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“Flux,” Saps’ pulse is pounding under his skin, panicked and unsteady and so quick it might just tear right through it. “I need the vial.”
It’s red. It’s wrong and red and not green so it’s not right. Magic is going to drink it. She can’t drink it. Flux can’t give it to her because if he does it’ll lay guiltily on his conscience. He doesn’t know what went wrong, but he has a small fucking hunch it has to do with the fact he’d only been given ten minutes to make it.
The last one took two years.
It can’t be right, but the words can’t seem to find their way around the dry, scratchy lump in his throat under the scrutinizing gaze of the people he’d tried his best to trust. He thinks back to what the old man had told him, the gruff warning leaving his throat, and thinks he might’ve been right.
Flux is staring up at him, quiet and observing and it’s stressing him right out. His nails curl in, pick at the skin around his thumb in steady beats till it bleeds.
Flux questions him and Saps just needs it but his words aren’t meeting their ears. He eyes off the vial in Flux’s grasp, gaze blurry and he hasn’t blinked so his eyes burn and dry. This is bad. This is really bad.
“I made it,” he states, as clear and as quick as he can. Thomas is there, because he always is apparently, and he’s staring between the two with furrowed brows, lost and confused. That doesn’t really matter though because his mind is reeling and his chest rises and falls when he remembers to breathe.
Flux clicks his tongue, looks off to the side – probably at Gray, at the way she’s stood behind Saps, at the evidence of the somewhat effective cure (or preventative, because that’s what it seems to have been) thrumming through her system – before that familiar once-warm gaze finds Saps’, cold and hardened and disbelieving.
His chest pulls and twists, Saps doesn’t like it but he isn’t surprised.
As he leaves, hands void of the faulty ‘cure’ and Grayleigh spewing reassurance that barely sinks in, he feels a weird emptiness in his chest that only grows the further he walks from Flux and he doesn’t let himself have the satisfying closure of looking back.
It’s warm in the lab. Unnaturally so.
Atleast, Saparata thinks it’s a lab. Seems like it couldn’t be anything else. He’s alone down here for the most part, there’s others here too, somewhere, he knows, but the more he learns the less he feels the urge to accompany himself with them. The people here just happen to never cease the chance to wrong and step over him.
Sometimes, when everything gets quiet like this, he can hear things. Not hallucinations, because he isn’t infected ( he knows his time is ticking, running out steadily as it is for everyone nowadays ), and not the distant growls and revolting noises these things make, but the nagging reminder of his past. His present, too, because it seems Paradise City is scarce with opportunity. A vast horizon of despair.
It’s his cousin's voice every now and again. He thinks back to it, a youth where hope was fresh and he was all belief and naive perseverance. Saparata can remember the day vividly –– more-so than he’d like to –– and still wakes up in a cold sweat recalling the lump of dirt and the shovel in his grasp.
Then, it’s the Sixty-fifth trial. Sixty four people’s blood already on his hands and the notion that maybe, just maybe, there isn’t a way to fix this has yet to cross his mind. He was more desperate than ever, tired and sick of failure, and he let it get the better of him. His morals damned as he tuned out the screams and pleas to stop.
Saps’ footsteps echo down the seemingly endless halls of this underground thing, and the medical gear itches. His head and legs and hands – okay, really everything – aches. He doesn’t like the weight of a knife in his hold. It’s unfamiliar and a responsibility he isn’t used to, never wanted to get used to because he’s just supposed to be a scientist.
When he arrived, stretched out from the curled up ride in the bus once it’d broken down and ushered off alongside the other passengers, it wasn’t as immediate as he’d like to have thought. The dread didn’t settle until he'd stood across from Ish, watching as his limbs contorted and he muttered his last apology.
He should've listened to him, then. Turned back and chased the road they came down, ran as far as he could. This was far bigger than him.
As grotesque as it was, as much as his jaw clenched and his face twisted into a grimace at the sight, it was (unfortunately so) the greatest opportunity he’d had yet. The sight awoke something in Saps – the guttural, weird sense of responsibility –– that curiosity that led him to the very moment Ish turned.
Down in the humid, isolating sectors of the lab, Saparata finds it’s himself he’s on the path of losing next.
Saps was wrong.
It’s Mike, this time.
He comes to that conclusion the moment the man – he hadn’t known much about him, only that he’d presumably died, been found, and was now on the path to death all over again – pulls him aside and asks of him something much heavier than he’s made to take on.
But, he’ll do it. He owes them – Grayleigh, as promised – that much. These people still have hope in him, as little as that may be, but hope nonetheless and he’ll be damned to let that go to waste.
(Maybe he agrees to it because of that budding responsibility that comes with the slow loss of his name and the replacement of ‘doctor’, or maybe it’s intrigue, that morbid curiosity he’s always harboured deep in his head.)
So, when they’ve descended – Rotation beating helplessly at the locked door of the menacingly large metal tube and Grayleigh pleading for them to stop, for Saps to do something – Saps can only nod at Mike, witness the settled, almost relieved look on the young man’s face, and flick the lever to lock the door in front of him.
