Magical Top Surgery Pond Real Confirmed

Jasper remembers the first time he used a radio. There was a competition each year at summer camp. Color war. Red and green. They’d paint their faces and sneak through the woods by night, coordinating with walkie-talkies and well-used maps. He is red this year. The Darkness soaks his hands already. Jasper doesn’t have to navigate. The radio in his mask directs him.

These are familliar kinds of trees. He rests his hand on the broken bark of an oak and leaves a charcoal handprint behind. How far is he from home? He is a bloodsoaked beast wearing the mask of a supervillain. If he came within a mile of his father’s orchard, any Sparston man would be in their rights to shoot him.

It would be quick. They have good aim. Jasper has not been armed with a gun. The radio tells him to hurry, but it’s not the voice of his handler. Why not? Has Bridges abandoned him too?

He thinks about home. He thinks about his friends. Mostly Jasper thinks about the pain in his neck and in his bones that he’s so grateful to be numbing with his powers. The Darkness leaks from his eyes and Jasper cannot pull off the mask to wipe it away.

Above his head he sees the constellations. Lyra and Aquilla and Cygnus. Another bright light hangs nearby, but he can’t tell what planet. He hasn’t spoken to his grandfather since May. He probably never will again. Wasn’t there a time when he hoped for that?

Eventually there is a fight.

He sees the shortest enemy first. She’s five feet flat, with her hair tied into a ponytail that reaches halfway down her back. The briefing supplies information. She’s superhumanly strong and a master climber, but has no ranged abilities. Capture without killing. Jasper forms the darkness into a whip and lashes out. He is far too slow. The enemy pulls herself up a towering maple with claw-tipped hands and races through the canopy.

Jasper follows. This is likely a trap, but he follows. He also remembers the warning that the villain gave, that when he is sent into combat, he should just lie down and take it, but God does it feel good to barrel down the trail like a beast unleashed. He doesn’t even need to dodge. The Darkness disintegrates anything in his path.

Maybe he can throw something? His muscle memory is usually alien, but the old Zachary still exists somewhere. Jasper registers another enemy approaching as he forms a sphere of Darkness in his right glove. The construct even has the looped stitches of a baseball. He knows exactly how to spin his wrist. No time to follow the orb as it leaves his hand. He turns with the momentum as the world flashes white.

The lenses in his mask darken a few shades against the glare. Funny. His alien eyes see well at night, but not once in his captivity was it truly dark. Did they know? This enemy is like an angel. She even turns to look when the climbing girl yells in pain and falls from the branches. She cares about them more than herself. Jasper flinches too, but there’s no time. He cannot dissapoint.

They grapple in the shattered forest. Jasper is not listening to his radio. He is not thinking about the climbing girl. He’s thinking about the old story where Jacob wrestles the angel by the riverbank. He got a new name out of it, and a destiny too. Jasper doesn’t relent, even when the woman yells for him to listen, and that this was supposed to be a rescue. He tries to ignore the villain’s warning to yield. Her fist slams his shoulder out of place. The hum of the Darkness asks to fix it. Jasper obviously agrees.

He tears the familiar emblem off of her chest. She slams his helmet into her knee. The Darkness is glorious and he never feels any pain. Is his body accumulating damage? Certainly. His hands move like flippers and his legs are wooden. Not wooden as in stiff, but wooden like puppetry, and animated only by tendons of magic holding him together. She staggers backward with a hand on one bleeding hip. The blood glows.

“We aren’t your enemies! Try to think clearly! This was… they said you would come with us!”

The collar of his suit is tight. He can’t remember how to speak, but he holds still.

“The Department said they would let you go. We - the Horizon Guard, we’re with the Horizon Guard- just had to pick you up, here. Clearly they told you something different”.

They told him to fight the enemies and make all the suffering worth it. (They told him to obey above all else) Jasper tries thinking clearly. He really does. These two young women are clearly not any of the Horizon Guard he knew before his arrest, but it has been a few months.

Jasper lets his hands fall and listens to the Darkness rattle in his lungs. He reaches up to touch his mask. Then the radio chatter stops, and the thing they put in his chest gives a faint pop. He freezes completely. Even his magic stops it’s smoke-like swirling. Most importantly, it stops his heart.

Luckily, Jasper is a raging storm of magic beneath his skin. His heart wasn’t really needed. The Darkness can hold together by strength of will and the belief that he is the way he thinks, no matter what happens to his animal body.

But what strength of will does you-have-been-lied-to carry? He struggles for something stronger as he sinks to his knees, but his memories have been shuffled together and there is no time to sort. Human, cavern elf, prisoner, superhero. A single descriptor sticks up like a thorn. Monster. He feels no pain while the Darkness rages. It feels good. Only a monster would feel good after doing something like this. The thing in his chest stopped his heart, and the Darkness makes it so he doesn’t need one. It warps the rest of his body to match.

And so when the storm of red in the forest pulls back into the shape of a man, he comes back wrong. His mask has been erased, and the face underneath is not human at all. Now, all of his teeth are fangs. Claws split his gloves. He glares down at the angel with black eyes between scales and pure magic writhes within the cracks. He is longer six foot five, but towering and beastly, and they fight like gods on mountaintops.

There is no voice in his helmet anymore. He has been abandoned again, but this feels too good to miss anyone. He is utterly free, as only the completely alone can be. Distantly, he knows that this cannot last. His heart has stopped. His monstrous skin splits and dark red something pours out to swirl in the air.

His head whips to the side as someone small and weak enters the clearing they’ve made.

“Okay, okay! Someone cover for me! That’s enough, Zachary”.

It’s a young voice. The voice of a senior camper with a bit of authority for the first time. The voice of cousins empowered by their fathers who aren’t sure how far that goes. Somehow, he agrees with it. Jasper stills. Darkness sloughs off of his shoulders. There is tree bark between his teeth.

“Stop fighting”.

A teenaged human stares up at him, specifically at the maelstrom eyes that stare out of his misshapen skull. The child stands at the height of his ribcage. The Darkness screams that he is being charmed, but Jasper doesn’t see any problem with that. Obedience always hurts less.

“I was looking forward to meeting you”. The child says, and takes a shuddering breath, “Well, the version of you that isn’t on a monstrous rampage. Come back. You’re not a monster… not any more than me”.

How did they know? Is someone reading his mind? Jasper isn’t sure if his thoughts have even been in English. He does not resist the spell. The Darkness turns on him. His body becomes uncertain. His claws fade into mist and he begins to shrink. No, he shouldn’t be at eye level with this mortal. He’s supposed to be tall. Zachary realizes that he is on one knee. He is terribly tired.

“Zach? Oh no. I think he’s crashing. Call Striker!”

Pain blankets him like the first snowfall of the season. He collapses.

……………………

The moment the child tells him he is not a monster, the Darkness pulls back from his veins and leaves nearly nothing behind. Jasper has pushed too far, been pushed too far, and like overworked farmland his body is desolate and crumbling. Far away monitors show that he slipping into shock. In the absence of magic, his heart remembers that it needs to beat. It struggles.

His one-time enemies circle close and panic. The climbing girl yells at the glowing one that she’s murdered him and she responds that the freak was tougher than anyone said. This is more than they expected. They expected the Department of Supernatural Resources to pull some kind of trick after they proposed to set Zachary Sparston free, but this is worse. They call their mentors. The real Horizon Guard always expects worse. They are prepared.

The superhero called Sky Striker, who knows first-hand how the government abandons what it doesn’t find useful, arrives in minutes. The sensors of her own mask lock onto his fading heartbeat. She swoops like a peregrine, and, remembering the pararescue jumper she used to be, Striker lifts his too-light body in her augmented arms and races away. The youngsters can make their way back. She can’t afford to wait.

The base is a whirlwind of activity. Striker cuts away what remains of his villainous uniform and sets him into the best medical equipment they have. It was invented by another Horizon Guard. He died this March. None of them are coping well. They have hacked the Department of Supernatural Resources to learn Zachary’s blood type, but the retreating Darkness has left Zachary’s circulatory system half-formed.

Hours later, he is still unconscious. Clouds of magic look like bruises as they swirl beneath his skin. The vivisection scar still shines on his chest. An ally of theirs floats in without a foot touching the ground. Wizard nonsense. They’re too panicked to question it. This boy’s aunt is a wizard, and their dean says they may be able to save him. This is just like magical overuse, right? They have healers. His aunt is one of them. Zachary opens his blue eyes for a moment when she sits by his bed. He seems not to believe what he’s seeing.

The wizards keep him breathing, but it’s unstable. They say he must be conscious to control his powers, but while his powers are like this, he can’t become conscious. Twelve more hours. Twenty four. He is so thin. The Horizon Guard named Ferrel, a five hundred year old warrior, mutters for no one to overreact. Then her brother darkens the doorway.

Ferrel doesn’t give a damn about the boy. The fact that he bears the memories of a villain she once killed doesn’t make him any more than another human coward. Elster disagrees. He’s been trying to speak to him for weeks. That tall dark and handsome villain hasn’t been seen in New York City since he burned it. Ferrel has to hold the rest of the Guard back from a fight.

His longcoat brushes the floor. He does not make eye contact with anyone except his sister. They speak briefly in the language of the Chrysaors with a dying boy between them. Then the prince of a fallen fae kingdom does the ironic and unthinkable: he kneels. By his bedside, Elster takes things from within his coat. A bottle of iridescent powder. A dagger. A small yellow apple.

