself, muscles spasming with the sheer force of the pain. Spike could feel his own body thrum as he watched. The ever-present, aching hurt that now lived in his bones seemed to hum at the sight of it, seemed to celebrate that it was no longer lonely in the misery it caused.

Spike dropped to the floor, fighting once more with a writhing body as he struggled to get its clothes off. It was more difficult this time, though he couldn’t quite place why. It could be that Vicious was a more formidable opponent than the doctor had been, even when incapacitated like this, or some psychological block holding Spike back. Or maybe he was just tired.

Getting into the stolen clothes was an arduous process. It was more exhausting trying to support himself and walk on his own but the sheer amount of time that fighting the folds of the fabric took with no strength to hold himself up rose an anxiety in him, his eyes constantly flicking towards the door.

Finally, he managed to dress himself in the first clothes he had worn in months. The fabric felt strange against his skin. Restricting, almost suffocating.

He grabbed the gun off of the floor, where it had tumbled after Vicious had been incapacitated. There was a holster but it seemed more trouble than it was worth. Spike just tucked it into the waistband of his newly acquired pants.

It seemed odd that Vicious hadn’t had his sword on him. He’d always been incredibly partial to it. Even though Vicious had almost certainly not been expecting to see Spike today, he should have had it on him.

Maybe his near-death experience had left him as weak as Spike was, despite his ability to move and recover properly, a luxury Spike had not been afforded. Or maybe the near-death experience had jolted some survival instinct into place, had knocked some sense into him. Spike always thought the sword was stupid anyway.

He opted out of wearing the ostentatious coat Vicious preferred. It would draw more attention than anything else. He did pat down the pockets though, searching for anything useful.

There was a wad of cash and a vial of something in one side, a half used pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and some sort of ID card without a photo on it in the other. He shoved them all in his new pants pockets and struggled to his feet.

“We can’t use the chair. I doubt it’s the kind they use upstairs, it might draw attention.”

Lyra just stared at him, eyes wide and blank.

He took a hesitant step forward, trying to support himself, and almost collapsed, grabbing at the nearest hard surface to support himself.

It was only after he stopped his fall that he realized he was leaning on Julia’s frozen casket, her uncanny, half-rotted face staring up at him.

It seemed cruel that she should still be beautiful, even when she was in so horrifying a state.

He drew his eyes away, forcing them back to the room. She would not want to be wept over; she would want him to get out. He eyed the fire alarm on the wall. “Do alarms ever go off? When you were downstairs, I mean.”

She blinked. “Sometimes.”

“What happened when they did?”

“Nothing happened. They were very loud.”

“They didn’t come get you?”

“No. They came after they were over, sometimes. They would usually complain. Or laugh.”

“About what?”

Another blank stare.

Fine. It wasn’t enough information to really know anything but at least it was something to go off. For all he knew, the alarms she heard could have been for hazardous material exposure or escapees in other rooms.

But the morgue was painting a picture of a hospital that was far bigger and more public-facing than he would like and the longer they took to notice the pair of them were missing, the better of a shot they would have at actually getting somewhere halfway safe.

He was sure he could hardly manage stairs in his condition, dreading using them. It did not seem to be an issue because next to the doors that seemed to lead to a set of stairs, there was a number pad, seemingly requiring a pin to unlock. That, at least, was not typical of hospitals. People needed codes to get into morgues, on occasion, but something designed to trap people inside was far less common. He avoided looking down at Julia’s body and did his best not to think about it.

The elevator in the corner of the room seemingly did not require a pin, though surely it could not be that easy. He pressed the button and waited, every second that passed feeling like an eternity.

When the door slid open, he saw the slot for a keycard. A staff elevator then. That was fine, this he could get around. He shoved some metal tool he was not familiar with into the elevator door and then pulled the alarm. The blaring was immediate, deafening. For the first time since they’d poked around in his head, the ringing in his ears was entirely drowned out.

He shifted towards Lyra, holding his arm out. “Come on, help me out of here.” He looked around, hoping he would be able to find some sort of makeshift cane that he could use to hobble his way out of here. He wasn’t sure Lyra could support him the whole way out. She was clearly stronger than him, but that wasn’t a particularly high bar to clear anymore and she was certainly still weaker than the average person.  

He wondered if any amount of time or complicity there would have led to him also getting the exercise Lyra was clearly afforded, at least on occasion. Considering Vicious was apparently still manning the operation, he very much doubted it.

He looked at Julia one last time. He wished he had longer here, with her, but there was no time for sentimentality.

The morgue seemed to be the basement of whatever medical center they were in, the rooms they had been occupying falling below that. He imagined most doctors here had no idea they even existed. The door to the labs below was hidden, looking like a door from the labs side but hidden behind a cabinet from out here, barely even visible. He wanted to try and barricade it shut but anything he could move in his current state would not be particularly difficult to push away.

Instead, he tucked himself into the elevator and made sure Lyra was inside with him and removed the tool, letting the elevator doors pull shut. He pulled out Vicious’s keycard but found the elevator already recalling back to the ground floor of the hospital in response to the alarm.

Once released onto the ground floor, his options for canes were plentiful, IV stands littering the halls. The building was steadily emptying, plenty of them abandoned in the name of being able to get out of there faster.

From there, exits weren’t hard to find. With the alarm pulled, the most they needed to do was follow the flow of traffic and it spit them out onto the street.

His head began to spin as he stepped out back into… a city. He wasn’t sure which one. The sheer quantity of noises clashing against the alarm, the colors and lights and shadows, the people shuffling around him… He could see them bumping into him but he couldn’t feel it. He could tell his clothes were scratchy but wouldn’t have noticed someone stepping on his foot in the chaos if he hadn’t watched it happen. The alarm had been almost comforting in its loudness but as it faded into the distance, the chaos of the city began making his head spin. He couldn’t focus on anything, his attention unwilling to stay put, jumping around at every new noise. Every now and then he’d catch the ringing again and turn his head, looking for the source of it, before realizing it was in his head.

He could orient himself later; right now he just needed to get out. He grabbed Lyra’s hand with his free hand and began pulling her through the crowd into an alley, walking on and on past layers of exhaustion, knowing right now their most valuable asset was distance.

Eventually, no matter how determined he was, he could push himself no farther.

Lyra didn’t even seem to be registering what was going on, seemingly happy to trail beside him eternally. He wondered if her aversion to recognizing pain worked for her exhaustion as well.

He had dragged them into a shady part of the city, opting for dingy alleyways at every turn until he was in the least reputable neighborhood he could find. He scanned the street for a shitty hotel, someplace that wouldn’t ask any questions.

It wasn’t particularly hard to find.

Lyra trailed after him per usual. He doubted she even noticed the shady nature of where they were, too far removed from society to be able to recognize that sort of thing. If she did notice, she didn’t say anything.

He was sure the two of them were quite a sight, both looking emaciated and limping, him more than Lyra. She was still in the doctor’s clothes, he realized with a start. He would have to do something about that.

The woman at the front desk didn’t so much as give them a second look. He handed over a wad of Vicious’s cash and she handed him a key with a room number on it, not so much as bothering to speak. It was fine by him.

They hobbled to their room. It probably was not the most strategically positioned room he could have picked but he did not have any more scheming in him. He just needed to rest.

It only had one bed but then, shady off-book places like this didn’t have much use for rooms with twin beds, in his experience. He couldn’t bring himself to care about it. It would just be good to lie down.

Lyra walked into the room and settled almost instantly, sitting on the bed, her back straightening and her arms falling to her sides, resting ever so lightly on the bed below her.

It took a moment to realize what she was doing. It was the exact same posture that she had been forced into in the restraints.

“Stop it,” he snapped. “Sit normally. Lie down.”

She locked up for a second, limbs twitching as she shifted back and then lurched forward again, back to her seated position. Her spine relaxed and then straightened once more. He realized the orders contradicted, that she was trying to comply with both.

He took a deep breath in. This wasn’t her fault. “Ignore that. Just go to sleep.”

She seemed to relax at that and shifted ramrod straight again. Her posture barely collapsed in on itself as she fell asleep, her breathing steadying almost instantly.

He went to focus his attention elsewhere, to try and figure out how to keep them safe and free for any significant amount of time, and then paused, looking back at her. He reluctantly planted himself on the bed beside her and tried to shift her towards the headboard.

It would have been simple, a few months ago. Before he had died. He could have picked her up and thrown her to the top of the bed if he wanted.

