((OOC: Okay, experimenting with a few preliminary ideas for SWORD and what they'll want to do with some of our heroes.))
...
“Who’s there? Lily? Rome? Lenna?”
Rome groaned. Consciousness prodded him with a stick to see if he was dead.
“Answer me.” It was Caleb’s voice. Rome knew that growl anywhere.
“Thank God,” he gasped.
Rome opened blurry eyes to darkness. He could barely make out the bars of the cage he was in. He was cold. And his head hurt.
“Rome?” Chains shifting, limbs dragging. “Rome, you okay? What just happened? I don’t…remember.” Caleb sounded uncharacteristically lost and confused.
Rome was strangely calm. “It’s okay, you didn’t hurt me,” he coughed, lying.
“I didn’t…what?” Now Caleb sounded pissed.
“Where are the others? The girls okay?” Rome didn’t move from where he lay belly-up on the freezing concrete floor.
“There’s a couple cages. I think they’re here.” The sound of bars shaking. “Ow! Sh*t, the bars are silver.”
“Mine are electrocuted. Lucky bastard.”
“Rome. What. Happened?”
Rome paused. The insides of his arms burned where the needles went in and came out, went in and came out. He was sure he looked like a heroin addict by now, and that there were bruises all along his arms, if he could only lift his head to look without the world falling apart.
“Uh. You don’t remember?”
“If they changed me, Rome, no, I don’t remember,” Caleb ground out, losing his patience.
“You were definitely wolfed out. Dunno if they’re dosing you with the same stuff as me.” He paused, drew in a fortifying breath, which hurt his chest, sticky with blood. “Cage fight.”
“What?”
“I’m not kidding,” Rome sounded hurt. “They had a muzzle on you—” which was kind of funny, although Rome couldn’t dredge up the energy to laugh, “so you didn’t turn me. I was supposed to try to protect myself…with my brain. I, ah. Think it worked. Sort of.”
“Did you blast me or something? My head really freaking hurts.”
“Uh. Yeah. I think so. May have been the tranq darts, too, though. Sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too, kid. I didn’t hurt you?”
“Not much,” Rome answered wearily, the truth, sort of. Rome’s limbs were twitching, seizing. Or was he just shivering? “Oh, God…” he whined, near to tears.
“Rome. Rome! Stay with me, kid.”
His brain was jiggling in its juices, as swollen as it was, and he couldn’t stop it. Whatever they were dosing him with made his powers stronger, but he didn’t like the side-effects. Technically, he didn’t like the intended effects, either, not that the agents cared.
He didn’t have a name to them: he was just a number. He was an “it.” They all were. Elenna wasn’t a girl, she was an “it.” Number 92. Lily was an “it,” too, Number 93. Caleb was lucky they didn’t call him “Fido.” He was Number 91.
Rome was Number 94. And they liked playing with him the most.
That’s what he felt like. A complete tool. Something they used. Like a condom. Except a reusable one. That was how gross it was. They told him what to do and—his body just did it. He had no control over it. Maybe some control, but not much. It was all way beyond him. He was just the stupid conduit. Now Lily: she could turn it off and on again. They had roughed her up a bit more in the beginning, but when they realized how uncooperative she was and how…easy he was, they used him more and more. They rarely needed precision. They wanted power. And he had that, whether he wanted it or not.
He felt like that guy in the X2 movie, Stryker’s kid, what was his name, Jason? The one in the wheelchair, the one strong enough to mind-rape Professor Xavier, but all lobotomized and emaciated. That one. It made him feel disgusting. Like a condom that got used more than once. It was only a matter of time before the latex broke.
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