Elster places both hands on his chest. Zachary’s body shocks awake, but his eyes are unfocused.

“He is trying to keep the boy alive,” Ferrel explains to the room so no one rushes to stop it. No one likes the volatile, drunken, woman she’s become, but they won’t get in her way either.

Sometimes magic looks like science. Sometimes it looks like pure fantasy. Zachary is a creature of story, so Elster chooses more narrative magic. It looks like cutting a slice from an apple.

“Eat this, it will save your life,” Elster explains to Zach alone. Like Adam in the garden, he is half-asleep and shameless. He obeys.

“You know I am the liar. This kind of act has consequences,” the villain whispers.

Zachary blinks once, twice. Elster places a hand onto his palm. “Too late to turn back”.

His hand glows teal-purple-blue and finally the deep red of the Darkness. Then he stands and folds his hands behind his back. A design or a brand fades on Zachary’s palm. His heart rate finally evens out. The dozen heroes, wizards, and doctors all gasp. Even Elster shows a faint smile, though mostly he shudders with the siphoned power.

Then Jasper curls in on himself in the nest of IVs, and closes his blue eyes tight, and they remember that perhaps this boy in this state would rather have died than been saved by a devil. But he is alive, and the sun shines through the windows. He is out, and his heart is beating. They have time to manage the details.

……………….…………

That is the end of Buried Depths. Truly, all of this was prologue, but I'm not writing anything more chronologically. The real story is their recovery, where Zach and nearly every other character you’ve met are only allowed to be free under the condition that they become a superhero team. The Department of Supernatural Resources tries its best to make them fail, which would prove that redemption is impossible and living weapon projects are the only way forward. The grieving survivors of the old Horizon Guard try to play caretaker.

The team is this: Zachary/Jasper, the reality-warping warrior who now owes a supervillain a life debt. Sara/Sol, a defiant flying tank of a woman. Noah, the guy-in-the-chair genius who can also control the weather. And Cyrene, a cutthroat telepath not fully down for the hero thing. There are also two members you haven’t really seen: Daniel, an edgy metalbender with serious trauma, and Vicky, the teen with mind control powers you just met, who is the only one of the group to have never been imprisoned.

If you would like to continue being tagged on any one-off posts I write about these characters in the future, let me know. Otherwise, the Buried Depths taglist will be retired.

Taglist: @purpletealgoatguy @hellodecisionparalysis @weibun-art @zozgreenery @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi @theloveofwhump @chaotic-orphan @hueningplushie @amandagn394 @superalk

Every bone is his body hurts as the magic within grows restless, but the prickling pain is barely a nuisance compared to the agony before he was cut apart. Earlier in his captivity, Jasper might’ve hid his eyes and coaxed a bit of magic into his limbs to stop the jitters. He knows the consequences of disobedience now. He lies on the tile that used to be soaked with his blood. It hurts to breathe, but at least he can.

“Jasper,” his handler’s voice. His ears twitch involuntarily. They’ve been pierced with circles of red jasper. If he ripped them out, the holes would probably close. But that would hurt. They would just do it again.

“I know you can hear me, Jasper”.

Do not speak. Do not frighten. He remembers pulling the prongs of his collar out of the flesh of his neck. Jasper wraps his arms around his chest and resolves to do nothing.

“You need to eat something, Jasper. You haven’t even taken your pills since I brought you here. There’s no reason for you to be in pain”.

There has always been a reason. Whether it’s the collar around his neck or a soaked cloth over his face or a fist against his jaw, there’s always been a reason. He had to learn control. He killed a man. He deserved it.

“I’m going to walk closer”.

He does. Handler Bridges has heavy footsteps. He can hear a plastic tray sliding against the tile. These damn ears. He knows the main has crouched only a few feet away.

“Eat something. At least take the painkillers. That’s easy”.

It sounds like a order, so he pulls himself upright. Jasper blocks the bright light with a skeletal forearm and chokes on the cup of pills. His mouth is dry as the dead. He drinks the water. He drinks the soup. Jasper presses his back into the corner.

“See, I knew you were hungry. Do you want to talk to me? Go for a walk?”

He stares blankly at Bridges’ feet. Those rubber-soled boots. They don’t conduct electricity. He remembers the air crushed from his lungs.

His handler can tell he isn’t wanted. He leaves. Jasper curls up again. He thinks of murderers and monsters. He loved superheroes. His sister loves fairy tales. They are all obligated to fight for the good. Faithful and courageous. He killed a man. He has felt a hand beneath his heart. The door opens. He reaches for the painkillers without turning around. Bridges makes him eat.

He does not want to talk, his teeth are monster’s teeth. He does not want to walk, there is nowhere to go. They gave him a chance and he failed. It he should never have come back from the dead. He doesn’t crawl onto the cot to sleep. Unconsciousness will find him wherever he lies. It is exhausting to heal.

………….

Even in his dreams, Jasper is stuck underground. He sits on the surgical bed and swings his legs. Looks down, and the y-shaped incision on his chest is drawn in red ink. Looks up, and the camera in the ceiling stares like the beady black eye of a crow. No, not a crow, a magpie. This time, Jasper recognizes the presence of a villain’s mind barging into his dreams. He stares in silence until a voice in the back of his head drags an honest answer from him like a bird pulls a worm out of the dirt.

He actually gasps. “You are going to get me killed”.

The camera uncurls, flashing iridescent wings and white feathers on it’s chest. A real magpie could never find it’s way down here. This is the villain Elster, whom he once admired. Of course he chooses now to return. Killing a guard must’ve earned his wicked favor.

“Do you want to be? If you wish to die, I’d like to know. It will save me a great deal of effort”.

Last time, he woke himself up rather than speak with the man who unleashed demons on New York City. That’s not so easy now. Healing is exhausting and he was sliced apart only days before.

“Effort?”

“Zachary Sparston, I’m the magpie. Mimicry is my trick. Don’t be stupid”.

He hasn’t been called his full name in weeks. Zachary Sparston is dead, he’s just not sure what it happened. Did he drown in choking terror? Did he never wake up after Sapphire split his skull on the tile? The bird hops from ceiling light to door frame.

“You want to take the Darkness from me,” he guesses. “And that’s easier from a corpse. I know you’ve tried stealing magic before. And I know the last bearer of the Darkness nearly killed you. I won’t make it easy”.

“Would you? What about those musings in your journals? Asking Jackson for old security footage? The watercolor of my eyes?”

“…I’m not that boy anymore”.

The villain laughs. He recoils from the sound, too human to come from a bird, yet too dissonant to sound earthly.

“That’s always what it comes down to, does it not? Power and identity. You poor thing. Abandoned by your family, fought over by everyone else. Not that boy anymore. If only identity were that easy”.

There is a humanoid shimmer behind the bird. The bird is a mask and this is the man. It’s legs are crossed at the ankles.

“Talking about yourself, Elster?”

“Oh, no. I’ve been fought against, but never over. Thank you for the outburst. It answers my question. Since you want to live, I have advice. When they send you into combat, give up”.

The spectral shimmer lifts it’s hands, and the bird tilts it’s head. Of course the manipulative villain wants the heroes to give up. He can’t. He’s come so far. If it’s not for a purpose then he’s just a murderer…

“I’m not scared of you. There’s nothing you can do to me that’s worse than what just happened”.

“But you are. You are so scared that you want to die”.

No amount of magic and compel a response to that.

“A soldier who wants to die is bad product. When they send you into combat, let yourself fall. You are fragile. It will be easier for everyone the less damage you incur”.

Jasper struggles to piece together meaning. Zachary was the researcher, and he’s been abandoned or murdered. Does Elster have a point? Didn’t he essentially give up while fighting the heroes, and that’s how he lived to scheme another day? But he’d be mad to listen to a trickster god.

Jasper begins to hyperventilate. This is a dream. It means nothing. The pain flares along his chest regardless.

“Zachary, listen, people are trying to save you. Let them”.

“I’m a murderer. I don’t deserve to be saved. I won’t live like you”.

He imagines bright light and needles in his neck. He needs it all to stay safe, and not the monster that the Darkness has made him. Elster is pretty. He is awesome and terrible. He is a liar and a killer. Jasper is too, but at least he only did it once.

What is he then?

“Power and identity, Zachary. We are what we believe we are”.

He wakes up.

…….

That next morning, Bridges says he won’t give him the painkillers unless he walks to the other side of the cell for them. It is training so blatant that the process of waterboarding seems opaque.

Jasper thinks of Sara, who’d rather be beaten bloody than fight an innocent. He thinks of the heroes of the Horizon Guard, who saved the world from tyrants even when submission is so much simpler. But the longer he goes without using his powers, the worse the shifting in his bones becomes. He can’t, never could, choose pain.

His handler coaxes him further out of his shell. Jasper speaks a few words that evening. He makes eye contact. He absolutely, categorically, cannot use his powers. There’s a desperate edge to his hander’s voice when he fails. Jasper apologizes, shaking. He can’t use his magic in the same way that he couldn’t reach his hand into a fire pit. It is primal self-preservation, even as the Darkness whispers that they are one and the same and he will wither unless the magic is given a chance to breathe.

Well, Jasper likes being able to breathe too, and he knows what happens if they are forced to dampen his powers.

So they call in more people. His handler nearly begs. He can’t let this all have been for nothing. He is so strong, so brave, and he needs to use his magic again. Jasper manages to summon a swirl of red, but it’s as weak as before the Darkness took up permanent residence in his soul. His eyes stay tearful and blue. He would like a blanket to bring to his corner. He wants the pain to stop.

