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beastandwolverine · 3 days ago

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I l😍ve Henry so much

Lark

Reply to this beginning by @thebettermccoy

⁂

It was too bright. The artificial lights in the pens made it difficult to sleep sometimes, but she always had the option to turn over or bury her face in the crook of her arm to block it. Quickly, here and now wherever here and now she happened to be, she discovered she could not move her limbs freely. Sharp bands of metal bit into her wrists and ankles when she attempted to lift them. Turning her head did nothing to alleviate the light piercing her eyelids either. She grimaced. Ambient sounds--beeping, mostly--filtered into her consciousness.

Something touched her forehead and automatically she flinched away. The next touch wasn’t nearly as gentle. That something became heavy enough to painfully press the back of her skull into the unforgiving metal table below her.

Her jaw loosened; a thin whimper that threatened to become a scream crawled out.

“Keep your mouth shut. I’m not ready to examine it yet.”

She knew that rich voice. The Beast. The Butcher.

She closed her mouth with a snap.

He didn’t let up on her forehead. She’d lost the privilege to move it. His finger--thumb?--pressed to her eye, harshly enough for stars to erupt in it and for her stomach to roll. The beeping at the edge of her hearing began to slow. She felt cold, then hot. An odd heaviness began in her fingertips and began creeping up her hands and wrists, then forearms--

“Vasovagal response in conjunction with oculocardiac reflex intact,” Beast muttered. Not to her, of course.

The pressure on her eye let up. Everything began to feel normal again. The relief was short lived, however; the same digit forced her eyelid open. Although she tried, she couldn’t blink or even squint. While a brief shadow gave her a reprieve from the overhead brightness, that original light was nothing compared to the thin, concentrated beam flicked at her, burning out her vision.

Her eyelid was released, thankfully, but he repeated it, flashing the harsh penlight into her other eye as well. Tears involuntarily rolled down her cheeks from the pain.

“Dazzle reflex attempted. Pupillary light response intact. No anisocoria. Menace response--”

She blinked to try and reset her vision, and the grey mass standing near became clearer. Not just the features of Doctor McCoy came into focus, but other, unexpected colors as well. Before she had a chance to determine what, exactly, those colors were, a hand snapped close to the side of her head. She flinched violently to avoid it.

“--intact.”

The clawed hand did not strike her. The sharp edge of a nail drew along her cheek, however, following the trail of wetness. She watched the Butcher lift his hand suck the taste of her tears off his thumb.

He leaned in to examine her more closely. She watched his own eyes saccades between hers before he seemed satisfied and straightened again.

“Open.”

She blinked once.

“Open,” he said with more menace, as if repeating the word would make his meaning clear. He raised his hand again. This time the threat of physical contact was not implied, but promised.

She opened her mouth immediately.

The Beast hooked the thumb he’d put into his own mouth into her inner cheek, pulling it away so he could have a clearer view of her teeth. The same claw that graced the skin on the outside did the same on the inside, although here it sliced her open, forcing her without words to keep her mouth loose. As blood pooled at the back of her throat, she struggled not to move. Her instincts told her to cough but she didn’t dare. Not while he was systematically examining her teeth, making quiet verbal notes to himself about whatever he saw.

More tears fogged her vision. When she blinked, they followed the tracks laid by the others before them. The Beast scowled in disgust.

“Swallow, you dumb cow.”

He didn’t remove his thumb, making it impossible to close her mouth properly. Still, she obeyed the best she could, making sure as she closed her jaw she did not bite him. He watched with interest the mechanics of her tongue and throat work to prevent her from choking. Only when she managed to swallow the blood did he release her.

“Very good,” he praised absently, patting her cheek. The wetness he smeared on her skin--she didn’t know if it was spit or blood, or both--quickly cooled. The Beast brought his hand back to his mouth. She watched, curiously, as a faint red haze trailed after his hand as he moved it. The color dissipated once he sucked the taste of her off his digit again, muttering to himself, “Involuntary reflexes overridden, voluntary reflexes intact. All positive. Expected. But extrapolating from previous data--”

Her gaze dropped from his face. Now that she concentrated, more colors became clearer. The Butcher was grey and wore a white lab coat and dark trousers, but as she stared red and orange and white and blue became visible--

“Stop that. What are you doing? What is--”

Before she could react, his clawed hand was on her forehead again, applying the same painful pressure it had before. The Beast’s face filled her vision again, his own gaze sharp under furrowed brows.

“How did you do that, little Lark? I saw the change--explain yourself!”

