I could not tell you how my end would inevitably come, nor when. It was a comforting thought to imagine I would pass on at a ripe, elderly age, with a beautiful wife and devoted children. I would want them to stand there, casketside, to accompany my decrepit corpse as it was dropped into the barren earth beneath their feet. It would be quaint, in a way, that end. I would happily guess that most people would endorse the thought, even welcome it. It would have been a fitting end for most men.

It was such an end where you would feel accomplished, and satisfied with everything you had done in life. Sure, you might reflect on every slight mistake you have ever made as you croak, but all good endings need a negative in some manner. It would not be a fair exchange, then. Death needed penance.

But in reality, and with obsessive cynicism, I know that the most likely cause would have probably been some form of disease, airborne or otherwise. Perusing the statistical chances for most of the more, uninhibited, variations of the unseen diseases early on in childhood had influenced that particular train of thought. I cannot even remember why I had looked for it in the first place, just happened to have.

Since that horrific insight, the persistent anxiety about illness had stuck in my dome, watching how I then shattered after the slightest brush with a rampant infection, and then the spiral that followed. From then onwards, it was not just apprehension of illness, germs and the like anymore, it was debilitation in the face of ailment. At this point, merely not washing my hands would send my body into some catastrophic havoc that would have had me locked up in times past. It is paranoia, copious amounts of it, but it was the way I am.

Every choice I had made since childhood had been conceived so that I could keep myself as safe as possible. I was the type of person to stay home if someone at school was noticeably ill and wash my hands until the calloused skin would peel backwards, true enough to reveal the clean pink underneath the soiled white.

I was the type of person to read every medical warning leaflet in each pillbox and obsess over the unlikeliest outcomes each time I took one. I did not see a chance, or probability in that ink, I just saw the impending consequence, and prepared myself to experience each symptom. But I was forced to take them.

The prescribed tablets did something to my brain, but they never contained the recurring compulsions, impulses or anxieties. Instead, the trepidations were merely demoralised by the stale nonchalance the pills had tried to bring me. But that concoction of powders, that same indifference to life, failed to prevent the pain now coursing through me. All it did was leave me vulnerable, unable to move in the one time I needed to.

I was defenceless in the one time I so desperately needed not to feel, not to be present in myself. I was as aware as I had ever known myself to be, all while the pills smothered the warnings I should have seen.

But defencelessness was only the beginning.

It began in my eyes, a blinding, searing white that took my entire vision hostage. It was not painful, not at first, just horrific. All I could do amidst the sudden palpitations was to force my crackled mouthpiece to scream into the nothingness before my eyes and pray for the best, "MUM!"

But at the moment those breathless syllables left my lips, it came.

A pain that I couldn't ever forget.

Within a second of my mouth sealing, the sheer amount of trauma that suddenly penetrated the tender sockets of my eyes caused me to lose everything I carried in my stomach. Over and over, I wretched acrid bile forwards as the biting agony delved deeper into my corneas, tunnelling further into my skull.

It was as if someone had taken a live blowtorch to my eye socket, and had proceeded to push the burning nozzle further into my skull with each few seconds that passed.

A searing heat, that nothing would ever be able to replicate.

I could not take a full breath, nor consider taking one deep enough to fill my aching lungs. With each breath, the bile came up through my throat, further restricting what little I could inhale. It developed into hyperventilation, with only half-hearted breaths that I was allowed to have.

It was devastating enough that I could only screech empty noise as it burrowed into the epicentre of my being, ravaging every piece of me that hindered its path. Again and again, I tried to scream, but the words were sparse as my mouth filled with that coarse fluid, dribbling on myself as though I had the fluids to spare.

"MUM!"

It was indescribable, insatiable, and yet every time I felt the surge wane inside my head, it grew ever more turbulent. In these few minutes, it had made every feeling of pain that I have ever known feel like a trial, a demonstration in comparison to what I felt then. It was the truest notion of pain I could imagine, more than I could envision a human having to bear whilst living.

A glimpse of hell, the truest preview of penance I could ever bear witness to.

I retched, choked and spluttered, long until my throat tore. With each minute suffered, I felt like I had dropped another inch into my waiting grave, ebbing ever closer to the closing of my casket.

The squealing of a door came from somewhere around me, but I could not give it any attention. Only a second later, a shrill scream fought the silence against my noiseless anguish. The symphony of hysteria accompanied, serenaded, the barrage of misery festering inside me. It only made it worse.