“If you can’t use your powers, the higher-ups will need to drag them out of you, Jasper”.

But they are afraid. After so many incidents of disintegrated shackles and damaged equipment, no one is willing to drown him. A single, gentle, shock (delivered while his handler argued in the background) leaves Jasper curled on the ground and clawing at his neck. The electricity had been administered through a wire against his chest. That’s not a useful trigger, Bridges shouts, unless they want him catatonic.

Does the asset have any useful triggers? A blank-faced agent asks. Bridges snaps that he must. No one wants to die.

So they give it another day. He flinches a bit at a shower but doesn’t do anything stupid. Another day. Bridges grows more desperate. He talks about things that Zachary would’ve liked. Baseball, sunlight, movies. He keeps reminding him how many of the staff wanted him dead after he attacked the Blond Demon. He fought so hard to prove that Jasper was useful. He needs to be useful again.

Or he could be dead. Jasper has no preference, but the Darkness must like him alive. He thinks of movies, idly, because he remembers caring about that kind of thing. Good cop bad cop. His handler gives commands and asks questions. Jasper apologizes and shakes. This time, Jasper thinks that the voices he can faintly hear through the soundproof walls of his cell aren't hallucinations. He can't make out words, but they frighten him.

One day, a faceless guard enters with a gun. Zachary reckons with his emotions. His handler has failed. It was all for nothing. They are putting him down. Jasper doesn’t have super strength unless the Darkness flows through his veins. This bullet will kill him quick. He waits. Instead, the guard says very clearly: you have permission to use your powers.

The bullet buries itself in his thigh. The pain is like his shock collar in his neck, but then more blood is spilling than he can tolerate. Jasper screams and lets his magic numb his pain. This wound heals perfectly in seconds, but the y-shaped scar on his chest still pulls on his skin whenever he breathes.

A blood red tear runs down his face.

This magic is too much for him. The distance between Zachary’s own memories, and the alien monster that last bore the Darkness, is as thin as the surface of water. Magic lurks beneath his skin, vivid as the blood soaking his uniform. He could kill. Jasper collapses to the ground and curls his shoulders up. His ears are ringing. He can kill but he should not. The commands keep coming.

Stand up. Break the cuffs. Follow me. Somehow he does. There is a room of combat robots to fight, and Jasper throws himself at one like the beast he his. The Darkness flinches more than it moves. The guard points, and he attacks. There is no forward planning. When something hurts, he heals it. He does not feel pain. Pain is a punishment, but he’s being good. The next day, he doesn’t need the gun. The memory is enough for him to slash a sandbag apart. The Darkness keeps disintegrating the sand even as it flows to the floor.

He’s doing what he has to do to keep breathing. It hurts when he can’t. Before long, the command is to suit up in that uniform he was given. It’s a little big now, but the armor makes him look broad enough. He wears the villainous mask that he once refused to touch.

They walk him down the halls. These are places he does not recognize. They reach an elevator, then another. Jasper’s heart begins to pound. He passes humans who don’t wear armor, who look away and whisper when he passes them in the halls. He killed a man… when? A week ago? Longer? Not long enough to be absolved. The van is windowless. So is the cargo hold of the jet. He is not cuffed or collared, but the neck of his uniform is tight. He can hear the engines hum, but there is no power dampener. This is not a strong enough cage for a monster like him.

Jasper tunes out the sound of his briefing. His handler isn’t the one speaking, so what does it matter? He’s being sent into a fight like any other.

……………………………….

Buried Depths ends next week. He lives, don’t worry, I’ve just found that whump tumblr did not meet expectations and I don’t want to write the entire recovery arc in order.

He lost control. He thought it was hell, but it ended, and hell never would. The incisions go from his shoulders to his solar plexus, but they don’t feel like a lion biting his throat, and so Jasper is certain this is a mercy. He’s a monster, anyway. He didn’t just kill the Blond Demon, he enjoyed it. He feels firm spots of pressure along the center of his chest. They push and dig and lift, and it’s a violation like the prongs of his shock collar plunging into his neck, but he doesn’t scream in agony. Jasper just stares at the ceiling with wide, blue, eyes and lets the terror wash over him like ice water.

He is freezing, he deduces, because the skin over his chest cavity has been pulled from him. This should be fatal, right? Do his powers keep him alive, or can anyone be torn open with the right combination of chemicals? He wonders whether anyone else on base has been cut apart to avoid thinking about the hands on, in, under, his ribs. The pressure is diffuse. His ribcage protects him as it is designed to do. Designed by who? God did not give him these ears.

Something enters the edge of his field of view. Is it the device they used to try and sample the Darkness? The buzzing starts up again, but it’s higher pitched. The previous device had a resonant quality. It was a sound that belonged in a movie, like his awful powers belong in a comic book where death doesn’t matter. This is just a saw. He wants to hold someone’s hand, but his muscles are paralyzed. Even eye contact with be nice. They saw through his ribcage like his father cuts the horns off of cows.

“Should we show him?”

“Is that safe? Bridges says he learned his lesson, but…”

The staff discuss and decide. What has he learned? That no matter what the Darkness whispers, he is weak. Human technology can crush him like a bug under a shoe. His own body can be turned against him, and made to feel worse than death. They wheel a circle of steel above his head. It’s small and murky pink. Jasper can’t turn his head away. The paint is uneven and shifting. It isn’t paint. Jasper shuts his eyes. They still let him shut his eyes. The white of his rib cage gleams like bared teeth in his mind’s eye regardless.

“Jasper”. A warning.

He looks again. Back when he was part of the world, rather than buried beneath it, Zach had seen animals butchered. Nothing about this sight is familiar but the color. His ribcage hangs open like a dislocated jaw. His lungs rise and fall as though he hasn’t spent hours choking. A blue-gloved hand holds back the skin. If he focuses, he can feel the fingertips, then the metal pieces that replace them. But he can breathe. None of it hurts, not even the burns on his neck.

One worker asks another what he was even expecting. The asset has a breathing tube and has been tortured for the past twenty hours out of twenty-four. He’s not going to react. Does he want him to? That’s weird, man. Stop being a freak.

His heart beats. The Darkness extends tendrils of fog to feel the open air. He usually forces his magic back into his ribcage when it must be hidden. Now, everything is exposed. They see his failure, his lies. Jasper wills the Darkness away from anything important, but it still lurks in his chest.

They pull the mirror away. A face enters his field of view. He can only see a rectangle of tanned skin between its face mask and hair covering. The tears in his eyes blur the image further.

“We are going to take a sample of the Darkness now. If you resist again, you will be thrown back into your cell until you die”.

He does not comprehend the threat. Death is easy. He feels the collection device touch his lung, then pull. It’s like the shock collar racing along his nerves. The device tugs on every vein and artery and capillary. He feels as though he is being lifted off the bed by the marrow in his bones. Then it severs the connection and he slams back to earth. Despite never having been anything but horizontal, he feels knocked into the ground. He can’t even gasp with his chest sliced open. The machine breathes for him.

He doesn’t attack, or anything. Jasper supposes that means they won’t kill him. The rest of the surgery proceeds without issue. He never gets used to the feeling of hands underneath his heart, or seeing glimpses of tools red with his own blood, but he endures. Mostly he just feels cold. Yes. Cold. He wants to writhe and claw because moving will warm him up. Everyone wants to curl up when it’s cold, but he’s tied down and exposed to the elements. He shivers when they put something heavy next to his heart.

The Darkness must disagree, because they snap for him to leave it alone. Whatever it is. At first it’s heavy and cold, but his body has adapted to much more invasive magic. When they start scraping at his ribs, it becomes impossible to focus on. He could never feel his heart before today, after all. His chest cavity is a void. The staff press his ribs back down. They sew them or staple them and Jasper’s eyes go wide at every jab through the bones. He broke an arm, once. He had to wear a cast for weeks. How is he supposed to fight like this? His skin is returned to place and delicately stitched together.

And he’s thinking about his sister. She knows how to sew. All of the Sparston women do. Their magic helps them make things, but all that the men can do is watch. Visions and prophecy and weird dreams of supervillains saying something that he can’t remember. Did his family see this coming?

They tighten the stitches, but Jasper is still cold. Shapes swim between the ceiling lights. Perhaps he is lying in a snowbank. The white walls are the pale sky after a storm. Have they drugged him again? No, that isn’t safe. He’ll hurt someone. Someone is trying to get into his head.

Pain sparkles along his chest like bubbles in a river. The pressure is building, ready to burst. He feels like someone is reaching out to him, but Jasper has no interesting in speaking, or even seeing. While he is unconscious, he feels no pain. He rejects the summons and floats along. Who would even try to walk in his dreams? His family abandoned him. He remembers the supervillain who tried to talk with him before. Any part of Jasper that once idolized a murderer has been put where it belongs.

Waking up means pain. One arm has pulled the straps as far as they go, and it hurts. The pain in his chest is a fracture in the world. He is jagged and frayed from his knees to his ears. Jasper looks his body over. He is covered in bandages, but he can remember. Cutting his ribcage with a bone saw. The prongs of a shock collar stabbed into his neck. Thrashing on the tile. It hurts to breathe, but at least he can.

His arms are tied down, but the breathing tube is gone. A medical technician asks him to rate his pain. He has not spoken since he mistook his handler for his father. His shame is enough to drown in, but Jasper finds himself able to manage just fine. The bad things happen when he tries to speak. They can gag him so easily. Might as well just… relax. He survived hours of hell. This is nothing. It will pass.

