#I love you!! happy birthdayy sorry I didn't finish this all

[corvidfeathers]

the questions we ask ourselves 2/3

Underground, with white walls and bright fluorescent lights, there was nothing to mark the passage of time.  The processions of orderlies prying subjects out of their cells or putting them back in was constant, and the doctors seemed to conduct their tests at all hours.  It leant to the feeling of timelessness in the Pit; if Alexander didn’t have his wrist chip display screen showing the time, and mark the beginning and end of his shifts, he might have lost days and days in the maze of white corridors.

It was a torture tactic, Alexander remembered.  He could hear the rough voice of one of the Guard instructors, tapping her fingers on the display screen at the front of the classroom and outlining in brusque terms the things that they might be put through, if they were ever caught by an enemy.  The things that they might put others through, when they caught the quarries they hunted.  Leave the captured disorientated, uncertain of the passage of time; give them no routine to adhere to.  Most humans didn’t do well without routine.  Let the isolation and uncertainty erode their resolve.

It left them easier to break.

Or, in this case, easier to… deconstruct?  To condition?

The second part of the OC story I’m writing for @ninetalees​ for her birthday!  I love you darling!

This ended up being longer than I thought it would be, so it’s going to be three parts instead of two!

What am I doing here?

The cold of the wall Alexander was leaning against leached through his uniform, reaching his skin beneath.  He shivered, straightening.  Hour after hour of nothing had passed in the facility.  Before, he had been posted at the front of the facility, where he could see the doctors and orderlies come and go for their work days, and things seemed… if not normal, at least some semblence of it.  Now, by choice, he was deeper in, posted next to Cell Block B.  To… help.  He was there to help.

Underground, with white walls and bright fluorescent lights, there was nothing to mark the passage of time.  The processions of orderlies prying subjects out of their cells or putting them back in was constant, and the doctors seemed to conduct their tests at all hours.  It leant to the feeling of timelessness in the Pit; if Alexander didn’t have his wrist chip display screen showing the time, and mark the beginning and end of his shifts, he might have lost days and days in the maze of white corridors.

It was a torture tactic, Alexander remembered.  He could hear the rough voice of one of the Guard instructors, tapping her fingers on the display screen at the front of the classroom and outlining in brusque terms the things that they might be put through, if they were ever caught by an enemy.  The things that they might put others through, when they caught the quarries they hunted.  Leave the captured disorientated, uncertain of the passage of time; give them no routine to adhere to.  Most humans didn’t do well without routine.  Let the isolation and uncertainty erode their resolve.

It left them easier to break.

Or, in this case, easier to… deconstruct?  To condition?

What was happening here?

Hundreds of his comrades had guarded this place over the past two years it had been part of the Guard rotation.  Not one of them breathed a word about it to the public, or even discussed it among themselves.  They had all… accepted it, as another post, just like guarding the Royal Family’s parties, or watching the palace, or shepherding the Crown on trips around this city.  Keep the royal children entertained, catch a few wild-eyed gunmen, hunt down conspirators against the Crown…and... casually participate in the systematic destruction of hundreds, and hundreds of people.

How had none of the other Guards balked?

Disloyalty is death.  The words of his Commander rasped through his ears.  He could feel the iron weight of her stare, just by conjuring up her image in his head.  The Guard stood between the Royal Family and all the dangers of the world; they must be loyal to a fault, whatever the cost.  He understood that.  Ivan had explained it to him, again and again; their nobility lay in the fact that it was their duty, their privilege to lay down their lives for the lives of others.  In exchange, they had a purpose.  A purpose like few others had, at the cost of other ambitions, other loyalties, other… feelings.

Alexander’s eyes flitted to the corridor in front of him, and then down to the time displayed on his wrist chip.  Late at night; the lights were still just as bright, and he could hear footsteps echoing in the distance, but the orderlies had recently taken several subjects from cells nearby.

If his observation of their routine was correct, he would have a half an hour, at least, before they returned.  Most likely.  They did not adhere to any sort of schedule he could parse, but they didn’t seem to take too many people from the same group of cells at the same time.

He crossed to the cell across from his post, and peered through the single slat of a window.

She was still there.  Crumpled on the floor, evoking images of broken, too-still bodies and staring eyes.  He pushed that away; the orderlies were meticulous.  They removed the dead quickly.  He had seen it.

He pulled the keycard from his pocket, and waved it in front of the door.  As a Guard Captain, he had been given access keys to the majority of the doors in the building; at least the doors that didn’t protect classified information.  Well, information more classified than the existence of the place.  Through careful testing, he had surmised he could not open the doors of the laboratories, or the storage, but when an orderly had called him for assistance corralling and forcing a wild-eyed subjects down a hall and into their cell, he had found on his keycard could open the cells.

One last glance down the hallway.  His fingers resting against the doorknob were slick, and he could feel sweat trickling down the back of his neck, despite the chilly atmosphere of the hallway.  He couldn’t see any figures making their way down the hallway, and the only footsteps that met his ears were far away, by his estimation.

