Chapter Text
So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell
Blue skies from pain
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
- Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd
When he wakes up, his head’s pounding. Like really pounding, not the little baby thumps of a two-tylenol-and-you’re-set headache, but the blinding, molecule-splitting, earth shattering, hammering of a once in a lifetime migraine. He doesn’t know where he is, what he’s doing there, or even who he is. Pain explodes behind his eyelids in a Fourth of July's worth of fireworks and makes it difficult to think, but he knows all of this should be concerning to him, like, a lot more concerning. He can’t even remember his own name, for god’s sake. Forgetting who you are is really not normal, that he knows for certain, and hey, that’s a symptom of brain cancer or something right? He’s pretty sure he read that somewhere, though he could have gotten the facts wrong...because...because....god it hurts to think. Why the hell does it hurt so much? It must have something to do with the fact that he’s laying here on some floor, but he can’t for the life of him remember why he’s laying here on this food (it feels like a floor, it’s certainly no mattress...maybe it’s just a hard surface). Or even where this floor (hard surface) is. He can’t keep his eyes open long enough to take in any contextual clues, because when he does everything is blurry and out-of-focus and those vampires are really onto something, because (sun?)light really does burn. He lays there and breathes and his brain slams against his skull like an angry gremlin in a cage, and he knows he should be trying harder to get up, to see something to jump start his memory. But he just lays and lays and wallows in the shallows of unconsciousness, hoping the pounding will stop and the hard surface will magically become a nice soft pillow, and he’ll wake up and there’ll be...there’ll be what? He doesn’t know what he wants to wake up to, and that's unsettling enough that it forces him to start moving. He manages to fold his elbows up under him so he can prop himself up and blink, since not knowing where you are is a whole mine-field in itself-- he could be tied up and gagged in a basement or chained against the wall in a sex dungeon somewhere or someone could be syphoning all the blood from his veins to get at some of that sweet, sweet mutant DNA, since the government is always trying to get their hands on it anyway, and if he’s learned anything from his time with the X-men, it’s that no mutant is ever really safe and--Jesus Christ, the X-men! That’s--they’re important, aren’t they?
Memories shutter and start in the deep engines of his brain, each one a shard of glass ripping through the fabric of his migraine. There’s a whole life back there, he’s sure of it, can see the outline of the window that’s been jumped through, but the pieces are mismatched and jumbled and there’s images and feelings and people and they’re all hitting him like he’s the first pitch at the World Series. The low light of a lamp in a bedroom, fingers in his hair, safety pressed against his back, a hand on his stomach, holding him in place. The murmur of a lullaby in his ears. Oj lulaj, lujaj, (bis) Maleńki sukole.
Shattering glass, falling like rain. I did that.
A crack, a snap, an explosion of bone at his knee--pain pain pain--will he be able to walk again, to run? oh god oh god.
“And you?”
And you.
And you you you you you you?
“I’m your-”
There’s the sound of footsteps coming from far away--no wait, they’re close by--and he rubs his eyes, because the world is fuzzy and out of focus, and he needs to see so that he doesn’t die immediately. His memories can wait. He’s in an attic, and he’s wearing clothes that aren’t his, and looking around, he recognizes this place, but distantly, like he’s experiencing deja vu. There’s a whole host of memories clamoring to explain it, and he feels like if he just reached a little further, he could open them, but they feel so far away, so removed from himself, from who he is and what he’s always been. It’s like waking from a dream and only having lingering impressions remain--colors and sounds and the outline of a person. Or like remembering someone else’s dream. Wait, how does that make sense?
The footsteps are getting closer, they’re right outside, and he needs to get up, he needs to be ready for anything ( “They’re never gonna go easy on you, so why should I?”), his brain’s getting in the way of his limbs, and he feels the terrifying, alien sensation of slow.
The door to the attic opens.
A man steps inside. He knows this man. He doesn’t know how (someone else’s dream-no his dream), but the sleek, streamlined features, the eyebrows that perch on his face like a hawk primed for flight, the cut of his suit, they mean something to Peter. There’s another memory fighting to the surface, pushing past all of the others, and he knows what this man’s voice will sound like before he even opens his mouth, but he can’t for the life of him place where he’s heard it before.
“Hello, Peter,” he smiles like an oil spill.
“Do I... know you man?” Peter’s brain hurts so fucking much. His thoughts are upside down and inside out and his memories are trying to scream a warning at him in neon flashing lights while also giving him a memory of Lorna’s third birthday when she face planted right into her cake on purpose and he needs to get up and defend himself. He can’t go back, he can’t go back.
Go back where?
“Oh yes,” the man doesn’t laugh, but Peter hears some distant amusement in his tone that sounds near enough. He’s coming closer, and every molecule in Peter’s body is telling him to run as fast as he can, to get away because this man means something very very bad, but Peter’s paralyzed. He wants to move, but his body betrays him.
“Don’t worry Peter,” the man’s crouching down, he’s leaning over Peter’s face.
There’s a syringe in the man’s hand--when did that get there?--and now, there’s a sharp sting and a flush of cold, and it’s in Peter’s neck. Peter tries to push the man away, but the man has eased the needle out of Peter’s neck, and he’s holding his arms down calmly, effortlessly. He shushes Peter like someone would shush a racoon caught in a trap, and Peter’s so cold. Black spots flirt with his vision for a brief second, before completely overcoming it, and just before Peter slips away, he hears the man’s purr of a voice, murmuring in his ear.
“You’ll remember me soon.”
***
When he wakes up again, his head still hurts, and there’s ice in his veins, twisting up through his body like tree roots. He tries to sit up, because his instincts are screaming DANGER, but when he moves, he realizes he’s strapped down to a gurney. He jerks and struggles against the binds, but all that manages to do is give him chafes and burns along the exposed skin of his arms (he’s not wearing clothes anymore, just a hospital gown). There’s a weird disconnect of his mind, as half of him, the side that cracks jokes when there’s nothing left to smile about and tries to take the punches as they come--directly to the face most of the time, but still--is chilling under an umbrella at the beach, holding a juice box like it’s a martini and thinking this might as well happen, while the other half is acutely aware of how fast his heart is beating and how much his hands are sweating, and that there’s a voice screeching not again, not again in the back of his mind like a banshee, even though he can’t remember being in a situation like this before. That fact alone is just about as freaky as this whole thing, because he knows that someone’s been messing with his mind, but he doesn’t know who and when and why the fuck can’t he get out of these? Aching and sweating for his effort and still tied down by restraints, Peter feels his anxiety kick up a notch, because he knows there’s something he can do to get out of them, something that’s never failed him before, something no one else can do because he’s special, he’s different than everybody--not only because he could never sit still in school, or because his hair is literally silver and always has been, or even because he’s a mutant--but because there’s literally no other mutant that’s ever been as fast as him or thinks like him or who has been trained by people like Mystique or whose dad is literally Magneto, and if there’s anyone in the world who should be qualified to vibrate out of restraints it would be him, the fastest man alive. Oh wait. Shit. At least he remembers exactly who he is now, even if he doesn’t know how he got here at all. The new information about his identity doesn’t really help though, because his chest is still heaving like his lungs are trying to phase out of his skin, and he needs to run, he needs to get out of here, for the love of god, he can’t stay here, his arms need to work already, because if he doesn’t get out then that’s bad bad bad, and Mystique is gonna be so fucking pissed that he freaked out so bad that his powers just went kaput when they’ve never done that before when he needed them most, even after all those awful, gruelling hours of training, and his dad’s never gonna even know that he had a son to begin with and dang that would suck hardcore to have lost all of your family and then find out that you actually did have a son all along but he was so fucking incapable that he died on a gurney in who knows where and fuck, he’s going to die isn’t he? Oh shit.
