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It has been months, maybe years, since they cut Amelia down off the wall and laid her out in this bed. It's been long enough for her body to start to break itself down, slowly, so torturously slowly - worse, almost, than the agony of the sickness that got her here in the first place. The muscles in her arms and legs are wasting away. Painful pressure ulcers burrow deeper into the flesh of her backside, like worms through the skin of an apple. Amelia refuses to let her mind deteriorate at the same rate. It feels as though it is all that will be left of her, soon enough.
The truth is that she does not know what is happening to her body, beyond a basic understanding of catatonia, and it scares her shitless. All the same, she tries to keep her perspective clear. She's alive for a reason; Murkoff have plans for her, and if they don't, they're looking for one. She suspects that this is the slightly more sophisticated second act of Easterman's tantrum. The benefit of catatonia is that her body is unresponsive to any of the methods of torture he or his attack dog might have resorted to - rest in peace to Clyde Perry, may what's left of him dissolve in a barrel in the desert until it's all just unidentifiable sludge.
Easterman can do whatever he likes with her body; it doesn't even feel like a significant part of her anymore. Nothing he does will get him what he wants. He could have her living brain cut out of her head, and he still wouldn't be able to read her mind.
I've kept myself alive in here for so long, she reminds herself. Maybe this is me doing just that, in a different way.
She thinks of herself as a wet specimen inside a dusty jar. Still perfectly preserved, hanging suspended in a state of half-being; not dead, though, not yet. Just waiting.
These kind of thoughts unsettle her. They don't feel like her own.
It's been too long. The months-or-years in this bed are catching up to her, no matter how sharp she tries to keep her mind. She's still finding the scattered little seeds of delirium that Easterman managed to plant in her. Maybe there was never any way to survive Sinyala without him getting to her in some way. Of course, the plan was never for her to survive Sinyala in the first place - but plans change. So, in a stomach-churning betrayal of her promise to Damon's memory, Amelia has to accept the truth: she does not want to die here. She never really has.
She wants to live.
And I'm sure as hell not dead yet, she reminds herself, one more time for good measure.
She’s still here. Living proof of Easterman's greatest fuck-up. She’s the exit wound in Murkoff’s back, and proud of it.
Amelia has been thinking a lot these days about her time on the wall after the escape, the days she spent strung up above the exit with her limbs twisted and yanked from their sockets. She wasn’t conscious for much of it, but what she does remember is very useful. All she can do these days is think, try not to let her brain grow dull from neglect, so she tries to find the lessons in everything. As it turns out, public humiliation taught her a great deal.
When she first cracked open her swollen eyes and saw all the Reagents gathered below, despair welled in her gut. She thought that they had abandoned her, or worse: that they had come to laugh at her. But those poor, corralled men and women did not look up at her with contempt, nor hatred, only terror. Their eyes were wide and wet. Each upturned face was a tragedy mask of love.
Even some she had considered loyal acolytes of Easterman came to her at some point or another. Of course they did; they’d worship anyone set in front of them. They loved her like they would love the voice of God. They saw her up there and in her pain, they felt close to her. Maybe her own mistake was trying to be anything other than a mirror to their suffering. Maybe they hadn't wanted a saviour. They just needed a martyr to champion.
Easterman’s error was giving them exactly what they needed. That's the mistake she has to make him pay for next. If she could only-
A noise in the distance catches her attention, disrupts her thoughts: a door opening at the far entrance to the hospital wing.
She can hear the faint echo of approaching footsteps on the linoleum in the hall. Whoever it is, they're light on their feet, as if they don't want to be heard. Dread crushes her chest in, even though it's usually just one of the junior doctors, coming to do the bare minimum to keep her alive and 'well' - feed her, change her catheter, dress her burned eye, give her a whore's bath that relieves the pressure on her sore ass for a few beautiful moments. Though the procedures they carry out are invasive and often painful, these doctors have no real interest in prolonging her misery. Her care is simply another mundane aspect of the job. For that, perhaps, she should count her blessings.
The footsteps are now just outside the automatic door, the gait now familiar; her stomach drops at the rhythmic beeping of the passcode on the keypad, the hissing release of the lock. In her peripheral vision, the dark shape of her visitor slips quietly into the brightly-lit ward.
"Hello, Amelia," Doctor Easterman says.
Her anxiety curdles into disgust at the sound of his soft, slimy voice. It's been a long time since he last visited the ward. Of course, he must be busy fighting with the Board over whichever nightmare therapy he's most recently conjured up, or mainlining whatever unregulated substance he's currently hooked on. Why has he come here? To gloat once more about how he's turned the Reagents against her, against each other? Is he here to burn out her other fucking eye? Amelia wishes she could crane her neck to follow his movements around the room; from the sounds of it, he's pacing around the bed, each footstep slow and deliberate. He doesn't want anybody to know that he's here, yet he's still taking his sweet time. He probably thinks she has all the time in the world to listen to whatever he has to say for himself.