They wait.
Nothing happens, not for a little, and the cries and wails don’t stop. It reminds Saps, distantly, of his Sixty-fifth experiment, and it covers his skin in goosebumps despite the scorchingly hot air enveloping them.
Grayleigh is stood at Mike’s door, her cries piercing his ears, Mike’s back turned helplessly in what Saps can only assume a desperate attempt to tune it out because he’s made his decision. It’s final.
“Grayleigh – Gray get back,” his voice is stern, he’s only trying to help – make sure she’s safe – but she flinches at his words and curls in on herself. Still, she abides, stumbles back in a heap of her tears and Saps lets her lean against his side.
He should feel more guilty than he already does, should’ve shut down Mike the moment he asked this of him, but it was his last, dying wish of heroism. He was willing. He is willing.
The machine blares, and it startles the operation awake. Saps flinches where he stands, nail pinching and flicking at his thumb, and watches. Tightens his jaw, it ticks as it clenches, and in a way he’s been waiting for this very moment the day this place was shown to him.
The lights in the tubes dim, the alarms continue and it’s so, very dark – and then it isn’t.
Saps etches down his apology and sifts the gun off Mike’s lifeless side. Rotation leaves, Grayleigh sobs and he can only hold her in his arms and let her endure.
It’s not long before the others come. Snowbird ascends from the lower facility, a crumpled, shot Flux in his arms. A sacrifice – they want to cure Grayleigh.
He can’t do this – can’t be a part of his mess – can’t meet the hazed over eyes of Flux as they all shout and argue and push him into the very tube Mike just died in.
It’s all too much – everything happens way too fucking fast and Saps has always been a coward.
Shots are fired, they ring in his ears so he runs, climbs and hides on the will of Grayleigh pleading for him to just go, stay safe. He isn’t sure who’s been hit, but he can make out Snow go limp and can only pull out his gun and freeze because a woman – Zora, he thinks – is closing in on him and he figures it’s his time.
But it isn’t, because no, he won’t be freed of this everlasting torture, so with a lasting, lingering hold of Flux’s gaze, he slips into the elevator and leaves.
This is it. He’s found it – the key to the cure is in his hands and all he needs to do is run a few tests. It’s almost too good to be true.
The fabric of the medical gear is still itchy, uncomfortable against his skin but necessary, and Magic is dragging behind him in all her immune glory.
It’s still warm, and he’s starting to notice his name is falling flat on people's minds – isn’t sure where they got ‘doctor’ from, because he isn’t a doctor – but he’ll allow it. It brings him purpose. If he’ll need to be a ‘doctor’ for this to work, for them to trust him, he will be.
Magic is only getting worse. Or maybe she isn’t, maybe it’s been like this for years. She hasn’t told him, and he hasn’t really asked. But, she’s immune, and he will make this cure. They’re in a room, one that looks lab-like and it has all the necessary equipment for his experimenting, his research. It’s true, raw luck, and it’s exactly what he needs, and he has time.
There’s a cage in here, a sign asking ‘David, help me’, it’s gruesome but it’s nothing they haven’t seen before. Magic is slumped against the wall, mumbling something to herself but it’s all things he’s seen before. She could be hallucinating, again, as she has been, it’s all predictable and following the simple rulebook of infection.
It’s when he’s peering in, questioning its contents he feels it.
A stumble, and a sharp swipe to his arm.
It’s sudden, and he hisses, clutches at the ripped part of his coat – his skin – blood staining white fabric.
“Oh - i'm sorry –” Magic is quick to sputter out, small and rushed as she curls right back into herself again.
“Did you just hit me?” It’s weird, and he can only question the obvious. Saps isn’t sure how it happened, and it stings. Uncomfortably so, actually, worse than anything he’s ever felt before.
“I didn’t mean to, I was trying to –” she trails off, nods towards the cage.
Okay. Yeah. Makes sense, he thinks. She’s a little disorientated, has been infected for quite some time, and nausea and headaches have always been an evident factor of the illness. It’s not a shock she might’ve lost her footing. So, he breathes out a hopefully soothing laugh. He’ll brush it off, bandage it later, or something.
“I know, it’s okay –” he pauses, Magic’s backing off, a pained noise leaving her lips as her head hangs low. Something weird flickers in her face, and it’s – for some reason – a little concerning.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, sorry. Just a little nauseous.”
“Oh. Well, do I have any water –”
Hm.
This is weird. Why does he feel weird? The sting in his arm is persistent and it’s travelling up and up and his head fucking hurts and –
“Magic.”
She isn’t looking at him. She doesn’t even look like she's here and he’s infected. She’s infected him. His luck, as minimal as it was, has completely ran out. Wrung dry and this is it. He won’t have long, he’ll eventually succumb to this if he doesn’t find a cure but he’ll try. He’ll keep trying and the infection will die with or without him, one way or another.
“Magic, did you just infect me?”
He will forget his name. Forget his studies. He will die and on his grave they will deem him doctor.