There’s a clang from far away, but it’s sharp and jarring enough that it pulls Peter forcefully from his fully blown panic attack and into the real, physical world, where he forces himself to breathe: in, one two three four five, out, one two three four five. He does that until his heart stops feeling like it’s about to rocket up his throat and out his mouth like it's heading for the moon and the Russians are on its tail. Once he’s calm enough to think coherently, even through his persistent migraine, he forces himself to focus on his surroundings, and that’s when he realizes that he simultaneously recognizes the place he’s in, and has zero idea where it is. Well. He’s in some sort of jail cell, obviously. It’s weird and reminiscent of a containment holder in one of those sci-fi movies that are on at 3 in the morning that he watches when he can’t sleep and Lorna can’t tease him for it, but one that looks like if it was the future, and then there was an explosion in the cell, and he was put in it ten years after said explosion. The walls look like they were white once upon a time, but now they’re scorched and sooty (like everything else). They have a weird hexagonal pattern, like a beehive if it had been sliced flat and enlarged and filled in and then stuck upright. Or something. Next to his bed is a projection that keeps flickering and glitching between a scenic view of a beach and a city skyline and reminds Peter of the last time he ever went to a public arcade, where he managed to simultaneously break every single machine at the exact same time and the owner, Mr. Wang, had a breakdown in front of a bunch of kids and everything. Peter went back and fixed all the machines that night (he would have stolen new ones but his mom found out and she made him do it the hard way).
There’s a box in the corner of the room that looks like some sort of evil torturing chamber with a whole window to peer in, and the whole place looks like a tornado swept through and absolutely decimated its interior, but the doors are all steel, shiny, and brand spanking new, which is incredibly unsettling. Honestly, this whole place is creepy as hell, and the more he notices the closer he is to having another panic attack.
Instead, Peter just lays there for a while, his limbs heavy as bricks, energy slowly pooling back into his body. The instinct to get up and just run is there, tugging at his bones, and he yearns to just go, to move, to fly, to get away from where he is, or at least figure it out. But after the evaporation of the initial adrenaline boost that came from waking up strapped to a gurney, he’s so tired, so slow, so ugh. He hates it and he hates himself, but this is life kid! You break your leg one time and your chance at a gold medal at the summer Olympics is zilch (and when did that happen anyway? It doesn’t feel broken now).
He doesn’t know what to do, he can hardly get up enough energy to breathe, he feels dizzy and lightheaded and look at all those black spots. There’s this tearing, ripping, shredding in his stomach and he wonders if he’s hungry. He wonders when the last time he ate was. He has to eat. That’s important. He knows it is, but he doesn’t know why….His memories are crashing and receding like waves in a storm against the shifting shore of sand in his mind, and he’s desperately trying to cling to each one as it comes. He can remember [Lorna], with her cherub cheeks and rosy nose singing at the top of her lungs to some nonsense pop song on the radio, the entirety of the Star Wars movies’ dialogue, how many empty bottles he found around Bill on the night of the Incident, every Pink Floyd lyric to ever have been recorded, the McDonald’s Menu on May 8th 1972, even how many F’s he got in a row on tests the year he dropped out of highschool. There’s also disjointed flashes of the X-men, of Mystique slamming him into the ground for “training”, Scott scowling at something Peter said, Professor X giving his dad googly eyes and his dad giving them right back, and his dad walking past him with a furrow on his brow and not a single ounce of recognition on his face beyond the polite we-are-business-associates nod because hey! Peter is a fucking coward who doesn’t know how to break it to the moody terrorist guy that he’s his son. But nothing other than that...nothing to bridge the gap between 17 and 27 and now--how old is he? Is he still 27? No, he can’t be, there’s more, there’s definitely more. There are voices in his head, so so many voices, and they keep whispering and screaming and murmuring and he knows them, so intimately, so well, they make him shudder.
The door to his weird sci-fi cell slides open (just like in Star Trek), and two guards enter, with masks over their faces and goggles over their eyes, and if the impersonality of the way there isn’t a single inch of skin showing through their combat gear is an intimidation tactic, then they’ve got that locked down.
They march into the room and systematically undo his restraints in sync, like they’re two puppets connected by strings, and once all of the buckles have been released and the straps have fallen loose and away, the guard on the right says, “Get up.”
The guard on the left looks passively ahead, staring at the wall. Or maybe nothing. Maybe he’s thinking about lunch (or whatever mealtime it is). Peter’s definitely thinking about lunch.
“Righ, right, yeah okay,” Peter sits up, and the world turns upside down and inside out, and he realizes this is not going to be as easy as it normally would be (should be).
He clutches his head for a moment, groaning and grumbling and wondering if he’s about to vomit all over his new jail cell. Guard number one says something that’s meant to motivate him to get a move on, but it feels like his head is an egg and someone’s trying to hammer a nail right through it, though he just grunts and makes an aborted motion like he means to stand up, then doesn’t. There’s a fire in his brain, burning burning burning, and he keeps getting new memories of Lorna, Mom, Bill. But he’s forgetting at the same time...he’s forgetting...there’s somebody, so many somebodies that he can’t envision, can’t name or place. Pulling his knees up, he rests his head between his legs and sways back and forth, back and forth. Guard one walks into the room and prods him (not gently).
“You, you little kleptomaniac, get to break into the Pentagon.”
Peter throws up mucus over the side of the bed, right on the guard’s shoes. The guard doesn’t take it too well. But the other one’s surprisingly calm, so there is no major harm done to him, which is always a plus when dealing with big guys with guns strapped to their thighs (Peter’s had enough very very bad encounters to know).
When they’ve gotten everything sorted, and the guards have gripped Peter under the armpits and forced him to stand, and Peter’s head doesn’t feel too much like Mt. Vesuvius the day before it popped it’s lid and rained hellfire on the bustling town of morons who thought it was a great location for a place to live, they blindfold Peter and basically drag him through some military facility or prison (20 paces, right, right again, 43 paces, left, an elevator, up, ding-- one floor--right, right, left). They open another door and shove him into a metal chair. There’s the crunch and squeeze of bands clamping down on his wrists, around his ankles and his thighs, over his biceps, and he knows he’s really in for a ride tonight (today? this afternoon?).