"I trust you can hear me," he says, low and venomous. "Locked in there. Unable to move a muscle, and yet everyone is still running around, cleaning up your mess. Nobody understands why you're still alive." He lets out a strained, tremulous sigh. "Perhaps they're right, and we should just exterminate you like the vermin you are. After all, so much is changing. So much has been... revealed to me. But you're..."
He exhales roughly, through clenched teeth. "You're unreachable," he hisses. "Liminal. Like a child not yet born."
Amelia is vaguely aware of him moving closer. The bed squeaks under his weight as he sits at her feet, bracketed by the metal railing on either side of the mattress. She can feel his eyes on her, his gaze slithering over her face, her body. Alarm begins to creep up her useless legs.
"I hope you know how much I hate you, Amelia," he whispers. It sounds like he might be crying.
Easterman adjusts his position, turning fully so that he can crawl up over her legs. True fear washes over her, the kind of utter terror that would paralyse her if she were not already incapacitated. One skeletal hand reaches out for her. The surreal abomination of his touch, the feather-light brush of his fingertips over her brow, the bridge of her nose, the oxygen mask covering her mouth. His face finally comes into view, and Amelia feels as though she might vomit. He looks... different, somehow. More alive. His eyes are wet and shining, the pupils blown.
What has happened to him? Amelia wonders. She's never seen him like this; she doubts anybody has.
Without warning, he pulls the oxygen mask roughly from her face. The sudden loss of support sends blind panic coursing through her veins; she can live without the additional air supply, but she doesn't want to have to. The surprise is so disarming that for a split second, she doesn't realise that Easterman is lowering his face to hers.
He kisses her so lightly at first that if it wasn't for her open eye, she would hardly know it was happening.
Amelia's entire body plunges into an icy abyss, so cold that it burns. The shock numbs the revulsion to a totally new sensation, an absolute absence of feeling. White noise crackles softly in her skull, static eating away her brain.
It's strange, the instantaneous relief from all of that pure, stomach-crushing anguish. Clear-eyed and empty, Amelia can observe what is happening to her body, what is being done to it, as if she is not herself. As if she were just another doctor, secretly watching Easterman loom over her body from the height of a security camera. Her face is rubbery and uncompromising under his hands - he’s trying to keep her head from flopping to the side, and she’s mostly just embarrassed for him, now. His wedding band is cold against her jaw - why hasn’t he taken it off?
Easterman tries to push his tongue into her mouth, and Amelia wants to laugh blithely in his face.
You're pathetic, she tells him, the words dying inside of her. Sneaking off at night just so you can molest the next best thing to a corpse? You sick fucking animal.
She thinks he might be muttering something against her slack lips, something low and cruel and desperate. Whatever he's saying is none of her business; her hearing's mostly gone, by now. It's as if she's hearing everything from underwater.
Everything is cold and quiet and so, so far away.
Easterman pulls his face away from hers, and looks down at her expectantly, waiting for her to stir. Like she's a princess trapped in a long, dark dream, and he truly believes that his kiss will be the very thing to draw her out of it. Nothing happens, of course. Amelia is still the same fucking brain-in-a-jar she was a minute ago. A strange succession of emotions pass over his face: doubt, then disappointment, then rage, then self-pity, then self-hatred.
He lifts himself off of her, wordlessly. If he wasn't crying fully before, he is now. Amelia can hear his every inhale hitching wetly in his throat. He remembers the oxygen mask, and fits it back onto her mouth with shaky hands, then steps back from her as if he can't stand to touch her again, in the wake of his failure.
The relief is immediate, but as soon as she takes her first clear breath, all bodily sensation comes flooding back. Amelia suddenly feels as though she's been gutted, like Easterman hollowed her out and crawled inside of her. The shifting of the bed as he climbs off and straightens up makes her want to scream.
He stands at the foot of her bed for a long, lingering moment, and then he is gone. Amelia hears him fumbling with the exit passcode, then the sound of his shoes slapping the linoleum as he starts to run.
He doesn't slow down until he's out of earshot.
Amelia lies there, the same way she always has; the way it's starting to seem like she always will.
He'll never get what he wants from me, she tells herself, so that it doesn't feel so much like dying. He can do whatever he likes to my body, but he'll never get his hands on my mind. I'm gonna get out of here. I have to.
I'm alive. I'm winning. I'm alive.