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Piper had no recollection as to how she got there. There being the dark, musty cell-like room with a thick metal collar tight around her throat, which she knew from experience, would release an electric shock strong enough to make her pass out if she acted out. She wasn’t alone though, instead she was accompanied by two other girls, both wearing similar collars. It felt like days ago when she had finally raised her voice to ask if the others knew where they were, receiving two shakes of their heads and the familiar silence resumed. It could’ve been hours ago when she asked them, she realized, seeing as she had no sense of time in a dimly lit room with no window and barely any contact with people besides the other two in the cell.
The first time that a handler came in to grab the girl to Piper’s left she was too stricken with fear to move, left staring with wide, frightened eyes as the blonde kicked and screamed before the collar shocked her with enough voltage to knock her out. After she was dragged out by her arms, her head down against her chest and eyes shut, Piper looked over at the girl to her right, admiring the emotionless look on her face as she calmly sat against the wall. It wasn’t hard to miss the way her hands clenched together though, just as Piper’s did. The silence resumed.
The next time that someone else came into the room, they took the girl to Piper’s right. She didn’t resist, just allowed them to drag her tall body up and out the door, her long black hair falling in a straight line along her back. When the door slammed shut, Piper watched as the blonde girl pulled her knees tighter to her chest and tucked her face into them. She wanted to ask what happened to her, but it didn’t seem like the right time. Silence once again.
On the same day, the guards returned the dark-haired girl whose face had paled considerably, and they quickly approached Piper. She tried to back away from them, but the cell was small and there was no more distance to put between them. She had thought that she would have more time to prepare herself before it was her turn to be taken, more time to cope and calm her mind. But, as the guards grabbed her harshly with their gloved hands, forcing her to her shaky feet and forcefully pushing her towards the door, she looked one last time at the girls in their cell. The blonde was visibly shaking, her face remaining between her legs as her nails dug deep grooves into her skin. When Piper’s gaze made it to her dark-haired cellmate, her empty eyes met Piper’s and she knew that she would return to the cell with that similar blank look frozen on her face.
The guards continued pushing her to walk faster down the hall, a large hand on the back of her head to keep her eyes forward. She tried to glimpse all that she could though, noticing similar cell doors all along the hallway and still no windows anywhere to be seen. There wasn’t much difference here than what she could see in her cell to her disappointment. Her breathing began to quicken as they soon approached a door that was unlike the rest. It was a simple glass door with a handle, allowing Piper to see multiple types of machinery within the room.
They stopped in front of the door, one guard keeping a firm grip on Piper and the other knocking two times before opening the door. Piper was given a harsh shove, causing her to fall to her hands and knees on the concrete. She heard the door shut behind her and took a daring glance back through the glass to see the guards walking away. This was her chance.
A raspy voice sounded out through the room, “I wouldn’t do that.”
Piper jerked her head forward, finally taking in the sight of an older man standing in a white lab coat besides what looked to be a chair used for different medical examinations. At his feet, blood was pooled, steadily moving in rivulets towards a drain in the center of the room. Piper didn’t move, just watched as the men took a careful step out of the blood and began to walk over to her.
With a blank face, she allowed the man to grab her arm and direct her towards the chair, feeling her skin twist and pull as harsh leather straps were placed around her forearms and legs. Her eyes strained against the blinding, white overhead light as the doctor positioned it more closely to her face. With half-closed eyes, she regarded him, keeping her face neutral.
She had no recollection of this man, as far as she knew. The deeper she tried to search within her mind as for what event had led her to become a prisoner of this place, the more lost she became. Everything was gone. She didn’t remember her family, her hometown, or her friends. Nothing. She was a blank slate.
Finally gathering what little courage she had, she asked weakly, “Why don’t I remember anything before this?”
The doctor continued grabbing his tools and placing them on a small tray beside Piper’s right arm as he responded with “Everyone gets wiped before they are placed within their holding chamber. Your cellmates are in the same situation.”
She forced herself to swallow, nails pressing into the plastic of the decaying chair. “What about my family?” she asked, staring incredulously at him. “My friends and my home? My life?”
He simply chuckled, sitting down on a stool and holding a syringe filled with red liquid in his hand. “You won’t need any of that after we’re done with you.”
And the needle of the syringe went into her arm and Piper felt her vision dissolve into nothing as pain consumed her being.
____________
This bizarre syringe treatment continued on until she was left with an everlasting bruise mark on the tender skin of her forearm. She never figured out what it was, only allowed the poison to travel through her veins in agony before she awoke back in her cell. Her two cellmates didn’t even give her as much of a glance whenever she woke up screaming.