“Hang tight,” one of the guards says, and wow. Just, wow. It’s not like Peter has the juice to vibrate his way through these in an instant--no matter how badly he wants to ignore the very real possibility that using his powers might cause him to pass out in his current condition (very hungry).
“Gotcha,” Peter fires back, because he’s nothing if not adaptable, and the door behind him closes.
Then Peter waits. His head’s still throbbing, but distantly, in the way Bill’s sister’s chili had throbbed in his throat six hours after he’d eaten it that one Christmas--seriously that shit was so hot it hurt--was that even legal? Should he have called Child Protective Services on her?
So Peter waits. He wonders how he got here.
Peter waits. The clamps dig into his flesh and turn aggressively uncomfortable with every agonizingly slow passing second. He tries to adjust, even just for a fraction of difference, but these bonds are tighter and stronger than the ones on the gurney, and he can’t do much fidgeting at all.
So, he waits and he remembers, and it hurts hurts hurts.
Because now details upon details of his memories are spilling in through the chinks in the bombed out chapel roof of his mind, and its not just the nice stuff, or the innocuous stuff, or disjointed sensations and phrases that he can’t place in the timeline of his life, but whole sequences and how they really made him feel . And he can now remember how it felt to stand in front of a whole second grade class of mini Judy Helen’s and Mike Johnson’s in their pressed collars and clean shoes, with natural silver hair and a name like Pietro Maximoff, and get laughed at for his accent.
And as he waits, he can’t break free, can’t stop thinking.
He remembers Mom’s face, but only from that night, when he came home crying, asking her why oh why did she have to name him Pietro and why were they Polish and didn’t you know Sarah Smith’s mother says that anyone with an accent like his was probably a communist and wanted to destroy America?
He remembers the way her face contorted: worried, weary, heartbroken in ways that he hadn’t been able to fully understand. They’d been trying so hard to fit in, to be like everyone else (and they would try harder), but it wasn’t enough. This was before Bill, before Lorna, when it was just the two of them against the world, and the world was very big and very scary, but also very small, and very manageable, if dealt with one step at time (or at least, that’s what she always said). The next day, Mrs. Smith got a personal visit from a gap toothed Pietro, smiling to his gums, and his well-pressed mother, homemade cookies in hand.
And Peter waits. He remembers watching Magneto on TV, Lorna tucked into his lap because she trusted him, because she knew that he was different but he’d never hurt her, never do what the man on TV was doing, all while words that meant of freedom and equality and finally, finally, being a mutant isn’t a curse took over his brain and for a moment made him think that he could--that Peter might--well he’s in D.C. for god’s sake, Peter could get there in time to still be on TV. And he’d remember Peter, sure he thought he was weird when they met, but Peter knows he’s useful, more than useful, he’s powerful , and Magneto would be happy to have someone like him…he’d never have to hide again, never have to feel shame again….And then there was the moment Lorna turned towards him and buried her face in his chest and he thought, idiot.
In the dead silence after, when his mom turned the TV off and stood up with an expression carved of pure stone, he thought she was worried about what would happen to him (what he might do).
He wasn’t expecting what she would tell him next.
Peter waits. And waits. And waits.
He thinks about how, when he was with Mystique and the others, on the plane flight to the end of the world, he’d lied and said she’d changed his life, because everyone else was saying it, and he’d never been around people like him that were his age--although everyone in that plane was either his dad’s age or ten years younger, but still, he could pretend. It was never her that changed his life that day.
Eventually, he thinks that all of this thinking he’s been doing is more painful than any torture that whoever’s got him has lined up. His whole body is trying to move, trying to break from the confines of his skin, and man, he wishes that the guard had taken off the blindfold over his eyes, he could have counted scuff marks on the walls or bloodstains on the floor and he would have been perfectly happy, peachy-keen, ready to go. But thinking... thinking...thinking? That--
Finally, finally, the door behind him opens, and in comes the snip-click-snap of polished dress shoes and the soft, slick voice of the man from before .
“Hello, Peter,” he says, a smile in the shape of his words.
There’s a hive of bees swarming in Peter’s stomach, and he wants to throw up at the sound of the man’s slippery slick voice and his warm tone, and the way it makes him feel, like he’s being welcomed home like a long lost friend by someone with a voice that reminds Peter of the voice-over in a horror movie he rented from blockbuster this one time.
“Man, you're uglier than I first thought,” Peter croaks out anyway, because he’s not supposed to show fear or something, and boy, he sounds terrible: like a cross between that time Lorna swallowed six worms because he dared her to (he’d actually dared her to swallow ten) and the way his mom sounded for four days after she’d kicked Bill to the curb ( “Don’t you dare come back you skurwysyn!” ).
“I’ve missed you,” the man says, completely ignoring Peter’s jab, and the sad tone that echoes through the room makes Peter feel like he’s done something awful.
The words “I’m sorry” are on the tip of his tongue, but he doesn’t say them. Instead, he squares his jaw, and fixes his eyes on the ceiling. How he feels, this regret soaking into his gut like vinegar on a sponge, it isn’t right, and he knows it, and he refuses to give in to the way it makes him want to cower and submit to whatever this man wants.
“It was really disappointing what you did, you know how I don’t like it when you go too far away,” the man murmurs. click-snip-clack.
Peter fights the fear and frustration and craving to keel to the man’s wishes enough to force out a reply, throwing as much sarcasm as he can muster, “Little clingy huh? Sorry, dude, but I don’t like to get real handsy until at least the third date.”
The man doesn’t laugh, doesn’t even offer a reply, and sure, Peter’s delivery was a little flat, but he expected there to be some sort of reaction, even just annoyance or irritation. Instead, the man just keeps coming closer, his cadence succinct and infuriatingly rhythmic. His nerves are on fire, and there’s something so disarming about the man’s voice, so soothing, that his desire to please him skyrockets, which consequently pushes his anxiety to an equal intensity level. Peter starts struggling. With every step the man takes towards him, the harder he fights, and he knows that this is a sign of not just distress, but weakness, and that he shouldn’t give himself away, but his limbs are burning burning burning, and he has to get out, he has to leave. The man’s so close, he’s moving faster now. Peter’s being held under water, his chest is constricting, he has to scream and flail and fight because he can’t stay like this, he can’t stay here. His body is jerking and pulling and pushing, and despite how hard he tries, nothing works. It hurts. His skin stings and smarts, and something in his shoulder pops, and that makes him scream, but he doesn’t stop--can’t stop. The man is at his side now, and Peter is trying as hard as he can to throw himself off the other side of the chair to get away from him, which does nothing because this chair weighs like a ton and is basically bolted to the floor, but by now there are hands on his arms, soft and demanding, and that’s when Peter realizes that the man’s been calling his name this whole time.
“Peter! Peter--take a deep breath and clear your mind,” the man says, and ice shoots up every vein in Peter’s body. His spine stiffens, and he knows that something is about to happen that he has to fight, not with fists and elbows and knees but with sheer, stubborn, Maximoff willpower.