Now half of his energy went to supporting himself, leaning on the mattress as he tried to shuffle her up the bed into something that might resemble a comfortable position.

He gave up fairly quickly, the frustration of the moment overwhelming any altruistic inclinations he might’ve had.

He grabbed a pillow and propped it behind her. It wasn’t much but at least it was something.

He realized belatedly that it probably didn’t matter how she slept. She seemed to have been trained out of feeling pain; it wasn’t like she would be achy in the morning.

He probably should address that, figure out what the root cause might be. It was a matter for later, for when he had rested and called for help.

With that addressed, he shuffled down the bed, reaching for the phone.

He began building his resolve for it, for talking to them again, for asking for help, for telling them he was alive.

He typed in a number for the Bebop and held his breath.

One ring. Then another.

A screeching noise followed, harmonizing with the ringing in his ears. The line was out of service.

Fine. He called Faye. It rang out. He called Jet’s emergency line. Nothing.

So no phones. Maybe something had happened, made their phones unusable or made them mistrustful of them.

He fiddled with the screen, trying to open the messaging system. It was janky, an old thing clearly halfway broken down. He managed to pull up a messaging system, though the screen seemed inclined to flash static at him. He’d have to try everyone’s numbers again later, on a different phone that didn’t seem minutes away from self-destruction.

He left messages in every place he thought someone might see them. Personal numbers, old pseudonyms, ghost accounts Ed had used. They’d notice one of them sooner or later.

He supposed that was all there was to be done. In a perfect world, he’d get them farther, would have a plan to get off-world already in motion. In a perfect world, Jet would have picked up the goddamn phone.

But this was not, nor had it ever been, a perfect world. He collapsed into the bed, Lyra bouncing slightly beside him where she sat as he hit the uncomfortable mattress.

It was odd. Lying down, after being vertical for so long. He felt the way his blood began to pool, sinking down to the back of him. He did his best to ignore it.

Sleep came quickly. The exhaustion already sat heavy in his bones and fighting it back had been an active battle for hours. The second he gave up, he drowned in it, unconsciousness overwhelming him, mercifully taking him away from the waking world.

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

You've been turned into a mythical creature, spin the wheel to see which one!

Are you happy with it?

^^^^^^

https://wheelofnames.com/5k9-xsu

Are you happy with it?

yes!! I love it

yes!

It's okay I guess

no

NO.

results/other

Voting ended onJul 14

(if you don't consider some of these mythical creatures please don't come for me)

[bucketsofmonsters]

The Past is Prologue

Chapter 10: Lyra

Spike Spiegel x fem OC

cw: medical horror, dissociation, suicidal ideation, flashbacks, conditioning, depersonalization, amnesia, forced nudity, ivs, restraints, memory loss, torture, sensory deprivation, losing time, loss of sight, surgery, unreliable narrator, whump

Work count: 3k

Masterlist

Ao3

It was hard to compare them. For so long, every person she’d seen had been so covered. For so long, she hadn’t seen at all. 

But there he was, this man who insisted upon pushing her. She didn’t know where she stood with him, who she should be for him. 

Something about him grated on her. It was almost novel, letting herself feel something like that. It had been so long since she’d been allowed to. Some part of her just knew the rules were different with him. 

Maybe it was his status. He was clearly one of her instead of one of them, that was clear from looking at him. 

And she was looking at him. Her head had been directed this way, she didn’t dare move it. 

She wasn’t even really sure what he was, now that she was looking at him. He wasn’t wearing clothes. The people who tended to her always did. She’d thought, quietly, the few times that she’d seen them, that that made them human. It was what separated the two of them; that they walked and discussed and tested and asked and she was delineated into only answering. 

There was something feral about him. It was his anger, she thought, perhaps. The way his eyes darted around, how his chest heaved. He barred his teeth like he wanted to bite and rip and consume. 

His hair was overgrown, almost blocking out his vision on its own. Her own head felt lighter now. Maybe that was why she could see now, eyes no longer blocked by dark tresses. 

His eyes were visible though, just barely. They peered out at her, bloodshot and frantic. 

His behavior was odd, like he was trying to bargain with an invisible enemy more than he was trying to communicate anything with her. The rules he stated were circular, twisting in her mind as if his words held slightly different meanings to the ones the doctors wielded. 

She wished he would stop speaking. The only thing he seemed capable of doing was getting things tangled up inside of her. But then, she didn’t dare act out of turn. It was clear this meeting was for some purpose, set into motion by people who mattered. She didn’t understand but she could fall in line. 

And so she did. 

He seemed upset by it, every kind word causing a proportional negative reaction. 

She wished she could shut her eyes. It was too much, this brightness and color and movement. His reactions, trying to make sense of them. They had been right to take it from her. They knew best, at the end of the day; knew what she should not be made to handle. 

She tried her best to adjust her eyes to it, to let it filter through her brain without interference the way the dark could. 

It was harder than she’d anticipated. She couldn’t stop noticing things, couldn’t narrow her field of view or prevent distraction. 

The light felt sharp, almost penetrative. Nothing like the soft, noncommittal possibility of the dark. The dark didn’t ask anything of her. 

“Do you want to close your eyes?”

Want. A difficult sort of question, the sort she could change her answer to. She wished she could ask, could try and prompt a direction out of him. “I try not to want.”

“That’s not an answer. Give me a real answer.”

“I don’t want to have to choose.”

He scoffed. “Tough. You can, though. If you want.”

Can. She didn’t like the way he spoke. She kept her eyes open and refused to vocalize it. 

“You know, when we met, you were rude to me.” He spoke almost wistfully, which didn’t make sense. They hadn’t met. Or…

Maybe they had. He would be allowed to remember things she was not, there was nothing to stop him. He wasn’t like her, he wasn’t molded like this. 

Or maybe he was. He looked like she did, looked like he would fit. But something there just didn’t. It felt wrong. Like she knew something, somewhere. Somewhere she shouldn’t have access to. 

But she needed to know it, needed to know if he was one of them, if she should listen. 

She was rude? She wouldn’t do that if he was one of them. Had she known then? Was she allowed to think about this? 

The silence had apparently gone on for too long. Spike huffed. “You can speak. I know you can.”

“We met.” Not a question. She knew that logic wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny, but it might get her something.

“We did.” He understood, she could hear it in his voice alongside something else, a quiet dare to push.

“We’re meeting.” There. That was something, at least. A delineation. 

 “To you, maybe. We met a long time ago.”

When? That’s all she wanted to ask, just one word. She knew she couldn’t. 

Had it been here? Or maybe before? She knew there had been a before, there had to have been.

“I haven’t known you very long.”

“You have. You’ve just forgotten. You know, I can’t be too upset. I think I’ve forgotten too. Our meeting.”

“When I was rude.”

“No. Well, maybe, I guess. I don’t really know. You were rude in a sort of… second meeting. Like this one, I guess.”

“I remembered you. In the second meeting.”

“No.” She winced at the response. It felt like she’d given a wrong answer. “You didn’t. You weren’t allowed to.”

“I don’t remember that either.”

“No, I know.”

“I’m happier now,” she posited, not because she remembered before or had any concept of relative happiness, but because something in her said it was what he wanted to hear. “I’m happier being this. Now.”

It seemed to have the opposite effect of what she had intended. He seemed to hollow at the words. He was stuck in the same position, of course, but she watched something inside him collapse through his eyes. It was disconcerting. One was never faced with truths like this when the world was black. If it had happened before, she had not been able to know it. She selfishly thought she preferred it that way. 

Or maybe it wasn’t selfish. If she became hollow, she doesn’t know if she would want him to see. If he was like her, she certainly wouldn’t.  But she didn’t know if he was, couldn’t figure it out. If he was like them, she would never presume to want or not want anything from him, of course. 

“Do you want to know something?” he asked. 

She didn’t. “Yes.” It was what he wanted to hear. 

“It’s my fault. You were rude when we met, you asked me questions. And now you’re nothing. A puppet who’s master doesn’t bother to enliven anymore.”

She was right. She hadn’t wanted to know that. “I’m not supposed to ask questions, I think. I’m never sure.”

“You thought that then too. I think I didn’t count as much because I was like you.”

It made sense. She’d considered that very thing mere minutes ago. “You’re not like me.”

He sagged at that, head pushing up against the restraints, refusing to allow him the slack his body clearly wanted. “No. But I thought I was, back then.”