They ask again, and Jasper stares down at his chest as if he’s never seen it before. It hurts, but he’s felt so much worse. His neck is worse now. None of the pain has any sense of urgency. Pain is a punishment, not a survival mechanism. They won’t let him die.

A four, he says.

There are specific ways to breathe and to eat. He sleeps to recover from twenty hours of torture, and time loses its shape. They unwrap the bandages. If he could run his hands along the stitches, would he feel the wires holding his bones together? They take the tubes out of his chest. It hurts more when he coughs and less the rest of the time. He speaks maybe fifty words, and all of them are replies to commands.

His handler is not his father, but when he appears, it feels like being picked up at the bus stop. He walks him back to his cell, not speaking, hardly even looking. His cell is still empty, but his blood has been cleaned. His handler gives an apology that Jasper doesn’t need. He retreats to the bed and sinks gently to his knees. It hurts to use his arms.

“You can use your powers. To heal. Nobody needs a burn like that on his neck”.

His neck is still bandaged, so he gently pulls that away. It’s a more gruesome injury than the vivisection. He lifts one hand to the side of his neck and tries to coax magic back into his system. It expects to be crushed and electrocuted. This is not a place where escape is possible. Jasper draws the Darkness to his fingertips, but cannot convince it to warp reality the way it used to. He’s just bending red through the air.

He does not manage to heal the burn tissue. His shock collar did worse than a 3rd degree burn. It’s cauterized the muscle below his skin. He stops trying and pushes the magic down. Jasper’s eyes never even managed to turn black and red.

“Are you done?”

He’s done trying. Jasper is staring at the drain in the floor with human blue eyes and trying to stay awake. He looks up at his handler, nods, and follows his eyes to the mirrored walls. The blackened tissue on his neck is like the bite of a vampire.

“I guess that’s permanent, then” his handler whispers, but Jasper is looking further up on his reflection. There are circular stones in his ears. Red jasper set in black metal. It perfectly matches his combat armor, but clashes with his green prisoner uniform.

Do not speak, give no reason to be punished, but his mouth opens of its own accord. “Permanent”.

……………………………………

The three kinds of body modification: earrings, prominent scars, and an undefined mechanism within his ribcage.

Two chapters remain until Jasper is free. It’ll all be a little contrived, but you know. First drafts and tumblr chaos. Who cares anyway.

He struggles to breathe. His collar presses against his neck. The last thing Jasper did before the power damper choked him unconscious was reach for a scalpel. Not to kill the Blond Demon, because Jasper already did enough, but to avoid whatever punishment he would earn for losing control. He lacked conviction.

This is the same hexagonal cell he knows so well, but it’s as barren as the day he entered. No television or books or blankets. Jasper has lost every luxury and gained restraints on his wrists and ankles. His hunger is a clawing animal. Is it more or less pleasant than vivisection? His breaths are shallow because he’s hyperventilating but also because the power dampener is on again. The machine turns the parasitic Darkness to dead weight. Within a few minutes of it active, he’s in breathless agony. He is all out of grace.

Jasper knows better than to claw at his throat, especially with a shock collar latched around it, but he longs for the scalpel. How can the Darkness be powerful enough to make him attack like a rabid animal, but fill his own lungs with brambles at the push of a button? He can’t even hear the alien memories justifying themselves. He curls around the drain in the floor and hopes the darkness in his vision comes quick. 

Instead, he screams. He has the air to scream. The power dampener switched off and his shock collar turned on. He remembers this combination from his training. All he’s missing is the water. Drowning until he loses control, then electrocution until he regains it. The power dampener was a mercy then, and never went on so long that his lungs froze up. He deserves this for losing control. Another shock, with maybe five seconds between. 

“No, please,” 

Again. Every muscle contracts. Jasper waits, tense like a spring, for another shock, but instead he hears the power dampener rumble. No, no, this can’t be a cycle. He told Noah he could handle waterboarding but this is inside him. It weighs him down. He counts seconds between increasingly ragged gasps. It’s even harder to breathe while crying. 85 before he’s too panicked to think. His vision begins to darken. The electricity is white hot. 

It continues that way for some time. Suffocation until he can’t breathe, then electricity to pull him back from the brink. There’s never enough time between pain to catch his breath. If he reaches for the collar, then the shock drags on for entire seconds. His smoothly healed skin is scraped from thrashing against the tile. His blood stains the floor, but there isn't enough to drip.

Jasper realizes at the tenth repetition that without an ending it might be better to let himself slip away. Then, an unexpected miracle. The airlock slides open at the exact same moment that the power damper activates. They’ll have a few minutes to talk, before the air is crushed from his lungs. 

“Bridges! I’m so sorry, I swear I would never hurt you”. 

Jasper looks up from his knees. His handler stares down. His eyebrows are just the slightest bit raised, as if he wants to cry. 

“The most of staff wanted to kill you where you were lying. Just… leave the power dampener on and take the Darkness from your corpse”. 

Can he tell that would be better than this? Well, no. This will pass. The waterboarding ended. Hell is eternal, but he is torturously alive. 

“There were some emergency meetings. Director Gardenne called in with her opinion. I said you could still be of use. Agent Barnum was clearly at fault. Do you understand what I’m saying so far?”

“Yes, sir”.

“Tell me”.

“Most of the staff wanted to kill me. You and the Director saved my life because you thought I could still be useful”. 

“We believed in you. Not everyone was so sure. They agreed, as long as you learned your lesson. What do you think that is?” 

“I can never lose control. I attacked a guard. I’m sorry. They shouldn’t forgive me for this. They should’ve let me die”. 

And his handler, who he trusts with his life, who is harsh but fair, who he has been convinced never lies, kicks him to the floor. The impact is light but reverberates through his frozen lungs.

“Die? And waste all this effort? Half of the Horizon Guard were murderers first. All dying would do is let you off easy”. 

“I’m sorry! It hurts!” 

“What did you do to Agent Barnum? I know he was awful to you, but that doesn’t give you permission”. 

“I don’t know! I attacked him and I… I let the Darkness taste his soul? I don’t know where those words are coming from. I might’ve dislocated his jaw”. 

He rests one boot on Jasper's chest. Breathing gets harder. Bridges waits before speaking, despite the literal time limit over their conversation.

“You killed him. The Darkness ate him from the inside. So now, you’re gonna pay that back until the rest of the staff here can see us in the halls without calling for blood. Do you understand?” 

He signals with a hand and the power dampener deactivates for exactly one breath. Could he have attacked, if he wanted to? The clock resets, but he still feels like a ghost. A murderer. The Blond Demon is dead. He killed him.

“...I understand”. 

“When I waterboarded you, we went for twenty minutes. It’s been about that long now,” Bridges sighs. He closes his eyes and steps off of Jasper’s chest. 

“Manslaughter is a serious crime. You have a lot left to pay for. I’ll be back in a few hours”. 

Hours. 

“Hours? Wait, please, you can’t leave me here that long”. 

“We can and we will. They want you dead, Jasper. The only way they’d agree to let you live is if we made living worse. We have to convince them that you will never lose control again. Never. Because next time they will absolutely kill you”. 

He has nothing to bargain with and the Darkness is turning against him fast. It’s as if the boot is back on his chest. He has an urge to drag his nails down his forearms until he looks as broken as he feels. 

“Look at me, Jasper”.

He obeys. There is nothing else to look at here. 

“Stop counting. Stop trying to think your way out of this. I won’t let you die here”. 

His handler walks back out of the cell. Jasper is too busy crying to crawl after him.

It continues like that. He is an ecosystem of pain. Spasming lungs here, empty stomach there, bruises on his arms and chest and knees from writhing on the tile. He can think in fragments, and his thoughts cycle like the torture. 

Why haven’t they tied him down? Who is watching this? Does the toilet still work? If he tried really hard- no, you must keep control. He has killed a man. Did the Blond Demon have a family? What would they tell his family if he chokes to death?

Is he in hell already? Did he ever come back from the dead?

As bruises begin to spread under his skin, Jasper’s train of thought settles onto a single track. Someone is making sure he stays conscious. If he is not conscious, then he won’t feel pain. This is unendurable, and the solution comes to him as blunt and clear as the lights. 

Jasper drags himself over to the sink. His wrists are tied together in front. He curls up until the wave of shocks passes, then pulls himself upright in those seconds before his lungs fill with thorns. The sink is solid stainless steel, and Jasper has never been very durable. He just heals. This is going to hurt, he thinks, but he’s already decided to act. 

Jasper slams his forehead against the sink. The pain is sharp, but instantly sets his head ringing. The fear of suffocation recedes an inch. Something new replaces it. Jasper is sweat-soaked and sliding on the tile. He’s falling the rest of the way to the floor, and his bound hands can’t break his fall. Jasper lands on his side. His shoulder hits the tile first, then the box of his shock collar. The metal prongs are half an inch long. They drive through the fresh burns on his neck like fangs. 

The first time he tries to scream, he has no air to make the sound. He imagines the prongs stabbing straight through his larynx. Jasper thrashes like prey in the jaws of a lion, like a fish with the hook through its gills. The cycle continues. An electric shock to his neck is nothing compared to a shock inside it. Jasper snares his own tongue between his sharp teeth and adds more blood to the floor. He draws enough breath to scream. 

“BRIDGES!” 

