Who. Dahlia and Max. Where. The cell, as per usual. What. Just some cellmates chatting, yo. When. A few hours after their last scene. Rating. Low.
Dahlia didn't sleep that night. She closed her eyes and rested her head, but every time she would feel herself begin to drift off, she'd think of Jenny or Chase, even Lucy, and she would be wide awake once again. They had a bedding they were given, at least she and Max assumed it was bedding, but it felt far too strange on Dahlia's bare skin, so she opted instead to sleep on the less forgiving floor. If you would call it sleep, that was. More like restless naps, really. Finally, when she accepted that there would be no rest on her part, she sat up again and stretched her arms out to try and work some of her aching muscles loose. "Max, you awake?" she whispered, not wanting to disturb him if, by some miracle, he had managed to find the sleep she so desperately needed.
"Yeah," he murmured. "You notice the floor's moving? Just... reaaally subtly, but it's like the floor is breathing or something. It's spongy. But only sometimes." He ran his hand along it, contemplating. "I spilled some water earlier... for a bit it was a puddle but then it kind of soaked in. LIke the floor was drinking it."
Between her tossing and turning, she hadn't noticed much of anything except the overwhelming silence in the cell. For all the tubes suspended above them, one would've thought there'd be more mechanical noises, wouldn't there? "No, I didn't notice." What she did notice was the way her stomach rolled and growled, desperate to be fed, but she wasn't about to eat the sludge that was offered to them in the umbilical-like tube. She wasn't that hungry. Yet. "This is so fucked."
"Yeah," he murmured thoughtfully, and he ran his hand over the floor again almost like he was petting it. "I'm kind of thinking... that maybe it's alive. Like... really alive. And we're in it. Like it's some big... biomechanical... thing... that is made of living tissue or something." He curled his fingers experimentally, trying to scratch the floor. Nothing happened, and he relaxed his fingers again.
Alive?" she asked, instinctively making herself even smaller in an attempt to make less of her touch the floor. "Maybe that's why everything feels so … weird." The bedding, the feeding tube … everything felt so familiar and yet equally foreign. It was strange, to say the least. "Did you eat any of that stuff yet?" She touched it earlier, and that was enough to convince her to wait until she was absolutely desperate for nourishment.
"Yeah. It doesn't have a flavor, which is kind of okay and kind of worse," he said neutrally. "I'm not sure I've ever eaten anything that tasted... so bland before. It's like nursing home food." He tipped his head back to study the ceiling. "You know... I think my earlier theory was right. About this being like a zoo. We're pets or something. Science projects."
"Pets," Dahlia echoed, letting that sink in a moment. It made sense, given the way everyone was kept in the cells. Some people were still asleep, while others were awake and testing out their environment like she and Max. "They can't do that." It seemed like such an idiotic thing to say, considering the fact that They had done it. "How have they not been caught by now?" From the way Max described it, this place had been around for a while. "Somebody has had to find it by now. Places like this don't just … stay hidden."
"I'm sure if they have this much... technical advance, they can do things, Dahlia. Cloaking devices maybe, or just... they kill anyone who interferes with whatever it is they're doing here. I don't pretend to know the answers." He shook his head and sighed a little, stretching his legs out and cracking his back. Sitting on the floor wasn't the best thing for a guy closer to sixty than thirty.
"And when they get bored with us? Do they rip our wings off like some little asshole kid who got tired of his science experiment?" It sounded that way, if they put some poor pregnant woman on display for all to see. Her stomach lurched, but she quickly reminded herself that it wasn't Jenny. Jenny was only a little over a month pregnant; she wasn't even showing yet, so unless they ran tests on her, they wouldn't know she was pregnant at all. But who was to say they didn't do tests? Swallowing hard, she pressed her head against the glass. "I keep thinking this is a nightmare."
"I don't know. Maybe," Max said honestly, quietly. "Maybe they just get rid of us if we stop being entertaining, or we don't act how they want us to. I don't know." He shook his head, watching her and then looking into the other cells. "I don't know what they want us to do, but we have access to food and water. We have bedding. It's temperature-controlled. I'm thinking they want to keep us alive for a long time in here."
"Do you think …" No. Dahlia cut herself short and shook her head, drawing herself closer against the glass. She wasn't necessarily trying to get farther away from Max, because he seemed like a decent enough guy -- she just didn't like having her back open to much of anything, since she wasn't exactly able to defend herself. "Do you think they're trying to … to fucking breed us?" It would explain them waking up without any clothes.
"Do I--- what?" he asked, blinking at her in shock and then arching both brows. "To breed? Jesus, why would they want that to happen?" He looked at the pregnant girl again, but something cold crept in the pit of his stomach. "Maybe," he admitted after a minute. "But I mean, they can't possibly think that just bunking people up together means we'll breed."
"I don't know. Maybe they -- maybe they don't understand. Like you said, we could just be pets to them. Something for them to study and research. If that's the case, they'd want to know as much about us as possible." And what was more important to human survival than reproduction? Shivering, she hugged herself that much tighter. "I don't know. Maybe we're both wrong. Maybe we're just being held hostage. Maybe it's a terrorist thing."
"It's not a terrorist thing," Max murmured, gazing at the wall with the tubes. The wall with what looked like bodies suspended in eggs, the tubes running through them, that fluid dripping. The... the people who looked like they were being used as decanters of some kind, just torsos hanging there limp and hope-to-god-not-alive.