A mistake, then. But not one of hers. She didn’t know what the consequences were, when they got things wrong. But then, she could hardly remember what her own consequences were. She only knew they existed, that they loomed over her perpetually. 

“You forgot,” she tried, trying to order the events in her head. She didn’t think she was supposed to understand it but it was unravelling all the same. This stranger felt almost in kind to her, parallel to who she had been formed into. 

“Yeah.” His voice was soft, almost sad. “I forgot.”

They didn’t talk after that, but still she looked at him, watched him breathe in shaky breaths and blink heavily behind shaggy hair. 

Eventually, he slept, some heavy sheet of exhaustion overwhelming him. That too she could understand. She could not join him, now, with all this light, but she could understand. And maybe that was what counted in the end. 

When the doctors entered the room, he was none the wiser. 

She did not call out to him. That would be unwise, would run counter to the person she was supposed to be. Still, something in her pulled taut at the sight of them approaching him, of cold gloved hands running over warm skin. 

Was his skin warm? Their hands were always cold. How would she know the difference? 

The cold, ungiving metal around her wrists snapped open and her arms slid off the sides of the chair. Her whole body slumped over as her head was no longer held up and. All she could do was stare. It was not supposed to do that, she knew that much. Or did she? She supposed perhaps it was. They did not seem concerned so perhaps she should not be either. 

They were looking at her. She could not tell why, could only see their heads trailed in her direction. They were covered completely, impossible to read. Then how did she always know when they were upset, when she had done something wrong? She looked at them expectantly, eyes darting between the two men. 

The doctor came over and pulled her to her feet. She followed the motion reflexively, obediently. 

It was easier to see him this way, looming over him. She watched his struggle to tilt his head back as much as he could to look at her, fighting against the unyielding metal of his restraints. 

Wasn’t he supposed to be the one who was with them? Why was this line being drawn, her standing with a doctor while he stayed restrained? It wasn’t right, she couldn’t do it. 

She shouldn’t. Something resembling guilt tangled itself in her stomach. 

Standing like this, she could see things she hadn’t been able to see before. The man’s arm was peeled open, its insides revealed to her, alive and pulsing. 

It wasn’t right to see him like this. Cut open. Laid bare. 

Her hand twitched towards her stomach. She stopped it when it actually moved, no longer held steady by the metal. It was harder to keep herself in check this way, no longer guided by the firm hands of people who knew better. She resolved herself not to move unguided again. 

The doctor led her over to him. Her feet moved forward, out of her control. It was what they wanted her to do. 

The man strained his eyes to look up at her, having given up on shifting his head. It looked painful. Those sorts of things didn’t matter in the dark. 

She didn’t know why she was being shown this. She didn’t know why she was being shown anything. 

She wanted desperately to ask for guidance, to ask why. She refrained, instead looking blankly at the doctor, waiting for any guidance. 

She received it. “Go on. Touch.”

She knew she shouldn’t, knew somewhere inherent inside of her that it was wrong. Her hand creeped forward, brushing against the least invasive piece of him, touching at the skin on the outside of the gaping wound, holding loose, unmoored. It shifted easily at her touch, with nothing to cling to. Even still, like this, separated from its master, it was warm. 

He jerked at the contact, not a wince of pain nor a start of surprise, but something she couldn’t quite identify. Almost like she’d shocked him. 

She remembered that, she realized belatedly. Remembered shocking people; dragging her socks across carpets, sending a small burst of electricity through her fingers. 

It didn’t seem likely here. She had no socks, let alone a carpet. She rarely had so much as the ability to drag her feet, though she supposed she'd now been given that privilege. And besides, she had the nagging feeling that she would have known if that’s what she’d done to him. 

She went to withdraw her hand, her mission completed, but the doctor tsked at her. “Stay there. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

The words hit her like a blow, her body locking in place. As the doctor shuffled over, filling a syringe with something, she heard a crack. She turned to see the man, jaw now open, stretching it from side to side. 

“It’s alright,” he said, words coming fast as he nervously glimpsed at the doctor. It almost seemed like he was scared the doctor might take his words away. It didn’t make sense, the man didn’t follow orders. The doctor could do nothing to him. “They’re making you do this. It’s not your fault. You shouldn’t feel guilty.”

She didn’t like his words. Putting a name to the guilt sent it bubbling up through her, rising outside of the depths of her guts where it had settled, happy to be ignored in favor of complacency. 

The doctor returned, fiddling with the plastic bits of the man, running his fluids through him. The doctor inserted the needle, sending the contents of the syringe flooding through them, churning into the rest of his body. 

She wasn’t sure where the instinct came from, but she braced for screaming, her muscles tightening. 

It never came. 

Instead, the main in the chair convulsed a little, a wet rattling coming through his chest. And then he was looking at her again, eyes sad and angry and almost a little damp. Almost. 

She wished his hair was longer. Then she wouldn’t have to see them. 

His arm twitched under her fingers, the skin loose and shifting with every tensing of his muscles. 

And then he shuddered, his eyes going glassy. 

She wanted to pull away. She shifted back, onto the heels of her feet, feeling unsteady. 

The doctor’s hand cradled hers, pushing her harder into his flesh. She could feel his veins thrumming in time with the throbbing she could see, the way they wound endlessly around and around inside his arm. Was hers like that, on the inside? Or had they reordered the veins, rearranged his insides to suit their needs?

It upset her how dry it was, how sterile. There should be insides on the inside, a wet mass that bled when cut into. It wasn’t right, to see it splayed like this, to have it so perfectly organized so as to almost not be recognizable as flesh. 

As soon as the doctor let go of her hand, she let it fall to her side. She knew it wasn’t permission to let go, but she decided to take it as such anyway

They started speaking about something. She didn’t know what, she wasn’t listening. Instead, she began a slow shuffle back to her chair. This time, she had to think about every movement, forcing herself forwards. It was a relief to slump back onto her chair, lifting her hands so they fell in line with the restraints. 

One of the doctors looked back at her, as unreadable as ever, and muttered something to the other. She was glad it was too quiet to hear, she didn’t have to focus on ignoring it. 

The restraints snapped shut and she was able to relax once more, being held up by forces outside of herself. 

They did not stay long after that, seeming disinterested in whatever they’d been doing now that she was not involved. Something inside her fluttered at the idea that her action, unguided and independent, had saved him from more pain. She was unsure if it was a good or a bad fluttering. It did not seem for her to decide. 

The man stared at his arm, face forlorn and unreadable, looking bare without protective equipment. It was a privilege, she supposed, to be able to hide like the doctors did. He made no move to leave, though something inside her said that he could if he wanted to. She was not sure where that left him, what side she should categorize him on. 

“They’re chemically stimulating emotions,” he informed her unbidden, pulling her from her thoughts. It was for the best, she wasn’t sure if she should be having them. 

“It made you feel something.” Still not a question. A stupid technicality, something that could be toppled over with a look. She tried not to think about it. It was harder to do, when she could see. She mourned the dark once more. 

“Yeah.”

“It was…” she struggled to get the words right. “I don’t know what they made you feel.”

“And you won’t know,” he snapped. 

“Your name is Spike,” she said, the fact slotting into place like it had always been there. There was some emotion behind it, something it took some force to shove away. 

He let out a huff of air. It sounded sad. “And yours is Lyra,” he said, voice low and defeated.

[snowkissedmonsters]

Happy Halloween!

[snowkissedmonsters]

I read @monstersandmaw ‘s Gabe and Odessa story today… I know that last scene was emotional but I can’t stop imagining Gabe hearing all those nice things about himself 🥺🥺🥺

[cosmic-whorror]

Flirting with the swamp dragon 😉

[bucketsofmonsters]

The Past is Prologue

Chapter 7: Spike

Spike Spiegel x OC

cw: medical horror, dissociation, conditioning, depersonalization, amnesia, forced nudity, ivs, restraints, memory loss, torture, sensory deprivation, losing time, loss of sight, surgery, unreliable narrator, whump

Work count: 4k

Masterlist

Ao3

Spike had played his cards badly. He knew that, saw it now that the desperation to escape had ceased to cloud his mind. His arm had just been free and it had felt so close. 

But of course it hadn’t worked. He had gotten up not only with no plan, but with no real idea of where he even was. 

Next time he would be better. 

He was irritated that he’d given away his resistance to sedatives so early. It was a good tool to have, a way to make them underestimate him. 

