Reality Check

There was a ringing in his ears and a pounding in his head. The world was tipsy and spinning, despite the fact that he was seemingly laying down. Adam groaned as reality made a fight to comeback.

‘Must have been some party last night…’ he thought as he struggled to sit up. His head spun for a moment and he had to sit still with his eyes closed for the dizziness to pass. Once he was able o look around his room a startling realization hit him, ‘This isn’t my room…this isn’t Sanctuary….’

The room he was in was nothing more then a jail cell. It had a cot, which he was sitting on, a toilet, and a sink off in the corner. The door looked to be solid metal with only a mail slot to see through. There was no window and the only source of light came from a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling.

“Where the hell am I?” Adam said up loud as he attempted to stand. His attempted failed, and he crashed back down to the cot. “God damn it!” the scientist bellowed as he rubbed his aching head. It was throbbing now, and with each new pulse of pain another memory flashed through his mind as the pervious day’s events replayed in his head.

“Oh Jess…how the hell am I going to get you out of this?”

Shalimar was pissed. Hell, she was beyond pissed. She sat there in front of a computer screen staring at images upon images with her best friends in the bedroom. One crying her eyes out and the other trying his best to sell her a lie.

“It’s going to be ok Em. It’s going to be ok. We’re going to find them. It’s going to be ok,” Brennan had said.

“The hell it is!” Emma had yelled, anger and frustration clear as day in her voice.

In times like these, Shal did not envy Emma. She was so close to all of them. So connected to their feelings and their minds. It was the curse of her gift. She couldn’t help it and no matter how many wall she built around them or how hard they tried to shield her from themselves, she would always feel it. Still, they tried to. They loved her so that they tried to keep her safe from themselves. They tried to keep their dark away.

The fact that Jesse wasn’t shielding, that he wasn’t attempting to, spoke volumes. Even higher volumes then his screams. It yelled that they were hurting him. They were scaring him. They were breaking him. And all Shalimar could do was sit their and watch ‘home movies,’ while a computer scanned faces for anything. Any clue.

They had already found the abduction footage. Already seen it. They knew that Adam and Jesse had been safe up to that morning. That they had been on their way home. Their final phone call home had given them that. So they had narrowed their footage search down to that morning. And they had found it, the abduction.

They knew that Jesse and Adam had fought, had tried. They had nearly succeeded in their escape attempt. But Shal saw their one mistake, they hadn’t been paying attention to everyone. And that was what caught them. The boss man had moved behind Adam during the fight and held a gun to his head. Jesse was forced to his knees and had a governor put into his neck. And Shalimar had hissed sharply when she saw it used on him; animalistic rage surging through her blood.

Unfortunately, while Adam and Jesse’s fighting styles had been clear as day, the abductor’s faces had been blurry. The security cameras were old and dirty. Shal had, had to run the footage through six different filters to clean it up. She had, had to play witness to the past six different times while her anger grew. She didn’t know much right then and there, but she did know that when she got her hands on the bastards who did this she couldn’t be held responsible for what happened to them.

Now, on the seventh time, she managed to clean the footage up enough to run it through the recognition scan. So for the seventh time she sat and watched the horror show play through, and her blood boiled, and the technology did it’s work, and Jesse slipped farther out of her reach. Until a miracle happened, and the scan produced a name to go with a face.

“Well hello there Ronald Miller, 654 Fair More Street, how would you like to meet me face to face?” Shal asked the screen, a completely feral smile on her face.

Jesse had been through many things in his short life. Had survived more odds and more hells then anyone could ever have imagined. There was never a tight situation that he couldn’t phase out of. Never a blow that was hard enough to dent his hard shell. He was the undefeated victor in his life’s trials. He had yet to meet his match and that had left him feeling pretty invincible. Until now.

Now reality had come to check in and was kicking his ass.

To say he was in pain was to call an elephant ‘big.’ His head was exploding, small eruption of nerve cells imploding inside him. A firry pit of hell consuming his right side and lung. The frantic fight for air and the almost other worldly feeling that kept him in an alternate state. The thought had occurred that they didn’t need him fully alive to complete their tests.

Because of his molecular structure, his powers were hardwired into his brain and almost as natural as breathing. As long as his core brain functions were working, he would phase and mass just like they wanted him to without even being aware of it. He shoved that though away as far and deep as he could. He didn’t want to think about the brain damage that was being inflected upon him at the moment. Anymore then he wanted to feel the pain. The truth was, however, there was no avoiding it.

Even when his tormentors spoke he was unable to avoid the pain. He could barely make sense of them and didn’t even know if they were talking to him or not; not with his eyes firmly shut.

“Pain was more intense then expected….will have to wait for heart rate to drop some….lazer is functioning….governor is working….full control….heart rate stabilizing….another hour….”

There were different voices, but they all blended together. Jesse tried to focus, tried to push his mind past his pain. He needed to know what was happening, he needed to know what they were planning, and he needed to know where Adam was. But his fear and the pain combined made it impossible for his mind to overcome anything. It was no good.

He lay on a cold operating table with tubes shoved down his throat and in his chest, stripped down to scrub pants, and strapped down in restraints. His entire world had been reduced to forcing himself to take that next painful breath and trying to keep his body from suffocating. That was it. He didn’t even have the ability to pray.

It was a fuck of a reality check.