“Surrender, and you will find meaning,” The man continues, and there are a thousand needles pinning him in place, thin and piercing and painful. “Surrender and you will find release.”
Peter pushes his body up with as much strength as he can, his hips bucking and his shoulders engulfed in an inferno of pain. “No! No no no no no!” He shouts, because he refuses to hear the next part, refuses to listen. He keeps his litany of “no’s” up like a child who doesn’t want to eat his broccoli, high pitched and insistent and maybe with a bit of a tears, but it carries him through the next repetition of “Take a deep breath and calm your mind”. He increases his volume at “you know what’s best. What’s best is you comply”, and he’s screaming so loud, so forcefully, that the man stops before the last part. Peter can’t even remember what the words are, but he knows, instinctually, that getting to the end is the worst thing that could happen. Somewhere, deep inside, Peter feels proud of himself, feels some sort of jagged vindication, but his shoulder hurts so much that he can’t really focus on it, and the anger in the man’s grip as he clutches Peter’s shoulders is enough to extinguish any good feeling left.
“We’ll have to do so much work to undo all of the damage they did to you, do you know that?” The man’s voice is harsh, and Peter flinches. “This is all your fault, you know. Your cowardice overpowered your loyalty.”
Tremors rupture through Peter’s body, ripping up and down his limbs like a hurricane, and hot, shameful tears spill from his eyes and sear his face. Above him, the man clicks his tongue and Peter feels him shaking his head as he sighs. The blindfold is pulled down to Peter’s neck so gently it almost feels like a caress, and despite the fact that the lighting in the room is dim, Peter blinks rapidly to adjust. The man is not looking at Peter, but instead in the direction of the door, and he offers a self-deprecating smile to the wall, as if to say what can you do?, before shaking his head one more time and begining to card a hand through Peter’s hair. Peter, whose body is still shuddering from trauma, finds that the touch is almost soothing, and leans into it, even as a voice in his head tells him no!
“Good to see they haven’t erased everything from your mind completely,” the man hums, brushing Peter’s bangs from his face. Closing his eyes, Peter lets him. It’s like he’s being lulled into a dream, one that he knows is a nightmare and doesn’t want to have, and he knows he needs to stay awake--needs to want to stay awake--but he’s just so, so tired.
“They? Who messed with my memories?” Peter slurs, his exhaustion all at once overwhelming.
“I’m afraid the name will jar unpleasant experiences from your memory,” the man admits, “But they stole you from me, and turned you against me.”
Peter feels far away from his body--he can’t feel pain anymore. “Who are you?”
“You don’t even remember me...do you see what they’ve done to you? I wish you had been stronger--you could have been able to resist if you hadn’t been so weak. It would have made the job of fixing you so much easier.”
“’M sorry,” Peter says, because he hates being a disappointment and an inconvenience, and there’s something about this man that makes him want to make him proud.
“Don’t worry, Peter. It’s going to be painful, but your penitence will make you pure again, and, if you’re good, maybe I’ll forgive you.”
“Penitence?” Peter knows he should be scared, but the man’s nails are scraping his scalp, and it feels so nice, and he can’t remember the last time he was touched so gently, and he thinks that this man means something to him, even if he can’t remember what.
“Yes,” the man says. “I hate seeing you in pain, but it’s the only way to break their control over your mind.”
“Control?” Something like terror spikes in Peter’s stomach, even as he floats in the clouds of soft caresses and soothing voices.
“Don’t worry. Once we’re done, you’ll be free.”
Peter’s mind is lagging. His vision is unfocused and no matter how much he blinks, it doesn’t stop how badly he just wants to close his eyes and sleep. From far away, he hears the door open, and a pair of boots on the floor. There are more people around him, and there’s the sharp stinging sensation of a needle sliding into his arm, and then the tight pulling of the surrounding skin as his blood is syphoned away, and he wants to ask what they’re doing, or protest no, but the man’s hands are still in his hair and it feels so nice.
“Don’t worry, Peter. I really shouldn’t, but I’m going to give you another chance. Just answer my questions correctly, without resistance, then there might not even be a need for your penitence. I really don’t want to see you in pain, you know how much that hurts me.”
“O...okay,” Peter mumbles, closing his eyes.
“What is your full name?”
Oh, he knows that. “ Pietro Django Maximoff. I go by Peter.” That wasn’t so bad.
“How old are you?”
He doesn’t know that one. “Seven, seventeen, twenty-seven, thirty-seven.”
The man’s hands tighten in his hair, and he gives a tug, one that lets Peter know that wasn’t the answer he was looking for, but he doesn’t give him any time to fix it.
“Where are you from?”
“Vienna, Virginia. Near Washington, D.C.”
There’s a frown in the man's voice when he asks the next question. “Where are you really from?”
“I was born in Poland.”
Another tug, sharper this time. Still not what he wants. Peter’s heart is speeding up, despite the sluggishness dragging him down, and he knows that the next questions are crucial, that he has to answer them right or there will be pain pain pain..
“Where do your powers come from?”
“I’m a m--” Finally, his training and the trust issues instilled in him after a lifetime of discrimination kicks into overdrive, and he can hardly hear the next question through the distressed chorus of: don’t tell them don’t tell them they’ll kill you they’ll kill you, that’s running through his brain. The man’s grip on his hair has now become incredibly painful, and Peter feels his eyes welling with tears for the thousandth time, but he keeps his mouth shut.
“Who are you?”
“Peter.”
The man sighs. Untangling his hands from Peter’s hair, he strokes his forehead with two fingers and says, “I was so hoping that you would do well. But, I can’t stop what’s coming next.”
He lets go of Peter and instantly, awareness floods through him like a tsunami, along with a debilitating fear that makes him scream out, “No, no, wait--”
The man shakes his head and says, “I don’t want to do this, but it’s for your own good.”
Then, there are hands--gloved ones--all over his body, pinning him down in the places that the restraints aren’t, and the absence of the man’s touch is so keenly felt that Peter feels like sobbing, even while he returns to jerking and wrenching. The people above him are all wearing hazmat suits that hide their faces, like Peter is radioactive and will give them cancer from just breathing near them, and he can see his warped face in the oppressive surfaces of their masks, his hair askew, his skin pale and sallow, his eyes sunken and bulging. He doesn’t recognize himself there--even his own reflection is alien. The only sound in the room is that of Peter’s protests and the rattling of his chair, but even that fades when someone sticks another needle into his neck, and he slowly loses autonomy over his own body. The chair moves slowly backwards, like a hospital bed, until he’s horizontal, and there’s a ring of hazmat masks and one man looking down at him like some cosmic choir of judgement. He can’t move, he can barely breathe, but he’s more awake than ever and he can’t stop thinking about how if he vomits, he won’t be able to turn his head or sit up, so it’ll just burble up like a pathetic geyser, then get caught in his mouth and esophagus and he won’t be able to breathe and he’ll die a la drowning in his own lunch. The man, standing right by his head, looks down at him like he’s a particularly interesting bug, one that he’s grown to see as a pet, and Peter feels disgusting down the marrow of his bones.