It wasn’t a mistake he would be making again. Now, on the rare occasion where they decided it was appropriate to sedate him, he was very careful to not give himself away. He felt dizzier, less lucid now when it happened so they had seemingly upped his dose but at least it hadn’t been fully effective. If he foolishly warned them again he might not be so lucky a second time. 

There was a traitorous part of his mind that wondered if they had upped the dosage at all. They didn’t seem to much mind that he’d woken up and taken to some mild wandering. Perhaps they hadn’t bothered, content in their preexisting security measures, not wanting to taint their results even more. 

That would, of course, mean that it was not an increased dose of sedatives making his head feel cloudy, but instead his time in this place degrading his mind. He would be lying if he said he didn’t feel it sometimes, how sluggish he was becoming, the way his thoughts had begun to fall away completely when he wasn’t careful, a lack of existence washing over him unbidden. 

He tried not to think about it much. It wasn’t a productive train of thought. 

Instead, he focused on his planning. When he was alone and they thought he was sedated, he did break out on occasion. 

He was not always left unbound, only sometimes leaving his arm free as they worked on a part of him that would otherwise be covered by a metal cuff. But the jam he’d put in the lock on his wrist left him able to worm his way out at will regardless. 

They weren’t escape attempts. That would come later. No, instead he was focused on gathering materials. In a perfect world, he’d be gathering information too, but that was proving a more difficult process. 

His first step was always to remove the contacts they had stuck in his eyes to remove his sight. It was disorienting; to see the bright, medical lights of the room after so recently having been drowned in complete darkness. 

Gathering materials was easy. He tucked an old IV needle from the disposal bucket into his gums the first time he’d broken out after his ill-thought out escape attempt. It seemed the least likely source to get him noticed. 

He also snuck a few used syringes out of the biohazard bin, using them to siphon off tiny amounts of basically every medicine in the room and then tucking them away, hiding them within some of the inner mechanisms of his chair. 

He would have liked to mess with the chair itself, to make it dispense less of whatever they refilled it with, whatever it was pumping into him. But it was too risky, the odds that they would notice it were far too high. 

So instead, every time he had a spare moment, he repeated his steps, siphoning off minor amounts of fluid and then locking himself away again. 

Unfortunately, he had no real idea what any of the fluids did. He had tried looking through notes, searching for any useful information he could use, but they were beyond his level of understanding. They didn’t seem eager to leave anything that he could make sense of within his space, hoarding information from him more than anything else. 

Gathering information was another matter altogether. There was no clever trick he could do to get that. All he was left with was talking, balancing between asking Lyra enough questions to actually get somewhere but not enough to send her into one of her confused, frantic states. 

He was getting better at it, getting more out of her every time. 

It didn’t hurt that she seemed to be eager to help him, clearly trying her best to funnel him information. 

On one of the rare days she was shuffled out of the room for whatever they did to her, she came back from her testing excited, something desperate in her voice. 

“I think I remember. Some of it, at least. Long enough to say and then I can forget.”

The sentiment didn’t fully make sense to him but he understood the urgency. He kept his mouth shut and pushed down his questions. 

“I… They let me move, in there,” she told him like it was a revelation. “Away from you. They didn’t take me away, before.”

“Before?”

“Before you. When things were normal. They let me move here, exercised and stretched me. And now they take me away. To see… There was a man. He…” she squished her eyes shut with all the force she could muster. He wondered if it was habitual or if it actually helped. It wasn’t like he could see her often enough to make any sort of determination about it. “He hated you.” She spat out the words, coated in the memory of an emotion. 

It didn’t help as much as he suspected she’d hoped it would. A lot of people hated him. He hadn’t exactly been good at making friends, especially early on in his life and especially with the sort of people who would run illegal tests on people who were supposed to be dead.

“Do you remember what he looked like?” he prompted, unsure if she’d even been able to see at the time. “Did he give a name?”

“He hated you. I don’t need to forget that. They didn’t tell me to.” Her voice got softer and softer as she spoke, the urgency draining from her, left behind in her forgetfulness. “He doesn’t have a name. He just… It’s your fault. He blames you. He can’t blame her. That would make it real.”

He desperately tried to slot her half-lucid words into any memory of his, into any of the people who hated him. He couldn’t make it make sense. “Come on, I need more than that.”

She just sighed. “You should stop fighting. It’s harder when you fight.”

She stopped talking after that, no matter how much he pleaded with her. 

The next time they came, they came for him. At least, he thought it was for him. When they did all this in front of her, he couldn’t help but wonder if it was half for her sake too. 

But whoever the powers that be had decided it was for, he was the one in harm's way. It seemed like experimentation, the way they watched and notated and measured. From his end of things they entered, read off some vitals that he was not able to move his neck far enough to see, and then he was tortured. 

Much of his memory during the events was clouded. He watched the liquid move through the tubes, the ones seemingly permanently implanted in his side now, and then every sense was overwhelmed. He could not see, could not hear, only felt the liquid pain now coursing through him.

And then it would wane and his lucidity would return and the cycle would start over again. 

It was in the third waning that he noticed something about his doctor. The doctor’s changed every time, they were hard to see in their protective garments but different skins colors and builds gave it away. Some were repeats, he imagined, but the staff here was in no way small. 

He had no idea if this particular doctor had visited him here before, had seen him in his current, sorry state. But as he peered through the man’s goggles, through the cracks in the protective gear that revealed bits of skin, he recognized him. “I know you,” he hissed out.

The doctor seemed unimpressed with this revelation, continuing to work quietly. 

“You took my eye,” he pushed further, at least wanting to be noticed. 

That at least provoked a reaction, a tiny huff of air escaping the man. “I wondered if you’d ever recognize me. I did. I had to be more delicate then. I suppose your pain mattered more then. Your usefulness too.”

“What, I’m not useful enough as a lab rat?”

“Quite the contrary. You’ve been very helpful, Mr. Spiegel. I certainly prefer you this way, if I’m being honest. You're much easier to deal with when I can shut you up.”

“Well, I can talk now. Does that mean you were missing me?” He forced a wryness into his tone that used to come naturally. 

“Some people were interested in what you might say. I am not one of them. But then, the chemicals I test are easier to understand. I inject, you feel pain. I cut, you hurt. No talking required. I think we both prefer that, a simpler matter.”

“I do not prefer it, if you’re taking critiques.”

“Nothing else useful to add?”

“Come on, doc, you were just singing my praises for how useful I--” The rest of his sentence was cut off by a sudden shriek as his body was wracked with sudden sharp pains, the overwhelming dull ache that it left behind a renewed and reinvigorated version of his new normal. 

He tried to speak a few more times. The attempts didn’t have the opportunity to last long. 

Eventually, it dulled enough for the screaming to stop, the constant, dulled pain returning to him. He did not try to speak. He knew well enough by now that his mouth was wired shut. 

Lyra was apparently facing no such difficulties. “You keep hurting him,” she told them. “You don’t hurt me but you hurt him.”

He winced. It was clearly said out of concern for him, worry about the torture they’d been inflicting on him while she was forced to sit and listen. The sentiment was sweet, but more attention on him was the last thing that he needed. 

They paid her little mind, her voice as much white noise to them as the whir of the machines was. 

She didn’t seem to mind. It certainly didn’t stop her. When she spoke next she did so quietly, almost conspiratorially, like it might stop them from hearing her. “Sometimes when he asks me questions, I think my head hurts. It’s hard to tell. I can’t feel it but the pressure is still there, the echoes of where the pain should be.”

His eyes widened. It was such good progress, a vital breakthrough, and all he could do was fight the urge to shout, “Stop saying this in front of them.” Not that he could open his mouth even if he wanted to. She was going to ruin it, alert them to her growing awareness and just get reset back to where they’d begun through whatever process they’d used to get her here in the first place. 

The doctor, for his part, seemed entirely unconcerned with this. “Stop worrying about that. And don’t feel pain,” he said, and Spike watched as she slumped over as much as her bindings allowed, her body completely relaxing. 

Perfectly, instantly. At their command. 

There was no way that conditioning could get someone to stop feeling pain. It wasn’t possible, was so far outside of anything that had been done before. 

But they were pumping her with drugs perpetually, were testing something on her. And she was so very responsive to commands, almost like she was chemically suggestible. 

Everything about how she spoke, about the way she was, clicked into place. Things she wasn’t allowed to know or to feel or to do. Could a drug really do that, convince a mind to forget, to sever ties to pain? It certainly would be useful, far more useful than the painkillers he’d thought they were testing on her. 