This is why the floor is tile. Square icebergs in a sea of blood. It’s on his hands. He killed a man today. He’s beaten people bloody for the past two months. 

“SIR HELP PLEASE”

His voice is hoarse and his spit is tinged red. A cattle prod is jammed an into the muscle of his neck. 

“TURN IT OFF!”

Blood trails from his temple and shoulder. Dragging his body across the floor. He begs until his voice is hoarse. He imagines his vocal chords like electric wires. The collar is hard to grip, and every failed attempt brings on unthinkable pain, but he has to get it out. He swears he sees the shock race along his bound hands. Everything that isn’t red is white.

Jasper finally manages to make his hands clench around the box of his collar. The prongs are stuck to his flesh with coagulated blood. Ripping them free feels like being stabbed all over again. But he does it. He has nowhere to wipe his hands.

The door slides open. A pale monster that hasn’t seen the sun in months stares at the movement. He lifts his head. His bleached hair is stained with blood. He begs.

Please, he’ll do anything, make it stop. He’ll never hurt anyone again, or if they want, he’ll kill anyone they say. Anything. He imagines being given a knife and cutting the Darkness out his own heart. He’d have to rip his ribs open with his own hands. He would. Please let him.  

It’s not even his handler at the door. Both men are masked, but they’re too short. Their faceless staring reminds him of the camera above. 

“Where is my handler?”

There is no reply. He fears that his language is unintelligible. With brazen actions but heads held fearfully back, one guard hauls him upright by the arms. The other holds his head steady by the hair - why aren’t they fixing his collar, does the open wound not bother them? Together they untie his hands and cuff them behind his back. 

“No, stop! Where is he? He said he’d come back!” 

They shove him forward onto his chest. The second guard plants a boot on his spine to hold him down. He is weak from lack of oxygen, from hunger. They bend his legs at the knees and connect them to his wrists. He’s lucky he’s so tall. Otherwise he swears his spine would snap.

“Gross, honestly,”

“I know. I need to burn these gloves”

They linger behind him. Jasper begs them to talk to him. The guard secures a gag into his mouth. He must’ve been speaking English, then, if they wanted him to stop. There is a weak struggle, but Jasper has ridden horses, and is familiar with the process of breaking them. He’s already conditioned to accept whatever they do.

 None of this changes the cycle. He nearly passes out. Electricity drags him back. They guards stand and wait for him to tire like fishermen admiring a catch. No, more like hunters. Fish don’t scream. One of them adjusts his collar. They poke gently at the wound. Jasper imagines a bite mark. 

He supposes they leave after that. A murderer doesn’t deserve company. There are no more sudden changes. The pain in his stomach gradually grows. The tissue on his neck becomes numb. He still struggles to breathe and then thrashes against electricity. The scrapes on his limbs scab over and are replaced by new ones. However, his struggles lack urgency. This is his eternity. 

Someday someone will come to get him. His father, with a rifle across his back. Captain Cavalier of the Horizon Guard with those eyes like chips of the sky. A supervillain in the shape of a magpie. He sees figures in the brightness but his eyes do not focus. Someone is telling him that he must keep control. If he dies, it will all be for nothing. 

He is so, so tired. He should not waste energy on fighting. Jasper lies above the drain in the floor and moves only involuntarily. He can’t be trained out of wanting air and avoiding pain, but that’s okay. Nothing hurt while they cut him open. He was just afraid, and ashamed. 

Lying under the black eye of the camera, with six one-way mirrors surrounding him, covered in blood and spit and everything else, he realizes how silly that was. He is nothing compared to the powers of the universe. He must keep control of his actions. He must be useful. Everything else is for Them to manage. Jasper almost smiles. 

Much later, a hallucination resolves into a man real enough to untie his limbs. Jasper’s shoulders are both sprained, but he melts into his arms. The man is tall and tan. He removes the collar from his neck, gently, while minding the scabs. He twitches as the wound is cleaned, but worn hands are around his shoulders. He removes the gag. The filtered air feels as fresh as any spring day.

“Dad? Dad, I’m so sorry”.

He leans into the man’s chest, and the bloodstains do not bother him. 

“I’m not your dad, Jasper,” his handler replies as he picks him up off the floor. 

Right. His dad sold him away because he couldn’t control his powers. He wants to sleep. He wants to ask if he did okay, if he’s proud, if his father would be, but these are things that do not matter. 

He is transferred to new people. They wash the filth from his skin, and mutter how much easier it would be to shave his hair. He is given new scrubs, a bottle to drink. They bandage his neck after several seconds of disgust and confusion. He stares at nothing. His stomach is still an empty pit.  

Can you walk, Jasper?

Lie down here, Jasper.

Don’t flinch, Jasper. 

He realizes very late that he is again lying on a surgical bed. He stares straight up at the ceiling  with every limb tied down. The sedatives are in his system before he remembers that he can struggle without electrocuting himself. Jasper shifts his weight a bit. They chastise him. He doesn’t want them to make a messy incision. They don’t want him to kill anyone else.

Someone lowers a scalpel to his sternum, out of sight. It doesn’t hurt, and Jasper has never been more grateful.

...........................

Finally got to give Zach his "vampire bite". He's very pale and his powers are bloody, so people see the burn scar and assume he's a vampire or something. He lives in a superhero kitchen sink world. That's as reasonable a guess as any. His other major scar is much harder to mistake. He’ll get that next week.

Also I am one person away from a follower milestone you guys.

His best bet is that they’re going to take a sample of his lungs. The Darkness that fills them has made every breath a death rattle, and his transformed skin is too opaque to radiation for any scans to be useful. Jasper takes a deep breath and ignores how the doctors startle at the sound. He is monstrous and undead. He is lucky to be given this chance to be useful.

His handler keeps sneaking glances at him that look almost proud, but his posture is tense. There is also another man. He has curly blond hair and is armed with a rifle and a smile from hell. Jasper avoids eye contact as he remembers fingers in his mouth. This is the torturer his sleep-deprived mind named the Blond Demon. Jasper wasn’t supposed to remember what they did, but even his haggard mind couldn’t forget being treated like an animal at a petting zoo. The demon stole his damn teeth. They were falling out, but still.

“Ready, Jasper?”

He snaps to awareness. His feet clang against the legs of the table. Most of all, he's hungry.

“This is your final exam. It’s gonna be freaky as hell, but if you keep it together, then you’re out of here”.

“I understand, sir”.

He is carefully maneuvered into place. Sometimes in the movies that Zachary watched, the villain tied the hero down to dissect him. He is glad that this situation feels entirely different. Captured super spies are always flat on their back. They spit insults and the villain mocks them back. Jasper is restrained, but it feels pragmatic. The medical staff sweep back his hair and position him on his side. His arms are above his head with his elbows bent, but they place cushions under his shoulder and between his legs. They tie his head down onto the mattress. Everything seems very calm. No one threatens him.

In the back of his mind is inherited trauma. The last bearer of the Darkness reminds him that the word is not dissect, but vivisect, because he is a living creature and he agreed to none of this. It half-heartedly makes the same suggestion as always: kill everyone, escape, and wreak bloody vengeance on the world. Jasper knows that the Horizon Guard in their glory will stop him. Buried beneath that fear of pain is another regret. Jasper has one last piece of surface-world morality, and it’s a desperate desire not to kill. If he’s deserving of a second chance, then everyone else should be too.

His hearing is too acute to ignore the doctors, but too many words are unfamiliar. He twitches at the pinch of the needles. None of this is very new. He’s had dozens of blood tests in his less than three months imprisoned. They’ve tried every scanner in the base, shoved swabs down his throat, and measured the capacity of his lungs under every circumstance they can mimic. This, whatever it is, is a final attempt to understand.

Like one understands a butterfly by ripping off it’s wings, the parasite suggests. It is not truly another voice in his head. It is an intrusive thought from another body of memories. Jasper sees red. He startles, but the Darkness is all under control. A lab tech is just hooking a bag of blood up to one of his arms.

“His heartrate is speeding up,” one of them remarks.

“We’re in the clear unless he flatlines. Then, run. And call baby Skywalker”.

His handler yells from across the room. “His callsign is Sapphire!”

Jasper exhales sharply. It’s funny how if he biologically dies, they’re the ones in danger. The thing in his chest cavity won’t let him go so easily. How many times now has he died? In March he was burned up by a villain’s spell, but so was half the planet, and everyone came back. He just came back wrong. Then his heart stopped when he lost control during a failed biopsy, and again fighting Sapphire a few weeks ago. It must be August now.

“Administering the sedative,” someone says.

The lights are very bright in this room.

“Jasper, how do you feel?”

The reply leaves his mouth fully formed.

“It’s very bright and I feel cold”.

Someone chuckles. He hears wheels sliding on tile, switches flipping. They position a heat lamp over him like an albedo-drake on a cloudy day. Like a what? He remembers a kind of alien lizard. Their scales were hinged. Mirrored white on one side for solar flares, charcoal black on the other for soaking up good sun. They didn’t do well in captivity. Jasper has too much chemical calm in his system to be worried by how easily he remembers.

“Would you like us to blindfold you?”

All he can see is the wall, the blood bag, and a jungle vine tangle of IV tubes. Jasper guesses there’s four medical staff, two guards, and his handler. He was so proud when he stopped needing a blindfold. He knows the layout of everywhere he’s seen.

“No, thank you”.

They test the sedative. Jasper can feel pressure but no pain. Everything beneath his jaw is ethereal. Someone is touching him?

“Bite this”.