“When you left last time, you were very eager to erase any traces that you were here at all.”
The hazmats are attaching little wires all over his body, and Peter knows what that means, but he hopes beyond hope that he’s just paranoid and pessimistic.
“We lost almost every physical sample of the research we’d conducted on your...rare condition. You might have thought you were being smart about it,” there’s a sharp pain where someone jostles Peter’s shoulder while attaching a wire to his bicep, “but really, it was very stupid, because now, we’re going to have to do everything we already did, all over. Really, I’m not even surprised that you caused such an inconvenience, what else would I expect from you?”
Peter stares at the ceiling. It’s the same surface as that other room, with white hexagon tiles and there are scorch marks here too. What blew up that it would be this bad? And why would someone want to blow this place up in the first place? Was this room like a science lab? That would explain the weird beehive walls--if Peter’s learned anything from Hank it’s that scientists like their freaky futuristic interior design almost as much as they like using Peter as a lab rat.
“It’s very interesting, you see,” the man continues, “your condition allows for so many physical advancements that normal humans just can’t achieve through the use of steroids or serums, but you’re certainly not an Inhuman--your original blood work results proved that. You’re something very, very other , something so unlike anything I or my colleagues have ever encountered. So, the question is, Peter--what are you? And, what can you do? And if you will not tell us, or you simply don’t know, as I suspect you might not, then that leaves us with one option:”--
Peter knows where this is going, it’s something that’s kept him holed up in a basement for years, that’s transformed his dreams into nightmares too many times for him to count, that him and everyone like him has feared the inevitability of since the moment they realized they were different.
--“Scientific experimentation.”
Peter would swallow if he could.
“Make no mistake, though,” the man leans over Peter’s face, forcing him to look into the swampy murk of his brown and green eyes, “This will be ten times more excruciating than it could be, because you need to learn your lesson.”
His eyes are smarmy and beady and ugly and beautiful.
“Tell me, do you understand?”
He looks at Peter like he’s expecting an answer, even though Peter can’t lift his tongue, much less form a coherent sentence out loud. Peter wants to scream, FUCK YOU just as much as he wants to scream PLEASE NO .
“Tell me you understand, tell me that you are being hurt because you deserve it. Tell me that you are being hurt because you must be purified from your disobedience. Tell me you are being hurt because it’s what’s best for you.”
When Peter stays silent, the man nods his head like Peter’s been a naughty child, and he gestures to one of the hazmats.
“Begin.”
First, he feels a sharp zap, like he’s just touched an electric fence, but slightly more uncomfortable...That wasn’t so bad.
“Do you know what we’re doing to you?” The man asks.
Peter says nothing, because he literally can’t. Another zap, stronger this time.
“Your body is remarkable. Your metabolism alone is impressive and abnormal enough to have scientists studying it for years.”
Another shock wave. This one leaves a lingering feeling of almost-pain.
“Of course, there is the obvious that makes your body unique--your heightened capability for achieving levels of speed that should be, frankly, impossible for the human body to accomplish. If my body were to undergo the same level of acceleration as yours does seemingly daily, it would be completely impossible for me to survive, as the force of gravity would destroy my organs, push the blood from my brain, and cause my bones to shatter. You do not experience these side effects because, with your ability for speed, your body has adapted to a heightened resistance to blunt trauma and can withstand and absorb impacts and shocks that the normal human body would never be capable of living through. So, your body has its own built in protection, you could say. Quite ingenuitive, if you ask me. But there remains a question, or several, I suppose.” At this point, the man smiles. There’s something distinctly cat-like about the way his grin distorts his whole face.
When Peter gets shocked again, he wants to whimper.
“How much can your body take? And what kind of impacts and shocks can it sustain better than others?”
Another shock. This time, Peter feels like he’s being stuffed full of lightning.
“There there,” the man’s smile looks distinctly shark-like, “If the shocks damage your nervous system, then we’ll be able to test how long it takes for you to repair different parts of your body.”
Peter tries to open his mouth and howl, for help, for God, for anyone or anything. The scream never gets past his lips.
***
Right when the effects of the drug they gave him begin to wear off, and he can move his lips enough to shout, he blacks out.
***
When he wakes up, he’s hungry enough to eat a twinkie factory, and then the ding dong factory next store, and maybe a pizza while he’s at it. His body aches like Hell all over and he just about wishes he could sink into the puddle of goo that he feels like. The good news is that his headache’s gone; nothing like a good round getting the shit electrocuted out of you to really clear up the ol’ noggin and get the brain working again.
He wishes he could be literally anywhere else.
He’s back in the first room, but the gurney’s gone, and he’s on the floor. It looks like there was a bed in here at one point, but they must have removed it to increase his levels of discomfort. How considerate of them.
Peter pulls himself into a sitting position, and then immediately regrets it when the entirety of his body feels like it’s being shredded apart. He winces, collapses against the wall. He would complain about how the waiting is almost as bad as the experimentation/torture, but that simply isn’t true, not when every nerve in his body feels like a half-melted string of liquorice.
Eventually, a tray is shoved through a slot in the bottom of the door, with three granola-bar looking things that look both unappetizing and inedible. Peter downs them in three bites each anyway.
***
When Peter works up enough courage to audibly ask for something to drink (because he knows he’s being monitored, no way is he not ), the two guards from earlier march in with a bucket and waterboard him for kicks. When they’ve had their fun, they leave the empty bucket for him.
***
The next time they blindfold him and drag him out of his cell, they take him somewhere else. This time, not only do the guards push the blindfold down the moment they get into the room, but they also hold him a little less like they’re trying to give him bruises. Maybe they’ve warmed up to him, Peter does have that effect on people, what with his charming personality and good looks. This room has a device in the middle of it that very distantly could be considered a chair, if you squinted at it...and had never seen a chair before, maybe. Instead of reclining back, it holds you in a kneeling position, and there are a lot of disturbing and pointy looking mechanisms on it that don’t look appealing whatsoever, but maybe they’re decoration?
“I’m not going to sit in that, am I?” He lolls his head towards the guard on the right. Neither of them say anything, and they just pull him towards it.
“Of course I am,” he mutters, as they shove him in it and secure his restraints. This time, there’s a part of the chair that clamps down on his head, so he can’t move it back and forth at all. There’s a screen in front of him, but it’s not turned on, and Peter thinks it’s too much to hope that he might be watching Star Wars .
The guards then proceed to tape his eyelids open.
Yeah, definitely not Star Wars .
Then, they inject a needle into his neck, and Peter flinches, because it’s in the exact same spot as the past two previous injections, and that area feels like one big bruise.
Great, now he won’t be able to move again. He just looooooves that.
Then, Thing 1 and Thing 2 move to stand behind him like he needs monitoring when he’s been strapped down and injected with Don’t Move Juice, and that’s when the Cat in the Hat shows up. Peter can recognize him by cadence alone, and when he comes into view, there’s already a thousand emotions that are warring through him: fear, fury, insolence, indignation, desperation, admiration.
