[Fic] Don't Give Up on Me
There was blood in Cain's eyes. He couldn't see anything, trying to blink through the thick droplets as they dribbled down his face. He would have wiped his eyes, but if he let go of the girl's arms, he knew she would kill him.
"Lydia!" he barked, fighting to keep his voice controlled and authoritative, however close it was to cracking. "Control yourself!"
She screeched and squirmed, and Cain knew that even if she was in a listening mood--if she was in any other mood but violent--the only response he would have gotten back would have been something entirely incoherent. It said that in her file, in his practically-illegible scrawl on a sheet of paper stained with blood. She was totally incoherent now, and he had no idea if it was because of the treatments or her Calling.
He had known coherent Rakshasa--as coherent as one could be when their thoughts were consumed with killing people. They seemed normal, and maybe that was the dangerous part about them. He hadn't been able to break poor Lydia of her Calling, of the desire to kill--that much was obvious. But maybe he had diffused her, or at least put up some kind of warning. Maybe this was just an intermediate stage that she was in, maybe he was so close to fixing her that this was just the hardest stage before the beautiful coasting.
The squirming in his arms seemed to say differently. The squirming seemed to be telling him to just give up, to have her locked up and not waste any more energy on this fruitless battle, but Cain was first and foremost a scientist, and with an experiment, even a failed experiment (and his wasn't failed, it certainly hadn't failed yet, they didn't know that. He just had to push a little harder, a little longer, just push her beyond the point where the urges registered. They could cut her off. They could save her,) you had to try again and again and again to see what your set of data was, and from there you used that data to draw a logical conclusion. That's what the facility was for--it was for running an experiment, one that Cain was determined would eventually work. They had close to a hundred subjects, some who ended up as demons that weren't Raks that functioned just fine, that resisted their Callings. And no one had succeeded this far with a Rak--Lydia was still alive, she hadn't killed herself or anyone else.
Yet was a word that Cain didn't believe in--if something hadn't happened thus far, something that wasn't up to chance, and there was no evidence to point to it happening in the future, there was no reason to think it was going to happen. If you flipped a coin up in the air and it came up heads 99 times, who's to say that the odds aren't actually in favour of it happening a hundredth time? And Lydia was no simple coin. Lydia was complex, Lydia was in recovery from her Calling, and Cain was going to heal her.
One of his assistants came running with a needle, and Cain held on tighter to Lydia. "Do it," he said, strangely calm despite the blood in his eyes. The assistant nodded, and knelt next to the struggling pair, injecting the sedative into the bright blue veins in Lydia's arm. The poor girl screamed and screamed, but she did that even before she had gotten her wings. Instead of sedating her like it was supposed to, the cocktail of drugs seemed at first to make her more violent in her struggles and Cain had to hold on for dear life as the assistant withdrew the needle. "Lydia, calm yourself. Needles are nothing to be afraid of," he instructed in that voice again. "Needles are not the monster--the monster isn't in the needles. Do you know where the monster is, Lydia?" The scream became more high-pitched as the sedative did its job and she began to flail even harder. Cain just tightened his grip--he wasn't going to have her flail herself into something, or have the needle rip her veins open. He wasn't going to let her Calling kill her like it had killed so many of her kind. "The monster is in YOU, Lydia. The monster is in you, and we're helping you fight it. We can beat it, Lydia. We can beat the monster." He repeated it, over and over again. "We can beat it. We can beat the monster."
She finally fell limp in her arms, and Cain gave her an extra squeeze before practically collapsing over her body. He inhaled and exhaled heavily, breathing in the faint coppery scent that seemed to be a permanent feature of all Raks. He hadn't had time before that attendant had died to check if that was a biological difference between Raks and their fellow demonkind, or if that was a side effect of the relentless urge to kill, and the killings that happened as a result.
He sat back, smoothed her matted hair from her face and picked at the crusty black stain just under her chin. He had found it interesting in the initial examination of Rakshasa behavior that if they weren't allowed to kill as they pleased, they tended to turn on themselves and the more creative a Rak was, the more danger they were to themselves. Lydia had chewed through half her lip before Cain had found her, and the blood-spit combination sort of resembled dirt in the poor lighting of her open room.
"Sir?" Kyle, one of his assistants, stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder. "Should we take her to solitary confinement?"'
Cain sighed and shifted the limp body of his once-promising test subject to the floor gently, not wanting to hurt her in such a fragile state. "Yes please," he said quietly. "And be sure to strap her down. And if you would send one of the attendants to find her a mouth guard and an Angel of Healing, before she wakes up preferably. I don't need her to mutilate herself right when she wakes up."