They too were still taken for their respective treatments, only they lacked the bruise that Piper had so she assumed that they were all being experimented on differently. Sometimes the blonde girl would return with a new scar on her perfect skin, a permanent mark of what these people had done to her. The dark haired girl had begun to talk to herself, whispering things like “Get out of my head” and “Leave me alone” into the room whenever Piper tried to sleep.
Just now, the blonde girl had just been returned from her treatment, a newly raised line displayed sickenly on her cheek. Her blue eyes were downcast as she shuffled over to her designated spot to the right of Piper. She sat and pulled her knees up to her chest, folding her arms over them and forming her signature position. The dark haired girl simply stared at the wall above her cellmate’s head, her lips moving impossibly fast as she muttered inaudible things to herself.
Piper felt her eyebrows furrow in anger at the obedience of her cellmates. Whenever she was taken for her treatment, she fought back, kicking, biting, and screaming at the guards until one of them hit her hard enough to knock her out or the collar around her neck shocked her into submission. The girls in front of her went easily, allowing the men to grab them by the arm and direct them out of the cell without a sound leaving their mouths. How could they just submit to their captors so easily? Didn’t they want to escape and go home?
Too much time had passed without any answers, and she couldn’t keep her mouth shut any longer. “Why are you just letting them take you?” she asked to the silent, dark room.
The girl to her right inhaled sharply and wetly, halting her crying and raising her head to stare at Piper with tear-soaked lashes. The other girl barely looked at Piper out of the corner of her eye.
She stared the blonde girl down. “Why don’t you scream or kick or do anything to stop them from taking you? Do you want to go with them now? Do you like what they’re doing to you? To all of us?” The questions just rolled seamlessly out of Piper’s lips. It was as if she couldn’t stop herself.
The blonde girl’s jaw clenched before she shakily stood up. “You seriously think I want them to keep hurting me? Are you fucking stupid? Literally what the fuck is wrong with you, you’ve got to be messed up in the head to be saying shit like that,” she yelled, taking a half step towards Piper.
Piper pulled herself to her feet too. “Then fight back! Quit just obeying them because you’re scared of them. We can get out of here together and go home,” she shouted back at the girl, splaying her arms out to her sides to get her point across and ignoring the painful twinge from her arm.
“Go home? To where?”
The deeper voice came from Piper’s left, from the girl who had never spoken before, who hardly showed any emotion. She was still sitting, but her dark eyes were looking into Piper’s.
She spoke again, “They wiped our minds. Even if we escaped, where would we go? We have no money and no idea where we are.”
“We can figure it out!” Piper shouted. “I’m not just gonna willingly submit myself to these people!”
The blonde girl was suddenly in front of her face saying, “Oh, and you think I’m just so happy to be letting these people take me and experiment on me? Hell no! But I’d rather less struggle if it means less pain. Don’t know why that’s so hard to get through your pretty little head.”
Before Piper could open her mouth with another retort, the dark-haired girl murmured, “Do you know what they’ve been doing to us? Have you the slightest clue as to what these people do?”
Piper had no idea what the liquid injected into her arm was, she guessed that it was some type of poison or serum but so far the only pain she had felt besides the roughness of the guards was the blinding rush of pain from the injected liquid and the bruise from her injection site. “No,” she answered before staring incredulously at her cellmate. “Are you trying to tell me that you do?”
The blonde girl was silent, it was obvious that she had no clue as well.
“This is a mutant creation facility where random people are picked off the streets, out of their homes, anywhere, and forcibly given a serum that will trigger any possible mutant genes inside you. If their experiments don’t yield results, you will be discarded.”
Piper’s mind went wild. A mutant creation facility. Did she mean the people with extraordinary abilities and powers that caused destruction all over cities and the country? The people who could transform into animals, manipulate objects with their minds, or pick up a building one-hundred times their size? There was no way, why would this facility pick her? She was just some ordinary human, a regular girl with no potential to become something like that.
“What do you mean by ‘results’?” the blonde girl questioned, fingers rubbing together in anticipation.
Their other cellmate grinned wickedly. “Those scars on your skin would be your results, Wren. Everytime they hurt you, you gain strength and heal immediately but your injuries leave behind a permanent mark, a scar. Soon, I suspect that your entire being will be consumed with destroyed skin.”
Wren’s tears fell down her face, running past that newly created mass on her cheek and falling onto the concrete beneath them. Her face crumpled until she was openly sobbing, clutching at her ruined skin in disbelief, and fell to the floor.
Piper swallowed nervously. “What about your results?” she asked the still grinning dark-haired girl. Her face was terrifying, and Piper swore that her teeth had sharpened into points.