The light on the door flashed blue, and he pulled it open.

The cell was still lit, with bright lights that left no corner of it shadowed.  The girl had shifted, and curled around herself on the floor.  There was no be.  

At the scrape of the door against the floor, she looked up.  Her eyes were wide, but her expression held no spark of fear.  Only the weight of resignation.  

She blinked at him.

“Hello,” Alexander said, easing the door shut behind him so it didn’t make much noise.  He was all too aware of the smallness of the cell, the few feet between them.  If she could do what the other subjects had demonstrated…  He was well-trained, a Guard with years of combat training and experience.  He would have to rely on that.

He stood against the far wall, keeping a distance from her so he wouldn’t spook her.  She stared up at him, never breaking eye contact.  Her attention did not waver to his uniform, or the weapon he carried with him, strapped into his holster; they were fixed on his eyes.

Alexander knelt, and held out his hands to her, palms up.  A gesture of peace.

“You’re… the one from before,” she said.  “I… I remember… you.”  Her expression softened for a moment.  “Your eyes, they’re…”

Recognizable.

“... Kind,” she said.  She sat up, but hugged her knees to her chest, resting her chin on top of them.

“You remember me?” Alexander said.  “You were only awake for a moment.”

The girl stared at him.  “I remember.”  Her eyes widened, and for a moment fear flashed across her face.  It was replaced in an instant by the same dull resignation she had initially showed.  “This is a trick, isn’t it.  One of the games.  The tests.”  She blinked, very quickly, and despite her flat expression Alexander realized she was barely holding back tears.  “Take me away, then.  Take it away.”

“Take… it away?” he said stupidly, before he realized.  “No… not, I’m not here to… condition… you.”

“Why are you here?” she demanded, leaning forward.  Her lips showed just the barest hint of sharp canines, and Alexander remembered the gleam of blood on another subject’s teeth, the one he had wrenched away from an orderly who had made the mistake of trying to restrain them before they had been fully… shut down?  Taken out of their violent state?

“I…”  He had no answer for her.  None worth saying.  “I…”

“Go away,” she snarled.  Then her expression fell, and tears were glimmering in her eyes again.  “Please.”

So he did.  What else could he do?

What are you doing here?

“Come on, come with me.  Don’t you want to do something with your day of leave?  You can’t just sit here all day, with those stormclouds hanging over your head.”

“... Don’t give me that look.  Sometimes I think it’s deadlier than any of our concoctions.  Well, your concoctions.”

“I’m busy.”

“Busy?  With what?  Research?  Come on, life isn’t all about poisons.  I’ve barely seen you since you took that job in the Pit.”

“Mmm.”

“Is that what you’re moping about?  I’ve heard… things about that place.”

“Mmm.”

“... I could get you transferred, you know.  Probably.  I mean, I know my way around the command.  If I pled your case, talked you up, I bet I could get you assigned to the same post as me.”

“No.”

“What?  I… haven’t done anything to hurt you, have I?”

“I, uh… no.  I mean.”

“Are you sure?

“Babysitting the Crown’s brat?  No thank you.  I’m fine.  I’m not made for that sort of work, anyway.  I like the solitude.”

“You would.”

What do I remember?

The men and women lining the halls, alert, always averted their gazes when she was brought past.  She had known why, and then she had forgotten it; she had done something, at one point, trying to needle the emotions she thought they were feeling, but the memory of that defiance had been taken from her.

They were not the orderlies and they were not the doctors.  They used to be clothed in red.  That hid the blood, even when one of them had been prodded to…  …  well, she forgot things like that, sometimes.  But she knew their uniforms were the colors of the blood beneath her nails, and they could bleed, to.  Not like the orderlies and the doctors, whose skin remained perfect, untouched and unscarred despite the scalpels in their hands.

The soldiers- that was what they were, soldiers- did not wear red any longer.  They wore green, now, resplendent in it, and they walked the halls stiffly, took their posts with the gravity of statues, and stood there until some switch turned in their heads and they walked somewhere else.

The man with the kind, mismatched eyes wore green, too.

She pressed herself against the door, trying to catch a glimpse of him.  Sometimes, he was standing just a few paces away.  His eyes would be staring at nothing, lost, or burrowing a hole in the wall before him.  Sometimes she watched him for hours, just to see his eyes.  Just to have something to look at, something to wonder about.

He had… come into her cell.  Held out his hands.

Like a friend.

Like he…

No.  The concept had not been taken from her, but it was so dangerous it did not bear thinking about.  The world for her began and ended in these walls; anything, anyone that said otherwise was another test.  If she failed, they would take her back again, cut and cut and cut holes in her memories and in her mind until all the pieces fell apart.  Then she would lose herself entirely.

But… she watched the kind eyed man.  Watched him stand through his shift, and then leave.  The girl felt sure he was leaving; his shoulders would slump in relief for just a moment.  He thought no one could see.  In the moments when no one was looking, he looked sad, or angry, his lips drawn down and his eyes taking in the place as if it was taking all his strength not to flinch away.

