The Wilds

I - Orion

   The first time 0872 died was also the first time he caught a glimpse of 1343. It hadn’t been much per se; barely more than a hint of a scent he didn’t yet know how to describe in words. As he grew older, the search for these same words would be one of the few things 0872 grabbed onto with all his might to try and maintain his sanity - just like when counting each drop in a drip that formed under his window every time it rained, he would go over all the descriptive words he knew again and again, desperate to find something suitable yet failing every single time.

   The convulsions had begun around the time he turned thirteen – as he overheard Dr. Tennison tell a nurse, and, much like provoked by a trigger, started coming at increasingly shorter gaps, out of nowhere and with a brute, bruising strength. The first time had been the worse, the deep shaking of his bones making him hit his head against the iron headboard of his bed till a deep cut opened on his hairline. Four security guards had to climb atop 0872 to restrain him, and even that proved unsuccessful as he somehow managed to throw two of them powerfully to the ground. The convulsion only stopped when a transparent, warm and slimy liquid was injected into his arm. And then again, only for a few days.

   When his heart finally started failing, the heart rate monitor by the side of his bed spiking to a crazy rate as his heart beat so fast that for a moment 0872 thought it would burst out of his chest, Dr. Tennison at last determined he should be taken to the medical wing. Strapped to the bed by his wrists and ankles, a piece of cloth stuck in his mouth so his teeth wouldn’t clack, 0872 left his room for the first time in his life.

   As he took in the outside world around him, nothing more than a brightly lit corridor with walls painted an unnerving shade of light green, 1343’s scent was the first thing that greeted him. And he never really forgot it.

   By the time his heart decided to fully stop just as they arrived at the medical wing, 0872’s eyes were sealed shut, and the darkness that surrounded him, like a soft bubble shielding his being from all the outside noises and sensations, felt restful, soothing even. But there, at the back of his mind, was a little glimpse of consciousness, small and insignificant yet growing louder by the second. And as much as 0872 did not know the words to argue with himself, he was aware of the very unmistakable idea behind them: he couldn’t give up so easily. He couldn’t simply cease to exist. He couldn’t leave her.

   So he fought. Fought the darkness that threatened to envelop him. Fought his body’s need to surrender to it. Fought the drugs that poisoned his system to make him motionless and vulnerable. As a deep flow of energy, violent in its discharge burst its way into his chest, 0872 grabbed onto it. Again and again, four times and for what felt like hours, until his eyes shot open and despite the cloth in his mouth, he growled.

    Just by her scent, 0872 could tell it was a she and that she had been in distress, her fear all-consuming as he fought the urge to bathe on it, to chase it as one would a terrified rabbit - the hair on the back of his neck standing up as instinct build its way into a threat to overpower him. Yet, apart from the panic he could read on her scent just as well as he was able to tell his walls were white, 0872 could also smell her anger. Rage, even. It fuelled his own. And now that he knew how to trace her scent even at its faintest, giving him a general idea of her whereabouts – the room next to his, he believed – that anger never really left him. It crept its way inside his chest and took residence, now belonging to him just as much as her. It was a mighty drive, the very own thing that kept him opening his eyes on the mornings and forcing the raw meat the guards served him down his throat. To what he owed his survival was a mystery, but then again why not make the most of it and plot revenge?

   He made a promise to himself: he would leave that room – that f*****g cage one day, and he would take 1343 with him.

   It took months and months before he finally met her, so many he lost all track of count. A year passed, then two – or at least so he thought. Two years of poorly restrained convulsions, now decreasing in quantity thanks to Tennison’s medication, of laying all day on his bed listening to the guards talking in the courtyard below his window, of whispering their words to himself until they shaped themselves into meaning. Two years of endless anger building, frustration carving its way deep in his bones. Violent in its nature, 0872’s rage kept him from being compliant to Tennison’s experiments anymore, growling and roaring till some guard had to shoot him down with sedatives.

   And then he found the stain. Anticlimactic as it was, the revelation of finding something different in his room after all those years of the same smooth walls painted a blinding white, the heart rate monitor, the iron bed screwed to the floor, and a single oddly placed toilet, he was almost glad to find it. Kneeling on the ground next to it, near the wall’s footer, he could tell it was nothing more than a humidity smirch, light grey and almost imperceptible against the pale wall. As he touched it with the tip of his fingers, 0872 could just about feel the drywall shift and sink lightly beneath his digits. He scratched a small hole in it and brought his face closer until it levelled with the gap. 1343’s scent hit him with full force.