They didn’t stay long after that. That was fine, Spike didn’t need them to. 

“What did they ask you?” he tried first, as soon as they left the room. 

“I’m not supposed to remember that,” she informed him, voice patient, like he might just not understand. 

And then he tried again, with new words and authority in his tone. “Tell me what they asked you.”

“I…” Her face screwed up, hands flexing by her sides. She was usually so still but this was something else, something baser. An instinct to flee. “I can’t… I don’t…”

This was it, the truth he’d been brushing up against all along. And it was such an easy thing to confirm. “Does that hurt?”

“No.”

“Feel pain.”

The scream she let out was primal, an animal thing, ripped out of her. It was horrible and piercing and the most beautiful thing Spike had ever heard because it meant he was right. And frankly, it couldn’t have gone better. This was a truth he could use. 

What was it they’d said last time? The words that had brought recognition to her eyes. “Remain on course.”

Her head twitched to the side in something that resembled recalibration, banging against metal restraints. And then she relaxed, the unconcerned, sleepy look washing back over her. “Was that… Do I…”

She was brushing up against the words, seemingly trying to figure out how to ask him something. 

Or, perhaps, trying to figure out how to ask anything at all. She had her moments, difficulty with questions no matter who she was with. It was usually easier with him. 

He didn’t know if that was true anymore, if his new ability to give orders, to slip into her mind alongside her various captors, had recontextualized him to her. 

It could even be more than that. Maybe telling her to remain on course contained language he didn’t know about, had implications about the speaker. 

It was certainly possible. 

“Ask your question,” he tried, an easy authority slipping into his tone.

After that, it seemed effortless, the words tumbling out of her. “Am I supposed to remember that?”

“Would you like to?”

She tensed at that. She often did, when she couldn’t figure out the right answer to a question. Not that she’d ever lie, she just didn’t seem to like not knowing. 

“I don’t… That’s not for me to say.”

He didn’t push. Him pushing her never led either of them to anything good. 

“Spike?” she called out, almost too soft for him to hear over the droning roar of all the medical machines shoved into this room with them. 

“Yeah?”

“Are you with them?”

He would’ve reeled back if he had the movement capabilities for it. “No. Why would you ask me that?”

She hummed noncommittally in response. “Then how did you do that?”

“I just noticed the patterns. I’m mimicking them.”

“Oh.” She sounded confused and almost disappointed. “Should I listen to you then?”

“Yes.” Surely if she was asking that, she knew she could not trust his answer.

She did not seem to consider this, letting out a contented hum and leaving the answer as it was. He hoped it hadn’t harmed his authority too badly. He would need it to get out of here. 

They had limited time to work with here. She could find someone to coddle her after they got out. 

“You listening to me?” he called out. He needed to be sure.

“Yes.” She loved questions like that, clear ones. She answered them as if on reflex. 

“Next time they haul you away somewhere? Remember.”

It was an odd thing, the way she behaved on orders. She seemed hardwired to forget getting them, to forget any difficult truth around them, really. But it didn’t matter if she could remember them, she’d follow them anyway. 

He wasn’t sure if there was a time limit on how long she would follow one and hadn’t really had a chance to test conflicting orders but he knew enough to make it work. 

It was, of course, unthinkably cruel. Doing this to her. Doing this to anyone.

But leaving her here was worse. Here they’d just continue controlling her, keep chipping away pieces until there was no person left. It had to be done. 

And never let it be said that Spike didn't use every tool at his disposal to get things done. 

It didn’t take long before they took her away again. Or maybe it did. It was hard to tell time in here. It felt like she was gone longer than she’d been before but then, perhaps it was the isolation getting to him. 

Eventually, she did return. She always did. There had been no reason to worry at all. 

“Did you do it?” he asked as soon as the doctors had left them behind. He wondered, not for the first time, if they listened in on them when they weren’t here. Surely they must. It seemed impossible they would leave that stone unturned. 

“I can’t remember what they say. It’s not allowed, not even for a little while. They ask. I must answer correctly.”

It was difficult to not get frustrated with her. “But I told you to.”

“I could not remember the destination but I remembered the path. The turns. There is no rule about that. I remembered.”

“The turns? To what, a way out?”

“It is not the labs,” she said, which didn’t quite seem like an answer. It didn’t matter, it was enough for a chance. 

He clicked open his locks, pulling out his lockpicking needles and stumbling over to her, moving to get her out as quickly as he could. Her wrists came first, and then her head, and then her ankles. 

It didn’t take long before she was free. She seemed disinclined to move regardless. 

It wasn’t difficult to prise the contacts from her eyes. Even at the feeling of his fingers she did not move nor flinch nor try to close her eyes. With no restraints left on her, she sat perfectly motionless for him. 

Her eyes were brown, a dark brown that tried to drown out her pupils. He’d never been able to see them before. 

He watched as she blinked, adjusting to the sudden light, squinting up at him. He could tell when her eyes adjusted and she could see him, color draining from her face. He watched as she transformed from a doll, a lifeless husk, into a real person. 

She gasped in a breath like she’d been drowning, pulling back minutely in her chair like she was still bound. 

“You’re going to help me escape,” he said, voice firm. “You’re going to show me a way out.”

She didn’t seem to hear him, chest heaving as she watched him, unblinking. “It’s you.” The words sounded punched out of her. 

“We don’t have time for this. Come on, you’re going to help me leave.” He put force behind the words, trying to get through. 

He was on the other side of it now. He’d spent so long trying to get her to be a person, to get through to her and now that she had clearly regained something of herself he just needed her to fall back into the brainwashing and remember how to take an order. 

Lyra looked like she might cry. They didn’t have time for this. 

He moved to grab her arm, to pull her to her feet and at least get her moving, and she flinched away, somehow making herself look even smaller than she had. “Don’t fucking touch me,” she hissed at him, something frantic in her face. 

“Come on, I’m not with them. I won’t hurt you.” He did his best to sound gentle and not snappy but he could tell it was half successful at most. 

“Not with… You’re Syndicate. This is… why are you here? You’re his right hand man.”

“Listen, I haven't been with the Syndicate in a long time. I can tell you the whole story after we get out, right now we have to go.”

This only seemed to hurt her more, tears welling up in the corners of her eyes as she stared up at him in disbelief. “You don’t remember me at all. Spike, I’m so stupid. Of course you don’t remember me, why would you remember me?”

“We don’t have time for this, we can have this conversation later, come on.”

He reached for her again, desperate to just get her moving. She pushed herself away, collapsing onto the floor as she spilled over the side of the chair. “Don’t touch me.” There was a visceral desperation in her voice. “You put me here. You did this, I’m not helping you do anything.”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t put you anywhere. I’m trying to get you out now let’s go.”

“No, I… Oh god, you shot me. How did I forget that? I can’t believe I felt sorry for you, you evil bastard.”

“What do you mean I shot…” Oh. 

This was a Syndicate operation, he’d figured that much out. And she knew him, blamed him even. 

All this time, he’d wondered how long she’d been here, to have been so completely torn down like this. Years, probably. He’d known that too. 

So, really, he shouldn’t be shocked to learn that he’d done this. He’d been a prolific enforcer in the Syndicate, it wasn’t like he had any shortage of people he’d shot. 

“Listen,” he growled, leaning closer to her, trying to put command in his voice, trying to salvage this. “I’ve hurt a lot of people. When we get out of here you can swear revenge on me, kill me, whatever you need to do, but being here isn’t good for either of us. We have a common interest. So get up,” he said, putting emphasis on every word, willing them to be compelling enough to get her to her feet. “And get us out of here.”

He watched her, face morphing from fear to sadness to anger and then back around again, like her body was trying to stretch its muscles now that it was allowed to feel again.

For a second, she glanced around the sterile, nightmarish room they’d been trapped in, that she’d seemingly been stuck in for years, and he thought he had her. 

And then she looked up at him, nothing but determination in her eyes, and she said, “I don’t have to take orders from you.”

[bucketsofmonsters]

The Past is Prologue

Chapter 6: Lyra

Spike Spiegel x OC

cw: medical horror, dissociation, depersonalization, amnesia, forced nudity, ivs, restraints, memory loss, torture, sensory deprivation, losing time, loss of sight, surgery, unreliable narrator, whump

Work count: 2k

Masterlist

Ao3

Warm. He’d been warm. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d touched something warm.