“Oh, me?” The girl turned towards her, pointing a clawed finger to her chest. “I’ve been given a parasite.” After she said that sentence, she seemed to wrestle with her mind, her eyebrows furrowing in pain as she argued with whatever entity inhabited her body. A quiet but bone-chilling voice filled the air, her cellmate’s mouth moving to utter, “Never say that again, Ellie.”
Piper forced herself to ignore her cellmates’ sobbing and insanity for a second and looked down at herself, noting that nothing outwardly had changed on her body. And her mind felt as intact as it could be in a situation such as this.
“Wondering what your experiments have been doing to you?” Ellie had ceased her strange way of speaking to grin again at Piper who nodded slowly, bracing herself for an answer she might not want to hear.
“We have no idea,” was Ellie’s response.
“We?” Piper asked. “What do you mean ‘we’?”
“I mean Venom and I. We don’t know what is intended for you,” Ellie clarified and her smile became the stuff of nightmares. “But you better hope you find out fast.”
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It felt like a month had passed, and Piper still felt fully human. Her treatments had continued on like normal, only now she had noticed the increasing frustration evident on the scientist’s face after she returned as herself. Multiple times, she had been tempted to ask what kind of mutant they wanted her to be, some dark part of her wishing for an ability unique to herself. Of course, she knew that even if she became a mutant, these people would still regard her as their property. At least until she killed them herself.
Wren and Ellie’s appearances had changed significantly. Her blonde cellmate’s skin was almost completely riddled with scar tissue, and her muscle definition had increased greatly, her biceps so large she could pop Piper’s head off her neck with one squeeze. As Piper looked at Wren, it was hard to imagine the skinny, fair-skinned girl who had first appeared in the cell.
At times, Ellie seemed as she used to be, sitting with her head down and staring at the walls, saying nothing. Then, startling Piper from her fitful sleep, a raspy, unsettling voice filled the empty space, saying nonsensical things, “Ellie, do it. Get us out. Help us. We need to escape from here. We’ll die if we stay here. They’ll die if we stay here. We’re all going to die. We’re all going to die. You are going to die.”
After the first time Piper heard that voice utter those words, she didn’t sleep at all, choosing instead to sit and stare at Ellie, watching her lips for any sign of movement that let loose that unnatural, heart-crushing voice. And when it did choose to speak, Piper could do nothing to stop it, forced to listen to its mutterings about their incoming deaths.
There were also the instances when Ellie would get aggravated with Wren or Piper and her fingers would lengthen into black claws, her eyes turning completely white and sharpening to points near her temples, and her blunt teeth tripling inside her mouth now as fangs. The voice came out much more when she looked like that and usually it made Wren and Piper cower together in a corner of the room until Ellie had calmed down.
Watching the two girls’ bodies and minds change without their consent tore up Piper’s soul, coerced to watch as Wren’s blue eyes darkened in desperation whenever she awoke and saw the newfound lesion on her skin or see Ellie slowly lose herself to whatever was possessing her. She couldn’t relate to their pain, and she didn’t truly know what was going to happen to them or when the mutations would even stop altering their bodies. Instead, she tried to speak to them as a friend, offering herself up to them if they needed to cry or just wanted someone to lean on. More often than not, Wren took up her offer, choosing to sleep and take up space beside Piper instead of the spot alongside the right wall of their cell. When she did, Piper held her and slowly brushed her fingers against her aching, throbbing skin after a bad experiment, attempting to soothe that neverending pain.
She constantly felt Ellie’s eyes on them whenever they were close, and she had asked Ellie multiple times if she wanted to join them, only to receive a quick shake of her head and the tightening of her arms around her legs as she avoided Piper’s gentle gaze. When she thought that Piper had finally looked away, her dark eyes would return to their fixed state on the girls as they slept, not catching any sleep herself on those nights that she decided to watch over them.
It was the fifth time that Wren had decided to sleep against Piper’s side when the door was thrown open, startling everyone awake and to their feet, drowsiness quickly wiped away by their fingers. Two guards filled the room, approaching Wren and Piper. Wren tightened her grip on Piper’s arm, squeezing the skin painfully, and Piper remembered that today was Wren’s turn to be taken. Yesterday Piper had been led out, evident by the bruise triple the size of a quarter on her forearm, which Wren was now threatening to make worse.
Piper turned to face Wren who looked at her with teary eyes and a hopeless expression. She tried her best to smile at the crying girl and murmured, “It’ll be over before you know it and then you can come back and let me braid your hair. It’ll be fine, I promise.”
Wren opened her mouth to respond when the guard laid a hand down on Piper’s shoulder roughly, causing her to raise an eyebrow at him. Refusing to leave Wren’s side, she asked, “What are you doing? I was taken yesterday.”
“It’s been decided that you will be given the dosage everyday until you show signs of a mutation. Let’s go,” the guard ordered, forcing her to stumble a few steps.