My heart throbbed in my ribcage, intensely enough for me to feel the throbbing in every joint, every piece of me. As a stick would batter a drum, my heart reverberated through into my skull, pulsing with frantic persistence amidst the inexcusable suffocation.

With each wanton beat, I soon began to pray for it to be the last.

The next thing I knew, I felt erratic hands hop against my skin, their hold desperately tender as the fingers checked every part of me for damage. They shook me and consoled me, but they were unable to quench the molten torment coursing through me. The digits were relentless until now, but their warm touch stood lost to me, foreign to my skin as the bludgeoning continued. The hands were unable to stop the pain.

A pair of hands, I wouldn't ever know the touch of again.

This routine continued, until at some given point, a red made itself known. Even with the searing white scalping my innocent corneas, even under the pulverising agony, that iridescent crimson swarmed every spot of the white canvas before me and abused every fearful thought into submission.

That meandering, effortless vibrance of the red was unlike any colour I had ever known, more vivid than any memory of colour. It was not just a tone, it was as though judgement had chosen a pigmentation to deliver itself to me, that it was inevitable to be there, as though it always had been.

Without realising it myself, I found myself fixated on that otherworldly colour that seemed to threaten me into focusing on it, on the transcendent beauty it brought to me. I could not look away, nor could I think of anything other than it. The pain soon paled in comparison to the hold that colour held on me.

I was drawn to the colour, my brain polluted by the vibrancy. It was like an addiction a fingertip away, just beyond my shivering grasp. Everything within me compelled me to stare, to bask in the brilliance it carried.

Yet, the entrancement found itself over just as fast as it had come, because the most comforting of darkness arrived around me, and took every memory that followed with it. I passed out, in an instant, within the embrace of that soothing shade, without a single word of reason as to why.

A sleep so peaceful, that nothing could ever compare.

But that was then.

…

I look to the steeled wall on my left with a restrained turn of my head, forcing the chain behind me to brace and groan. Almost like a carapace, the walls alongside the room were constructed of enormous sheets of gunmetal riveted against one another, overlapping as armour would cover each weak edge with another.

I was held in place, bound like a rotisserie chicken fashioned in steel manacles, plucked and pillaged for any iota of value I could ever contain. I could strain to look in each direction, but never move anything but my head an inch in each direction. My body wanted to move, to run, to escape, to die. But the chains would not permit it, and my captives could never allow that to happen. I was their prisoner, an unwilling experiment at best. My pale skin had already been branded as their caged cattle.

Parts of my body could reach the floor with leverage, with me actively trying to make it happen. Whereas, if I relaxed completely, my whole chest could sink into the floor, deeper into the sordid ooze below.

This room had been all I have known since that night, these same four walls, watching as I was invaded for every secret I hold dear beneath my skin. It had stood witness as I had begged with the monsters and pleaded with every ounce I had left to offer. The room had seen it all, been covered in everything I held dear.

My morbid eyewitness was just bright enough for the rivets inlaid in each overlapping section to glint, refracting in the dark like a few dozen carrion birds watching me in the vast distance, deciding whether I was dead enough to try. I couldn't be sure of that answer, myself.

Stolen novel; please report.

The liquid beneath me similarly shone in that weak light, as rancid as it had ever seemed. What was funny, though, was that the shimmering fluid was the warmest thing here, the lone thing keeping the cold from biting. My contempt for it waned at times, but it was still disgusting nonetheless.

My situation should have called for every impulse and worry to manifest and scream ceaselessly in my head, just by thinking of the plethora of dirt that could invade my open wounds, and it did, for a time. But even the dread of sickness had lost its edge, dulled amidst the repetition of fear, nausea and madness.

It had been so long, so trying, that I just don't think I care anymore. If I happened to die from pestilence or disease, so be it. Perhaps it'd get me out of these chains faster, kill me quicker, free me.

Each part of me throbbed, exhausted in every manner I could make it out to be. My scarred tongue still harboured the lingering imprint of my teeth, from when the fear had surpassed every conceivable notion of survival that rationality had tried to offer. It was merely cowardice that prevented me from going further.

And so I lay here, unable to do anything but hope. Hope for release, for escape, for painless death. I was left with nothing but my ability to wallow in consuming fear, forced to hang precariously above the unholy concoction of liquids I had garnished the floor with, day in and day out. Alone.

