Strong For Too Long Trilogy ✔️

18. Another Rainy Day In The UK

CHAPTER 18: Another Rainy Day In The UK

Six months of it. I counted each day. I read each date. I listen to every single writhing tick of the clock in the hospitalised room where my scars dried up. My brain in shambled monstrosity and my limbs strengthening by their thin cords. I wasn't myself. But I wasn't theirs anymore either.

I wasn't trapped in a containment unit...but I was still watched, more so with other eyes than manipulative camera lens.

I couldn't feel a breeze like a could in the bunker I remember being held in for the smallest number of weeks. Maybe months. I don't know, I'm not sure, counting every second of every day wasn't a mindless act, but it was aiding in making my breathing shallow, my heart barely beat and my pulse lower to a rate that should have killed me. Yet, it almost felt as if nothing could kill me.

In the time I spent hanging...I surveyed my life for what it was, whether it was worth the kind of suffering I've been silenced into. The dreary, dark, deformed mind that I couldn't escape even if I tried and I'd never felt so lonely when surrounded by scientists, doctors, nurses with no ethical strategy, no human connection because I was a white rat in a blood red lab. Experimented on, drained and yet still alive.

Why that is...I still had no answer too. Despite desperately wanting an answer to one question. Who. Am. I?

Why did I allow this psychotic institution, this deranged facility and the even more deranged people within...tell me what to do, when to do it and how to survive, how to reflect pain once removed, how to numb it all up on the inside? Pain is subjective, remove that subjective and become an unstoppable, impenetrable, flawless subject in an experiment that should not have been approved of.

"Can you tell me your name?" Lucinda asked me.

I stare at her red high heel shoes. She looked to be so uncomfortable in such priceless shoes, as if her feet don't belong in their confining spaces, she sits there waiting patiently for an answer I couldn't give.

"I don't remember." I told her, my voice scratchy, unattractive. The lines of my drained veins inside my forearms were prominent, deadly and obscuring. I held in the harshest of breaths, whenever I needed to deeply breathe, it was impossible because no matter how hard I could have tried, it was a grilling process I no longer wanted to go through.

"Do you know how long you've been here?" She asks me next.

If I couldn't remember my own name, what made her think I could recall how long I'd been in this place. In a facility I didn't understand, when all I remember is Washington, that's all and even then, I couldn't tell where Washington was.

I look up at her, "I don't know."

"They have given you the designated Candidate Number of Candidate Eleven. You've been here for just over two years, your name before this was Olive Crane. You were eighteen years old when you enrolled in the programme, Eleven. Tell me, how are you feeling today?" She asks me, a question I don't know how to answer.

"I don't feel anything." I tell her, again, I couldn't stop being truthful.

"You've survived all eight stages. Congratulations, Eleven. They will now be training you to get back out into the field. Are you excited? You'll be let out in to the real world in a month's time. This is very good news. You've been doin very well, you should be proud of yourself." She says to me.

I blink, "I don't feel anything."

We were in the same position all over again.

Doctor Lucinda, if she even was a real doctor, sits at her desk, porcelain and perfected, with her glasses on, reading the file Doctor Elizabeth had given me to give to her when the chains were removed and I looked at my reflection, not at all understanding who I was. No make-up was needed, my curls were now natural, not necessary for any touch-ups, no need to change or alter. I stare at her blankly, as if I didn't recognise her.