“What? That’s insane, my arm will literally fall off if you inject me everyday! Let go and let me talk to the doctor,” she shouted, pulling against his unrelenting grip as her feet skidded along the floor to try and stop his movement.
“She’ll die! Please, I’m begging you. Don’t take her,” Wren pleaded, coming in front of her guard to beg him, tears now flowing freely down her face.
“If she doesn’t begin to mutate within the next three days, she’ll die anyway,” he said, glaring down at her before pushing her harshly against the concrete wall.
“No!” Wren screamed, pulling back her fist to punch the guard, and she probably could have crushed his skull in if her collar hadn’t shocked her with enough volts to make her drop to the floor, her body twitching with aftershocks. Piper watched with disbelieving eyes as the guard simply shoved Wren’s arm out of his way with his boot before forcing Piper further towards the door, ignoring her screams and weak hits against his body as she struggled.
Right before she felt the familiar shocks from the collar around her neck coming to subdue her, she dared a glance towards Ellie, her eyes widening slightly at the rage evident in her expression. But her white eyes were settled on the guard hauling Piper away, her claws clenching into the skin of her palms, almost as if imagining that her hands were the guard’s heart instead. As Piper’s eyelids began to slip shut, Ellie’s eyes returned to normal as she met Piper’s dazed gaze, and the softening of her cellmate’s face led her into the void.
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Awakening with a scream, Piper pulled against her restraints, wanting to return back to her cell for the first time during her time there. She wanted to lie against Wren and listen to her inappropriate jokes, she wanted to pretend not to notice Ellie watching them as they slept. She wanted to run her fingers through the other girls’ hair and tell them that they were more than their mutation. She wanted to run away from here with them.
“Awake now, are you?”
With a shuddering chest, Piper met the eyes of the scientist, feeling her body beginning to tremble in fear. She could die today.
The man sat down on his stool and clasped his hands together as if he were simply about to tell Piper that she had allergies or the flu, something of less importance than attempting to trigger a mutation within her blood. He began to speak, “I assume you have some sort of an idea as to why you’re back with me so soon?”
Piper held her tongue, not wanting to confirm her own fears.
He sighed and clicked his tongue. “Well, I hate to say it, but your body isn’t responding to the serum, even after two months. It took your cellmates around four weeks to show symptoms, and even that could be considered a late reaction.” He paused to insert the familiar red liquid into a syringe two times its usual size. “This does sadden me, I assure you. This strand of mutation would most certainly produce interesting and useful results, and I had hoped that you would have been the one to receive it.”
She tried to pull away from him as he placed the needle against her bruise, whispering, “Please don’t. I’ll die if you give me that much.”
The scientist chuckled and said, “Maybe. We’ll just have to wait and see,” before pushing the needle into her vein.
Immediately, Piper knew that this injection was different. Instead of the usual blinding pain that knocked her out after a few seconds, this constant agony never let her mind rest, gut-filled screams leaving her body unwillingly as she ripped the decaying chair to pieces with her nails. Every inch of her was on fire, lava traveling through every morsel of her insides and eating away at her. Thoughts were impossible besides please make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop. Even if her eyes were open, she saw nothing, redness filling her vision as the pain continued on, feeling as if it would never stop, as if she would die in the next second if she had to keep feeling this. Her gums began to tingle with shocks of pain every millisecond alongside with the tips of her fingers and toes, unleashing another round of agonized wails. Distantly, behind her own voice, she could hear the man begin to laugh, shouting, “Yes! Yes! Yes, finally!”
Eventually, the spasms moved to her lower back in four separate areas, her back arching inhumanly away from the chair as if to keep it from touching the afflicted area. This, this was hell, she decided, only able to pause her screams to engulf large lungfuls of air before the pain erupted again and her mouth fell open once again. Tears streamed down her face as she pleaded for someone to end her misery, the anguish reaching a point where her voice stopped working and she was screaming silently, tiny tendrils of her voice escaping at times. She had ripped the remaining leather of the chair completely off its armrests and her thrashing in the chair had left her with welts in the shape of the restraints against her shaking limbs. She was going to die, and what a horrible way to go.
After Piper felt her eyes close on the verge of blacking out, her suffering stopped, every ounce of pain leaving her body as if it was never there. She was left sobbing and barely able to breathe as her vision cleared enough to see the scientist in front of her. He grabbed a square of what looked like concrete and held it tight against Piper’s trembling palm before letting go. With a heavy frown, he watched as the concrete clattered to the ground and Piper’s fingers fell limply back to rest on the chair. The man visibly began to look angry, now approaching Piper and forcing her mouth open wide. At this point, exhaustion filled her being so she had no strength to struggle or turn her head away, her eyes barely open enough to watch as he poked her upper canines with his index finger. He pulled back with a frustrated shout, seeming to lose his wit as he tore the leather restraints off of the chair before grabbing Piper by her shirt and throwing her onto the floor. She let loose a soft grunt, feeling blood pooling around her head from the impact of the floor, and opened one eye as the man ripped the back of her shirt open.