Frightened, she shook her head as best she could. She had no idea what he was talking about. A change? A change in what? And whatever she’d seen, whatever she thought she’d seen, had fled. All she saw now was an increasingly interested Doctor Henry McCoy, and that was much worse than when he was simply going through rotely and making notes on routine observations.

At her refusal to elaborate, he lifted his upper lip in another scowl. Narrowing his eyes as he straightened to tower over her again, he released her. Not feeling like her skull was about to be crushed gave her so much relief she almost sobbed, but held any noise in.

The Butcher Beast stared down at her for another long moment, then, muttering to himself too softly for her to catch his words, he turned abruptly and strode behind her, out of her vision.

“Do not disappoint me, little Lark,” he called out over his shoulder before his footsteps retreated and the sound of a heavy door closed.

Now that she was alone with a machine ominously beeping in time with her heart rate, Lark gave in to the sobs she’d held back.

⁂

While strapped to the table in Doctor McCoy’s laboratory--his main lab, he called it--Lark learned a few things.

One, she had survived the injection. Serum XM-4001. She’d never forget its designation; the Beast muttered it to himself frequently enough it was seared into her memory.

Two, the Butcher liked to talk.

He talked to himself. He talked to her. He talked to his equipment. All of his conversations, unless he ordered her--forced her--to reply, were one sided. Sometimes he hummed. It was never a melody she was familiar with. Not that she would have joined in! He had never been human. He wouldn’t have been whispered the same songs the cattle in the pens sometimes sang to each other, passed down like an oral history of times long past.

He made his notes verbally; his words appeared on a monitor she could see if she stretched her neck. And that was how she learned:

Three, something had changed in her. Whatever chemicals he’d injected her with had done their job. She was no longer a mere human, although the Beast didn’t seem quite sure that she was a mutant either. She didn’t understand the medical jargon he used. Tapetum lucidum. Heterochromia. Pigmentary dispersion. Some terms he seemed to be confident in, others, lilted as if they were only speculation. She gathered that some tests he would like to run on her were not readily available.

Which led her to lesson number four, which she was proud she came up with on her own: she did not tell him there was a change in her vision. He could run a million tests on her physical body, but he had no access to what she thought, felt, or experienced. What changed in her seemed the most minor thing anyway. Hardly worth mentioning.

If something was warm or hot, she saw it as red with orange outlines, fading to yellow. If something was cold, it was greens and blues. She could still see other colors; nothing degraded into only basic shapes. Nothing was less clear, only enhanced. Overlaid with the colors. As much as she hated it, she could still make out all the features of his face and hands.

Lark simply kept this development to herself.

Oh, and five.

Doctor Henry McCoy did not give her preferential treatment. Unless said preferential treatment meant finally being unstrapped from a table but placed in a holding cell that barely granted her enough room to lie down. It wasn’t even in his lab; it was located in a corridor between his workspace and the pens. The other cells around her were empty. He collected her whenever he wanted to run more tests. There was no schedule to them that she could determine. He also dragged other subjects passed her, either breathing as they entered his laboratory or still as he removed the corpses.

She was bathed. Bathed-ish. A bucket of foul-smelling soapy water was placed near the bars of her cage and she did her best, but before she could begin to truly get clean the cold water was impatiently dumped over her, leaving her sputtering and gasping. A second bucket with no soap followed the first.

Shaking with the chill, she eventually stripped out of the soiled, sopping tunic she had worn as long as she could remember. In the pens she had been taught her skin would dry more quickly without it, and once her clothing was dry too, she could wrap it around herself again. The unexpected drenching had left her exhausted and despite her shivering, she fell asleep.

When she woke up, her one piece of clothing was gone. It was never returned. Lark took to huddling on the bare floor of the cage, her knees tucked to her chin and her arms around her legs.

For some reason--although if she dwelled on it, she could most likely come up with more than one--Doctor McCoy wasn’t pleased with her. She’d survived, yes, but whatever he saw within her eyes wasn’t enough to convince him his trial was a success. In fact, he seemed to hate that there was a physical change in them. What that was, she didn’t know, having no reflective surface to see herself in.

Lark still kept mute about what she could see.

She got proof of his anger at the--in his mind--only partial success when, after another painful examination of eyes, teeth, and nails, he spit that, “if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out”, which left her cold to her core in a way that had nothing to do with being nude.

She’d have fought him for the few seconds it would take for him to subdue her if he’d attempted an enucleation.

Instead, she was fitted with a device that covered the upper portion of her face. While it prevented the Beast from having to look at her eyes, it also blinded her. Leather straps and locks secured it to her head; although she tried to dislodge it when she was shoved back into her cell, she broke fingernails in the futile attempt.