I did not feel human, not anymore. Whether it was the fact I had been hung like a carcass for all this time or the fact that I had not felt the familiar pang of thirst or hunger once, I did not know. I felt like an animal, kept within an enclosure, harvested for another's benefit. An experiment, to something higher than myself.

What even was my name?

The question was alarming, but unanswered, as a resounding click reverberated through the cell before I could prepare myself to recoil. In that instant, my restless heart began to chug in my chest, coughing like a cramped canary. At the sole entrance to this cell, the thick steeled door that situated itself inside of the wall shifted astride and permitted my captors to wander inwards. My veins itched beneath my battered casing.

Their chalk-white skin seemed to hum bleary in the fluorescent light that followed their frames. They were paler than any manner of paint; it was as if someone had carved each feature from well-maintained bone.

The shivers began to crawl up through my spine, tickling each nerve as it raced to stand each strand of hair upright, with each step they took. Nausea accompanied the unwilling tears that streamed down my cheeks, dripping steadily into the noxious tincture of liquids below.

With draping wide tails dragging inches behind their stubbed white feet, each step forward was measured, and calculated. Their featureless canvases looked down at me, with two beaded eyes that should never have been on their faces. Their heads held no hair, no evidence of breathing apparatus or auditory equipment. Only alabaster white prevailed on their figure, the absence of warmth in each appendage, the lack of humanity.

The humanoids looked as though someone had described how a human should look to a blind man, and said storyteller had happened to be under the influence, and perhaps blind himself. Their counterfeit figures would be the nightmare that startled you awake, one that you could not blink away to forget.

"PLEASE!"

My words left my mouth in a scrambled mess, as loud as my torn throat could beg. Their steady irises never hesitated once as they closed in on my prone figure. I could not look away, and yet every survival instinct begged me to look elsewhere, at anything but the monsters a mere foot away.

"STOP!"

I knew it was useless. Each time it was this same routine, the same story. And each time their facades failed to flinch, as if they did not even dare to acknowledge my suffering. Their chests would rise and fall, as calm as the ocean would offer waves on an auspicious day, but they were not human, that much was evident.

Standing beside me, the pair of beings chattered in a way that was both fast and incomprehensible, a pitchless disarray of whines and syllables that I could not ever begin to understand. As they kneeled to my level, onwards they conversed, gaping at me with their undisturbed ornaments. Their eyes were so alike mine, the colours and the size, and yet they looked as if they were an afterthought on their faces. They were so still, so unbothered by the state of me.

"Ya gin nht?"

"Og nht in."

Humans were emotive, their eyes, especially so in that regard. But these things held no smear of emotion, no slither of sympathy within their lukewarm browns. I was meat to their gaze, a target to their sights. My teeth chattered, as I cowered under the look of nonchalance they harboured, of how little I signified to them.

"…Please."

The butchers gripped my bound skin, inspecting each inch of my pale flesh for value. I writhed and begged as much as I could, but their textureless fingers found each crevice and wound they had left earlier.

Gleaming instruments designed specifically to delve and investigate my body followed soon after the preliminary canvas of my epidermis. I would scream and squirm, thrash around like a wild animal, but that just led to them pinning me to the floor; Their pale hands clamped on the back of my neck.

Every plea I made, and every bargain I offered were ignored, dismissed as their tools separated flesh. Each yelp seemed to spurn their grip to tighten on my neck, forcing my head further into the ground.

My face pressed against the sticky liquid beneath me. Every breath burned my lungs as I inhaled the putrid ammonia, tearing my trachea as the burn travelled into my system. The hum of tools powering and halting, and the sharp pinches were all that told me when each instrument was changed out for another.

"HELP ME!"

I fought their hands to look upwards, to shout into their faces. My horror met their indifferent gaze, and the words seemed to slip off my tongue. Again and again, I would feel my skin peel and push, split and separate. Before I could find the courage to plead again, I felt tubes burrow deeper into flesh and then the suction that accompanied each delve. They would acquire samples from me, steal vials of fluid from each section of me, and harvest all they could get their tools into. I was an animal, once more.

Over and over, they would take everything that made me, me. All the while they would whisper to one another in their indifferent language, likely commenting on what manner of monster I was to them. Why I was different.

I did not know what they were doing, I did not want to know. It was blatant refusal, willful ignorance. I could look down to my chest, to see the abundance of damage they had left, but I couldn't. It was easier for me not to think of it, acknowledge it. My eyes were steadied on their faces, committing each vacant feature to memory. My screams had long lost their volume, and hoarse pleas for my meagre life took their place.