"Very good, sir," Kyle replied, and swooped in to gather Lydia up in his arms and hurry her away. Cain got steadily to his feet, fingering the black blood that would invariably stain his lab coat. He had close to twenty by now, and he had just ruined one of the few he used for meetings with clients, but that was the hazard with working with Lydia--she had an almost sixth sense when it came to acting out at poor times. Cain figured that little habit would be broken along with her Calling. In the meantime, he was going to bleach the hell out of it and hope that the stains weren't too noticeable.
And then there was the cut on his head to attend to. He prodded it a few times, wincing as it burned where his fingers touched, and glancing in the mirror on the wall he was entirely unsurprised to find that it was nearly as long as his pinky finger. This was what he got for trusting someone in Lydia's unstable mental state with things like spoons. He knew in theory she should have been on a liquid diet until she was healed, but he had gotten a little too confident after nearly a week of behaving days--she was practically coherent on Thursday, forming close to whole sentences and even sputtering out a word from before--please--in order to get a cookie.
He sighed as he prodded once again and then gathered up a ripped section of Lydia's sheets, holding it to his head to stop the bleeding. He needed either stitches or a healing angel, and he was going to go with the latter, because he had a meeting in the morning with prospective sponsors and it wouldn't look good to be running a facility for reforming demons and come in with a head injury from one of his test subjects.
Dr. Ray's door was wide open, but Cain knocked anyway. "Cain McKay, if I have told you once I have told you a thousand times, if the door is open that means I am on call and you do not have to knock. Get your ass in here, I heard about the attack. And take off that lab coat."
Cain did what he was told, though he wasn't about to let inaccurate gossip spread throughout the facility. "It wasn't an attack," he corrected calmly. "It was simply an intervention gone a tad bit awry. I hope someone came to get you to fix the poor girl."
"Which poor girl?" Ray half-mumbled, gathering up needle and thread.
"Lydia," Cain said. "And Ray, I have a meeting with sponsors in the morning. I don't think it would be a good idea to go in there walking wounded."
Ray whirled on Cain and raised an eyebrow at him. "Very well," he said, putting away his medical instruments. "But you don't know that she won't attack--I'm sorry, require intervention--tomorrow, Cain." He sighed as he rolled up his sleeves and took a dry sterile bandage, dampening it and dabbing at the wound, trying to wipe away as much blood as possible. "Have you thought about putting her in Ward 9?" he half-whispered, as if he knew the reaction that suggestion was going to bring.
Cain pulled out of his reach. "She is NOT a failed case, Ray," he snapped. "She is in the recovery stages--we don't know how long that may take. We got past her wings--"
"Barely," Ray mumbled, throwing away one bandage and picking up another.
"And we've made breakthroughs. She said PLEASE to me on Thursday, Ray."
"After spending three hours being shocked. And it wasn't necessarily please, Cain, it could have been 'peas' or 'playmates'--it could have been anything."
"It was please," Cain snapped. "She said please. We're progressing--just because progress is slow and occasionally she regresses, it does not indicate that she's failed. She hasn't killed anyone since she got her wings."
"Because you know to keep her under lock and key. Because you shock her and nearly kill her, then present her with an angel and unlock the chains for--what's her max, five minutes at a time?."
"And because of those actions, she doesn't kill. Last week it was EIGHT minutes. It's working, Ray, it's just going slowly at the moment." Cain hissed as Ray pressed a little too hard into the wound. "I'm not giving up," he said insistently. "I'm not giving up on her."
"I never said you were," Ray mumbled, and he closed his eyes, wincing. Cain closed his eyes too--the sensation of being healed was always once that tended to gross him out, as tissues stretched themselves back together and cells multiplied to create new skin. Ray finally pulled away and Cain opened his eyes to see the older man--much older, close to one hundred though he looked to be in his fifties-- reach for a box of small band-aids to place over the tiny cut that had formed on his forehead. "All fixed," he said to Cain.
"Thanks very much, Ray," Cain replied, trying to sound sincere. "I appreciate it."
"Eh, it's what you pay me for. Now go check on the kid before she tries to kill herself again."
Cain didn't bother explaining that he had her sedated and restrained and that she WASN'T going to try to kill herself again, that she hadn't done that in nearly three months and that she was well on her way to recovery. Ray wouldn't understand. Ray couldn't because he was far too in touch with the hurt that went on in the facility--hurt that was necessary to heal. Like resetting a bone, Cain had once tried to explain to him. They were just resetting bones.