   Needing no more encouragement than that, 0872 began punching the hole with bruising strength and in repeated, nearly automatic movements. His knuckles ached, the force of his hits drawing blood and staining the wall in front of him with spots of crimson red, but he solemnly ignored it. Blinding white paint began giving way to a brownish plaster as he half punched half dig his way in. 0872 figured he was likely making too much noise and could get in trouble, but that notion was quickly overweighed by the need to get to 1343, the pacing of his punches growing desperate, the underside of his fingernails thick with mortar to the point he could hardly feel them.

   Hands sore, bruised purple and with slashes on the knots, 0872 only quit striking when the plaster gave way to a faint light, no sound coming from the other side other than the familiar rhythmic beep of another heart rate monitor. He deepened the edges of the hole with his fingers, tearing off pieces of dry plaster despite the growing numbness of his digits. When the hole appeared to be big enough to fit his hand, 0872 once again levelled his face with it.

   He felt the scrape on his forehead more than saw her claws.

   Jumping back a notch, his back met the foot of the bed painfully as 0872 registered the coppery scent of the blood that began pouring out of his forehead. Ignoring the throb both on his back, hands, and now above his eyebrow, he approached the hole yet again only to have to dodge the second charge of her claws. 1343 hits were frantic, do-or-die being the word that came to his mind. She was afraid, he could tell that much, yet her reaction to fear seemed to be a desperate attempt to fight for survival instead of the very own silent abidance he used to be guilty of.

   She smelled of something different than both himself and the wing staff, something he couldn’t quite place but that made his instincts spike with caution. And with said caution, he waited for her hand to strike once more, it being scantily a second out of the hole before he snatched her wrist. She hissed and trashed against him with renewed vigour, but 0872 held her on a firm grip, palm up facing him, bending her wrist slightly downwards so her claws were out of reach. Her hand was similar to his own, though smaller, but where his fingers gave way to standard short nails, hers were long and bent at so sharp of an angle they reminded him more of the surgical knives from the medical wing than proper nails.

   As he studied her hand, 1343 charged around him, seemingly torn between pulling her hand from his grip or reaching out to scratch him. Her noises, distressed snarls and hisses most often, came increasingly faster, and 0872 had to leap out of the way of a second hand barely before its claws scraped his knee. Feeling patience leave his body, 0872 succumbed to his instincts, urging him to claim dominance as they were, and gave a mighty warning growl. Half expecting 1343 to give up fighting, he was surprised when she answered him with a hostile, furious hiss.

   He growled again, this time louder, more threatening, and in the few seconds of reluctant silence on her part that followed, he voiced:

    “I’m not one of them” his voice sounded thick, halfway between a shrill and a grunt when he tried it. Never having spoken much more than whispered words, the syllables flowed out sloppy and hoarser than he meant to. As his talking was met only with silence, 0872 tried again: “do you speak?”.

    “Yes” came the answer after a few seconds of heavy  silence. Her voice was lighter than 0872’s, sharper even, yet just as broken and husky as his. “Not much”.

    “I’ll let you go, okay? Don’t scratch me” 0872 voiced and heard her hiss at the commanding tone in his voice. Deciding to ignore it, he slowly let go of her wrist, eyes never leaving the sharp claws of her nails as she retracted her hand back through the hole.

   He remained silent for a while, waiting to see if she would say anything. He wished for her to talk, but as frustration build its familiar way inside his chest, 0872 realized he had no idea how. He had a vague sense of needing to sound approachable, perhaps even friendly, but how in the world would he phrase it in a way that made any sense? He waited for the words to pop into his head like a miracle but gave up as he was just met with a feeling of stupidity and a numbing headache.

    “Why did you put hole in the wall?” she finally said, sentence barely phrased like a question.

    “I don’t know” was the only thing he could answer, the truth.

   More silence, this time for what felt like an eternity. For almost twenty minutes, none of them said anything, though he could hear her irregular breathing and the beep of the heart rate monitor through the whole.

    “Did I hurt you? I can smell blood” she finally said. 0872 was now sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall next to the hole. Forearms resting on knees and ears perked up to all the sounds 1343 made, he had noticed she was scenting him by the low sound of sniffing.

    “A scratch. It doesn’t hurt” he answered, tracing the cut that now ran through his left eyebrow with the tip of his fingers. Drawing his hand back to look at it, he noticed there was very little blood. “Was not deep, either”.