The mouthguard isn’t the same as the one when he was waterboarded (the memory of pain is more distant than usual). There’s a hole in it. It takes too long for them to push a breathing tube down his paralyzed throat. When he really uses his powers, he doesn’t even need oxygen.

He can’t focus on the tube, or anything, but using his powers is a persistent suggestion. Why not? Because he can still feel temperature and pressure. The two prongs of his collar are cold against his neck.

Pressure on the side of his chest. First wide and soft, then razor thin. They cut into him. He can tell because the doctors say so, and because he can feel the skin splitting layer by layer. He stays calm. The Darkness does not want to lose it’s host. His eyes flicker up to the bag of blood. What’s going on back there?

What does it matter?

Something in between his ribs to match the breathing tube down his throat. The Darkness touches hard metal. Cavern elves work with carapace and hardwood whenever they can. Cultural tradition. Steel requires someone to face the bright lights and forge it, and few were ever so brave. Tendrils of magic as thin as the legs of an insect brush against the foreign intrusions. Metal holds his skin open. Metal bends his ribs apart.

The Darkness, aware as it is of the chemistry of it’s host, quietly hums that they’ve increased the dose of the sedative. Jasper does not react. He hasn’t been this tired since they kept him awake for days. He hasn’t felt this violated either. Well, only seven people are watching him now, and only two have their hands on -

The proper preposition is in

Every wisp of magic freezes like a predator before the pounce. The surgery pauses for a moment, then resumes. It’s hard to remember. Good. That means he won’t remember this. The mouthguard must be custom made to match his strange teeth. That blond guard and all his minions. They were only following orders.

The pressure scrapes into his core. They cut into his lung. The Darkness creeps up the scalpel’s blade as water moves up a cloth. He hears a shocked gasp and footsteps. There is a hole in his chest. Jasper imagines it like a hull breach, cold water flooding in. The Darkness obeys without question and knits the injury back together.

“What? No. Dammit,”

Jasper cannot apologize without gagging on the breathing tube, but he tries to appear submissive. He curls his chin down to his chest.

“Okay. We’re going to do that again”.

Metal splits magic. He is the thing threatening to spill free. Tendrils brush against her glove. It rejects this. It does not seek a new host. It wants the boy. Leave. Leave. Jasper knows they will leave when they are done. Even the crowd of hands eventually let him sleep. Metal touches metal. A high-pitched mechanical whine. He can’t feel anything below his neck, but his ears flicker, and that’s the beginning of the end.

“Oh, he doesn’t like that sound, does he?” The voice comes from just out of sight. It is the voice that mocked him with a cattle prod pressing into his back. The voice that pulled his hair and whispered in his ear and encouraged a crowd to do as they pleased. Something burns in his chest. Maybe it’s just hate.

“You shouldn’t even be here, Barnum. Shut it,” his handler says. Jasper feels as deeply protected by the act as he feels disturbed by the blade in his lungs. Barnum is the blond demon for sure. He tries to turn. Most of his body is dead weight, just like after all those days awake. The Darkness begins burning off the sedative like fog.

“Now, look what you’ve done! He’s panicking. Get out of here, Barnum”.

“No, I don’t think that’s necessary. Isn’t he your good soldier?”

There is a scuffle out of sight. This demon must feel on top of the world. All this effort to contain a prisoner that he was able to abuse with no precautions but handcuffs and a few days of sleep deprivation. There was a crowd, but Jasper understands obedience. Maybe the demon wasn’t the one shining lights in his eyes or sticking hands down his shirt, but he was the one who gave permission. Jasper fell asleep in his hands when it was all over.

Hatred is rigid and unchanging, so Jasper stops moving. The buzzing machine is moved closer and he feels the vibrations in his exposed muscle. One end of it touches his lung. A button is pressed.

THEY ARE GOING TO TAKE IT FROM YOU

Take the Darkness? Oh, of course he would. That monster.

Tension in his chest. There is no pain, but he feels intimately that something is about to break. The machine spins and pulls the magic from his lungs. The Darkness lashes out and unwinds the molecules of sedative in his blood. His fingers clench.

YOU WILL BE WEAK AND HE WILL BE THERE.

He can’t be weak, he has missions to run. What good will he be without these powers? The last three months, all for nothing? He can never go home, there is so much blood on his hands.

YOU KNOW WHAT THEY DO IF YOU ARE NOT USEFUL.

They’ll kill him like Rachel. He has nowhere to go, but the demon is here. If they rip the Darkness out of him he’ll die from the shock. Surely they can’t be taking all of it. Just a sample. A proof of concept that it can be controlled. He doesn’t need to be controlled. He has control.

Jasper bites down, hard, and the breathing tube collapses between his jaws. The whirring stops.

“Sample collection successful. The subject is clearly distressed, but restraints are holding”.

“Sick,” says the blond demon. “Can I see?”

HE HAS TAKEN ENOUGH

Jasper just had his lungs cut open without a glimmer of pain. Forgive him for forgetting that actions have consequences. He tears his hands free. The left goes to turn his collar to ash. The right rips the breathing tube. He coughs up something red, but feels no pain. It spills down his bare chest and melts the strap on his waist. In one second, he’s rising to stand. Jasper doesn’t bother to remove the IVs. He doesn’t even close the hole in his side.

He just rips the sample, the piece of him, from the surgeon’s hands, pushes her aside, and lunges at the man behind. The world is condensed to him and the demon alone. Heroes kill demons. His weapons do not scare him. The bullets sink into his chest like pebbles in water and the Darkness heals the wounds along with everything else.

“I HAVE GIVEN YOU ENOUGH”.

His rifle crumbles to dust. The demon sounds like he’s trying to call for help, so Jasper gags him with a hand. Fingers behind his teeth.

“Not so fun, is it?”

He should be running, but Rachel died trying to escape. They’ll kill him for this anyway, if he doesn’t die from the shock. The Darkness feels it’s way through the other man’s circulatory system. A second heart, a second pair of lungs. He doesn’t deserve this magic, but maybe he can be of use. The blond demon’s eyes turn black, without even the glowing red iris that makes it clear where Jasper is glaring.

The man stops struggling. His chest moves up and down, and slowly Jasper begins to breathe in sync. The only dead man here is Jasper. They’ll shoot him. They’ll make him suffer. He stands on unsteady legs. Everyone who could flee, already has.

When the power-dampener activates, he is terrified, but not surprised. Jasper looks toward the cart with the scalpels, but he is already sinking to his knees. Starving. suffocating. Maybe a man who was fighting to live could’ve managed to make an attack, but Jasper doesn’t have the will to seize a blade and put it to his own neck. He is too good a host to die by his own hand. Is he too good an asset to be killed?

They keep the power dampener on until he blacks out. He does not feel them carry him away. Handler Bridges watches the proceedings. He asks the blond demon if the blood on his face is his own. The guard says no, he's alright. Bridges hands him a towel - waits until he's distracted - and punches him in the jaw.

———————————

I hope no one is disappointed that this is not the classic y-shaped vivisection. I have based it roughly on an open thoracotomy. They were going to do more before they got interrupted.

Four chapters remain of Buried Depths. I’ve been building up to these last few chapters for 8 months now, and so I’d really appreciate reblogs, comments, audience interaction stuff, etc.

“Wait! We’re in lockdown, doors can only be opened remotely”. She says with her hands lifted to protect her face, but there’s been a misunderstanding. He doesn’t need her keycard, or their help, to open this door, not if he can disintegrate both airlock doors himself. The problem is the power-dampener. Then, he hears it. A siren quietly bleeds through the soundproof walls of his cell. 

“Lockdown? So they mean to bury us?” 

Her eyes dart back and forth in confusion, but then Noah seems to settle down. 

“We’re too valuable to let that happen. Listen, it’s stopped. There’s nothing to worry about”. 

The siren hasn’t stopped. Noah must mean the shaking. Jasper exhales and returns to the bed. It’s a relief to have the pressure off of his legs. Without using his powers to take the weight, even standing is a pain. 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you”. 

Noah looks at the wall behind him rather than make eye contact. “Doesn’t matter. Are you alright?”

Jasper takes a few steadying breaths, but the Darkness rattles within his lungs. The staff keep trying to take scans of it, but his flesh is nearly opaque to radiation, and his magic is even less cooperative. 

“No. I can hear sirens, Noah. I’ve never heard these sirens. Something is terribly wrong”.

Past and present are a maelstrom. He remembers weapons that ignite the atmosphere, open-pit mines stretching a mile deep, “heroes” swinging to crush his skull with a war hammer. Jasper knows that some sirens do not deactivate. They blare until the speakers are crushed. 

“I don’t hear any sirens. We’re not in danger”. 

“You’re wrong,” 

“Trust me,” Noah says, but she fidgets with the collar of her comfortable green sweater. It doesn't feel right to call that a collar too.

“These tunnels, they’re unstable”. 

“This place was built to withstand very powerful people. The tunnels are fine". Noah checks the screen of her pager-watch again. “There’s no evacuation order. It says… let’s try to calm down, okay? Breathe with me”. 

Why breathe? If he lets the Darkness take him, he won’t need to breathe. He’ll be able to disintegrate the cell walls and feel the air on his face. The sunlight above will burn his monstrous skin. 

“What does it say?”

“I can’t tell you, just, believe me. Everyone is scared right now”. 

He struggles to hold ideas together. A distant rumble resonates in his chest. It’s not far. Jasper presses his hands over his ears, then grips the edge of his bed. He needs to flee, but what good will that do? His cell is only a few paces wide.