It realigned something in her, made him more real. Creatures didn’t feel like that, didn’t beg you to return to personhood. 

It was a difficult shift to make. When they hurt him, now, it panged something inside her. It felt… It wasn’t… 

She wished that they’d stop. She wished they’d do tests on her instead. She couldn’t hurt anymore. She didn’t remember how. 

But they didn’t care what she wished. And she knew she was unwise, in the end. They knew best. This was why she couldn’t be trusted to ask questions. 

Sometimes she felt it again. Left alone, from time to time, she heard shuffling that should not have been possible, clinks and steps in an empty room. 

And every now and then, she felt something warm, coupled with low, slippery words. They never quite made sense. She forgot much of it almost immediately. She remembered that it seemed to upset the voice. She remembered that he sounded like he had a secret. 

But more than anything, she remembered warm.

She didn’t mention it much, keeping it as close to herself as she could. It seemed more likely to continue that way, whatever it was. Remaining unspoken seemed for the best, even if it was some sort of tactile delusion. 

She spoke around it, sometimes. She was getting better at that now, of edging around what she thought she was supposed to do. 

“You don’t forget things,” she said, sneaking her question through in a statement. 

“I do, but continue.”

“You do?” Her heart sank. She couldn’t figure out why. 

“Sort of. Not like you do, but everyone forgets things. You aren’t some sort of memory loss pioneer. Sorry to disappoint.”

Disappointed. Was she disappointed? She didn’t think so. It didn’t feel like what she thought disappointment would feel like. It felt like… Sorrow. Grief. Loss. 

“I think…” It felt wrong. It disobeyed no order and yet it felt wrong. It was a wish against what she was, what she needed to be. 

“What do you think?” he gently prodded her. 

“I think it would be nice to remember. Just for a little while. I wish that I could.”

“Maybe someday you will.”

It was a nice thought, if a faux one. She knew this place, knew how things were. Every day she forgot more. Every day she became less. 

She hoped Spike wouldn’t become less. There was so much of him; his energy demanded to take up space. It was nice. For her, at least. She was sure he was as discontent with her unbeingness as she was content with his life and energy.

But there was nothing to be done about that. She didn’t know how to be anything else anymore. 

They left her in their room to do most of her testing now, that much she knew. Usually she could remember some of the journey out, though to Spike’s dismay the routes were mostly fuzzy. 

But she didn’t, so they must not be moving her. 

She could also feel it sometimes, in the way Spike spoke, like he was talking around it, like he knew something she didn’t. 

It was harder now, with him here, to let her mind go blank. To let go of the curiosity that came with forgetting. Sometimes she couldn’t quite help herself. 

“They do tests on me in here now,” she said one day, unbidden. She wasn’t even sure if Spike was awake, if he could hear her at all. 

“Mmhmm.” He hummed it, low and melodic, almost sleepy. Maybe he had been asleep. He wasn’t now. 

“Do you… what do they do?” She pushed the words out, the uptick in her voice that usually accompanied a question notably absent. She was fairly certain Spike had begun to notice that, her aversion to questions depending on the day. 

“What?” She could hear the excitement in his voice.

“I just mean… I thought you might know.”

“I do. And you want to know?”

“I suppose. They let you know it and they left you in here with me so it can’t be that bad to know.”

The defense sounded weak even to her own ears. Spike didn’t seem to mind. “They tend to just resupply whatever they’re pumping you with and then just… I don’t know. They ask you weird questions.”

She hummed in recognition. “I have to get them right.”

“They’re not really the sort of questions you can get wrong. Unless you’re lying, I guess. They like asking if you're in pain.”

Couldn’t get wrong? That didn’t make any sense. “I would never lie.”

“I’m not saying you would.” His voice was condescending. It got that way sometimes now, when he seemed to think he was pushing her too hard. 

“There is a wrong answer anyway.”

“Like a lie.”

“I wouldn’t lie.”

“We’re talking in circles,” he huffed. “How can it be wrong? You just tell the truth.”

“Being in pain is wrong. I’m not supposed to remember how.”

“That’s what it is then? They’re making sure their weird shit is still working on you?”

“Nothing is working. I just am. I am.” It felt odd to put force behind her words. She didn’t have the opportunity to do it much anymore. 

In reality she couldn’t remember what she was supposed to be. But it felt important to say it. 

Spike didn’t push back. He never did, when she sounded like that. 

“Right. You have to know it’s not your fault if it doesn’t work though. If you feel pain, it’s because their weird sedatives or whatever aren’t doing their job, not because you did anything bad. 

“I am what I’m supposed to do. You wouldn’t understand, you’re new. It hasn’t seeped in yet.”

“Yet? You think they’re doing it to me too? Did they talk about having other test subjects?”

“I… no. Not subjects. You just have to learn how to be. It’s the only way forward.”

He went quiet, after that. She wondered, sometimes, why he did that. If it was anger or irritation or perhaps she was being ungenerous and he was simply thinking. 

It used to be easier to settle into the silence before, when she did not have to worry about things like why it had gone quiet or what anyone else might be thinking. 

In the interim, they rested. She remembered the early days, when Spike would shift endlessly, never stopping. He’d given that much up now, had learned how to sleep. The rest would come. Soon he wouldn’t even remember this part. She certainly didn’t. 

They moved around each other differently now, as he learned the rules and learned her. He seemed more inclined to give instruction, to provide guidance instead of questions. It took a weight off her shoulders. Instructions were simpler. There was no doubt or correctness in orders. 

But still there was separation, something he was keeping from her. It strung a line of tension between them, one she was steadfast in ignoring. 

Sometimes she forgot it existed entirely for days at a time, happy in her obliviousness. Then, it would twang and something inside her would become aware again. 

She was accustomed to not knowing things. She was unsure why this specific breed of not knowing was beginning to grate on her this way. 

But there was little she could do about it, the idea of pushing unconscionable to her. 

So she let him maintain their peace, ignored the way the tension tugged on her. 

It only worsened with the tests. 

It had been so long since the tests had grated on her but now she dreaded them. She couldn’t remember the tests, of course, but feelings had started to leak through. An awareness that squirmed under her skin. 

She wished it could go back to the way it was. 

And then they were taking her out of the room again, pushing her through doors and halls. Maybe she could hold onto it. Just some of it, only for a while. 

Long enough to tell Spike. He’d like that, he always wanted to know things.

And then she could forget, both of her missions completed at once. Surely that wouldn’t be breaking any rules. It wasn’t remembering, not really. It was just taking a little longer to forget. 

It was an easier thing to decide on than to enact. 

She remembered it was different there. The air was less sharp, staler and easier to breathe. It smelled of something. It was hard to tell, her nose so accustomed to the overwhelming scent of disinfectants. This was subtle, something it would take time and memory to figure out. She had neither. 

She remembered movement. That had seemed unusual. She didn’t often get to move, had wondered if she knew how when she was lucid enough to pull the thought to mind. It summoned some sort of guilt to her chest. She didn’t think Spike got this kind of freedom, didn’t think he got to move. 

But how did he touch her then, a traitorous part of her mind dared to ask. How does he move across the room? What is that shuffling?

The questions needed to stop. She was remembering for Spike, for a while, on a loophole. She could not start with the questions too, could not start thinking like this. 

But she definitely remembered moving, remembered an ache in her limbs as they stretched. She remembered standing, remembered the pull of gravity, having to fight against it. 

She remembered that they spoke to her. She could not remember what they said. 

She remembered fire, remembered smoke. She remembered coughing, keeling over on herself. She remembered being told to stop. She remembered stopping, her lungs still…

And something else was there. Someone spoke to her, someone who didn’t look like the rest of them, not covered and sterile. 

There was something there. A silhouette of a memory. 

Someone… He was…

“Forget.”

[velinxi]

Dragon watching

[pitrepan]

skeb-like commission 🐔

[bucketsofmonsters]

The Past is Prologue

Chapter 5: Spike

Spike Spiegel x OC

cw: medical horror, dissociation, depersonalization, amnesia, forced nudity, ivs, restraints, memory loss, torture, sensory deprivation, losing time, loss of sight, surgery, whump

Work count: 4k

Masterlist

Ao3

Their captors, whoever they were, seemed less interested in separating them after that. He couldn’t help but wonder if their interaction had played into that decision, either her sudden birth of memory or the unfortunate state that his questions had worked her into. 

He was more careful about what he asked her now. It was hard to tell what would send her in either direction, towards lucidity or placation, but there was certainly a pattern. 

