Classroom X

day minus two thousand: rage

The boy would never forget the day they started calling him the Angel of Death. It was a gloomy day, like all of his other days were. It was the day they crossed the last line. The day they killed his twin brother; and the day he turned a killer.

They'd come to him in the morning, two burly soldiers the size of bears. Or maybe he was just thinking that because he was too small in comparison—reedy and sickly with bones jutting out all over his thin frame. It had been freezing all night, and he was glad to be out of the dungeon, glad to have the chains off his wrists and ankles. He knew nothing good ever happened if they took you out of your cell—either they killed you, or experimented on you until you really wished they'd rather kill you. No matter how many times it happened to him, how many times he saw it happening to the other kids, he could never get used to it. But he was still glad to be going somewhere that was warmer; It had been so long since he'd been allowed outside the dungeons.

When they reached the laboratory, he immediately knew what they wanted him to do. It wasn't hard to guess after he saw the brown rabbit they'd clamped to a board on the counter. His stomach turned. They wanted him to kill it.

He took a few more steps. He saw his brother.

His blood chilled.

What was his brother doing there?

He kept his face unreadable as he shuffled closer to the counter. He was forced to live through so many of the horrendous facets of the experiments—electrodes and biochemical tanks and spinal injections—but this was the part he hated the most. The part where they asked him to take a life.

When they brought their batch to the facility for the first time, each kid was paired up. This was because the Doctors wanted each pair to grow to be friends, that sometime during the hellish life that was going to be foisted on them, they would come to trust and care for each other. They'd be the shoulder for the other to lean on. And then they would start playing with you, like how a cat would play with a mouse. They'd turn your partner into your weakness,  use them to get you to do what they wanted you to do.

They would take each pair out of their shared cells together. They would tie one up and ask the other to kill a small animal, or hit one of the other kids with a cane. And if they refused to do it, their friend would be punished. This was an exercise that forced them to be cruel so they could protect the ones who they truly loved. An exercise they conducted routinely. He had seen the other kids break because of this, only, that was exactly what the Doctors wanted them to be—broken.

Because, the broken ones were the ones who had a heart, the ones who cared. And for some reason, the doctors seemed to favour the ones who still had a heart.

His brother was his weakness. So he pretended to hate his brother so the Doctors would leave him alone. He made them believe that his brother was the one who had more potential than him, that his brother should be the one in their duo that they should be trying not to damage. They would chain up his brother to a post, order him to kill a kitten if he didn't want to see his brother lashed within an inch of his life. He'd just grin at them like a fiend and pick up the knife. Then he'd cut the heart out of the kitten and eat it raw, when it would still be beating. Once he was finished he'd lick the blood on his fingers as though he'd had the most delicious meal in the world, and that the blood was dessert. If they asked him to hit one of the other kids he'd do it without hesitation. He'd make his victims cry out for him to stop, and then he would laugh at their pain.

He showed them that they couldn't break him, because he was already a broken thing which someone had tried to put back together in the wrong way. He pretended he was inherently evil, that he was a cold-blooded psychopath with a heart of stone. That he wasn't killing those kittens because they were threatening him with his brother, but because he truly enjoyed doing it. There were moments when he thought he'd become what he was pretending to be. He didn't mind. He cared about things he cared about, and didn't care about things he didn't care about. He would be a monster if he had to be. It was fine. Because his brother had enough heart for the both of them.

So the Doctors stopped. They stopped using his brother to threaten him; instead they used him to threaten his brother. Naturally, he didn't want his brother to suffer a moral dilemma, and so he started being awful to him as a means to help him out. So his brother would have an excuse to choose to watch him get whipped instead of doing something he didn't want to do.

It was his little rebellion. He'd shown the Doctors that when it came to him, they'd have no victory. He could see it in their eyes that he troubled them, and that was his share of happiness in this world.

So when he saw his brother next to the squirming rabbit, locked down on a chair with thick chrome chains, his heart chilled like the blood in it had frozen to ice. But this time the soldier standing over his brother wasn't holding a whip. He was holding a gun to his head.

Calmly, hyper-conscious of his every move, he strode up to the counter and peered down at the faintly struggling rabbit. He stroked its fur gently, a perfect, psychotic smile hitched to his face. He didn't even spare a glance in his brother's direction when he drawled in a deceptively smooth voice. "Where's the knife? Don't you want me to kill this beauty?"

There were about eight Doctors in the lab that day, faces suppressing some sort of wicked anticipation, stark white lab coats a scourge to his eyes. He thought it was strange. Usually there would only be one or two of them  present at scene to oversee an experiment. He wondered why it was different this time.

"We need you to kill it without touching it," one of the Doctors instructed.

"What?" His face snapped up in incredulity. Did he hear them right? Or had they really driven him to lunacy that he was hearing peculiar things?

"Kill it without touching it," said the same Doctor. "Or your brother dies."

His eyes jumped to the gun pointed at his brother, to his brother's vacant eyes. "But doing that is impossible!"

"Then I suppose you don't mind us killing your brother."

The soldier changed his stance.

"Wait!" he called out, desperation creeping into his voice despite himself. He thought it might be a riddle they wanted him to solve. That they were expecting him to think out of the box."Tell me how I can do it."

"You'll have to figure out that part on your own."

"You can't do this!"

"Why?" One of the other Doctors sneered. He had wire spectacles and a clipboard in his hand, positioned to take notes. "We were under the impression that your brother meant nothing to you."

His lips had gone dry, and a tremble had started at the base of his spine. What was he to do now? What did they expect him to do? "Just stop this." he half-pleaded. "If you want me to kill the rabbit, I'll kill it. Just give me a damn knife!"

"Kill it without touching it or your brother dies," repeated the Doctor with infuriating evenness of tone. He looked like it was really a possibility.

"I don't know how to do it!"

"Then it's just your bad luck." The Doctor motioned to the soldier.

The soldier released the safety of the gun.

"Don't!" he shouted out.

The soldier pulled the trigger. His brother's body slumped forward almost instantly, but didn't fall off the chair because he was being held in place by the chains.

The bullet had gone right through his brother's brain. His brother was dead.

Fury welled up inside him like geyser shooting to the surface, hot and simmering. He screamed in grief and rage and hatred, screamed at himself, at his own impotence. In the end, all of it had been for nothing.

He charged forward like the crazed beast he was, snarling, eyes unfocused, thinking only of hurting his brother's murderers. There was nothing else in his mind.

And then his world turned the shade of blood.