#plot progression;

It’s a bare room, dusty from a lack of use, but it wasn’t the room that was between clinical and almost akin to a cell.

You remember now, albeit hazily, that you’re in your house.

Not the one in Russia, not the one in Texas, but the one in San Francisco. The one you’d stayed in months ago before–

–Before what?

You sit up, pressing your palms into your eyes- god, your eyes hurt so much- until you see stars, trying to remember what had happened.

School. You’d been going to school here. Not here, here, but to a University nearby.

Brothers. You have brothers. They went back to Texas when you’d finished enrolling.

You find your phone in your pocket, checking the time, the date, realizing with a start that finals should be over by now, but you don’t remember taking any exams at all. Nor do you even remember studying, working on submissions; everything in the past week? Nothing. You remembered nothing.

All you remember was getting dropped off somewhere in the dead of night, and wandering back here, collapsing onto the bed, and passing out.

You find your shades on the bedside table and slip them on, concealing your eyes, as you would on any other day (right? That is what you did, wasn’t it?), and make your way out of the house.

You knew it was because you woke up, bodily strapped down to your bed. It wasn’t just your hands bound down, but wide strips of leather were belted across your body to ensure that you wouldn’t thrash too much.

Sick and feverish from the previous night, you only hoped they would do it quickly.

The clarity in your consciousness was the terrifying part; they hadn’t put in the IV when they returned you to your room. Keeps the blood work clean and raw, they said. Nothing in the way to muddle the results when they extracted your now enhanced mutated DNA.

Black spots were dancing in your vision, light-headedness, a sense of vertigo, nausea; one piled on after the other as they kept extracting blood from you.

Was this how they planned to do it? Drain you like some kind of animal put up for slaughter?

...Unsurprising, considering what people thought of your kind when they knew what you were.

You pass out again, hoping that you wouldn’t have to wake up to another day of this anymore.

By the time your vision cleared, five people were on the floor.

Four were dead, and one was well on their way.

Your breathing was ragged, and the last of the inky tendrils that saturated the whites of your eyes had receded, leaving them looking relatively normal again, if not for the slight glow of your red irises; a seemingly permanent side effect of the serum.

Kneeling down, pale fingers curled around the last person’s throat, forcing them to look up at you, into your eyes, and with one last glance up at her, and a small nod, you look down, the whites of your eyes flooding with black once more, and you could no longer feel their pulse wildly thrumming against your hand.

You’re sweaty from the exertion, dizzy and disoriented.

‘There’s still one last test,’ she says. ‘Then we’ll see.’

…It was the man from the other day.

They wheel him in, strapped down to a gurney, still thrashing, more wildly, in pain.

‘Extract.’

You obey.

You remember it starting as discomfort that grew as the man writhed less. Until he lay sleeping peacefully now, your nerves on fire, you were screaming, in unbearable, excruciating pain.

Then you black out.

Did you do this to him…?

She’s sitting across you this time. Her silhouette traced by the light flooding from behind her, obscuring her features. You think you know her, who she is, what she looks like, but there was hardly a time you were lucid anymore. There were gaps before, breaks in the haze, but they kept you on a diluted IV of the serum now when you weren’t being administered the full dosage.

You could hear the smile in her tone, the smug satisfaction from how she was visibly breaking you already.

The man on the floor, writhing in pain, was distracting. As was the twitching muscle in your jaw from how hard you ground your teeth, unnerved tension being your default by now.

You should have just killed him.

That’s what she would have wanted to see you do.

They murmured among themselves about how she wouldn’t be coming today. She needed to gather more... volunteers for your case. That you were progressing finely, becoming stronger with every trial. Your true, full potential may make itself known soon.

They’re efficient.

It’s quiet today. The only thought you had was to quietly wonder when this would be over.

When would they would kill you.

It was hard to be cognizant with whatever it was they were giving you making everything hazy and vague.

You could feel your mouth move. Sometimes you formed words. Sometimes you just screamed.

Were those tears running down your face, or was it blood? Did it make a difference?

Your eyes hurt.

Everything was too bright or too dark; the only time it was somewhere in between was when the shadow of someone looming over you blocked out the light. You could hear a woman’s voice. Authoritative, familiar. The same voice who asked you questions. Questions about the others, questions about where you came from, who you were, what you could do.

Requests for a demonstration.

Your eyes hurt so much.

A sharp pain. Hyper awareness that had no place in your body, making you feel everything all at once; from how your blood coursed in your veins to how your pupils dilated while your fingers twitch and tremble, wrists bound down to the arms of a chair.

Your tongue felt too big in your mouth. You couldn’t form words to answer the questions.

The sting of a backhanded slap. That sharp pain of a needle again. Foreign fluid making its way into your bloodstream.

Then back into darkness.