Days Union Oneshot Book [DISCONTINUED]

honestly... work

A/N: Request from @MYCOPHOBIA

WHY DID THIS HURT SO MUCH TO WRITE WTF...

* * *

The first thing I heard was a beep—a beep all too familiar. Following the cue of the sound, my eyelids lifted open like a mechanism to awaken to the scene before me. The tall test tubes glowing with cyan glass, other clones herded like sheep through the facility, and the smell of the putrid biological gel for developing clones greeted me like a nostalgic memory replayed once again. I had become too accustomed to waking up here to deem any of it bizarre; besides, my mind was already overwhelmed with another concern.

"You. Over here." A woman in a white lab coat took me by the arm and dragged me out of the main aisle of priming tubes. From her coat and swinging nametag, I recognized her as one of the scientists working here, though I could not discover her name was 'Laska' without the guidance of the nametag's label. She sat me down on one of the scattered chairs and looked down at her clipboard stacked with an inch-thick's worth of papers, presumably about the other clones.

"Name?" she asked curtly, not even looking up at me. I showed no shock, as I had already remembered the rudeness of the staff from my past lives.

My tongue answered before my brain could, "Evyth Undom." Over the years, I learned to crack a smile when my mouth remembered the habitual reflexes before I had to rack every crevice of my memory to find out what my name was. At least this run, I was not forgetting the most important thing.

"Age?" Her pen tapped impatiently as her gaze darted over the group of newly-created clones having their first panic at their awakening. They thrashed against the touch of the soldiers, who responded with a few warning gunshots that awakened the dust of the foundation above. We all should have been used to the gunshots, but their loud cracks still managed to make a few of us flinch.

"T-Twenty-five..." I answered, my head flooded with too much adrenaline to feel the relief of yet another detail remembered.

She gulped down the lump in her throat and continued to scribble down notes with a shaky hand. "Occupation?"

"Tailor for Comet Tailoring." The crowd of clones had calmed down by now—well, the ones still alive. The ones far too panicked to obey orders had failed their first test and had been deemed too defective to function in society, all decided by the soldier's trigger. Now, their bodies were dragged off to be morphed into food clones, their only chance at a true life now lost forever.

The scientist signed off on a waiver and handed it to me, her signature rushed and the ink still spotty from her lack of effort. "The map will guide you around the city in case you forgot any details. Your work is expecting you to come in on time today." As she walked off, I located my home by the messy red circle she had drawn at the facility of Comet Tailoring. She could not even wish me luck in this new life.

Whatever. I should have expected it.

I showed the waiver to the guard at the door, who gave a short nod and opened the door for me. The sunshine, although dim through the dense clouds, still blinded my new eyes untrained to natural light of day. It would take quite a bit to get used to this new life, but I had done it before.

What was another run to me? I already knew all I needed to know: my name, age, and occupation. Enough to survive, enough to live, enough to cheat death successfully once again.

That was living, right?

* * *

The soft whirs of the sewing machine filled the tiny office room, its mundane drone sometimes broken by a clearing of a throat or an exhausted sigh. My first day back on the job brought the memories of my past lives flooding back, like the memory of the time we broke the coffee machine at the sip of the terrible coffee. I managed to recall the name of my boss long enough to apologize for my sudden disappearance at the hands of a Daybreaker's gun (that's what the remnants of the memory leading up to my death recalled, anyway). He shrugged it aside and told me to catch up with my work, which had piled up while I was gone.