It was then she learned another thing:

Doctor McCoy considered her too valuable to simply dispose of. He didn’t just kill her and dissect her. Whatever was in her that made his serum work, it wasn’t common and hadn’t been repeatable. And that tiny bit of information gave her a tiny bit of hope.

Blinded in a cell only four by five feet across, Lark only had her thoughts, hearing, and physical touch to focus on. At first. She learned each and every inch of her confinement. Which thin bar of the cell had rusted and had some give. Which brick had the most crumbly mortar around it. She filed both pieces of information away. Her ears began to pick up subtle sounds; some that meant the Beast was pleased, others--especially when more subjects were being worked on--she wished she could scrub from her memories. Sometimes those sounds overlapped.

And then, to her surprise, the colors returned.

At first she couldn’t quite understand it. She knew the entire area of her cell, but a red drifted through where she knew the door and wall to the lab was. With this surprising stimulation, with something new to occupy her, she concentrated on that.

Red was always the easiest. It was heat. It took time, but since most of it was stationary, she learned to see the equipment in the lab first. Then, with more practice, she began to differentiate mechanical from organic. The Beast became easy to discern; his bulk and his familiar movements through the space made it simple. And as much as she hated it, his subjects became useful too--fiery bright with fear and adrenaline that faded to the cooler colors when they expired. Lark could watch it all in real time.

She successfully hid her capability until one day, hunger driven--Doctor McCoy’s preferential treatment did not include much better rations, despite his “promise”--and by her new vision alone, she snatched a rat that wandered between the bars of her cell. She barely snapped its spine before gnawing into its belly, and had the damn misfortune of not realizing the Beast just happened to glance through the window of the door at the same time.

He saw what she did and slammed the door open so hard she almost dropped the first warm meal she’d had in . . . ever.

⁂

“Lark!” he snarled. “How did you--”

Lark crouched, the mangled rodent held tight to her chest, glaring up in his towering direction. She snarled back.

The Beast’s query choked itself off at her animalistic response. He held his tongue as she returned to her meal, the rat’s thin bones crunching between her molars. She attempted to crack its skull before spitting it to the floor, clearly determining whatever calories she could suck from it weren’t worth the effort. It landed in tufts of bloody fur.

Doctor McCoy broke into booming laughter. “Is this the end for you, little Lark? I’ve given you a chance at something better, and instead you’ve forsaken even humanity? You’ve sunk lower than the degenerates that occupy the pens?”

She licked the palm of one hand. “No. I was just hungry.”

If her unexpected hunting prowess had surprised him, if her wordless growl clearly warning him away startled him, neither of them stunned him like her lucid, full sentences.

“My, my. This is an intriguing development."

Lark lifted her chin to look him blindly in the eye. She tracked his movement with uncanny precision as he sank to his heels in front of her.

“Tell me, Lark,” the Beast said in a quieter voice, “how did you catch that rat? How did you even know it was there?”

Now it was her turn to laugh. The noise was thin, as if she was attempting the sound for the first time. Instead of answering him verbally, she grabbed the rat’s head from the floor in front of her and threw it, also with uncanny precision, at him. It was only his own quick reflexes that deflected it, a swipe of his hand preventing it from hitting him in the face.

All pretense of a gentler, simply curious Doctor McCoy vanished. The Beast pushed off from the floor with all the power in his legs, launching himself the short distance to the bars of her cell. The entire structure rattled at the impact, the thin metal bending inward on itself.

“Tell me how you caught that rat blindfolded!” he roared, reaching through the bars to grab her, to take her by the scruff of her neck, throttle her, rend the answer from her via lacerations and blood.

Instead of being caught, though, Lark slipped out of immediate reach of his clawed hand. Her escape wouldn’t last long; the Beast was quicker than she was and the cell wasn’t that large. She only had the element of surprise this one last time, and only a split moment before his rage continued to erupt.

Lark took hold of the bar that had been loose before he slammed bodily into the cage. She had heard it snap on the impact; what could hold a human was balsa wood to the Butcher. With a desperate tug, she managed to pull it completely free. It lacerated her hand. She ignored the sharp pain and shoved the broken tip against her neck.

She pressed it in hard enough that blood spurted around it.

“I’ll tell you!” she agreed. “I’ll tell you, Doctor--but you have to take this thing off my head! Or I’ll slit my throat and you’ll never have an answer!”

The Beast’s voice dropped an octave. “And if I simply tear that arm off at the elbow, little Lark, then drag you out of this cage to slowly dissever you until you answer me? I can make a dismemberment last a very long time. Whatever shall you do then?”

