Stasis wasn't the same as sleeping.
People don't dream in stasis.
In the cold depths of their tanks with tubes snaking in and out of their bodies like worms, forcing them to eat and breathe, there were no dreams.
No solace.
No comfort.
Just a dark place full of wheezing, beeping machines.
It… scared 37 to be there in the stasis chamber, surrounded by bodies and bits in suspended animation. No matter how many times she'd visited before, the apprehension always came back and curled around her neck like long, bony fingers.
It made it hard for her to breathe, to think.
All she wanted to do was turn around and run back to Hubie and her little place in the Habitat, surrounded by bugs and trinkets, but she knew that she couldn't.
37 kept her eyes on her feet and just kept moving, ignoring the horrors around her as best she could.
It made her nauseous in an ironic, stupid, sort of way. She could look at her own body torn apart and gutted, growing back in a flash, acid eating her down to the bone. A hundred tortures no child should ever have to experience. She could sit through it all and be fine, she could marvel at the undulations of her own bare intestines and not flinch.
But the second someone else got hurt, she felt sick…
Sick…
Sick in ways she couldn't put into words or shapes or colors other people could understand.
37 hated the stasis chamber, hated the cold dark, hated the wheezing and whining vents. She hated the scurrying scientists in their white coats and purple gloves scratching notes onto their clipboards.
In her heart of hearts, in the slimy black pit of her stomach hidden by feathers and fluff and a happy attitude as fake as Hubie's nails, she hated Jack too.
She hated him for getting hurt and for ending up there.
She hated herself for hating him.
But still, she found him in his tube and sat there with her eyes shut and her cheek against the glass, letting the uncanny warmth of the liquid beyond settle into her skin like lotion.
"I brought you something," she said, into the not-silence, the near silence, the noises that blended together and began to fade into nothing the longer she sat there surrounded by them.
She didn't expect a response from the mangled mass of gore bobbing placidly in the tube, but she talked like she did.
37 couldn't look at Jack, she'd already done it once and once had been enough. The memory was seared into the backs of her eyelids, the ghost of it haunting her as she sat there with closed eyes.
She rummaged around in her pockets and pulled out a rock, a weird knobbly thing that had flecks of brightly colored plastic embedded in it. "Hubie says it's a… it's a plast-ee-glom-er-it, it's a kind of rock made of plastic and sediment that's been melted together." 37 placed her gift amongst the pile of a hundred other little things she'd found or made that reminded her of Jack.
It was a shrine to their friendship.
Jars of bugs, strange rocks, oddly shaped sticks, wet specimens, rabbit's foot keychains. His bear… thing, Mr. Man, was there too.
Mr. Man unnerved some of the scientists in a way that didn't really make sense to 37. They could stand to sit there and turn children into monsters, to tear them apart and peer at their organs, but a breathing stuffed animal was somehow one step too far. She found it funny, how some of the staff skirted around her little friendship shrine solely because of that bear. A few of them had gone so far as to lodge formal complaints with Hubie, to demand he do something about the collection of oddities slowly swallowing the base of Jack's stasis tube.
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Hubie found it amusing that so many grown adults could be put off by a prototype children's toy. He let 37 keep her shrine so long as it didn't become a tripping hazard or stop the scientists from treating Jack properly, just because he found everyone's discomfort funny.
37 snuck a glance up at Jack without meaning to and immediately wished she hadn't. He was just a head, organs and a few attached bones floating in a tank of pink fluid. Nausea scaled the back of her throat. She shut her eyes again and shuddered as if trying to shake off the image.
Jack had been like that for a while; his cybernetics had been completely unsalvageable after the incident with Nettie. Nobody had expected him to survive and 37 seriously questioned whether or not this actually counted as survival.
It certainly wasn't living.
Half the scientists had hoped that the serum would cause Jack to grow back the parts he'd originally lost to the experimentation done on him previously, but that was stupid.
Bodies didn't work like that… not without help at least, 37 knew that much.
She also knew that her body and her blood could do amazing things, she could heal from almost any injury. She'd been sliced completely in half once and been perfectly fine after she'd pressed the raw halves of herself back together.
Complicated stuff like brains and eyes took the longest to grow back. But that was OK, Jack's head was mostly intact anyway. The worst of the damage done to his soft parts had healed on its own, but the scientists wanted to keep him in stasis until they could build him a new chassis.
It was probably for the best. Ever since the incident with Nettie things had changed in the Facility, and not for the better. The project had changed course, focusing entirely on Nettie and her abilities, countless hours had gone into figuring out if her initial transformation had been a fluke and how to trigger it again on purpose if it hadn't.
While Nettie was loving all the new attention, the other children weren't enjoying it nearly as much. Many of the children had their own unique transformations, but it was apparent that no two kids had the exact same trigger so it was a shot in the dark trying to find ways to discover these newfound abilities, let alone harness them. Many of the methods necessary to force the children into becoming their other selves (the staff seemed hesitant to use the word 'monsters', at least out loud) were often cruel or extreme, and largely ineffective.
And though she missed him terribly, 37 knew deep down that Jack was probably safer in stasis. But that didn't stop her from wanting to save him from his slumber, even though the thought felt like the most selfish thing in the world to her.
"I miss you…" 37 whispered. "The scientists are scary now, even Hubie." Her stomach hurt, fear settling deep in her belly, talking about it should have helped but she only felt worse with each word that came out of her mouth.
"They took Nettie away after she hurt you and did stuff to her to make her change again, she's not even sorry she did it!" 37 sniffed back an angry tear. "Now everybody else is getting hurt cuz of her. It's not fair, it's not!"
She sniffed again, wiping her face on her shirt. "I-I've been hearing stuff at night, bad stuff… sometimes it's people hurting but most of the time it's something else underneath us." She swallowed thickly, suddenly very afraid, like the 'something' might show up any second. "I hear it in my dreams too, they're full of teeth now and crying eyes and other stuff that hurts to think about… I woke up with a bloody nose this morning and a song in my ears I don't remember."
37 opened her mouth to say something else, but faltered, her head snapping up like an animal sensing a predator in the bush.
Jack's Keeper, Mara, rounded the corner and paused. The same startled 'prey in the grass' expression on her face. The two stared at each other for what felt like a very long time, the silence between them broken by a stream of bubbles snaking its way through a nearby stasis tank.
"Hi…" said 37.
"...hi," said Mara, sidestepping the strange little girl, her normally brightly colored hair a somber shade of brown that day. Mara pressed a few buttons on the panel attached to Jack's tube and wrote down the information that came up on the screen.
She looked tired, pained.
Like being there physically hurt.
Mara went into the Project with the knowledge that whichever id she'd be stuck with would almost certainly die at some point and there was no use in getting attached. But, humans will pack-bond with anything, (even rocks if they aren't supervised) and she had bonded with Jack from day one.
Something about his spark and sass made her smile.
It was like he had this hard coded desire to exist despite everything.
Mara just stared at the tube, not really seeing its contents. She stared at her reflection in the shatter-proof glass, tinted pink by the stasis gel inside.
She looked like microwaved shit, felt like it too. Mara scrubbed a hand down her face and watched Jack's exposed organs pulsate with whatever passed for life in this place. Tears stung the back of her eyes. She shut them and took a deep breath, jumping when something warm brushed her hand.
Specimen 37 looked up at her with those horrible, big blue eyes of hers. They had no pupils, just a flat disk of sky blue that scared the shit out of most people. Mara was not most people, but she was still unnerved by the tiny undying girl with feathers instead of hair, the same genre of thing as the mutant that started all of this.
"I can fix him," 37 said in a whisper, "do you trust me?"