That last one scares him the most, because he doesn’t know where it came from and he doesn’t want it there.
The Cat, as Peter decides to call him, because it makes him feel a little better to imagine the guy in a stupid floppy red and white striped hat, cradles a martini glass, with an olive in it and everything, in his hand like he’s just walked out of some high-end party, and Peter wonders if he just brought it in here to look cool. So he asks him.
The Cat chuckles like Peter is a particularly amusing baby and strokes the back of two of his knuckles down Peter’s forehead, asking, “How are you, darling?”
Peter wants to vomit his brick granola bars all over him. Instead, he spits into the Cat’s martini. The Cat curls his upper lip, wipes the side of his suit like some of Peter’s saliva somehow made it all the way over there, and mumbles, “How charming.”
He then breaks the whole glass over Peter’s head. A sharp stinging pain bursts across the top of Peter’s forehead, and he can feel bits of glass in his hair, which is completely drenched. He doesn’t need to see his reflection to know he’s bleeding.
The screen in front of him then turns on, with a swirling, hypnotic pattern playing across it, and Peter, in the pit of his stomach, knows he’s been here before.
“Look into the center of the circle, darling,” The Cat commands, standing just at the edge of Peter’s peripheral vision.
Peter doesn’t want to look at the center of the circle.
“Look at it,” The Cat repeats.
Peter forces his eyes to unfocus. The Cat slaps him with the back of his hand.
“Listen to me,” he hisses into Peter’s ear, then caresses the exact spot he just hit.
Peter looks into the center of the circle.
“Take a deep breath and clear your mind,” The Cat starts.
It’s right around here that the serum that renders him as mobile as a sack of flour kicks in, and while he can’t scream to cover up the man’s words, he can use his super special skill of Zoning Out, the one that he employs so often, to such success, that it may as well have been in his DNA all along. Maybe that’s another part of his mutation--it’s definitely possible, seeing as he apparently has a lot of other weird secondary mutations. The point is, he’s a fucking ace at not paying attention, especially to people who really really really want him to do something. The man stands right in his peripheral vision, and the lights on the screen before him (the really nice screen by the way, like what kind of futuristic alien place is this that the TV is so flat and the image is so clear?), pulse and swirl like the lights at a Pink Floyd concert when you’re on acid--which, Peter has never done, for the record--and Peter hates how much this whole situation makes him so anxious and terrified while soothed and relaxed. The man’s presence is a magnetic pole, consistent and strong and irresistible, and Peter’s hurtling towards it. He wants the man to touch him. He never wants the man to touch him again.
“Take a deep breath and clear your mind,” The Cat repeats.
He wants to rub his eyes he wants to rub his eyes he wants to rub his eyes.
“Surrender and you will find meaning.”
Yeah fucking right--Peter’s quit at alot of things in his life: school, eating anything with green in it, listening to sound advice from his elders, but none of that has provided him with any meaning. If anything, it’s just given him more time--something which he already had wayyyyyyy too much of-- to goof off and be an asshole and beat his personal best score of Mrs. Packman 447 times.
“Surrender and find release.”
The kaleidoscope on the screen in front of him shifts and swirls and inverts and eats itself, and is it possible for shapes to be cannibals? Wouldn’t they need mouths for that? And digestive systems? Would they just absorb the other shape like osmosis--wait is that the right science word? Who knows.
“Take a deep breath and calm your mind.”
Peter starts playing Rush’s 2112 in his mind, trying to focus on the notes and not the Cat’s voice.
“You know what’s best. What’s best is you comply.”
And the meek shall inherit the earth...WE’VE TAKEN CARE OF EVERYTHING FROM WORDS YOUREADANDTOSONGSYOUSING.
The Cat’s still talking. The shapes on the screen never stop. Peter’s still got twenty minutes of song to get through. And then he can go through the whole album. He’ll be fine. He’s not going to let them get to him.
***
He doesn’t know how long they’ve been there, but he knows it’s been long enough for the Cat to go through several college lectures that all managed to sound incredibly vague and aggressively specific at the same time. At some point, he’d started talking about the world, how flawed it is, how they need to purge it, and had just never stopped. A lot of what he said sounded like eugenics, so Peter, as someone who has a very personal relationship with genocide on both sides of his family tree, decided that he’d have to pull out the entirety of The Wall to get through that one. Now though, it feels like the serum is finally wearing off, and he might be able to run through the entire discography of Pink Floyd out loud just to annoy the Cat.
“Tell me, what are you afraid of?” The Cat stops his long session of talking at Peter to actually ask him something.
“Bell bottom jeans, Aerobics classes, guys who wear suits all day,” Peter says.
The Cat pushes Peter’s bangs, now crusted with Blood Martini, our of his face and leans down to make eye contact with him.
“No, really. What are you afraid of? Why don’t you want to listen to me?”
“Uhh, aside from the fact that you’ve got me strapped to a chair with my eyes taped open and are forcing me to watch literally the most boring movie of all time? I have no idea.”
“Come now, you know I have to do this. You’ve been brainwashed by them , I’m just trying to set you free.”
“So that’s why you broke a martini over my head?”
“Pain often pushes the mind in the right direction.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works.”
“Please,” the Cat’s face is so close, Peter can feel his breath on his face. “Know that I only want what’s best for you. And I want you to want what’s best for you. Do you see what they’ve done to you? You’re weak, you don’t know who you are, you’re afraid of so much. You’re insecure and incompetent and convinced that I am the bad guy. Please, just tell me the truth.”
Peter wants to touch him. Peter wants to be touched by him. Peter hates him.
Peter’s eyes may be dry, but his mouth still has enough saliva in it for him to spit in the Cat’s face.
***
They come for him at random intervals--there’s no rhyme or reason to it. Peter’s tried to count the moments in between, tried to find some sort of system in order to stay alert and figure out time in some semblance of a way, but they mess with him at every corner, giving him meals sometimes two hours apart, sometimes sixteen. Whenever they drag him into the experimentation or the brainwashing room, that screws up his whole internal clock, because those sessions are hardly ever short and most of the time end with him passing out. He has about six electrocution sessions before they seemingly get bored of his nervous system and move on to the immune system, where they inject him with all kinds of diseases to see how he reacts to them, and how quickly he can get over them. They never tell him which ones they’re injecting him with, and the first one, whatever it is, hits him like a bolder and has him vomiting up granola bars and water all over his cell and coughing throughout brainwashing sessions, which really pisses the Cat off. At some point he gets a gag for Peter, instead of like, a cough drop, and then goes off on a spiel for like 35 circle pattern cycles about the corruption of the world. The questions he asks are all the same, and all of his little impassioned speeches all turn out to mean the same thing, and Peter asks if this is a riddle, if it’s a joke, if he’s supposed to connect the dots and win a prize, but all he gets for it is a backhanded slap and a reprimand of I thought you were smarter than that , and it stings enough that when the Cat praises him, he feels a swell of pride, of hope. Every touch the Cat bestows upon Peter makes him feel so good, so peaceful, and sometimes, he whispers nice, sweet things into the shell of his ear that makes him want to close his eyes and sleep, but every time he lets go, Peter feels worse than ever before, because he knows that the way the Cat makes him feel is wrong, that this is all wrong , but he also feels dirty for wanting to fight back.
