Burned Alive

1

He woke up, his joints stiff and his head aching. He sat up, only to hear the popping of his own bones, the bruises from the day before coming into his view.

His bed creaked under his weight and he wished it would finally give in and break just so he wouldn't have to hear it complain every morning.

He pushed his hair away from his eyes, groaning when he felt the pain in his right hand become more intense and he brought it down to inspect the how swollen it had gotten overnight. He bit his lip when he saw how deep purple and red it had turned in the night and mentally slapped himself for sleeping on it, which he was sure had only made it worse.

He pushed aside his pain and looked around the room, the same room he'd woken up to for the last 20 years. Nothing had changed, but he had. He was no longer the little 3 year old who was afraid of the dark room he was shut and locked in at night, he had learned to love the darkness and the being alone with it. He had grown into a man in this room, listening to the voices in his head and the doctors in their white coats in their white rooms as they tried to "help" him. He had changed, but not in every way. He still carried around that burning hate that ate away at him every day he was alive.

"Gage?" He looked away from the concrete wall to see the nurse in her all-white uniform with that fake smile on her face.

"Breakfast is ready whenever you are." He told him before looking down at her clipboard she help closely.

He slowly stood up, knowing what would come next. The handcuffs. The nurse smiled at him as she placed the handcuffs on his wrists and then led him through the empty and white hallway.

He could fight, refuse to allow this pathetic women to handcuff him. But he'd tried that many times over the past years and he was always reminded of how terrible a doctor can treat you if you refuse to cooperate. He didn't want to go back to wearing a straight jacket and being taken away to have himself be tortured.

The nurse led him down the hall and into the familiar room where he walked in and sat down, alone as always. He was brought a tray of food and he sat alone and ate alone, left to stare at the other fellow asylum patients who sat alone at their tables, handcuffed and as alone as he was.

But what he hated about it, was that they all stared back at him. They all wanted to see what made him so different from them. They wanted to see what he was most ashamed of. What he hated with all that he was. He felt his anger build up again, knowing that they all stared at him, that they knew he was different, and that he couldn't change it.

"Gage? Your father is here to see you." He turned his head to see another nurse he didn't care to recognize. He searched the white wall in front of him until he found the old wall clock and he saw the hours that had passed since they'd brought him in for breakfast. He didn't know that much time had passed, he didn't care.

He was once again led through the white and empty hall back to his cell, which everyone else called a room, and he walked in and sat down on his creaking bed and waited for someone to speak to him again.

"You're looking happy as ever." He recognized the voice of his father, his real father, but he didn't look up from where he had began staring at the floor. His hair was pushed away from his face and he felt the presence of his father standing in front of him.

"It's time for you to get a haircut, it's nearly past your shoulders." His father laughed. But Gage just pulled his head away, allowing his hair to cover his face once again.

"Son...look at me, please." Gage lifted his face enough to see his father, though he made no attempt to push his hair out of the way. And his father was met only with the cold stare from his son, his blind eye staring at him as well.

It was something James hated, seeing his son. He did love his son, but seeing Gage in the situation he was in hurt him more than he imagined it ever would. Twenty years ago when he had him institutionalized, he thought it would help Gage. But in those years he saw his son brutalized at the hands of doctors, experimented on like he was a guinea pig, and treated like an animal. It had only helped in Gage's slow transformation into what he now was as he sat before his father. James forced himself to ignore the many scratchings into the concrete wall of the word "monster".

"They're treating you all right here, aren't they?" James asked, watching as Gage only continued to stare icily at his father, no emotion being given away.