Everything within her told her to shout and push him away but she found herself incapable of moving any muscle within her body as her thoughts began to slow. She hardly felt his harsh touches against her lower back before he stood up and kicked his rolling table across the room. Without another glance at Piper, he stormed out, the glass door slamming so hard that a large crack appeared in the upper right corner.
Piper was eerily aware of how loud her heartbeat was in her ears and how slow it boomed, but there was no chance of her moving or calling for help. Her fluttering lashes finally slipped shut permanently after the twelfth boom.
____________
Something wet was dripping onto her. Tiny droplets falling onto the skin of her forehead. With a grimace, she shakily raised her hand to wipe the liquid away.
“Oh thank fucking god,” a voice said next to her and she felt herself be crushed against a large body.
She made a confused noise, peering out of one eye to see that she was back in her cell. And alive.
“I thought you were dead. I literally thought they gave you back to us dead, baby girl. You weren’t moving and your head was bleeding so much, you scared the shit out of me,” the familiar, feminine voice continued on, their fingers running through Piper’s hair soothingly.
When she finally had enough strength to open her eyelids fully, it was to stare into the wide eyes of Wren above her, feeling Ellie’s unmoving gaze on her from a few feet away. She croaked out, “Water?” before being pulled up against Wren’s hard-toned chest and seeing a cup of water against her lips. She greedily tilted her head back and let the cool liquid rush down her throat, soothing the roughness there. When she was done, she pulled her face away and Wren set the water down on the ground.
“What happened?” Piper managed to ask, avoiding the other two’s eyes.
Surprisingly, it was Ellie that spoke up, “If you’re asking what happened to you, we don’t know. They took you away for one hour before they brought you back here, unconscious and bleeding from the back of your head.”
“We could hear you screaming from here,” Wren said quietly, pulling Piper’s body tighter against her. “Do I sound like that when they take me away?”
Ellie shook her head. “No.”
Wren’s eyebrows furrowed. “What did they do to you, Piper?”
She didn’t say anything for a minute, scared that phantom pains would run up her body if she talked about what had happened in that room. Ellie watched her face carefully before the terrifying voice said somehow comfortingly, “We are here for you.”
With a deep breath and a nod, Piper started to explain, “They took me to the usual room and the scientist strapped me down like normal. But he pulled out a syringe that was huge, bigger than before, and filled with more of the serum than I’d ever seen. He injected me with it and the pain was…consuming me. It was the worst thing I’ve ever felt, and it never stopped.” She paused before saying her next words, “I honestly wished that I could die. I wanted to if it meant that the pain went away.”
Wren gave her a sad, but empathetic look, most likely having those same thoughts when she was taken for her experiments. She nudged Piper to continue when her words trailed off.
“Finally, it stopped and I could barely feel anything. I don’t know why but the scientist placed a piece of concrete against my hand and got upset when it just fell back to the floor. Then he forced my mouth open and felt around my teeth, but he was visibly becoming more distressed with whatever he was noticing. Before I passed out, he threw me on the floor and ripped my shirt open before feeling the lower skin of my back. He got really mad though, kicked a table and broke the door when he left.” She looked back up to the girls. “Then I woke up here.”
Wren made a confused noise. “Why did he do all those things at the end? Normally, he just brings you back after he injects you, right?”
Piper nodded, pressing her thumb to all of her other fingertips one at a time.
“I think he was looking for the results of the mutation,” Ellie said, eyes on Piper’s moving fingers. “Whatever they are hoping you turn into must involve a change to your fingertips, teeth, and back.”
Wren whistled. “That’s so weird, no offense, but those are really weird parts of your body for a mutation to spawn.”
Ellie glared at her. “They gave me an alien parasite that cohabitates my mind and can take over my body any time it wishes to, I don’t think Piper’s fancy fingers are the weirdest thing to happen to us.”
Piper let loose a laugh, startling the other girls who began to smile.
Wren giggled. “Yeah, you’re right. Also, I thought Venom didn’t like to be called a parasite?” she asked.
“It’ll get over it,” Ellie responded, a corner of her mouth turning up.
Piper felt her mood lighten just by listening to them talk. She liked being with them, even if they were stuck in this tiny cell and going through hell just to please a deranged scientist. There was some sort of bond forming between them that wouldn’t be easily broken. Not a trauma bond, but something made out of respect and comfort, something that promised that they were there for each other, ready with open arms to pour out their love onto another. And that’s just what Piper wanted to do.
