The Wall

The Happiest Days Of Our Lives

Time was immeasurable as he lay there, his view of the ceiling unobstructed save for the occasional condensation produced by his breaths. He thought of nothing in those moments, he wasn't sure how, why, or how to replicate it. To an extent, he wasn't anything at all, as lacking in life as the unforgiving floor beneath him.

To an extent, he found his peace. Such a thing could not exist in his life, he'd surmised, so now in these moments where he enjoyed the separation of consciousness from reality, he knew his peace, as meaningless and superficial as it was. He may have laid there for an eternity, as far as he knew. Without comprehension of his surroundings, a frame of reference, after he awoke from this catatonia, would be the only manner of discerning time.

He did awake, of course. Even the facade of peace was a tentative thing. The ship had an unnatural stillness to it, no faint vibrations of footfall, no zephyr of entropic air. As such, when a sudden lurching caused his more distant appendages to shift ever softly to the side before returning to their corpse-like stillness, Rocket was awoken from his mental slumber.

Perhaps a loose piece of orbiting detritus bored a hole through his vessel, he'd certainly welcome the assistance in passing on that a total exsanguination of oxygen from the vessel could bring. Undoubtedly this planet had satellites, and space by nature, turned even insignificant flotsam into death sentences through speed and well-placed impact.

Secondly, a rush of warm air provided a loathful reminder of his physical body. The silent fantasies of becoming no more than a transient observer of the world's trepidations were trammeled by the warmth. He was far too numb to discern where the heat originated and flowed by sensation alone, but the breeze of his condensed breath seemed to flow opposite of the heat, caused by a change in air pressure.

The air flowed towards his feet. While this vessel did its best to maintain the oxygen within the craft, its ventilation cutoffs were far from sufficient, and slowly the air pressure had begun to drop from the moment of atmospheric escape, now suddenly rising in response to docking with another craft. The cargo ramp had been opened, both vessels now participating in a shared airflow.

Though much of his sensations were either numbed or dulled, his sensitive ears betrayed the presence of an invader boarding his ship. The warnings fell unto an uncaring mind, though, its owner already resigning himself to the whims of whoever found him first. His ship was small, and his presence on the floor just past the ramp was impossible to miss. Before long, he found himself staring unfocused at the masked visages of his intruders.

Two humanoids entered his ship, recognized not by identifiable facial structure or body type, but by the standardized, all covering, thick, impenetrable uniform of guards, sparsely planted though spotted frequently throughout the facility by Rocket during numerous of his journeys outside the cage. They primarily existed to facilitate testing on animals more abundant in natural self defense mechanisms. Should one of these experiments resort to violent indignation during an assessment, execution was the natural response, or nonlethal subjugation if the animal has proven nascent.

Their confirmation of the raccoon's maintained vitality came in the form of his condensed breaths, as he otherwise gave no external response to the various stimuli he was subjected to, including a brief communication confirming their success, their stern verbal commands in tandem with the readying of their rifles, or the tight, disdainful hold they placed on his forearms after a brief confirmation of instruction through their earpieces brought about by his ignorance of their initial demands.

His head hung loosely, his neck growing irritated at every slight bounce of his cranium that accompanied their footfall. Physical perturbances were mere sensations like all others, the whole of which emotional resignation benumbed. Death and man were divorced from each other's grasps, the latter pertaining to comprehension, as opposed to the literal interpretation of the former.