It wasn't until their figures moved backwards, could my reeling mind begin to imagine what they had done, guess what they had taken this time. I soon found myself staring towards the glass containers they carried alongside them, at the fleshy mass of myself within each jar.

The door shut and secured itself with a firm click and whine. My chest hurt and constricted as the light receded like I hadn't taken a breath since the light had first come. Each inhale took more willpower than the last, with less in return. The petulant heaving came soon afterwards.

I felt more exhausted than before, but I knew I'd recover, I always did. My tense frame lowered itself further to the ground, against the newly-cleaned metal now pressing against my ribcage. The defeatism wallowed inside my bones, the constant awareness of how little I could do.

In every manner I could think of, I felt dirty, thoroughly vulnerable to their whims. The, somehow, still rational portion of my haywire brain tried to desperately look for an impossible answer to its questions, while my irrationality imagined the amalgamation of disease and bacteria that the beings had shoved wantonly inside my veins. All while the rest of me recoiled as the violating memories forced their way to my forethought, making me relive each horrific second and recount just how helpless I was.

The sounds, smells, looks in their eyes. Each of these diminished what little humanity I had left in the tank each time, and left me feeling less of a human with each offered minute. It scared me, the thought of becoming indifferent to each of these days, growing used to the suffering. Because what would I be then?

I began to cry.

Nothing more, nothing less. I couldn't eat, drink, think or move. The only thing they had left me was the agony and fear, and the primal cowardice that prevented me from swallowing the pink in my mouth. The one choice still available to me, that I couldn't take. Because I was afraid, truly afraid of dying.

Despite everything, every thought I had, I didn't want to die. It might seem ridiculous to say, but I want to live. I want to love, to live, to die on my terms. That lone hope, that entirely human sentiment, was the only thing stopping me. Is there anything wrong with that?

But as sure as the sun shines, it'll happen again. They'd take and take, again and again, until something changed.

Why me?

The question had been among the first, but the monsters, the aliens, gave some medium of explanation for that. Realistically, at least as much as it could be, there were two options. One, that I had been abducted by aliens, or two, that I was in another world.

What else could there be?

A language so unlike anything human. Aliens that resembled a human, and yet remained so far from humanity. Even the glistening tools they had carved me with had hummed something otherworldly, a whine so high I could've sworn they were whistling to ridicule me.

I didn't know where I was, even who I was anymore. I can recall most memories of my childhood, but each day, those same images blurred further. But I was sure that this wasn't Earth, or anywhere even close.

But at the same time, who's to say these monsters weren't already here, lurking in the darkness, waiting to snatch unsuspecting children from their slumber? The 'aliens are here' conspiracies have never made so much sense, and yet it didn't feel right. Everything around me looked as though it had been described in a fantasy book, written solely to portray the stark difference between our planet and another.

I didn't know, couldn't know. All I knew were these four walls, the dozens of instruments they played against my skin, and the crescendo of my heart in my chest. I knew nothing of the outside, the world hidden away just beyond that door, just outside my chained reach.

What would I see? Three suns lounging in the sky? An armada of monsters scavenging the landscape, dragons that'd happily munch on me? What else, other than these walls?

Hanging in place, I relaxed myself, as much as I was able. I savoured the fleeting freedom, the assurance that for now, I was at peace. My head dipped downwards, and the tears fell from my quivering chin.

Drip

Drip

Drip

This went on for some time, the stale monotony, the repetition that echoed around me. My silent wails continued, my voice unable to express the distress I was in, the horror that I couldn't escape from.

It was the same routine, the pattern I had known. All that remained was for me to pass out in due time, for when the sheer exhaustion took over the fractured awareness I had left.

Did I deserve this?

Why me?

The questions accompanied my journey into sleep, and my sluggish mind was left to wonder how to answer each. As the temporary respite spread across each suspended joint, and coaxed each disturbingly painless limb to relax, I felt sleep take me. The only solace left to me had arrived once more.

My sore eyes closed, and the blanketing darkness smothered my view with its comfort. Flashbacks of pain accompanied the dark canvas, memories of everything they had done. I was now free even to wonder what manner of disease I could've contracted from each foreign utensil plunged inside me.

But before the greatest highlight of each day, before the memories of a life I had once lived could taunt me into a deeper depression, the door wheezed open again.

The unfamiliar had entered.