Once, she saw another green-clad person walk by.  A woman.  She snapped something to him, and the kind eyed man straightened, his expression immediately going blank as he saluted the woman.

She knew that blankness.

She knew it intimately.  It was her last defense between what little she had left and those who wanted her to be nothing.  Or worse than nothing.

So she watched him, not daring to draw attention to herself.  It was enough to see him leave, to wonder where he was going.  It was enough that his eyes were kind, and that once, he had held out his hands to her.  More was dangerous.

More was dangerous.

It was only on the best days, days when she dared to hope, just a little bit, that she let herself… think about doing more than looking.  Reaching out.  She wouldn’t, but it was a good thought to think.  It kept her through the long, cold periods of darkness in her cell, and the dread when the doctors took her.

They took her more often now.  More testing.  Some of it she remembered.  Some of it she didn’t.  They spoke the words, and she became… not herself, anymore.  Something else, something so furious and angry that it would tear the world apart if it could.

Maybe that was her.  Maybe all these fragments of memories and hopes weren’t quite a person, just a worn garment covering rage.  The doctors just had to rip off the garment, again and again and again, until there was nothing to it.  Until the anger was her, and she was the anger.

It was a day like that, when her body ached and her mouth tasted of iron, when the whitecoats had poked an poked and poked until she had done… things she couldn’t remember, when her lips betrayed her.

She lay in the dark, unable to conjure the slightest scrap of herself, unable to even remember those… eyes she liked so much.  They had pushed out all of those little pieces of her, and replaced them with the satisfaction of taking things apart.  Of blood on her hands and her face and the childish desire to destroy.  There was nothing else, and there never would be.  Just the cell, and the whitecoats, and the killing.

The voice startled her.

“Is there a world beyond here?”

Something scuffed against the floor outside.  

She looked around, surprised.  It took a moment to realize it had been her who spoke.  At last, she had failed their test.  She lay down, resting her head and letting the cold floor numb away some of the pain.

When she glanced up, there were eyes peering into the door.

Mismatched eyes.

But the door didn’t open.  The orderlies didn’t pile in, to drag her down to the room where the whitecoats would rifle around in her head and cut and cut and cut until they were satisfied.  

He just stood there for a moment.  She heard an intake of breath.  His eyes narrowed.  Thoughtful, maybe.  Considering his answer.

“There is,” he said at last.

“Tell me what it’s like,” she whispered, and shut her eyes.

And he did.

She saved every little words, every image he described in his soft, strong voice, filing it away as hers, hers, hers.  His voice wasn’t sharp, or commanding, and it could not fill a room; but it could fill her little cell, and it was gentle, and it was kind, and it was beautiful.

What do you remember?

[dellinah]

*crawls out from under my bed where I have been living the past few days like nothing happened and I'm not incredibly late with this*

Ok, fine, maybe a bit late... a few days late... BUT it's the thought that counts right. Or at least that's what I tell myself >_>

ANYWAY my foggy mind and bad sleep schedule aside, a few days ago we celebrated the birthday of one of the most amazing human beings wewfs that the Earth has ever had the privilege to be walked on by, that being @detectiveashcroft aka Odin and the ocasion calls for great happiness and celebration so have this!!

Anyway (again) hey Odin! Happy birthday boi I hope you had one as amazing as you!

I'm sorry that this is really late, I knew I couldn't get it out on the day bc ofc it happens to be when life decides I must be busy and foggy but I didn't mean to let it drag this long >_> I actually finished this yesterday but I was way too tired to be able to write anything so i thought I'd do it today instead

(Not that I'm much more confident in myself today but I WILL TRY)

Hey Odin! I hope you had a nice birthday and I'm happy I get to know when it is now so that I get to wish you one! (Yes, I will do this every year now for as long as we remain friends deal with that)

You're genuinely one of the best people I've ever met and you have done so much for me, much more than you probably realize bc I know you don't see yourself as that great sometimes but I will SCREAM IN YOUR FACE THAT YOU ARE GREAT until you are convinced. Hey megaphone rules say I cant use it to tease you, not that I can't use it to uplift you so I SHALL DO THAT and you cannot stop me u3u also ima still use it to tease you anyway bc how can I not when you're such a s-

You've always inspired me to do my best and go beyond even when I didn't think I could (both with my art and other stuff) and you inspire me to be myself by unapologetically being yourself (which is great bc your self is amazing) and I have the funnest of times whenever weird furry rps happen out of nowhere and I think of you as a great friend and someone I'm so happy life has decided to put in my way

I can only apologize for not always being my best self around you but also thank you for putting up with me and still being there for me regardless and I just wish to better myself to be a good friend for someone who is such an amazing friend not only to me but everyone else who is lucky enough to know him bc you're just such a sweetheart <3

So yeah, you're the best self aware furry friend that another (sort of) self aware furry could have and I just hope you know that and that all this is enough of a celebration even though nothing I could do could ever be enough to show how great you are

*hugs warm wewf and snugs into floof* HAPPY BIRTHDAYY I love you a lot and you're greatt