Without a second thought, Piper wrapped one arm around Wren’s neck and another around Ellie’s, pulling them close to her as she embraced them, feeling their shocked gasps against her ribs. Ellie moved as if to flinch away but the soft feeling of Wren’s hand on her head made her stay, eyes closing in content as she allowed Piper to hold her. Wren nuzzled deeply into Piper’s neck, her ruined skin running against the smooth surface but Piper didn’t find it repulsive. If anything, she leaned into Wren’s touch, listening to her soft breathing as she felt herself begin to fall asleep.
Before she fully went under, Wren asked almost so quietly that it went unheard, “Why was he so mad after the pain went away?”
Piper stiffened, remembering the scientist’s anger at seeing her body unchanged. “I guess whatever he thought would happen, didn’t actually happen,” she answered shakily, burrowing her head further into the bodies in front of her.
“That’s bad,” Wren whispered. “What if he does it again? What if you don’t survive the next time? Why didn’t your body mutate?”
Ellie shushed her, feeling Piper’s body beginning to shake. “Hush. We don’t know anything for certain so let’s not worry about anything just yet. We just have to hope that Piper’s body is going to accept the serum soon before he does it again.”
It’s funny, Piper thought, that now all of them were hoping for a mutation, rather than fearing it or not wishing for it as they were before. She guessed when death was the alternative, there wasn’t much else to hope for.
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Over the next day, Ellie and Wren were both taken out of the cell two times each. One time, they were both taken at the same time, leaving Piper utterly alone and anxiously awaiting for their return. When the guards brought them back, they both ran to Piper and held her gently, whispering soothing words as if she was the one being experimented on. Despite Wren’s new wound to her shoulder, she pulled Piper towards her and let her rest her chin there as she made up entertaining stories to fill the silence. The stories weren’t enough to lessen Piper’s fear though, she knew she was going to be taken soon, maybe in the next hour or so.
Imagining that indescribable pain again made her cave in on herself, furious at her own body for refusing to mutate. If it would just accept the serum, then the agony would stop and maybe they would all be sent out of this room. Wren and Ellie’s mutation was almost fully developed while Piper’s hadn’t even made a single appearance.
“Maybe I’m not meant to be one of you,” she said that night while they were laying on the floor, bodies pressed as close as they could to one another.
Wren stirred from her sleep, asking sleepily, “What do you mean, honey?”
“I mean both of your mutations appeared so fast and I haven’t felt anything close to mutating. So maybe I wasn’t the right choice for these experiments,” Piper explained, staring listlessly at the gray ceiling above her.
Ellie’s silky voice filled the room, “Maybe they’re the ones that are wrong. Maybe the serum isn’t strong enough, even scientists make mistakes sometimes.” She turned her head so she was laying more against Piper’s shoulder. “Don’t think things like that.”
Because if she was right, if her mutation never appeared, she was going to die. In two day's time.
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Two days passed quickly and their minds were filled with nerves when no one appeared at their door. Food was passed through a slot at random times during the day and no words were spoken during the exchange. As they ate in panicked silence, Piper knew that whatever they did to her next would most likely be the end of her. If her body hadn’t responded before now, why would it suddenly decide to accept the mutation, even if it was a larger dose? It wasn’t feasible, not in the slightest, so Piper decided to devote all of her thoughts to the two girls beside her.
Throughout the night before the fourth day, Wren peppered kisses all over Piper’s face and Ellie ran her hands reassuringly across her stomach, trailing her nails across the skin. Piper gratefully returned the kisses, feeling tears fall down her cheeks as she ran her own nails over Ellie’s arms before turning her head to press her lips against Ellie’s softly. Wren intertwined her fingers with Ellie’s across Piper’s hips, connecting the three of them as one. In that moment, nothing could separate them.
Piper hated to see what her death would do to them, wondering if they would survive without her familiar, constant presence. Wren would cry, probably for days, and maybe punch a wall until her bones were visible in her hand. Ellie would return to her silent state, staring blankly at that wall as Venom tried unsuccessfully to get her to rip out the throats of the guards and that damn scientist. They would wonder if they could kill each other, dying at the same time as blood filled the floor of their cell, spilling out through the cracks of the walls and into the hallway.
Or maybe they would move on. They had only met two months ago, anyway. It was easy to forget about someone if you only knew them for a short time. Maybe they would go on to terrorize the city with their abilities without a single thought about Piper, alive or dead.
She fell asleep thinking these things, feeling every inch of where her skin mets theirs’. Every single part of them that was connected, she relished and would have pushed pure comfort onto them if she had the ability. This was all she could offer them, alongside her love.