“We’re going to die here. I’m getting us both out of here”. 

“That is the worst thing you could do right now! Jasper, you need to calm down”. 

“THEY ARE GOING TO KILL US". It is the voice of the Creature of the Underground.

Then, he chokes. Jasper hasn't been electrocuted by his shock collar in days. At the same moment, the power-dampener rumbles to life and crushes him again. The weight recedes like a crashing wave before Jasper has even realized he’s drowning.

He stares at Noah with blank emotion. He needs somewhere to put his confusion, pain, hatred, but Noah is a short young woman holding a watch. He feels power bubbling beneath his skin despite what the human guards tried. He could kill her. Her dark eyes meet his and she flings the device across the room. 

“Jasper, Zachary, please! Listen! The base is on lockdown because another prisoner is already trying to escape! They’re not going to kill us. You’re scheduled for release”.

“Really?”

“I swear on my life, Zachary. We’re both too valuable to lose”. 

Escape. Death. Release. The alien clinging to his thoughts laughs and laughs, but Zach sinks to his own knees over the drain in the cell’s exact center.

“Oh, God. I’m so sorry. I can hear the sirens. You can’t understand”. 

She lifts her chin in a nod of acknowledgement.

“I think I do”. 

A ragged moment passes. Then the ground shakes again. The watch rattles against the tiles.

“Oh I’ve fucked everything up. They thought I was good enough and now I’ve lost control. Please tell me you felt that. I can’t go insane… they’re letting me go”. 

“I did, that time”. 

“Who is it? 

Noah shakes her head. “Phosphor. She’s close”. 

“To escape?” 

“To us. She’s the only other asset in your zone of the base”. 

Noah is just a girl and he nearly tore her apart but didn’t he beat Phosphor in the ring as well? No, Phosphor isn’t just a girl. She’s too dangerous to be the same kind of person as his sister. Lizzie’s powers create rather than destroy. She’d never end up here.

“She’s insane,” Jasper states.

“She’s been here since October,” Noah replies, but so has she, and Noah just stopped a break out.

“So all this shaking is from explosions she caused”.

Jasper rolls his shoulders, trying to shake the memory of his collar. A single thought sticks in his mind more powerfully than pain. Explosions ringing throughout the base. Are there no power dampeners in the hallways? His own cell has malfunctioned. Does that mean there is nothing between him and the surface?

“I assume”. 

The thought of escape multiplies. It is a living thing covered in burrs and brambles. He cannot shake it. The Darkness is obsessed. 

“I’m really being released?” Like slamming his head into the wall to stop a train of thought.

“Within two weeks. You have a final surgery scheduled, and after you recover, you’ll be assigned missions like I am”. 

He smiles despite himself. Is that really release? No, but it’s just as good. All these miserable days, they weren’t for nothing! He’s really good enough to help the world. 

“Who told you?”

“Rumor, but a trustworthy one”. He must turn back into the monster, because Noah whispers cyrene.

“Do you think I’ll be working with the Horizon Guard? What’s been happening out there?”

“You might be. You’re very strong”.

“Oh my God, I want to meet the Horizon Guard. Well, the ones that are left. I am strong! I can help them in case the demons come back. And I have so many shows to catch up on. And my friends? They must be so worried. I tried sending a letter but I don’t know if he ever got it”.

He dreams of it. Jasper can never go home. His family sent him away, and one vision of a villain didn’t make him a real Sparston, but he sees himself playing his part someplace new. Fighting other monsters, making his handler proud, showing that a season of effort wasn’t for nothing. Jasper imagines standing side-by-side with Lord Ferrel or Captain Cavalier as they face an alien foe, maybe even Elster. He’ll take a bullet for them, and die in his hero’s arms. 

Noah’s voice drags him back. “It’s nice having outside contact”. 

“You have a twin, right? What was it like seeing them again? I have a little sister, and I don’t want to scare her”. He looks at his pale hands. “Who am I kidding. She’ll be horrified. I'm lucky my family sent me here. The Guard would’ve killed me”. 

“Can you give me my watch back? It’s not dangerous, I swear. I hit a panic button. It can’t hurt you”. 

He creeps across the floor and whacks it her way. Noah checks the readout and clips it around her wrist.

“Noah, I am so sorry. It’s this thing inside me. It has its own PTSD and the thought of this place caving in just set it off. I can be trusted. I’ll prove it, however I have to”. 

“Your handler probably has ideas already”.

“I’ve learned to handle waterboarding. I can do anything he needs”. 

The corner of her mouth curls in disgust, and Jasper feels his heart drop through the floor. Maybe it’s even physical. The Darkness would love to reject a coward like him. Why hasn’t it? Why is he the bearer of this? Why was he chosen? Just for being curious, and for carrying a bit of family magic that let him bear the weight? Why couldn’t he let them take it during his biopsy? 

The siren stops. Her pager blares it’s own alarm. 

“The situation has been handled. I’m being recalled. I’m probably in deep trouble for this-

“I’m sorry”. 

“-but good luck out there”.

Jasper holds himself perfectly still while the airlock door opens and closes again. And then all is silent. Jasper heaves himself up onto the bed. He isn’t healing like he used to. He eats what he’s given and follows orders, but the grasping pain in his bones never goes away except when his eyes are red with magic. The pain is the worst right after he returns to normal.

Deep down he thinks it’s because he’s pushing himself too hard, but that make sense if he’s about to be released. Finals week is always the hardest, and harvest is the busiest time of the year. He’ll rest once he’s proven himself. 

He shouldn’t have trouble occupying himself until dinner. Books, television, and daydreams should tide him over. Unfortunately, Zach got into this situation because he wouldn’t let sleeping dogs lie. He heard half of a story today. What’s the ending? Bridges never tells him anything, but Cyrene seems to know a lot. They don’t talk. She’s kind of terrible. But Zach is curious, so he thinks of her. Loudly. 

Cyrene told Noah about my promotion - How did Cyrene know this? - Can Cyrene hear me now? - Is she listening? - Are you listening? Telepathic communication still feels like an attack. Cyrene named herself after a mythic hunter, and now there’s an arrow stabbed into his mind. He asks the question.

What happened today?

You really are a caricature of yourself. You spend half an hour complaining about your own curiosity and now you’re asking questions you don’t want to know the answers to. 

But I do? 

What do you think happened, Zachary?

Phosphor - Rachel, that’s her real name - is unstable. She’s been imprisoned for three times as long as he has, but people talk like she lost it eight years ago when All Hell Broke Loose and demons invaded New York City. She’s explosive, literally and emotionally.

His cell’s power-dampener was broken today. If her cell is near to his, did she have the same malfunction? Phosphor must’ve taken that chance and blasted her way out. That was the first period of shaking. Then she ran, blowing up anything in her path. He imagines the aftermath. What did Noah see walking back to her own room? 

Suddenly squeamish? You’ve coughed up your own lungs. 

Why are you like this? I’m an adult. I’m going to be working with the Horizon Guard soon. They probably called Sapphire to drag her back to a working cell.

If her messages are arrows shot into his mind, the wisdom of his magic is poison from an old wound. The realizations feel like recalling something he's always known. Cyrene told him once that his most desirable trait was how he broke with clean edges, but Phosphor is explosive. It’s taken them less than three months to chip Jasper into a weapon. Rachel had been imprisoned for nine before trying to escape. 

They killed her, didn't they?

They’ve already cremated the body. 

He remembers that after the caverns collapsed and the atmosphere ignited there was nothing left. He remembers ash clinging to his mouth. Did the ashes taste like Darkness or was his magic twisted to taste like death? 

I didn’t know this place could do that. 

They found a way. Happy now?

Did she suffer? 

You don't care about that in the ring.

There is a furious buzzing in his head not unlike a siren. He tries not to even think of a reply. Cyrene relents.

She did.

He owes Noah his life. (and he’s still imagining a body on fire. He can draw with charcoal but charred bones are jagged and stick in the throat and in the mind) Phosphor tried to leave and she is dead. She is dead and there is already nothing left. Twelve generations of his family are buried together. Intellectually, he understands that his transformed body won’t be lying with them, but the idea of ash?

How often does this happen?

Rachel is the first prisoner to die here. They have been very careful to avoid making martyrs.

And before he can ask a million questions, the power dampener slams down, and Cyrene is gone. The concept that he could be a martyr does not make it easier to risk death by suffocation. It’s stupid, anyway. He’s a soldier, not a victim, but maybe nobody knows what’s good for them. Zach sure didn’t, what with his crush on a supervillain and everything.

His magic returns. Jasper remembers to breathe. Then he fills his water bottle and tries to wash the taste of death from his mouth.

...................................

We enter the final sequence. Next chapter, Jasper gets vivisected and things fall apart.

There are only four walls. The floor and bottom half of each is lightly padded, and there are shapes scattered throughout to allow a soldier to take shelter. Sapphire lets his dark eyes glow. Looking into the shining blue is like looking up into the sky and knowing you are really looking out, knowing you are a speck of dust clinging to the side of a speck of dust, and spinning.

His alien memories recognize this magic too. It’s similar to his Darkness, but Zach can’t translate the name they provide. The Abyss. The Cosmos. The Vastness. It is space itself. Zach hasn’t left this labyrinth in months. How did he not fall up into the sky? Better to just think of it as Blue.