Her most lucid was always after he was hurt, for reasons he couldn’t quite fathom. She didn’t seem to care much for her own wellbeing, but the more openly injured he was, the more she could say. 

Any mention of her name shut her down entirely, except in rare moments of comprehension. It was like an off switch, near instantaneous. Even unable to use it, Spike was glad he knew it. It made her feel less like a tool being used against him. 

The footsteps came again, echoing through the room, cutting through the mechanical whirring he could hardly notice anymore. It had been too constant for that, invisible unless he paid attention. 

Without warning, the lights clicked on. They’d never done that in this room before. He blinked, trying to make sense of the sudden light. 

There was one doctor in the room. He might have been familiar. It was hard to say, with how covered they tended to be. He could only guess at male, from figure and posture and height. 

And in front of him, strapped into a chair, was a girl. She looked around his age, he supposed. It was hard to tell, really, under the wires and the tubes and the exhaustion painted across every feature. 

Her eyes pointed forwards, unfocused. He couldn’t see the color of them, some film fogging them up, like the eyes of a corpse. He imagined his looked the same when he couldn’t see. 

Her tubes were different from his, attached to different places with different thicknesses. Some were similar, pumping blood in and out of her, but most seemed to connect to various IV’s. 

She was naked, just as he was. The state felt clinical, sterile to match the room around them. It was an uncomfortable juxtaposition, her strapped down and exposed next to someone who couldn’t be more covered, barely identifiable as human. 

Her nudity revealed the oddest fact about her. Where her stomach should be, there was a clear plastic window. No, not a window, a door. He could see hinged pressed into her left side, digging into flesh. Through the window, he could see inside of her, could see organs shifting and squirming with every breath, could see the aftershocks of every heartbeat. 

He tried not to look at it much. It felt invasive in a way that made his own insides squirm. 

The girl, Lyra, he supposed, could have been pretty, if he’d met her in another setting. Her hair was long and dark, lips full and smile lines lovingly pressed into the corners of her eyes.

She wasn’t smiling now. Her face was completely blank, like it hadn’t held an expression in a long time. 

She didn’t react to the touch of gloves against her skin, to the plunge of a needle into her arm. 

“What is your name?” asked the doctor, definitely male, voice low and uninterested. His voice was unmarred by dehydration. 

“I don’t know,” replied Lyra. It was probably true. Spike doubted she had the capacity to lie right now.

The doctor wrote something down. “And his name?”

A small wrinkle formed between her brows and she paused. Slowly, less certain, she responded. “I don’t know who his is.”

Spike went to speak, to make himself known or to protest the questions, he wasn’t quite sure. He wasn’t one for overthinking things before he said them. He found his mouth sealed shut when he tried. 

The doctor turned to him momentarily, likely a response to some shifting Spike hadn’t realized he was doing, before turning back to Lyra. “You do. Your roommate.”

Her eyes widened slightly, almost imperceptibly, like she’d had a quiet realization. “I do. It’s name is Spike.”

It. He wondered if that was for the doctor’s sake or if it was how she really thought of him. She seemed distant, now, so he would have bet on the latter. She seemed to have trouble recognizing anyone’s humanity when she was like this. 

The doctor tsked offhandedly, seeming more for his sake than for either of them. “He is a chatty one, isn’t he?”

“I… suppose. He asks questions.” She put force behind it, like she was trying to will them to understand the questions she clearly had, about what authority Spike may or may not have over her, about what she should say to him. 

They didn’t seem particularly inclined to read into anything she’d said, humming dismissively. “I’m sure he does. And what do you remember?"

Her eyes darted around, despite the fact that she still clearly couldn’t see, almost like she was searching for something. For a moment, something approaching anger graced her face. It was gone as quickly as it appeared. 

“Nothing,” she said. “Spike. That’s his name. Am I supposed to know that? Or, wait no. Is it… I know that,” she finally settled on, seeming panicked at her slip up. 

The doctor didn’t seem to care. He couldn’t help but wonder what had left her half averse to questions like this, sometimes able to ask him dozens of things and sometimes clearly terrified of it. They didn’t seem to come with any sort of punishment. At least, they hadn’t this time, he supposed. 

“I’ll leave that up to you,” the doctor said, still not deigning to so much as look at her. 

That seemed to upset her more than anything, something being left in her hands. 

That too was ignored. 

“Any pain?” the doctor prodded again, checking some sort of monitor hooked up to her, attached to the side of her chair. 

“No pain,” she confirmed.

“Good. We intend to keep it that way. Remain on course.”

There was a gleam of something in her eye at that, something like recognition. It meant something, Spike was missing something.

But the gleam was gone in a heart beat, replaced by the familiar blankness found only in livestock and pets awaiting their next command, and Spike had found nothing, no thread to cling to. 

The doctor left sometime after that. Spike had been too lost in thought to notice. It was alarming, that something like that could happen when they hadn’t even taken away his sight. 

A bad omen, certainly. 

He needed to stay sharp, he needed to learn more. “You’re really not in any pain?” he asked, testing theories, pushing Lyra again. It was better than just sitting there, better than doing nothing. “I can hear your voice, I know you’re dehydrated, nothing hurts?” Talking didn’t hurt him either, but it certainly wasn’t a lack of pain causing it.

“Not anymore.” She never explained her answers, just stated them like they already made sense. 

Pain killers, then, maybe. It certainly wasn’t what they were testing on him, the constant pain thrumming through him being more than enough to disprove that. 

But maybe it made sense, in some backwards sort of way. Something to suppress pain being used on her while he was dosed with some sort of torture drug, something meant to draw out pain, maybe a way to do so without actually injuring someone. 

That was the one thing about torture. It had to end eventually, the human body only capable of taking so much. Maybe this was a route around that.

And she was… what. They already had pain killers, they’d been around for centuries. And besides, completely shutting off any ability to feel pain was beyond dangerous, a terrible idea to give to anyone, friend or foe. 

“You really don’t feel any pain?” he prodded, hoping to get anything useful out of her. “Never?”

Her breathing audibly slowed, perfectly rhythmic and calm. It took her a few seconds to answer. “I’m not supposed to discuss that.”

“Come on, they never told you not to answer my questions. I heard it myself, nothing wrong with it.”

“Can’t answer what I’m not supposed to know. It’s wrong.”

And around in circles they went. 

It was hard not to get frustrated with her. It wasn’t her fault, he knew that, but it didn’t change the fact that speaking with her was an exercise in self control. It was a miracle he hadn’t lost his temper at her. If the information locked in her head wasn’t his best shot he had at getting out of here, he probably would have. 

Watching them perform tests on her did trigger something resembling empathy. Pain or not, it was a horrible thing to be conditioned to. He couldn’t help but wonder at what she had been like when they’d first brought her here, before they’d broken her. How long had she fought before turning into this? How long would it take before the same happened to him?

They’d been letting him see more, though Lyra did not seem to be being extended the same privilege. She didn’t really seem to mind the idea, not in any of her states of lucidity, too accustomed to being robbed of her sight. 

He couldn’t imagine why he was being extended this grace. It certainly wasn’t out of the goodness of their hearts, of that much he was certain. 

“Don’t you miss seeing?” he’d asked her once, when they’d left his vision on while they were alone. It was becoming more and more common. 

He watched her face screw up, watched the expression he imagined she had no concept she was making. “No. Seeing makes my head…” she drifted off, voice going distant. 

“It does what? Makes your head hurt?”

“No pain. The darkness is easier. Darkness is safer.”

He pushed down the dozens of follow up questions that swelled in him. “Fine. Sure. Why not.”

She hummed contentedly, seeming to like that response. “Why not,” she echoed. 

It did nothing to make this feel less inhumane, observing her while she was rendered completely blind. 

It was for the best though. Maybe he’d see something that could help them escape. 

A door hissed from in front of him. He was pretty sure the doors in here were on some sort of airlock system. It was difficult to know for sure, they never transported them when they were able to see.

Two doctors entered, approaching Spike instead of Lyra. He wasn’t sure which he was hoping for. 

They went for one of his tubes, pulling it out of his line of sight and attaching something to it. They had some sort of IV next to them, he imagined that was pumping through him in one of the tubes that typically held his blood. 

A wave of nausea washed over him, the world starting to spin despite his obstinately static state of being. A sedative then, he decided. 

It was the last thought he had. 

He woke up to his arm open again. They seemed to have some sort of fascination with it, the freaks. 