Her sleep was interrupted by a large hand over her mouth and another around her throat, squeezing so tightly that she thought it might collapse. She watched with wild eyes as two guards grabbed Wren and Ellie who were screaming and trying to reach Piper. Wren managed to shove one of the guards into the wall, breaking the foundation and leaving a giant hole in the back of his head. Before she could run for Piper, her collar unleashed a current of shocks that made her fall to her scarred knees, eyes closing in pain as she tried to stay awake. Venom had taken over Ellie’s body by this point, black sludge sliding over her skin easily and her veins visibly turning white as its voice growled, “Let her go or we’ll bite your heads off.” Venom swiped its claws across the guard’s chest that was holding it, leaving him gasping on the ground and holding onto his bloody chest. The collar around Venom’s neck went off before it could kill the guard holding Piper, forcing Venom to retreat and for Ellie’s body to shake uncontrollably.
Piper screamed and sobbed, kicking as hard as she could against the guard’s chest, watching as the ones she held closest were reduced to silence. A new set of guards walked into the cell, one with a shotgun in his hand and another with a blowtorch. Piper watched in horror as bullets were shot relentlessly into Wren’s unmoving body and Ellie’s body went up in flames, a shrieking noise filling the room as the remaining tendrils of Venom burnt away. She couldn’t look away as Wren’s body filled with holes, chunks of her flesh flying off in multiple directions and her blood splattered the walls. Ellie’s agonized screams were easily heard over the roar of the fire exploding onto her body, her body writhing in pain in front of Piper’s eyes.
“Why are you doing this? Stop it! They didn’t do anything, they didn’t do anything! Stop it!” she cried, digging her nails into the skin of the guard still holding her. They were dying in front of her, something she never considered when she thought about her own death. Her own mistakes were killing them.
“Kill me instead! Give me all of the serum, I don’t care! Kill me! Just don’t make them die,” she begged, her face crumpling in anguish as her eyes were unable to look away from the carnage in front of her.
Clapping began behind her, the constant firing of the gun and roar of fire stopping immediately. Ellie and Wren were so quiet.
Piper tore her red, glassy eyes away from their bodies before facing the man in the doorway. The scientist met her gaze with a sickening grin, watching in amusement as pure hatred took over her face. With an enraged shout, she kicked the guard holding her between his legs and stuck both of her thumbs into his eyes, feeling blood burst beneath her fingers. He shouted in pain and his hold on Piper loosened enough for her to fly towards the scientist. She tackled him, straddling his chest as she began to scratch, claw, punch, and rip at his skin in rage. The entire time he was laughing, screaming, “Finally! Some emotion from you, you bitch!”
She was too caught up on tormenting her tormentor to notice what he held in his hand. If she had looked, she would’ve seen the plastic container holding a black, red, and blue spider about the size of her hand within, its fangs dripping poison down the walls of its containment. With a flick of his thumb, the scientist let the spider loose onto Piper’s neck and laughed maniacally as it bit her, the venom running into her veins before the spider dropped dead to the floor.
Her senses went erratic, everything feeling ten times how it normally did, including the pain from the bite. With pain-filled gasps, she placed a shaking hand over the bite and crawled off of the man, who watched her in amazement. If she could sort through the thousands of sounds she was hearing, she might have heard the soft breaths escaping Wren’s mouth or the wet sounds of Venom overtaking Ellie’s body again. But she didn’t register that, she couldn’t when the tingling began in her fingertips. She planted her hands on the floor as she struggled to catch her breath and arched her back violently when the crawling sensation began in her lower back. Her mouth fell wide open as her teeth began to throb and ache, and she tried to lift an arm up to feel where the pain was coming from but found that she was unable to, her fingers seeming to be stuck to the floor, unmoving despite her vicious tugs. She growled, biting down on her lip and flinching when her pointed canines pierced her lip, blood spilling into her mouth. Unable to process what was happening to her, she yelled and threw herself backwards, yanking her hands off of the floor and hitting the wall behind her.
The scientist was clenching his hands together in excitement, apparently holding no concern for the blood pouring down his face. “Yes! Yes! Yes! Look at you!” he said with a grin. “If only I had tried the actual spider’s venom earlier instead of that serum created in that damn lab! What was I thinking? It barely contained any of the venom, of course it didn’t work.”
He continued uttering nonsense to himself, pulling out a data pad and jotting down notes hurriedly. Too busy with his thoughts, he didn’t seem to feel the dark aura emitting from Piper’s being. He did notice though when, from her lower back, four skinny limbs grew out of her skin, black in color. He didn’t have time to move before Piper was on him, her extra limbs pinning him to the wall, their impact so strong, cracks had begun to spiral around them in the wall.