Immediately she shifted the position of her makeshift weapon to the front of her throat. She swallowed, and the sharpened tip bobbed against her skin.

“Then I’ll shove it right here, and I’ll never speak again.”

⁂

He let her out of the cage. Not gently, but not with his claws buried in her either. Keeping tight hold of the wire pressed into the front of her throat--her only leverage--she was allowed to stand and walk on her own feet. She stumbled over the entryway into his lab.

The Beast made a noise near her, something that indicated he’d seen her trip and was calculating what it could possibly mean.

Lark was guided to a table and told to climb onto it. When she paused, feeling the edges to gauge how much effort she needed to do as ordered, he took a moment to watch before repeating the command with more threat this time. He wasn’t accustomed to any hesitation when he spoke. Any pause felt like disobedience, and that would never do.

She didn’t hurry. In fact, Lark took even more time to determine exactly where each side of the table was. As a low growl filled the air menacingly behind her, she said,

“If you hadn’t forced this contraption on my head and blinded me, I’d already be on this table.”

The growl grew, but she remained unmolested as she finally climbed onto the metal examination table. Her feet dangled and she kept close track of where, exactly, the Butcher was in the room. In front of her, then at her side, then behind her. He could easily disarm her, so she pushed the sharp edge of the wire even more tightly against her larynx. To the point that it was more than an ache, but actually painful. A necessity, so only a quick sharp jab would drive it into her voice box and render her--hopefully--mute.

A warm trickle dripped to the hollow between her collarbones, pooling there before continuing down her sternum. Her blood mixed with the rat’s she’d smeared on her chest.

The Beast shifted on his feet behind her. Lark heard the subtle whisper of metal on metal as he picked something up. She tensed; this was the moment that would prove how valuable she truly was to the Butcher. Pulling air laced with the smell of disinfectant into her lungs, it may be the last breath she ever took.

He took hold of one of the locks holding the leather around her head. There was still no gentleness in his touch. He twisted her neck to one side to maneuver the hardware into a position that he could use the key on it. She both felt and heard the lock release, and some of the pressure she’d grown accustomed to lessened.

Two more locks followed, and suddenly, the whole apparatus loosened and came away. It stuck to her skin in a few places before falling off due to its weight. Lark gasped at how light she felt.

Blinking rapidly, real vision returned as if she hadn’t been blinded for . . . she had no way to tell time here. Glancing around her, she was able to match all the machines she knew by their heat signatures. She turned further and caught sight of the Butcher dropping the leather headgear carelessly onto a mayo stand. She’d seen him intimately too: his chest always red, the hair on his head always blue and green, and the rest of him various colors in between.

With startling speed he stepped in front of her again.

“Well, little Lark--I’ve upheld your request. You’re free of the harness. Now do not make me wait to learn your secret.”

She knew that once revealed what his injection had done to her, that would be the end of her life. No one survived the Butcher’s experiments. She had no expectation to be the first. Lark felt, however, that she gained a small victory. She’d stayed alive, she’d forced him to release her from the cell and free her from the leather that blinded her. She’d been able to see again. She didn’t die in darkness.

Lark smiled, her lips cracking as they widened. “I can see colors,” she told him. “More than normal. Heat and cold. More than I’d ever seen before in my life.”

Instead of striking her down, clawing out her throat or disemboweling her as she expected, the Beast stared at her, processing her words. “Temperature? You see thermal signatures?”

She nodded, and licked the fresh blood off her lips. “Yes. I could see that rat. Its body was red, its tail was green because it had less heat. Through the wall, I could see all the machines you have in this room. I could--I can see you, and the heat coming off your body. I could see every person you brought in here, red and orange at first, then blues and greens when they stopped breathing. I could see your arousal as you watched them die.”

He narrowed his eyes, still absorbing what she told him. His large clawed hand--yellow, but his nails were green--grabbed her upper arm. Lark barely flinched, even when he yanked her off the table, ready for the end.

To her infinite surprise, Doctor McCoy shoved her towards a scrub sink. “Go clean up. You’re covered in rat blood, and that’s disgusting,” he commanded.

This time the water was warm and the soap actually worked. It made her smell fresh. The Beast threw a lab coat at her as she finished. “Cover yourself. I don’t need you distracting me, little Lark. We have a lot of discovering to do together.”

Slipping her arms into the the labcoat sized for him, it draped Lark as though she was a child playing dress up. His attention sharp on her, he grinned. Just before he showed too many teeth, the smile almost looked pleasant.

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#dark beast #henry mccoy #writing #fanfiction #writing with partners who are amazing

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