The smell is the first thing Shouta notices and it takes every ounce of willpower not to retch. It's stinging his nose and eyes. An assault on his senses.
He looks around and for the first time in a long time he has no idea what to do.
There are large cylindrical containers much taller and wider than him littering the room and most of them are broken. Pieces of glass and a slime like substance cover the floor. There are so many. About sixty if he were to guess. But that's not the problem.
Shouta approaches the closest broken container and kneels down.
There is a body. A very small body. The child is naked and curled around themselves as though trying to keep warm.
The child's skin is a sickly blue and rigor mortis has long since set in.
The child is dead.
He looks up and sees his mission partner, Jin hovering over another body — another child — and his face is a stone block. The child has started to waste away.
The smell that burns his eyes is the smell of decomposing children.
This is a more a torture chamber than a lab. Shouta doesn't do anything and the anger that settles in his stomach is overwhelming, as though it's seeping through his very skin.
Their was a case a few years back, when he was still fresh to heroics, that had been about 60 infants who'd been kidnapped. By an underground organization, the media had theorized.
He looks down and the child in front of him — dead, and so, so small — and he wonders if he'll be able to hold back if he ever lays his eyes on that so called doctor.
He knows for a fact Hizashi wouldn't. Nemuri wouldn't.
He and Jin hey move on to another room at the end of the hall and his fellow hero's face cracks as though someone had punched him and he tenses as hard as a springboard.
Jin has a daughter of his own if Shouta remembers correctly.
He looks at Shouta and there's a distinct look of horror that's in his eyes. Shouta moves, standing up and comes up next to Jin in several long strides. He looks down the hall, and he feels all the breath leave him.
There's one container center of this empty room, a faint green light emits from it. It's full.
(The boy was just there. Floating in a vial of liquid. Nearly lifeless.)
He and Jin approach, he can feel the hesitance in his steps and the hesitance in his own.
He wants to know but there is very large part of him that doesn't. He wants to be able to save just one of these children but, there's a quiet part of him that almost wishes maybe all of them had died. That way, they wouldn't have to live knowing everything was taken from them by a madman who wanted nothing more than a power for his own use.
They stand in front of the tank and for a moment they're silent.
The water is an unearthly green and the only sound is the soft mechanics of the cylinder. There is a child inside. Small, just far too small. And naked. His big, purple eyes are open and he stares at them. Clearly distressed.
Shouta's feet feel planted to the ground, and he doesn't know what to do. It's a ridiculous notion. He's a hero. Jin is a hero. They're both underground hero's who've seen far too many people die to still have all their screws in place, but they're both stuck.
There is a child in a tank. Shouta may have maimed and injured too many people (villains perhaps, but still people) without a second thought to really be considered a person of good moral standing — but, Shouta thinks, at least we didn't experiment on children, at least we didn't kill them in the name of knowledge, at least we don't leave kids to die slowly and who knows how painfully.
YOU ARE READING
A myriad of us here (but they're pointing up at our sun)
Fanfiction"Dead," the boy utters. He looks at him in surprise, as does the rest of the team. The child's voice was somewhat scratchy. "Friends. Dead friends." Hearing this they had realized that he must have seen all of the children die from the experimentati...