He could feel it better this time. The constant pain bombarding him from every direction was becoming more routine. It was easier to place specific, sharper pains this way. 

It was a blessing, really. It left him more able to determine external stimuli, made information gathering easier. 

It didn’t feel like a blessing, now, with the sharp pain of being dissected running through him. 

At least he could confirm they were not using pain relievers on him. It made the use of a sedative earlier even more confusing. They hadn’t moved him, he was in the same room he was accustomed to. Only one doctor was here now but it wasn’t like there was anything he could do. 

His eyes were dry. He’d probably kept them open, then, while he was under. He kept himself as still as he could, unresponsive. He was sure they were keeping track of him well enough to know the exact moment he’d be off sedation but it was always worth playing to the element of surprise. 

The doctors, per usual, seemed largely unconcerned with Spike for any matter other than cutting him open like a dead frog. 

They wrote something down, squinting at something he couldn’t see on the side of his chair. 

And then the doctor turned and left, the familiar hiss of the likely airlock sounding alongside the distant echo of footsteps. 

He looked down at his arm. Cut open. Dissected. Not restrained.

Maybe that was why they put him under. He knew he was a flight risk, more than most. It wasn’t a bad idea. 

He lifted his arm, slowly, testing his bounds. There was an uncomfortable shifting, a visible mechanical movement of exposed muscles. The skin on either side, untethered, flopped around freely. 

He didn’t have time to be squeamish. He moved it, slowly but with intention, to the ends of the various tubes in him. Most seemed to blend seamlessly with his skin, connected to something inside of him. 

Then he found what he was looking for. One of the temporary IV’s stuck into him with a hard metal base, the softer plastic tips seemingly being swapped for a metal one for ease with little regard to his comfort. 

He pulled it out of his skin, separating it from the plastic tube and leaving clear liquid pouring out on the ground below him. 

He shifted his arm around to the other side, trying to angle it to at least keep the open side facing up, and moved slowly, gently. The needle, long and malleable, bent in half easily as he inserted it into the lock. If he’d been the praying type, he would’ve prayed it was sturdy enough to provide the needed pressure. As it stood, he just held his breath. 

The lock clicked open. 

He exhaled. Onto the next lock. 

He tried to avoid the use of his right arm as much as he could, leaving it face up and motionless while he worked unless he really needed it. 

And then he was fully free. 

He jammed the needle back into the lock that had been trapping his left wrist, leveraging the pins against the rest of the lock as best he could. He’d seen locks like this before. They tended to lock electronically, triggered by a button somewhere and hissing shut, the physical locks a backup system. He was glad, now, for their high tech facilities. 

If he was right about the type of lock, and he really hoped he was, they were incredibly sturdy when properly mechanized. However, they were incredibly easy to jam up physically, if you knew what you were doing. 

He’d taught Ed about them once. She’d spent minutes, which was basically years in Ed’s version of the world, trying to get a lock open digitally when Spike had jammed his lock picking set into it and broken it permanently. She’d followed him around for the rest of the day, demanding he’d shown her how he did it. She did wander off to ask Faye something about halfway through his attempted display but knowing her, she’d already figured the rest of it out by then. 

He jammed the pins further up than they were meant to go, shoving them back out of place. If he’d done it correctly, the lock's newfound deficiency would be easily detectable by anyone trying to physically lock it; the pins refusing to clock back into place, lodged further out from center than they were meant to be. However, without a proper recalibrating, the machine would think the pins were where they should be and the cuff would close, but would not lock. 

It was an insurance policy, should he not manage to get out. He hoped he wouldn’t need it.  

Lyra had not reacted to any of this, had not so much as shifted. He wondered if she really hadn’t been able to sense anything was different or if she did notice and was playing dead. 

“Do you want to leave?” he tried tentatively, standing on shaky legs, weak from lack of use. 

“I don’t… No.”

He hummed, pulling over a rolling IV pole to lean on as he took stock of the materials he now had at his disposal. “You sure about that? Because I think you do, deep down.”

She blinked, like she was remembering something. “I do. Deep down.”

“Atta girl. So, what do you say you help me get us out of here?”

“I’m not supposed to know that.”

“Know what?”

“How to leave.”

He moved over to her, his left arm clutching the IV pole, his right being held aloft, the open wound pointed skywards. It left him no hands left to pick the lock with.  “Not supposed to, sure. But do you?”

“I don’t know things I’m not supposed to.”

He hooked his arm around the pole, leaning his body against it while trying to keep it stable with his foot, freeing up his left hand. It moved forward, placing the needle into the lock, his knees leaning up against her legs where they sat, strapped into the chair. 

She gasped as soon as he made contact with her, eyes going wide, darting around like she’d just remember the concept of sight. “I… You’re real.”

He chuckled. “What, thought you imagined me?”

“No one is real anymore. How did you…”

“You can ask questions you know.”

“I can’t… I can ask questions?” She sounded confused and overwhelmed. He could see her leg twitch under the bindings like she didn’t know what to do with it anymore. 

“You can. If anything, I’d say it’s encouraged."

“Your name is Spike,” she said like it was a revelation. “My name is Lyra.”

“Mmhmm. Exactly. Now, how do we get out of here?”

“I’m not supposed to know that.”

He fought the urge to get irritated. It wasn’t her fault, not really. He could be kind about it after they escaped. “I need you to tell me.” 

“You need?” The bindings on one of her arms clicked free. She made no attempt to move it, arm remaining perfectly in position. 

They didn’t have time for this. He worked on her other bindings, desperate to get her closer to lucidity so she could give him what he needed to get the fuck out of here. “Yes. Look, I promise everything is going to be fine. Just tell me.”

That seemed to snap something in place inside her. “There’s many ways out. They take me, sometimes. You could see yourself, if you learn to behave.”

“I’ll get right on that. In the meantime, could you show me?”

She seemed almost dazed, her breathing coming a little faster. His hand shifted from his lockpicking back to her just for a moment, touching her arm, trying to bring her back to herself. She tensed beneath him. “Could I? I… tell you. I can tell you.”

He went back to picking the locks, working on the band strapping her head to the back of the chair. “Good. Start doing that. Tell me everything you can.”

And then the airlock hissed and Spike deflated, throwing all of his weight against the IV pole. He knew when he was beat, knew there was no way out of this. 

The doctor stared at Spike where he stood, free and dissected and bargaining with his fellow captive. He hit some button on the wall and an alarm sounded, loud and echoing through the room. 

And then the doctor approached him, seeming entirely unconcerned with his new found freedom. 

Spike tried to get ready, to make himself fluid and untouchable the way he always did. 

It didn’t work. His muscles, weak from lack of use, had forgotten how to move, how to work together. He couldn’t fight, he could barely stand. 

The doctor manhandled him, shoving him back towards the chair easily. Without effort. Spike could barely squirm, feeling the skin of his arm pulling back further at the movement. 

Manacles locked over his wrists. His head was shoved back more aggressively than was strictly necessary, the force of it slamming him back into solid metal. It hurt. At least he could tell that much now. 

“I knew your vitals looked weird,” the doctor said. It took Spike a minute to realize he was being addressed. “It must have affected your susceptibility to sedatives. I thought I had activated some latent…” he trailed over before looking up at Spike, seemingly realizing who he was talking to. “Doesn’t matter. Interesting, though. Would be more interesting if you’d stay put. Should take cues from that one.” He nodded haphazardly at Lyra, who had tears streaming down her face. He didn’t seem to notice. “Are you going to stay put while I stitch you up or do I have to strap your arm back down with the rest of you. It is so much harder to handle you that way.”

Spike tried to open his mouth, shocked to find his jaw easily shifted. He’d lost this fight, he knew that. Better to be docile until he had a better opportunity, an opportunity he had a chance of winning. “I’ll stay put.”

The doctor hummed his acknowledgement, pulling out some medical supplies Spike had never seen the likes of before. 

Despite his better judgement, he avoided looking. There was only so much he could take in one day. Instead, he stared at Lyra, who seemed to be coming out of whatever haze she’d entered, tear tracks still visible on her now peaceful face. 

[pocketss]

Ummm she's literally sensitive :/

[vozart]

Part 1 of a little comic for mershark soap and pirate ghost :)

Ghost thought sharks didn't make noise so he's really shocked when the one he's stuck with (hes not really stuck hes keeping it around cause he feels bad and the mer is handsome) starts crying loudly...