Muse: Cain McKay
Word count: 1985 words
Prompt: "Sometimes the questions are complicated but the answers are simple." --Dr. Suess for sunday_reveries
"Lydia!" he barked, fighting to keep his voice controlled and authoritative, however close it was to cracking. "Control yourself!"
She screeched and squirmed, and Cain knew that even if she was in a listening mood--if she was in any other mood but violent--the only response he would have gotten back would have been something entirely incoherent. It said that in her file, in his practically-illegible scrawl on a sheet of paper stained with blood. She was totally incoherent now, and he had no idea if it was because of the treatments or her Calling.
He had known coherent Rakshasa--as coherent as one could be when their thoughts were consumed with killing people. They seemed normal, and maybe that was the dangerous part about them. He hadn't been able to break poor Lydia of her Calling, of the desire to kill--that much was obvious. But maybe he had diffused her, or at least put up some kind of warning. Maybe this was just an intermediate stage that she was in, maybe he was so close to fixing her that this was just the hardest stage before the beautiful coasting.
The squirming in his arms seemed to say differently. The squirming seemed to be telling him to just give up, to have her locked up and not waste any more energy on this fruitless battle, but Cain was first and foremost a scientist, and with an experiment, even a failed experiment (and his wasn't failed, it certainly hadn't failed yet, they didn't know that. He just had to push a little harder, a little longer, just push her beyond the point where the urges registered. They could cut her off. They could save her,) you had to try again and again and again to see what your set of data was, and from there you used that data to draw a logical conclusion. That's what the facility was for--it was for running an experiment, one that Cain was determined would eventually work. They had close to a hundred subjects, some who ended up as demons that weren't Raks that functioned just fine, that resisted their Callings. And no one had succeeded this far with a Rak--Lydia was still alive, she hadn't killed herself or anyone else.
Yet was a word that Cain didn't believe in--if something hadn't happened thus far, something that wasn't up to chance, and there was no evidence to point to it happening in the future, there was no reason to think it was going to happen. If you flipped a coin up in the air and it came up heads 99 times, who's to say that the odds aren't actually in favour of it happening a hundredth time? And Lydia was no simple coin. Lydia was complex, Lydia was in recovery from her Calling, and Cain was going to heal her.
One of his assistants came running with a needle, and Cain held on tighter to Lydia. "Do it," he said, strangely calm despite the blood in his eyes. The assistant nodded, and knelt next to the struggling pair, injecting the sedative into the bright blue veins in Lydia's arm. The poor girl screamed and screamed, but she did that even before she had gotten her wings. Instead of sedating her like it was supposed to, the cocktail of drugs seemed at first to make her more violent in her struggles and Cain had to hold on for dear life as the assistant withdrew the needle. "Lydia, calm yourself. Needles are nothing to be afraid of," he instructed in that voice again. "Needles are not the monster--the monster isn't in the needles. Do you know where the monster is, Lydia?" The scream became more high-pitched as the sedative did its job and she began to flail even harder. Cain just tightened his grip--he wasn't going to have her flail herself into something, or have the needle rip her veins open. He wasn't going to let her Calling kill her like it had killed so many of her kind. "The monster is in YOU, Lydia. The monster is in you, and we're helping you fight it. We can beat it, Lydia. We can beat the monster." He repeated it, over and over again. "We can beat it. We can beat the monster."
She finally fell limp in her arms, and Cain gave her an extra squeeze before practically collapsing over her body. He inhaled and exhaled heavily, breathing in the faint coppery scent that seemed to be a permanent feature of all Raks. He hadn't had time before that attendant had died to check if that was a biological difference between Raks and their fellow demonkind, or if that was a side effect of the relentless urge to kill, and the killings that happened as a result.
He sat back, smoothed her matted hair from her face and picked at the crusty black stain just under her chin. He had found it interesting in the initial examination of Rakshasa behavior that if they weren't allowed to kill as they pleased, they tended to turn on themselves and the more creative a Rak was, the more danger they were to themselves. Lydia had chewed through half her lip before Cain had found her, and the blood-spit combination sort of resembled dirt in the poor lighting of her open room.
"Sir?" Kyle, one of his assistants, stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder. "Should we take her to solitary confinement?"'
Cain sighed and shifted the limp body of his once-promising test subject to the floor gently, not wanting to hurt her in such a fragile state. "Yes please," he said quietly. "And be sure to strap her down. And if you would send one of the attendants to find her a mouth guard and an Angel of Healing, before she wakes up preferably. I don't need her to mutilate herself right when she wakes up."
