Immortals

Interlude // Shane

Once upon a time, I had heard of white rooms being used as a form of torture. Sensory deprivation could make someone go mad.

Admittedly, I wasn't at that point yet, but if I had to lay there, restrained in a sterile white operating room for much longer, I didn't doubt I would snap.

It was almost funny, actually, that thought. My last moments with my mind and I would spend them losing my mind before it was even stolen from me. The irony of it all.

I wanted to cry for myself, let myself feel some sort of self pity, but I couldn't. I had already used up all of my tears. Whether it was minutes or hours ago that the stock was depleted, I didn't know, but my eyes were too dry to replenish them.

This was the end of my life, and I couldn't even cry about it anymore. Maybe that was a symptom of white room madness. Maybe it wasn't and I was just being dramatic. Maybe I'd never know. I didn't know what scenario was correct.

Although maybe the correct answer was "completely and utterly fucked," if I was guessing based off of the tone of my torturer, who was entering the room.

"Fucking bitch and her fucking crack addict friend broke into my house and fucking escaped, fuck them," she muttered as she walked into the room, words slightly muffled by a medical mask and the scrubs that concealed her. "Pretty sure they stole classified documents too, those little shits. We'll see what happens when their little hideout is gone."

I wasn't sure if my heart was catching in my throat or if I was suppressing an urge to laugh. In my heart there was fear for the Land of Escapees, a place that, from what I could tell, was gone. It was a place that was supposed to be safe, and was found by the people it was meant to hide us from. But at the same time, something in me wanted to laugh at the circumstances. My friends, my partners in crime, broke into an official's house and stole classified documents. Even more amazingly still, they may have gotten away with it. While I wasn't sure who it was, although by the name "crack addict" I could assume that Emery was involved, I could make an educated guess that they were looking for any clue or indication that they could find me and save me before it was too late.

Before it was too late.

It was too late, I realized as the thought cut through my psyche. It was too late for me, and possibly for them. It definitely was for the Land of Escapees. The night I was living in this sterile room was a night of endings that would not bring themselves to beginnings that I would have a chance to see, because I was one of the endings of the night.

And as she came closer to the bed with each echoing footstep in the room, the end of me was also coming closer, closing in on the last shreds of myself that I was trying to hold onto.

The battle I had spent years fighting, the one against the government and their rules, was lost. I was a fallen soldier, a casualty of war.

I wasn't ready to go yet, but it wasn't up to me.

"This won't hurt."

Her voice held a hint of sarcasm as a needle pricked through my arm, a toxin running through my veins within seconds.

This won't hurt.

I could feel myself slipping out of consciousness, my last thoughts before the government took over my mind slipping away along with it.

I'm not ready to go yet.

I need to keep fighting.

What about Mia, Ashe, Emery, and Parker?

This can't be happening.

This can't be...