The Retriever Institute

One Hell to the Next

In the darkness, words seep into his skull. "There is little in this world that is truly well defined by two opposite words. People tend to skip steps because of this, listing night or day and forgetting dusk and dawn, the time between dog and wolf, the golden hour. There are so many things in between. So, when you think of people you think good and bad. Evil and riotous.

Well, the truth is? People are never just good or bad, they're just people with motivations. Those motivations can cause their actions to affect some people positively, and some people negatively. Those whose actions affect more people negatively than positively are deemed evil. Those whose actions affect more people positively than negatively, are deemed good. But, is it really all that simple? Or is the true evil, ignoring the vastness of truth?"

The sound echoes in his skull, but it ends with ringing, a high pitched echo of nothingness.

There's darkness, and blinding light. X' hands come to shield his eye sockets, but he finds they don't budge. Everything is blurry, hazy and unreal. He still hears the whispering voice of the doctor echoing through the dark. (Distantly he thinks that's not possible, as he watched him dust with a knife in his back meer days ago.) As he looks around, the figures at the edge of the light spin like colorful dreidels. X can barely think. There's a sickness bubbling up in his chest that makes his soul clench. Everything feels wrong.

X forces his magic outward, trying to feel at the edge of his awareness as his sight spins and blurs despite being almost completely still.

Then, everything jolts sharply and suddenly his skull bangs against the cold metal floor and he's pulled into a sick nothingness.

Meer moments of awareness seeping through the nothing, making it feel like seconds before he opened his eyes again.

It's dark again, but everything is perfectly still. He can't move, there's a bruising force keeping him in place. He's sitting up, not on the floor. His bones ache. It's cold. His magic can't spread out to take in his surroundings, it's stuck close by. All of the information comes rushing to him.

It makes him feel dizzy.

His vision still blurrs, and the light makes his head spin. As he looks around, the world around him drags with the movement of his eyelights, bleeding like watercolor saturating thin paper, making it ripple and churn.

There's a figure at the edge of the darkness, and it watches him with one gleaming eye.

"... awake?" The figure asks. Part of it blurrs into static, like he hears the words but they mean nothing.

The figure's mouth is moving. Sharp white teeth peek from it, but he can't understand the words. X' self comes back to him all at once, like it stopped floating around him to lurch back into his body. He can hear everything, it's so loud, too loud. It smells like dust and fresh water that's been still in pools on the floor for far too long. His hands flex against the force holding them down, and what seems to be rope grits against his wrists.

"¿Dónde estoy?" X asks to the figure. The figure murmurs something under his breath, seemingly perplexed. X tries again, vaguely thinking that something hadn't been right. "Where am I?" He asks, though his accent is laden in his voice in a way it usually isn't. That used to make the doctor so mad. (Used to...) X grits out a grin at the thought of his dust laying in a neat pile on the floor.

"A secure research facility."

"Mandar a algn a la mierd-"

The figure meerly rolls his eyes, "Stars above, calm down."

"¡Hazme!" X barks, magic sparking with defensive intent.

"Don't be so dramatic, Peñaloza. I just want to know what you know... You did destroy the only place we could get that information, after all. We only want to help." The reassurance was false and totally ungiving of any comforts.