    “I’m sorry” came 1343’s answer, though so uneager he had to bite back a laugh.

    “It’s fine” he managed to answer.

   They fell into a comfortable silence, the tension seemingly growing faint by the second. 0872 let his head fall back, leaning against the wall behind him, and closed his eyes. The pain on his knuckles was beginning to get to him, and he wondering if he hadn’t perhaps broken a finger or two. Eyes opened again, he tried moving his hand, slowly opening and closing his fingers into a fist. It hurt but was not unbearable.

    “Why do you talk to me?” came her question, waking him from his stupor.

    “There’s no one else” 0872 replied after a few seconds, gaze locked into his aching hand and teeth grazing his bottom lip as he tried curling each finger toward his palm. The index finger worked, and so did his middle and ring fingers, but he had to choke back a grunt of pain when trying with his little finger. Yep, definitely broken.

    “Did you go outside?” 1343 asked.

    “Ever?” he asked and continued after hearing her breathed out ‘yes’: “Once, but I was sick. Don’t remember much. Did you?”.

    “Did I what?”.

    “Go outside, leave the room”.

    “Once. I escaped” she muttered, and 0872 found himself so surprised he left his spot leaning on the wall and crouched next to the hole, ignoring the pain on his hands from leaning his body weight on them.

    “You did? Did it work?” he asked, holding his breath without realizing.

    “Well I’m still here”

   0872 rolled his eyes, but answered anyway: “You know what I mean”.

    “Yes,” 1343 uttered after a moment where she seemed to consider her answer. “It can scare you”.

    “What?”

    “The story of my escape, it can scare you” she mumbled, seeming to search for her words more carefully this time. As frustrating as the conversation was as if they were both walking on a very fragile, thin line of understanding, the feeling of hearing and replying, having to make sense of the words before daring them out of his lips, as foreign as it felt, was also much the same as an epiphany. And 0872 didn’t want for it to end.

    “It won’t” he replied straightforward.

    “They were taking food to me. They… used to” she stopped mid-speech, probably weighing whether she had used the right words or not “Tie my hands to the bed and leave the food on the floor. I bit the belt they used to tie me, chewed on it or something – I don’t know the word. When the man with the food arrived, I attacked him. Scratched his jaw open and bit his ear off. I ran to the corridor but they got me”.

   0872 remained silent, processing the story as much as his imagination let him, not that there was much imagination left in him at all. Had there ever been, though? He could barely remember his time as a child. Yet thinking back at his childhood, he had never had the impulse to leave, had he? For the longest time, 0872 had complied out of numbness, perhaps lack of option, whilst 1343 apparently had a will to fight, to escape, running in her veins. He was proud of her, but also envious. He had only started rebelling, noticing there was something wrong with his life two years before after all, and in that time he had done barely more than growl and roar at guards and doctors like an injured, cornered puppy.

    “I scared you” 1343 voiced, not a question as much it was a statement.

    “No” he replied. He wasn’t in the least frightened or even surprised by what she had done, just collared by the realization that he could’ve tried it as well, hell – even succeeded. 0872 wasn’t stupid, he could tell even the guards, burlier and more physically capable than the doctors, were afraid of him. He could smell it in their skin, notice it on the hesitant, unwilling way they approached him as one would to a caged wild animal. He supposed he was a caged wild animal, after all. Yet somehow the idea had never dwelled on him before the convulsions, before 1343.

   He was about to continue to talk, explain to 1343 he didn’t fear her in the least, sensing she perhaps needed the solace, when he caught the faint scent of guards approaching the corridor. It was hard to define anything with so much concrete between them, but 0872 didn’t need much, just enough to be able to tell they came in a group of five and flanked the much thinner Dr. Tennison, with his permanent scent of soap, on all sides.

    “Guards coming this way,” he said in the speed of an intake of breath, getting up from his spot on the floor with a jump. “Hide the hole with the heart rate machine, quickly”.

   He heard her moving the heart rate machine on the other side and began doing the same. It might’ve been heavy to the guards, but 0872 found no issue in lifting it and placing it against the wall as carefully as he could, effectively shielding the hole from view. Just as he was about to turn to the door, he lowered himself against the far end of the machine, cheek pressed against the cold metal, and whispered through the tiny slot of the hole still visible:

    “Will we talk again?”.

   He knew she could hear him, so he didn’t hide the tiny unsurprised smirk that formed on his face as she answered:

    “Yes”.