***
“What is your name?”
“Peter Maximoff.” Don’t let that go, don’t let that go.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen, no, twenty-seven no--”
“Where are you from?”
“Magda Maximoff’s basement.”
“Where are you really from?”
“Washington D.C . ”
“Where do your powers come from?”
Don’t tell them, don’t tell them, don’t tell them, don’t--
“Who are you?”
“Peter Maximoff.” Peter Maximoff Peter Maximoff Peter Maximoff Peter--
***
“Did you know that you have an incredible immune system?” The Cat asks him. They’re back in the experimentation room, Peter’s strapped down to his chair, and there’s a needle in his arm.
“In fact, it’s so good, that each illness we’ve infected you with has run its course within the matter of a day. Tell me, did you ever get sick as a child?”
When Peter tries to think of an answer, it’s difficult, because the Cat’s hands are in his hair, and he’s running his fingers over the tip of his ear. He has to force himself to focus, and when he does, he realizes that he never got sick after his mutation manifested. Not once.
Peter shakes his head.
The Cat pats his forehead, a wordless good boy.
“Now that we’ve tested various diseases on your immune system, we’d like to move on to something more...physical.”
Peter isn’t concerned at first, because this is the best he’s felt since he got here. But then the Cat’s words sink in, and he tries to jerk upwards.
“Shhh, shhhh,” the Cat soothes, pushing down Peter’s shoulders and holding him steady, “Calm your mind.”
It almost works, but Peter fights him.
The Cat sighs and signals for one of the hazmats. They sedate him again, and though he tries to fight it, tries to force his body to process it faster, it starts working anyway.
“Now, we’ve noticed, in the x-rays that you sat so still for,” The Cat says the last part like it’s praise, “that your right leg has already been broken before.”
Peter’s thoughts are screaming, shrieking, struggling. NONONONONONONONONONO
“And we were wondering, how much force could cause your very resilient bones to break?”
Peter hates this. He hates this man standing above him, with his hands and his smile and his cruelties spoken like secrets.
They force him to stand up for this. Two hazmats hold him up, his arms slung over their shoulders like they’re buddies and he’s just got hammered at a bar and they’re about to start spouting What is love (Baby Don’t Hurt Me) all the way home, but they’re not--and they won’t. The Cat says they want to break his leg the same way it was broken before, something about science methods and efficiency and pins and bolts in his bones and something something something. He knows he needs to pay attention, because even though the explanations of what they do to him is another form of torture, are just a way to make him feel the pain before it actually hits him, he knows that it’s important, and that if he gets out of here, Hank and the Professor would want to know exactly what they did to him so they could fix it or monitor him or some shit, but he just can’t. He can’t. The last time he broke his leg, it was a literal god--one who had the ability to adapt to his powers, one who gave everybody else a run for their money (but he still got a couple solid punches in, so)--that bashed his leg in, and it hurt like hell, it hurt like nothing he’d ever experienced in his life, because his foot was stuck, and someone was finally, finally moving at the same speed as him, but it wasn’t good, it was terrifying, and then, he felt every fracture, every splinter, every rupture as his knee snapped inwards, but this time will be a thousand times worse, because this time, he’s shivering and scrawny and exhausted, and it’ll all be his fault. There is no god here (there isn’t, he isn’t), just humans in suits, and Peter hasn’t been able to do anything about it. The world is so so slow, and he can’t get away, and all of this is because he was never fast enough to begin with, because he can’t do what the Cat wants, because he can’t say the things the Cat wants him to say, and because he can’t stop wanting to please him. There’s some sort of contraption they lock his feet in, something about weight and gravity and physics, and Peter thinks he might actually vomit this time. When the mallet comes, it’s not enough force--his leg doesn’t break. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt though. They try again. It doesn’t work. Peter doesn’t think he’d be able to walk on the leg anyway, but they don’t stop. Slam slam slam slam. Nothing yet! Do it again. Slam slam slam slam.
Finally, the hit comes that does him in. There’s a crack that shatters the air and punches the ground out from under him, and the hazmats let him collapse to the floor, his face slamming against it with enough force to give him a bloody nose. Even through the drugs they’ve pumped into his system, he can hear himself keening and whimpering. God he can’t breathe--it’s his leg that broken but he can’t breathe, can’t function through the agony, everything is fuzzy and incomprehensible though the pain and he’s just so afraid. I’m going to die here , he thinks. I’m going to die I’m going to die I’m going to die.
There are hands running across the skin of his scalp. They’re gentle, calming, and for a second, the pain goes away. All of it. Peter wants to curl into the embrace, wants to bury himself in the touch of those hands, but then they fist around the wiry strands of his hair and jerk him up, so that he can make eye contact with the Cat, who’s crouched down on his haunches. The pain floods back in all at once, like power rushing back into a house after a blackout, and it’s debilitating. The Cat looms over Peter, his eyes urgent and intense and terrifying.
“Are you hurt?” He asks.
No shit , Peter wants to spit at him. What comes out is a broken whine. Blood is flowing down his face, and he wants to drown in it.
“Do you want it to go away?”
No duh. Another pitiful whimper.
“Then you know what to do. You know what’s best. What’s best is you comply. Compliance will be rewarded, and you won’t feel this way ever again.”
Peter can’t help it, he wants this all to go away. But he can’t give in….but he can’t remember why. Why can’t he just let go? Why can’t he just...comply?
Cold seeps through his body, and he feels both nothing and absolutely everything all at once. A hazmat jostles his legs as they move around him and he almost blacks out from the pain.
“Calm your mind,” The Cat says, and Peter tries, he really does, but he can’t, he can’t. Comply. No. Yes. Hurt. Stop. Please. Ow. Please. Comply. Surrender surrender surrender. No no no.
Someone moves his leg again--this time he knows it’s on purpose. He loses time, he doesn’t know how long, but he thinks he might actually pass out, because the next time he can think coherently, the world is opening up from black like the beginning of an old movie. He’s still on the floor, and there’s still blood on his face, but it feels tight and cracked like it dried a long time ago. His position hasn’t moved at all, but he’s dazed and overwhelmed with pain, so when the Cat tugs his head up again, all he can do is hope that maybe, now that he’s been punished, the Cat will be happy enough to go back to calling him “darling” and run his hands through his hair, so the pain will go away.
But he doesn’t.
“What is your name?”
However long he was out must have been enough to finish running the drugs through his system, because he can move his chapped and cracked lips enough to form a broken, “Pet--Pietro. ”
“How old are you?” The Cat’s looking at him like he wants him to do well, he wants him to succeed.
“I can’t….” a tear slips out of Peter’s eye, “remember….”
The Cat’s lips are pressed together tightly, and more tears fall. I can’t stop disappointing him.