"Very good, sir," Kyle replied, and swooped in to gather Lydia up in his arms and hurry her away. Cain got steadily to his feet, fingering the black blood that would invariably stain his lab coat. He had close to twenty by now, and he had just ruined one of the few he used for meetings with clients, but that was the hazard with working with Lydia--she had an almost sixth sense when it came to acting out at poor times. Cain figured that little habit would be broken along with her Calling. In the meantime, he was going to bleach the hell out of it and hope that the stains weren't too noticeable.
And then there was the cut on his head to attend to. He prodded it a few times, wincing as it burned where his fingers touched, and glancing in the mirror on the wall he was entirely unsurprised to find that it was nearly as long as his pinky finger. This was what he got for trusting someone in Lydia's unstable mental state with things like spoons. He knew in theory she should have been on a liquid diet until she was healed, but he had gotten a little too confident after nearly a week of behaving days--she was practically coherent on Thursday, forming close to whole sentences and even sputtering out a word from before--please--in order to get a cookie.
He sighed as he prodded once again and then gathered up a ripped section of Lydia's sheets, holding it to his head to stop the bleeding. He needed either stitches or a healing angel, and he was going to go with the latter, because he had a meeting in the morning with prospective sponsors and it wouldn't look good to be running a facility for reforming demons and come in with a head injury from one of his test subjects.
Dr. Ray's door was wide open, but Cain knocked anyway. "Cain McKay, if I have told you once I have told you a thousand times, if the door is open that means I am on call and you do not have to knock. Get your ass in here, I heard about the attack. And take off that lab coat."
Cain did what he was told, though he wasn't about to let inaccurate gossip spread throughout the facility. "It wasn't an attack," he corrected calmly. "It was simply an intervention gone a tad bit awry. I hope someone came to get you to fix the poor girl."
"Which poor girl?" Ray half-mumbled, gathering up needle and thread.
"Lydia," Cain said. "And Ray, I have a meeting with sponsors in the morning. I don't think it would be a good idea to go in there walking wounded."
Ray whirled on Cain and raised an eyebrow at him. "Very well," he said, putting away his medical instruments. "But you don't know that she won't attack--I'm sorry, require intervention--tomorrow, Cain." He sighed as he rolled up his sleeves and took a dry sterile bandage, dampening it and dabbing at the wound, trying to wipe away as much blood as possible. "Have you thought about putting her in Ward 9?" he half-whispered, as if he knew the reaction that suggestion was going to bring.
Cain pulled out of his reach. "She is NOT a failed case, Ray," he snapped. "She is in the recovery stages--we don't know how long that may take. We got past her wings--"
"Barely," Ray mumbled, throwing away one bandage and picking up another.
"And we've made breakthroughs. She said PLEASE to me on Thursday, Ray."
"After spending three hours being shocked. And it wasn't necessarily please, Cain, it could have been 'peas' or 'playmates'--it could have been anything."
"It was please," Cain snapped. "She said please. We're progressing--just because progress is slow and occasionally she regresses, it does not indicate that she's failed. She hasn't killed anyone since she got her wings."
"Because you know to keep her under lock and key. Because you shock her and nearly kill her, then present her with an angel and unlock the chains for--what's her max, five minutes at a time?."
"And because of those actions, she doesn't kill. Last week it was EIGHT minutes. It's working, Ray, it's just going slowly at the moment." Cain hissed as Ray pressed a little too hard into the wound. "I'm not giving up," he said insistently. "I'm not giving up on her."
"I never said you were," Ray mumbled, and he closed his eyes, wincing. Cain closed his eyes too--the sensation of being healed was always once that tended to gross him out, as tissues stretched themselves back together and cells multiplied to create new skin. Ray finally pulled away and Cain opened his eyes to see the older man--much older, close to one hundred though he looked to be in his fifties-- reach for a box of small band-aids to place over the tiny cut that had formed on his forehead. "All fixed," he said to Cain.
"Thanks very much, Ray," Cain replied, trying to sound sincere. "I appreciate it."
"Eh, it's what you pay me for. Now go check on the kid before she tries to kill herself again."
Cain didn't bother explaining that he had her sedated and restrained and that she WASN'T going to try to kill herself again, that she hadn't done that in nearly three months and that she was well on her way to recovery. Ray wouldn't understand. Ray couldn't because he was far too in touch with the hurt that went on in the facility--hurt that was necessary to heal. Like resetting a bone, Cain had once tried to explain to him. They were just resetting bones.
Muse: Cain McKay
Word count: 1985 words
Prompt: "Sometimes the questions are complicated but the answers are simple." --Dr. Suess for sunday_reveries