She stared the man down, her eyes completely pitch black, and she enjoyed the horror on his face when her six other eyes opened, emerging because of the spider’s poison. She grinned, her fangs catching on her lower lip, before muttering, “Are you excited now? Will you still be excited when I rip you limb from limb?”
He struggled in her grip, saying with a weak voice, “You can’t do that, not when I still have control of you.” His eyes flickered down to the collar still around her neck for the slightest second before barely meeting her eyes.
With a raise of her eyebrow, she reached up, grabbed the metal collar, and ripped it off her neck, watching it crumble into pieces at his feet. She looked back at his now paler face and asked, “And what about now? How will you stop me?” She licked down the side of his sweaty face, making sure that one of her fangs tugged slightly on his skin but made sure to pull back before her venom could enter his bloodstream.
His breath quickened. “W-well, I can…I c-can,” he started to stammer out before Piper interrupted him with, “I mean, what did you think was going to happen? You torture me for months, kill the two people I love the most, and you expect me to just go along with your little plan? After you made me this?” She gestured to herself, her eight eyes blinking at different times.
He shuddered and sweat beads rolled down his forehead in earnest. “You should be grateful. Without us, you wouldn’t have reached your true potential,” he began saying, though her grip around his neck was tightening to a point where he struggled to get words out. “Without us, you would still be working that minimum wage coffee shop job, living paycheck to paycheck, and miserable with your life.”
At the brief mention of her past, she remembered what he stole from her: her memories, everything she used to be. With newfound fury, she sank her fangs into his neck and ripped his arms from his body simultaneously, eating away at his screams and watching him slide to the floor with a grin. He gasped wordlessly as he fell on his side without any arms to keep his balance, another shout letting loose when his wounds touched the ground.
Piper pulled her spider limbs from the wall and let them dangle behind her as she watched the life leave his body, pulling at one of his legs until it detached from his body as he neared death. He barely made a noise besides a pained whine, his body so pale, he already looked like a corpse. His death was quick, an embarrassing wheeze leaving his body before he stopped breathing forever.
The hallway was quiet finally, and now Piper could grieve for those she had lost, her eyes filling up with tears now that her energy was gone. She felt her six extra eyes close and fuse back into her skin as she wiped at her eyes, refusing to turn around and see what was left of Wren and Ellie. She staggered back a step, her hand around her mouth muffling the scream she wanted to let loose. So many different emotions ran through her at once: grief, longing, sorrow, frustration, rage, fear. She needed to leave, needed to get out of here and sleep until she woke up numb. Feeling nothing was better than feeling everything at once, she decided.
“Baby girl?”
At the sudden voice speaking out behind her, her fear increased tenfold and her heightened senses threw her up onto the ceiling in the corner of the hallway, her fingers sticking to the wall and easily holding up her weight. Her mind was playing tricks on her. She was dead. That wasn’t her. She decided to remain in her safe spot in the darkness of the hallway until her mind calmed down enough for her to walk out of there.
“Piper?”
It came again and Piper let out a whining sound, crying again. Why must her mind torture her so? “Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it,” she muttered to herself, pressing her forehead against the ceiling.
“Come back to us.”
Her eyes flew open. It might’ve still been a trick, but she needed to look to confirm that she was hallucinating them. Then, she could pick herself up off the floor and limp away, grief clouding her face.
She felt the spinneret on the inside of her wrist attach a web to the ceiling, placing her feet onto it and beginning to dangle, lowering herself to the ground but refusing to turn around just yet.
“You can come down now, honey,” that familiar voice said, no ounce of pain evident. “You were amazing. Let us see you.”
“We wish we could’ve helped you. I’m sorry we let it go this far,” another voice said, deeper and silkier. “Let us hold you, Piper.”
With a sob, Piper dropped to the ground and turned to look over her shoulder slowly, knowing the blood on her cheek would be the first thing they saw. When she finally took them in, standing before her, uninjured and smiling softly at her, her spider limbs fell to graze the floor and she stumbled towards them, cries pouring out of her mouth.
She fell into their open arms, listening to their hushed, “It’s okay, darling. You did so well. We’re so proud of you.” Lips brushed against her forehead and her hair, hands running along her body, even her new limbs which twitched at being touched for the first time. Strong arms picked her up, holding her to their chest, letting her legs and arms wrap around their waist and neck as if she couldn’t bear to have any distance between them. The other walked behind them, their unrelenting gaze watching over her carefully for any sign of pain or discomfort.
She felt herself settle deeper into their arms, her mind slowing down now that danger wasn’t imminent, and dreams filled her being, dancing along her mind with streaks of red and black, intertwined and incapable of being separated anymore. Together, they were one and they were lethal.