|| Inevitable ||

XII

3 hours later...

The back of a hand meets my cheek gently. "Wake up," a gravelly voice says.

My head twitches a little due to the nerve I had been sleeping on. The white room is back. The bed is back. The tray is back at my side. Even a monitor stands beside me, a guardian angel that keeps track of my steady heart and watches over me.

A man, one I've never seen before in my life, stands to the side of my bed flicking at the IV tube hanging from its rack. "I never really understood why we bothered making people well again. I mean you're going to end up dying anyway. Am I right?" He tosses me a look over his shoulder as he walks over to the wall opposing my bed. Folding his arms, he leans back on the wall and gives me a slow look up and down. "It's nice to meet you, 21775."

I frown. "217 what?"

"You," he says smugly, raising a finger to point to me. "Are number 21775."

The blues in his eyes are darker when they are out of the reach of the light above me. They're haunting, but not nearly as haunting as ones I've seen before. I press my mind to remember a single pair that has indeed been more haunting, but I can't. Then all of a sudden, a flicker of grey dances in the corner of my mind's eye, a burst of silver fire.

What was that?

Shaking my head, I rub away the remnants of sleep from my eyes. "Uh, that's cool and all, but who are you?"

The stranger pushes himself off the wall. "Does it really matter?" He shrugs, a lopsided grin curving into his lips. "You don't know anyone else's names here."

"I know Julian's."

He skips over my objection without missing a beat. "Let me rephrase, you do not know the names of anyone important. Is that a fair assumption?"

Fair enough, I note in my mind. My kidnapper is obviously calling a large amount of the shots here, but this man appears older, sharper. He's kept his distance from me so far, even when by my bedside he was still a good three feet away. But in spite of this distance, I can still pick out the veins of silver running through his murky brown hair and the age engrained into his cheeks. I continue my slow assessment with narrowed eyes. He must look after himself, that's the only way the lines in his skin would be so barely noticeable. And he doesn't spend much time outside in the open, skin as pale as that can only be obtained through an unhealthy abstinence from the sun.

The man pulls at his collar, but the movement feels more careless than anxious, as if he couldn't be bothered to give me the time of day. "You're very pale..." I say slowly.

"Don't get out much."

Odd. "I guess that's fair enough. I'm a bit pale myself." I force a laugh to diffuse the tense mood but it does little to help. He is unnerving. There is something about him that just makes me want to run for my life and never look back; an itching feeling.

He breathes sharply out of his nose, something I'm certain, was meant to be a laugh. A mocking one at that. "You don't say," he scoffs.

"You know what, I don't know who you are, and quite frankly, I don't care at the moment," I take a pause when he narrows his eyes at me.

"You're a bit bitey aren't you? He didn't mention that over the phone."

"And you're a bit old and wrinkly." My words come out more sharply than I had intended. "And who is this he? Because no one has mentioned you. Actually I have no idea why I am being so civil. You're a stranger, probably a murderer like the other two, and yet I'm talking to you like I this is normal thing to do. I'm locked up in a house that has a labyrinth to let animalistic people loose in, this is anything but normal." I wrack my brain for answers. "Why? Why am I being so... normal?"