Turquoise lights, thin blue lines stretching across the room.
Smooth reflections beyond the surface of a glass-walled cage.

Wires and metal-cased tubes cascading the walls and low ceiling. The low hum of machinery winding up into the center-stage. A play about to begin, the prologue to a symphony about to unfurl, beyond the amber glow of a pair of eyes beyond the distant world.

Pupils narrowing, as a faint noise echoes in the distance.

Thud, thud, clank. 


Smile, spreading, the soft buzzing of an electrical current, rushing through his collar.
Pale eyes, pale skin, veins decorating where cheeks were meant to blush.
Alive, but barely. 
A person, but barely.


"Breach in Delta?", a hissed whisper, heart racing with fear.
No answer, only another thud, another soft hiss, beyond the glass, as he watched, eagerly, anticipated.

Strung up by his arms, toes hovering above the sterile ground, he was waiting. Unsure of what, unsure of why, his day had come after all. The first day that was different from all the others. 

A door sliding open, wet footprints painting the scene in carmine and gravel. A familiar copper spell, intertwining with a craving he had yet learn to curb and bury. Bloodlust, they had called it, but it had meant nothing to him then, before he had a name, before that very day.

"This one is it...", one of the two strange intruders nodded towards the inscription in the metal plate above.
"Like some sort of uncanny Messiah", they used to joke, he could taste it on their lips, tell their desires from the weight of their breaths.

"Are you sure it is me you're after?", he hummed softly behind white strands of hair, framing the strangers that had entered his domain.

Hesitation. The two strangers froze in their tracks. Only two, that's all it had taken to make it past security in the most well-guarded post they had to offer. 
Only two.
All these years he had expected it would take a miracle, divine intervention, a power outage and a plane crash at least, to make a dent into the fortress they had designed around him. 

01.01.

"It's alright", she responded, pulling her goggles off her face and brushing aside her dark curls, freckles seaming her face, like a constellation of stars, from one ear to the other. She smiled. Their gazes met for a split second. Turquoise glow on tan skin.
Sharp teeth, a smile. The strange woman froze, shuffled backwards, hand on her weapon.

"Don't worry, I won't hurt you.", the prisoner responded, voice growling, slowly lowering himself off of his restraints, limbs twisting and turning into their respective parts, detaching themselves from the tubes and wires, trying to keep his posture straight, as the past years began to strain his abilities.

Waiting. Hunting. 

His gaze shifted briefly, following another indefinable noise, the nervous breaths of an old friend, hat pulled down and gloved hands fidgeting for an access code.

"This one, on the other hand", he said, sternly, and with purpose, as the tubes clattered behind him, slowly releasing his spine from its final restraints, as his feet touched the ground for the first time in decades. 

"No please, this is not, I am not, I...", the faceless scientist begged in the dim turqouise light.

"Shhhh."

He rested a bony finger on the womans' lips, "You were just containing an asset, were you?", he giggled, shifted past the stranger, body fading into fog, and re-merging whole, "Don't worry, I understand."

Relief, doubt, hope.
He had never thought of hope like this before. 

A giggle, a splatter, a red hat.

"Too bad you are on the wrong side of the fence today", he hummed softly, tossing a head aside and wiping his lips, before facing the one-man rescue mission he had yet to call home. And the stranger in the red hat smiled, as if he already knew what was next. 

"Hungry?"


⋘ ↻ 03/12 ⋙