“Alright, Sapphire, take it easy,” his handler says. Handler Bridges is also responsible for Sapphire, though he’s more like a father to the boy. How close are they? He imagines his handler cheering the boy on at a little league baseball game and feels his face go hot.

“And Jasper! Remember, Sapphire can’t heal from a broken skull like you can. The higher-ups want a clean fight and no hospital bills”.

Zach used to waste his time. He researched, and learned that Sapphire’s real name is Alex - AJ - Safir. He is about sixteen years old, and both of his parents were murdered When Hell Broke Loose and Elster tried to take over the world.

He never had another vision of that villain in the shape of a magpie. Sometimes he wakes up feeling watched, but that’s got to be because he is, right? It’s just the security camera and the one-way mirror walls. Cameras watch him now. It’s fine. Didn’t he always want to be on tv?

They put on their helmets. Sapphire’s face is eclipsed by a featureless mirrored mask. Jasper is given permission to use his own magic. He breathes in relief. The Darkness weaves between the fibers of his muscles and soothes every ache from of overuse. It fills the microscopic pores of his bones to fix the damage it caused. He is an imperfect vessel, but the Darkness shapes him in its image.

Handler Bridges exits the room and tells them to begin.

It doesn’t start with a bang. Sapphire waits, so Jasper has the chance to pour magic into the air until he feels like he’s tugging on his heart. He’s gotten fast. Jasper lashes out with his hands and the tendrils race toward his opponent. They pass through the blue sillhuette where his body used to be. A punch hits the base of his spine. Teleporter. He stumbles forward but stays on his feet.

“You’re tougher than you feel,” Sapphire replies.

Jasper turns to face him. All that magic becomes a bramble of thorns around him. He won’t be hit from behind again. Jasper sends the spikes outward. Each time, Sapphire teleports away. It isn’t instant though. He just needs to be quicker.

So Jasper vaults over one of the obstacles to close the distance. It’s waist-high to him, but closer to shoulder-height for the boy. He isn’t expecting the attack. Jasper lashes out with a last tendril of magic. Sapphire dodges, but when he tries to teleport behind, his left arm intersects with the Darkness. He jerks it out of the way.

“What the-“

An apology sticks in his throat.

A hole is missing from his jacket, and fresh blood stains his arm. Jasper’s heart beats less and less the more comfortable he becomes in this state, but now it’s like thunder. The wound is so clean. Sapphire is a wielder and he is a vessel, but their powers are equally matched. Sapphire must be incorporeal when he teleports, to avoid any nasty physics. His power cancels that right out.

You can kill him. The alien memories argue. He’s a dog. It would be a mercy.

If that’s true, he’s the dog toy. He has barely registered the blood before Sapphire telepathically throws him against his own shield. The Darkness seeps back into his skin on impact. It’s sticky. Anyone else would be impaled. Jasper claws at his throat, but there’s nothing to grab onto. His magic redirects matter and does away with his need to breathe.

The boy throws him against the celing. Jasper falls fifteen feet to the floor. A rib cracks and immediately is mended. He tastes blood in his mouth. The injury is accompanied by dull pain like getting hit by a baseball moving sixty miles an hour. There’s no fear around it. He must’ve just missed a catch.

Become stronger. Kill him.

I will not.

Why? Because he is not your real enemy?

With his head ringing, Jasper extends a hand (the muscles twitch and overextend). The ooze on the ground obeys his command and forms into projectiles. Sapphire deflects rather than dodge. He throws up a shield of his own, perfectly spherical and equally Blue, but the missiles pierce through it. They lose most of their momentum as they do, but he seems terrified. Jasper is pulled off of the ground again.

The Darkness surges to protect him, but he has nothing to grab on to. The boy doesn’t throw him around like something weightless. He is so much heavier than a rag doll, and every shove has fatal momentum behind it. The first time they met, Sapphire dented his skull. His thoughts are bleary, but Jasper thinks it’s happened again. There is no pain, but he feels every impact like a deadly insult.

The Darkness is a force of perpetual change. A fluid fits the shape of its container. Does it really matter if his bones are breaking if they heal the moment it happens? Ribs fragmenting into lungs doesn’t matter if those lungs aren’t in use. Liquid doesn’t flinch. He is completely limp when the boy drops him to the floor.

This body is not strong enough. It whispers. Let go. Let me save you.

He’s already enough of a monster. Jasper braces for more, but the boy lets him lie there. The shifting, skin-crawling, sensation makes it hard to move. He’s not sure where his feet end and the stuff around him begins. Hopefully, Sapphire can’t tell either. The idea comes to him to make another shield, this one so tightly wrapped that no concussive force could harm him.

Yes. A cocoon. Transform. You can win.

But Bridges never hurts him for losing a match, and he’s clearly lost. Jasper pulls the fingers on his left hand together. His thumb can’t quite make the fist. He tries tapping on the mat.

“Tapping out? Wait, is that your magic, or blood?”

Yes. He is tapping out. He moves his head up and down. Jasper realizes that he’s directing the order to the magic in his muscles, not to the muscles themselves. He’s a puppeteer.

Sapphire curses. Zach wants to reassure him. He opens his jaws and viscious red pours from his mouth.

Oh, God. To speak he needs to breathe, and move air over his vocal chords, and he hasn’t done either of those things in a minute. Jasper tries forcing his lungs to expand. He’s learned anatomy down here. That takes a pressure differential that he doesn’t have at the moment. Panic seizes him. Suffocation means waterboarding, and the power-dampener, and punishment. He cannot breathe. The only thing keeping him alive is magical will.

Sapphire runs to his side but refrains from touching the Darkness.

“Are you dying? They said- I thought”.

His broken ribs punctured into his lungs and rather than fix it the Darkness just got rid of them both. When a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, every part of it but the central nervous system turns into sludge. That’s why none of it hurt. He’s a sack of skin with nothing inside it. Jasper finds the strings to move his arms and roll over onto his back. The Darkness cannot die, but this body can.

No. It’s not just “this body,” it’s his body. This magic already gave him sensitive ears and constant pain and teeth people want to keep as trophies. It won’t get anything else.

Sapphire yells at the camera. “You told me he was strong enough!”

He just might be. Jasper can feel his insides settling. The Darkness has a better memory than he does. It, not his body, keeps the score. He has a diaphragm again, and the right number of ribs.

“I-“ he coughs up ooze. It pours from his nose and mouth and even his eyes. This is an entire chest cavity, not just his stomach. Sapphire telepathically hauls him to a sitting position. Jasper lifts his head to look, but everything is blurry and tinted red. He clumsily wipes his eyes. A sheet of red sticks to his glove. It isn’t supposed to be like this. The Darkness is supposed to fade away, rather than need to be expelled.

Sapphire teleports in and out every few seconds. The Darkness evaporates in wisps of smoke. The next time he wipes his face, he’s does it by moving his human muscles. He’s too weak to try a third time. His body is no longer transforming, and that means it is in collapse.

It hurts. The lungs that reformed from nothing hurt. His throat is sore from heaving. Jasper tries not to move, but when he does, his freshly mended bones scrape against eachother and drag tendons behind them. He is so far past hungry that his body has forgotten that it needs to eat. It did not hurt this much to come back from the dead. It did not hurt at all to be dead. Only a few people would even miss him. He is monstrous. The boy uses his powers to lift him onto the stretcher.

He registers the beeping first. Jasper opens his eyes to the view from the hospital bed. Someone has pulled him from his Darkness-stained armor into a green uniform. The pain everywhere has consolidated into a few specific torments: head, lungs, ankles, and half dozen tubes going in and out of his body.

His handler sits in a chair with his hands clasped together. He hopes his tone of voice is real concern.

“Oh, good, you’re finally awake”.

Sapphire, or maybe AJ now that he’s out of uniform, sits on the other side of the room. His dark hair holds the shape of his helmet.

“I’m sorry,” Jasper replies. His vocal chords are newly-formed. He’s also bleary, and sedated.

“This is our fault, Jasper. Sapphire overreacted. He’s never had anything get past a shield before. He’s just a kid, you know? He got scared”.

Jasper saves his energy.

“How do you feel?”

“I thought I was going to die,” he replies without opinion.

“You don’t seem worried by that”.

“…it hurt”.

“You’d miss out on a lot if you were dead. A whole lot of hard work for nothing”.

The last time he was lying down near Bridges, he was waterboarding him. Now, his legs aren’t even tied down. (His wrists are, but with a lot of slack).

“I’ve made the edit to your file. You are no longer listed as being superhumanly durable. You have extremely hightened healing abilities, and not like Deadpool or anything either. That means no getting set on fire, or fighting Horizon Guards on your own”.

“I would never fight a Horizon Guard. They’re the good guys”.

“Well, you fought Sapphire. He’s one of them,”

That wasn’t true three months ago. Last he checked, Sapphire is a product of the United States millitary, and some complicated other stuff, but not the Horizon Guard. Maybe he’s been promoted?

“It was a joke, Jasper. I’m not worried about you going rogue”. His handler steps closer. Jasper tucks his chin down to his chest, but the man just touches the restraints on one wrist.

“Not to mention, you wouldn’t get far if you did”.

………………………………………

For more of Sapphire, see [ here ]

There is one more chapter before the (multi-chapter) finale sequence, and at the end of that, this sad man will be free. (I am unsure, leaning against, writing anything after). The finale sequence is brutal. Things are falling apart. I’ve been looking forward to it this whole time.

So! This is basically the last call for sending in any asks while Zach is in a relatively stable (but imprisoned) state. I do deeply appreciate every comment I receive.

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