“Where are you from?”
“Not here.”
“Where’s that?”
That question is different...he doesn’t remember why. “Far away.”
“Where do your powers come from?”
Fear floods him, there’s someone else in his mind that’s telling him to stay strong, to resist, and he knows they’re important, he just doesn’t know why. I can’t say i can’t say i can’t
“Who are you?”
Pietro pietro pietro pietro piet--
There’s a sharp crack as someone kicks his leg, and the world, along with the pain, bursts into oblivion like collapsing stars.
***
Everything that happens when he’s awake is fuzzy, tinted by pain enough that all of reality feels distantly hallucinogenic. He can’t count how many times the Cat repeats his compliance speech, or needles him with the same questions, over and over and over, until he just wants to scream in agonized frustration, what do you want from me? At some point, they re-break his leg so that it can heal properly enough for them to monitor its progress. Apparently just leaving it like that will cause the bones to grow all wrong, and then where would they be? Peter can never tell if they give him painkillers or not, but it doesn’t matter because he spends most of his time fading in and out of consciousness.. A needle is always in his arm when he wakes up, and he knows they’ve probably got him hooked up to an IV to keep him at the bare minimum level of alive, but he wishes they wouldn’t bother and just let him slip away due to starvation. He might just die from that anyway, seeing as he’s always hungry, always thirsty, never fully able to function as it is. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to last much longer, and that’s good, because he thinks, in his haze, that he understands what these people want, and he can’t bear to give it to them.
***
One night, lying on the hard scorched floor of his cell, the glitching view of the beach casting a low glow onto his skin, Peter thinks, morbidly, that if he dies, at least they’ll get to experiment on his corpse.
***
After his leg heals, (“faster than the human body has ever been capable of ” ), they stick a bunch of wires to his chest, shove him on a treadmill, and tell him to run. He can’t even last half a mile, but that doesn’t seem to matter to them, because they have him run through a whole list of exercises that would almost be considered physical therapy if it didn’t feel like he was being monitored by a bunch of aliens, and the Cat keeps nodding at the clipboard that one of the hazmats holds up for him. Eventually, after they run through a dozen tests or so, send him back to his cell, and then make him do it again and again and again, the Cat has them break his leg again.
He sobs through the whole process and flames of shame lick at his heart until his chest is a burning building, crumbling in on itself under the oppressive, smothering smog of physical pain. But he can’t stop the tears, can’t stop his body from mourning itself, and as the Cat recites the same words he’s heard so many times he hears them in his dreams, he wonders if his life has just become a loop, if he’s living the same events in a cycle and all at once and what is time anyway? And what does it even matter because has he ever really been alive--is this all a dream, was his other life a dream? How long has he been here, why can’t he just die and what is death, maybe this is hell--of course. He’s already died and this is hell and he wants to die after death, because maybe in the second level of the afterlife he’ll have a chance at heaven and what if they’re the same and he gets to heaven and there’s the Cat with his arms open, ready to hold and pet Peter and what will Peter do? Will he run away--or to--him? Everywhere he looks is the Cat and he’s always smiling, always calling him darling and Peter wants to die wants to go home can’t go home will never go home please god, please god, please just take it all away.
***
“What is your name?”
pietro
“How old are you?”
I don’t…
“Where are you from?”
There’s something...i don’t know...
“Where do your powers come from?”
I…
“Who are you?”
I don’t know i don’t know i don’t know.
***
One day-night-afternoon, the Cat asks him “What are you afraid of?”
And he says, “Never getting out of here.”
***
The sound of his bones snapping is familiar. Peter doesn’t know how long he’s been here. Yesterday--or maybe that was this morning--they broke his leg again. He thinks, at some point, his body will just refuse to heal itself, and his leg will stay like this forever, a thousand shards of bone suspended within his flesh like an elaborate modern art display. He’ll never walk, never run, again--at this point, maybe he doesn’t want to. Maybe then, they’ll cast him aside and leave him to Rot In Peace forever.
***
“Your name no longer matters. Your name is nothing. You will be called what we call you, Mercury.”
...Mercury...
“Your age doesn’t exist. You are immortal as long as you please HYDRA. You were born to comply.”
To comply.
“You are from HYDRA, she is your mother, your father, your beginning and your end.”
HY...DRA
“Your powers are a gift from HYDRA. They are a tool bestowed upon you. They are not yours. If you fail to comply they will be taken from you.”
My powers...aren’t mine…
“You are HYDRA. You are one head out of many. Hail HYDRA.”
Hail...no. no. NO. NO I WON’T--
***
He’s strapped down in the brainwashing chair when the gunfire starts. After he refused to hail HYDRA, they did a lot of things to him that he can’t...can’t really think about, because his brain is a murky bogland of waste, and there are some trash piles that he just can’t see, can’t look at all, and everything that just happened buried itself deep into his subconscious the moment they started up the brainwashing lightshow, and that’s okay, because that means that he won’t feel what he just felt ever again, until they do it again, that is, but he doesn’t really know what they did, so it’s all okay. When the sounds of fighting reach them in their little bubble of swirling shapes and malicious caresses, the Cat breaks off mid sentence, and his voice becomes harsh, commanding. He orders the guards to do...something. And then, boots scuffle against the floor and dress shoes click-snip-clack away at a faster pace then Peter has ever heard and...he’s alone. He wants to close his eyes. He wants to sleep for a thousand years. There’s something happening...he should care, shouldn’t he? He doesn’t. Nothing matters, he just wants to close his eyes. There’s fighting outside, it’s getting louder, it’s just outside. Someone is yelling, something explodes. More gunfire. Peter is afraid, isn’t he?
Suddenly, without preamble, it all stops. The door to the room opens. It was all a ruse, another mind game. Peter waits for the sound of dress shoes. He’s met with the thud of boots.
“ Dios mio, ” says a voice Peter doesn’t know, and he’s distantly intrigued. A face comes into view. A woman, dark eyes, dark hair in twin braids, a look of concern and anger and sympathy twisting her face into something real. Something human. Peter almost cries. She reaches out to touch him, and he tries to jerk away, tries to flinch, but he can’t move.
“Hey, there,” she murmurs, her voice deep and raspy and full of this sound that makes Peter think she might just not be a part of some HYDRA plan.
“It’s okay,” she holds her hand up to where he can see it, and he watches as she moves it so so slowly, like he’s a wounded animal that might bite her. “Everything is going to be okay now.”
Peter doesn’t know if he should believe her. But, suddenly, she’s moving like she isn’t marinating in molasses like everything has since he’s been here, and as she rips off the tape keeping his eyes open like she’s ripping off a bandaid, Peter thinks in disbelief, it can’t be.
And then there are more people, and he’s being released, and he needs to close his eyes, but he can’t force himself.
“Hey,” says the woman, the impossible woman, smiling softly at him. There are tears in her eyes--wait no, they’re in his.
“You can rest now. You’re safe with me.”
Peter wonders if trusting her is a mistake. But does it matter?
He closes his eyes.